The Discerning Texan
All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.
-- Edmund Burke
-- Edmund Burke
Monday, April 18, 2005
Exposing Chomsky for what he is (and isn't)
For years Noam Chomsky has been the "guru" of the so-called "intellectual" left. This linguistic professor, who had taken the hatred of all things American to a level rivalled only by Al Qaeda (whom he calls "freedom fighters"), is probably the widest read and most often quoted personality on the far left. And, it turns out, the most often flatly wrong about his "facts".
So when "Reason" magazine, hardly a right-wing publication, writes an article that pretty much exposes Chomsky for the demagogic blowhard that he is, it is cause for celebration:
Collier and Horowitz understand well the manufactured reality of political fame, and to dismantle it requires not contrary vitriol or clever rejoinders but direct, fact-based assertions that undermine the authenticity of the image. To that end, the contributors follow a simple procedure: Quote actual statements by Chomsky and test them for evidence and logic. The best contributions to the volume add the effective and timely tactic of citing Chomsky’s progressive virtues and revealing how smoothly he abandons them.
According to his followers, for example, one of Chomsky’s signal talents is his ability to penetrate the veneer of mass politics and uproot hidden facts and motives. In his words, he aims to see through “professed goals” and uncover “background factors” in political events.
Stephen Morris tests that capacity in his discussion of Chomsky’s thoughts on America’s misadventures in Southeast Asia. Thirty-five years ago, Chomsky approached the war as if it were a propaganda endeavor that discerning critics like himself were able to puncture. But what happened to that discernment, Morris wonders, when Chomsky toured North Vietnam in April 1970?
Chomsky’s analysis of U.S. actions plunged deep into dark U.S. machinations, but when traveling among the Communists he rested content with appearances. The countryside outside Hanoi, he reported in The New York Review of Books, displayed “a high degree of democratic participation at the village and regional levels.” But how could he tell? Chomsky did not speak Vietnamese, and so he depended on government translators, tour guides, and handlers for information. In Vietnamese hands, the clear-eyed skepticism turned into willing credulousness.
Another virtue Chomsky prizes is a solid grasp of historical facts. In his thinking, popular U.S. history is an insidious rationalization of racism and greed. To understand the past rightly, he insists, one must contrast a real truth (the U.S. is a violent empire) with a widespread myth (the U.S. promulgates freedom and prosperity). As the editors of Chomsky’s book What Uncle Sam Really Wants put it, “Chomsky is a scholar; the facts in this book are just that, and every conclusion is backed by massive evidence.”
Thomas Nichols takes on this historiographic talent in his entry on Chomsky’s use of facts and footnotes. Nichols points out that Chomsky’s footnotes are red herrings, his numbers exaggerated, and his facts tendentious. For instance, a footnote in Chomsky’s World Orders Old and New that purports to demonstrate a point in fact leads only to an earlier Chomsky title, and in that text the relevant passage footnotes still an earlier Chomsky title.
But his most damning discovery is broader: that Chomsky lacks a historian’s openness to fresh evidence. All historians know that understanding history is an unfolding enterprise, ever subject to revision. And yet not one revelation of the last 20 years has led to a moment’s reassessment by Chomsky. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the opening of KGB archives, testimony by dissidents and ex-Communists—nothing alters his outlook. When Vaclav Havel addressed Congress in 1990 and praised the U.S. for inspiring those under the totalitarian boot, Chomsky scorned this freedom fighter for uttering an “embarrassingly silly and morally repugnant Sunday School sermon in Congress.” The truth remained: “In comparison to the conditions imposed by U.S. tyranny and violence, East Europe under Russian rule was practically a paradise.”
With its record of crimes and hypocrisies, Chomsky argues, the U.S. could sustain its moral identity only if it had a press primed to play lieutenant to the capitalists and generals. This raises another commended Chomskyan asset: media savvy. In 1988’s Manufacturing Consent (co-authored with Edward Herman), Chomsky launched a widely repeated argument against the consolidation of media and their goal of propagandizing for a power elite. The book (along with a documentary based on it) remains a favorite on college campuses; even among Chomsky’s critics, few are willing to defend centralized media. Indeed, media savvy is a valuable trait, and one would think that an anti-conglomeration media theorist would keep abreast of changes in media structures and deliveries.
And yet Eli Lehrer finds that, in the last 10 years, Chomsky has all but ignored the most striking new medium of our time: the Internet. He says little about the weblogs and other virtual newsroom start-ups that have done the very work he advocates, forcing into the public eye stories that traditional media outlets ignored. When he does heed the Internet, he makes the same charges he leveled against the networks, in the process misrepresenting basic aspects of online communication. The Internet is just the kind of populist medium that Chomsky supposedly reveres, but all he can do is squeeze it into a conspiracy theory.
Other essays in the volume recount similar failings of Chomsky on Chomskyan grounds. He downplays the Holocaust and anti-Israeli terrorism. A philosopher of language, he tosses around the words genocide and terror indiscriminately. (As the U.S. prepared to invade Afghanistan, he predicted, “Looks like what’s happening is some sort of silent genocide.”) An uncritical defender of the Third World revolutionaries, Chomsky limits the motives of terrorists to reflexive moves against U.S. aggression, a refusal of responsibility that mirrors the paternalism of the colonialist. The only independent thought and action he allows them is the formation of socialist movements.
In turning Chomsky’s virtues against him, The Anti-Chomsky Reader offers a challenge to those who fixate on only the crimes in U.S. history. At its best, the volume transcends the pro-Chomsky/anti-Chomsky debate to focus on larger outcomes in a post-9/11 world. Let us have pointed dissent, it suggests, but without an obsession with U.S. guilt. Keep the virtues—mistrusting government, exploding myths, analyzing media—but apply them impartially. Chomsky is caught in a Vietnam-Watergate time zone, when the Pentagon and White House assumed the most fiendish place in democratic protest. It’s time to recognize that fiends may collect wherever power is concentrated.
So when "Reason" magazine, hardly a right-wing publication, writes an article that pretty much exposes Chomsky for the demagogic blowhard that he is, it is cause for celebration:
Collier and Horowitz understand well the manufactured reality of political fame, and to dismantle it requires not contrary vitriol or clever rejoinders but direct, fact-based assertions that undermine the authenticity of the image. To that end, the contributors follow a simple procedure: Quote actual statements by Chomsky and test them for evidence and logic. The best contributions to the volume add the effective and timely tactic of citing Chomsky’s progressive virtues and revealing how smoothly he abandons them.
According to his followers, for example, one of Chomsky’s signal talents is his ability to penetrate the veneer of mass politics and uproot hidden facts and motives. In his words, he aims to see through “professed goals” and uncover “background factors” in political events.
Stephen Morris tests that capacity in his discussion of Chomsky’s thoughts on America’s misadventures in Southeast Asia. Thirty-five years ago, Chomsky approached the war as if it were a propaganda endeavor that discerning critics like himself were able to puncture. But what happened to that discernment, Morris wonders, when Chomsky toured North Vietnam in April 1970?
Chomsky’s analysis of U.S. actions plunged deep into dark U.S. machinations, but when traveling among the Communists he rested content with appearances. The countryside outside Hanoi, he reported in The New York Review of Books, displayed “a high degree of democratic participation at the village and regional levels.” But how could he tell? Chomsky did not speak Vietnamese, and so he depended on government translators, tour guides, and handlers for information. In Vietnamese hands, the clear-eyed skepticism turned into willing credulousness.
Another virtue Chomsky prizes is a solid grasp of historical facts. In his thinking, popular U.S. history is an insidious rationalization of racism and greed. To understand the past rightly, he insists, one must contrast a real truth (the U.S. is a violent empire) with a widespread myth (the U.S. promulgates freedom and prosperity). As the editors of Chomsky’s book What Uncle Sam Really Wants put it, “Chomsky is a scholar; the facts in this book are just that, and every conclusion is backed by massive evidence.”
Thomas Nichols takes on this historiographic talent in his entry on Chomsky’s use of facts and footnotes. Nichols points out that Chomsky’s footnotes are red herrings, his numbers exaggerated, and his facts tendentious. For instance, a footnote in Chomsky’s World Orders Old and New that purports to demonstrate a point in fact leads only to an earlier Chomsky title, and in that text the relevant passage footnotes still an earlier Chomsky title.
But his most damning discovery is broader: that Chomsky lacks a historian’s openness to fresh evidence. All historians know that understanding history is an unfolding enterprise, ever subject to revision. And yet not one revelation of the last 20 years has led to a moment’s reassessment by Chomsky. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the opening of KGB archives, testimony by dissidents and ex-Communists—nothing alters his outlook. When Vaclav Havel addressed Congress in 1990 and praised the U.S. for inspiring those under the totalitarian boot, Chomsky scorned this freedom fighter for uttering an “embarrassingly silly and morally repugnant Sunday School sermon in Congress.” The truth remained: “In comparison to the conditions imposed by U.S. tyranny and violence, East Europe under Russian rule was practically a paradise.”
With its record of crimes and hypocrisies, Chomsky argues, the U.S. could sustain its moral identity only if it had a press primed to play lieutenant to the capitalists and generals. This raises another commended Chomskyan asset: media savvy. In 1988’s Manufacturing Consent (co-authored with Edward Herman), Chomsky launched a widely repeated argument against the consolidation of media and their goal of propagandizing for a power elite. The book (along with a documentary based on it) remains a favorite on college campuses; even among Chomsky’s critics, few are willing to defend centralized media. Indeed, media savvy is a valuable trait, and one would think that an anti-conglomeration media theorist would keep abreast of changes in media structures and deliveries.
And yet Eli Lehrer finds that, in the last 10 years, Chomsky has all but ignored the most striking new medium of our time: the Internet. He says little about the weblogs and other virtual newsroom start-ups that have done the very work he advocates, forcing into the public eye stories that traditional media outlets ignored. When he does heed the Internet, he makes the same charges he leveled against the networks, in the process misrepresenting basic aspects of online communication. The Internet is just the kind of populist medium that Chomsky supposedly reveres, but all he can do is squeeze it into a conspiracy theory.
Other essays in the volume recount similar failings of Chomsky on Chomskyan grounds. He downplays the Holocaust and anti-Israeli terrorism. A philosopher of language, he tosses around the words genocide and terror indiscriminately. (As the U.S. prepared to invade Afghanistan, he predicted, “Looks like what’s happening is some sort of silent genocide.”) An uncritical defender of the Third World revolutionaries, Chomsky limits the motives of terrorists to reflexive moves against U.S. aggression, a refusal of responsibility that mirrors the paternalism of the colonialist. The only independent thought and action he allows them is the formation of socialist movements.
In turning Chomsky’s virtues against him, The Anti-Chomsky Reader offers a challenge to those who fixate on only the crimes in U.S. history. At its best, the volume transcends the pro-Chomsky/anti-Chomsky debate to focus on larger outcomes in a post-9/11 world. Let us have pointed dissent, it suggests, but without an obsession with U.S. guilt. Keep the virtues—mistrusting government, exploding myths, analyzing media—but apply them impartially. Chomsky is caught in a Vietnam-Watergate time zone, when the Pentagon and White House assumed the most fiendish place in democratic protest. It’s time to recognize that fiends may collect wherever power is concentrated.
