Why Noam Chomsky...

[Guest Raidne]

There is, in fact, an entire Wikipedia entry devoted to the topic "Chomsky criticism." Would the detractors at least agree that it is representative of their objections? Or is there more that's not covered?

Also, does everyone that thinks Chomsky's a loud-mouthed capitalist hypocrite disregard Gore to the same degree?

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Sologdin,

want a choice

well, there's always third parties.

unless this is a concession that elections in the US tend to be shamesque if not outright shams.

QFT!

Choosing between two parties that are flip sides of the same choice is not a "choice" in the meaningful sense of the term. What I really love are those who damn and vilify those of us who attempt to make a real choice by voting for candidates and parties that are different because it's our fault when their preferred candidates lose close elections.

[snake]

Well, NestorMakhnosLovechild, had a nice post on why he/she didn't take Chomsky seriously and linked an article to back up his assertion. It was post #92. Haven't seen anyone tackle that post yet.

[Guest Raidne]

Thanks snake. I think I missed this in the midst of the flaming.

Note: While I was sourcing something for my post I came across this article which sums up all of my criticisms of Chomsky far more eloquently and in far greater detail than I will lay out below. So feel free to read that article and just skip over my entire post).

I have a couple of problems with Chomsky, as someone who once considered himself an anarcho-syndicalists, and they all have to do with sloppy references:

(1) Chomsky loves to cite himself.

***

(2) Chomsky's citation of primary sources often reads more like a characterization of them.

These are difficult to address without putting some time in the library. Anyone own a few of Chomsky's works and want to address this? The author in the linked article specifically refers to Deterring Democracy.

I find nothing inherently wrong with Chomsky citing himself if, for instance, a previous work of his did the empirical work that forms the basis for the proposition cited. With regard to the sources, I'd always prefer to see appropriate use of signals with parentheticals telling me what they are cited for, but the author nails Chomsky for putting citations at the end of the paragraph only, and that's common practice in the liberal arts. Also, if you're familiar with academic work in the social sciences, the citations are awfully barebones like this, because the authors assume that few people are going to really use the citations except for other researches who are going to also read the works cited, or have already read them.

When I was in college and had oodles of free time and I was very into Chomsky, I would track down (to the extent you can with his some of his citations) the original foreign policy documents that he was referencing at the Rutgers University library. I remember being struck by how different the original documents read than he characterized them. I think Chomsky could have made plausible arguments that the documents in question SHOULD be characterized the way he wanted them to be, but that's not what he did. He cited them as saying things they just did not on their face say, and that I think is highly disingenuous.

Again, I'd like to know if any signals were used in these citations that weren't taken into account, like, for instance, in the law, if I cite using the signal Cf., I mean that the cited authority supports a position different from the main proposition, but sufficiently analogous to lend support, or if I use see generally, I mean that the cited authority provides helpful background material related to the proposition.

...his tendency to never, ever back down from a factual misstatement....

We'd have to line every academic along the wall if we were really going to object to that. It's like asking them to foresake their branding. It's not ideal, but I'm going to throw out the worth of a scholar because of this flaw.

At any rate, in the end, all of these criticisms are quite valid in terms of Chomsky's work as a serious scholar, and, IMHO, Chomsky is not a serious academic scholar on political issues. Chomsky is a serious academic scholar on the topic of linguistics and a popular scholar on political issues.

As such, I could level the same accusations against, say, Doris Kearns Goodwin as a popular historian, but I don't, because I know she's not writing for an academic audience. I value her historical work a little bit less that way, and would never, ever cite to it in an academic paper, but surely we can agree that she is still important historian and that her books are not, at best, a waste of paper, and at worst, a pernicious attempt to bamboozle the American public into believing her flawed and needlessly polemical view of history?

[Guest Raidne]

Also, this criticism from the linked article...

Chomsky has repeatedly referred to Bakunin's fears that Marx's state socialism would degenerate into a "Red Bureaucracy." The only source Chomsky ever cites is a letter from Bakunin to Ogareff and Herzen, quoted in a work in French by Daniel Guerin – not exactly accessible to the average reader who wants to find out more (see above paragraph). So I did a word search of "Bakunin" and "red bureaucracy." Guess what? 104 references, about two-thirds of them from Chomsky. And in each of them, he referred to the stock Bakunin quote in almost exactly the same words, and gave the same inaccessible reference (if he gave a source at all).

...is bullshit. This is a completely uncontroversial claim. A letter is perfectly fine. And if Daniel Gurein's publication is the only place this letter appears in print, it's perfectly fine to cite to that source. And, okay, it's in french? So?

I mean, read anything at all on Bakunin and you're going to come across the idea that all forms of government, even Marxist governments, lead to oppression.

It's like failing to provide more than a basic citation for the proposition "President Bush purported to represent a new era of right-wing ideology labelled "compassionate conservatism." How many citations do you need? And then, we're slamming the guy for providing a primary source quoted in a secondary source? Why?

[Former Lord of Winterfell]

*snickers*

Well, he asked. Anybody want to just link some shit?

http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2005/01/chomsky_and_the_1.html

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000155.html

But here's the one that should keep you busy. Cheers!

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

[Mlle. Zabzie]

At any rate, in the end, all of these criticisms are quite valid in terms of Chomsky's work as a serious scholar, and, IMHO, Chomsky is not a serious academic scholar on political issues. Chomsky is a serious academic scholar on the topic of linguistics and a popular scholar on political issues.

As such, I could level the same accusations against, say, Doris Kearns Goodwin as a popular historian, but I don't, because I know she's not writing for an academic audience. I value her historical work a little bit less that way, and would never, ever cite to it in an academic paper, but surely we can agree that she is still important historian and that her books are not, at best, a waste of paper, and at worst, a pernicious attempt to bamboozle the American public into believing her flawed and needlessly polemical view of history?

So do you feel the same about Chomsky cites in the poli-sci/general social sciences area (linguistics excluded) as you do about DKG cites in the history area? (That is, if I'm understanding you correctly, do you think that Chomsky is interesting, thought provoking and worthy of a read, but not, perhaps, a definitive authority on the subjects (other than linguistics) on which he writes?) If so, I agree with that.

[Guest Raidne]

I do, Zabz. Linguistics is his area of real academic expertise. But I respect him -and DKG - as popular writers, and I also find that niche to be critically necessary. How many people have read Bakunin because of Chomsky?

[sologdin]

So I did a word search of "Bakunin" and "red bureaucracy." Guess what? 104 references

gotta love internet-only research. i don't want to beat up justin raimondo's site too much, though--and it's weird that the article points out some basic critiques of chomsky from the left (which appear to be limited to his citation practice as well as the fact that he's not sufficiently anarchist), but agrees with the basic thrust of his writings:

For all the cloud of obfuscation that surrounds Chomsky's use of sources, a great deal of what he says about U.S. policy in the Third World – its support of death squads and right-wing dictators, and the role of corporate interests in formulating such policies – is heavily documented and hard to refute.

probably correct to point out that he's not an academic scholar of geopolitics, but is rather a public intellectual and popularizer. perhaps that means it's a mistake to rely too heavily on him. serious argument, e.g., shouldn't rely on s.j. gould, for the same reason--though he's a good enough writer that many people outside of the sciences have read and understood him.

[Guest Raidne]

Thanks FLOW! I'm on the last link, which is a collection of more links.

This one caught my eye first. Supposedly these are the quotes the "Chomsky cultists" don't want you to hear.

Funny stuff, because this is the kind of stuff I always heard the "Chomsky cultists" saying.

So here we go:

ON COMMUNISM...

“One might argue, at least I would argue, that council communism... is the natural form of revolutionary socialism in an industrial society.”

(Government in the Future [seven Stories Press, 2005], p. 27)

Really? We don't want people to know that Chomsky is sympathetic to council communism? Has anyone been paying attention?

I mean, it's a great point - council communism takes the power from the capitalists and gives it to the workers, but otherwise maintains the system of private enterprise instead of moving toward state ownership, so it certainly might be more "natural" than a state-run system. Basically, you'd pass laws against having employees that are not also shareholders and vice versa, and then these workers councils would also govern. The idea is to avoid the vanguard (back to Bakunin's worry again).

WTF? Do Republicans not want us to know that they are...Republican?

ON POVERTY...

“if we ever get anything like a kind of just society, things like my standard of living may very well not exist. In that sense, there will be, I think, material deprivation in some manner for a large part of the population. And I think there ought to be.”

(Interview, Black Rose, No. 1, 1974)

Well, no shit. Because there is extensive material deprivation for many people now. Chomsky never just talks about the West. Certainly his standard of living would not, at first, exist, and it should be that way because it's a precondition for Justice and brings us all down to the same playing field.

This is not quite my view, at least not all the time, but I don't think there is anything surprising about that.

ON REVOLUTION...

“I suppose that, at some point, the ruling class will simply strike back by force, and there has to be defense against that force, and that probably means violent revolution.”

(Interview, Black Rose, No. 1, 1974)

Again. Ummm...yeah?

ON 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.”

(Alexander Klein, ed., Dissent, Power and Confrontation [McGraw-Hill, 1971], p. 119)

Well, no kidding, right? Chomsky is something of a utilitarian. I'm sure he'd argue, also, that American colonialists employed terrorist tactics.

ON DICTATORSHIPS...

— Maoist China

“But take China, modern China; one also finds many things that are really quite admirable... 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...”

(Alexander Klein, ed., Dissent, Power and Confrontation [McGraw-Hill, 1971], pp. 117-8)

Okay? Is there nothing admirable about communist China? Is it untrue that collectiviszation and communization was in many ways a grass roots effort?

— Stalinist North Vietnam

“I would like to express the great joy that we feel in your accomplishments... Your heroism reveals the capabilities of the human spirit and human will.”

(Radio Hanoi, April 14, 1970)

Have you ever, ever read anything that Ho Chi Minh wrote? Our involvement there was an atrocity. Even if you disagree, do you think Chomsky supporters are ashamed that he said that????

— Pol Pot’s Cambodia

“the evacuation of Phnom Penh, widely denounced at the time and since for its undoubted brutality, may actually have saved many lives. It is striking that the crucial facts rarely appear in the chorus of condemnations.”

(After the Cataclysm [south End Press, 1979], p. 160)

That's an empirical claim, without moral content. Again, I am not shocked.

ON AMERICA...

“Such facts as these... raise the question whether what is needed in the United States today is dissent or denazification... I myself believe that what is needed is a kind of denazification.”

(Ethics, October 1968)

Okay, we need to remove powerful capitalists from their positions of power, i.e. rid the US of the agency capture problem. Totally uncontroversial.

ON REPUBLICANS...

“The new Republicans represent a kind of proto-fascism. There’s a real sadism. They want to go for the jugular. Anybody who doesn’t meet their standards, they want to kill, not just oppose, but destroy.”

(The Progressive, March 1996)

Anyone who read the Giffords thread knows my view on this. Anyone who really pays attention to the anti-abortion, anti-gay rights crew knows that it's true. Do Republicans deny that a large section of the party would like to demolish the dissent? That they don't value the existence of a pro gay marriage counterpoint, for example???

ON ZIONISM...

“Hitler’s conceptions have struck a responsive chord in current Zionist commentary.”

(Fateful Triangle [rev. ed., Pluto Press, 1999], p. 208)

Here, Chomsky is arguing that Zionists have a final solution in mind for the Palestinians not unlike what the Nazis had in mind for the Jews. Again, annihilation is the goal. Chomsky vehemently opposes the alignment of the current conflict over the Israeli state and the resistance against a two-state solution with the Holocaust. As well he should. Because they are not related. For my part, I would draw the distinction that the Israelis, at least, feel as though they must be constantly vigilant to ensure their survival, but the fact remains is that the Israelis have a policy that would allow the use of nuclear weapons in more than one situation, and it's not when they are nuked first. They also actively engage in settlement practices designed to change the ethnic make-up of conquered territories. Lastly, all of this was said in the aftermath of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which the US was ostensibly against, the UN was against, and, to my understanding, the entire international community was against.

ON JUDAISM...

“In the Jewish community, the Orthodox rabbinate imposes its interpretation of religious law... Were similar principles to apply to Jews elsewhere, we would not hesitate to condemn this revival of the Nuremberg laws.”

(Foreword, Sabri Jiryis, The Arabs in Israel [Monthly Review Press, 1976], p. viii)

I can't find context for this, but it sounds like he's saying that Orthodox Jews define who is and who isn't Jewish in a way that is not unlike the Nuremburg laws, which did the same thing.

ON ISRAEL...

“Israel’s ‘secret weapon’ ... is that it may behave in the manner of what have sometimes been called ‘crazy states’ in the international affairs literature... eventuating in a final solution from which few will escape.”

(Fateful Triangle [rev. ed., Pluto Press, 1999], pp. 468-9)

Well? Are there or aren't there four situations in which the Israelis have "unofficially" decided to engage in tactical nuclear strikes?

ON JEWS...

“The Jewish community here is deeply totalitarian. They do not want democracy, they do not want freedom.”

(Interview, Shmate: A Journal of Progressive Jewish Thought, Summer 1988)

Again, it doesn't surprise me that he would say this. 7 years before Yigal Amir assassinated Yitzak Rabin, and during a period of increased aggression in Israel.

ON ANTISEMITISM...

“Jews in the US are the most privileged and influential part of the population... privileged people want to make sure they have total control, not just 98% control. That’s why antisemitism is becoming an issue.”

(Variant, Scotland, Winter 2002)

Here is the quote in context: "Even when I got to Harvard 50 years ago you could cut the anti-Semitism with a knife. There was almost no Jewish faculty. I think the first Jewish maths professor was appointed while I was there in the early '50s. One of the reasons MIT (where I now am) became a great university is because a lot of people who went on to become academic stars couldn't get jobs at Harvard - so they came to the engineering school down the street. Just 30 years ago (1960s) when my wife and I had young children, we decided to move to a Boston suburb (we couldn't afford the rents near Cambridge any longer). We asked a real estate agent about one town we were interested in, he told us: 'Well, you wouldn't be happy there.' Meaning they don't allow Jews. It's not like sending people to concentration and termination camps but that's anti-Semitism. That was almost completely national.

By now Jews in the US are the most privileged and influential part of the population. You find occasional instances of anti-Semitism but they are marginal. There's plenty of racism, but it's directed against Blacks, Latinos, Arabs are targets of enormous racism, and those problems are real. Anti-Semitism is no longer a problem, fortunately. It's raised, but it's raised because privileged people want to make sure they have total control, not just 98% control. That's why anti-Semitism is becoming an issue. Not because of the threat of anti-Semitism; they want to make sure there's no critical look at the policies the US (and they themselves) support in the Middle East.

With regard to anti-Semitism, the distinguished Israeli statesman Abba Eban pointed out the main task of Israeli propaganda (they would call it exclamation, what's called 'propaganda' when others do it) is to make it clear to the world there's no difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. By anti-Zionism he meant criticisms of the current policies of the State of Israel. So there's no difference between criticism of policies of the State of Israel and anti-Semitism, because if he can establish 'that' then he can undercut all criticism by invoking the Nazis and that will silence people. We should bear it in mind when there's talk in the US about anti-Semitism."

ON THE HOLOCAUST...

“I see no antisemitic implications in denial of the existence of gas chambers, or even denial of the holocaust.”

(Quadrant, Australia, October 1981)

Read this in the context of the earlier quote. I would disagree with his use of the word "implications." I would say, rather, that it would be possible to deny the holocaust without being anti-semitic, but, practically speaking, it's probably never happened. But what Chomsky is trying to say is that not everything that could be said that Zionists would not like is anti-Semitic. This is a provacative and, yes, offensive way of putting it, but I'm not surprised that he said it.

ON THE COLD WAR...

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

(Letter, in Alexander Cockburn, The Golden Age Is In Us [Verso, 1995], pp. 149-151)

Again, not surprised. Plenty of places around the world have suffered under the tyranny and violence of the US, for better or for worse. It's a utilitarian question. Not shocked.

ON 9/11...

“for the first time in history the victims are returning the blow to the motherland.”

(La Jornada, Mexico, September 15, 2001)

ON AL-QAEDA...

“It’s entirely possible that bin Laden’s telling the truth when he says he didn’t know about the [9/11] operation.”

(9-11 [seven Stories Press, 2001], p. 60)

ON LIBERATING AFGHANISTAN...

“Western civilization is anticipating the slaughter of, well do the arithmetic, 3-4 million people or something like that... Looks like what’s happening is some sort of silent genocide... we are in the midst of apparently trying to murder 3 or 4 million people...”

(Lecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, October 18, 2001)

And? Again, all of these quotes are freely available and already discussed in this thread, at length. Person for person, we have killed more people in Afghanistan than were ever killed here. True or false? And how do you justify that if every life is equal? They started it? Did they? The majority of people who died? They belonged to Al Qaeda? Come on. The "oh they're harboring terrorists" argument is what the Israelis used in Lebanon.

ON LIBERATING IRAQ...

“But here’s a way to liberate Iraq... No US casualties, no threat to Israel, good chance of bringing democracy... Help Iran invade Iraq... They have a fair chance of introducing democracy.”

(Interview, The New Yorker, March 31, 2003)

Well, Iran is democratic, right? This goes back to the conversation we had before where democracy does not always mean a Western capitalist democracy and he was calling Bush out on that.

So, yes, very long post, but there you have it. None of this is shocking to me. This is what I thought Noam thought.

[Mlle. Zabzie]

I do, Zabz. Linguistics is his area of real academic expertise. But I respect him -and DKG - as popular writers, and I also find that niche to be critically necessary. How many people have read Bakunin because of Chomsky?

probably correct to point out that he's not an academic scholar of geopolitics, but is rather a public intellectual and popularizer. perhaps that means it's a mistake to rely too heavily on him. serious argument, e.g., shouldn't rely on s.j. gould, for the same reason--though he's a good enough writer that many people outside of the sciences have read and understood him.

I agree with this and it makes sense. This thread has made me stop and think about what my real beef with Chomsky is. It's actually not Chomsky (though I do not share his worldview). It's people who cite Chomsky as irrefutable authority, without applying critical thought to Chomsky's analysis. That is, one has to read Chomsky like one reads any source (primary or secondary: with due regard for the author's biases and agenda. One may end up ultimately agreeing with conclusions drawn by him (or any author) but it shouldn't be "because Chomsky said so", it should be "because I have read his analysis, considered counter-analysis, and have reached a similar conclusion." My experience has been that the former seems more prevalent than the latter (not, actually, in this thread, but elsewhere), which just plain irks me.

[Guest Raidne]

Not really. I think his idea that Iran wants to invade Iraq is a little erroneous, too. The last things the Iranians want is more Arabs within their borders. They're having a hard enough time with the Arabs they have now.

Okay, okay, I was lazy with that one. Here is the quote in context.

"Really? I don't know of any," Chomsky interrupted. "But here's a way to liberate

Iraq, an easy way, and it will knock off all the most common arguments. No U.S.

casualties, no threat to Israel, good chance of bringing democracy, probably be

welcomed by the population, they'll allow plenty of oil to flow, Saddam will be

torn to shreds, they'll destroy every trace of weapons of mass destruction. Help

Iran invade Iraq. They could do it very easily if we gave them any support at

all."

"But--" "Excuse me. They have a fair chance of introducing democracy. The U.S. doesn't.

The reason is that the majority of Iraq's population is Shiite. Shiites are likely

to want an accommodation with Iran, but the U.S. will never allow them to have a

voice in the government because it doesn't want the government to have an

accommodation with Iran.. .. What's the downside?"

The student looked baffled. "Are you honestly advocating that we help Iran invade Iraq?" he asked. "No. You are," Chomsky said. The students laughed, startled by this unexpected

twist. "Proposing that Iran attack Iraq is insane. But it makes a lot more sense

than having the U.S. attack. Are you saying that the people who supported Saddam

while he was committing his worst atrocities are more likely to liberate the

Iraqis than the people who opposed him?"

The author of this page makes the point I've been making about Chomsky's strict utilitarianism. For him, the motives don't really matter. As the author puts it

Chomsky's logic is the unforgiving, mathematical logic of tort law: the philosopher Avishai Margalit has called him "the Devil's accountant." His moral calculus is a simple arithmetic. Nothing exculpates or complicates the sheer number of the dead.

And that is, IMO, a perfectly valid philosophical position. It is also in direct opposition to the Nazis who asked why what they did was so wrong if it wasn't, at base, really the same thing that everyone else had always done, only without being coy about their motives and more efficiently and on a much larger scale?

This is the problem raised by the Nazis. We really want to say that they were worse, but it's philosophically difficult to delineate. Chomsky's position solves this problem, so it's no wonder that he holds to it.

And what would be a better measure? Let's say Barack Obama accidentally destroys half the earth, but with good intentions? At that point, do you really freaking care?

[Shryke]

Depends on which half.

[Former Lord of Winterfell]

Thanks FLOW! I'm on the last link, which is a collection of more links.

Well, that's one. There's about 30 others.

That oughta keep ya busy for awhile....

[Guest Raidne]

Well, he said, at base, that it wasn't any less preposterous for the US to invade. The rest was just polemics, as you say, suited to the audience. But really, the whole thing was nothing more than a thought experiment, in context, not an actual position.

[sologdin]

http://oliverkamm.ty..._and_the_1.html

let's have a look. tendered anti-chomskyite writes:

In American Power and the New Mandarins (1969, p. 21), Chomsky cites an article by the political scientist Samuel Huntington from Foreign Affairs, July 1968, entitled “The Bases of Accommodation”:

[Huntington] explains that the Viet Cong is ‘a powerful force which cannot be dislodged from its constituency so long as the constituency continues to exist’. Evidently, we must therefore ensure that the constituency – the rural population – ceases to exist. A Himmler or a Streicher would have advanced one obvious solution. This liberal socialist [sic – evidently a typographical error for ‘social’] scientist, however, suggests another: that we drive the peasants into the cities by force (’urbanisation’), putting off until after the war the ‘massive government programmes’ that ‘will be required either to resettle migrants in rural areas or to rebuild the cities and promote peacetime urban employment’. This policy may prove to be ‘the answer to “wars of national liberation”’ an answer that we have ‘stumbled upon’ in Vietnam, ‘in an absent-minded way’.

review of the locus cited reveals that the quoted language arises from footnote 5 to the introduction of the cited text; the footnoted bit about SH follows a discussion about letters to the boston globe from aid workers in vietnam regarding how most of vietnam is a “wasteland” or “no man’s land” and that this is the way to beat the insurgents, &c.; the full footnote text is not presented by kamm, but it may not be too important, except that the final line of the note is that “It is helpful to have this explanation, from a leading political scientist, of the ’basic assumptions’ underlying the American doctrine of counter-revolutionary war,” which is not really objectionable, considering that SH does in fact present an explanation of the doctrine.

kamm then argues that:

Chomsky is not always easy to decipher, owing to his imprudent partiality for attempted irony, but the message here could scarcely be cruder. Huntington’s recommendations are in aim if not method the equivalent of the Final Solution.

on its face, without review of the underlying materials, this argument is manifestly erroneous: a himmler or a streicher would have advanced one obvious solution v. this liberal social scientist advances another. this writer draws a conclusion from material cited in support of same that is not authorized by the langauge of the quotation.

That manifest error aside, review of the SH article in question reveals the following items:

The movement of people into the cities during the past four years is a nationwide phenomenon. In 1962 Saigon's population was estimated at 1,400,000. Today it is at least twice that, and the population of the Saigon metropolitan area is probably about 4,000,000 more than 20 per cent of the entire country. The increases in population of cities like Danang, Nha Trang, Qui Nhon, Pleiku, Kontum and Ban Me Thuot have been even more spectacular. Smaller cities and towns have also had extraordinary growth rates, with many provincial capitals doubling or tripling their population in two or three years. The principal reason for this massive influx of population into the urban areas is, of course, the intensification of the war following the commitment of American combat troops in 1965. About 1,500,000 of the total increase in urban population is accounted for by refugees, half still in refugee camps and others settled in new areas. At least an equal number of people have moved into the cities without passing through refugee camps. The social costs of this change have been dramatic and often heartrending. The conditions in the refugee camps, particularly in I Corps, have at times been horrendous, although some significant improvements are now taking place. Urban welfare and developmental programs require increasing priority from the United States and Vietnamese Governments.

More than anything else urbanization has been responsible for the striking increase in the proportion of the population living under Government control between 1964 and 1968. The depopulation of the countryside struck directly at the strength and potential appeal of the Viet Cong. For ten years the Viet Cong has waged a rural revolution against the Central Government, with the good Maoist expectation that by winning the support of the rural population it could eventually isolate and overwhelm the cities. The "first outstanding feature...of People's Revolutionary War, as developed by Mao Tse-tung and refined by the North Vietnamese in the two Indochina wars." Sir Robert Thompson argued in a recent issue of this journal, "is its immunity to the direct application of mechanical and conventional power." In the light of recent events, this statement needs to be seriously qualified. For if the "direct application of mechanical and conventional power" takes place on such a massive scale as to produce a massive migration from countryside to city, the basic assumptions underlying the Maoist doctrine of revolutionary war no longer operate. The Maoist-inspired rural revolution is undercut by the American-sponsored urban revolution.

In an absent-minded way the United States in Viet Nam may well have stumbled upon the answer to "wars of national liberation." The effective response lies neither in the quest for conventional military victory nor in the esoteric doctrines and gimmicks of counter-insurgency warfare. It is instead forced-draft urbanization and modernization which rapidly brings the country in question out of the phase in which a rural revolutionary movement can hope to generate sufficient strength to come to power.

Time in South Viet Nam is increasingly on the side of the Government. But in the short run, with half the population still in the countryside, the Viet Cong will remain a powerful force which cannot be dislodged from its constituency so long as the constituency continues to exist. Peace in the immediate future must hence be based on accommodation.

i'm fairly certain that "forced draft urbanization” means the process of bombing the holy hell out of the rural areas--it is a euphemism for an older euphemism--“pacification.” but, to take the quoted NC passage point-for-point--

[Huntington] explains that the Viet Cong is ‘a powerful force which cannot be dislodged from its constituency so long as the constituency continues to exist’. a true quotation of SH by NC.

Evidently, we must therefore ensure that the constituency – the rural population – ceases to exist. NC’s inference.

A Himmler or a Streicher would have advanced one obvious solution. true enough, and merely NC’s comment.

This liberal social scientist, however, suggests another: that we drive the peasants into the cities by force (’urbanisation’), putting off until after the war the ‘massive government programmes’ that ‘will be required either to resettle migrants in rural areas or to rebuild the cities and promote peacetime urban employment’. i fail to see how this is objectionable--the foreign affairs article does indeed “suggest” that rural insurgencies might be denied the victory by means of carpet-bombing their support areas, even if the article also proclaims a personal interest in peace by the author, supported by kamm when citing to SH’s self-serving commentary on Chomsky’s argument. Sure--SH did say that peace in the immediate future must be based on accommodation--but simultaneously notes, without any obvious disapproval, that the US has found the “answer” to wars of national liberation.

Really? The “answer”? is it your final answer? Or rather the Final Answer? WTF is the objection to NC here? How is the fascist analogue unwarranted? The US bombed this shit out of Vietnam in order to protect a rightwing client dictatorship, and killed several millions in the process, and SH describes the process as an "answer," even while protesting that he loves peace. imagine that--a warmonger who loves peace.

This policy may prove to be ‘the answer to “wars of national liberation”’ an answer that we have ‘stumbled upon’ in Vietnam, ‘in an absent-minded way’. not seeing the objection here, based on SH’s writing.

SH does write quite a bit in the underlying article about the meaning of "accommodation"--much of it is very progressive sounding, pro-democratic. SH’s rejoinder complains that NC ignored the title of his essay, as quoted by OK: “the bases of accommodation.” what are the bases of accommodation? despite all of the top-shelf rhetoric about the virtues of working together, mutual tolerance for different economics, diversity, and “why-can’t-we-all-just-get-along" thinking, the “bases” are plain:

Unlike the other parties and sects, however, the Viet Cong began in the late 1950s to receive significant reinforcements in the form of returnees and supplies from North Viet Nam. Consequently, at that point the Viet Cong broke the pattern of evolution which it had shared with the other groups--consciousness, confrontation, withdrawal--and instead instituted a renewed period of confrontation. After 1963 the other groups reached varying degrees of accommodation with the Government while the confrontation between the Government and the Viet Cong intensified. Yet it is not unreasonable to assume that when it becomes clear that this confrontation cannot succeed, the indigenous Viet Cong will again move into a phase of withdrawal, which conceivably could then be followed by accommodation and incorporation into a restructured and expanded political system.

i’m fairly certain that the underscored bit means that the bases of accommodation are the bombs that fall on the villages and compel the viet cong to settle its differences with the dictatorship. What else might SH mean, other than the vietnamese left must be forced to the bargaining table?

On the whole, it appears to me that mr. kamm has not read the underlying SH article and has rather recklessly relied on SH’s ad hoc rebuttal, which attempts to make out SH's personal defense, without regard for the actual policy preferences that NC was describing. the NC quotation at the top does not appear to be primarily interested in SH personally, but rather takes SH's description of the urbanization process in vietnam as true, and draws out the implications. to address NC's argument from the perspective that it falsely slanders SH as a nazi or draws that comparison or misquotes SH is both false and missing the point.

[Guest Raidne]

All that's holding up, for me, is the idea that Chomsky is a popular political scholar, which I agree with, who takes matching contributions to his 401K and picked the stock portfolio option, which I have no problem with as I do the same.

[Guest Raidne]

Reviving this thread because of cyr bringing back the Gasland thread.

I read my OP, and at first glance, it seems blatantly contradictory to what I've said here. To whit, here, I have said that I don't expect Noam Chomsky to sacrifice matching 401K funds by pulling his retirements funds out of his 401K in order to allow him to specifically choose which companies he invests in, in order to ensure that none of his money goes toward purchasing shares in Lockheed Martin, Exxon Mobile, and other companies that he specifically speaks against.

In the Gasland thread, I said that I do expect landowners in Pennsylvania to refuse to sign possibly highly profitable gas leases that would allow energy companies to engage in chemical fracking on their properties, to the possible detriment of not only their own environment and water supply, but that of those around them.

I can make one distinction right off - many of the people I was complaining about in Gasland were complaining about acts of the gas company that were fully within the rights underlined in the lease. There is no analogy to inadvertently owning stock in a corporation that one does not ethically support - the person is essentially complaining about the terms that they signed.

But there is still an analogy between my expectation that individuals will not profit at the expense of their environment and neighbors' environment and my lack of expectation that Chomsky will not profit off the capitalist system, and specific companies, that he protests. Presumably, Chomsky thinks overthrowing the capitalist system, and companies like Lockheed Martin and Exxon in particular, is of equal importance to ensuring the environmental quality of New York and Pennsylvania.

So I think what gets me here is the strength of the relationship between the action proposed and the effect felt, and the contiguity of the actor with the bad acts. For instance, one person refusing to sign a gas lease will directly prevent fracking on their property. True, a neighbor may allow it and pollute their water supply anyway, but not so many people need to refuse to sign leases to prevent the alleged bad act from happening.

With shareholders, I'm not even quite sure what the desired effect is. To push the company out of business by refusing to buy their stock? Won't they eventually repurchase all their own, go private, etc.? Can you even affect a corporation by refusing to buy their stock? I mean, sure, you could prevent the existence of, say, your cousin's puppy-torturing business venture by refusing to become the third shareholder in the close corporation, but when we're talking about publicly traded companies...anyone have an example of ethical investors taking down a previously successful objectionable publicly-traded company by convincing people not to buy stock in it?

[Former Lord of Winterfell]

What about Bradford's article?

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000155.html

[Guest Raidne]

Bradford takes issue with Chomsky claim that "In the early 1990s, primarily for cynical great power reasons, the US selected Bosnian Muslims as their Balkan clients..."

He says he only ever sees three responses from the idiotic Chomsky-clones:

(1) It was said in haste in an interview--it's not representative of his thought.

(2) Of course the U.S. selected Bosnian Muslims as their Balkan clients for great power reasons! Mineral wealth! Oil pipelines!

(3) 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!

So, I found the original source, in entirety (which you'd think Bradford would link to if he had a shred of integrity, but whatever...)

Here it is:

Can we talk of the clash between two civilizations?

This is fashionable talk, but it makes little sense. Suppose we briefly review some familiar history.

The most populous Islamic state is Indonesia, a favorite of the US ever since Suharto took power in 1965, as army-led massacres slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people, mostly landless peasants, with the assistance of the US and with an outburst of euphoria from the West that was unconstrained, and is so embarrassing in retrospect that it has been effectively wiped out of memory. Suharto remained "our kind of guy," as the Clinton administration called him, as he compiled one of the most horrendous records of slaughter, torture, and other abuses of the late 20th century. The most extreme Islamic fundamentalist state, apart from the Taliban, is Saudi Arabia, a US client since its founding. In the 1980s, the US along with Pakistani intelligence (helped by Saudi Arabia, Britain, and others), recruited, armed, and trained the most extreme Islamic fundamentalists they could find to cause maximal harm to the Russians in Afghanistan. As Simon Jenkins observes in the _London Times_, those efforts "destroyed a moderate regime and created a fanatical one, from groups recklessly financed by the Americans." One of the beneficiaries was Osama Bin Laden. Also in the 1980s, the US and UK gave strong support to their friend and ally Saddam Hussein -- more secular, to be sure, but on the Islamic side of the "clash" -- right through the period of his worst atrocities, including the gassing of the Kurds, and beyond.

Also in the 1980s the US fought a major war in Central America, leaving some 200,000 tortured and mutilated corpses, millions of orphans and refugees, and four countries devastated. A prime target of the US attack was the Catholic Church, which had offended the self-described "civilized world" by adopting "the preferential option for the poor."

In the early 90s, primarily for cynical great power reasons, the US selected Bosnian Muslims as their Balkan clients, to their enormous harm.

Without continuing, exactly where do we find the divide between "civilizations." Are we to conclude that there is a "clash of civilizations" with the Catholic Church on one side, and the US and the most murderous and fanatic religious fundamentalists of the Islamic world on the other side? I do not of course suggest any such absurdity. But exactly what are we to conclude, on rational grounds?

The point here is that there is no clash of civilizations between the Muslim world and the US, or the West generally, because there are great relationships between the US and some Muslim countries, as evidenced for our support for Bosnian Muslims and their fight for an independent state. This is true - we did support that. In all our efforts, we sought to secure their independence, and to punish war crimes perpetrated against them by Christian Bosnian Serbs (with a smattering of Western neo-nazis...). Why did we support the Bosnian Muslim quest for independence? I have no idea. Was it for cynical reasons? I'd be disappointed if it wasn't, as I expect a healthy amount of Realpolitik in every decision made by my government, as we already hashed out at length in the Egypt thread.

The stuff about Robert Faurissan has already been covered at length upthread and never responded to. When Chomsky said that Faurissan is apolitical, he meant precisely that he seems apolitical and is a holocaust denier for reasons that have nothing to do with hating Jews or being a Nazi. Naturally, he's still wrong, etc., but one of Chomsky's great efforts in life to separate any questioning of any beleif held by the Jewish people at large, if there is such a thing, or the state of Israel, from anti-semitism. He wants to say that we can say that Holocaust deniers are crazy, offensive, and totally ignoring the facts, but we shouldn't want to silence them because of their perceived anti-semitism, ever, and we shouldn't *uncritically* label them as anti-semitic. It's a free speech issue.

We can go back to Cambodia - again - I suppose, but we've been there already also, and I can only conclude that Bradford intentionally misrepresents Chomsky's writing or is, sadly for him, just not that bright of a person who is incapable of nuanced thought. I'm actually going with the former for the Balkans thing and the latter for the Nazi sympathizer thing.

Happy?