On Kurtz and Chomsky

A new post over at the rhetorically overwrought but nonetheless informative Moonbat Central has a fantastic display of Chomskyite ideology at its worst, witness:

“Unlike many leftists of his generation,” says [Robert] Barsky, “Chomsky never flirted with movements or organisations that were later revealed to be totalitarian, oppressive, exclusionary, anti-revolutionary, and elitist … He has very little to regret. His work, in fact, contains some of the most accurate analyses of this century.”

This is, to put it very mildly, willful blindness bordering on insanity. The movements and organizations Chomsky has supported which were not merely later revealed to be totalitarian, oppressive, etc; but were openly so from their inception; amounts to a laundry list of the worst ideological pathologies of the twentieth century. A recitation that includes the PLO, the FLN, the NLF, North Vietnam, Castro's Cuba, the Khmer Rouge, Maoism, Nasserism, Baathism, the Sandanistas, et al; would be significant only in its inadequacy to convey the breadth of Chomsky's affection for authoritarianism. Indeed, an objective look at Chomsky's record reveals that there has hardly been a totalitarian, oppresseive, exclusionary, anti-revolutionary, or elitist movement which Chomsky has not supported. The fact that much of the mainstream left has managed, either out of inchoate resentment or a secret admiration for the unfettered capacities of absolute power, to convince itself otherwise is, of course, the essence of the Chomskyite phenomenon. It reminds me of nothing less than the passage in Conrad's Heart of Darkness in which Marlow reads through Kurtz's lengthy paper on the Suppression of Savage Customs, and after pages of well meaning and intelligent discourse on the issue, finds a single, scrawled line at the end: "Exterminate all the brutes!" Once one sifts through the various exhortations of "accurate analysis" and high minded moralisms of the Chomskyites, this will to absolute power, and thus destruction, is, ultimately, all one is left with.