Noam Chomsky: Rise of Far-right Imperils U.S. PDF  | Print |  E-mail
Written by Selwyn Duke   
Tuesday, 27 April 2010 09:00

Noam ChomskyWill intellectualism ever intersect with wisdom?

A number of definitions of insanity have been put forth over the years, and a recent interview has inspired me to add the following: It is when one is wrong over and over again but still expects himself to be right.

The interview was with a very worried man, linguist-turned-social critic Noam Chomsky. His concerns? Among other things, he said that he has “never seen anything like” what’s occurring in today’s America and that we are now “very similar to late Weimar Germany.” Yet the stuff of Chomsky’s nightmares is not ObamaCare and a metastasizing federal government but something else entirely: Tea Parties and middle-American angst.

And if we are to believe writer Chris Hedges, who conducted the interview, we should heed Chomsky’s words. After all, writes Hedges, “Noam Chomsky is America’s greatest intellectual. His massive body of work, which includes nearly 100 books, has for decades deflated and exposed the lies of the power elite and the myths they perpetrate.”

Now, one of these deeply intellectual books is After the Cataclysm, which seemed to expose the lie that Pol Pot’s communist Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia was responsible for the deaths of millions of people.

Except that it wasn’t a lie.

When all was said and done — which was just about the time the book was published, 1979 — the Khmer Rouge had, both directly and through policy, exterminated a quarter of their nation’s population. They targeted the bourgeoisie and educated classes, who were often identified by signs of Western influence, such as wearing eyeglasses (yes, really). All this was scoffed at by Chomsky, who, being a great “intellectual,” would have been the first in Pol Pot’s crosshairs. But he didn’t have to worry about that — he was safely ensconced in his MIT ivory tower in Cambridge at the time.   

Now, when pondering the myth that Chomsky perpetrated, some may wonder if he is a liar. But I don’t say he stepped over the corpses and then defended the executioners; I don’t say he was a malevolent genius, as this gives him both too little and too much credit. I say the last thing a man swelled with intellectual pride wants to hear: He was a useful idiot. He was willing to rationalize away reality until it grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and stuck his face in the bones of the killing fields, motivated as he was by a desire to defend a creed for which he had a sick, twisted affinity. He never had the sense to realize that godless, relativistic people — the Khmer Rouge embraced the belief of intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre that without God, all things are possible — would find killing millions entirely possible. He was never intellectual enough to understand that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior and to judge the Khmer under the light of history — that of their Soviet and Red Chinese philosophical forebears.

But Chomsky is not alone. The left has always been the excitement-craving woman who chooses bad boys, gets burned, and then continues seeking them out — all the while dismissing the nice guys as too square. For instance, New York Times Moscow bureau chief Walter Duranty carried water for the nascent Soviet Union, writing lines such as “Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda,” while the communists were starving millions of peasants to death.  Providing some more examples in his review of the book The Forsaken, Richard Pipes writes:

[There is] the incredible naïveté of Franklin Roosevelt, who lacked even elementary knowledge of the Communist regime: He is quoted as asking, "How could Stalin afford to buy all these factories?" There are vignettes of the no less naïve vice president, Henry Wallace, who visited the concentration camp at Magadan and found nothing amiss, as well as of the despicable American ambassador to Moscow, the multimillionaire Joseph Davies, who liked everything in the Soviet Union and even took Stalin's show trials at face value.

And the greater the “intellectual,” the greater the rationalization. British playwright George Bernard Shaw visited the Soviet Union in 1931, reported that the gulag was a kind of luxury vacation spa, and upon departing Russia said “Today I leave this land of hope and return to our Western countries of despair.” Two years later, he labeled reportage of Stalin’s Terror Famine as a “lie” and a “slander” and said in a lecture before the Fabian Society in London, “Hitler is a very remarkable man, a very able man.”

It was because of the fictional narrative painted by such intellectuals that thousands of depression-era Americans — the useful idiots’ useful idiots, I guess you could say — immigrated to the Soviet Union seeking a better life.

What they got was a worse death.

After the rude awakening of living Soviet reality, Stalin couldn’t let them remain among the Russian population and foment discontent or return to the U.S. and reveal Russia’s dark underbelly, so he sent them to the luxury-vacation-spa gulags. Few emerged alive. It’s hard to say if this bothered Shaw, however, as the American émigrés were working-class men. You see, Shaw was also a proponent of eugenics and once wrote, “[I]f we desire a certain type of civilization and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it.” As to who these were, note that Shaw ultimately took issue with how Hitler was killing people — because Hitler was killing the wrong people. He shouldn’t exterminate human beings based on race and ethnicity, said Shaw, but based on class.

Returning to Chomsky, he is every bit the intellectual Shaw was. Yet, if he were not merely an intellectual but that far rarer person, a wise man, there are some things he would understand.

He is right to draw parallels between today’s America and Weimar Germany.

The problem is that he has little idea what they are.

It’s sloppy to lump Nazis and Tea Partiers together under the label “right-wing.” And it isn’t just that Nazi stands for “National Socialist Workers Party,” a point leftists consider profoundly un-intellectual; it’s also that those who actually fought the Nazis — figures such as Pope Pius XII — understood them to be “left-wing” extremists. But, then, when the hot war ended and the cold one for the history books began, the Nazis somehow metamorphosed into right-wingers.

Yet even this misses the point. The political terms “right” and “left” originated with the French Revolution, with rightists seeking to preserve the monarchy and leftists to overthrow it. The terms no longer are thus defined, of course, but what do they denote? Their meanings change from time to time and place to place, and some definitions are truly nonsensical. For instance, while we hear that rightists are characterized by nationalism, the communist Soviets, Chinese and North Koreans are/were case studies in nationalism.

But sloppy definitions benefit those who are damned by accurate ones. As for accuracy, the Nazis actually were anti-Christian neo-pagans. They aimed to destroy the faith and in this endeavor would co-opt it, claiming that their version of Christianity was the correct one. And Hitler favored not just paganism but also Islam over Christianity, and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, tried to discredit the Catholic Church in 1937 by blowing sexual abuse (which occurs in all institutions) among clerics out of proportion.

Seem familiar? Does it sound more like today’s “right” or today’s “left”?

Ask an intellectual and you’ll get one answer. Ask a wise man and you’ll get another.

 

Selwyn DukeSelwyn Duke is a columnist and public speaker whose work has been published widely online and in print, on both the local and national levels. He has been featured on the Rush Limbaugh Show, at WorldNetDaily.com, in American Conservative magazine, is a contributor to AmericanThinker.com and appears regularly as a guest on the award-winning, nationally-syndicated Michael Savage Show. Visit his Website.



 

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0
Crandall
April 27, 2010
74.196.197.129
Votes: +4
Blind leftists

Body, soul and spirit
1 Thessalonians 5: 23 says man is “spirit and soul and body”. The soul is made up of mind, will and emotion and the spirit is where the Holy Spirit dwells when we are born again. And the body is “Oh my, I kicked that chair with my big toe and did it ever hurt!”
An ant has a soul and body, but no spirit and all creatures other than man are two fold beings.
A lost person’s spirit is dead so he is just hitting on two, body and soul. Potentially a lost person is a little smarter than an ant, peckerwood, snake, mouse, blue jay, etc. But unsaved man very seldom ever reaches his potential, therefore he is usually about as smart as an ant.
An ant works very energetically gathering food, but it doesn’t know the difference between good wholesome food and poisoned food.
As an illustration: God hating leftists work hard to build a socialist/Communist nation and usually don’t realize the danger of what they are blindly doing. They are a lot like the ant. If the Communist dupes are successful one month after taking over a nation they are purged. They are killed before they have a good chance to wake up and abort the mission. Bill

0
DDW
April 28, 2010
173.57.11.190
Votes: +4
Chomsky is indeed a fool

A blind, deluded fool stumbling around inside a darkened mentality. What's worse is he's that by his own deliberate choice. Apparently Arby J. Brown and Winston Smith have made the same choice. Make no mistake about it, the day is coming when we're going to find out just who's right and just who's wrong. A word to Arby J. Brown: folks who talk about hate are usually the very folks who are filled with hate; you might want to watch that in your future babblings. To Winston Smith: If Chomsky is a national treasure, then that is yet another indicator of how low things have sunk.

Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools. Romans 1:22

0
DDW
April 28, 2010
173.57.11.190
Votes: +1
Fools

Over the years, I've known many people who have high IQs and many years of "higher" education under their hats and yet they remain fools.

For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, He taketh the wise in their own craftiness. I Corinthians 3:19

0
T. Dan Tolleson
April 28, 2010
66.53.82.177
Votes: +1
Thank you, Selwyn Duke . . .

Thank you for exposing the negligent idiocy of Chomsky's propaganda for the Khmer Rouge. Thank you, also, for putting that idiocy into historical perspective with other precedents by useful idiots.

As the poster-boy of America's socialists/communists, Chomsky is the hero that Americans are not supposed to question.

Have you ever thought about writing a piece comparing the socialist apotheosis of Chomsky with the near-unanimous demonization of Joseph McCarthy?

Now, that could be an interesting comparison, especially if you were to delve into how the truth in each case was distorted and what those distortions indicate about the ongoing decline of our country.

0
JJJooonnn
April 28, 2010
76.122.145.132
Votes: -1
Where is the evidence?

I hear this assertion a lot. Supposedly Chomsky claimed that Pol Pot wasn't massacring people. Except that we never see any quotations from him that actually show that this was his claim.

What he claimed, rightly, was that when the US was aggressively bombing Cambodia nobody in the American media noticed. When the Khmer Rouge came to power, largely a result of the US bombing campaign, Pol Pot in fact was an enemy of the state. Suddenly the crimes occurring and Cambodia mattered. And in fact crimes that were unsubstantiated were reported as well. A complete 180 in reporting, even though if we were to look to the evidence it would seem that the death rate hasn't actually changed. What has changed is the party immediately responsible.

Then when Vietnam ousted Pol Pot and he turned his guns towards Vietnam, suddenly criticism of Pol Pot once again ceased. He was fighting our enemy and hence he was an ally. Suddenly his hideous atrocities were down the memory hole. The US ensured that Cambodia's seat at the UN remained in the hands of the Khmer Rouge and funded Khmer military insurgents to return Cambodia to their vicious rule.

Similar crimes were occurring in East Timor due to Indonesia, who was being supplied with armaments by the US. They killed hundreds of thousands and this was praised or ignored in US press. Why is it that when people on the enemies list commit crimes it's front page news, but when client states do the same nobody says anything?

Chomsky always said that the Khmer Rouge was hideous as was Pol Pot. But what he also said was honesty requires us to not exaggerate his crimes. And it is interesting that crimes are only crimes if they are committed by official enemies. Identical crimes committed by countries on the friendly list are papered over or ignored. It's worth noticing this. For Chomsky's critics this apparently is a denial that Pol Pot committed atrocities. It's so absurd it's actually pathetic.

0
Markon Smith
April 29, 2010
77.105.53.138
Votes: +4
Selwyn Duke is right. Here is the proof!

I can testify about how this man is inconsistent and how his opinion changes to whatever he feels is politically correct at the moment from my own perspective as Serbian.

During the bombing of Serbia in 1999 he was in-line with Clinton's war propaganda. His opinion was "essentially that of the NATO/US commander, Wesley Clark" (his own words):
http://emperors-clothes.com/yr/chomsky.htm

After the war, he has changed his views on the conflict and the situation in the region completely and became very pro-Serbian. Please read this interview with him taken after the war to see the difference:
http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20060425.htm

0
JJJooonnn
April 29, 2010
76.122.145.132
Votes: +1
Markon Smith, you are misreading crucially

Markon, I read the opening lines of you paragraph that supposedly indicates Chomsky was in line with Clinton's war propaganda. He says that his opinion is "essentially that of the NATO Commander, Wesley Clark." What was Clark's opinion? If NATO bombs Serbia we should expect Milosevic to retaliate and kill a lot of people. That's bad. And that's what happened. So Chomsky was opposed to the bombing. He didn't think it was the best way to resolve the problem. He wonders why the US didn't support the non-violent opposition to Milosovic? What the US did was create a violent conflict when this was unnecessary.

0
Sir Daniel M.J. Tobin
May 02, 2010
63.117.245.99
Votes: +1
The Right

I am honored and humbled to be The Nassau County Executive Committee Chairman to the Constitution Party, and wish to serve the country as the US Congressman, 4th federal District NY State. I wish to replace the pro-abortion,liar, hypocrite and unfunded federal mandate signing incumbent, Carolyn McCarthy this year. She has also signed on to the possibly illegal Bush-Cheney-Rice-Rumsfeld Iraq Oil War, which has cost 3,000 American lives, untold Iraqi civilian lives, and billions of American taxpayer dollars. I have prosecuted War Criminals of Iran, Libya, and Syria, and the financial terrorist networks that support them on the Board of Directors of The Victims of Pan Am Flight #103, and helped pass economic, travel and diplomatic sanctions against Foreign War Criminals who sponsor anti-American Terrorist acts, and also helped keep sanctions against American companies that do business with them also: Exxon-Mobil, Amerada-Hess, Royal Dutch Shell, Occidental Petroleum, Marathon Oil,and BP. I am horrified to read that this Chomsky character is such a widely read leftist-socialist, and hope to rally the readers to my side and elect a real leader. Please send contributions made payable to: Dan Tobin for Congress, 115 Atlantic Ave Apt 2a, Hempstead,NY 11550-1204

0
Tom Snow
May 04, 2010
75.173.200.156
Votes: -1
...

Selwyn, good article. I know that trying to present a cogent, successful, article about this old communist hack is difficult. Chomsky and Moynighan (Senator-COMMIE- VERMONT)have been telling lies and fairy tales to the American public, and university students, for 50 years each. They are both trained in Goebbels- tell a lie long enough and everyone will believe it to be true. I remember being forced to read this idiot in college. There is NOTHING of any use let alone "intellectual" about what this guy has generated on paper from his smaller than normal mind. Chomsky definitely is the consummate use-LESS idiot.

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Our valuable member Selwyn Duke has been with us since Saturday, 16 August 2008.

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