Loading ...Well, I'm continuing my painful crusade to educate myself about the left which unfortunately means that I have to read their books and watch their movies. Anyway, here's my reaction to "Noam Chomsky - Rebel Without a Pause."
Here's the link:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0368083/
This film is a compilation of Chomsky lecture snippets which mostly appear to be from his trip to McMaster University in Canada. In each segment, Chomsky speaks with an omniscient voice and with phrases of total authority. The director of this film interviews a professor along with Chomsky’s wife who both attest to the fact that he reads everything all day long. Presumably, that is why he seems to know everything even though most of the stuff he speaks of could never be known by a private citizen. He has no access to the President, the State Department or the Department of Defense so is in no position to be reporting on most of the things he claims. What he refers to here is inside information that could not be obtained from perusing newspapers and magazines.
He is more than happy to share a score of flawed and fallacious claims with his listeners, indeed, the lies abound. The worst argument of all made here concerns the role of the press during the Cold War. Derek Rasmussen is quoted as saying that our journalists were cowardly for criticizing the Russians as we should have let their media do that and just focused on our own government. I guess this is evidence of the common leftist notion of “alternative patriotism”—which basically means systematically attacking your own country outside a frame of reference. With the Soviets, as we know, they had no journalists capable of criticism. The Soviet Union was a totalitarian country. There was no free speech and no free press; talking out meant going to the Gulag and/or death. One would hope that a realization of this might have caused some leftists to juxtapose the USSR with America, and then to develop an appreciation for their own country. But, as we all know, this never happened during the Cold War.
Chomsky claims that the 2001 Tax Cuts were “for the rich,” but, of course, they were not. The cuts were given to anyone who paid taxes. The rich, just as with the poor, got paid back a set percentage of what they paid in. That the rich paid more in taxes, and therefore got a higher amount back is a reflection of progressive taxation (something which the left is devoted to). Had the poor got more back than the rich would have meant that they were unfairly taxed—which they were not.
He also claims that we once supplied Iraq with Weapons of Mass Destruction but we never did. In fact, throughout the seventies and eighties, we gave them very little, and practically nothing aside from a few helicopters. Most of his other claims are risible. He states that George W. Bush wants to phase out education when he has done the exact opposite with No Child Left Behind. The Bill has spent far more money on education than any other Bill in history. Bush has thrown more cash to Educrats than any other President.
Chomsky’s defense of public schooling and social security showcase that, with leftists, emotion always trumps reason. Rather than acknowledge that the people are sick of spending more and more money on low grade educational institutions, this great sage morphs the argument into it being those who care versus those who do not. He does the same thing with Social Security. The question, “are we supposed to care about the old lady down the street?”, becomes his justification for endless Social Security at any level of taxpayer proposed indemnity. His is not a serious mind. Talking about government programs in an emotional manner is never the recipe for fixing them or making sense of them. No service delivery can improve when bureaucracies are described in moralistic terms. When the extent of one’s analysis is, “don’t you care about the old lady down the street?”, you fail to have anything meaningful to say about government.
The filmmakers try to portray Chomsky as a Saint. Two sympathizers are interviewed who imply that his life has been endangered by right-wingers due to his dissent. I guess that applies to me because I’m a right-winger who is not a Chomsky fan. In fact, I think he’s a disgrace and laughingstock, but why would anyone want to hurt him? The guy is a joy to refute and ridicule. Making fun of him is a righteous experience. Besides, it is the emotion-addled left who are the sources of violence in our society—see anti-globalist actions and protests. This is only to be expected because violence is the predictable result when people are so deluded that they regard America as being a racist, sexist, state. Why wouldn’t they be violent when they hate the land into which they were born? Chomsky is a lost cause, but all sensible people should join together as one to rebuke this anti-American scourge.
Joyanna Adams said,
August 12, 2007 at 12:13 am
amfortas said,
Competition time! We live for 'choice'. Who else for Noam?
August 12, 2007 at 8:19 am
dwtray2007 said,
Life’s short so let’s take just one of your points. You claim that Chomsky argues that the US ‘once supplied Iraq with Weapons of Mass Destruction’. Firstly, you don’t actually quote a passage where Chomsky says this, which any responsible journalist should do. My guess is that Chomsky has never said anything quite so simplistic as that, so let’s have a quotation please. In any case, you deny the claim but you don’t refute it because you offer no evidence. According to you ‘throughout the seventies and eighties, we gave them very little, and practically nothing aside from a few helicopters.’ So let’s look at a snippet of the evidence.
According to a US Senate Committee Report in 1994, from 1985 (if not earlier) to 1989, the US supplied Iraq with the following:
Bacillus Anthracis (cause of anthrax).
Clostridium Botulinum (a source of botulinum toxin).
Histoplasma Capsulatam (cause of a disease attacking lungs, brain, spinal cord and heart).
Brucella Melitensis (a bacteria that can damage major organs).
Clotsridium Perfringens (a highly toxic bacteria causing systemic illness).
Clostridium tetani (highly toxigenic).
The report also stated that ‘these microorganisms exported by the United States were identical to those the United Nations inspectors found and removed from the Iraqi biological warfare program.’ (‘U.S. Chemical and Biological Warfare-Related Dual Use Exports to Iraq and their Possible Impact on the Health Consequences of the Persian Gulf War,’ Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs with Respect to Export Administration, reports of May 25, 1994 and October 7, 1994)
These exports were allowed until at least 1989, despite the fact that Iraq had been reported to be engaging in chemical warfare and possibly biological warfare against Iranians, Kurds, and Shiites since the early 80s, not least the Halabja atrocity. As Michael Dobbs reported in the Washington Post in 2003, Halabja 'provoked outrage on Capitol Hill and renewed demands for sanctions against Iraq.' The State Department and the White House also claimed to be outraged yet turned a blind eye to the export of 'dual use' items such as precursors for chemical weapons and steel tubes that can have military and civilian applications. In December 1988, Dow Chemical sold $1.5 million of pesticides to Iraq which could be used as chemical warfare agents.
There was no doubt that the US government knew Iraq was using chemical weapons. On March 5, 1984, the State Department reported that ‘available evidence indicates that Iraq has used lethal chemical weapons’. Fifteen days later, the New York Times reported that US intelligence officials had ‘what they believe to be incontrovertible evidence that Iraq has used nerve gas in its war with Iran and has almost finished extensive sites for mass producing the lethal chemical warfare agent’.
As one insider at the time recounted, the Pentagon ‘wasn't so horrified by Iraq's use of gas. It was just another way of killing people— whether with a bullet or phosgene, it didn't make any difference.' The Reagan and Bush I regimes, still thoroughly outraged by Saddam's barbarism, made sure to block the Senate resolutions for sanctions against Iraq. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Murphy wrote, 'The U.S.-Iraqi relationship is … important to our long-term political and economic objectives … We believe that economic sanctions will be useless or counterproductive to influence the Iraqis.'
The US was in fact an enthusiastic ally of Saddam’s throughout the 1970s and 1980s, providing him with chemical, biological and nuclear assistance. For example, the US was still training Iraqi nuclear scientists, at Portland, Oregon, as late as 1989. Crucially, US aid to Saddam continued long after the Iran-Iraq war and was justified as Murphy states above.
The evidence is there if you care to look for it -as Chomsky does. In fact, much of it is in the mainstream (although many of us would still like to see the thousands of pages the US unilaterally redacted from Iraq’s December 2002 weapons declaration). I assure you, I’m just scratching the surface. As a quick side point, do you know who one of the major suppliers of Iranian nuclear hardware was? That’s right, from the 50s to 1979, under the Atoms for Peace project. US companies even used to show off in newspaper adverts featuring pictures of the former Shah.
I won’t bother dealing with the rest of your article except to say that I find your remark that Chomsky is frequently ‘in no position to be reporting on most of the things he claims’ quite comical. It’s is a truly ludicrous remark. Chomsky’s friends and foes alike all concede that his work is scrupulously and copiously referenced and he frequently makes reference to the voluminous declassified record of US Government documents. As one writer remarked (I forget who), arguing with Chomsky is perilous because you’re liable to have your head handed to you studded with footnotes.
More relevant to your article is the following remark made in Britain’s Guardian newspaper a couple of years ago.
‘His boldness and clarity infuriates opponents - academe is crowded with critics who have made twerps of themselves taking him on.’
August 13, 2007 at 12:03 pm
Pete McCormack’s Blog » Blog Archive » FRIENDS AND ENEMIES, SO-CALLED (and a few things I’ve never heard on the News) said,
August 16, 2007 at 11:52 pm