The Full Chomsky
By Bernard Chapin (11/10/04)
Question: How could a linguist working as a college professor have omniscient insight regarding the inner-workings of the American government and exclusive knowledge concerning the hidden motivations of every government official in our nation’s history?
Answer: There’s no way he could.
Yet, such common sense does little to refute the fact that Noam Chomsky is one of the ten most quoted figures in the humanities. He has published screed after screed deconstructing American foreign policy positions and never has given any indication that his insinuations may somehow be limited by lack of connections or first hand evidence (or, in some cases, any evidence whatsoever). Since the 1960s, he has fully played the role of Wizard Professor and created an entire library’s worth of “pseudo-academic smog”.[1]
Until recently, there have been few antidotes for his morass of accusations and allegations, but now we have “The Anti-Chomsky Reader,” edited by David Horowitz and Peter Collier, which offers purchasers the service of deconstructing the deconstructor. Once you’ve finished reading it, you’ll be highly grateful as Chomsky’s lies are so pervasive and counter-intuitive that it’s a wonder anyone but the paranoid ever read him in the first place.
“The Anti-Chomsky Reader” is a compilation of essays outlining and refuting the travesties that the M.I.T. linguist has passed off as truth. It does not confine itself to politics alone. Substantial space is given to the analysis of his scholarly publications in linguistics. These are addressed in two chapters called, “A Corrupted Linguistics” and “Chomsky, Language, World War II and Me.” In the area of his chosen field, many have given him an intellectual pass but this work does not. His linguistic ideas may be as spurious as his political tomes. All sources give him initial credit for his core academic assumption about the “biological basis of grammar,” but it seems that he has engaged in little in the way of scientifically verifiable work over the course of the last fifty years. Chomsky’s creative terminology dazzles admirers but his new theories inevitably amount to nothing
Overall, the compendium leaves no region of his reputation left unexamined. Anti-Americanism is central to his worldview. He never sees this nation as being superior to any other. At best, we mirror the pathologies of totalitarian states. We can discern this clearly in Stephen Morris’s “Whitewashing Dictatorship in Communist Vietnam and Cambodia.” The author sums up Chomsky’s fetish for defending the Vietnamese and Democratic Kampuchea aptly when he argues that,
“As a radical political ideologue, he is crippled by an intense emotional commitment to the cause of anti-Americanism. Operating on the principle that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend,’ he wholeheartedly embraced the struggle of two of the world’s most ruthlessly brutal regimes.”
Chomsky’s hopes for mankind are vested in murderous revolutionaries and not in his own nation. It is our nation, and never the Khmer Rouge, which gives its citizens the freedom to vote, the freedom to trade, and, most obviously, the freedom to spread the type of sedition that Noam Chomsky has been disseminating for close to 40 years.
He does not limit himself to Asia, however. The professor has constantly minimized the acts of many totalitarian states. Chomsky regarded Soviet control of eastern Europe, when compared to the American presence in Vietnam, as being “practically a paradise,” [2] we see a man who cares far more about Holocaust deniers than the six million who were exterminated in gas chambers or desolate Russian ravines.
After 9/11, he was more concerned about a fictitious famine in Afghanistan than about the nearly 3,000 incinerated in The World Trade Center attacks. He predicted that the toppling of the Taliban would result in 3 to 4 million famine deaths. When no such famine occurred, he did not issue an apology or retraction. He simply chose to say nothing.
There is not much about this world famous ideologue that is genuine. He has ardently defended the right of free speech for anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denying cranks like Robert Faurisson and Pierre Guillaume but chose not to say anything, or sign any petitions, supporting Soviet intellectuals relegated to the gulag due to their ideas.
Chomsky’s self-proclaimed political orientation is preposterous. He is enthralled with the socialist ideal but describes himself as a libertarian. If this were true he would be the first libertarian in history who hated capitalism and the free market. He also claims to be an anarchist but seems to love nothing more than strong governments which redistribute the wealth of its citizens and coerce its people into complying with the socialist ideal. He is so deeply repulsed by our nation, and so entirely lacking in perspective, that he holds Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Truman to be war criminals but Pol Pot, who murdered 25 percent of all Cambodians, as creating “constructive achievements for much of the population.” He has an easy answer for those who dare argue with him. We do not understand as we have false consciousness.[3] Only he, the magician, can know the true workings of the American state.
Stylistically, Chomsky’s works are written with an obfuscating hand and penned in the language of the opaque. The mechanics of his style: “As a strategy for creating a Potemkin village of intellectual authenticity, [are] brilliant; as scholarship it is charlatanism.” Chomsky litters his work with footnotes yet the footnotes are a parlor game because they often lead to more footnotes citing other assertions he made in earlier works.
The most egregious passage of them all occurs in John Williamson’s essay, “Chomsky, Language, World War II and Me.” It concerns Chomsky’s interview with “The New Yorker” magazine [4] where he is quoted as saying to one of his classes that Russian archives proved that Britain and the United States supported Nazi armies in the hopes of holding back the Soviet’s eastern advance. When questioned about the quotation by
Williamson, Chomsky dismissed the reporter as having manufactured his statement and that she had printed “a ridiculous gossip column.” He then, even though he claimed not to have said what he did, referred Williamson to a source that did not support his assertion in the least. Chomsky’s statement about the reporter turned out to be slanderous as the lecture that the reporter quoted from is available online via videotape. In it, the linguist says exactly what the reporter says he did. When confronted with his mendacity, Chomsky changed tactics and pronounced how absurd it was for someone to quote from his lecture. The real absurdity is that anyone should take him seriously at all.
In case one thinks that this was an isolated incident, Chomsky appears to have learned nothing from “The New Yorker” scandal as he lied last month in a speech at the University of Michigan when he said that the United States had planned an attack on Japan before Pearl Harbor. No evidence was offered to support his claim as no evidence exists.
What can one say about Chomsky? As a scholar and shaper of young minds he is deplorable. He is a Jew hating Jew who views the Israelis as Nazis and their behavior will result in “a final solution from which few will escape.” [5] His country has made him rich and famous although he discerns no good in the sea of prosperity around him. His is a most disturbed, jealous, and depressed mind. Chomsky has tied his life’s disappointments to officials in Washington. If the linguist would merely be content to hate himself rather than project his feelings upon the government, we would all be much better off.
[1] Phrase from “Chomsky and the Cold War” by Thomas M. Nichols, p. 48.
[2] Nichols, p.61.
[3] Argument made by Eli Lehrer in “Chomsky and the Media: A Kept Press and a Manipulated People.” p.82
[4] Recounted by John Williamson in “Chomsky, Language, World War II and Me.” pp. 236-241
[5] Chomsky quoted on page 94 of Paul Bogdanor’s “Chomsky’s War Against Israel.”
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