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From Link 1
| quote: | | 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. |
This is Chomsky rationalizing the terrorism found in countries converting to a socialist/communist regime, or when terrorism supports his own cuase. Not really a fact I'm disproving, but an interesting look at his rationalization of anything that supports his goals.
| quote: | | 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.” |
Here is Chomsky telling us that the death toll caused by Pol Pot could in no way reach 1 million, after attacking four seperate books and writings telling him so. He was trying to do this in defense of his pro Pol Pot regime stance.
| quote: | Chomsky revealed his original 1977 source for this (number) 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 says that 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.
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To this day, Chomsky still will not apologize or recant on his position toward the Pol Pot regime. His own source for the death toll recanted, yet he still "sticks" by his faulty numbers...faulty facts, disproven countless times.
In regards to 9/11 Chomsky says:
| quote: | | (Chomsky)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.” |
One of his sources calls his bluff:
| quote: | | 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.” |
His second "source" was actually taken from an anti-American propaganda piece in which a German diplomat wrote:
| quote: | | 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. |
So, we see that Chomky's "fact" that tens of thousands died from a chemical plant bombing was taken from a german diplomats "guess." There's some rock hard evidence for you. It's even further degraded by some simple logic. As shown in the article, the factory was only out of commission for 3 months. If, in this time frame "tens of thousands" had died, one of the four world health organizations in the area would surely have known about it as this would have been an epedemic in proportion. However, none of the four report any increase in deaths in that area during those four months. Both of his sources turn up lame, while at the same time there is no statistical proof of these deaths, yet again Chomsky sticks by his "facts" to make his point.
I'll skip LINK 2 since so many of you seem to not like it...it is a "classic" anti-Chomsky piece on the net though...thought I'd put it in there for those reasons.
LINK 3 is a well written report by a Cambodian that was a first-hand witness to the Pol Pot regime. In the report, the student systematically discounts the "facts" Chomsky uses in his book "After the Cataclysm." I recommend you just read it, instead of me paraphrasing it. It's quite good.
Here is the meat of LINK 4. As I've said before, it demonstrates his "misuse" of facts, by not including both sides of the story. As well as failing to analyze the other issues involved, as well as the ramifications of his own accusations.
| quote: | Chomsky is chiefly concerned with condemning the history of U.S. foreign policy, with special emphasis on 1980s Nicaragua, the Soviet-era Afghanistan War, sanctions on Iraq, support for Israel and the 1998 bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan -- which he continues to describe as a much worse crime, comparatively, than Sept. 11.
Chomsky, however, is far less sloppy with the facts than the contributors to Beyond the Curtain, unless you count the many facts he chooses to leave out. As a result, it's his conclusions that are suspect, such as this reductive explanation of U.S. involvement in Yugoslavia: "In the early 90s, primarily for cynical power reasons, the U.S. selected Bosnian Muslims as their Balkan clients, hardly to their benefit."
What about public outcry over Serb atrocities and the siege of Sarajevo? Or former secretary of state Madeleine Albright's very personal belief that appeasing European dictators is bad strategy? Or eloquent and persuasive pressure from international leaders such as Vaclav Havel? Apparently irrelevant, compared to sliming Washington and spreading conspiracy theories.
Chomsky's logical gimmick, which involves taking the loftiest of U.S. rhetoric and comparing it with the grimiest of U.S. history, is seductive as it is paralytic, for those inclined to blame America or seek out subversive explanations for official history. The bombing of Serbia couldn't possibly have been motivated by "humanitarian intervention," he argues, because if humanitarian intervention was a real concern, Washington wouldn't have looked the other way while Indonesia massacred the East Timorese.
This rhetorical cul-de-sac gains a conspiratorial edge (as it must, to explain away that vast majority of international thinkers who find his theories bunk), by liberal use of the phrase "of course," sprinkled with sarcastic comments about how "the doors are better left closed" on certain topics.
But there is a lie in Chomsky's premise. Again and again, he presents his concerns as being rooted in humanism, yet more often than not, his rancid ideology produces analysis that sounds alarmingly inhumane. As in this horrifying exchange, which begins with a feeble stab at hope by one of Chomsky's softball interviewers:
"Q: If the Taliban regime falls and bin Laden or someone they claim is responsible is captured or killed, what next? What happens to Afghanistan? What happens more broadly in other regions?"
"A: The sensible administration plan would be to pursue the ongoing program of silent genocide, combined with humanitarian gestures to arouse the applause of the usual chorus who are called upon to sing the praises of the noble leaders who are dedicated to 'principles and values' for the first time in history and are leading the world to a 'new era' of idealism and commitment to 'ending inhumanity' everywhere."
Ultimately, the questions Chomsky never asks are the ones most damning for him and his followers, who number in the hundreds of thousands: Why is the world a much better place than it was 13 years ago? Why have more than 100 countries ended single-party or military rule? |
I put in LINK 5 to show Chomsky's almost maniacal and unrealistic views on a socialist/communist state. In this article states that people should work because of the "socialsitic rewards" for such actions. Again, someone tell Chomsky that communism failed. The article also points out several other blantant holes left by Chomsky in his socialistic dream of the world. I think it to be a good attack on Noam's overall philosophy.
LINK 6 is an attack on Chomsky's economic viewpoints, as laid out by an economist. It deals mostly with Noam's belief in a Syndicalistic society.
| quote: | Chomsky follows Marx in opposing the private ownership of the means of production, which he believes permits "elite groups" to :"command resources, based ultimately on their control of the private economy," and ends up excluding the public from "basic decisions concerning production and work."[3]
Let's stop right there. As Ayn Rand so eloquently argued, the ultimate means of production is the human mind. Chomsky of course doesn't want to abolish the private ownership of our minds (I hope.) What he means is hard capital: machines, buildings and so on. One would think that if private persons and business concerns cannot own these things, the state will do so. We call that state socialism. Chomsky apparently is against that too.
So, if the state isn't going to own income-producing property, and private concerns are not going to own it, who is going to own it? Apparently, and this all very fuzzy, the means of production will somehow be collectively owned by the workers themselves, wherein we arrive at the silly concept of anarcho-syndicalism. Instead of greedy capitalists owning the corporation, the workers themselves will own it. But it will not be ownership in the form of individual shares that can be sold. That's capitalism.
No, he favors a vague and ill-defined form of collective ownership that the workers will figure out as they bumble and stumble along towards bankruptcy. As Mises writes in Socialism, "as an aim, Syndicalism is so absurd, that speaking generally, it has not found any advocates who dared to write openly and clearly in its favor
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| quote: | Chomsky is apparently against the division of labor: "In its early stages, the industrial system required the kind of specialized labor… Now this is no longer true."[4] Here again he follows Marx. We won't have accountants, doctors, carpenters, etc. Rather, (former) carpenters will take their turn at brain surgery; (former) lawyers will build skyscrapers; airplanes will be driven by (former) dental hygienists and so on. Everyone will take turns. There will be plenty of opportunities to work at a mortuary as well.
Chomsky apparently holds to the labor theory of value, another Marxist concept. According to this theory, all the value of a business is contributed by the "workers". That worker we call the owner, apparently contributes nothing. Only someone who never owned a business could believe this preposterous theory. Since the owner contributed nothing to the business, why did the workers show up there in the first place?
According to the labor theory of value, the workers could have gone to a vacant lot, and produced the same amount of wealth by replicating the same physical actions they undertook working for the greedy capitalist, this time without a building and without any equipment, management, customers or business plan. If we take away the greedy capitalist, these little details must go as well. Just think of Marcel Marceau pretending to work. That's right. You syndicalists pretend to work and we capitalists will pretend to pay you.
Chomsky is apparently against mass production because of its dehumanizing effects on workers. (Does this not also follow Marx? Make a note of that.) He apparently thinks each worker should spend an inordinate amount of time placing his or her own personal and artistic stamp on those widgets. (How do you do that with a hammer?) Chomsky is oblivious to the fact that such workers would then live in miserable poverty because of their drastically reduced productivity. Right now, people are free to live a Chomskyesque fantasy life. Few do, outside of Bohemia, where they are known as starving artists. Not even Chomsky is Chomskyesque, ensconced as he has been at non-syndicalist MIT, specializing in linguistics, for forty-seven years.
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| quote: | Chomsky denies he is a pacifist. Thus, it must be assumed that he would approve the use of force to establish fundamental justice. Third, it is obvious from his over-heated anti-capitalist rhetoric such as "wage slavery" that he considers capitalism extremely unjust. Fourth, the historical example he cites as best exemplifying his own views—the anarchists in and around Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War—involved the use of a great deal of force to collectivize firms and farms.
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Again, Chomsky is a communist, with ideas that are far more incredible that Marx's ever were. His utopian vision of a future society is not only impossible in his own description, but contradicts itself on numerous times. Chomsky should have stayed with linguistics, a field he is truely good at. Instead, as he crossed into politics and economics, his short comings have been found.
I think I have shown examples where Chomsky either lied, or purposefully did not show all sides of a story to make his point...gonzo journalism. I also wanted to give some sources in which his very ideologies were shown to be either hypocritical or faulty, at best. I'm sorry to have quoted so much from the sources, but it seems that it may have been difficult to find my points in them, so I drug them out.
| quote: | | It seems as thought the links you posted are so specific in nature, yet you try to warrant its content as justification to discredit the majority of Chomskys work. |
Well, I don't really have the time to go through and try to disprove every stance Chomsky has taken, because I can't. However, with both the Pol Pot regime and the chemical plant bombing, I did show that facts at the core of his arguement were false, and he refused to admit his error after he knew he was wrong. Correct me if I'm wrong, but if I don't give "specific" examples, I cannot show he fabricates his facts...however my "specific" examples are not "broad" enough to show he has a track record of misleading his readers...I'm at a loss as to what to do at this point.
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