The Top 100 Chomsky Lies - 500 Beiträge pro Seite

[spicault]

Interessante Lektüre für deutsche Chomsky-Fans, vor allem für die Leser von "Der Spiegel", "die Frankfurter Rundschau" usw.

http://www.paulbogdanor.com/100chomskylies.pdf

[Heizkessel]

100.000 sind in ostdeutschland umgebracht worden?
wackere leistung!

[webmaxx]

Antwort auf Beitrag Nr.: 21.210.271 von Heizkessel am 16.04.06 20:35:31

Dafür solltest du eigentlich eine Auszeit kriegen - die Tötung vfon Menschen als "wackere Leistung" zu glorifizieren, ist wirklich daneben.

[Heizkessel]

für deine hirnrissige unterstellung, solltest besser du bis zu den sommerferien meditieren.
ich möchte mal die zahl von 100.000 vom kommunismus ermordeten belegt sehen. kannst du das belegen?
falls nicht, troll dich besser.

[big_mac]

Antwort auf Beitrag Nr.: 21.210.426 von Heizkessel am 16.04.06 21:48:28

100.000 ? Das ist ja fast schon eine Tragödie.

Allein Stalin ist für zig Millionen Tote verantwortlich !
Das ist dann keine Tragödie, das ist dann Statistik

[InvestigativTrader]

Antwort auf Beitrag Nr.: 21.210.209 von spicault am 16.04.06 20:14:23

wenn das keine Antisemitismus in Purform ist.

Da versucht doch jemand tatsächlich den Ruf des jüdischen und hochrespektbalen Noam Chomsky in den Schmutz zu ziehen.

Chomsky hat wie keiner vor ihm, über jahrzente die amerikanische Politik und Medien analysiert und mit offener Sprache kritisiert.

Seit genauso lange Zeit setzt er sich weltweit für Frieden ein und jetzt tischst du uns dieses Pamphlet auf und behauptet er sei ein Lügner.

Da bleibt mir nur zu sagen:


"I entrust my family`s future to Bush" und "Bush ist uns recht", sowieso, "Bush did not Lie"

US Hegemony is Good

[Punk24]

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[CaptainFutures]

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[tom2006]

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[CaptainFutures]

Antwort auf Beitrag Nr.: 21.211.936 von tom2006 am 17.04.06 12:41:57

Ich glaube man sollte jetzt jeden Tag eines dieser unverschämten Hetzlügen dieses Berufspöblers Chomsky hier veröffentlichen!

Fangen wir am Besten gleich heute mit an!

The Lie: “in comparison to the conditions imposed by US tyranny and violence, East Europe
under Russian rule was practically a paradise.”

The Truth: The communists murdered 4.5-5 million people in Ukraine; 400,000 in Poland;
360,000 in Romania; 300,000 in Belarus; 200,000 in Hungary; 100,000 in East Germany;
100,000 in Lithuania; 70,000-100,000 in Yugoslavia; 30,000-40,000 in Bulgaria; 20,000 in
Czechoslovakia; and 5,000 in Albania. Other atrocities included the murder of over 500,000
POWs in Soviet captivity and the mass rape of at least 2 million women by the Red Army in
Soviet-occupied areas of Germany.

[Heizkessel]

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[PresAbeL]

Antwort auf Beitrag Nr.: 21.210.209 von spicault am 16.04.06 20:14:23

Hervorragender Thread, spicault! Alles feinsaeuberlich belegt. Ein Treffer ins Schwarze, wie das Schmerzgejaule der Boardlinken denn ja auch zeigt ...

[CaptainFutures]

Antwort auf Beitrag Nr.: 21.212.628 von Heizkessel am 17.04.06 14:40:42

Iron Curtain’s 100,000 Dead



Up to 100,000 people are now believed to have died at the hands of East Germany’s former communist rulers and the Soviet occupiers that preceded them. A report by the German government, excerpts of which were published yesterday in Berliner Zeitung, says that 65,000 died in or en route to Soviet internment camps for political prisoners set up in the occupation zone soon after the Second World War. The Soviet authorities have always maintained that only 43,000 died in the camps, many of which were located in what had previously been Nazi concentration camps. The inquiry, carried out over 18 months by the Ministry for Families and Senior Citizens, found that East Germany’s communist rulers continued to execute people for political reasons until 1981.

The report said that 756 men, women and children were sentenced to death by Soviet military occupation courts in the first few years after the war for dissident acts such as distributing opposition leaflets.

Many of those who died in the internment camps starved to death or collapsed through fatigue. Between 1950, when the camps were closed, and 1981, hundreds of people died after torture in East German prisons and 170 were executed by guillotine or firing squad.

At least 33 per cent were condemned for political activity or “treason” - such as defecting from the Stasi secret police. The other two-thirds were judged to have been war criminals or murderers. The victims were not given proper funerals or buried in graves.

In its efforts to disguise the nature of the regime, East Germany’s leaders falsified documents relating to victims’ deaths. The death records concerning one person guillotined in the early 1950s claimed only that the scalp had been “broken,” the report said. Another victim - a woman guillotined for spying in 1955 - was described as having died as a result of “collapse of the heart and circulatory system.”

Most of the 65,000 deaths in the internment camps were kept secret long after the Soviet occupiers that had run them had handed over power to East Germany. The first conclusive evidence of mass killings in the camps emerged shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when several mass graves were discovered close to the sites of internment camps.

Two camps - at Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald - were formerly Nazi concentration camps that had simply been taken over by new masters. Others included former penal institutions, prisoner-of-war camps and army barracks. Under an agreement between the four allied powers in 1946, the camps were intended for people deemed to be a security risk - Nazis, former SS officers and fascist collaborators. In the Soviet sector, however, they housed thousands of East Germans whose links with the Nazis were tenuous but whose political leanings ran foul of the Soviet occupiers.

The investigators also found Stalin’s NKVD security service abducted about 600 East German refugees in western Europe and spirited them back to East Germany from 1945 to 1954. About 300 were kidnapped and returned to East Germany by the Stasi between 1950 and 1962.

The inquiry was part of a drive to collect evidence needed to pay restitution to victims of Stalinism in East Germany. Findings may also help justice organisation pursuing hundreds of investigations into human rights abuses.

http://www.paulbogdanor.com/eastgermany.html

[CaptainFutures]

Antwort auf Beitrag Nr.: 21.213.177 von PresAbeL am 17.04.06 15:41:59

Und da die Grenzdebilität bei einigen "aufheizern" hier anscheinend keine Grenzen mehr kennt ziehen wir den zweiten Tag mit der zweiten Chomsky Lüge gleich heute nach:

The Lie: “Also relevant is the history of collectivization in China, which, as compared with
the Soviet Union, shows a much higher reliance on persuasion and mutual aid than on force
and terror, and appears to have been more successful.”

The Truth: The communists officially declared that they had killed 800,000 in the first few
years of their dictatorship; unofficially, they admitted to the murder of 2 million in just a
single year. China’s forced collectivization culminated in the Great Leap Forward, the worst
catastrophe in human history, in which 30 million died.

[Heizkessel]

Antwort auf Beitrag Nr.: 21.214.572 von CaptainFutures am 17.04.06 17:42:52

etwas aus einer quelle mit der gleichen quelle belegen zu wollen, das fällt nur dir ein.
ein imam presabel muß sich ja die haare raufen, wenn er das mitansieht.

[CaptainFutures]

Antwort auf Beitrag Nr.: 21.214.930 von Heizkessel am 17.04.06 18:13:50

Du willst also behaupten, daß diese durch Untersuchungen nachgewiesenen Zahlen gelogen sind?

Sag mal hast Du den Schuß noch nicht gehört!

[Heizkessel]

hab ich was von gelogen gesagt?
ich hätte nur gerne saubere quellenangaben, und wenn möglich auch unabhängig. und flachpfeiffen, die jeden quatsch nachplappern, solange es ins eigene weltbild passt, kann man ohnehin nicht ernst nehmen. und jetzt wieder ran an die arbeit, du mußt sicher noch 5 threads bis zum abendbrot aufmachen.

[CaptainFutures]

Antwort auf Beitrag Nr.: 21.215.197 von Heizkessel am 17.04.06 18:39:04

quatsch

Was ist hier Quatsch?

Lügen als solche zu enttarnen durch das Zitieren und Hinweisen auf die tatsächlichen Fakten und Gegebenheiten ist also für Dich "nachplappern"?

Du bist doch nicht mehr ganz sauber im Kopf Junge!

[Heizkessel]

noch rote farbe übrig?
du kannst also von dir aus belegen, daß in ostdeutschland 100.000 menschen umgebracht wurden?
wieviele davon sind vor gründung der ddr umgebracht worden, wieviele danach?
die restlichen 99 lügen kannst du sicher dann auch nebenbei entlarven? falls du ins stocken kommen solltest, frag bei presabel nach, der weiß ja, daß alles feinsäuberlich belegt ist.

[MODiva]

Hallo,

es ist doch sicher möglich, dies alles zu diskutieren, ohne begriffe aus dem sado-maso-sprachgebrauch zu verwenden, oder?

Also, bitte weniger aufregung, dafür mehr sachlichkeit.

Liebe grüsse,
eure MODiva

[PresAbeL]

Ich kann mich gar nicht beruhigen! Eine blitzsaubere Arbeit von dem Bogdanor. Zur Schwaeche der heutigen Linken gehoert leider, dass sie intellektuell und methodisch gar nicht mehr in der Lage sind, ein solches Handwerkstueck abzuliefern. Mein Bedauern ist durchaus ehrlich, weil ich naemlich Auseinandersetzungen auf Bogdanor-Niveau wesentlich spannender finde als die offenbar mit Linken leider nur noch moeglichen Poebelei-Austauschrituale.

[PresAbeL]

Dabei ist unser groesster Chomsky-Fan on board noch gar nicht aufgetaucht. Da ich den eigentlich nicht fuer feige halte, sondern vielmehr fuer eine der ganz seltenen Ausnahmen von der Regel, beginne ich mir langsam Sorgen zu machen!

[CaptainFutures]

Zweiter Tag, dritte Chomsky Lüge:

The Lie: “the basic sources for the larger estimates of killings in the North Vietnamese land
reform were persons affiliated with the CIA or the Saigon Propaganda Ministry… in fact
there is no evidence that the leadership ordered or organized mass executions of peasants.”

The Truth: North Vietnam announced that 30% of the victims were innocent and that 15,000
were executed by mistake, implying 50,000 massacred. Reports from North Vietnamese
defectors indicated that 50,000 were massacred. A Hungarian diplomat was told by an official
source that 60,000 had been massacred. A French leftist working in North Vietnam wrote that 100,000 had been slaughtered. The total death toll would have been several times higher since
the families of those executed were starved to death under the policy of “isolation.”

[CaptainFutures]

Antwort auf Beitrag Nr.: 21.218.888 von PresAbeL am 18.04.06 07:04:25

Es gibt auch überhaupt keinen einzigen Grund den zusammengestellten Fakten und Tatsachen des Herrn Bogdanor zu mißtrauen oder auch nur ansatzweise anzuzweifeln. Genießt der Herr Bogdanor doch einen hochrespektbalen Ruf als Autor und hat schon etliche Lügen und Verbrechen der Kommunisten, Islamisten und Linken aufgedeckt und sein Artikel "Chomsky’s War Against Israel" hat schon überdeutlich offenbart wessen geistes Kind der Herr Chomsky ist.

[Punk24]

Genießt der Herr Bogdanor doch einen hochrespektbalen Ruf als Autor und hat schon etliche Lügen und Verbrechen der Kommunisten, Islamisten und Linken aufgedeckt und sein Artikel

Also ein bezahlter CIA-Propagandist

[Heizkessel]

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[PresAbeL]

Antwort auf Beitrag Nr.: 21.219.751 von Punk24 am 18.04.06 09:36:33

Punk24, ich weiss es ist schwer, weil auf Englisch. Es ist eine lupenreine analytische Arbeit. Solche selten gewordenen Werkstuecke haben die eigenartige Eigenschaft, dass es fuer ihren Warheitsgehalt vollkommen irrelevant ist, ob sie bezahlt wurden und von wem!

[puhvogel]

@Heizkessel:

Ich kann Dir gleich mal zwei aufzählen, die von Russen nach dem Krieg umgebracht wurden.

Meinen Großvater, netterweise vor den Augen der Familie und einfach for fun, und der beste Freund meines Schwiegervaters, nachdem er als Kind ein wenig mit herumliegender Munition gespielt hatte.

Wenn ich immer das Geblabbel vom Bombenterror höre. Den richtigen Krieg haben die Westdeutschen doch gar nicht erlebt.
Nichts gegen die Russen, einige, meist Offiziere, haben auch ihr eigenes Leben riskiert um so manches minderjährige "Faschistenpack" zu retten, allerdings hat der Stalinismus nur das Schlechteste im Menschen gefördert und gefordert. Und die Russen sind ja genauso menschenverachtend mit ihren Leuten umgegangen, s. russische Kriegsgefangenen oder die Eingeschlossenen von Leningrad.
Viel schlimmer finde ich persönlich aber seine Verniedlichung des Roten Khmer-Regimes. Was für ein *********
So, jetzt musst Du nur noch 99998 finden.
----------------------------------------------
Ich werde aber weiter den Spiegel lesen, auch wenn Chomsky ganz offenbar ein David Irving-Klon ist. Danke, spicault!

[CaptainFutures]

Antwort auf Beitrag Nr.: 21.223.580 von puhvogel am 18.04.06 14:36:08

Danke, spicault!

Ja, Danke spicault! Mehr davon spicault!

[CaptainFutures]

Dritter Tag, vierte Chomsky Lüge:

The Lie: “Revolutionary success in Vietnam both in theory and practice was based primarily
on understanding and trying to meet the needs of the masses… A movement geared to
winning support from the rural masses is not likely to resort to bloodbaths among the rural
population.”

The Truth: By conservative estimates, Viet Cong death squads assassinated 37,000 civilians
in South Vietnam; the real figure was far higher since only a small fraction of the murders
were recorded before 1967 and the data only extend to 1972. Viet Cong terrorists also waged
a campaign of mass murder against civilian hamlets and refugee camps; at the height of the
war, nearly a third of all civilian deaths were the result of deliberate Viet Cong atrocities.

[CaptainFutures]

Vierter Tag, fünfte Chomsky Lüge:

The Lie: “given the very confused state of events and evidence plus the total unreliability of
US-Saigon ‘proofs,’ at a minimum it can be said that the NLF-DRV ‘bloodbath’ at Hue was
constructed on flimsy evidence indeed.”

The Truth: The communists boasted of murdering thousands in the South Vietnamese city of
Hue. One regiment reported that its units alone killed 1,000 victims. Another report stated that
2,867 people were killed. Yet another captured document spoke of an “enormous victory” in
which more than 3,000 people were killed. A further document catalogued 2,748 executions.

[CaptainFutures]

The Lie: “In a phenomenon that has few parallels in Western experience, there appear to have
been close to zero retribution deaths in postwar Vietnam. This miracle of reconciliation and
restraint… has been almost totally ignored.”

The Truth: Defector Nguyen Cong Hoan stated that 50,000-100,000 people were massacred
by the communists. Political prisoner Doan Van Toai and communist official Nguyen Tuong
Lai reported that 200,000 Viet Cong deserters were targeted for execution. An estimated
165,000 dissidents and POWs died in concentration camps. Mass expulsions led to the
drowning of 200,000-250,000 boat people, according to UN figures.

[CaptainFutures]

The Lie: “it seems fair to describe the responsibility of the United States and Pol Pot for
atrocities during ‘the decade of the genocide’ as being roughly in the same range.”

The Truth: They were not remotely in the same range. American forces caused
approximately 40,000 Khmer Rouge and civilian casualties in Cambodia during 1970-5. The
Khmer Rouge killed more than 1.8 million civilians during 1975-9.

[CaptainFutures]

The Lie: “One comparison that we presented in great detail was particularly illuminating: the
‘benign bloodbath’ conducted by Indonesia after its invasion of East Timor in 1975, and the
‘nefarious bloodbath’ of the Khmer Rouge when they took over Cambodia in the same year…
the two slaughters were comparable in scale and character.”

The Truth: They were comparable neither in scale nor in character. The Indonesian invasion
of East Timor caused 100,000-180,000 deaths. The Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia
caused well over 1.8 million deaths. The Indonesian military carried out brutal repression of
armed resistance in a foreign territory. The Khmer Rouge bloodbath was an ideologically
motivated attack on a defenseless population in its own country.

[CaptainFutures]

The Lie: “If 2-2½ million people, about 1/3 of the population, have been systematically
slaughtered by a band of murderous thugs who have taken over the government, then
[Senator] McGovern is willing to consider international military intervention. We presume
that he would not have made this proposal if the figure of those killed were, say, less by a
factor of 100 – that is, 25,000 people… [or] if the deaths in Cambodia were not the result of
systematic slaughter and starvation organized by the state but rather attributable in large
measure to peasant revenge, undisciplined military units out of government control, starvation
and disease that are direct consequences of the US war, or other such factors.”

The Truth: Not one serious observer thinks that only 25,000 died under the Khmer Rouge or
that the mass deaths were the result of anything other than systematic slaughter and starvation
organized by the state. Even Khmer Rouge leader Khieu Samphan acknowledged 2 million
deaths, which he attributed to the Vietnamese invasion.

[spicault]

Antwort auf Beitrag Nr.: 21.453.694 von CaptainFutures am 06.05.06 11:23:01

By FrontPage Magazine
FrontPageMagazine.com | May 12, 2006

NOAM CHOMSKY SUPPORTS HIZBOLLAH, IRAN

In a lifetime filled with despicable statements and support for history’s worst regimes, MIT professor Noam Chomsky has finally hit absolute bottom as he visits the leader of the Hizbollah terror gang, calls the United States a “leading terrorist state,” and supports Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons—to deter “Israeli aggression.” From Drudge Report. (Hat tip: LGF readers.)


Radical American thinker and MIT professor Noam Chomsky met
with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut today and
branded the U.S. a terrorist state.

“I think that Nasrallah has a reasoned argument and a
persuasive argument that they (the weapons) should be in the
hands of Hizbollah as a deterrent to potential aggression and
there is plenty of background and reasons for that. So, I think
his position, if I am reporting it correctly, and it seems to
be a reasonable position, is that until there is a general
political settlement in the region and the threat of aggression
and violence is reduced or eliminated, there has to be a
deterrent. The Lebanese army cannot be a deterrent.”

MORE:

“There is a meaning to the word terrorist, in fact you can read
a definition of term terrorist is the U.S. code of laws. It
gives a very clear, precise, adequate definition of the word
terrorist. have been writing about terrorism for 25 years
always using the official U.S. definition [of the word
”terrorist“], but that definition is un-usable, and the reason
is that when you use that definition it turns out, not
surprisingly, that the U.S. is one of the leading terrorist
states, and the other states become terrorist or non-terrorist
depending on how they are relating to U.S. goals.”

MORE:

“The regional superpower Israel is threatening to attack it
[Iran], the U.S. is threatening to attack it. These threats
alone are outright violations of international law and of the
U.N. charter. Iran is in difficulty. Iran has been trying for
some years to negotiate settlement but the U.S. just refuses.”

Not anti-war. On the other side.

UPDATE: It’s interesting to compare the careers of Ward Churchill, who was virtually unknown before being exposed as the author of the despicable “little Eichmanns” essay, and Noam Chomsky, who has been preaching (and profiting from) his virulent brand of anti-Americanism, influencing gullible college idiots (and the New York Times) and lending support to America’s sworn enemies, for many years. Thursday, May 11, 2006

[Joerver]

Antwort auf Beitrag Nr.: 21.538.443 von spicault am 12.05.06 15:11:26

Noch tiefer geht's nicht. Da ist Bild noch seriös!



http://www.drudgereport.com/

[CaptainFutures]

Antwort auf Beitrag Nr.: 21.544.705 von Joerver am 12.05.06 22:41:08

Also sind die Aussagen von Herrn Noam Chomsky alle erfunden oder verfälscht worden oder was willst Du damit aussagen?

[spicault]

Antwort auf Beitrag Nr.: 21.544.705 von Joerver am 12.05.06 22:41:08

Wenn der Drudge Report dir nicht gefällt, dann schau mal unter

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/00015…

Oder handelt es sich hier wieder um CIA-Propaganda?

My Very, Very Allergic Reaction to Noam Chomsky: Khmer Rouge, Faurisson, Milosevic

"Never get involved in a land war in Asia." "Never go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line." And now, "Never get involved in an argument over Noam Chomsky."

The Chomsky defenders--and there seem to be a surprisingly large number of them--seem to form a kind of cult. Arguing with them seems to be a lot like trying to teach Plato's Republic to a pig: it wastes your time, and it annoys the pig. But I've spent more than enough time on this over the past three months: time to let it out of the cage:

Consider Chomsky's claim that: "In the early 1990s, primarily for cynical great power reasons, the U.S. selected Bosnian Muslims as their Balkan clients..." On its face this is ludicrous. When the United States selects clients for cynical great power reasons, it selects strong clients--not ones whose unarmed men are rounded up and shot by the thousands. And Bosnian Muslims as a key to U.S. politico-military strategy in Europe? As Bismarck said more than a century ago, "There is nothing in the Balkans that is worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier." It holds true today as well: the U.S. has no strategic or security interest in the Balkans that is worth the death of a single Carolinian fire-control technician. U.S. intervention in the Balkans in the 1990s was "humanitarian" in origin and intention (even if we can argue about its effect). Only a nut-boy loon would argue otherwise.

But whenever I ask the Chomskyites why he would claim that, "In the early 1990s, primarily for cynical great power reasons, the US selected Bosnian Muslims as their Balkan clients..." I get one or more of three responses:

* It was said in haste in an interview--it's not representative of his thought.
* Of course the U.S. selected Bosnian Muslims as their Balkan clients for great power reasons! Mineral wealth! Oil pipelines!
* Yes, he's made some mistakes. And he refuses to back down or make concessions when he is wrong. But it's more than counterbalanced by the stunning quality of his insights!

Insights? Like his writing a preface for a book by Robert Faurisson--a guy whose thesis seems to be that "the alleged massacre in gas chambers and the genocide of the Jews is part of one and the same lie, a gigantic political and financial racket for the benefit of Israel and international Zionism"? Like his claiming in said preface that Faurisson seems to be "a relatively apolitical liberal of some sort"? Like his claims that he "know very little" about Faurisson's work, has "no special knowledge" about the topics Faurisson writes about, and--as Jay Parini notes-- continues to "maintain to this day that he has never read anything by Faurisson that suggests that the man was pro-Nazi"? These are supposed to be high quality insights?

But whenever I ask the Chomskyites why he would claim that Robert Faurisson is a "relatively apolitical liberal," and how he could possibly manage to "never read anything by Faurisson that suggests that the man was pro-Nazi," I get one or more of three responses:

* What Chomsky wrote and said about Faurisson was written and said in haste, without proper reflection--it's not representative of his thought.
* Chomsky is quoted out of context: he's defending Faurisson's right to free speech according to the principles of Voltaire, not endorsing or defending Faurisson.
* Yes, he's made some mistakes. And he refuses to back down or make concessions when he is wrong. But it's more than counterbalanced by the extraordinarily good work he's done uncovering the cynical crimes of power-mad governments like the U.S. and Israel.

Which makes me ask, wouldn't it be better not to misrepresent Faurisson's beliefs? Not to claim that he is a relatively apolitical liberal? Not to say that you have seen no evidence that Faurisson is pro-Nazi? It is, after all, a much stronger defense of free speech to say that you are defending a loathsome Holocaust-denier's right to free speech because free speech is absolute, then to say that poor Faurisson--a relatively apolitical liberal--is being persecuted for no reason other than that some object to his (unspecified) "conclusions."

And uncovering the cynical crimes of mad governments? Take a look at Chomsky's 1979 "After the Cataclysm":

If a serious study…is someday undertaken, it may well be discovered…that the Khmer Rouge programs elicited a positive response…because they dealt with fundamental problems rooted in the feudal past and exacerbated by the imperial system.… Such a study, however, has yet to be undertaken.

Reflect that it was published three full years after the Cambodian Holocaust of the Year Zero. Ask yourself whether this is an uncovering or a covering of the crimes of an abominable regime. But it gets worse. Go back to your Nation of 1977, and consider the paragraph:

...there are many other sources on recent events in Cambodia that have not been brought to the attention of the American reading public. Space limitations preclude a comprehensive review, but such journals as the Far Eastern Economic Review, the London Economist, the Melbourne Journal of Politics, and others elsewhere, have provided analyses by highly qualified specialists who have studied the full range of evidence available, and who concluded that executions have numbered at most in the thousands; that these were localized in areas of limited Khmer Rouge influence and unusual peasant discontent, where brutal revenge killings were aggravated by the threat of starvation resulting from the American destruction and killing.

Of this, [e-mail] writes:

"Sounds very impressive, does it not? If... entirely respectable magazines denied the accusations that the Khmer Rouge had committed vast crimes... we cannot take seriously these allegations.... There must be some substantial evidence, presented by these magazines, that shows or strongly suggests that the refugees tales of terror were nonsense, right?... He claims that these are "conflicting reports" that justify disbelief in the alleged crimes of the Khmer Rouge....

In the case of the Economist, there are no [such] articles.... Presumably [Chomsky] refers to a letter to the Economist ... a letter replying to an entirely accurate article.... [T]his letter was indeed... ["provided"] by the Economist, but it is misleading to invoke [its] authority... the Economist opposes Chomsky's claims.

In the case of the Far Eastern Economic review the review did indeed publish an article that said almost, but not quite, what Chomsky represents it as saying.... Nayan Chanda ( Far Eastern Economic Review October 29 1976 ) does indeed doubt the refugees are telling the truth... but he... [presents no] evidence contradicting their stories. He does indeed say "thousands"... he does not say "at most in the thousands"... [he says] "the numbers killed are impossible to calculate."... Chomsky presented the Far Eastern Economic Review as confidently denying the possibility that the killings were vastly higher, but Chanda specifically denies such knowledge and confidence....

Chomsky lies by misdirection.... [H]e said "[provided]" to associate the authority of the Economist with a letter to the editor... [he said] " at most in the thousands" as if it were a conclusion of an article... [in] the Far Eastern Economic Review...."

I've looked through the Economist. If there's anything written by the Economist's staff that has evidence casting doubt on the Cambodian Holocaust, I missed it as well.

So why does Chomsky lie about the "highly qualified specialists"? The claim that it is "space limitations" rather than "nonexistence" that prevents their being named cannot be a claim made in good faith, can it? And why would anyone lie for Pol Pot, unless they were either a nut-boy loon or were being mendacious and malevolent in search of some sinister and secret purpose? But when I ask the Chomskyites why he would falsely claim in 1977 that accusations of Cambodian genocide had been disputed in the pages of the Economist and the Far Eastern Economic Review by "highly qualified specialists"judging "the full range of evidence" and that these highly-qualified specialists put a firm upper bound of "at most in the thousands" on Khmer Rouge executions, I get one or more of three responses:

* What Chomsky wrote and said about the Khmer Rouge was a mistake, but it's uncharacteristic of his work.
* Chomsky never said the Khmer Rouge were genocidal butchers, he only said that there wasn't conclusive evidence that they were genocidal butchers.
* When a serious study of the Khmer Rouge is carried out, we will learn that most of the evidence of their "crimes" was faked by the Vietnamese after their conquest of Cambodia

I can't see how anyone can make the second claim in good faith: Chomsky not only said that there wasn't conclusive evidence that the Khmer Rouge were genocidal butchers, he wrote--falsely--that there was reliable evidence that they weren't genocidal butchers.

And I don't see how anyone can claim that Chomsky's lies are "uncharacteristic" of his work. There are just too damned many of them.

I tried (unsuccessfully) to ascertain the reasons for the appeal of Chomsky--to people who don't believe that the Khmer Rouge are benevolent friends of humanity, that Robert Faurisson is an apolitical liberal, and that U.S. intervention in Bosnia was motivated by metal mines and pipeline routes, that is--once before.

-------------------------------------------------------------

My Allergic Reaction to Noam Chomsky

Dear ****,

You had expressed disbelief at my strong and negative reaction (based on memories of the 1970s, when he seemed to be mocking those who tried to alert the outside world to the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia) when the name "Noam Chomsky" was raised. You said that Chomsky was one of the most intelligent, hardest-working, incisive, and moral voices on the left today.

And you suggested that I give him another chance.

So the next time I stopped by Cody's, I picked up one of Chomsky's books: his (1992) What Uncle Sam Really Wants (New York: Odonian Press: 1878825011).

But I only got to page 17. Then I put the book down--with my strong negative reaction confirmed.

The book begins by stating that it is first going to sketch out the history of U.S. foreign relations since World War II. By the second page Chomsky is in the middle of a brief discussion of planning for the postwar period. Four paragraphs are devoted to NSC 68 and its consequences, in which NSC 68 is exhibited in a vacuum. There is not a word about the gradual shift in U.S. policy from Rooseveltian cooperation with Stalin to Trumanesque confrontation, and not a word about how NSC 68 had no prospects of becoming policy until Josef Stalin took off the leash and Kim Il Sung began the Korean War.

I found this absence of any attempt to sketch the context disturbing.

After a discussion of George Kennan, Chomsky wanders off into three pages on "study groups" of the "State Department and the "Council on Foreign Relations" who sought to plan for U.S. postwar economic domination of the "Grand Area." But there is no contact with Bretton Woods, or the founding of the World Bank and the IMF, or with those--in the U.S. centered around social democrat Harry Dexter White--who actually made the policies that governed the postwar reconstruction of the global economy.

Chomsky then turns to political events in Europe in the aftermath of World War II. He begins by making it sound as though the U.S. armies conquered North Africa and Italy, and then Roosevelt decided to put fascists like Darlan and Badoglio back into power. The real history is more complicated: overextended U.S. forces and a willingness to make deals with little devils in order to get into a better position to fight the greater devil. I think that Roosevelt's decisions to back Darlan and Badoglio were mistakes: but they didn't happen the way that Chomsky says that they did.

Chomsky then moves on to how "CIA subversion" dispersed and suppressed the "anti-fascist resistance" in Italy, Greece, and Korea. No mention is made of the likely character of the regimes that would have come to power in the absence of U.S. support for the center and the right.

Now this is a big mistake, for it is hard to look at postwar Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and North Korea and avoid the conclusions that (a) people there lived worse and suffered more than the people of Italy, Greece, and South Korea; and (b) governments like those in the first three would have held power in the second three were it not for U.S. intervention. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that U.S. support for the center and the right in Italy, Greece, and South Korea "expanded the cage" relative to what would have happened otherwise. It is possible to make the case that U.S. intervention in Italy, Greece, and South Korea was destructive. But any such case needs to be backed by a powerful argument that "antifascist" Italy, Greece, or South Korean governments would have been very different from the actual governments of Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, or North Korea. Chomsky makes no such argument. Chomsky appears profoundly uninterested in informing any of his readers that his case has this missing piece.

Now let me make it clear what I am objecting to. I am not objecting here to claims that U.S. foreign policy in the late 1940s was disastrous because:

* that there was a real possibility for a continuation of wartime good feeling had the U.S. been less confrontational
* that Stalin might well, if properly placated, have been willing to accept Finland-like regimes all along his borders
* that ramping up the U.S. to fight the Cold War did immense damage to our democratic institutions and liberties.

Indeed, I agree with one and a half of those three points. (Indeed, Dean Acheson himself agreed with at least one of them.) And smart and thoughtful people whom I respect believe in all three of them. People are allowed to follow different paths and reach different analytical conclusions than I do. I'm not an intellectual totalitarian. I'm a liberal who believes that society needs a diversified intellectual portfolio of well-informed views.

What I object to is that Chomsky is an intellectual totalitarian. What I object to is that Chomsky tears up all the trail markers that might lead to conclusions different from his, and makes it next to impossible for people unversed in the issues to even understand what the live and much-debated points of contention are. What I object to is that Chomsky writes not to teach, but to to brainwash: to create badly-informed believers in his point of view who won't know enough about the history or the background to think the issues through for themselves.

What I object to is the lack of background, to the lack of context. In telling the history of the Cold War as it really happened--even in ten pages--there has to be a place for Stalin, an inquiry into the character of the regimes that Stalin sponsored, and an assessment of Stalinist plans and programs for expansion. And Chomsky ruthlessly suppresses half the story of the Cold War--the story of the other side of the Iron Curtain. A naive reader of Chomsky would not even know that there was a complicated and much-debated set of issues here.

In my view, the first duty that any participant in a speech situation has: to tell it like he or she thinks that it is, not to try to suppress big chunks of the story because they are inconvenient in the context of your current political goals. You can't show only half (or less than half) the picture. That's a major intellectual foul. And in a world in which there are lots of people who try hard to tell it as it really happened, I see no reason why I should waste time reading someone who tries to tell it as it isn't.

And then there are Chomsky's casual lies:

* ...that the (doomed) postwar partisans trying to fight guerrilla wars against Soviet rule in Ukraine, Belorus, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere were "armies that had been established by Hitler" (instead of people--a good chunk of them fascists and anti-semites--who had fought against the Nazis when the Nazis occupied eastern Europe, and fought against the Soviets after the Red Army drove west--for they wanted, and one can understand why, to be ruled by neither Hitler nor Stalin).
* ...that the "liberal extreme" of postwar American policymaking was the George Kennan who sneers at "vague... and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization" (the liberal extreme--in fact, the vital center for much of the period--was the position that Kennan was arguing against in the passage Chomsky quotes: the position held by those who did care deeply about human, rights, economic development, and democratization., and who made them the focus of a substantial chunk of U.S. postwar policy).
* ...that "free trade is fine for economics departments and newpaper editorials, but nobody in the corporate world or the government takes the doctrines seriously" (I was in the government, and will be again. How dare he lie about what I take seriously?).

So by page 17 I had had more than enough. He's a sleazeball. I closed the book, and went on to read other things.

Sincerely yours,

Brad DeLong

[Joerver]

Antwort auf Beitrag Nr.: 21.549.417 von spicault am 13.05.06 12:54:24

Warumj stellst Du eigentlich den Link zu dem Blog von Prof. Brad DeLong nicht ein:

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/

[PresAbeL]

Antwort auf Beitrag Nr.: 21.551.867 von Joerver am 13.05.06 14:43:41

Joerver, offenbar hast Du inhaltlich nichts zu dem Thread beizutragen. Die saubere Dokumentation der Chomsky-Positionen, die im Eingangsposting referenziert wird, scheint Dich nicht im geringsten zu interessieren. Die zuletzt von Spicault hier einegstellten Sachen fuegen sich naht- und wiederspruchslos ins Bild! Also, joerver, Butter bei die Fische oder mach halt mal wieder einen smear blog auf!

[flitztass]

Diesen Thread hab ich erst jetzt entdeckt und hiermit mal zu meinen Favoriten hinzugefügt.

[PresAbeL]

Antwort auf Beitrag Nr.: 21.589.882 von flitztass am 15.05.06 16:16:29

Das hat er auch verdient! Noch nicht einmal Chomsky-Verehrer rv vermag offenbar an der Doku etwas auszusetzen ...

[spicault]

Antwort auf Beitrag Nr.: 21.590.168 von PresAbeL am 15.05.06 16:33:01

The hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky
by Keith Windschuttle

There’s a famous definition in the Gospels of the hypocrite, and the hypocrite is the person who refuses to apply to himself the standards he applies to others. By that standard, the entire commentary and discussion of the so-called War on Terror is pure hypocrisy, virtually without exception. Can anybody understand that? No, they can’t understand it.
—Noam Chomsky, Power and Terror, 2003

Noam Chomsky was the most conspicuous American intellectual to rationalize the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. The death toll, he argued, was minor compared to the list of Third World victims of the “far more extreme terrorism” of United States foreign policy. Despite its calculated affront to mainstream opinion, this sentiment went down very well with Chomsky’s own constituency. He has never been more popular among the academic and intellectual left than he is today.

Two books of interviews with him published since September 11, 2001 both went straight onto the bestseller lists.[1] One of them has since been turned into a film entitled Power and Terror, now doing brisk business in the art-house movie market. In March 2002 the film’s director, John Junkerman, accompanied his subject to the University of California, Berkeley, where in a five-day visit Chomsky gave five political talks to a total audience of no fewer than five thousand people.

Meanwhile, the liberal news media around the world has sought him out for countless interviews as the most promi- nent intellectual opposed to the American response to the terrorist attacks. Newspaper articles routinely open by reminding readers of his awesome intellectual status. A profile headlined “Conscience of a Nation” in the English daily The Guardian declared: “Chomsky ranks with Marx, Shakespeare, and the Bible as one of the ten most quoted sources in the humanities—and is the only writer among them still alive.” The New York Times has called him “arguably the most important intellectual alive.”

Chomsky has used his status, originally gained in the field of linguistics, to turn himself into the leading voice of the American left. He is not merely a spokesman. His own stance has done much to structure left-wing politics over the past forty years. Today, when actors, rock stars, and protesting students mouth anti-American slogans for the cameras, they are very often expressing sentiments they have gleaned from Chomsky’s voluminous output.

Hence, to examine Chomsky’s views is to analyze the core mindset of contemporary radicalism, especially the variety that now holds so much sway in the academic and arts communities.

Chomsky has been a celebrity radical since the mid-1960s when he made his name as an anti-Vietnam War activist. Although he lost some of his appeal in the late-1970s and 1980s by his defense of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, he has used September 11 to restore his reputation, indeed to surpass his former influence and stature. At seventy-four years of age, he is today the doyen of the American and much of the world’s intellectual left.

He is, however, an unconventional academic radical. Over the past thirty years, the left in the humanities has been smitten by high theory, especially neo-Marxist, feminist, and postmodernist philosophy out of Germany and France. Much of this material was arcane enough in its own language but in translation it elevated obscurantism to a badge of prestige. It inundated the humanities with relativism both in epistemology and moral philosophy.

In contrast, Chomsky has produced no substantial body of political theory of his own. Nor is he a relativist. He advocates the pursuit of truth and knowledge about human affairs and promotes a simple, universal set of moral principles. Moreover, his political writings are very clear, pitched to a general rather than specialist audience. He supports his claims not by appeals to some esoteric conceptual apparatus but by presenting plain, apparently factual evidence. The explanation for his current appeal, therefore, needs to be sought not in recent intellectual fashions but in something with a longer history.

Chomsky is the most prominent intellectual remnant of the New Left of the 1960s. In many ways he epitomized the New Left and its hatred of “Amerika,” a country he believed, through its policies both at home and abroad, had descended into fascism. In his most famous book of the Sixties, American Power and the New Mandarins, Chomsky said what America needed was “a kind of denazification.”

Of all the major powers in the Sixties, according to Chomsky, America was the most reprehensible. Its principles of liberal democracy were a sham. Its democracy was a “four-year dictatorship” and its economic commitment to free markets was merely a disguise for corporate power. Its foreign policy was positively evil. “By any objective standard,” he wrote at the time, “the United States has become the most aggressive power in the world, the greatest threat to peace, to national self-determination, and to international cooperation.”

As an anti-war activist, Chomsky participated in some of the most publicized demonstrations, including the attempt, famously celebrated in Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night, to form a human chain around the Pentagon. Chomsky described the event as “tens of thousands of young people surrounding what they believe to be—I must add that I agree—the most hideous institution on this earth.”

This kind of anti-Americanism was common on the left at the time but there were two things that made Chomsky stand out from the crowd. He was a scholar with a remarkable reputation and he was in tune with the anti-authoritarianism of the student-based New Left.

At the time, the traditional left was still dominated by an older generation of Marxists, who were either supporters of the Communist Party or else Trotskyists opposed to Joseph Stalin and his heirs but who still endorsed Lenin and Bolshevism. Either way, the emerging generation of radical students saw both groups as compromised by their support for the Russian Revolution and the repressive regimes it had bequeathed to eastern Europe.

Chomsky was not himself a member of the student generation—in 1968 he was a forty-year-old tenured professor—but his lack of party membership or any other formal political commitment absolved him of any connection to the Old Left. Instead, his adherence to anarchism, or what he called “libertarian socialism,” did much to shape the outlook of the New Left.

American Power and the New Mandarins approvingly quotes the nineteenth-century anarchist Mikhail Bakunin predicting that the version of socialism supported by Karl Marx would end up transferring state power not to the workers but to the elitist cadres of the Communist Party itself.

Despite his anti-Bolshevism, Chomsky remained a supporter of socialist revolution. He urged that “a true social revolution” would transform the masses so they could take power into their own hands and run institutions themselves. His favorite real-life political model was the short-lived anarchist enclave formed in Barcelona in 1936–1937 during the Spanish Civil War.

The Sixties demand for “student power” was a consequence of this brand of political thought. It allowed the New Left to persuade itself that it had invented a more pristine form of radicalism, untainted by the totalitarianism of the communist world.

For all his in-principle disdain of communism, however, when it came to the real world of international politics Chomsky turned out to endorse a fairly orthodox band of socialist revolutionaries. They included the architects of communism in Cuba, Fidel Castro and Che Guevera, as well as Mao Tse-tung and the founders of the Chinese communist state. Chomsky told a forum in New York in December, 1967 that in China “one finds many things that are really quite admirable.” He believed the Chinese had gone some way to empowering the masses along lines endorsed by his own libertarian socialist principles:

China is an important example of a new society in which very interesting and positive things happened at the local level, in which a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step.

When he provided this endorsement of what he called Mao Tse-tung’s “relatively livable” and “just society,” Chomsky was probably unaware he was speaking only five years after the end of the great Chinese famine of 1958–1962, the worst in human history. He did not know, because the full story did not come out for another two decades, that the very collectivization he endorsed was the principal cause of this famine, one of the greatest human catastrophes ever, with a total death toll of thirty million people.

Nonetheless, if he was as genuinely aloof from totalitarianism as his political principles proclaimed, the track record of communism in the USSR—which was by then widely known to have faked its statistics of agricultural and industrial output in the 1930s when its own population was also suffering crop failures and famine—should have left this anarchist a little more skeptical about the claims of the Russians’ counterparts in China.

In fact, Chomsky was well aware of the degree of violence that communist regimes had routinely directed at the people of their own countries. At the 1967 New York forum he acknowledged both “the mass slaughter of landlords in China” and “the slaughter of landlords in North Vietnam” that had taken place once the communists came to power. His main objective, however, was to provide a rationalization for this violence, especially that of the National Liberation Front then trying to take control of South Vietnam. Chomsky revealed he was no pacifist.

I don’t accept the view that we can just condemn the NLF terror, period, because it was so horrible. I think we really have to ask questions of comparative costs, ugly as that may sound. And if we are going to take a moral position on this—and I think we should—we have to ask both what the consequences were of using terror and not using terror. If it were true that the consequences of not using terror would be that the peasantry in Vietnam would continue to live in the state of the peasantry of the Philippines, then I think the use of terror would be justified.

It was not only Chomsky who was sucked into supporting the maelstrom of violence that characterized the communist takeovers in South-East Asia. Almost the whole of the 1960s New Left followed. They opposed the American side and turned Ho Chi Minh and the Vietcong into romantic heroes.

When the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia in 1975 both Chomsky and the New Left welcomed it. And when news emerged of the extraordinary event that immediately followed, the complete evacuation of the capital Phnom Penh accompanied by reports of widespread killings, Chomsky offered a rationalization similar to those he had provided for the terror in China and Vietnam: there might have been some violence, but this was understandable under conditions of regime change and social revolution.

Although information was hard to come by, Chomsky suggested in an article in 1977 that post-war Cambodia was probably similar to France after liberation at the end of World War II when thousands of enemy collaborators were massacred within a few months. This was to be expected, he said, and was a small price to pay for the positive outcomes of the new government of Pol Pot. Chomsky cited a book by two American left-wing authors, Gareth Porter and George Hildebrand, who had “presented a carefully documented study of the destructive American impact on Cambodia and the success of the Cambodian revolutionaries in overcoming it, giving a very favorable picture of their programs and policies.”

By this time, however, there were two other books published on Cambodia that took a very different line. The American authors John Barron and Anthony Paul called their work Murder of a Gentle Land and accused the Pol Pot regime of mass killings that amounted to genocide. François Ponchaud’s Cambodia Year Zero repeated the charge.

Chomsky reviewed both books, together with a number of press articles, in The Nation in June 1977. He accused them of publishing little more than anti-communist propaganda. Articles in The New York Times Magazine and The Christian Science Monitor suggested that the death toll was between one and two million people out of a total population of 7.8 million. Chomsky mocked their total and picked at their sources, showing some were dubious and that a famous photograph of forced labor in the Cambodian countryside was actually a fake.

He dismissed the Barron and Paul book partly because it had been published by Reader’s Digest and publicized on the front page of The Wall Street Journal, both of them notorious anti-communist publications, and partly because they had omitted to report the views of journalists who had been to Cambodia but not witnessed any executions.

Ponchaud’s book was harder to ignore. It was based on the author’s personal experience in Cambodia from 1965 until the capture of Phnom Penh, extensive interviews with refugees and reports from Cambodian radio. Moreover, it had been favorably reviewed by a left-wing author in The New York Review of Books, a publication for which Chomsky himself had often written. Chomsky’s strategy was to undermine Ponchaud’s book by questioning the credibility of his refugee testimony. Acknowledging that Ponchaud “gives a grisly account of what refugees have reported to him about the barbarity of their treatment at the hands of the Khmer Rouge,” Chomsky said we should be wary of “the extreme unreliability of refugee reports”:

Refugees are frightened and defenseless, at the mercy of alien forces. They naturally tend to report what they believe their interlocutors wish to hear. While these reports must be considered seriously, care and caution are necessary. Specifically, refugees questioned by Westerners or Thais have a vested interest in reporting atrocities on the part of Cambodian revolutionaries, an obvious fact that no serious reporter will fail to take into account.

In 1980, Chomsky expanded this critique into the book After the Cataclysm, co-authored with his long-time collaborator Edward S. Herman. Ostensibly about Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, the great majority of its content was a defense of the position Chomsky took on the Pol Pot regime. By this time, Chomsky was well aware that something terrible had happened: “The record of atrocities in Cambodia is substantial and often gruesome,” he wrote. “There can be little doubt that the war was followed by an outbreak of violence, massacre and repression.” He mocked the suggestion, however, that the death toll might have reached more than a million and attacked Senator George McGovern’s call for military intervention to halt what McGovern called “a clear case of genocide.”

Instead, Chomsky commended authors who apologized for the Pol Pot regime. He approvingly cited their analyses that the forced march of the population out of Phnom Penh was probably necessitated by the failure of the 1976 rice crop. If this was true, Chomsky wrote, “the evacuation of Phnom Penh, widely denounced at the time and since for its undoubted brutality, may actually have saved many lives.” Chomsky rejected the charge of genocide, suggesting that

the deaths in Cambodia were not the result of systematic slaughter and starvation organized by the state but rather attributable in large measure to peasant revenge, undisciplined military units out of government control, starvation and disease that are direct consequences of the US war, or other such factors.

After the Cataclysm also presented a much more extended critique of refugee testimony. Chomsky revealed his original 1977 source for this had been Ben Kiernan, at the time an Australian graduate student and apologist for the Pol Pot regime, who wrote in the Maoist-inspired Melbourne Journal of Politics. What Chomsky avoided telling his readers, however, was that well before 1980, the year After the Cataclysm was published, Kiernan himself had recanted his position.

Kiernan had spent much of 1978 and 1979 interviewing five hundred Cambodian refugees in camps inside Thailand. They persuaded him they were actually telling the truth. He also gained a mass of evidence from the new Vietnamese-installed regime. This led him to write a mea culpa in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars in 1979. This was a left-wing journal frequently cited by Chomsky, so he must have been aware that Kiernan wrote: “There can be no doubting that the evidence also points clearly to a systematic use of violence against the population by that chauvinist section of the revolutionary movement that was led by Pol Pot.” Yet in After the Cataclysm, Chomsky does not acknowledge this at all.

Kiernan later went on to write The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide under the Khmer Rouge 1975–79, a book now widely regarded as the definitive analysis of one of the most appalling episodes in recorded history. In the evacuation of Phnom Penh in 1975, tens of thousands of people died. Almost the entire middle class was deliberately targeted and killed, including civil servants, teachers, intellectuals, and artists. No fewer than 68,000 Buddhist monks out of a total of 70,000 were executed. Fifty percent of urban Chinese were murdered.

Kiernan argues for a total death toll between April 1975 and January 1979, when the Vietnamese invasion put an end to the regime, of 1.67 million out of 7.89 million, or 21 percent of the entire population. This is proportionally the greatest mass killing ever inflicted by a government on its own population in modern times, probably in all history.

Chomsky was this regime’s most prestigious and most persistent Western apologist. Even as late as 1988, when they were forced to admit in their book Manufacturing Consent that Pol Pot had committed genocide against his own people, Chomsky and Herman still insisted they had been right to reject the journalists and authors who had initially reported the story. The evidence that became available after the Vietnamese invasion of 1979, they maintained, did not retrospectively justify the reports they had criticized in 1977.

They were still adamant that the United States, who they claimed started it all, bore the brunt of the blame. In short, Chomsky still refused to admit how wrong he had been over Cambodia.

Chomsky has persisted with this pattern of behavior right to this day. In his response to September 11, he claimed that no matter how appalling the terrorists’ actions, the United States had done worse. He supported his case with arguments and evidence just as empirically selective and morally duplicitous as those he used to defend Pol Pot. On September 12, 2001, Chomsky wrote:

The terrorist attacks were major atrocities. In scale they may not reach the level of many others, for example, Clinton’s bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext, destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and killing unknown numbers of people.

This Sudanese incident was an American missile attack on the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, where the CIA suspected Iraqi scientists were manufacturing the nerve agent VX for use in chemical weapons contracted by the Saddam Hussein regime. The missile was fired at night so that no workers would be there and the loss of innocent life would be minimised. The factory was located in an industrial area and the only apparent casualty at the time was the caretaker.

While Chomsky drew criticism for making such an odious comparison, he was soon able to flesh out his case. He told a reporter from salon.com that, rather than an “unknown” number of deaths in Khartoum, he now had credible statistics to show there were many more Sudanese victims than those killed in New York and Washington: “That one bombing, according to estimates made by the German Embassy in Sudan and Human Rights Watch, probably led to tens of thousands of deaths.” However, this claim was quickly rendered suspect. One of his two sources, Human Rights Watch, wrote to salon.com the following week denying it had produced any such figure. Its communications director said: “In fact, Human Rights Watch has conducted no research into civilian deaths as the result of US bombing in Sudan and would not make such an assessment without a careful and thorough research mission on the ground.”

Chomsky’s second source had done no research into the matter either. He was Werner Daum, German ambassador to Sudan from 1996 to 2000 who wrote in the Harvard International Review, Summer 2001. Despite his occupation, Daum’s article was anything but diplomatic.

It was a largely anti-American tirade criticizing the United States’ international human rights record, blaming America for the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, accusing it of ignoring Iraq’s gassing of the Kurds, and holding it responsible for the purported deaths of 600,000 Iraqi children as a result of post-1991 economic sanctions. Nonetheless, his comments on the death toll from the Khartoum bombing were not as definitive as Chomsky intimated. Daum wrote:

It is difficult to assess how many people in this poor African country died as a result of the destruction of the Al-Shifa factory, but several tens of thousands seems a reasonable guess. The factory produced some of the basic medicines on the World Health Organization list, covering 20 to 60 percent of Sudan’s market and 100 percent of the market for intravenous liquids. It took more than three months for these products to be replaced with imports.

Now, it is hard to take seriously Daum’s claim that this “guess” was in any way “reasonable.” He said there was a three-month gap between the destruction of the factory and the time it took to replace its products with imports. This seems an implausibly long interval to ship pharmaceuticals but, even if true, it is fanciful to suggest that “several tens of thousands” of people would have died in such a brief period.

Had they done so, they must have succumbed to a highly visible medical crisis, a pandemic to put the SARS outbreak in the shade. Yet no one on the spot, apart from the German ambassador, seems to have heard of it.

Anyone who makes an Internet search of the reports of the Sudanese operations of the several Western aid agencies, including Oxfam, Médecins sans Frontières, and Norwegian People’s Aid, who have been operating in this region for decades, will not find any evidence of an unusual increase in the death toll at the time. Instead, their major health concern, then and now, has been how the Muslim Marxist government in Khartoum was waging civil war by bombing the civilian hospitals of its Christian enemies in the south of the country.

The idea that tens of thousands of Sudanese would have died within three months from a shortage of pharmaceuticals is implausible enough in itself. That this could have happened without any of the aid organizations noticing or complaining is simply unbelievable.

Hence Chomsky’s rationalization for the September 11 attacks is every bit as deceitful as his apology for Pol Pot and his misreading of the Cambodian genocide.

“It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies,” Chomsky wrote in a famous article in The New York Review of Books in February 1967. This was not only a well-put and memorable statement but was also a good indication of his principal target. Most of his adult life has been spent in the critique of other intellectuals who, he claims, have not fulfilled their duty.

The central argument of American Power and the New Mandarins is that the humanities and social sciences had been captured by a new breed of intellectuals. Rather than acting as Socratic free thinkers challenging received opinion, they had betrayed their calling by becoming servants of the military-industrial state. The interests of this new mandarin class, he argued, had turned the United States into an imperial power. Their ideology demonstrated

the mentality of the colonial civil servant, persuaded of the benevolence of the mother country and the correctness of its vision of world order, and convinced that he understands the true interests of the backward peoples whose welfare he is to administer.

Chomsky named the academic fields he regarded as the worst offenders—psychology, sociology, systems analysis, and political science—and held up some well-known practitioners, including Samuel Huntington of Harvard, as among the worst examples. The Vietnam War, Chomsky claimed, was designed and executed by the new mandarins.

In itself, Chomsky’s identification of the emergence of a new type of academically trained official was neither original nor radical. Similar critiques had been made of the same phenomenon in both western and eastern Europe for some time. Much of his critique had been anticipated in the 1940s in a book from the other end of the political spectrum, Friedrich von Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, which identified the social engineers of the welfare state as the greatest internal threats to Western liberty. Chomsky offered a leftist version of the same idea, writing:

There are dangerous tendencies in the ideology of the welfare state intelligentsia who claim to possess the technique and understanding required to manage our “postindustrial society” and to organize the international society dominated by the American superpower.

Yet at the very time he was making this critique, Chomsky himself was playing at social engineering on an even grander scale. As he indicated in his support in 1967 for the “collectivization and communization” of Chinese and Vietnamese agriculture, with its attendant terror and mass slaughter, he had sought the calculated reorganization of traditional societies. By his advocacy of revolutionary change throughout Asia, he was seeking to play a role in the reorganization of the international order as well.

Hence, apart from occupying a space on the political spectrum much further to the left than the academics he criticized, and apart from his preference for bloodshed over more bureaucratic techniques, Chomsky himself was the very exemplar of the new mandarin he purported to despise.

He was, in fact, one of the more successful examples of the breed. There has now been enough analysis of the Vietnam War to demonstrate conclusively that the United States was not defeated militarily. South Vietnam was abandoned to its fate because of the war’s political costs at home. The influence of radical intellectuals like Chomsky in persuading the student generation of the 1960s to oppose the war was crucial in elevating these political costs to an intolerable level.

The result they helped produce, however, was far worse than any bureaucratic solution that might have emanated from the behavioral sciences of the 1960s. From our present vantage point, we can today see the long-term outcome of the choice Chomsky posed in 1967 between the “comparative costs” of revolutionary terror in Vietnam versus the continuation of private enterprise agriculture in the Philippines.

The results all favor the latter. In 2001, the average GDP per head in the Philippines was $4000. At the same time, twenty-five years of revolution in Vietnam had produced a figure of only half as much, a mere $2100. Even those Vietnamese who played major roles in the transformation are now dismayed at the outcome. The former Vietcong General Pham Xuan An said in 1999: “All that talk about ‘liberation’ twenty, thirty years ago, all the plotting, all the bodies, produced this, this impoverished broken-down country led by a gang of cruel and paternalistic half-educated theorists.”

These “half-educated theorists” were the very mandarins Chomsky and his supporters so badly wanted to succeed and worked so hard to install.

As well as social science practitioners and bureaucrats, the other representatives of the intelligentsia to whom Chomsky has long been hostile are the people who work in the news media.

Although his politics made him famous, Chomsky has made no substantial contribution to political theory. Almost all his political books are collections of short essays, interviews, speeches, and newspaper opinion pieces about current events. The one attempt he made at a more thoroughgoing analysis was the work he produced in 1988 with Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. This book, however, must have been a disappointment to his followers.

Media studies is a huge field ranging from traditional defenses of the news media as the fourth estate of the democratic system, to the most arcane cultural analyses produced by radical postmodernist theorists. Chomsky and Herman gave no indication they had digested any of it.

Instead, their book offers a crude analysis that would have been at home in an old Marxist pamphlet from the 1930s. Apart from the introduction, most of the book is simply a re-hash of the authors’ previously published work criticizing media coverage of events in central America (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua) and in south-east Asia (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia), plus one chapter on reporting of the 1981 KGB-Bulgarian plot to kill the Pope.

To explain the role of the mass media, Chomsky and Herman offer their “propaganda model.” This claims the function of the media is

to amuse, entertain and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfil this role requires systematic propaganda.

This is true, they maintain, whether the media operate in liberal democracies or under totalitarian regimes. The only difference is that in communist and other authoritarian societies, it is clear to everyone that the media are instruments of the dominant elite. In capitalist societies, however, this fact is concealed, since the media “actively compete, periodically attack and expose corporate and governmental malfeasance, and aggressively portray themselves as spokesmen for free speech and the general community interest.”

Chomsky and Herman argue that these attacks on authority are always very limited and the claims of free speech are merely smokescreens for inculcating the economic and political agendas of the privileged groups that dominate the economy.

The media, they note, are all owned by large corporations, they are beholden for their income to major national advertisers, most news is generated by large multinational news agencies, and any newspaper or television station that steps out of line is bombarded with “flak” or letters, petitions, lawsuits, and speeches from pro-capitalist institutes set up for this very purpose.

There are, however, two glaring omissions from their analysis: the role of journalists and the preferences of media audiences. Nowhere do the authors explain how journalists and other news producers come to believe they are exercising their freedom to report the world as they see it. Chomsky and Herman simply assert these people have been duped into seeing the world through a pro-capitalist ideological lens.

Nor do they attempt any analysis of why millions of ordinary people exercise their free choice every day to buy newspapers and tune in to radio and television programs. Chomsky and Herman fail to explain why readers and viewers so willingly accept the world-view of capitalist media proprietors. They provide no explanation for the tastes of media audiences.

This view of both journalists and audiences as easily-led, ideological dupes of the powerful is not just a fantasy of Chomsky and Herman’s own making. It is also a stance that reveals an arrogant and patronising contempt for everyone who does not share their politics. The disdain inherent in this outlook was revealed during an exchange between Chomsky and a questioner at a conference in 1989 (reproduced in Chomsky, Understanding Power, 2002):

Man: The only poll I’ve seen about journalists is that they are basically narcissistic and left of center. Chomsky: Look, what people call “left of center” doesn’t mean anything—it means they’re conventional liberals and conventional liberals are very state-oriented, and usually dedicated to private power.

In short, Chomsky believes that only he and those who share his radical perspective have the ability to rise above the illusions that keep everyone else slaves of the system. Only he can see things as they really are.

Since the European Enlightenment a number of prominent intellectuals have presented themselves as secular Christ-like figures, lonely beacons of light struggling to survive in a dark and corrupting world. This is a tactic that has often delivered them followers among students and other idealistic youths in late adolescence.

The phenomenon has been most successful when accompanied by an uncomplicated morality that its constituency can readily absorb. In his ruminations on September 11, Chomsky reiterated his own apparently direct and simple moral principles. Reactions to the terrorist attacks, he said, “should meet the most elementary moral standards: specifically, if an action is right for us, it is right for others; and if it is wrong for others, it is wrong for us.”

Unfortunately, like his declaration of the responsibility of the intellectual to speak the truth and expose lies, Chomsky himself has consistently demonstrated an inability to abide by his own standards. Among his most provocative recent demands are for American political and military leaders to be tried as war criminals. He has often couched this in terms of the failure by the United States to apply the same standards to itself as it does to its enemies.

For instance, America tried and executed the remaining World War Two leaders of Germany and Japan, but failed to try its own personnel for the “war crime” of dropping the atomic bomb on Japan. Chomsky claims the American bombing of dams during the Korean War was “a huge war crime … just like racist fanaticism” but the action was praised at home. “That’s just a couple of years after they hanged German leaders who were doing much less than that.”

The worst current example, he claims, is American support for Israel:

virtually everything that Israel is doing, meaning the United States and Israel are doing, is illegal, in fact, a war crime. And many of them they defined as “grave breaches,” that is, serious war crimes. This means that the United States and Israeli leadership should be brought to trial.

Yet Chomsky’s moral perspective is completely one-sided. No matter how great the crimes of the regimes he has favored, such as China, Vietnam, and Cambodia under the communists, Chomsky has never demanded their leaders be captured and tried for war crimes. Instead, he has defended these regimes for many years to the best of his ability through the use of evidence he must have realized was selective, deceptive, and in some cases invented.

In fact, had Pol Pot ever been captured and tried in a Western court, Chomsky’s writings could have been cited as witness for the defense. Were the same to happen to Osama bin Laden, Chomsky’s moral rationalizations in his most recent book—“almost any crime, a crime in the street, a war, whatever it may be, there’s usually something behind it that has elements of legitimacy”—could be used to plead for a lighter sentence.

This kind of two-faced morality has provided a model for the world-wide protests by left-wing opponents of the American-led coalition’s war against Iraq. The left was willing to tolerate the most hideous acts of state terrorism by the Saddam Hussein regime, but was implacable in its hostility to intervention by Western democratic governments in the interests of both their own security and the emancipation of the Iraqi people. This is hypocrisy writ large.

The long political history of this aging activist demonstrates that double standards of the same kind have characterized his entire career.

Chomsky has declared himself a libertarian and anarchist but has defended some of the most authoritarian and murderous regimes in human history. His political philosophy is purportedly based on empowering the oppressed and toiling masses but he has contempt for ordinary people who he regards as ignorant dupes of the privileged and the powerful. He has defined the responsibility of the intellectual as the pursuit of truth and the exposure of lies, but has supported the regimes he admires by suppressing the truth and perpetrating falsehoods. He has endorsed universal moral principles but has only applied them to Western liberal democracies, while continuing to rationalize the crimes of his own political favorites. He is a mandarin who denounces mandarins. When caught out making culpably irresponsible misjudgments, as he was over Cambodia and Sudan, he has never admitted he was wrong.

Today, Chomsky’s hypocrisy stands as the most revealing measure of the sorry depths to which the left-wing political activism he has done so much to propagate has now sunk.


Notes
1. September 11, by Noam Chomsky; Seven Stories Press, 96 pages, $8.95. Power and Terror: Post 9/11 Talks and Interviews, by Noam Chomsky, edited by John Junkerman and Takei Masakazu; Seven Stories Press, 144 pages, $11.95. Go b

[spicault]

Chomsky hails Hezbollah on TV
Leftist American professor says U.S. leading terrorist state
Posted: May 17, 2006
1:00 a.m. Eastern

© 2006 WorldNetDaily.com


Noam Chomsky with Hezbollah leader Nabil Qauq


Hosted by Hezbollah, leftist professor Noam Chomsky ended his visit to Lebanon with a tour of Al-Khiam Prison where he declared the terrorist group's success in removing Israel from the south was "a victory for all the peoples that fight injustice and oppression."

In a broadcast by Hezbollah's Al Manar television Sunday, translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute, Chomsky was shown embracing Hezbollah leader Nabil Qauq at Al-Khiam, where Israel kept prisoners during its occupation of southern Lebanon. Hezbollah was credited with liberating the area after Israel withdrew in 2000.

The U.S. State Department lists Hezbollah as a "terrorist organization." Hezbollah Sec.-Gen. Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah frequently calls for destruction of the U.S. In a February speech aired on Al Manar, he led a crowd in chants, "America, America you are the Great Satan … America, America, the enemy of the Muslims … Those who have come at night, like bats, will hear Lebanon saying: Death to America."

On Saturday, Al Manar quoted Chomsky responding to Hezbollah's designation by the U.S. as a terrorist state.

The professor said that "if the U.S. was to stick to the clear and precise definition of terrorism in its code of laws, it would be the leading terrorist state."

Al Manar said Sunday Chomsky insisted on staying inside one of the prison cells for a short while: "He commended the perseverance of the inmates during the years of cruelty and pain, stressing that this prison was no different from Guantanamo."

The news reader said the "leftist intellectual chose to stand in front of a destroyed Israeli vehicle and declare that all the prisoners in the world must be released, whether in Israel or in American prisons."

Chomsky was asked about Lebanese expatriates who recently honored U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton.

"Well, you know, they have their own choices to make. There is pressure they have to deal with," he said. "When Japan occupied Asia and committed atrocities there, some Asians honored Japan because they were subject to imperialism."

A reporter asked Chomsky how the U.S. views his visit.

"I don't know what their response will be, and I don't care," he said.

Referring to Israel, Chomsky said, "The imperialistic forces do whatever they want, and as long as Washington allows them to do so, they will continue, until the American people learn about it and stop them."

On Saturday, Chomsky said Hezbollah's insistence on keeping its arms is justified

"I think Nasrallah has a reasoned argument and [a] persuasive argument that [the arms] should be in the hands of Hezbollah as a deterrent to potential aggression, and there is plenty of background reasons for that," he said.

Chomsky asserted that "until there is a general political settlement in the region, [and] the threat of aggression and violence is reduced or eliminated, there has to be a deterrent, and the Lebanese army can't be a deterrent."

Local observers quoted by Ali Hussein in the Lebanese weblog Ya Libnan said Chomsky doesn't understand the situation in the country.

"Chomsky needs to live here for a while to understand what happened during the past 30 years and why most Lebanese are against the Hezbollah arms," one observer said.

Another contended Chomsky "showed poor judgment in jumping to this quick conclusion about the Hezbollah arms."

Chomsky, he added, "does not know that the Hezbollah arms scare the Lebanese people more than the Israelis."

"If Hezbollah is not disarmed this could trigger a civil war ... is this what Chomsky wants? Did Chomsky learn what is happening at the Lebanese national dialogue talks?"

Hussein noted Chomsky tried to visit Lebanon when the country was occupied by Syria but was turned away.

"The reason he was able to get in this time is because of the Cedar Revolution that kicked Syria out," Hussein observed. "The government of Lebanon now is the product of the Cedar revolution."

Hussein said Chomsky "obviously doesn't know that Hezbollah and its allies fought the Cedar Revolution by aligning themselves with the Syrian regime."

Most Lebanese, he said, while they may opposed the war in Iraq, "are grateful for U.S. help in driving Syria out of Lebanon after the former PM Rafik Hariri was assassinated."

[spicault]

Antwort auf Beitrag Nr.: 21.210.209 von spicault am 16.04.06 20:14:23

Wenn es um Lügen geht, muss Noam Chomsky Weltmeister sein.

Chomsky's New Blood Libel
By Alan M. Dershowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 26, 2006

Noam Chomsky and his hard-Left gang of Israel bashers are at it again. This time it is about the current crisis in the Middle East, which they blame entirely on Israel.

Chomsky is circulating a letter which he got two naïve Nobel Prize winners—the playwright Harold Pinter and the poet José Saramago—to sign.

It is vintage Chomsky, beginning with its first sentences: “The latest chapter of the conflict between Israel and Palestine began when Israeli forces abducted two civilians, a doctor and his brother, from Gaza. An incident scarcely reported anywhere, except in the Turkish press.” Chomsky typically cites obscure news reports in languages no one can read. This time it’s “the Turkish Press.” The problem with Chomsky’s assertion is that a five minute Google News check reveals that the incident he points to was widely reported by the English language press, including The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, BBC, Reuters, and the Associated Press. (Lie number one).

This is what the associated press reported: “On Saturday, Israeli commandos seized two Palestinians suspected of being Hamas militants in the army’s first arrest raid in the Gaza Strip since Israel’s withdrawal nearly a year ago. An Israeli army spokesman said the two men, arrested at a house near Rafah in southern Gaza, were in the ‘final states of planning a large-scale terror attack’ in coming days. The army did not provide details on the nature of the alleged plot. Hamas denied that the men, who were identified by neighbors as brothers, are members.” Quite a different account than the one provided by Chomsky, et. al. (Lie number two). Chomsky has said in interviews that “we don’t even know their names,” referring to the arrested militants. But a quick check of newspapers reveals that their names are Osama and Mostafa Muamar, whose father is Ali Muamar, a notorious Hamas leader. According to press reports “local Hamas activists said the pair was…known to be members of Hamas.” (Lie number three).

Nor was the arrest of these Hamas terrorists the origin of the crisis, as Chomsky asserts. Even Kofi Annan acknowledged that “Hezbollah’s provocative attack on July 12 was the trigger of this particular crisis”; that Hezbollah is “deliberate[ly] targeting…Israeli population centers with hundreds of indiscriminate weapons”; and that Israel has the “right to defend itself under Article 51 of the UN chater.” But on Planet Chomsky, Annan and the UN are dupes of Israel who suppress the real story that only the Turkish press has the courage and honesty to report. (Lie number four). By the way, even the Turkish Daily News—which simply reprinted a widely distributed international Reuters story, datelined June 25, Gaza—reported that the two arrested individuals were alleged Hamas militants, a fact that Chomsky conveniently omits. (Lie number five).

The lies continue. Chomsky claims that Israeli missiles target areas “where the disinherited and crowded poor live, waiting for what was once called justice.” He never mentions that it is Hezbollah and Hamas that select those civilian areas from which they fire their anti-personnel rockets, precisely in order to put Israel to the choice of allowing the missiles to rain down on its own civilians or to try to destroy the rocket launchers by smart bombs designed to minimize civilian casualties. (Lie number six).

Finally, the BIG LIE: “[Israel’s] aim is nothing less than the liquidation of the Palestinian nation. This has to be said loud and clear for the practice, only half declared and often covert, is advancing fast these days, and, in our opinion, it must be unceasingly and eternally recognized for what it is and resisted.” Again Chomsky ignores the historically indisputable facts that Israel (and the international community) offered the Palestinians a state in 1938, in 1948 and in 2001. The Palestinians responded with terrorism in each instance. The vast majority of Israelis and the Israeli government favor the two-state solution. It is Hamas and Hezbollah whose “aim is nothing less than the liquidation” of Israel. Just ask them. Just read their charter. Just look what they’re doing. But not on Planet Chomsky, where everything is the mirror image of reality, and where “facts” are made up, ignored and distorted to serve a predetermined ideological end. (Lie number seven).

Now look at the one truth in the Chomsky letter, the call for Israel’s aims to be “resisted.” This will surely be read by Hamas and Hezbollah as support for its terrorism against Israel and those who support its existence. I doubt that all who have signed the Chomsky letters were aware that they are disseminating provable falsehoods. The list of signatories, in addition to Chomsky, Pinter and Saramago, now includes Tariq Ali, John Berger, Eduardo Galeano, Naomi Klein, Arundhati Roy, Giuliana Sgrena, and Howard Zinn. But now that they are aware of the lies contained in the letter, let’s see if they remove their names. If they do, some of them may come to realize how dangerous to their integrity and reputation it is to sign a Chomsky letter without checking its contents. If they don’t, it tells us how little they value about truth.

[CaptainFutures]

Noam Chomsky Handapparat für für die Carl-von-Ossietzky-Universität

Bestimmt bereitet die Carl-von-Ossietzky-Universität sich schon seit einiger Zeit vor auf Sonntag, den 23. Mai 2004, auf den Empfang ihres berühmten Preisträgers Noam Chomsky. Sie vergißt dabei, wie es sich für eine Universität gehört, neben der organisatorischen Vorbereitung nicht die inhaltliche und stellt als Handapparat eine Auswahl seines umfangreichen Werkes bereit. Was käme in Frage?

Noam Chomsky, der Dissident Nr. 1

Im Zeitalter des Internets können dem interessierten Leser eine nahezu unüberschaubare Anzahl von Büchern, Videos und CDs in allen Weltsprachen bereitgestellt werden. Die Angebote reichen bei Amazon.com vom Hardcover Hegemony or Survival: America´s Quest for Global Dominance (The American Empire Project) über den Paperback Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda (Open Media Series), die Audio CD Free Market Fantasies. Capitalism in the Real World bis zum Video Power and Terror. Noam Chomsky in Our Times.

Bei Amazon.de gibt es allein für Noam Chomskys Bücher 84 Suchergebnisse, außer Probleme des sprachlichen Wissens, Language and problems of knowledge, einem 1996 ins Deutsche übersetzten Aufguß seiner linguistischen Forschungen von 1987, liefert Amazon.de von Power and Terror (gibt es auch als Film) über People without Rights bis zu The Attack. Hintergründe und Folgen (alle broschiert). Vom letzteren "nur noch drei Stück am Lager". Die Bücher gehen weg wie warme Semmeln.

In seinen Werken verkündet der zukünftige Carl-von-Ossietzky-Preisträger scheinbar nüchtern und sachlich nichts als die Wahrheit; so auch zum Attentat des 11. September 2001, in dem er erklärt, daß aus der Sicht der mächtigen Staaten des Westens Terrorismus eine Frage des Standpunktes sei. Wenn unsere Feinde uns angriffen, handelten sie verbrecherisch, wenn wir Krieg führten, dann kämpften wir für die Freiheit. So schlicht und eingängig stellt sich einem Rezensenten im Internet Noam Chomskys Weltbild dar.

Amazon.fr bietet 383 Ergebnisse in englisch und 68 in französisch an, Spitze bei den englischsprachigen Angeboten sind 9-11, über den 11. September 2001, und Hegemony or Survival. Bei den französischsprachigen sind es Le langage et la pensée, mit drei wissenschaftlichen Vorträgen von 1967 (!), und die kämpferischen Werke Le profit avant l´homme und La loi du plus fort: mise au pas des états voyous, wobei Noam Chomsky mit voyou=Schurke pauschal die USA meint. Zwei Videos werden angepriesen, eines davon, Distorted Morality: America´s War on Terror?, ist vergriffen.

Gibt man bei Google Chomsky - guerra ein, erhält man 43 900 Angebote, bei Chomsky - terror 128 000 und Chomsky - USA - power 58 500.

Die festlich gestimmten Universitätsmitglieder benötigen auf diesem Gebiet wohl keinen zusätzlichen Vorschlag für ihren Handapparat, denn sie besitzen alle zu Hause eine stattliche Sammlung der kämpferischen Werke des Noam Chomsky, der als amerikanischer Jude den Europäern, vor allem den Deutschen, dazu dient, ihnen vorzugeben, wie weit sie gehen können, was sie über die USA, Israel und die Juden denken, sagen und schreiben dürften von dem, was sie sich selbst (noch) nicht zu äußern getrauen. Im Streitfall könnte man sich auf ihn beziehen und sich hinter ihn, den Vorzeigejuden, ins rettende Versteck verkrümeln. Was Rafael Seligmann auf deutschem Niveau seiner allzu plumpen Mein Kampf-Kampagne wegen nicht ganz so erfolgreich gelingt, das fällt Noam Chomskys intellektueller Eleganz scheinbar mühelos im internationalen Literaturgeschäft zu: er ist "the JEW ON DEMAND". Die 10 000 Euro Preisgeld wandern in seine Portokasse. (1)

Noam Chomsky für Linksradikale, Rechtsextreme, Antisemiten und Holocaustleugner

Dieser JEW ON DEMAND, mit dem es niemals einen langweiligen Augenblick gibt, Never a Dull Moment, er bedient außer den linken und linksradikalen Friedens-, Palästinenserfreunden und ATTAC-Anhängern in aller Welt auch eine andere Klientel, was vielleicht nicht so bekannt ist: Faschisten, Alt- und Neo-Nazis, Holocaustleugner und andere Rechtsextreme, wobei sich weite Bereiche des Bedarfs beider Gruppen überschneiden. Das wird beispielhaft an der positiven Aufnahme der Schriften des Noam Chomsky durch die Deutsche Nationalzeitung sichtbar, die sein neues Pamphlet Hybris. Die endgültige Sicherstellung der globalen Vormachtstellung der USA gemeinsam mit Wakaki: Terror-Tribunal. Die Nürnberger "Rechtsprechung" der Siegermächte 1945/46 wärmstens empfiehlt. Man kann die Bücher bei ihrem Deutschen Buchdienst ordern. Die Neo-Nazis stört ebenso wenig, daß Linke und Linksradikale das Buch für sich reklamieren wie umgekehrt. Keiner der von Noam Chomsky begeisterten Linken wundert sich über diesen Schulterschluß, keinen stößt er ab. (2)

Das gilt ebenso für Il Controllo dei Mass Media im italienischen rechtsextremen Verlag Barbarossa, wo von Linken unbeanstandet Noam Chomsky neben Julius Evola, Benito Mussolini, Roger Garaudy, Guiseppe Santoro und anderen Faschisten, Negationisten, Alt- und Neo-Nazis herausgegeben wird. Das Buch kommt sicherlich nicht in diesen Verlag wie mancher deutsche Professor seinerzeit angeblich in die NSDAP, nämlich unwissentlich. Noam Chomsky gibt sein Einverständnis, in einem solchen Verlag veröffentlicht zu werden, und die Linken stört das nicht. (3)

Er veröffentlicht antisemitische Beiträge und verfaßt mit den Programmen rechtsextremer Verlage kompatible Schriften, wie die für den genannten Verlag Barbarossa, Schriften, die ihm schon ihres Erscheinens in solchen rechtsextremen Verlagen wegen nicht gleichzeitig von den Linken aus den Händen gerissen werden. Sie werden nicht auf seiner von den Linken frequentierten Web Site (4) aufgeführt, und manche Linke wissen vielleicht gar nichts davon.

In einem seiner Artikel läßt er einen fiktiven Araber gegen von Juden geführte Medien und von Juden dominierte Kultur in New York argumentieren. In bekannt antisemitischer Art läßt er diesen Araber unterstellen, daß Juden nicht ihr Leben führen und Karriere machen wollen wie andere, sondern daß sie es als Agenten der jüdischen Sache tun. Die Protokolle der Weisen von Zion lassen grüßen. Geschickt kann er sich bei Kritik aus der Affäre ziehen, denn nicht er hat solche Argumente gebracht, sondern er zitiert einen fiktiven Araber. Was Noam Chomsky selbst dazu denkt, das läßt er offen. Diese unlautere Art durchzieht sein gesamtes Werk. (5)

Noam Chomsky schreibt gemeinsam mit Gore Vidal Referenzen für Veröffentlichungen des an Antisemitismus nicht mehr zu überbietenden (im Juli 2001 verstorbenen) Israel Shahak, der laut Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (WRMEA) prophetischen Stimme. Die Lügen des Israel Shahak über den Talmud, so müssen Kinder angeblich rituelle Flüche ausstoßen, wenn sie an nichtjüdischen Friedhöfen vorbei gehen, und seine Ansicht, die Israelis seien Nazis, sind weltbekannt. Beide lebenslangen Kämpfer für die Menschenrechte korrespondieren seit Jahrzehnten und treffen am 3. November 1994 endlich in einer gemeinsamen Rundfunksendung des Radio Free Maine zusammen, um sich in einem kraftvollen Gespräch über jüdischen Fundamentalismus, zionistischen Kolonialismus und US-amerikanischen Imperialismus auszutauschen. Wo treffen sie sich? Direkt im Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT), das zum Forum für die Hetze wird und dadurch die beiden wissenschaftlich aufwertet. Audio und Video Aufzeichnungen von dieser und anderen Reden des Noam Chomsky sind direkt beim Rundfunk erhältlich. (6)

Das Googeln von Noam Chomsky - Israel Shahak bringt 2380 Angebote, aus denen der Handapparat der Oldenburger angereichert werden könnte - und hieraus auch noch:

Noam Chomsky - Norman Finkelstein: 5950 Angebote,

Noam Chomsky - Ernst Zündel (7): 277 Angebote,

Noam Chomsky - David Duke (8): 8770 Angebote.

Ein Forumsteilnehmer beim Blog des Australiers Tim Blair meint treffend, daß es einen fortlaufenden Prozeß gebe, in dem der Welt vielfache Idiotien zu einer riesigen nutzlosen Kraft würden, man sehe es daran, daß David Duke mit Noam Chomsky, dem (linksradikalen) Karikaturisten Ted Rall und mit Lyndon LaRouche einer Meinung sei. (9)

So ist es. Die Carl-von-Ossietzky-Universität Oldenburg wäre zu ergänzen.

Man braucht in allen Fällen nur die wenigen informativen Teilsätze bei Google zu lesen, um einen Eindruck zu erhalten, um wen es sich bei Noam Chomsky handelt: um einen miesen Antisemiten und Feind Israels, um einen Hasser der USA. Auf ihn können sich alle linken und rechten Globalisierungsgegner einigen. Er sagt, was sie sich nicht zu sagen trauen.

So liest man denn auch in der Deutschen Stimme von Hugo Fischer die bewundernden Sätze in einer Buchbesprechung von Claus Leggewie - Die Globalisierung und ihre Gegner:

Gut gelungen ist die Darstellung der "Päpste" der Globalisierungskritik wie Jose Bové, Jean Ziegler, Arundhati Roy, Noam Chomsky oder der im Jahr 2001 verstorbene Pierre Bourdieu, um die teilweise ein regelrechter Führerkult getrieben wird. Es ist schon verblüffend zu erkennen, wie ausgerechnet innerhalb der Linken die Ausrichtung innerhalb der Binnengruppe über die "charismatische Herrschaft" (laut dem deutschen Soziologen Max Weber eine von drei Formen legitimer Herrschaft) von Leitfiguren und die Kraft affektueller Hingabe der Gefolgschaft hergestellt wird. (10)

Es sind sich alle einig, hinter der charismatischen Persönlichkeit Noam Chomsky herzulaufen und ihm zu huldigen. Ihm gar im Namen von Carl von Ossietzky einen Preis zu verleihen, das ist legitim.

Noam Chomsky, Unterstützer von Holocaustleugnern und ihren Institutionen

Die enge Gemeinschaft Noam Chomskys mit Holocaustleugnern zeigt der Skandal um seine Unterstützung des Negationisten Robert Faurisson. Für Mémoire en défense, in dem Robert Faurisson den Holocaust leugnet, schreibt er am 11. Oktober 1980 das Vorwort und wertet Robert Faurisson, den man bereits unter die Neo-Nazis zählt, damit zum Linken um. Herausgegeben wird das Buch vom linksradikalen Verlag La Vieille Taupe, der alte Maulwurf. Die linksradikalen Ultra-Revolutionäre Serge Thion und Pierre Guillaume, vom Verlag La Vieille Taupe, fliegen eigens nach Boston, um von Noam Chomsky eine Petition für Robert Faurisson unterschreiben zu lassen. Die Flugscheine bezahlt Louis Pauwels, seinerzeit Direktor des Figaro Magazine und damit befaßt, die rechtsextremen Ideen des Alain de Benoist in Frankreich zu verbreiten. Louis Pauwels im Gespräch mit dem Nazi-Dichter Louis Ferdinand Céline, solches wird heute herausgegeben vom Musikverlag Frémeaux Associés, Vincennes. Der Monatszeitung Le Monde diplomatique ist diese Unterstützung des Robert Faurisson in ihrer Nummer vom April 2001 eine uneingeschränkte Verteidigung wert. (11)

Auch Noam Chomsky verteidigt seine Unterstützung des Holocaustleugners vehement und mit vielen Worten. Er sei nur einer von 500 Unterzeichnern der Petition. Robert Faurisson habe ein Recht dazu, und es sei gänzlich abzulehnen, daß man ihn dehalb gerichtlich verfolge und aus dem Beruf entferne. Serge Thion stellt er als einen Hochschullehrer vor, der gegen jeden Totalitarismus sei, als einen libertären Sozialisten, für den einige ja auch Noam Chomsky halten.

Das Vorwort aus seiner Feder ist nur aus Versehen in das Buch geraten. Er sei kein Holocaustleugner: the most fantastic outburst of collective insanity in human history sei der Holocaust stattdessen. Bei Werner Cohn liest man, daß dies das einzige Mal sei, daß Noam Chomsky sich überhaupt dazu äußere, und das bei den Mengen an Texten, die er verfaßt. (12)

Das in den USA residierende revisionistische Institute for Historical Review (IHR), dessen Mitarbeiter und Anhänger den Holocaust leugnen, ist eben deshalb ein Freund des Noam Chomsky. Das IHR gibt die Zeitschrift Journal of Historical Review heraus. (13)

Arthur R. Butz rezensiert dort das Buch von Robert Faurisson Mémoire en défense samt Vorwort des Noam Chomsky, erschienen im Verlag La Vieille Taupe 1980, gemeinsam mit dem 1982 publizierten Buch zur Unterstützung der freien Meinungsäußerung (!) des Robert Faurisson Intolerable Intolerance der Autoren Jean-Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, Eric Delcroix, Claude Karnoouh, Vincent Monteil, und Jean-Louis Tristani.

Jean-Gabriel Cohn-Bendit ist der "libertäre linke" Bruder von Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Eric Delcroix der rechtsextreme Strafverteidiger von Robert Faurisson und Kandidat des Front National in der Picardie, 1996 für schuldig befunden, Verbrechen gegen die Menschheit zu leugnen, Vincent "Mansûr" Monteil ist ein zum Islam konvertierter Verehrer von General Charles de Gaulle, Muammar Ghaddafi und dem Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Jean-Louis Tristani ein Anhänger des Heidentums aus den Kreisen des GRECE des Rechtsextremen Alain de Benoist, und Claude Karnoouh ist ein linker Anthropologe, Philosoph und bekannter Holocaustleugner aus dem Kreis um Serge Thion und Gabor Tamás Rittersporn, letzterer heute weiterhin angestellt beim staatlichen CNRS und beim Berliner Centre Marc Bloch. Sie alle unterstützen ab 1979 gemeinsam mit Pierre Guillaume von La Vieille Taupe den Holocaustleugner Robert Faurisson, auf daß der seine Meinung (!) mitteilen darf. (14)

Das IHR druckt Noam Chomskys Essay All Denials of Free Speech Undercut A Democratic Society, von 1985 ab. Der Essay ist ein Unterstützerbeitrag zu einem Village Voice Artikel, und Michael A. Hoffman II, vom IHR, moniert, daß man Noam Chomsky an der Cornell Medical School von einem Eröffnungsvortrag wieder auslädt. Er vermutet dahinter zionistische Intrigen. In dem Essay wiederholt Noam Chomsky noch einmal seine Unterstützung für Robert Faurisson. Dessen Verurteilung der Leugnung des Holocaust wegen erklärt er für stalinistisch-faschistisch. Es scheint Noam Chomsky bis heute nicht klar zu sein, daß die Leugnung des Holocaust keine schützenswerte Meinung ist, sondern ein Straftatbestand.

Mark Weber sieht die Verteidiger des Holocaust, d.h. der Tatsache, daß es ihn gegeben und ihm sechs Millionen Juden zum Opfer gefallen sind, immer weniger werden und stattdessen die Front der Revisionisten immer stärker anschwellen. Man könne sie nicht mehr so einfach abbürsten. Er stützt sich auf Noam Chomsky, über den er schreibt, daß er lediglich die freie Meinungsäußerung unterstütze, nicht aber die Holocaust-Revisionisten inhaltlich.

Ausführlich wird sein Werk von 1983 The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel & The Palestinians gewürdigt, in dem u.a. der Krieg im Libanon verurteilt wird. Die US-Politik, Medien und der Lehrkörper seien bestimmt von Pro-Zionismus, heißt es weiterhin. Der Autor schreibe, Israel dürfe nicht kritisiert werden, und es spiele eine einzigartige Rolle als Nutznießer amerikanischer Unterstützung. Zahlreiche Beispiele führe der Autor dafür an. Er wende sich gegen die Aktivitäten in den USA von jüdischen Institutionen wie B´nai B´rith, deren Opfer er selbst schon geworden sei. Er bezeichne den pseudo-heiligen Elie Wiesel als Heuchler, der keinerlei Kritik an Israel übe, da es ihm an Informationen mangele. Über den (angeblichen) Holocaust aber gebe es für den angeblichen Holocaust-Überlebenden Elie Wiesel nicht genug Kritik in der Welt.

Der Rezensent L. A. Rollins erwähnt dann in einem Nebensatz, daß Noam Chomsky den Holocaust nicht in Frage stelle, aber jeder, der diese heilige Kuh Elie Wiesel öffentlich kritisiere, bedürfe der Aufmerksamkeit der Revisionisten. Noam Chomsky fordere in seinem Buch die Einstellung der Hilfe der USA an Israel, und er bringe Zitate über den Willen Israels, die Welt zu beherrschen. Das stamme nicht aus der Fälschung Protokolle der Weisen von Zion, sondern vom religiös-chauvinistischen Rabbi Elazar Valdmann, von Gush Emunim, dieser Rabbi wolle die Welt beherrschen. Trotz einiger Mängel ist The Fateful Triangle eine der besten derzeit verfügbaren Darstellungen zionistischer Mythologie. Selbst diejenigen, die Alfred Lilienthals "The Zionist Connection" gelesen haben, werden Chomskys Buch für eine ausgezeichnete Ergänzung halten, schließt der Rezensent.

Noam Chomskys wertvolle Einsichten schätzt William Grimstad in einer Rezension des 1988 von Edward Said und Christopher Hitchens (15) herausgegebenen Buches Blaming the Victims. Von hohem Wert für die revisionistische Sache sei darin der Artikel Middle East Terrorism and the American Ideological System von Noam Chomsky, der schreibe, daß die Palästinenser mit den Deutschen das Schicksal teilten, die zwei Völker zu sein, über die am meisten Lügen verbreitet würden. Noam Chomsky schreibe, daß die Israelis nicht mit den Palästinensern verhandeln wollten, gleichgültig, ob sie das Extistenzrecht Israels anerkennten oder nicht.

Theodor J. O´Keefe hält Noam Chomsky für einen ehrlichen jüdischen Geschichtswissenschaftler. Daß es Männer und Frauen gebe wie Noam Chomsky, Livia Rokach und den palästinensisch-amerikanischen Edward Said mache Hoffnung, daß Araber und Jude (sic!), von Fakten und nicht von Mythen oder Lügen über die Vergangenheit inspiriert eine gerechte und menschliche Lösung des von den Zionisten verursachten Problems ausarbeiten möchten.

Noam Chomsky, immer im Dienste der Wahrheit

Am 1. Januar 1980 schreibt Noam Chomsky ein Vorwort für das 63 Seiten umfassende dünne Buch von Livia Rokach, der Tochter Israel Rokachs, des israelischen ehemaligen Ministers unter Moshe Sharett, in den 50er Jahren. Sie verfaßt es über die 2400 Seiten des Tagebuches ihres Vaters. Beim Googeln von Noam Chomsky - Livia Rokach gibt es 218 Angebote, für dieses kleine Büchlein reichlich. Noam Chomsky schreibt das Vorwort zur Unterstützung der Verbreitung akurater Informationen. Der Titel des Buches lautet: Israel´s Sacred Terrorism. Eine begehrte Schrift, die in dritter Auflage erscheint. Mit Sicherheit trägt der Name des Vorwortverfassers zur Publizität des Buches erheblich bei.

Auch mit dieser Schrift will Noam Chomsky zur Verbreitung der Wahrheit beitragen, gegen Dogmen. Es besteht für ihn überhaupt kein Zweifel daran, daß die Wahrheit bei ihm und bei Livia Rokach liegt. Das eint ihn mit Festrednern wie Eckart Spoo, der 2002 ebenso klingt, als er die Verdienste Uri Avnerys würdigt. Die Wahrheit des Michael Schiffmann wird ähnlich gestrickt sein, bei dem Kreis der Antiimperialistischen Koordination (AIK) um Werner Pirker, Wilhelm Langthaler und Joachim Guilliard, zu denen er gehört. (16)

Livia Rokach zieht nach der Veröffentlichung des Buches nach Rom, wo sie sich als eine italienische Schriftstellerin palästinensischer Herkunft bezeichnet. Sie wird mit juristischer Verfolgung durch die israelische Regierung bedroht, aber das Buch erscheint in den USA bei der Association of Arab American University Graduates (AAUG). Uri Avnery, wie könnte es anders sein, wird zitiert: den Vertrieb des Buches zu verhindern, wäre ein Kardinalfehler, weil das ihm viel mehr Bekanntheit verleihen würde.

Das Buch sei ein explosives Dokument, das viel von der Wahrheit hinter den israelischen Greueltaten enthülle. So ist wieder jemand im Besitz der Wahrheit, und Noam Chomsky hat ihr geholfen, daß sie ans Licht gelangen kann.

Das tut er, ablassend von seinem Lieblingswildbret Israel, auch für die Sache der kambodschanischen Revolution: er hilft der Wahrheit ans Licht. Er, der Akademiker und Aktivist, der nie einen Fuß nach Kambodscha setzt, findet Fehler in den Texten von Jean Lacouture und François Ponchaud; beide entlarven das Mord- und Terrorregime der Roten Khmer. François Ponchaud lebt von 1965 bis 1975 in Kambodscha und spricht die Sprache, 1977 schreibt er das Buch Cambodia: Année Zero. Kambodscha: Jahr Null. 1978 kommt es in den USA in englisch heraus. Noam Chomsky erklärt die Arbeiten der beiden Autoren für Betrug. Mit Professor Edward S. Herman schreibt er einen Artikel gegen die Geschichten, die über Pol Pot verbreitet würden. Die Tatsachen können seiner Wahrheit nichts anhaben. Nach der Befreiung Kambodschas durch die Vietnamesen, Ende 1978, schreibt er 1979 mit Edward S. Herman das Buch After the Cataclysm. Darin bezweifelt er die Informationen, die aus dem Land über das mörderische Regime kommen. Alles sei Propaganda der westlichen Medien zur Unterstützung von deren Antikommunismus. Später, als nichts mehr zu beschönigen ist, spielen sie alles herunter. Edward S. Herman ist Emeritus an der Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Er beschreibt sich selbst heute auf seiner Web Site als Third World Traveller. Wie´s auf seiner Site aussieht, hat er bis heute wenig aus seinen Reisen gelernt. Er bleibt bei seiner Wahrheit.

1988 schreiben er und Noam Chomsky das Buch Manufacturing Consent. Herstellung von Übereinkunft. Ein Propagandamodell. Darin gehen sie auf 36 Seiten noch einmal auf Kambodscha ein, bringen aber nichts Neues. 1995 schreibt Edward S. Herman das Buch Triumph des Marktes. Die vier Kapitel heißen: Banalität des Bösen, Richtung auf demokratische Medien, das Ende der Demokratie?, das Weltimperium. (17)

Edward S. Herman scheint eine Art Volksausgabe des Noam Chomsky zu sein, seine Bücher sind für den Handapparat der Universität Oldenburg zu empfehlen.

In der Forschungsarbeit The Khmer Rouge Canon 1975-1979 analysieren Sophal Ear und Ronald E. McNair, von der University of California Berkeley, in dem Kapitel Chomsky, Herman, and the STAV ausführlich das Buch After the Cataclysm. Sie nennen die beiden Autoren dialektische Akrobaten. Gegen Schluß des Berichtes wird Noam Chomsky als derjenige bezeichnet, den alle Teilnehmer der Debatten als den noch am ehrbarsten von allen Pol Pot Verklärern ansehen. Einen sachlichen Blick auf die Tatsachen und eine fundierte Analyse der Lage könne ihm keiner attestieren, vielmehr lege er die Fakten, die ihn nicht groß zu kümmern schienen, passend zu seinem Vorurteil aus. Berichte von geflüchteten Bauern interessierten ihn überhaupt nicht. Sie stünden seinen Anschauungen über die Bauernrevolution entgegen. Noam Chomsky behauptet heute noch, seine Ansicht sei nicht widerlegt. (18)

The Khmer Rouge Canon 1975-1979 ist eine empfehlenswerte Lektüre. Sie macht anschaulich, wie ein ideologisch verstellter Blick auch noch die klarste Tasache verdunkeln kann. Der Revisionismus blüht wie bei den Holocaustleugnern auch hier.

Vielleicht fragt Noam Chomsky ja eines Tages Maître Jacques Vergès, dem man nachsagt, er habe von 1970 bis 1978 in Kambodscha bei seinen Freunden Pol Pot, Kieu Sampan und Heng Sary gelebt, der nach Paris zurückkehrt und auf Anfrage sagt: Ich bin von der anderen Seite des Spiegels gekommen. Dies ist mein Schattenbild. Dann gäbe es eine weitere Wahrheit, die höchstwahrscheinlich nichts mit den Tatsachen zu tun hat.

Das alles aber soll die Stadt Oldenburg nicht anfechten. Auch sie hat ihre Wahrheit: Die Stadt Oldenburg will mit dem Carl-von-Ossietzky-Preis die inhaltliche Auseinandersetzung mit Werk und Leben Carl von Ossietzkys fördern und über Oldenburg hinaustragen. (19) Na, bitte. Was hat das mit Noam Chomsky zu tun? Gar nichts. Hauptsache, es wird eine schöne Feier, und es regnet nicht. Dann kann das Gruppenfoto mit Chomsky draußen aufgenommen werden.


http://www.eussner.net/artikel_2004-05-13_03-06-06.html

[InvestigativTrader]

Antwort auf Beitrag Nr.: 24.655.331 von CaptainFutures am 16.10.06 12:51:44

Um über die Autorin(Eussner) und ihre wirren und hasserfüllten Beiträge mehr zu erfahren, sollten wir ihr Werdegang näher unter die Lupe nehmen.



Auffallend viele paralelen finden sich zu einigen Wo-User die sich seit kurzem als fanatische "Freunde Israels" gebärden:

“Fragwürdige Links: Vom antideutschen Neokonservativismus zur religiös-rassistischen Ideologie

Die « antideutsche » Ideologie, oder jedenfalls einige ihrer Ausdrucksformen, sind in den letzten 4 bis 5 Jahren zunehmend zum Feigenblatt des Übergangs ehemaliger Linker (und anderer politisch gescheiterter Existenzen) zu neokonservativen und neoreaktionären Attitüden geworden.

...


Es kommt aber noch doller, betrachtet man, auf welche anderen Webpages von dort aus verlinkt wird. Auch hier soll nur eine besonders prächtige Auswahl vorgestellt werden.

An sehr prominenter Stelle wird dort auf die Homepage einer selbsternannten « Journalistin » (die in Wirklichkeit noch nie mehr Investigationen betrieben hat, als das Internet zu durchforsten und die Ergebnisse in wirrer Form aneinander zu reihen) verlinkt. Es handelt sich um die, nach eigenen Angaben, ehemalige Linke und – dies war jedenfalls der Stand im Jahr 2005 – spätere FDP-Wählerin Gudrun Eussner.

Nachdem die Dame bis im Jahr 2002 in der Berliner Redaktion der Online-Publikation Kalaschnikow mit manchen fragwürdigen Gestalten zusammengearbeitet hatte, die ganz gerne an einer « Querfront » vorgeblicher Systemgegner von rechts und links gebasteltet hätten, stieg sie dort mit grobem Knall aus. So weit, so gut und richtig. Doch in der Folgezeit meinte sie – ein gebranntes Kind sieht das Feuer überall, und vor allem bei den Anderen -, überall angebliche « Querfronten » ausmachen zu können. In Artikeln, die an argumentativer Schwäche kaum noch zu über- bzw. unterbieten waren, behauptete sie etwa nach ihrer Ansiedlung im südfranzösischen Perpignan, per Internet-Prognose die Vereinigung ATTAC Frankreich als « rot-braunes Querfrontprojekt » entlarven zu können. Der Schuss ging freilich inhaltlich gründlich daneben.

Später, nach einigen weiteren politischen Kapriolen, ist die Dame nun allerdings erneut am Basteln eigener Querfront-Strategien jenseits von Rinks und Lechts angekommen. Mitunter verlinkte sie in jüngerer Vergangenheit offen rassistische Webpages als Quellenangabe für Schandtaten von Moslems und linken Journalisten. Auch Homepages von rechtsradikalen ehemaligen Algerienfranzosen, die 1962 aus der früheren französischen Kolonie ‘vertrieben’ wurden, verlinkte sie noch in allerjüngster Zeit. Findet sie doch dort Bestätigung darüber, wie abgrundtief böse die Araber und Moslems doch sind.

...

Interessant ist ausserdem dieses Kommentar die sich auf der verlinkten Site befindet:

"Zu ergänzen wäre aus meiner Sicht, dass jene “Dame” in Mordaufrufe gegen mich verwickelt ist."

Wieder mal ein Beweis dafür wo sich der liebe Captn selbst politisch einordnet und er seine Informationen bezieht.

Mehr gibt es hier zu lesen:

http://lathandir.blogsport.de/2006/07/20/berhard-schmid-uber…

[CaptainFutures]

Antwort auf Beitrag Nr.: 24.657.102 von InvestigativTrader am 16.10.06 14:16:55

So jetzt schauen wir uns doch mal an wo der Herr InvestigativTrader und seine zahlreichen bei W:0 vertretenen Gesinnungsgenossen sich selber politisch einordnen und von wem sie ihre "Informationen" alles so zu beziehen pflegen:

Chomsky and the Neo-Nazis

The name Robert Faurisson represents the most obvious (but not the most significant) connection between Chomsky and the neo-Nazis. Faurisson is a French hate-filled crank, a one-time lecturer in literature at the University of Lyon, right-wing, and deeply anti-Semitic. (17) As we shall see presently (and although he denies this heatedly), Chomsky seems to have taken to this gentleman and has, in any case, seen fit to keep political company with him.

Faurisson says that he is proud that his writings are distributed by partisans of both the left (La Vieille Taupe) and the right wing (Ogmios). The fact is that, in each case, these are tiny sectarian groupings. Ogmios is a Parisian bookstore-cum-movement that belongs to the anti-Semitic, anti-foreign, extreme right wing of the French political spectrum. It is reported to have received financial aid from the government of Iran. (18) Far more important to Faurisson is La Vieille Taupe ("The Old Mole") under the leadership of Pierre Guillaume, a small group of self-styled leftists who publish Faurisson's booklets and pamphlets, advertise them, publicize them, propagandize for them. It is they who are the friends of Chomsky, and it is through them that Chomsky was recruited to his present position as grand patron of the neo-Nazi movement. (At the time of this writing, Ogmios and La Vieille Taupe have joined forces to publish a new anti-Semitic review, Annales d'Histoire Révisionniste.)

Since the 1960's, Faurisson says, he has devoted innumerable hours to what he considers a very deep study of the fate of the Jews during the Second World War. He has written some books and articles on the subject and summarizes his "findings" as follows:

The alleged Hitlerite gas chambers and the alleged genocide of the Jews form one and the same historical lie, which opened the way to a gigantic political-financial swindle, the principal beneficiaries of which are the State of Israel and international Zionism, and the principal victims of which are the German people ­­ but not its leaders ­­ and the entire Palestinian people. (19)

Faurisson and his associates on both sides of the Atlantic are pleased to call this Holocaust-denial their "revisionism." They urge, and I cannot disagree, that fair-minded persons in free countries must keep open minds when confronted with reasonable or at least reasoned challenges to conventional wisdom. Perhaps, who knows, Napoleon never existed, perhaps the earth is flat, perhaps the Jews persecuted Hitler rather than vice versa, perhaps there was no such thing as a Holocaust of European Jews. All these nice opinions have their advocates and we shall have occasion to look at some of them in due time. In theory all received truth can and must be constantly re-examined in the light of new evidence, and we should be thankful to scholars and other reasonable men when they can confront us with thoughtful skepticism. But when, on the other hand, an outrageous point is advanced without regard for its truthfulness or for any rule of logic or evidence, when it is made simply to injure and defame, in that case, surely, we are justified in being less than respectful to the would-be "revisionist."

In my preparations for this essay on Noam Chomsky it fell upon me to read what Faurisson has to say and even to correspond with him. I can report that his challenge to our knowledge of the Holocaust does not meet any criteria of moral or intellectual honesty, of seriousness of purpose, of intellectual workmanship. All that is apparent is hatred of Jews and an effort to hoodwink his audience. No wonder he has not found a single scholar to take him seriously. Obviously I do not intend to argue against his thesis myself any more than I would argue with a man who says that he has been eaten by a wolf. But it is necessary to give an indication of the intellectual level of Faurisson's propaganda so that the reader can get some inkling of why he is ostracized by all decent men.

The heart of Faurisson's argument is based on his assertion that Jewish witnesses to the Holocaust are simply liars and that they are liars because they are Jews. Professor Rudolf Vrba, a colleague of mine at the University of British Columbia, was a witness to the exterminations at Auschwitz and is one of the very few to have survived. Faurisson names him a liar and a Jew and asserts that all who have had anything to do with bringing the Auschwitz facts to light -- witnesses, investigators, magistrates, etc. ­­ are either Jews or, in one case, "probably a Jew." (20) The Jewishness of a witness or writer, throughout Faurisson's opus, is enough to destroy his credibility in Faurisson's eyes. (He does make exception for Chomsky and the two or three other Jews who have rallied to him in a veritable paroxysm of self hatred.)

Faurisson is a practitioner of what might be called the Method of Crucial Source, a favorite among cranks. The Method consists of seizing upon a phrase or sentence or sometimes a longer passage from no matter where, without regard to its provenance or reliability, to "prove" a whole novel theory of history or the universe. More often than not the Source in question is a newspaper item ­­ after all, what cannot be found in some newspaper somewhere, at some time.

Among the many little booklets and leaflets which Faurisson and his left-wing publishers distribute by mail and in person, pride of place must go to a very pretentious pamphlet of twenty-four pages which contains the French translation of an interview ­­ a long text by Faurisson interspersed with a few helpful questions by the interviewer ­­ originally published in an Italian magazine in 1979. (21) This short pamphlet has 61 footnotes in very small print as well as a lengthy footnote to a footnote. Clearly it represents a major effort at presenting the gist of what Faurisson considers his proof that the Holocaust never happened.

One of Faurisson's basic claims is that Hitler's actions against the Jews were of the same order as Jewish actions against Hitler, one provoking the other as it were (p. 15). To prove that there had been a Jewish "war" against Hitler as early as March of 1933, Faurisson devotes his one and only pictorial illustration in this pamphlet to a reproduction of the front page of the Daily Express of London, dated March 24, 1933, which indeed bore a main headline "Judea Declares War on Germany." Sub-heads read "Jews of All the World Unite ­­ Boycott of German Goods."

Now Faurisson claims as his particular specialty the analysis of disputed documents and sources. (As Nadine Fresco has shown, these claims add a touch of lunacy to his malice. (22)). Here he uses the Daily Express as his Crucial Source, and, I suppose, the reader who is likely to be impressed by his propaganda may not ask about the nature of this newspaper in those days.

In 1933, the Daily Express was a sensationalist mass circulation paper run by Lord Beaverbrook, a man of often eccentric views who felt no compunction about using his headlines to promote favorite causes or to denounce pet peeves.(23) During the early years of the Hitler regime he thought that Britain should avoid alliances with France and other threatened European countries. In a private letter in 1938, he expressed the fear that "The Jews may drive us into war." (24) But his most famous pronouncement of the period, delivered in the very same front-page headline style as the "Judea Declares War" item of 1933, came on September 30, 1938: "The Daily Express declares that Britain will not be involved in a European war this year, or next year either. Peace agreement signed at 12:30 a.m. today." (25)


To Faurisson, nevertheless, Daily Express headlines represent the most weighty proof of what happened in history. And so important is this Crucial Source to the "revisionists" that Faurisson's California outlet, the "Institute for Historical Review," sees fit to use it with just a bit of embroidery of its own: "Is it true that Jewish circles 'declared war on Germany?' Yes it did. The media the world over carried headlines such as 'Judea Declares War on Germany.'" (26)

Faurisson has been the object of legal challenges because of his strident, exhibitionist, unscrupulous defamations of Holocaust witnesses and respected scholars of the Holocaust. He has also been suspended from his post at the University of Lyon for similar reasons. The court cases, of which Faurisson and his accomplices are inordinately proud because of the tremendous publicity they derive from them, (27) are similar in nature to the Keegstra and Zundel trials in Canada. Here too neo-Nazi publicists have been brought to court under statutes that derive from the law of libel: freedom of speech is held to be no excuse when it can be shown that falsehood is spread deliberately for purposes of inflaming hatred. Faurisson has traveled to Toronto in the Zundel trial as an "expert witness" on matters of truth vs. falsehood, but the jury was not persuaded by him and convicted Zundel.

When freedom of speech encroaches upon or is said to encroach upon other human rights, thoughtful civil libertarians will wish to look at the particulars of the case rather thoroughly. Chomsky says that he sees no need for such concerns, holding that "one who defends the right of free expression incurs no special responsibility to study or even be acquainted with the views expressed." (28) So presumably spreading deliberate falsehood ­­ say the representation of a consumer product as safe when in fact it is dangerous ­­ would enjoy Chomsky's enthusiastic defense. In any case it is a devotion to freedom of expression, he says, that has led Chomsky so frequently and so energetically to come to the defense of Faurisson. We shall have to examine this claim in more detail presently.

The relationship between Chomsky and Faurisson's publisher, La Vieille Taupe (29)
(hereafter VT), has been chronicled in two remarkably revealing documents in 1986. (30)
The first, by far the longer, is a narrative written by VT's leader, Pierre Guillaume; the second, much briefer, is a commentary on this narrative by Chomsky. Taken together, these documents tell us things that might well cause embarrassment among Chomsky's American supporters.

Guillaume begins by telling us that he first met Chomsky some time in 1979, having been introduced by Serge Thion, another member of the VT group whom we shall encounter again. Guillaume told Chomsky about Faurisson at this meeting. Faurisson had begun to have various legal problems. Then, says Guillaume, several months later, and without any other contact having taken place between them, Chomsky signed and promoted the following petition (reproduced by Guillaume in its original English):


Dr. Robert 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 historical 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. Fearful officials have even tried to stop him from further research by denying him access to public libraries and archives.


We strongly protest these efforts to deprive Professor Faurisson of his freedom of speech and expression, and we condemn the shameful campaign to silence him.


We strongly support Professor Faurisson's just right of academic freedom and we demand that university and government officials do everything possible to ensure his safety and the free exercise of his legal rights.


It is the publication of this petition in French newspapers, with Chomsky's name on top, that caused the first great consternation among Chomsky's left-wing supporters in France and elsewhere. The lamentable Alfred Lilienthal, the only other Jew of any notoriety with anti-Semitic connections, was also among the first signatories to the petition. (31)


Many civil libertarian readers objected to the petition's use of the word "findings" to characterize Faurisson's propaganda, seeing it as an endorsement of Faurisson's work and thereby going beyond a defense of freedom of speech. Chomsky has tried to parry this objection by denying that "findings" means what it means. (32) But it might also be pointed out that the petition describes Faurisson as being, among other things, "respected" for his "document criticism." In fact Faurisson enjoys no such respect unless we count the anti-Semitic lunatic fringe. (33) In any case, according to Faurisson himself, (34) the petition was originally drawn up not by a neutral civil libertarian but by Mark Weber, an American one-time professor of German who changed careers to become an apparently full-time "revisionist" propagandist. (35)

According to Guillaume, the petition played a decisive role in gaining public acceptance for the "revisionist" movement in France. And most of all, according to Guillaume, it was the prestige of Chomsky's name that helped the crusade of Holocaust-denial.

Next, 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.

After the appearance of the petition, Guillaume tells us, Chomsky received a great many letters of complaint which he shared with Guillaume. Chomsky told Guillaume that the principle of freedom of expression was threatened by such letters and that he wished to reply to them in a public way. Consequently Chomsky composed a text of approximately 2,500 words, Quelques commentaires élémentaires sur le droit à la liberté d'expression, "Some elementary comments concerning the right of free expression." In it he declared that everyone should have the right of free speech, including fascists and anti-Semites, but that, as it happens, Faurisson is neither one of these. Instead, according to Chomsky, Faurisson is best described as "a sort of apolitical liberal." For reasons that will become clear in a minute, this text later became known as "Chomsky's Preface." (36)

According to Guillaume, Chomsky sent this text to Serge Thion, VT's writer and propagandist, asking him to make the best possible use of it. The text was dated October 11, 1980. On December 6 Chomsky seems to have had second thoughts and wrote a follow-up letter to Guillaume and complained that, the state of hysteria in the world being what it is, the whole fight against imperialism could be sabotaged by a campaign that would associate him with neo-Nazism. (Chomsky was never one to understate the importance of his own personality for the fate of the world.) Therefore, if it isn't too late, Chomsky strongly suggests that his text not be made part of a book by Faurisson.

But, alas for Chomsky and the whole anti-imperialist movement, it was too late. The book by Faurisson, with Chomsky's text as preface, had already appeared. When Guillaume and Thion telephoned Chomsky on December 12, Chomsky's reaction ­­ all this according to Guillaume ­­ was firm, clear, and completely reassuring: he now stood by his preface and declared his letter of retrieval to be null and void.

What a friend we have in Chomsky!

Guillaume next reiterates the steadfastness of Chomsky's support and even confesses that without it the intrepid little original band of "revisionists" may never have grown to its present strength. And all this is so remarkable, according to Guillaume, since Chomsky is being victimized in his own country, the United States, where the imperial ideology of the West has somehow been able to raise its ugly head once again. As a result, Chomsky, according to Guillaume, has had his home audience greatly reduced and his popularity endangered.

Guillaume is not insensitive to the problems posed by Chomsky's ritualistic affirmations that his, Chomsky's, views are "diametrically opposed to those of Faurisson." Yes, but Guillaume understands the difference between a truth and a wink, n'est-ce pas (p. 163, my translation) :

Each time that Chomsky has said that his opinions remain "diametrically opposed" to those of Faurisson, he has done so in terms that are absolutely incapable of hurting Faurisson; and he has always indicated, by a word or a phrase, that his "diametrically opposed" view was more a matter of opinion than of scientific knowledge.

Guillaume replies here to criticism from one Chantal Beauchamp, who, presuming to be more "revisionist" than he, had objected to VT's collaboration with what she apparently regarded as an inadequately neo-Nazi Chomsky. Guillaume can reassure her even further (pp. 167-8, my translation) :

Chomsky was involved in very taxing struggles ..... Dramatic events were taking place in the Middle East. His own work ­­ the exposure ... of American imperialism there, of the realities of Zionism and of the state of Israel ­­ took on an immediate significance, something that could lead to practical results. How is this work less important than Faurisson's ... ?

The important work of Faurisson is the denial of the Holocaust. The important work of Chomsky is the struggle against Israel. And the common denominator of these, in the eyes of Guillaume and his followers, can only be anti-Semitism.

Now comes the most interesting part. Guillaume has told us how close a political friend Chomsky has been, how he had sacrificed self-interest to political principle by publishing his book with VT rather than commercially, how Chomsky's "diametric opposition" to Faurisson did not really mean what it said, how Chomsky's work concerning Israel is part of the same overall cause as Faurisson's denial of the Holocaust. And now, after all that, Guillaume says that he submitted his report to Chomsky for possible corrections or disagreements. So Chomsky was given the opportunity to tell his story should it differ from that of Guillaume. And it turns out that Chomsky indeed has a demurral that he needs to press, and which Guillaume magnanimously publishes as a sort of addendum to his own report. It seems that Guillaume had gotten one very important point completely wrong. It is not at all true, says Chomsky, that he is less popular now in his own country than he had been in the days of Vietnam. "I cannot accept even a fraction of the many speaking invitations that I receive, and now it's no longer, as it was in the sixties, a matter of speaking to five people in a church. Now there are real crowds at colleges and in the community." That is the sum total of Chomsky's correction. It confirms, in the most direct way possible, the close political collaboration between Chomsky and the French "revisionists."

Not only did Chomsky publish his Political Economy of Human Rights with Guillaume's organization. He also prepared a special booklet for Guillaume, not published anywhere else, of some of his self-justifying correspondence concerning the Faurisson affair. This publication, Réponses inédites, (37) carries Chomsky's name as author and Guillaume's initials, "P.G.," as editor. Guillaume explains that Chomsky had personally reviewed all translations from English to French.

For his part, Faurisson very frequently uses the Chomsky connection in his ceaseless pursuit of some sort of credibility. Bill Rubinstein of Australia reports that he had originally learned of the Chomsky-Faurisson connection only when an Australian Faurisson supporter flaunted correspondence that showed Chomsky furnishing Faurisson with information and advice. (38) It is just about impossible to come across a French "revisionist" publication ­­ be it by Guillaume, Thion, or Faurisson himself
that omits the obligatory reference to Chomsky's patronage. (39)

What does Guillaume's movement do to deserve such warm friendship from the famous linguist of MIT ?

The tiny movement of La Vieille Taupe, though having a history of quite different concerns that I will sketch later, seems to be doing little but Jew-baiting these days. Through a micro-empire of publishing enterprises, operating under its own name and such others as Spartacus, Éditions de la Différence, etc., the movement brings out a flood of "revisionist" and anti-Semitic propaganda. First and foremost it publishes numerous writings by and about Faurisson. It also features several titles by the late "left-wing" anti-Semite Paul Rassinier and the notorious "The Myth of Auschwitz" by the German neo-Nazi Wilhelm Stäglich.

Recently Guillaume and Ogmios have started to publish a very pretentiously-presented quarterly journal Annales d'Histoire Révisioniste. In appearance this magazine resembles a scholarly publication but its function is to show that the Holocaust never happened. The first two issues contain, among other items, translations of articles that have previously appeared in the California neo-Nazi journal Journal of Historical Review. (40)

In the spring of 1985 the movie Shoah was showing in Paris and VT's leader Pierre Guillaume, obviously seeking more notoriety, personally proceeded to hand out leaflets in front of the theater. The leaflets denounced the "political-financial" swindle by all those who claim that Jews were killed by the Nazis. As Guillaume tells the story, the incident became the basis of a defamation suit against him brought by the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism. (41)

VT's anti-Semitism is not confined to Holocaust-denial. It has discovered something it apparently thinks is a very clever find. It so happens that the young Bernard Lazare, later one of the founders of left-wing Zionism, wrote a curious little book in the years before the Dreyfus affair made him a partisan for Jewish rights. This self-hating early book, Anti-Semitism, Its History and Causes, is actually not at all a discovery of La Vieille Taupe. It has been used by anti-Semites and anti-Semitic movements from the days of Dreyfus to the days of Vichy. It is a curious hodgepodge of accusation and self-accusation, particularly bitter about the Talmud and its alleged influence on the Jews. The book can tell us very little about its professed subject but it has consistently been cited by anti-Semites as confirmation and justification of their hatred. (42) There is no possible reason for anyone but an anti-Semitic organization to republish it now. VT has proceeded to issue a new edition over the legal objections by members of the Lazare family and the organization Friends of Bernard Lazare. (43)


La Vieille Taupe is among the very smallest of the tiny political sects of Paris yet it publishes as if it were a major institution. The physical appearance of VT products is very professional and certainly belies the very marginal nature of the organization. I recently sent a one-paragraph note to the group in which I requested a list of its publications. By return air mail I received twelve books and pamphlets. Eight of these were marked with list prices that amounted to a total of 456 French francs. I estimate the four other items to come to at least another fifty francs, or a total of approximately 500 francs for the material in the package. Since the postage cost a further 148.50 francs, the value of the gift that I received from La Vieille Taupe amounts to 648.50 francs, or about $117 in US currency. I am obviously not the only person to enjoy this kind of largesse. I know nobody in the group, as far as I can tell nobody in it knows me, and I did no more than express a simple request for a book catalog. Where does the money for all this come from? Ogmios, a bookstore of the extreme right wing which is associated with VT in various enterprises, has been linked to the government of Iran (see above). The source of Vieille Taupe's own obviously substantial finances has so far remained a mystery.

Chomsky has of course been criticized for his involvement with Faurisson and the VT movement, not least within the Left. Chomsky has sought to meet all such objections by saying a) that he does not agree with Faurisson but is merely defending freedom of speech; b) that Faurisson and the VT are being maligned by opponents; and c) that the whole affair is unimportant and should not be discussed. Of these three arguments only the first ­­ the civil rights argument ­­ needs detailed examination, which we shall give it later. The other points can be dealt with more summarily.

Chomsky has persistently misrepresented the politics of Faurisson and VT. In his famous "Preface" he calls Faurisson a liberal. (44) He has also seen fit to praise Serge Thion, Faurisson's associate, as a "libertarian socialist scholar" (45) without mentioning that Thion has for the last nine years or so written lengthy books and articles to the effect that the Holocaust is a Jewish lie. Both Bill Rubinstein of Australia and I have sent detailed proof of Faurisson's anti-Semitism to Chomsky. I have most recently sent him Faurisson's article which declares all witnesses to the Holocaust at Auschwitz to be Jews and liars because they are Jews, (46) but Chomsky has remained obdurate. To Rubinstein he wrote the following:

I see no anti-Semitic implications in denial of the existence of gas chambers, or even denial of the holocaust. Nor would there be anti-Semitic implications, per se, in the claim that the holocaust (whether one believes it took place or not) is being exploited, viciously so, by apologists for Israeli repression and violence. I see no hint of anti-Semitic implications in Faurisson's work ...

Rubinstein has published this excerpt from a letter that Chomsky sent him. (47) As he does routinely, Chomsky objected to the publication of his correspondence but he has not denied either the authenticity or the accuracy of the passage.

Chomsky and his friends ordinarily try to suppress all information concerning his neo-Nazi connections. The best publicized case of such suppression involves the British linguist Geoffrey Sampson who wrote the biographical sketch of Chomsky in the British publication Biographical Companion to Modern Thought. Sampson wrote a laudatory description of Chomsky's linguistics but allowed himself the following few words of reservation about his politics:

He forfeited authority as a political commentator by a series of actions widely regarded as ill-judged (repeated polemics minimizing the Khmer Rouge atrocities in Cambodia; endorsement of a book ­­ which Chomsky admitted he had not read ­­ that denied the historical reality of the Jewish Holocaust).(48)

Sampson has now told the story of how Chomsky was able, through his influence with American publishers, to ban Sampson's contribution from the American (Harpers) edition of this reference work. (49)

A new book of almost 500 pages, The Chomsky Reader, has now been published by Pantheon under the editorship of James Peck. (50) It purports to "[bring] together for the first time the political thought of America's leading dissident intellectual." The work is well indexed. It contains no reference to Faurisson, La Vieille Taupe, Guillaume, "revisionism," or to any other topic that might give the reader an inkling of Chomsky's neo-Nazi involvements. The one mention of Thion suggests that this French neo-Nazi is actually no more than a Marxist intellectual.

If Chomsky likes to bad-mouth the Communists from time to time, they, on their part, know how to appreciate an ally and are willing to lend a hand in the cover-up. The Communist magazine Canadian Jewish Outlook (now known simply as Outlook) ran an article in October of 1983 (51) that praised Chomsky's attacks on Israel but completely suppressed any mention of his role in the neo-Nazi movement. Communists are usually sensitive to neo-Nazism but in the case of Chomsky there are obviously other considerations. (52)


I have spoken so far only of Chomsky's connections with the neo-Nazis of France, who seem to have been responsible for his recruitment to the cause. But the "revisionist" movement also has an American branch and Chomsky has become embroiled on this side of the Atlantic as well.

In its very first volume in 1980, the California-based Journal of Historical Review carried an article about Jews by a Doctor Howard F. Stein that turned out to be something of an omen of the journal's future. (53) Even to someone well acquainted with anti-Semitic propaganda, Doctor Stein's piece must have come as a surprise for the sheer audacity of its malice. And as it happens, Doctor Stein's piece also foreshadowed themes later taken up by Chomsky.

The Journal of Historical Review described Stein as an Associate Professor of Medical-Psychiatric Anthropology in Oklahoma. By now he has written quite a few articles ­­ all in psychobabble ­­ in various fringe journals of "humanistic psychology." He has also lectured at the mecca of New Age psychology, the Esalen Institute of California. And Doctor Stein is Jewish.

In his appearance for the "revisionists" Stein presented a rather straight-forward theory about the Holocaust: it is a Jewish myth. It seems that Jews have always fantasized about a Holocaust, from the very beginning of their history. They have always needed to be victims. Today they fantasize that they were victims of the Germans during the Second World War and they are completely insensitive to the great sufferings of non-Jews, in particular Germans and Arabs. Doctor Stein also refers the reader to an earlier article he had written in which he proposed that Jews are afflicted by a "Samson complex." (54) Like Samson in the Bible, it seems, Jews today are bound for self-destruction and seek to arrange matters so that they can destroy the rest of the world in the process. This is a view that Chomsky has also adopted, as we shall see.

I think that it is an open secret that we have in the United States an intellectual underclass of self-described "academic" journals. These dreary periodicals cater to the foolish vanity of college administrators who wish to see "publications" by their teachers. Stein's articles, looked at purely from the point of view of scholarly competence, must scrape the very bottom even of this material: there is not a shred of evidence to be found in his many pages of jargon and free-floating confabulation. By itself that would be as harmless as is almost all this underclass pulp. But Stein's writings have enlisted jargon-mongering in the cause of spite and hate, and this indeed jettisons them into a category quite by themselves.

Doctor Stein has achieved some international recognition for his contribution to the hatred of Jews. The French journal of the "revisionists," edited by our friend Pierre Guillaume, has published a French translation of the original 1980 article. (55)

Compared to Stein's malice, other JHR articles will seem commonplace. The last issue I received, that of Winter 1986-7, carries the article by Faurisson on Höss that I have already mentioned. It carries another piece complaining about an unjust persecution of the (Nazi) German American Bund in the United States during World War II. A book review tells us that when the Nazis established the Warsaw ghetto, "essentially, the German decision was Jewish, since Jews oppose intermarriages, and insist on their own built-in laws. The Germans also had to fear Polish inspired pogroms against the Jews. The wall prevented that as well." Yes, that's why we need the "revisionists" to set us straight about what happened in history.

Canadian Customs authorities have declared this nice journal to be hate literature and have restricted its import into Canada. Consequently I have been unable to check every issue of it and I do not know how often Chomsky has contributed to it. I do have before me the issue for Spring 1986 containing an article by Noam Chomsky, "All Denials of Free Speech Undercut A Democratic Society." (56) This piece contains about 2,200 words and is reprinted from the Camera of Boulder, Col.

Subscribers to the JHR also receive lists of books and tapes that the "revisionists" find necessary for a proper education. Some of this material is signed Noontide Press, which, like the Institute for Historical Review, is located in Torrance, California. My latest Catalogue of Historical Revisionist Books, dated Fall 1986, contains, among other items, the following titles: The Zionist Connection II by Alfred M. Lilienthal; Communism with the Mask Off by Dr. Joseph Goebbels, and The Fateful Triangle by Noam Chomsky. A special book list of Noontide Press dealing with what it calls "Jewish Studies" contains The International Jew by Henry Ford, Sr., The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, "translated from Russian," The Plot Against Christianity by Elizabeth Dilling ("A shattering exposé of the anti-Christian hate campaign propounded in the Babylonian Talmud"), and other such classics.

The Institute also sells two separate tapes of a speech that Chomsky gave against Israel, and here are some excerpts from its publicity for these tapes:

This lecture ... is, to put it mildly, devastating. In two hours of uninterrupted cannonade directed squarely at U.S. foreign policy with regard to Israel, Chomsky ranges brilliantly over such topics as Israeli imperialism ... the role of the Anti-Defamation League ("... one of the ugliest, most powerful groups in America")/ Media suppression, distortion, hypocrisy, and the "Memory Hole." An intense two-and-a-half hour mini-course on the political issue of our age, including Chomsky's answers to audience questions.

I have repeatedly called Chomsky's attention to the Nazis' use of his name and his materials, suggesting that he disassociate himself from these people, but he has just as repeatedly remained obdurate to such suggestions.

http://www.wernercohn.com/Chomsky.html#anchor22784

[CaptainFutures]

Und weiter gehts im Text mit dem antisemitischen Faschisten, Vozeigejuden, Berufshetzer und Lügner Chomsky:

Fürsprecher von Holocaust-Leugnern erhält Ossietzky-Preis der Stadt Oldenburg

Professor Noam Chomsky vom Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ein bekannter Linguist und "antzionistischer Fanatiker" ist seit Mitte der sechziger Jahre, als er sich einen Namen als Anti-Vietnamskriegaktivist machte, ein vor allem von Linken gefeierter Radikaler. Ende der siebziger Jahre verlor er aufgrund seiner Verteidigung des massenmörderi-schen Pol Pot-Regimes in Kambodscha ein wenig von seiner Anziehungskraft Doch nutzte er die Terroranschläge vom 11. September 2001 um seinen Einfluß wieder-herzustellen, ja noch zu steigern. Wenn heute Schauspieler, Rockstars oder protestierende Student/inn/en antiamerika-nische und antiisraelische Parolen in die Kameras rufen, nehmen sie oft Anleihen bei Chomsky. Mit der Verleihung des Carl-von-Ossietky-Preises der Stadt Oldenburg an Chomsky erfährt der Antiamerikanis-mus und Antiisraelismus nun auch in der Mitte der deutschen Gesellschaft offizielle Anerkennung und Ehrung. Ebenso ist Chomsky für die neonazistische Bewegung von großer Bedeutung. Der Preis zum Andenken an den von den Nationalsozia-listen ermordeten Friedensnobelpreisträger Ossietzky wird an einen Mann verliehen, der öffentlich Holocaust-Leugner unterstützte.

Der französische Holocaust-Leugner Robert Faurisson wurde erst richtig bekannt, als Chomsky ihn verteidigte und mit einem Vorwort aufwertete. Faurisson, ein unbedeutender Dozent für französische Literatur an der Universität von Lyon behauptete in seinem Buch "Memoire en defense" (1980) der Holocaust sei eine Erfindung. Die "Hitler-Gaskammern" habe es niemals gegeben. "Die Juden trügen die Verantwortung" für den Zweiten Welt-krieg. Hitler habe vernünftig und in Notwehr gehandelt, als er die Juden zusammentrieb und in "Arbeitslager", nicht in Todeslager steckte. Die "massive Lüge" über den Genozid sei eine bewußte Erfindung "amerikanischer Zionisten". Der Hauptnutznießer dieses Schwindels sei "Israel", das den "ungeheuren politischen und finanziellen Betrug" angeregt habe. Hauptopfer dieses "Betrugs" seien das deutsche und das palästinensische Volk. Auch das Tagebuch der Anne Frank nannte Faurisson eine Fälschung.

Wie zu erwarten, stürzten sich Judenhasser in der ganzen Welt begeistert auf Fauris-sons Buch. Chomsky beeilte sich Faurisson in Schutz zu nehmen und zwar nicht nur in der Frage der Redefreiheit, sondern auch hinsichtlich seiner Verdienste als "Gelehrter" und seines "Charakters". Chomsky unterschrieb eine Petition, die Faurissons Geschichtsfälschungen als "Ergebnisse" bezeichnete und behauptete, sie beruhten auf "umfassender historischer Forschungsarbeit". Dies verwundert nur auf den ersten Blick, denn in der Tat hat Chomsky selbst erklärt, die Zionisten hätten die Tragödie des Zweiten Weltkrie-ges ausgenutzt. Faurisson flog gemeinsam mit Serge Thion, einem anderen französischen Holocaust-Leugner, zu Chomsky, um sich dessen schriftliche Unterstützung persönlich abzuholen. Chomsky ging noch weiter. Nachdem er die Petition unterzeichnet hatte, schrieb er einen Essay, der mit seiner Erlaubnis als Vorwort zu Faurissons nächstem Buch über seinen Werdegang als Holocaust-Leugner verwendet werden durfte! Dort wiederholte Faurisson seine Behauptung, die Gaskammern seien eine Lüge und der Holocaust ein Schwindel. In seinem Vorwort heuchelt Chomsky Unwissenheit hinsichtlich Faurissons Werk - "Ich kenne sein Werk nicht sehr gut" -, kommt aber zu dem Schluß, daß Faurissons Aussagen weder antisemitisch seien und daß Faurisson selber weder Antisemit noch Nazi, sondern "eine Art" relativ apolitischer Liberaler" sei. Ein paar Jahr später wiederholte Chomsky sein Persönlichkeitszeugnis: "Ich sehe nichts Antisemitisches in der Leugnung der Existenz von Gaskammern oder selbst in der Leugnung des Holocaust". Die antisemitischen Implikationen einer Leugnung des Holocaust zu negieren, ist, als würde man sagen, an der Behauptung, die Schwarzen hätten ihre Sklaverei genossen, sei nichts Rassistisches, oder die Aussage, Frauen wollten vergewaltigt werden, habe keinesfalls etwas Sexistisches. Versuche, den Holocaust zu leugnen oder zu minimieren, gehören zum gängigen Handwerkszeug von Antisemiten und Neonazis. Daß sowohl Faurisson als auch Chomsky von ihnen häufig zustimmend zitiert werden, ist deshalb nicht überraschend. So publiziert z. B. der rechtsextreme italienische Verlag Barbarossa Chomsky neben den französischen Holcaust-Leugnern Bernard Notin und Roger Garaudy und dem Wegbereiter des italienischen Faschismus Julius Evola. Faurisson und Chomsky verteidigen jede gegen Juden erhobene Anschuldigung, solange ihr Urheber das richtige Codewort benutzt: "Zionisten".

Chomsky bestreitet das Existenzrecht Israels

als jüdischen Staat, als der es 1948 als Zufluchtsort vor dem deutschen und europäischen Antisemitismus gegründet wurde. Er will es durch einen "weltlichen, binationalen Staat" ersetzen, womit verfolgten Juden jegliche sichere Zufluchtsmöglichkeit genommen wäre. Das heutige Israel bezeichnet Chomsky als kolonialistischen jüdischen Staat, dessen Selbstverständnis er auf "völkermörderi-schen (im Org. genocidal) Texten der Bibel" gegründet sieht. Auf die Spitze trieb er seinen Antizionismus mit der Aussage, er befürchte, daß sich Israel für nationalen Selbstmord und die endgültige Zerstörung der Erde entscheiden werde, indem es die Welt in einen Atomkrieg stürze. Im Jahr 2002 unterstützte Chomsky eine Petition, die Universitäten dazu aufrief, jegliche Kooperation mit Unternehmen, die in der israelischen Wirtschaft aktiv sind, abzubrechen. Chomsky verharmloste die islamistischen Terroranschläge vom 11. September 2001, indem er schrieb, daß sie auf einer Skala bei weitem nicht den Level an Grausam-keit von Terroranschlägen der US-Politik erreichen. Als Beispiel größerer Grausam-keit nannte er die Bombardierung einer pharmazeutischen Fabrik im Sudan durch die US-Armee im Auftrag von Präsident Clinton, bei der eine unbekannte Anzahl von Menschen getötet worden sei. Es handelte sich dabei um die Zerstörung einer Fabrik, in der der CIA die Herstel-lung von Chemiewaffen im Auftrag von Saddam Hussein vermutete. Die US-Rakete traf die Fabrik in der Nacht, als dort bis auf den Hausmeister kein Mensch anwesend war. Der Hausmeister war das einzige Opfer. Der größte Anklagepunkt den Chomsky gegenüber der US-Regie-rung erhebt, ist deren Unterstützung für Israel. Er schreibt, "praktisch alles was Israel tut, d. h. was die USA und Israel tuen, ist illegal, faktisch ein Kriegs-verbrechen. (...) Das heißt, daß die USA und Israel vor ein Tribunal gestellt werden sollten". Zurecht attestiert der angesehene us-amerikanische Rechtsanwalt und Harvard-Professor Alan M. Deshowitz Chomsky ein antiamerikanisches, antiisraelisches, antiwestliches und ein wenig paranoides Weltbild".

Dr. Klaus Thörner

http://www.antifa-duisburg.de/07chomsky.htm

[InvestigativTrader]

Antwort auf Beitrag Nr.: 24.657.812 von CaptainFutures am 16.10.06 14:56:31

Und schon wieder einen notorischen Lügner zitiert.
Ich würd mich schämen Leute wie Cohn oder Eussner als Zeugen aufzuführen, dem Captn ist es recht solange seine Sicht der Dinge bestätigt wird.
Dadurch daß du deine Texte an 100 Stellen rot hervorhebst wird es auch nicht wahrer.
Aber lassen wir lieber Chomsky selbst zu Wort kommen:

Reply to Werner Cohn
Noam Chomsky
Outlook, June 1, 1989
Dear Sir,

Observing the performances of Werner Cohn is a curious experience. An occasional phrase has a relation to reality, but it takes an effort to imagine what may lie behind the discourse.

In Outlook, May, Cohn presents a fevered account of a second existence that he has conjured up for me, in France, where I pursue my secret life as a neo-Nazi, hoping that no one outside of Paris will notice. He gives two proofs. The first is what he calls his 'most crucial source': 'a joint article by Chomsky and his friend Pierre Guillaume, "Une mise au point",' in Guillaume's book Droit et Histoire. The second is that 'Chomsky could have published the French version of his Political Economy of Human Rights (written with Edward Herman) with a commercial publisher, but, in order to show solidarity with VT [Vielle Taupe], Chomsky insisted on publishing the book with it.'

Since I never wrote a 'joint article' with Guillaume, I was curious, and after a search, found the book in question. Indeed, it contains the chapter 'Une mise au point', written in first-person singular by Guillaume, with no hint of any collaboration with me. I am mentioned in it, and fragments of a letter of mine are quoted in which I discuss changes in the U.S. intellectual climate since the 1960's (with typical veracity, Cohn describes this as my 'comments on Guillaume's version of the Chomsky-VT relationship', which is nowhere mentioned). By Cohn's intriguing logic, I am also the co-author of his various diatribes -- perhaps in my third life, which he will expose in the next instalment. Cohn asserts that I found 'nothing to correct in Guillaume's' account. He has not the slightest idea what my reaction to the article is. Recall that this 'joint article' is his 'crucial source'.

Let us turn to his second decisive piece of evidence. When I learned of Cohn's fairy tales about the French translation of the book of Herman and mine, I was intrigued. Of course, it is obvious even without further inquiry that his claims are outlandish. There is no possible way that he could know of my intentions (and those of my co-author, Edward Herman, who somehow seems to have disappeared from the tale; perhaps I invented him as a cover). But we need not speculate on Cohn's mystical ability to read minds.

Standard procedure is to leave translations in the hands of the publisher. I make no attempt to keep track of the innumerable translations of books of mine in foreign languages. Curious about Cohn's allegations, I contacted the publisher, who checked their files and located the contract for the French translation -- with Albin-Michel, a mainstream commercial publisher, to my knowledge. They did not know whether the translation had appeared, never having received a copy. The same is true of my co-author and me.

Note that these are the examples that Cohn selects as the decisive proof of his theses. A rational person will draw the obvious conclusions about the rest. Cohn makes two further claims. He says that in defending the right of freedom of expression in the case of Robert Faurisson, I have always 'indicated' that my '"diametrically opposed" view was more a matter of opinion than of scientific knowledge' (a statement that he appears to attribute to Guillaume); and I have always defended freedom of expression 'in terms that are absolutely incapable of hurting Faurrison [sic].' Consider these allegations.

In Cohn's 'crucial source', cited above, Guillaume quotes my statement that 'there are no rational grounds that allow any doubt about the existence of gas chambers.' Thus Cohn is refuted by his own 'crucial source.' In my own writings, from the earliest until the present, the conclusions of standard Holocaust studies are taken simply as established fact, as Cohn knows perfectly well. In the introduction to my first collection of political essays, 20 years ago, I add that we have lost our humanity if we are even willing to enter into debate over the Nazi crimes with those who deny or defend them. The only particle of truth in Cohn's absurd charge is that I never use the phrase 'scientific knowledge' in dealing with any questions of history; my book with Herman, for example, which is neither science nor mere opinion.

Turning to Cohn's second point, it is taken for granted by civil libertarians that defense of freedom of expression is independent of the views expressed. Thus when I sign petitions (and go far beyond that) in the case of Soviet dissidents, some of whom have absolutely horrendous views, I never allude to this fact in the slightest way. In signing petitions supporting Salman Rushdie, I make no comment about whether his book slanders Muslims. I have no doubt that this practice enrages mullahs in Qom and commissars in the Kremlin as much as it does Werner Cohn, and for the same reasons. Where no civil liberties issues arise, I have been quite explicit about the fact that the views of Faurisson and others are diametrically opposed to my own firm conclusions about the facts, as in the statement quoted in Cohn's 'crucial source'.


The remainder of Cohn's ranting has to do with the alleged views of others, and fanciful comments about France. His conceptions on these matters are, naturally, of no concern to me.

That Cohn is a pathological liar is demonstrated by the very examples that he selects. Knowing nothing about him, and caring less, I am in no position to comment further on what may lie behind this odd and pathetic behavior.

Sincerely yours,

Noam Chomsky

http://www.chomsky.info/letters/19890601.htm

[CaptainFutures]

America’s Dumbest Intellectual

Walk onto the popular-music floor of Virgin Records in midtown Manhattan, and you encounter, as you’d expect, kids with shoulder tattoos and pierced body parts, wandering through rows of the latest hip-hop, altrock, and heavy-metal CDs as heavily amplified beats thunder. At the checkout counter, though, is a surprise. A single book is on display: perennial radical Noam Chomsky’s latest anti-American screed, 9/11—an impulse item for the in-your-face slackers of the Third Millennium. Strictly speaking, 9/11 is a non-book, a hastily assembled collection of fawning interviews with Chomsky conducted after the terrorist attack on New York City and the country, in which the author pins the blame for the atrocities on—you guessed it—the U.S. But you’d be wrong to dismiss 9/11 as an inconsequential paperback quickie. More than 115,000 copies of the book are now in print. It has shown up on the Boston Globe and the Washington Post best-seller lists, and in Canada, it has rocketed to seventh on the best-seller list. And as its prominent display at Virgin Records attests, 9/11 is particularly popular with younger readers; the book is a hot item at campus bookstores nationwide. The striking success of 9/11 makes Chomsky’s America-bashing notable, or at least notably deplorable—especially here in New York, which lost so many of its bravest on that horrible day.

Chomsky’s title for his new book may have a little to do with its best-seller status: some people may have picked it up assuming it to be a newsworthy account of September 11. But undoubtedly, the main reason 9/11 is selling so briskly is because of its author’s fame. According to the Chicago Tribune, Noam Chomsky is cited more than any other living author—and he shows up eighth on the all-time most-cited list, the paper says, right after Sigmund Freud. Do a search for “Noam Chomsky” on Amazon.com and up pops an astonishing 224 books. The New York Times calls him “arguably the most important intellectual alive.” He’s even been the subject of an adoring 1993 movie-length documentary film. Chomsky has achieved rock-star status among the young and hip. Rock groups like Bad Religion and Pearl Jam proudly quote his writings in interviews and in their music. To the self-styled bohemian coffee-house crowd, observes Wired magazine, “Chomsky is somewhere between Kerouac and Nietzsche—carrying around one of his books is automatic countercultural cachet.”

Chomsky, now a 73-year-old grandfather living in suburban Massachusetts, has worked for decades to win that cachet. Avram Noam was born in Philadelphia in 1928. His parents, William and Elsie Chomsky, had fled from czarist oppression in Russia to the City of Brotherly Love, where William established himself as a Hebrew scholar and grammarian. Radical politics aroused the young Noam—at ten, he wrote a school newspaper editorial on the Spanish Civil War, lamenting the rise of fascism, and two years later he embraced the anarchism that he still adheres to today. By the age of 16, the bright, ambitious youth had enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, where he eventually earned a Ph.D. in linguistics. Passed over for a teaching position at Harvard, he landed in 1955 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has remained ever since.

Most linguistics professors would have toiled in obscurity in a science-and-industry school like MIT. Not Chomsky. In the 1950s, he brashly challenged psychologist B. F. Skinner’s theory of language as a learned skill, acquired by children in a process of reward and punishment. Chomsky claimed instead that when we learn a language as children, we can articulate and understand all sorts of sentences that we’ve never actually come across before. “What we ‘know,’ therefore,” Chomsky held, “must be something deeper—a grammar—that makes an infinite variety of sentences possible.” In Chomsky’s view, the capacity to master the structures of grammar is genetically determined, a product of our evolutionary development. This idea—that grammar is hardwired in the labyrinth of DNA—shook the walls of linguistics departments across the globe. Chomsky promoted his theory tirelessly, defending it in countless symposia and scholarly reviews. By the mid-sixties, he was an academic superstar; in the seventies, researchers at Columbia University even named a chimpanzee trained to learn 125 words “Nim Chimpsky” in his honor.

With this fame as a base, the professor proceeded to wander far from his area of expertise. Such uses of fame, ironically, are common in the country Chomsky attacks so relentlessly. In America, you come across two kinds of fame: vertical and horizontal. The vertical celebrity owes his renown to one thing—Luciano Pavarotti, for example, is famous for his singing, period. The horizontal celebrity, conversely, merchandises his fame by convincing the public that his mastery of one field is transferable to another. Thus singers Barbra Streisand and Bono give speeches on public policy; thus linguistics professor Chomsky poses as an expert on geopolitics.

Chomsky first employed his horizontal celebrity during the 1960s, when he spoke out forcefully against the Vietnam War. His 1969 collection of agitated writings, American Power and the New Mandarins, indicted the nation’s brainwashed “elites”—read: government bureaucrats and intellectuals who disagreed with him on the morality of the war. But Vietnam was only the beginning: over the next three decades, Chomsky published a steady stream of political books and pamphlets boasting titles like What Uncle Sam Really Wants and Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies—all of them filled with heated attacks on American policies, domestic and foreign.

Those attacks would be laughable if some people didn’t take them seriously. Here’s a small but representative sample. The goal of America, Chomsky charges, “is a society in which the basic unit is you and your television set. If the kid next door is hungry, it’s not your problem. If the retired couple next door invested their assets badly and are now starving, that’s not your problem either.” Prisons and inner-city schools, Chomsky maintains, “target a kind of superfluous population that there’s no point in educating because there’s nothing for them to do. Because we’re a civilized people, we put them in prison, rather than sending death squads out to murder them.” Another example: “When you come back from the Third World to the West—the U.S. in particular—you are struck by the narrowing of thought and understanding, the limited nature of legitimate discussion, the separation of people from each other.”

Goodness. But if America is all about ignoring hungry children, why does the country spend billions in public and private funds every year on the poor? Does America deliberately seek to mis-educate and send to prison a “superfluous” population? Wouldn’t today’s knowledge-based economy benefit from as many decently educated people as it could find? What Third World countries does Chomsky have in mind where the discussion is more freewheeling and open than in the U.S.? Algeria? Cuba? Such puerile leftism is scarcely worthy of a college sophomore.

If possible, however, Chomsky’s assessment of U.S. foreign policy is even more absurd. The nightmare of American evil began in 1812, he thinks, when the U.S. instigated a process that “annihilated the indigenous [American] population (millions of people), conquered half of Mexico, intervened violently in the surrounding region, conquered Hawaii and the Philippines (killing hundreds of thousands of Filipinos), and in the past half century particularly, extended its resort to force throughout much of the world.” That the U.S. saved the Philippines during World War II, that Hawaiians voted to become the fiftieth state, that every day Mexicans pour across the border to take part in the economy of the hated United States—all of that is irrelevant to Chomsky. He believes in the Beaumarchais mode of political debate: “Vilify, vilify, some of it will always stick.”

For Chomsky, turn over any monster anywhere and look at the underside. Each is clearly marked: MADE IN AMERICA. The cold war? All America’s fault: “The United States was picking up where the Nazis had left off.” Castro’s executions and prisons filled with dissenters? Irrelevant, for “Cuba has probably been the target of more international terrorism [from the U.S., of course] than any other country.” The Khmer Rouge? Back in 1977, Chomsky dismissed accounts of the Cambodian genocide as “tales of Communist atrocities” based on “unreliable” accounts. At most, the executions “numbered in the thousands” and were “aggravated by the threat of starvation resulting from American distraction and killing.” In fact, some 2 million perished on the killing fields of Cambodia because of genocidal war against the urban bourgeoisie and the educated, in which wearing a pair of glasses could mean a death sentence.

The Chomskian rage hasn’t confined itself to his native land. He has long nourished a special contempt for Israel, lone outpost of Western ideals in the Middle East. The hatred has been so intense that Zionists have called him a self-hating Jew. This is an unfair label. Clearly, Chomsky has no deficit in the self-love department, and his ability to stir up antagonism makes him even more pleased with himself. No doubt that was why he wrote the introduction to a book by French Holocaust-denier Robert Faurisson. Memoire en Defense maintains that Hitler’s death camps and gas chambers, even Anne Frank’s diary, are fictions, created to serve the cause of American Zionists. That was too much for Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who challenged fellow leftist Chomsky to a debate. In the debate, Dershowitz keyed in on the fact that Chomsky had described Faurisson’s conclusions as “findings,” and claimed that they grew out of “extensive historical research.” But as numerous scholars had shown, Faurisson was not a serious scholar at all, but rather a sophist who simply ignored the mountain of documents, speeches, testimony, and other historical evidence that conflicted with his “argument.” Dershowitz noted that Chomsky also wrote the following: “I see no anti-Semitic implication in the denial of the existence of gas chambers or even in the denial of the Holocaust.”

Just recently, Chomsky spearheaded a group pressuring universities to divest themselves of any stock connected with the Jewish state: Israel equals South Africa in the Chomskian universe of moral equivalence. Here, happily, Chomsky got nowhere. He obtained 400 signatures for his movement; opposing him, Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard, gathered 4,000 signatures in support of Israel. The controversy set Dershowitz off again. This time, he said, he wanted the MIT prof to debate him “on the morality of this selective attack against an American ally that is defending itself—and the world—against terrorism that targets civilians.” He pointed out that universities have always invested in companies head-quartered in foreign nations with unsavory reputations—countries whose citizens don’t have the freedom the Israelis enjoy or suffer the terror they endure. “Yet this petition focused only on the Jewish State, to the exclusion of all others, including those which, by any reasonable standard, are among the worst violators of human rights. This is bigotry pure and simple.” Chomsky declined the challenge.

That brings us to 9/11, an egregious insult to decency in general and to the citizens of New York in particular. True to form, in one of the interviews, Chomsky calls the United States “a leading terrorist state” and equates President Clinton’s 1998 bombing of the Al-Shifa plant in Sudan with the horrors of September 11. In every way, Chomsky’s comparison is obscene. The bombing was in response to attacks on two U.S. embassies that had resulted in the deaths and injuries of thousands. The U.S. made sure it took place at night, when the target was empty of civilians. U.S. intelligence, mistaken though it may have been, indicated that the pharmaceutical factory was producing weapons of mass destruction. The unprovoked attack on the World Trade Center, needless to say to anyone except Chomsky and his disciples, occurred in broad daylight, with the intention of inflicting maximum damage and death on innocents.

Chomsky concedes that the WTC attack was unfortunate—not so much because of the deaths of Americans, but because “the atrocities of September 11 were a devastating blow to the Palestinians, as they instantly recognized.” (Some other group, disguised as Palestinians, must have been dancing in the streets that day.) Israel, he adds, “is openly exulting in the ‘window of opportunity’ it now has to crush Palestinians with impunity.”

On the rare occasions in 9/11 when Chomsky expresses condolences for the victims of the terrorist attack, he immediately goes on to excoriate the U.S. “The atrocities were passionately deplored, even in places where people have been ground underfoot by Washington’s boots for a long, long time,” he typically says. Chomsky rolls on in this manner. The West is the Great Satan, the Third World its eternal victim. The World Trade Towers were a symbol of America’s gluttony and power. In effect, we were asking for it and are now unjustly using it as a casus belli. More U.S. oppression is about to take place all over the globe. If you didn’t know better, you could be reading one of bin Ladin’s diatribes. Chomsky’s response to September 11 outraged even leftist Christopher Hitchens, a former admirer of the MIT professor who now attacked him for abandoning “every standard that makes moral and intellectual discrimination possible.”

Does anyone believe these inanities? It would be tempting to say that the author only preaches to the choir. But there’s more to Chomsky’s success than that. True, Chomsky is like the Bog Man of Grauballe, Denmark, preserved unchanged for centuries. Since the early 1960s, no new ideas have made it into his oeuvre. He is as he was, and his rage against democracy as practiced in the U.S. is of a piece with the raised fists of the Chicago Seven and the ancient bumper stickers condemning “Amerika.” But his message still seems to resonate with a sizable faction of the Boomers, trained to respond to emotion rather than reason. These are the people who sympathized with Susan Sontag’s notorious post–September 11 observation: “Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘humanity’ or ‘the free world’ but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?” These are the folks who applauded Bill Clinton’s fatuous mea culpa appraisal of the WTC attack: “This country once looked the other way when a significant number of native Americans were dispossessed and killed to get their land or their mineral rights or because they were thought of as less than fully human. . . . [W]e are still paying a price today.”

And now a younger crowd is following the Pied Piper of anti-Americanism. 9/11 makes it easy for them. They needn’t read it; they just have to make sure the thing is sticking out of their backpacks or sitting on their milk-crate coffee tables, a symbol of mass-market rebellion pushed at the record stores for $10.95—less than the new Eminem CD! Call it Anti-Americanism for Dummies. It would be more than a pity if the lies of 9/11 seduced more innocents; it would be a clear and present danger. We are at war now, and two generations of Chimpskies are enough.

http://www.city-journal.org/printable.php?id=831