An Anonymous J'Accuse

A reader who wishes to remain anonymous has sent me this excellent denunciation of Chomsky's actions, associations, and ideologies in Vietnam.

Chomsky does not like to be reminded of, or questioned about, his April 1970 speech in Hanoi. Instead he likes to refer to his 28-page account of the visit in his book At War With Asia. Unfortunately for Chomsky, the account in the book is in many ways even more damning than the speech.

Chomsky found North Vietnam a socialist paradise. He found the country “relaxed and serene.” Everywhere he went, the people “seemed healthy, well-fed, and adequately clothed.” The only negative feelings are evoked by the damage caused by American bombing.

So far as Chomsky can tell, “the country is unified, strong though poor,and determined to withstand the attack launched against Vietnam by the strongest superpower in the world.” That is, there was no dissent whatsoever. The famous American dissenter did not find that odd in the least.

Chomsky accepted every word of his Hanoi hosts without criticism, questioning, or skepticism. Governments engage in propaganda, he loves to remind us–but not Hanoi! When they informed him that their goal for South Vietnam was a “larger coalition government” he accepted that ludicrous contention without reservation.

He called the Saigon authorities “increasingly authoritarian and repressive.” Such a comment in Hanoi, a Stalinist state, certainly raises doubts as to Chomsky’s mental balance.

Chomsky, the champion of freedom of speech, wrote admiringly of his conversation with the director of “the major newspaper of North Vietnam” without, apparently, asking about other newspapers with dissenting views–or even modest disagreement with the Party line. Was there any part of the press or other media independent of Communist control? It never occurred to him to ask, apparently, and the great free speech champion ignored the subject entirely. In a country where millions suffered–and continue to suffer–repression of free speech to a degree infinitely greater than anything that happened later to Faurisson [a French Holocaust denier notoriously defended by Chomsky -- Benjamin] in France, Chomsky managed to remain completely silent on the question of basic human rights.

The conceit that Chomsky supported “the Vietnamese people” or “the revolution” but not the regime cannot be maintained. He describes with adoration his conversations with, among other high-ranking officials, Premier Pham Van Dong. And he accepted without question the Premier's ridiculous assertions that “South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos will be neutral” after the expected reunification of the country.

He visited a hospital. It was wonderful. He visited a math class, a linguistics seminar. All equally wonderful. He writes with approval of the “achievements of the North Vietnamese in the economic field.” He looks at the phenomenon of a free agricultural market alongside the state market,and concludes that “there is little incentive for the peasants to use the free market” because the state set agricultural prices artificially high. Most peasants, he says, have joined the cooperatives, “the advantages of joining being obvious.” Not a sign of coercion here!

Chomsky tells us that “there appears to be a high degree of democratic participation at the village and regional levels.” One wonder what the evidence for that “democracy” might have been.

He goes on to explain in some detail how the Party utilizes central economic planning, and cites with approval the analysis by Le Duan–head of the Party–of the central role of the Party in managing and directing the economy. Chomsky often likes to smear those who disagree with him as Stalinists and neo-Nazis, with such lines as “a Stalinist would be proud.” Here the Stalinists actually were proud–and Chomsky gave them his approval. He goes so far as to say that Hanoi was successfully applying Mao’s principles of development.

It is at this point that the only modest disagreement surfaces between Chomsky and his government hosts: Chomsky endorses the elimination, in the long run, of “party direction” in favor of “direct popular control at all levels.” He gives no indication as to how this might happen.

There follows a discussion of the North Vietnamese “land reform” after 1954. Citing reports from the Manchester Guardian, he says that the land reform “took a fearful toll; it was a chaotic affair, with thousands of people using the opportunity to pay off old scores, and thousands were killed in an eruption of violence and terror.” But it was all worth it, says Chomsky, for the hope it gave peasants of a new society. North Vietnam has succeeded, he says, “in resolving successfully an extremely difficult problem of agricultural production.” It is not a question of human rights; as with Soviet Five-Year Plans, it is merely a question of production. The human toll is irrelevant. And of course, in Chomsky’s version, the brutality of the process had nothing to do with government policy.

We can be sure that there is another side to the “land reform” story that Chomsky will not reveal, that he wishes to consign to the memory hole: here is a slightly different description, found athttp://www.newamerica.net/index.cfm?pg=article&DocID=43:

The Hanoi dictatorship instituted the Soviet and Chinese collectivization models as its disastrous "land reform program." A "Population Classification Degree" of March 2, 1953, assigned everyone to categories invented by the Soviets in the 1920s, e.g. "landlord" and "agricultural worker." Notwithstanding the fact that the average landlord in North Vietnam owned less than two acres of rice land, somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 North Vietnamese were denounced as class enemies and shot.

During this period Ho Chi Minh and his colleagues were so impressed by Mao's large-scale class genocide that they brought in Chinese Communists to help them sort out who should live and who should die. Bui Tin, a former North Vietnamese official, described the case of Mrs. Nguyen Thi Nam. Although her sons were Communist Party officials, "the Chinese adviser concluded that she was a cruel landowner who had to be eliminated." This case was brought to Ho Chi Minh's attention, but he refused to intervene. "Mrs. Nam was quickly condemned to death on the advice of Mao Tse-tung's representative, who accused her of deceitfully entering the ranks of the revolution to destroy it from within."

Some peasants used the land reform process to settle scores, but as the imprisonment and murder grew in scale many were frightened into resistance. On November 2, 1956, villagers rebelled in Nghe-An, near Ho's birthplace,forcing the regime to send in the 325th Division of the People's Army to crush them.

As in Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's China, in Ho's North Vietnam the land reform terror was called off when it had served its purpose of atomizing society and cementing the control of the communist party. Ho Chi Min admitted that "errors" had been made, but blithely dismissed the victims of the mass murder: "One cannot waken the dead."

The atrocities of the North Vietnamese government appalled many intellectuals, including some in the Communist Party. Their protest took the form of articles in two publications, Nhan Van ("The Humanities") and Giai Pham ("Masterpieces"), from which the so-called Nhan Van-Giai Pham Affair (1956-58) took its name. The regime cracked down on the dissidents, but could not kill the spirit of dissent. Nguyen Chi Thien began composing poetry critical of the regime, which was privately circulated. The authorities jailed him in 1961.

In testimony before the U.S. Congress in 1995, the poet described what happened: "In 1961 Ho Chi Minh himself signed a decree ordering the re-education of several hundred thousand people, consisting of those who had served in the military or government of the Bao Dai regime, and those in the general population who were discontented with the regime, including Buddhist monks, Catholic priests, lay Catholics, bourgeois capitalists and intellectuals. They were all corralled in hard labor camps…The vast majority of these people were never brought to trial and their fate depended entirely on the dispositions made by the Public Security cadres."

Released in 1963, Nguyen Chi Thien was arrested again in 1966 and was imprisoned until 1977. Like Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag, he had to compose his work and commit it to memory. Whether he was in the city jail of Hoa Lo (the "Hanoi Hilton" where many American POWs spent time) or hard labor camps in the countryside, he spent days reciting his poems to himself. His greatest fear was that if he lost his memory his life's work would be obliterated.

After being released in 1977, he lived with a friend and wrote down almost400 poems from memory. He chose Bastille Day, 1979 (July 14) to smuggle his work to diplomats in the French Embassy in Hanoi. Unfortunately, the Vietnamese security detail standing guard deterred him. Two days later,pursued by another security detail, he plunged into the British embassy, shouting in English, "I am not a madman, I am a poet and I have something important to give to you." To their credit, three British diplomats shut out the Vietnamese guards and asked him what he wanted. He gave them his manuscript and three photographs of himself, to establish that he did not seek to hide in anonymity. On leaving the embassy he was arrested. He spent 12 more years in prison and composed a second collection of poems. In 1991 he was released and emigrated to the United States.

To sum up: Chomsky, the famous dissenter and champion of human rights,visited a totalitarian country and found no dissent; and the absence of basic human freedoms did not concern him in the least. The “libertarian socialist” had nothing but good things to say about the imposition of economic, cultural, and political institutions that were and continue to be repressive, cruel, and coercive. The “independent thinker” lavished his praise on the most brutal Stalinist and Maoist policies.

So why does anyone take him seriously?

I must confess, as I read this I began to seethe with anger. Nothing is uglier than hypocrisy, especially when it results in murder; and the spectacle of this grinning clown, this king of the useful idiots, this wretched apologist for tyranny and slaughter parading himself around North Vietnam, armed with his suffocating moral self-adoration, adorning himself with the honorable title of dissident while the true dissidents, the true martyrs to human freedom, were condemned to silence and death by the very government he was busy aggrandizing; is as much of a monument to intellectual evil as the worst apologists for Hitler and Stalin. Chomsky is merely one in a long continuum of Potemkin intellectuals who began as gadflys and ended as cheerleaders to mass murder. It is up to us to see that history judges him as harshly as it has his fellow travelers.

The Counterrevolutionary Roll Call

Many thanks to Justin R. Taylor for placing me on his Definitive Anti-Chomsky Link List along with many other worthy counterrevolutionaries. It appears that, despite the best efforts of the good professor's minions, the anti-Chomskyite phenomenon is on the move. To the ramparts!

A Brief Digression

Neo-conservative founding father Norman Podhoretz (the antithesis of the Chomskyite, if there ever was one) has just published a magnificent article on the War on Terror, which he calls World War IV, and those who support and oppose it. It deserves to be read in its entirety.

More Chomskyite Anti-Semitism

Chomskyite activist and presidential candidate Ralph Nader has taken some time off from slandering every public figure in the country besides himself to defend his recent anti-semitic remarks:

In early July, after Nader made the "puppet" comment, Foxman and Barbara Balser, ADL's national chairman, wrote to Nader, saying, "the image of the Jewish State as a 'puppeteer,' controlling the powerful US Congress feeds into many age-old stereotypes which have no place in legitimate public discourse."

In a three-page letter dated August 5, Nader responded to Foxman by noting, "The Israelis have a joke for the obvious – that the United States is the second state of Israel." "How often, if ever, has the United States – either the Congress of the White House – pursued a course of action, since 1956, that contradicted the Israeli government's position?"

Nader lamented what he described as the lack of freedom in the US to debate and discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and he attacked the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobby, for its influence on Capitol Hill.

Like the master, Nader seems to completely lack any conscience or capacity for objective self-reflection whatsoever. Nader could easily criticize Israel without making ridiculously racist comments like claiming Israel runs the US government; and he could easily apologize for such obnoxious rhetoric like any honest person would, issue a mea culpa and be done with it. Instead, in classic Chomskyite fashion, he tries to obfuscate the issue with lousy history -- I could name numerous examples of the US government contradicting Israeli policy, the strong-arming of Yitzhak Shamir in the run up to the Madrid Conference is one of the most prominent examples -- and spurious inuenndo, i.e. claiming that AIPAC influence and Jewish lobbying success are somehow proof that Israel runs the US government. As with Chomsky, the real issue here is Nader's faith in his own infallibility and his rage at those who would dare question it; on a larger level, its a statement about the danger inherent in the authoritarian personality, in the intellectual who ascribes to himself a messianic perception of events cemented in place by a fanatic's morality.

My Back Pages

For those of you who are interested, I've posted some of my longer essays as permanent web pages:

• My review of Peace in the Middle East? begins here, links to the next three pages are at the bottom.
• Here There is No Why?, on Chomsky and Holocaust denial.
• Is Chomsky an Anti-Semite?
• For those interested in the occasional non-Chomsky related article, here's a piece I wrote last summer on Bruce Springsteen. I think its interesting considering some of the Boss's recent utterings.

Enjoy.

Is Chomsky a Traitor?

Another loaded question, but one worth tackling. We live in a time when the border between dissent and treason has been blurred as never before, and the location of that line may well be of near-existential importance in the near future; not merely for our country's security, but for the future of liberal government in general. We must begin with a few axiomatic and obvious facts: There is no question that Chomsky desires and advocates the destruction of his country in its current form; there is also no question that he is not averse to the use of violence in pursuit of this aim. It is by no means clear, however, that this amounts to treason in the legal sense. Personally, I am not in favor of treasonizing political opinions, however extreme, unless absolutely necessary; and any society which values free speech and open discourse must make peace with the fact that this freedom will inevitably be exploited by the unscrupulous, the irresponsible, and even the seditious. Recently, The Volokh Conspiracy had an interesting post on the legal definition of treason which may shed some light on the issue

The Supreme Court has held that "adhering" requires an intent to help the nation's enemies. Merely knowledge that one's actions will help the enemies isn't enough. Thus, for instance, in Haupt v. United States (1947), the Court concluded that a father's sheltering his son -- a Nazi saboteur -- isn't treason if his intention was simply to help his son (as a result of "parental solicitude"). To be treasonous, the father's actions had to be intended to aid the Nazis. Likewise, in Cramer v. United States (1945), the Court held that:

"On the other hand, a citizen may take actions, which do aid and comfort the enemy -- making a speech critical of the government or opposing its measures, profiteering, striking in defense plants or essential work, and the hundred other things which impair our cohesion and diminish our strength -- but if there is no adherence to the enemy in this, if there is no intent to betray, there is no treason."

In wartime, many actions may help the enemy. Criticizing the government may help the enemy. Running as antiwar candidate may help the enemy (by emboldening the enemy's allies).

Raising prices, either on goods sold to the military or on goods to the public at large, may help the enemy. So can striking. So can retiring from a high-level job (in government or in essential civilian work), when one knows that one's replacement will be less effective. (None of these may help the enemy vastly, but treason law doesn't require vast assistance, only some assistance.) If all of these actions were treated as treasonous, then we would have a totalitarian regime during every war.

It's actually not clear whether even intentionally aiding the enemy should always be punishable treason, if it's done through speech. For instance, say that an American opinion leader thought during the Spanish-American War that the Spanish were in the right and deserved to win, and argued this intending to help the Spaniards -- and actually helping them, because this emboldened them, weakened domestic morale, and so on. This might well be constitutionally protected speech, though I think some other speech that aids the enemey would not be constitutionally protected; consider the Axis Sally broadcasts from Nazi Germany by Nazi employees (though U.S. citizens), or of course a government employee's revelations of nuclear secrets.

Obviously, the realm of protected speech in this interpretation is very wide indeed -- contradicting, amusingly enough, Chomsky's claim that the US is a totalitarian society -- but not unlimited; even the most liberal society, after all, has the right to fight for its own preservation in the face of illiberal forces. This definition of treason seems to rest on three factors:

1. A fealty to and desire to aid the enemies of the United States.
2. The undertaking of specific actions to aid said enemies.
3. Behind those actions must be the specific intention to aid said enemies and the knowledge that those actions will do so.

In Chomsky's case, the issue is complicated further by the fact that Chomsky's actions are mostly rhetorical; that is to say that -- as far as I know -- he does not undertake obviously treasonous actions such as running guns to the enemy or divulging important information. I think we can safely say, however, that Chomsky's actions quite often meet the first and second conditions, while less often skirting the edge of the third. Being as indulgent as possible -- which I think ought to be the case in a free society -- we can nonetheless find at least two instances of treasonous activity in Chomsky's career, and a few more examples which we can regard as belonging to a grayer area.

The first and most obvious is Vietnam. In this case, the fact that Chomsky committed treason against the United States is rather glaringly obvious. There can be no question that Chomsky's ideological and emotional stake was with the North Vietnamese and the cause of communism in Southeast Asia. His statements in North Vietnam were clear expressions of fealty to that cause and, indeed, his personal identification with it; Chomsky's actions during Vietnam were not directed towards an amorphous pacifism but rather specifically intended to engineer an American defeat and a communist victory. The fact that Chomsky was motivated by ostensibly good intentions is, to my mind, no excuse whatsoever. To consider the defeat of one's country a glorious victory for the cause of humanity in no way negates the legal implications of aiding and abetting in it. The obvious counterargument, one of which Chomsky is almost comedically fond, is the Nazi hypothetical; i.e. that if one is a citizen of a state like Nazi Germany, than one is not merely permitted but obligated morally to work for its defeat. My only response is to say that to draw such an analogy between Nazi Germany and the United States indicates a moral and intellectual bankruptcy so profound that it can serve only to indicate to us the degree of intellectual malfeasance at work in the mind of one who asserts it. Chomsky's claim of virtue in treason is no more admirable than his later discovery of virtue in mass murder, or its denial. His actions regarding Vietnam -- and those of a good swath of his compatriots -- are, in my opinion, inextricably equivilant to type of actions undertaken by the "Axis Sally" propagandists in WWII and other pro-Nazi citizens of Allied nations; and ought to have been treated as such.

The only reason they were not, as far as I can see, is the fact that, in a classic case of defining deviancy down, such actions among the American intellectual elite had become so ubiquitous and widespread that they had ceased to be prosecutable. It would have involved locking up a mighty swath -- though by no means all -- of the intellectual elite of the United States. (Before the denunciations start, I would like to note that I am not accusing everyone who opposed the Vietnam War of treason, only those who did so out of identification with communism and in service of engineering a total North Vietnamese victory.) As the poet said: "Treason doth never prosper, for if it prosper none dare call it treason." In this case, treason -- or, at the very least, the total negation of the most essential values of a liberal society -- had become so widespread that it ceased to be a crime; this was not due to a sudden collapse in morality but rather a negation of courage; more precisely, to support the anti-communist cause -- to put it more accurately, the anti-totalitarian cause -- required a degree of moral and political courage which most intellectuals at the time simply did not possess. Treason won out not by conviction but by density; the sheer weight of the shift in the ideological center of gravity; a phenomenon which, quite simply, rendered the law impossible to enforce.

The second case, and this is a bit less clear, is that of Afghanistan. There is no doubt that Chomsky deliberately spread false propaganda that a "silent genocide" was in the offing in Afghanistan, and that he did so for the purposes of damaging and/or interdicting America's cause in that war. This, within itself, in no way constitutes treason; though it is one of the most disgraceful moments in an already ostentiously disgraceful career. I am less indulgent regarding the manner in which Chomsky went about spreading the slander; mostly through the European media and on trips to India, Pakistan, and other highly volatile areas of the world where such propaganda could well have erupted into anti-American violence; an outcome which was, in my opinion, precisely Chomsky's intention and hope. This does not, however, necessarily fulfill the requirement of intent to aid the enemies of one's country; for it does not declare Chomsky a champion of Bin Laden and the Taliban. I think there is a case to be made, however, that Chomsky regarded the situation as "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." In Chomsky's eyes, Bin Laden's violence was a welcome response to the American imperium; "for the first time, the guns have been turned around" as Chomsky put it; and therefore its engineer ought to be defended and aided however possible. I am personally convinced that Chomsky's spreading of malicious and false propaganda was undertaken with the deliberate intention of sabotaging a military effort against Bin Laden and that this constituted an act of treason; whether such a charge would hold up in a court of law, I am less certain, though I think the basis for an indictment is probably there.

There are other, grayer areas, which skirt the line of legal treason without crossing it outright: Chomsky's support for Central American communism, for Castro's Cuba, and more than a few others. I have also personally seen tapes of Chomsky's lectures being broadcast on Syrian television, a privilege for which I am sure he is well compensated. While these lectures are mostly anti-Israel, there is a fair amount of anti-Americanism wrapped up in them as well; a fact which cannot but contribute to America's bad image in the Middle East; an outcome of which Chomsky is no doubt aware.

The question, however, ultimately comes down to the refusal of a large piece of the American intelligentsia -- with Chomsky first among them -- to openly acknowledge the rather obvious implications of their ideologies. The idea that certain positions, such as advocating the overthrow of representative democracy in the United States, are ones which any liberal society is obligated to regard as criminal seems to be lost on a generation of intellectuals for whom intellectual responsibility has ceased to mean anything more than subscribing to a list of preordained ideologies of which anti-Americanism is the supreme catechism. The common sense argument, obvious to any thinking person, that desiring and attempting to engineer the defeat of one's country in a war can, in fact must, entail consequences has been obliterated by an elite convinced of their own righteousness in the manner that only the true fanatic can be. It is the rest of us, I fear, who will reap the whirlwind.

A People's Takedown of Howard Zinn

While writing my earlier post on Howard Zinn – another Chomskyite in the process of being mainstreamed, if he hasn’t been already – I was reminded of this article by Dan Flynn on Zinn's magnum opus. My apologies for its length, but it deserves extensive quotation:

For readers who prefer their history to be an accurate retelling of the past rather than marching orders for the present, Zinn’s writings disappoint. While every historian has his biases, Zinn makes no effort to overcome his. What is considered vice by most historians—politically motivated inaccuracies, long-winded rants, convenient omissions, substituting partisanship for objectivity—is transformed into virtue by Zinn.

“Objectivity is impossible,” pop historian Howard Zinn once remarked, “and it is also undesirable. That is, if it were possible it would be undesirable, because if you have any kind of a social aim, if you think history should serve society in some way; should serve the progress of the human race; should serve justice in some way, then it requires that you make your selection on the basis of what you think will advance causes of humanity.”

The New York Times’ review opined that the book should be “required reading” for students. Professors have heeded this counsel. Courses at the University of Colorado-Boulder, UMass-Amherst, Penn State, and Indiana University are among dozens of classes nationwide that require the book. The book is so popular that it can be found on the class syllabus in such fields as economics, political science, literature, and women’s studies, in addition to its more understandable inclusion in history. Amazon.com reports in the site’s “popular in” section that the book is currently #7 at Emory University, #4 at the University of New Mexico, #9 at Brown University, and #7 at the University of Washington. In fact, 16 of the 40 locations listed in A People’s History’s “popular in” section are academic institutions, with the remainder of the list dominated by college towns like Binghamton (NY), State College (PA), East Lansing (MI), and Athens (GA). Based on this, it is reasonable to wonder if most of the million or so copies sold have been done so via coercion, i.e., college professors and high school teachers requiring the book. The book is deemed to be so crucial to the development of young minds by some academics that a course at Evergreen State decreed: “This is an advanced class and all students should have read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States before the first day of class, to give us a common background to begin the class.”

And what “common background” might that be?

Through Zinn’s looking-glass, Maoist China, site of history’s bloodiest state-sponsored killings, transforms into “the closest thing, in the long history of that ancient country, to a people’s government, independent of outside control.” The authoritarian Nicaraguan Sandinistas were “welcomed” by their own people, while the opposition Contras, who backed the candidate that triumphed when free elections were finally held, were a “terrorist group” that “seemed to have no popular support inside Nicaragua.” Castro’s Cuba, readers learn, “had no bloody record of suppression."

The recently released updated edition continues to be plagued with inaccuracies and poor judgment. The added sections on the Clinton years, the 2000 election, and 9/11 bear little resemblance to the reality his current readers have lived through.

In an effort to bolster his arguments against putting criminals in jail, aggressive law enforcement tactics, and President Clinton’s crime bill, Zinn contends that in spite of all this “violent crime continues to increase.” It doesn’t. Like much of Zinn’s rhetoric, if you believe the opposite of what he says in this instance you would be correct. According to a Department of Justice report released in September of 2002, the violent crime rate has been cut in half since 1993.

According to Zinn, it was Mumia Abu-Jamal’s “race and radicalism,” as well as his “persistent criticism of the Philadelphia police” that landed him on death row in the early 1980s. Nothing about Abu-Jamal’s gun being found at the scene; nothing about the testimony of numerous witnesses pointing to him as the triggerman; nothing about additional witnesses reporting a confession by Abu-Jamal—it was Abu-Jamal’s dissenting voice that caused a jury of twelve to unanimously sentence him to death.

Predictably, Zinn draws a moral equivalence between America and the 9/11 terrorists. He writes, “It seemed that the United States was reacting to the horrors perpetrated by the terrorists against innocent people in New York by killing other innocent people in Afghanistan.” Scare quotes adorn Bush’s “war on terrorism,” post-9/11 “patriotism,” and other words and phrases Zinn dislikes.

Readers of A People’s History of the United States learn very little about history. They do learn quite a bit, however, about Howard Zinn. In fact, the book is perhaps best thought of as a massive Rorschach Test, with the author’s familiar reaction to every major event in American history proving that his is a captive mind long closed by ideology...

If you’ve read Marx, there’s no reason to read Howard Zinn. In fact, reading the first line of The Communist Manifesto makes a study of A People’s History of the United States a colossal waste of time. The single-bullet theory of history offered by Marx—“The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle”—is relied upon by Zinn to explain all of American history. Economics determines everything. Why study history when theory has all the answers.

Thumb through A People’s History of the United States and one finds greed motivating every major event. According to Zinn, the separation from Great Britain, the Civil War, and World Wars I and II—to name but a few examples—all stem from base motives involving rich men seeking to get richer at the expense of other men.
Zinn’s projection of Marxist theory upon historical reality begins with Columbus, who, Zinn posits, repetitiously queried the Indians: where is the gold? According to Zinn, those following Columbus to the New World did so for the same reason: profit. “Behind the English invasion of North America, behind their massacre of Indians, their deception, their brutality, was that special powerful drive born in civilizations based on private profit,” maintains the octogenarian writer.

A materialist interpretation continues with the Founding. “Around 1776,” A People’s History informs, “certain important people in the English colonies made a discovery that would prove enormously useful for the next two hundred years. They found that by creating a nation, a symbol, a legal unity called the United States, they could take over land, profits, and political power from the favorites of the British Empire. In the process, they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership."

Zinn sarcastically adds, “When we look at the American Revolution this way, it was a work of genius, and the Founding Fathers deserve the awed tribute they have received over the centuries. They created the most effective system of national control devised in modern times, and showed future generations of leaders the advantages of combining paternalism with command.” Rather than the spark that lit the fire of freedom and self-government throughout much of the world, the American Founding is portrayed as a diabolically creative way to ensure oppression. If the Founders wanted a society they could direct, why didn’t they put forth a dictatorship or a monarchy resembling most other governments at the time? Why go through the trouble of devising a constitution guaranteeing rights, mass political participation, jury trials, and checks on power? Zinn doesn’t explain, contending that these freedoms and rights were merely a facade designed to prevent class revolution.

Zinn paints antebellum America as a uniquely cruel slaveholding society subjugating man for profit. Curiously, the war that ultimately resulted in slavery’s demise is portrayed as a conflict of oppression too. Zinn writes, “it is money and profit, not the movement against slavery, that was uppermost in the priorities of the men who ran the country.” Rather than welcoming emancipation, as one might expect, Zinn casts a cynical eye towards it. “Class consciousness was overwhelmed during the Civil War,” the author laments, placing a decidedly negative spin on the central event in American history. America is in a lose/lose situation. Both slavery and emancipation, according to Zinn, were caused by the same thing: greed. Whether the U.S. tolerates or eradicates slavery, its nefarious motives remain the same. What is significant is that Zinn’s jaundiced eye fails to see the real issues surrounding the Civil War. Instead, he envisions the chief significance of the grisly conflict as being how it served as a distraction from the impending socialist revolution.

By the time the reader reaches World War I, Zinn begins to sound like a broken record. “American capitalism needed international rivalry—and periodic war—to create an artificial community of interest between rich and poor,” the Boston University professor writes of the Great War, “supplanting the genuine community of interest among the poor that showed itself in sporadic movements.” Yet another conspiracy to distract the masses from revolution!

“A People’s War?” is Zinn’s chapter on World War II, the war in which the author served his country. Zinn suggests that America, not Japan, was to blame for Pearl Harbor by provoking the Empire of the Sun. The fight against fascism was all an illusion. While Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan may have been America’s enemies, Uncle Sam’s real goal was supposedly empire. Regarding America’s neutrality in the Spanish Civil War, Zinn asks: “was it the logical policy of a government whose main interest was not stopping Fascism but advancing the imperial interests of the United States? For those interests, in the thirties, an anti-Soviet policy seemed best. Later, when Japan and Germany threatened U.S. world interests, a pro-Soviet, anti-Nazi policy became preferable.” Reality is inverted. It’s not the Soviet Union that went from being anti-Nazi to pro-Nazi to anti-Nazi. Zinn projects the Soviet Union’s schizophrenic policies upon America. While the Hitler-Stalin Pact is awkwardly excused, Zinn all but proclaims a Hitler-Roosevelt Pact.

Like all conflicts, the reader learns that the Second World War was really about—surprise!—money. “Quietly, behind the headlines in battles and bombings,” Zinn writes, “American diplomats and businessmen worked hard to make sure that when the war ended, American economic power would be second to none in the world. United States business would penetrate areas that up to this time had been dominated by England. The Open Door Policy of equal access would be extended from Asia to Europe, meaning that the United States intended to push England aside and move in.” Yet, this didn’t happen. The English Empire expired, but no American Empire moved to take its place. Despite defeating Japan and helping to vanquish Germany, America rebuilt these countries. Both are now the chief economic rivals of the U.S., not our colonies...

By simplistically dividing groups into oppressor/oppressed classes, one will inevitably err because the individuals who constitute these groups are too diverse to be pigeonholed into this rigid dichotomy. By taking the opening chapter’s treatment of New England’s Pequot War of the late 1630s as a case study, we see how this methodology unavoidably leads to error.

The war’s most significant event was the horrible burning of the Pequot stronghold of Fort Mystic in May of 1637. Finding themselves severely outnumbered and taking casualties, the settlers set fire to the Pequot compound. The decision would prove tragic. The hellish inferno claimed hundreds of Pequot souls, including untold numbers of women and children. If Zinn sought to use the situation to discredit the white settlers, the truth would have been enough to do the trick. Yet the activist author cannot resist the temptation of piling on, so he presents a version of the Pequot War wildly at odds with the historical record, but consistent with his theory.

Pequot violence against the whites is almost entirely absent from the text. The most Zinn can bring himself to admit is that “Massacres took place on both sides.” Also briefly mentioned is the killing of John Oldham, which Zinn justifies by labeling the murder victim a “trader, Indian-kidnapper, and troublemaker.” For reasons not hard to deduce, the author details only the atrocities committed by one side: the Puritans. Pequot atrocities are brushed aside. Graphic descriptions of Puritan violence are highlighted. What did Zinn leave out that complicates matters for his thesis? “[T]hey took two men out of a boat, and murdered them with ingenious barbarity, cutting off first the hands of one of them, then his feet,” writes 19th century historian John Gorham Palfrey about the Pequots’ assaults upon settlers. “Soon after, two men sailing down the river were stopped and horribly mutilated and mangled; their bodies were cut in two, lengthwise, and the parts hung up by the river’s bank. A man who had been carried off from Wethersfield was roasted alive. All doubt as to the necessity of vigorous action was over, when a band of a hundred Pequots attacked that place, killed seven men, a woman, and a child, and carried off two girls.” One needn’t be a rocket scientist to figure out why these troublesome facts didn’t make the final cut of this “people’s” history.

The text is also mute on internecine violence among the Indians. The Pequots not only waged war on whites, but on their fellow natives as well. They were a belligerent people feared by weaker tribes. The reader is left unsupplied with these facts that might give context to the brutal assault on Fort Mystic. Instead, Zinn frames the event to fit his thesis. The early American settlers “wanted them out of the way; they wanted their land,” he writes. Leaving aside the Pequots’ aggression that contradicts this simplistic land-grab theory, there is some debate about whether the land the Pequots occupied was in fact “their land.” Some historians have contemplated the theory that like the English and the Dutch, the Pequots were newcomers to the area, and displaced other tribes. Interjecting this debate within A People’s History would have proved inconvenient, so it too is left out.

Zinn portrays the Pequot War as a Puritan-versus-Indian conflict, but both Puritans and Indians fought against the Pequots. Whites comprised less than 15% of 500-plus men who attacked the Pequots at Fort Mystic. After the horrific conflagration ended, it was the Mohegans who executed the Pequots’ captured sachem. More importantly, leading up to the battle other Indian tribes—for example, the Narragansett—repeatedly urged the English newcomers to attack their enemies, the Pequots. Zinn writes that “Indian tribes were used against one another” by the Puritans when, in fact, the reverse was true. Indian tribes used the Puritans and their superior firepower to eradicate their fellow Indians who posed a threat to them.Because the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy preordains how every story is told, the story of the Pequot War is grossly distorted. By reading A People’s History, you’d likely believe that the Pequot War was fought strictly by whites against Indians, that it was unprovoked aggression on the part of the whites, and that the Pequots were a peaceful people. In short, reading Zinn’s two pages on the Pequot War leaves the reader more ignorant than enlightened...

History is too complicated to find a perfect fit within any theory. For the true believer, this inconvenience can be overcome. When fact and theory clash, the ideologue chooses theory. To the true believer, ideology is truth. Time and again, A People’s History of the United States opts to mold the facts to fit the theory, leaving the reader to wonder what “people” he is referring to in the book’s title. Dishonest people? Left-wing people? Delusional people?

For instance, Zinn claims that “George Washington was the richest man in America.” He wasn’t, but it makes for a good story. Perhaps the wealthiest man being rewarded with the run of the government is too compelling a concept for a Marxist to discard—even when it isn’t true. Whatever the reason for the inclusion of this falsehood, it’s one that can be easily disproved. Despite having substantial debts owed to British moneylenders in the late 1760s and early 1770s, as well as having to borrow money to travel to New York upon his election to the presidency, George Washington certainly rose to accumulate great wealth in his lifetime—even if he was chronically cash-poor. His last will and testament estimates his accumulated wealth at $530,000. That certainly qualified him as rich, but clearly there were men of greater means roaming America during his lifetime. Robert Morris, who eventually lost his wealth, was the Founding era’s wealthiest merchant. Moses Brown, whose family’s name graces an Ivy League university, was another contemporary of Washington’s whose wealth in that era exceeded that of the nation’s first president. Zinn is wrong.

“When the Scottsboro case unfolded in the 1930s in Alabama,” Zinn writes, “it was the Communist party that had become associated with the defense of these young black men imprisoned, in the early years of the Depression, by southern injustice.” Perhaps the Party had become “associated” with the defense of the Scottsboro Boys, but in reality the Communists merely used the embattled youngsters. Richard Gid Powers points out in Not Without Honor that the Communists had raised $250,000 for the Scottsboro Boys’ defense, but had put-up a scant $12,000 for two appeals. At the time, a black columnist quoted a candid Party official who stated, “we don’t give a damn about the Scottsboro boys. If they burn it doesn’t make any difference. We are only interested in one thing, how we can use the Scottsboro case to bring the Communist movement to the people and win them over to Communism.” One might see an analogous situation in Zinn’s view of history. He is only interested in it so long as it serves as a weapon of socialist ideology.

“Unemployment grew in the Reagan years,” Zinn claims. Statistics show otherwise. Reagan inherited an unemployment rate of 7.5 percent in his first month in office. By January of 1989, the rate had declined to 5.4 percent. Had the Reagan presidency ended in 1982 when unemployment rates exceeded 10 percent, Zinn would have a point. But for the remainder of Reagan’s presidency, unemployment declined precipitously. While Zinn teaches history and not mathematics, one needn’t be a math whiz to figure out that 5.4 percent is less than 7.5 percent. Despite unleashing an economy that created nearly 20 million new jobs during his tenure, Reagan continues to be smeared by historians—and it’s not hard to figure out why. Reagan’s free market polices were anathema to Marxists like Zinn. Upset at the pleasant way things turned out—Reagan’s policies unleashed an economy that continuously grew from the fall of 1982 until the summer of 1990—historians have preferred to rewrite history...

By now one might be thinking: On what evidence does Zinn base his varied proclamations? One can only guess. Despite its scholarly pretensions, the book contains not a single source citation. While a student in Professor Zinn’s classes at Boston University or Spelman College might have received an “F” for turning in a paper without documentation, Zinn’s footnote-free book is standard reading in scores of college courses across the country...

More striking than Zinn’s inaccuracies—intentional and otherwise—is what he leaves out.

Washington’s Farewell Address, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and Reagan’s speech at the Brandenburg Gate all fail to merit a mention. Nowhere do we learn that Americans were first in flight, first to fly across the Atlantic, and first to walk on the moon. Alexander Graham Bell, Jonas Salk, and the Wright Brothers are entirely absent. Instead, the reader is treated to the exploits of Speckled Snake, Joan Baez, and the Berrigan brothers. While Zinn sees fit to mention that immigrants often went into professions like ditch-digging and prostitution, American success stories like those of Alexander Hamilton, John Jacob Astor, and Louis B. Mayer—to name but a few—are excluded. Valley Forge rates a single fleeting reference, while D-Day’s Normandy invasion, Gettysburg, and other important military battles are left out. In their place, we get several pages on the My Lai massacre and colorful descriptions of U.S. bombs falling on hotels, air-raid shelters, and markets during the Gulf War of the early 1990s...

Zinn utters perhaps the most honest words of A People’s History of the United States in the conclusion of the book’s 1995 edition, conceding that his work is “a biased account.” “I am not troubled by that,” he adds, “because the mountain of history books under which we all stand leans so heavily in the other direction—so tremblingly respectful of states and statesmen and so disrespectful, by inattention, to people’s movements—that we need some counterforce to avoid being crushed into submission.” Two wrongs, he seems to be saying, make a right.

More recently, Zinn made clear that it is not just the idea of objectivity that he finds fault with, but facts themselves. In the current updated version of A People’s History, the author declares: “there is no such thing as pure fact.” Whether Zinn really believes this, or if it serves to rationalize intellectual dishonesty, one can only guess.

"I wanted my writing of history and my teaching of history to be a part of social struggle,” Howard Zinn candidly remarked in an interview conducted long after the release of A People’s History of the United States. “I wanted to be a part of history and not just a recorder and teacher of history. So that kind of attitude towards history, history itself as a political act, has always informed my writing and my teaching.” Indeed it has.

This idea, the politicization of all – even truth itself – is the surest sign of the totalitarian mind. Such thinking creates a hermetically sealed world in which quite literally nothing exists beyond the dialectic at work in the mind of the intellectual. This phenomenon, the all-dominating intellectual violence of the totalitarian personality, defines the Chomskyite more than any other attribute, and is, indeed, beginning to define the American intelligentsia as a whole. Not least, perhaps, because they spend so much time reading books like these.

The Counterrevolution Continues Apace

Two very interesting reviews of The Anti-Chomsky Reader are available at FrontPage (via Victor Hanson's site) and National Review.

Hilariously Horrifying

An anti-Chomsky fest is on at FrontPage, David Horowitz's blog gives us this alternately uproarious and chilling example of Chomsky's infantile mendacity:

As John Williamson, a contributor to the Anti-Chomsky Reader shows, Chomsky even lies about his own statements. In an email to Williamson Chomsky claimed that a statement of his quoted in a New Yorker profile by reporter Larissa MacFarquhar was "too ridiculous to merit comment...No one can seriously use this as a source...childish diatribes in journals attempting to discredit political enemies... almost all gossip...a ridiculous gossip column in the New Yorker." According to the New Yorker profile, Chomsky had made the comment to an MIT class that McFarquhar attended. Not ready to believe that anyone could be so brazen in lying about what he himself had said, Williamson contacted McFarquhar to check. She who told him that MIT had video-taped the class she had attended where Chomsky made the statement. Williamson obtained the tape and sure enough everything Chomsky had said -- every word -- was on the tape.

If you're interested, I posted on the New Yorker article here. Honestly, one doesn't know whether to laugh at the titanic asininity of the man; or weep over the fact that so many in the Western intellectual elite take him seriously.

Mainstreaming the Chomskyites

FrontPageMag has posted the introduction to the new, book-length Chomsky takedown, The Anti-Chomsky Reader (which I should be recieving a copy of sometime soon). Its nothing most of us don't know already, but its still a good general overview of Chomsky's various malfeasences. Without question, the most disturbing paragraph is as follows:

In the post 9/11 political ferment, Chomsky’s reputation, which had suffered because of his support of Pol Pot and his dalliance with figures like Faurisson, is on the upswing again. His following has grown, particularly in Europe and Asia, where his views have helped inform an inchoate anti-Americanism, and on the university campus, where divesting from Israel (a cause he has led) and attacks against the War on Terror are de rigueur. The New York Times and Washington Post, which had for the most part ignored the dozens of Chomsky books that had appeared clone-like over the past few years, both treated Hegemony or Survival as a significant work, with Pulitzer prize winner Samantha Power writing in the Times that Chomsky’s work was "sobering and instructive."

The embrace of Chomsky by the mainstream liberal elite in America and the political consensus in Europe -- both Left and Right -- has to be regarded as one of the most unsettling developments in the intellectual world since 9/11; if only because, for the first time since Vietnam, the idea that America is, on a fundamental level, not merely misguided or mistaken but also evil is becoming a part of acceptable discourse. As I pointed out in my first post, its why I started this blog. I must say, its nice to see some mainstream conservative figures taking the issue seriously, instead of dismissing Chomsky as an irrelevant crank; the latter description is true, the former, unfortunately, is not.

Whitewashing a Chomskyite

A case study in the liberal inability to stand up to intellectual totalitarianism is on display at The American Prospect, in the form of a review of a new documentary about Chomskyite historian Howard Zinn, entitled You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train (and indeed you can't, which is precisely why this blog exists). I've written about Zinn before, and I will echo only a few of my sentiments here. In terms of the article itself, as in most Chomskyite apologetics, the lie is contained as much in what is not said as what is said. There is no mention, for instance, of Zinn's support for Leftist totalitarianism throughout the Cold War; no mention of his unequivocal celebration of North Vietnam's brutal takeover of South Vietnam and the ensuing mass murder and oppression; and, most glaringly, no mention of the nature of Zinn's own vision of what the United States ought to become. As outlined in the closing chapter of A People's History of the United States, Zinn's is a totalitarian vision in which private property is abolished, the young are conscripted into slave-labor gangs, representative democracy is abrogated, and, it seems reasonable to assume, political dissent is to be tolerated with the same alacrity as in, say, Zinn's beloved Cuba. In other words, there is no attempt whatsoever to deal honestly with the implications of Zinn's anti-democratic ideology. The piece also regurgitates the trope that the book has "sold more than a million copies", without noting that a good portion of those sales are coerced, in classic authoritarian style, by schools and college professors who force their students to buy it as part of their curriculum. It does, at least, acknowledge the hermetic intolerance at the heart of Zinn's ideology, but nowhere finds the courage to grapple with it realistically

[T]here are no voices of dissent. Nothing from the elites Zinn was battling in the academy and the government, nor the everyday people who may have resisted the movements in which he participated.

Like that of Michael Moore, Zinn’s often sharp critique leaves one grasping a fistful of questions -- and offers no real pragmatic alternative to our current involvement in Iraq or the dilemma of terrorism. Zinn and the film would benefit by sharpening their views -- on Iraq, on the scope of Zinn’s work -- in dialogue with those who disagree with them.

The writer seems unable to grasp the fact that no ideology of totalism, no Manichean creed such as Zinn's can tolerate the possibility that other visions may harbor their own legitimacy; to do so would render it impossible to sustain the level of fanaticism required to buttress what is, essentially, a conspiracist's worldview. And even more than this, such a concession would require Zinn to admit that on a host of issues; on Vietnam, on Cuba, indeed, on the defining intellectual struggle of the 20th century itself; this "tireless skeptic of power" has been, unequivocally and without reservation or apology, on the side of the executioners. The fact that this patron of tyranny is being celebrated with only minor reservations in one of the foremost journals of mainstream American liberalism is, while perhaps not entirely surprising, nonetheless a disturbing sign of the times.

Here There is No Why?

To paraphrase Albert Camus, there are moral acts and there are political acts, just as there are moral crimes and political crimes.  In the case of Chomsky's support for Robert Faurisson, we must try to delineate that space between the moral and political which Chomsky so often blurs to his own advantage.  We must do so not merely for the sake of intellectual honesty, but also out of a certain moral imperative; it is unacceptable to dismiss the Faurisson affair as beyond understanding; when the denial of the murder of millions is involved, we have an obligation to seek a why, and not merely throw up our hands in disgust.  In my opinion, Chomsky's relationship to Faurisson cannot be explained by shallow deference to an absolutist Libertarianism or by easy intimations of a mere "cloaked" or "disguised" anti-semitism.  Nor are Chomsky's actions mere eccentricities or the exhortations of a vaguely disorded mind.  They are, I believe, entirely logical and understandable within the context of an obscure, but nonetheless significant political tradition.  Chomsky's surprisingly sanguine attitude towards Holocaust Denial, or "Negation" as it is termed -- with greater accuracy, in my opinion -- in France, stems from discernable sources: from his anarchist ideology, from his embrace of Third World radicalism, from his self-declared war with the Jewish establishment of the West, and from his own unconventional, but quite palpable anti-semitism.

Contrary to popular belief, a conspicuous strain of anti-semitism has existed on the revolutionary Left from its inception; and it is to this tradition, and not its reactionary counterpart, to which Chomsky may claim precedence.  This anti-semitism was neither subtle nor confined, indeed, it is possible to say without exagerration that, of all the movement's founding theoreticians, nearly every single one was an outspoken anti-semite to a greater or lesser degree.  Among the most prominent was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the spiritual father of anarchism and architect of the phrase "property is theft", who remarked famously that "The Jew is the enemy of mankind.  It is necessary to send this race back to Asia, or exterminate it...By fire or fusion, or by expulsion, the Jew must disappear...", words so violent that Proudhon has, ironically enough, come to be seen by later historians as something of a proto-fascist.  Another legendary anarchist founder, the Russian Mikael Bakunin, was no more sanguine than Proudhon on the subject of Jewry, calling them "an exploiting sect, a bloodsucking people, a unique devouring parasite..."; he was joined by the likes of Fourier, Duhring, and, especially, Marx, who I will return to momentarily.  Unlike the reactionary, racialist strain of anti-semitism which began slightly later and would culminate in the Nazi regime, this ideology drew its inspiration from the writings of French Enlightenment anti-semites like Voltaire, who had in turn been inspired by pagan Jew-haters like the Roman historian Tacitus.  Where reactionary anti-semitism excoriated the Jews as pollutants -- agents of corrupted modernity and "progress" undermining traditionally pure Christian, and later Aryan, society -- the revolutionary Left attacked Judaism from the opposite direction: as the primary obstacle and enemy of freedom, enlightenment, and progress.  Where the reactionaries assaulted Judaism for its corrosive universalism, its cosmopolitan ethos; the revolutionaries attacked it for its particularism, its ideology of "Chosenness".  In their eyes, the Jews were arrogant and separatist "haters of mankind", as Tacitus had put it, and the harbingers of oppressive, egoistic capitalism -- thus, Judaism was, in its very existence, a negation of the revolutionary values of universalism and egalitarianism.  Karl Marx, the most intellectually creative and rhetorically violent of the Leftist anti-semites saw Jews "simultaneously as real-life agents of egoistic capitalism and as metaphors for the whole of sinful society."  Or, as Edmund Silberner describes Marx's concept:

Judaism has contempt for nature, theory, art, history, and man as an end in himself.  It considers everything as an object of trade...Judaism as such is for Marx an expression of a self-alienated society...

As Marx saw it, capitalism was Judaism and Judaism capitalism:

[M]oney has become a world power, and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of Christian nations.  The Jews have liberated themselves in so far as Christians have become Jews...The Jew who exists as a particular member of bourgeois society is only the particular expression of the Judaism of bourgeois society...Out of its own entrails bourgeois society continually creates Jews.

In Marx's eyes, the Jews are both creators and creation -- quite literally the excrement -- of bourgeois capitalism.  As he concludes ferociously:  "The social emancipation of Jewry is the emancipation of society from Jewry."  In the revolutionary lexicon, of course, the Judaization of capitalism was nothing less than a Judaization of evil.  In the 1970s, German Leftist anti-semite and sometime collaborator with the PLO Ulrike Meinhof would sum up the modern version of this chimera

Auschwitz meant that six million Jews were killed...for what they were: money Jews.  Finance capital and the banks, the hard core of the system of imperialism and capitalism, had turned the hatred of men against money and exploitation and agaionst the Jews...Antisemitism is really a hatred of capitalism.

Thus, the primary act of revolution -- the annihilation of the capitalist system by violence -- becomes also the annihilation of Judaism. 

Chomsky rarely steps beyond the boundaries of this tradition; in his eyes the Jews and Judaism are an inextricable part and personification of the oppressive establishment of the West.  Or, in his own words: "By now Jews in the US are the most privileged and influential part of the population." [Emphasis mine - Benjamin]  The Jews, and particularly their national/political expression in the State of Israel -- which Chomsky sees as little more than an armed outpost of American imperialism -- are a formidable tool in the hands of the established order, and earnest collaborators in its crimes.  The Jewish intellectual establishment -- Faurisson's tormentors --  are viewed by Chomsky as traitors to the Left; closet racists and imperialists claiming universal values while secretly pursuing their own particularist interests.  Their accusations of anti-semitism are merely a tool intended to silence honest critics of their unholy alliance with Western imperialism, and the Holocaust merely a rhetorical weapon to justify Israel's various atrocities.  Or, as Chomsky himself puts it in classic Meinhofian fashion

Anti-Semitism is no longer a problem, fortunately. It’s raised, but it’s raised because privileged people want to make sure they have total control, not just 98% control. That’s why anti-Semitism is becoming an issue. Not because of the threat of anti-Semitism; they want to make sure there’s no critical look at the policies the US (and they themselves) support in the Middle East.

Thus, to speak for the Jews becomes speaking for "privileged people" who "want to make sure they have total control", a trope so obvious its pedigree hardly needs mentioning.  Of course, conspiratorial myths of Jewish power are not the sole catalyst at work in this statement; it is equally an expression of Chomsky's Third Worldist Manicheanism.  For, while Chomsky does not deny the Holocaust literally, he does deny it morally.  That is, he does not recognize the place of the Holocaust in the Western cultural ethos as legitimate.  For Chomsky, the great crimes of history were not those of Fascism or Nazism but rather those of Western capitalism and imperialism; crimes all the more horrendous as they continue to this day. 

And this leads us to the consummation of a horrendous dialectic.  In Chomsky's moral lexicon, the denial of the Holocaust ceases to be an assault against history or a racist abrogation of truth and becomes an act of insurrectionary rebellion.  For Chomsky, a strike against the Jews amounts to a strike against the established order, an uprising which, in the classic anarchist tradition, must be celebrated and defended as a blow for human freedom.  Faurisson, as a partisan of the Palestinian cause; an enemy of this privileged, collaborationist Judaism and its suffocating power masquerading behind a mythos of victimhood; is axiomatically on the side of the angels and his enemies, therefore, nothing more than artisans of oppression and violence.  The truth of Faurisson's claims, and the moral weight of his negation, is thus less than an irrelevancy.  It is all a matter of who is on the side of Chomsky's holy innocents.  But this is not the unkindest cut, the real crime at the heart of Chomsky's defense of Faurisson is not in his deference to Faurisson's negation but rather in the moral inversion by which he embraces it; for under the pillars of this church Faurisson's lie becomes an agent of justice and the bearers of truth -- those who touched the reality Faurisson seeks to erase, and lived to speak of it; and those extinguished shades for whom memory remains their sole memorial -- are defamed and their sufferings blasphemed.  In this light, Chomsky's morality appears to us as nothing less than an embrace of murder, a genuflection before the assassination of memory; an homage cheerfully rendered, even in the face of Auschwitz itself.  Saying perhaps more than he knew, Pierre Vidal-Naquet has called Faurisson "a paper Eichmann", if so, what are we then to make of this paper Chomsky, who hands himself over so utterly, and with such impassioned ease, to the cause of the assassins?

A note as to sources:
An excellent overview of radical and reactionary anti-semitism in the 19th century can be found in Revolutionary Antisemitism by Paul Lawrence Rose; the description of Marx's anti-semitic ideology quoted in the second paragraph is from Rose's book, as is the quote from Ulrike Meinhof.  George Lichtheim's 1968 essay "Socialism and the Jews", found in his Collected Essays was also quite useful on this subject.  Karl Marx's remarks from On the Jewish Question have been published in a small pamphlet called A World Without Jews.  Edmund Silberner's seminal article "Was Marx an Anti-Semite?" is also indispensible.  A good overview of the complex and often paradoxical relationship between the Jews and the modern Left is to be found in The Left, The Right and the Jews by W.D. Rubinstein.  Pierre Vidal-Naquet's already mentioned Assassins of Memory is an extraordinary collection of essays on Holocaust Denial in general and the Faurisson affair in particular.  Chomsky's remarks on anti-semitism can be found in this previous post.

Join the Counterrevolution

I feel a bit uncomfortable about using my blog for this purpose, but I think this case should be a necessary exception to the rule: as you may or may not know, the Presbyterian Church has decided to divest itself from Israel (a favorite cause of Chomsky's) as well as issuing a disgraceful -- and, in my opinion, rather obviously racist -- condemnation of Israel itself.  The following petition has been started in protest, and I urge you all to read it and, should you wish, sign it.

Some Wisdom From a Fellow Anti-Chomskyite

A very articulate and well-informed reader who wishes to remain anonymous sent me this excellent commentary on the Faurisson affair, which I think ought to be posted in its entirety:

1.  It's not so much that [Chomsky] says that he didn't read what Faurisson wrote; to me it is more that he didn't bother to read carefully or verify what the petition said.   Any careful reader would have noticed the quote marks around the word "Holocaust" and seen that loaded word "findings".  The drafter--I understand a Holocaust denier himself--was clearly trying to write a free speech petition that did a bit more than support free speech--he wanted to express some substantive support for the author and the author's views.  But Chomsky could never admit that he should have been more careful.  The principle that one is responsible for the expected outcome of one's actions is a principle that Chomsky applies to others and from which he exempts himself.

2.  The utter hypocrisy (1): if he followed his own stated principles, he would have said that this is a matter for France to work out, because he needs to focus on his own official enemy, the United States.  There should have been NO moral value, for Chomsky, in attacking France over this issue.

3.  The utter hypocrisy (2):  if he cared so much about Faurisson's freedom of speech, why has he visited, praised, and lent support to, countries with far less freedom of speech?  Why is Faurisson worthy of a petition and a foreword, to help boost the sales of the book, when Chomsky has publicly praised totalitarian North Vietnam for having achieved "social justice"?  Hundred of thousands have suffered far worse fates than Faurisson, for far less offensive speech, in countries Chomsky has lent his considerable support to.  These are excerpts from a speech Chomsky gave in Hanoi in 1970 (found on many websites).  Judge whether the speaker, addressing an audience to whom any freedom of speech is denied, can be called a champion of unconditional freedom of speech:

We saw brave men and women who know how to defend their country from brutal aggression, but also to work with pride and with dignity to build a society of material prosperity, social justice, and cultural progress. I would like to express the great joy that we feel in your accomplishments.

The people of Vietnam will win, they must win, because your cause is the cause of humanity as it moves forward toward liberty and justice, toward the socialist society in which free, creative men control their own destiny.   More important still is our admiration for the people of Vietnam who have been able to defend themselves against the ferocious attack, and at the same time take great strides forward toward the socialist society.

Decent people throughout the world see in your struggle a model for themselves. They are in your debt, everlastingly, because you were in the forefront of the struggle to create a world in which the chains of oppression have been broken and replaced by social bonds among free men working in true solidarity and cooperation.

I believe that in the United States there will be some day a social revolution that will be of great significance to us and to all of mankind, and if this hope is to be proven correct, it will be in large part because the people of Vietnam have shown us the way.

While in Hanoi I have had the opportunity to read the recent and very important book by Le Duan on the problems and tasks of the Vietnamese revolution. In it, he says that the fundamental interests of the proletariat of the people of all the world consists in at the same time in safeguarding world peace and moving the revolution forward in all countries. This is our common goal. We only hope that we can build upon your historic achievements.

Is the person who gave that speech one who supports freedom of speech unconditionally?  Is he one who takes responsibility for the expected outcome of his actions?

4.  In his various defenses of his actions regarding Faurisson, Chomsky cites with approval his friend Serge Thion, and calls him a foe of all forms of totalitarianism,  The last I heard, Thion had joined Faurisson in publishing articles that deny that the Holocaust occurred.  Chomsky, so far as I am aware, has never stepped back from his support of Thion.

A wonderful denunciation; I wish I wrote it.  I can only add that Chomsky's speech cited here rather conclusively puts the lie to the perennial excuse of anti-American intellectuals: that they are only criticizing American policies, and not endeavoring for America's defeat and the victory of its enemies.  The urge towards absolute treason is not merely present in the speech, it is palpable, it fairly shrieks in your face.  Those are the words of a man infused with desire for the violent slaughter of his country and its recreation in the image of a murderous totalitarian utopia.  The fact that they are also the words of the primary intellectual guru of today's anti-war movement is not something we should lightly dismiss.

Assassin of Memory

The following is from the highly recommended Assassins of Memory, by Pierre Vidal-Naquet, one of the most prominent French critics (along with Alain Finkielkraut) of Chomsky's support for Robert Faurisson.  It critiques in inimitably French style both the petition Chomsky signed, the press controversy surrounding it, and Chomsky's essay which prefaced one of Faurisson's books.

I read the text carefully and with an increasing sense of surprise. Epithets came to my pen, expressing, progressively, the extent of my surprise and my indignation...I shall proceed in order.

1. The preface in question partakes of a rather new genre in the republic of letters. Indeed, Noam Chomsky has read neither the book he prefaced, nor the previous works of the author, nor the criticisms addressed to them, and he is incompetent in the field they deal with: "I have nothing to say here about the work of Robert Faurisson or his critics, of which I know very little, or about the topics they address, concerning which I have no special knowledge." These are indeed remarkable qualifications. But since he needs to be able to affirm a proposition and its opposite, Chomsky nonetheless proclaims, a few pages further on, his competence. Faurisson is accused of being an anti-Semite: "As noted earlier, I do not know his work very well. But from what I have read - largely as a result of the nature of the attacks on him - I find no evidence to support [such conclusions]"...

2. Chomsky-the-Janus-faced has thus read Faurisson and not read him, read his critics and not read them. Let us consider the issues in logical order. What has he read of Faurisson which allows him to bestow so fine a certificate? For is he not "a realatively apolitical liberal of some sort" (pp.xiv-xv)? Since Chomsky refers to nothing in support of this, it is impossible to know, and I shall simply say: Faurisson's personal anti-Semitism, in fact, interests me rather little. It exists and I can testify to it, but it is nothing compared with the anti-Semitism of his texts. Is it anti-Semitic to write with consummate calm that in requiring Jews to wear the yellow star starting at the age of six "Hitler was perhaps less concerned with the Jewish question than with ensuring the safety of German soldiers" (Verite, p. 190)? Certainly not, within Faurisson's logic, since in the final analysis there is no practical anti-Semitism possible. But within Chomsky's logic? Is the invention of an imaginary declaration of war against Hitler, in the name of the international Jewish community, by an imaginary president of the World Jewish Congress, a case of anti-Semitism or of deliberate falsification? Can Chomsky perhaps press linguistic imagination to the point of discovering that there are false anti-Semites?
 
Let us now pose the other side of the question. What does Noam Chomsky know of the "criticisms" that have been addressed to Faurisson, and specifically of the study that he refers to, which I published in Esprit and which attempts to analyze "historically" the "method" of Faurisson and of several others? The answer is simple. "Certain individuals have taken Faurisson's defense for reasons of principle. A petition with several hundred signatories, led by Noam Chomsky, protested against the treatment Faurisson has recieved by presenting his 'conclusions' as though they were in fact discoveries. That petition seems to me scandalous."

The content of these lines leaves no doubt about Chomsky's motives. It is not a question of the gas chambers; it is very little a question of Faurisson, and only secondarily of freedom of speech. It is above all a question of Noam Chomsky. It is as though, by anticipation, Jacques Prevert were speaking of him, and not of Andre Breton, when he wrote in 1930: "He was, then, quite thin-skinned. For a press clipping, he would not leave his room for eight days." Like many intellectuals, Chomsky is scarcely sensitive to the wounds he inflicts, but extremely attentive to whatever scratches he is forced to put up with...

But let us return to the heart of the matter. Is the petition an innocent declaration in favor of a persecuted man that everyone, and first of all myself, could (or should) have signed? Let us read:

"Dr. Faurisson has served as a respected professor of twentieth-century French literature and document criticism for over four years at the University of Lyon 2 in France.  Since 1974 he has been conducting extensive independent historical research into the 'Holocaust' [scare quotes are in the original text - Benjamin] question.  Since he began making his findings public, Professor Faurisson has been subject to a vicious campaign of harassment, intimidation, slander, and physical violence in a crude attempt to silence him.  Fearful officials have even tried to stop him from further research by denying him access to public libraries and archives."
 
Let us pass over what is excessive or even openly false in petition.  Faurisson has been forbidden from neither archives nor public libraries.  Does the petition in fact present Robert Faurisson as a serious historian conducting genuine historical research?  To ask the question is to supply an answer.  The most droll aspect of it all is that one finds the following adage, which has become something of a motto, preceding works published by La Vielle Taupe:  "What is terrible when one sets out after the truth is that one finds it."  For my part, I maintain -- and prove -- that...Faurisson does not set out after the truth but after falsehoods.  Is that a "detail" which does not interest Chomsky?  And if one is to understand that poorly informed, he signed on trust a genuinely scandalous text, how are we to accept his willingness to underwrite today the efforts of a falsifier?
 
3.  But there is more still: regarding himself as untouchable, invulnerable to criticism, unaware of what Nazism in Europe was like, draped in an imperial pride and an American chauvanism worthy of those "new mandarins" whom he used to denounce, Chomsky accuses all those who hold a different opinion from his own of being assassins of freedom...
 
"I do not want to discuss individuals," Chomsky writes, and immediately thereafter, in accordance with the same double discourse with which we are beginning to be familiar, he attacks an imaginary "person" who "does indeed find the petition 'scandalous' [which was indeed the word I used], not on the basis of misreading, but because of what it actually says'.  An elegant way of not saying -- and at the same time saying -- that I assault the freedoms of my enemies.  For Chomsky goes on to say:  "We are obliged to conclude from this that the individual in question believes that the petition was scandalous because Faurisson should in fact be deprived of the normal right to self-expression, that he should be harassed and even subjected to acts of physical violence, etc."  It happens that what I wrote was precisely the opposite...The conditions under which Faurisson was brought to request leave of Lyon...were certainly regrettable, and I have said as much, but his freedom of expression, subject to extant law, has not been threatened at all.  He was able to be published on two occasions in Le Monde.  Thion's book, in which his theses are vented, was not the subject of any lawsuit, and if Faurisson is the target of a civil suit, brought by various antiracist associations, which do not all have freedom as their primary goal, such lawsuits do not prevent him from writing or being published.  Is not the book prefaced by Chomsky...proof?  Would he like a law passed by the republic requiring that Faurisson's works be read in public schools?  Is he asking for all history books to be rewritten in accord with his discoveries -- I mean conclusions (findings)?  Is he requesting at the very least that they be advertised and sold at the entrance to synagogues?
 
The simple truth, Noam Chomsky, is that you were unable to abide by the ethical maxim you had imposed.  You had the right to say: my worst enemy has the right to be free, on condition that he not ask for my death or that of my brothers.  You did not have the right to say: my worst enemy is a comrade, or a "relatively apolitical sort of liberal."  You did not have the right to take a falsifier of history and to recast him in the colors of truth.
 
There was once, not so long ago, a man who uttered this simple and powerful principle:  "It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies."  But perhaps you know him?  (p. 66-72)

There is little I could add to such an elegant and impassioned deconstruction. I would only note a small reservation of mine; it is something I have mentioned before, and Vidal-Naquet's shocked tone returns me to it now:  intellectuals of the Left -- even sensible ones like Vidal-Naquet -- find it extraordinarily difficult to completely rid themselves of the influence of Chomsky's work on their own ideologies and their admiration for some of his stances, particularly on Vietnam. This results in an inability to clearly percieve the motivations behind some of his more extreme stances. Vidal-Naquet seems to ascribe Chomsky's otherwise inexplicable sympathies towards Faurisson to vanity, rather than the far simpler and more likely explanation that Chomsky harbors anti-semitic sympathies.  Nor can he make the connection between Chomsky's intellectual authoritarianism and its practical political implications.  An unfortunate shortcoming, but, equally unfortunately, not an uncommon one.

The Political Economy of Holocaust Denial

Chomsky's association with Holocaust denial is rarely mentioned in the American press (its much more commonly cited in France, where the scandal originated), and represents one of the ugliest points in Chomsky's career.  In the late 1970s, in response to attacks on a French university professor named Robert Faurisson, Chomsky signed a petition which contained the following statement

[Faurisson] has been conducting extensive research into the 'Holocaust' question. Since he began making his findings public, Professor Faurisson has been subject to a vicious campaign of harassment, intimidation, slander, and physical violence in a crude attempt to silence him.

Faurisson was one of France's most outspoken and prominent deniers of the Holocaust, and Chomsky's support for him, and in particular the language of the petition he signed, caused an uproar.  This was exacerbated further by the publication of an essay by Chomsky defending Faurisson as the preface to one of Faurisson's books.  Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz challenged Chomsky to a debate on the issue, and describes Chomsky's defense as follows

[Chomsky] tried to dispute the fact that he had authorized an essay he had written in defense of Robert Faurisson to be used as the forward to Faurisson’s book about Holocaust denial, but again had to back down. Chomsky took the position that he had no interest in “revisionist” literature before Faurisson had written the book. When confronted by Robert Nozick, a distinguished philosophy professor who recalled discussing revisionist literature with him well before the Faurisson book, Chomsky first berated Nozick for disclosing a private conversation and then he shoved him contemptuously in front of numerous witnesses.

Its worth noting the background of Chomsky's beleaguered professor and where his "extensive research" has taken him; the following is from Deborah Lipstadt's excellent study Denying the Holocaust

According to Faurisson the "so-called gassings" of Jews were a "gigantic politico-financial swindle whose beneficiaries are the state of Israel and international Zionism." Its chief victims were the German people and the Palestinians...He asserts, for example, that the German army was given "Draconian orders" not to participate in "excesses" against civilians including the Jews; consequently, the massive killings of Jews could not have happened...Faurisson interprets the Naxi decree which mandated that Jews wear a yellow star on pain of death as a measure to ensure the safety of German soldiers, because Jews, he argues, engaged in espionage, terrorism, black market operations, and arms trafficking. German soldiers needed a means to protect themselves against this formidable enemy. He even had am explanation as to why Jewish children were required to start wearing the star at age six: They too were engaged in "all sorts of illicit or resistance activities against the Germans" against which the soldiers had to be protected.(p. 9)

Faurisson also claimed, and sought to prove, that the Anne Frank diary was a fraud (p. 233). Along with this portrait of Faurisson, Lipstadt paints us a fascinating picture of some of his more interesting allies

Though Faurisson and most of his admirers are on the political right, they and their activities have been abetted by an extreme left-wing revolutionary group, La Vieille Taupe...Originally a bookstore, it has become a publishing house that shelters an informal coterie of revolutionary types. Under the direction of its proprietor, Pierre Guillaume, it has distributed periodicals, cassettes, comic books, journals, and broadsheets all attesting to the Holocaust hoax. Guillaume is France's leading publisher of neo-Nazi material.(p.10)

Guillaume is a personal friend of Chomsky and has served as one of Chomsky's French publishers

Guillaume begins by telling us that he first met Chomsky some time in 1979, having been introduced by Serge Thion [a French sociologist who has claimed that the Holocaust is exagerrated - Benjamin], another member of the VT group...Guillaume told Chomsky about Faurisson at this meeting...Guillaume proceeds to tell us how helpful Chomsky has been to the VT movement in other ways. At a time when the VT movement suffered from ostracism on all sides, when, moreover, Chomsky could have published a French version of his Political Economy of Human Rights (written with Edward Herman) with a French commercial firm, Chomsky nevertheless stood by his friends of the VT and published his book with them. He, Guillaume, would have understood had Chomsky wanted to keep his distance from the VT in public. But no, Chomsky proved steadfast.

The fact that a man claiming to be an advocate of peace, justice, human rights, etc.; a man who regularly ascribes Nazistic tendencies to any and everyone of whom he disapproves; has shown himself remarkably sanguine at the prospect of supporting, defending, even collaborating with the Nazis' modern day political heirs, ought to raise more eyebrows than it does.  Or perhaps, in Chomsky's case, we've simply gotten used to such epic acts of hypocrisy.  There will be more on this subject soon.

Orwell vs. the Proto-Chomskyites

I was reading the Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. 2: My Country Right or Left (I confess to adoring that title) when I came across an exchange of polemics between him and several pacifist intellectuals during World War II. I was immediately struck, as one so often is in reading Orwell, by the relevance of the exchange to the conflicts of the here and now. I was struck, in particular, by the letter of poet D.S. Savage, which can only be described as proto-Chomskyite. It was written in 1942 as a response to Orwell's famous statement that "pacifism is objectively pro-fascist". Here are some excerpts:

It is fashionable nowadays to equate Fascism with Germany...Fascism is not a force confined to any one nation. We can just as soon get it here as anywhere else. The characteristic markings of Fascism are: curtailment of individual and minority liberties; abolition of private life and private values and substitution of state life and public values (patriotism); external imposition of discipline (militarism); prevelance of mass-values and mass-mentality; falsification of intellectual activity under State pressure. These are all tendancies of present-day Britain. The pacifist opposes every one of these, and might therefore be called the only genuine opponent of Fascism.

Don't let us be misled by names. Fascism is quite capable of calling itself democracy or even Socialism. It's the reality under the name that matters. War demands totalitariamn organization of society...Germans call it National Socialism. We call it democracy. The result is the same...

The corruption and hollowness revealed in the prosecution of this war are too contemptible for words. Certainly I will accept my share of responsibility for them, but I wont fight in a war to extend that corruption and hollowness...

Needless to say, we have no love for Fascism, and our entire attitude is one of personal resistance to all forms of Fasicsm, as they impinge upon us in concrete form. (Whereas Orwell swallows the concrete encroachments and waves his arms at a distant bogey.) Not only will we not fight, nor lend a hand with the war, but the "intellectuals" among us would scorn to mentally compromise themselves with the Government. Orwell dislikes the French intellectuals licking up Hitler's crumbs, but what's the difference between them and our intellectuals who are licking up Churchill's? However: we "don't believe in any 'defence of democracy', are inclined to prefer Germany to Britain, and don't feel the horror of Fascism that we who are somewhat older feel". I can only speak for myself, of coruse, but surely the "defence of democracy" is best served by defending one's own concrete liberties, not by equating democracy with Britain, and allowing all democracy to be destroyed in order that we may fight better - for "Britain"; and Orwell should not need to be told what, or who, "Britain" now is.

I am not greatly taken in by Britain's "democracy", particularly as it is gradually vanishing under the pressure of war. Certainly I would never fight and kill for such a phantasm...I feel identified with my country in a deep sense, and want her to regain her meaning, her soul, if that be possible: but the unloading of a billion tons of bombs on Germany wont help this forward an inch...England does not even know what she is fighting for, only what she is fighting against. The pacifists' "championing" of Hitler referred to by Orwell is simply a recognition by us that Hitler and Germany contain a real historical dynamic, whereas we do not. Whereas the rest of the nation is content with calling down obloquy on Hitler's head, we regard this as superficial. Hitler requires, not condemnation, but understanding. This does not mean that we like, or defend him. Persoanlly, I do not care for Hitler. He is, however, "realler" than Chamberlain, Churchill, Cripps, etc, in that he is the vehicle of raw historical forces, whereas they are stuffed dummies...living in unreality. We do not desire a German "victory"...but there would be a profound justice, I feel, however terrible, in a German victory.(p. 220-222)

I find this letter extraordinary because, with a few changes of names and dates, it essentially sums up the Chomskyite conceptualization of the War on Terror. It seems clearer and clearer to me the more I study his work that Chomsky and his section of the Left are as much heir to the revisionist school of anti-war intellectuals who grew up between the World Wars as they are to any of the standard schools of Leftist political thought. This also goes a long way towards explaining some of Chomsky's otherwise baffling sympathies towards the extreme Right. The following are excerpts from Orwell's reply

Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, "he that is not with me is against me". The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security...In so far as it takes effect at all, pacifist propaganda can only be effective against those countries where a certain amount of freedom of speech is still permitted; in other words it is helpful to totalitarianism.

I am not interested in pacifism as a "moral phenomenon". If Mr. Savage and others imagine that one can somehow "overcome" the German army by lying on one's back, let them go on imagining it, but let them also wonder occasionally whether this is not an illusion due to security, too much money, and a simple ignorance of the way in which things actually happen...Despotic governments can stand "moral force" till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force. But though I am not interested in the "theory" of pacifism, I am interested in the psychological processes by which pacifists who have started out with an alleged horror of violence end up with a marked tendancy to be fascinated by the success and power of Nazism. Even pacifists who wouldn't own to any such fascination are beinning to claim that a Nazi victory is desireable in itself...

What I object to is the intellectual cowardice of people who are objectively and to some extent emotionally pro-Fascist, but who don't care to say so and take refuge behind the formula "I am just as anti-Fascist as anyone, but--". The result of that so-called peace propaganda is just as dishonest and intellectually disgusting as war propaganda. Like war propaganda, it concentrates on putting forward a "case", obscuring the opponent's point of view and avoiding awkward questions. The line normally followed is "Those who fight against Fascism go Fascist themselves"...

It is because I do take the function of the intellentsia seriously that I don't like the sneers, libels, parrot phrases and financially profitable back-scratching which flourish in our English literary world...(p. 226-228)

Orwell's response is, I fear, even more relevant than his critic's attack. I see little difference between his proto-Chomskyites; with their fanatical relativism, self-hatred, and fascination with violence and totalitarian power that turns quickly to collaboration with political evil; and our own, fully realized version.

The Company He Keeps

From a FrontPage article on Leftist supporters of Palestinian terror organizations:

The military has pointed explicitly to the so-called "International Solidarity Movement", which operates cells in the occupied territories and also maintains several hundred members inside Israel, people who entered the country pretending to be tourists. Senior military officials said this week that two terrorists who conducted a bombing of Mike's Pub in Tel Aviv, killing several people, on the Tel Aviv Promenade, came into Israel as ISM members.

The ISM is the same organization to which Chomsky made the turgid, and, in my opinion, blatantly anti-semitic speech cited in this post. Here's some more info on the group and their antics, including the following

[ISM founders] Shapiro and Arraf also characterized “suicide operations” as “noble.” in the January 2002 article. They stated that Palestinians killed in nonviolent protests will have died in a manner:

"... no less noble than carrying out a suicide operation. And we are certain that if these men were killed during such an action, they would be considered shaheed Allah…"

Judge a man, as they say...

Chomsky the Eurocentric

From Chomsky's very nasty proto-seditious tract What Uncle Sam Really Wants:

The struggle for freedom is never over. The people of the Third World need our sympathetic understanding and, much more than that, they need our help. We can provide them with a margin of survival by internal disruption in the United States. Whether they can succeed against the kind of brutality we impose on them depends in large part on what happens here.

The courage they show is quite amazing. I've personally had the privilege -- and it is a privilege -- of catching a glimpse of that courage at first hand in Southeast Asia, in Central America and on the occupied West Bank. It's a very moving and inspiring experience, and invariably brings to my mind some contemptuous remarks of Rousseau's on Europeans who have abandoned freedom and justice for the peace and repose "they enjoy in their chains." He goes on to say:

When I see multitudes of entirely naked savages scorn European voluptuousness and endure hunger, fire, the sword and death to preserve only their independence, I feel that it does not behoove slaves to reason about freedom.

People who think that these are mere words understand very little about the world.

Its quite fascinating to see Chomsky wholeheartedly - and apparently completely uncomprehendingly - embracing the Rousseauvian idea of the noble savage; precisely the sort of Eurocentric fetishization of exotic primitivism that normally sends the Left into paroxysms of indignant rage. This does seem to bear out the oft-repeated idea that the Left's aggrandizment of the Third World is born as much out of patronizing racism as genuine sympathy.

And I like the line about "internal disruption in the United States"; at least he's being honest for once.