Chomsky Defends Treason, Again

I must say, I'm having a ball watching the public crucifixion of Ward Churchill. I've been waiting for awhile to see if the assundry frauds, petty tyrants, and would-be revolutionaries that have infested the American university system would ever get their comeuppance; and I'm gratified to see this blubbering excuse for an intellectual, who has no doubt committed many a public crucifixion of his own on students who dared to question his beliefs, being forced to sweat it out in the public eye.

As I expected, the good professor and erstwhile subject of this blog has weighed in on the subject, praising Churchill's scholarship as "excellent, penetrating and of high scholarly quality" an opinion which seems to be shared by Churchill himself and disputed by almost everybody else. Its not surprising to me that Chomsky is in Churchill's corner, since there doesn't seem to be much light between their respective ideologies. They both embrace the US as Nazi Germany trope (a position I consider tantamount to Holocaust denial) and advocate the violent overthrow of the US government, although Chomsky does seem to be a bit smarter about how he goes about saying so. They seem to share career paths as well, both of them being completely unqualified rhetorical arsonists who have achieved their position by saying disgusting things about subjects in which they hold no credentials and by bullying anyone who dares to contradict them, although I don't think Chomsky's ever been dumb enough to try to fake his own ancestry (although one could see his anti-semitism as an attempt to formulate a non-Jewish identity, but that's a subject for another time).

I think I should be clear on what I think about Churchill's possible dismissal; firstly, I absolutely support his right to spew all the venom he wants to (although I strongly doubt he would support mine to do the same), but I do not believe he has an inalienable right, constitutional or otherwise, to academic tenure and a university position. Now, I don't support universities summarily dismissing anyone who's views they don't care for, but Churchill goes well beyond that. What he is advocating is treason, and no university is required to give succor to such elementary forms of political evil, any more than they are required to retain a professor of neo-Nazi sympathies or one who thinks the world is flat (and yes, I consider Churchill morally and intellectually comparable to a Nazi or a flat earther; in fact, he seems to be a somewhat farcical synthesis of the two). Most ironically, it seems clear to me that Churchill was not hired in spite of his radicalism but because of it, and it would be a marvelous act of divine justice if that same radicalism results in removal from his clearly much undeserved position.