More on Chomsky:
Excerpt from “Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts on the Sixties”
by Peter Collier and David Horowitz (pp. 254-267)
geocities.com
The intellectual most associated with the view that America is the great Satan is
MIT linguistics professor . Once a prestigious specialist in his field, Chomsky
turned his pen in the Sixties to political themes, which since then have increasingly
obsessed him. In "The Responsibility of the Intellectuals," a famous broadside
issued during the Vietnam War, Chomsky writes deprecatingly, "It is an article of
faith [among intellectuals] that American motives are pure and not subject to
analysis." Since then, in a seemingly endless series of tracts on U.S. policies in the
Third World, he has argued compulsively that the evil of American motives is so
transparent that it ought to be assumed as an article of faith. Freighted with
footnotes and scholarly apparatus, Chomsky's volumes express an impassioned
hatred of America's institutions and national identity. Often reaching paranoid
extremes, his animus would serve to stigmatize anyone of less imposing credentials
as a political crank. And to some extent Chomsky has earned precisely that
reputation, despite his achievements as a linguist, through such episodes as his
defense of Robert Faurisson, a leading intellectual proponent of the claim that the
Nazi Holocaust is a "Zionist hoax." No longer published in The New York Review
of Books and other prestigious liberal magazines that once clamored for his essays,
Chomsky has become the Dr. Demento of American political commentary.
But within the Left itself, Chomsky's reputation has prospered. He is now easily
the most influential figure in the radical movement, speaking regularly to large
campus audiences, providing the argument for most left-wing texts on
contemporary politics, and inspiring a coterie of disciples such as radical journalist
Christopher Hitchens, who unctuously lauds Chomsky as "a man I greatly revere."
The heroic dimensions of Chomsky's status derive from his performance of an
absolutely critical service to the contemporary Left -- developing the devil theory
that holds America and the West responsible for all the world's evil.
From “Noam Chomsky, Punk Hero “
by K. L. Billingsley
frontpagemag.com
In academe, if you snooze, you lose. Now, in one of those peculiar ironies that
characterize the careers of American intellectuals, Chomsky is judged primarily on the
subject for which he forsook linguistic theory—radical politics. The notion that his
contributions in one field make him the intellectual heavyweight champion of the world in
the other would find few partisans among serious historians and intellectuals. How his
bashing of America and the West plays in the liberated former Soviet colonies of Eastern
Europe can be imagined. In those precincts it was the works of Alexander Solzbenitsyn,
Josef Brodsky, and Vaclav Havel which turned a generation away from socialism while
Chomsky was railing about how socialism was victimized by American hegemonism. In
Western Europe it was Andre Glucksman, Jean Francois Revel, and Bernard-Henri Levy
who called socialism-in-practice "barbarism with a human face."
Utterly impervious to these developments, Chomsky's brilliantly equipped mind remains
shrink-wrapped in leftist orthodoxies, anti-American and anti-corporate demonologies,
and anti-authoritarian postures which often wind up labeled, wrongly, as libertarian
socialism or anarchism. The professor is also what the French call a pisseur d'encre,
churning out a massive body of work, the intellectual equivalent of a Chinese wave attack.
And he is always careful to freight his essays with footnotes and scholarly trappings, a
kind of academic hamburger helper which nonetheless leaves the question: where's the
beef? What is the essence of his thought? During the height of the Cold War, Chomsky
pioneered the idea that there was no practical difference between freedom and unfreedom.
In his view there was a moral equivalence between free, democratic Western states which
had created a prosperity unequaled in human history, and into which immigrants willingly
streamed, and the Marxist–Leninist dictatorships which had created misery, poverty, and
death on a scale unknown in human history, and out of which millions fled at the first
opportunity, often preferring to die on their feet rather than live on their knees. In
Chomsky's view, both systems were equally deserving of scorn.
Chomsky pursued this idea of moral equivalence with a desperate vengeance into the
mid-80s, when the USSR initiated its "peace movement" and the Reagan Administration
entered the decisive end-game in the Cold War. Mr. Chomsky was in the middle of the
fray, nattering about America's "satellites" in a way meant to compare the role of South
Korea on the side of the U.S., say, to the role of East Germany on the side of the USSR.
In Chomsky's mind, the Cold War was always a myth created by America to justify its
rapacity. Others have held such views, but while most of them have had a frisson of doubt
as a result of revelations coming out of the Soviet Union and from U.S. intercepts of
Soviet intelligence in the post-war era, Chomsky still asserts that "the United States hasn't
faced a threat probably since the War of 1812," an apercu that veterans of Pearl Harbor
and D-Day would no doubt find interesting. |
