M.I.T. Philosophy & Linguistics Prof. Noam Chomsky

[RascalPuff]

Prof. Noam Chomsky is the (frequently censored) author of:

The Common Good,

What Uncle Sam Really Wants,

The Prosperous Few & the Restless Many,

*Media Control
(*The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda. "Propaganda," says Noam Chomsky, "is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state"--in other words, the means by which leaders keep the masses in line. In this slim pamphlet, he looks at American propaganda efforts, from the warmongering of Woodrow Wilson to the creation of popular support for the 1991 military intervention in Kuwait, and reveals how falsification of history, suppression of information, and the promotion of vapid, empty concepts have become standard operating procedure for the leaders of the United States--both Democrats and Republicans--in their efforts to prevent citizens from raising awkward questions about U.S. policy.")

The Manufacture of Consent,

Secrets, Lies & Democracy,

HEGEMONY or Survival:
America's Quest for Global Dominance

http://www.zcommunications.org/chomsky/index.cfm

Excerpt from Chomsky's Tuesday, 30 March 2010 entry:
"The reasons why Reagan’s war on terror has been dispatched to the repository of unwelcome facts are understandable and informative – about ourselves. Instantly, Reagan’s war on terror became a savage terrorist war, leaving hundreds of thousands of tortured and mutilated corpses in the wreckage of Central America, tens of thousands more in the Middle East, and an estimated 1.5 million killed by South African terror that was strongly supported by the Reagan administration in violation of congressional sanctions. All of these murderous exercises of course had pretexts. The resort to violence always does. In the Middle East, Reagan’s decisive support for Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which killed some 15-20,000 people and destroyed much of southern Lebanon and Beirut, was based on the pretense that it was in self-defense against PLO rocketing of the Galilee, a brazen fabrication: Israel recognized at once that the threat was PLO diplomacy, which might have undermined Israel’s illegal takeover of the occupied territories. In Africa, support for the marauding of the apartheid state was officially justified within the framework of the war on terror: it was necessary to protect white South Africa from one of the world’s “more notorious terrorist groups,” Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, so Washington determined in 1988. The pretexts in the other cases were no more impressive.

For the most part, the victims of Reaganite terror were defenseless civilians, but in one case the victim was a state, Nicaragua, which could respond through legal channels. Nicaragua brought its charges to the World Court, which condemned the US for “unlawful use of force” – in lay terms, international terrorism – in its attack on Nicaragua from its Honduran bases, and ordered the US to terminate the assault and pay substantial reparations. The aftermath is instructive. Congress responded to the Court judgment by increasing aid to the US-run mercenary army attacking Nicaragua, while the press condemned the Court as a “hostile forum” and therefore irrelevant. The same Court had been highly relevant a few years earlier when it ruled in favor of the US against Iran. Washington dismissed the Court judgment with contempt. In doing so, it joined the distinguished company of Libya’s Qaddafi and Albania’s Enver Hoxha. Libya and Albania have since joined the world of law-abiding states in this respect, so now the US stands in splendid isolation. Nicaragua then brought the matter to the UN Security Council, which passed two resolutions calling on all states to observe international law. The resolutions were vetoed by the US, with the assistance of Britain and France, which abstained. All of this passed virtually without notice, and has been expunged from history."

(Google: 'Noam Chomsky' - peruse & consider the index of subjects; draw your own conclusions.)

[Lloyd Gillespie]

RP, if ya take Chomsky seriously, ya better have a good supply of heroin...

Btw, I have that book, Hegemony or Survival__Faar to far left. I suppose it shows how the far left thinks, so one can avoid that radicalism, but he's really a bit distant from a whole egg...

[Mikal]

Prof. Noam Chomsky is the (frequently censored) author of:

The Common Good,

What Uncle Sam Really Wants,

The Prosperous Few & the Restless Many,

*Media Control
(*The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda. "Propaganda," says Noam Chomsky, "is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state"--in other words, the means by which leaders keep the masses in line. In this slim pamphlet, he looks at American propaganda efforts, from the warmongering of Woodrow Wilson to the creation of popular support for the 1991 military intervention in Kuwait, and reveals how falsification of history, suppression of information, and the promotion of vapid, empty concepts have become standard operating procedure for the leaders of the United States--both Democrats and Republicans--in their efforts to prevent citizens from raising awkward questions about U.S. policy.")

The Manufacture of Consent,

Secrets, Lies & Democracy,

HEGEMONY or Survival:
America's Quest for Global Dominance

http://www.zcommunications.org/chomsky/index.cfm

Excerpt from Chomsky's Tuesday, 30 March 2010 entry:
"The reasons why Reagan’s war on terror has been dispatched to the repository of unwelcome facts are understandable and informative – about ourselves. Instantly, Reagan’s war on terror became a savage terrorist war, leaving hundreds of thousands of tortured and mutilated corpses in the wreckage of Central America, tens of thousands more in the Middle East, and an estimated 1.5 million killed by South African terror that was strongly supported by the Reagan administration in violation of congressional sanctions. All of these murderous exercises of course had pretexts. The resort to violence always does. In the Middle East, Reagan’s decisive support for Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which killed some 15-20,000 people and destroyed much of southern Lebanon and Beirut, was based on the pretense that it was in self-defense against PLO rocketing of the Galilee, a brazen fabrication: Israel recognized at once that the threat was PLO diplomacy, which might have undermined Israel’s illegal takeover of the occupied territories. In Africa, support for the marauding of the apartheid state was officially justified within the framework of the war on terror: it was necessary to protect white South Africa from one of the world’s “more notorious terrorist groups,” Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, so Washington determined in 1988. The pretexts in the other cases were no more impressive.

For the most part, the victims of Reaganite terror were defenseless civilians, but in one case the victim was a state, Nicaragua, which could respond through legal channels. Nicaragua brought its charges to the World Court, which condemned the US for “unlawful use of force” – in lay terms, international terrorism – in its attack on Nicaragua from its Honduran bases, and ordered the US to terminate the assault and pay substantial reparations. The aftermath is instructive. Congress responded to the Court judgment by increasing aid to the US-run mercenary army attacking Nicaragua, while the press condemned the Court as a “hostile forum” and therefore irrelevant. The same Court had been highly relevant a few years earlier when it ruled in favor of the US against Iran. Washington dismissed the Court judgment with contempt. In doing so, it joined the distinguished company of Libya’s Qaddafi and Albania’s Enver Hoxha. Libya and Albania have since joined the world of law-abiding states in this respect, so now the US stands in splendid isolation. Nicaragua then brought the matter to the UN Security Council, which passed two resolutions calling on all states to observe international law. The resolutions were vetoed by the US, with the assistance of Britain and France, which abstained. All of this passed virtually without notice, and has been expunged from history."

(Google: 'Noam Chomsky' - peruse & consider the index of subjects; draw your own conclusions.)

QUOTE...

Unlike many leftists of his generation, Chomsky never flirted with movements or organizations that were later revealed to be totalitarian, oppressive, exclusionary, antirevolutionary, or elitist. Leninism, Stalinism, Trotskyism, and Maoism offered to many of Chomsky's disillusioned contemporaries an alternative to what they saw as blatantly exclusionary American-style capitalism. When reports about what had actually occurred in the former Soviet Union and China began to filter through, many felt betrayed. We now hear a lot about how the left has been discredited, the hopelessness of utopian thinking, the futility of activist struggle, but little about the libertarian options that Chomsky and others have so consistently presented. The type of dismay that has permeated contemporary intellectual circles has not touched Chomsky. He has very little to regret. His work, in fact, contains some of the most accurate analyses of this century. And yet, most of his criticisms of American policy, past and present, are seldom mentioned in the mainstream press or by the instructors and professors who teach history or politics. Political science departments rarely use his material on Vietnam, the Cold War, Central America, or Israel. --Robert Barsky, Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent, 1997

Thanks RP for the link....I like and admire Noam Chomsky and because I study Political Science and in particular Imperilism...I quite understand him. He is presently ranking high as the World's greatest Intellectual...and I love his honesty.....


Regards Mikal

[Lloyd Gillespie]

There was so much criticism of Chomsky, that WikiPedia had to create a special article about it: LINK Criticism of Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky - A Negative Subjectivist...

Below is just one example of hundreds, mentioned in the entire article...
Criticisms of Chomsky as a Political Theorist
[edit] Alleged Unfair Paraphrasing of President Truman

In a long letter to the December 1969 issue of Commentary, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. accused Chomsky of inventing quotations from a speech by President Harry S Truman:

In American Power and the New Mandarins Dr. Chomsky twice (pp. 268, 319) printed a series of what he represented as direct quotations from what he called this "famous and important" speech: "All freedom is dependent on freedom of enterprise.... The whole world should adopt the American system.... The American system can survive in America only if it becomes a world system." The purpose of these Truman "quotations" was to prove that the United States had long been "using its awesome resources of violence and devastation to impose its passionately held ideology and its approved form of social organization on large areas of the world" (p. 31.

Schlesinger quoted Truman's actual words:

There is one thing that Americans value even more than peace. It is freedom. Freedom of worship - freedom of speech - freedom of enterprise. It must be true that the first two of these freedoms are related to the third. For, throughout history, freedom of worship and freedom of speech have been most frequently enjoyed in those societies that have accorded a considerable measure of freedom to individual enterprise. Freedom has flourished where power has been dispersed. It has languished where power has been too highly centralized. So our devotion to freedom of enterprise, in the United States, has deeper roots than a desire to protect the profits of ownership.

Schlesinger wrote of Chomsky: "He begins as a preacher to the world and ends as an intellectual crook."
In his reply to Schlesinger's criticism, published in the February 1970 issue of Commentary, Chomsky admitted that some of the quotations he had attributed to Truman were in fact paraphrases of Truman's speech from secondary sources. He stated that this was an innocent mistake and promised to correct the quotations in future printings of his book. He argued that:

The remarks at issue are not theorems deduced from Truman's text; rather, they are efforts to formulate concisely the essence of his remarks. By any reasonable standards, their accuracy seems to me undeniable.

The exchange continued in the March, May and June 1970 issues of Commentary, with Schlesinger having the last word.
Interviewed in the book Chronicles of Dissent, Chomsky commented:
<BLOCKQUOTE>
In the first book that I wrote, American Power and the New Mandarins, in the first edition there’s a slight error, namely that I attributed a quote to Truman which was in fact a very close paraphrase, almost verbatim paraphrase of what he said in a secondary source. I got a note mixed up and instead of citing the secondary sou

[Mikal]

Whether a person feels positive or not is kind of a comment on their personality and of no great interest. You can find positive signs or you can find negative signs. How you evaluate them depends on something that happened in your life recently or something like that. There's no objective way to do it. The important thing is you try to commit yourself to making the positive signs more real. Suppose you felt that there's 99 percent of a probability that human civilization is going to be destroyed in the next hundred years, but one percent chance it won't be, and that one percent offers some opportunities to do something. Well, you commit yourself to that one percent.
(Quote by Noam Chomsky)

Quite afew do not like his honesty....but as to positive and negative critiques its on a balance beam....


Regards Mikal