quote:

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...Jack Straw. In the year 2000, as Home Secretary and in that capacity he had to approve asylum requests. Well one of them - this was actually published in the British press and I didn't think the government would be able to survive, but it passed very quietly - in 2000 there was a request from an Iraqi who had somehow escaped an Iraqi torture chamber and made it to England. He was applying for political asylum. Straw turned him down with a letter saying "we have faith in the integrity of the Iraqi judicial process and that you should have no concerns if you haven't done anything wrong ". In 2000!...

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quote:

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I don't think the US has a vision of security. It has a vision of dominance. So it acts quite consciously in ways that increase insecurity. (Italics mine - N.Beltov) Take, say, the invasion of Iraq. They understood that it was likely to increase the threat of terrorism and proliferation. That's transparent and by now they agree that that happened. Their own intelligence services agree that the invasion substantially increased the threat of terrorism, which is going to be a long - term threat. And it also, of course, increased proliferation.

...In fact, to talk about security is very misleading. States don't seek security, they seek power. (mine again) And the effort to extend power can increase insecurity.

---

It's funny, but later in the interview Chomsky claims that there is no connection between his academic work and his political work. But who could disentangle imperialist doublespeak so skillfully but someone with his linguistic background or something like it?

This other section on the components of "human rights" (as the US sees them) is very instructive.

quote:

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Chomsky: It used to be called "Asian relativism" and "communist relativism" and now it's "Muslim relativism". The fact of the matter is that if we were honest we would recognise that there is relativism with regard to universal human rights, and one of the leaders of the relativist camp is the United States. And the United States and Ireland and Britain and most of the West flatly reject - the US mostly but the others more or less - a central component of the Universal Declaration. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has three components - civil and political rights, social and economic rights, and cultural rights, basically. (mine again, N.B) Well, the United States publicly, flatly, officially rejects the socio - economic rights, explicitly. Jeane Kirkpatrick [former US ambassador to the UN] called them "a letter to Santa Claus". And Morris Abram, the US ambassador to the UN Commission on Human Rights vetoed the "right to development" because it paraphrased Article 25 of the Universal Declaration. And Paula Dobriansky, who's the current Under-Secretary for Global Affairs, she's very publicly explained that we have to eliminate the myth that there are social and economic rights which is poisoning the human rights discourse.

---

We have to "eliminate the myth" that there are such rights. It's the USian way.

I like that Chomsky very clearly points out the revolting hypocrisy of noisily shouting about the lack of certain kinds of rights in other places but remaining silent about the shocking lack of social rights in the USA (or other countries, for that matter).

Great stuff, enriched with the aroma of clarity, as always.

[ 09 March 2006: Message edited by: N.Beltov ]

quote:

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Staunton: If you look at America and around the world, what would be the most hopeful signs that you see?

Chomsky: The populations. Take, say, the United States. One of the most hopeful signs in the United States - I think very hopeful - is that there is an enormous gap between public policy and public attitudes. In fact the gap is so strong that the press literally does not report the studies of public attitudes, literally.
I'll give you an example. The federal budget comes out around February every year for the next year. After the last federal budget last February, one of the major polling institutions in the world, the Program on International Policy Attitudes based in the University of Maryland, which does in - depth studies, did a study of people's attitudes to wards the budget. They were the reverse of the budget. Where the budget was going up, the population wanted it to go down. Where it was going down, they wanted it to go up.

The public was strongly opposed to increased military spending, supplementals for Iraq and Afghanistan. It was very strongly in favour of increases in social spending, health, education, renewable energy, support for United Nations peacekeeping operations... across the board. And it was almost the inverse of the budget.

Well I had a friend do a database search on that. Not a single newspaper in the country reported it.

---

quote:

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States don't seek security, they seek power.

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In some of his recent speeches and interviews, Chomsky has pointed out that, if those running states were really as interested in the security of their citizens as they claim, they'd be doing certain quite obvious things (e.g. spending a lot more on drug education and treatment on their domestic populations than on militarized supply-side eradication programs overseas; or spending the money required to reduce the amount of 'loose' nuclear material; or spending public health dollars to prepare for threats like bird flu).

In case after case, however, you find these same people not only failing to invest properly in these areas, but spending huge resources on things that will predictably increase the risks to their own populations (e.g. invading Iraq).

quote:

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Originally posted by sgm:
Their own actions belie their claims that they're fighting a 'war on terror' 'over there' so that their citizens will be more secure at home.

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quote:

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Cougyr: After 9/11, I'm convinced that many of them would welcome more attacks on their own citizens; it's good for business.

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Chomsky would be one of those to draw attention to the (answer to the) question: Who benefits? etc. And it's clear that those who want the "National Security State" to expand have gotten their wish since 9-11.

quote:

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Originally posted by Cougyr:

After 9/11, I'm convinced that many of them would welcome more attacks on their own citizens; it's good for business.

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quote:

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...remaining silent about the shocking lack of social rights in the USA (or other countries, for that matter).

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Is that an example of what "St Noam" (I didn't know anarchists, or Marxists for that matter, had saints) called "intentional ignorance" in his Amnesty 2006 Lecture?

Or have we just read (or listened to, or watched on video) different things Chomsky published?

What a statement.

Which three communist leaders -- adovcates of Stalinism and anti-revisionism -- have had the most brutal and repressive regimes and are predominantly responsible for people associating the left with totalitarianism?

Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Nicolae Ceausescu.

Which three communist leaders have been American allies at one point in time or another?...

[ 11 March 2006: Message edited by: Heavy Sharper ]

Today's National Post carried a sort of book review of David Horowitz's The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, the review being authored by Jonathan Kay.

Horowitz has a history of offering criticism of Chomsky that amounts to little more than hysterical ad hominem abuse, and Kay, his uncritical reader, has obviously decided to carry on the tradition:

quote:

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Horowitz achieves his goal in The Professors: His parade of villains constitutes a suitably shocking indictment of U.S. academia. But his catalogue also raises an unanswered question about basic human psychology. Reading Churchill's comments, I wasn't merely disgusted. I was also curious: What sort of person thinks like this?

The question goes to the heart of Marxism's lingering hold on the academy. The reason generations of Western academics have embraced the doctrine and its many offshoots -- anti-globalization, anti-Americanism, deconstructionism, etc. -- is that it taps into the personally felt sense that life is inherently unfair. Even for those who've never read a word of Marx, the struggle between worker and capitalist presents a powerful metaphor for the more universal and romantic idea of a righteous underdog fighting back against life's inequities. Championing Palestinians over Israel, blacks over whites, Latinos over "gringos," the homeless over the homed, Osama over America -- all of these seemingly disparate post-Marxist obsessions essentially boil down to the same emotional reflex.

What distinguishes the Ward Churchills and Noam Chomskys is that they give in to this reflex utterly. Something in their psyches makes them identify so desperately, so pathologically with the world's perceived victims that they become blind to plain moral truths such as, say, that flying airplanes into skyscrapers is an unqualified evil.

---

What's more, it's simply a blatant falsehood to claim, as Kay does here, that Chomsky has been 'blind' to 'plain moral truths,' like the truth that flying planes into skyscrapers is evil.

In fact, Chomsky called the 9/11 attacks 'horrendous atrocities,' and echoed Robert Fisk in saying they were carried out with 'wicked and awesome cruelty.'

Moreover, 'plain moral truths' are Chomsky's stock-in-trade. Among the most basic, to which he habitually resorts, is the rule that states must not hold other states to standards they will not themselves meet. By appealing to such a rule, Chomsky exposes the hypocrisy of his own nation's rulers, who have condemned and even attacked other states for sponsoring international terrorism (e.g. Libya, Iraq), while sponsoring the same kind of terrorism themselves (e.g. Nicaragua, Afghanistan) and calling it support for 'freedom fighters.'

So, rather than address the well-documented evidence Chomsky routinely provides when he makes such arguments, Kay simply follows Horowitz in directing the attack to the man, instead of to the argument, seriously misrepresenting both.

Now, as it turns out, what makes Kay's cheerleading of Horowitz's anti-Chomsky smears on the pages of the National Post an unintentional Tale of Irony is American Conservative columnist George Will's love of baseball.

A bit of a stretch?

Well, running right above Kay's article on Horowitz's book, was George Will's article on the Barry Bonds steroid scandal, which Will concluded by considering whether the tainted Bonds and his batting record ought to be consigned to the memory hole:

quote:

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In any case, Bonds's records must remain part of baseball's history. His hits happened. Erase them, and there will be discrepancies in baseball's bookkeeping about the records of the pitchers who gave them up. George Orwell said that in totalitarian societies, yesterday's weather could be changed by decree. Baseball, indeed America, is not like that.

---

According to Will, Baseball, America (and, I assume, Canada: one never knows to whom the Post's editors are speaking) thankfully avoid the totalitarian practice of rewriting yesterday's history by decree.

And yet, just inches below Orwell's denunciation of the totalitarian practice of re-engineering history, we find Jonathan Kay, regular Post columnist, trying to 'change' and re-write Noam Chomsky's positions, which are a matter of historical record: no decree needed, Kay consigned the actual past to the memory hole all on his own, and was rewarded with several column inches in a major national newspaper for his efforts.

Not a drugged-up athlete's hit record, mind, but a well-known academic's stated positions on important issues.

What makes all of this doubly (trebly?) ironic, to my mind, is that Kay wrote just last month about the importance of the principle of free speech when it came to European newspapers' rights to publish certain cartoons, no matter how offensive they might be:

quote:

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But in Europe, it's the lofty principle — not its vulgar implementation — that editors are now standing on. Which is why several other newspapers defied Muslim threats and republished the cartoons this past week. Their point is that the ban on depicting Muhammad is, from a secular perspective, arbitrary — like a fiat against showing a man's elbow. Or an avocado. Or the number eight. And if you give in to that, you're validating a quantum leap in political correctness that opens the door for extremists — of any religion — to enforce any no-go area they please.

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Let me put it this way: if Kay thinks we shouldn't accept others' trying to enforce a 'no-go area' when it comes to cartoons some might find offensive, why does he appear so keen himself to set up 'no-go areas' around certain academics' arguments about American or Israeli policy?

quote:

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Originally posted by Heavy Sharper:
Which ("barbarian"] leaders have been American allies at one point in time or another?...

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Oh come on!

You must have read about a number of not so nice people, including Saddam (until not so long ago).

quote:

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Which ...communist leaders have been American allies at one point in time?

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Stalin

And more recently the successors to Mao

[ 16 March 2006: Message edited by: VanLuke ]

quote:

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Originally posted by sgm:
Horowitz has a history of offering criticism of Chomsky that amounts to little more than hysterical ad hominem

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That's pretty well the exposure Chomsky gets in the bourgeois press. The substance of his writings is only carried in the "left" media.

Check out the column of one of the stars of the Times just a few days ago, David Aaronovitch where the Guardian apologised for ... twice if memory serves.... their apparently deliberate attempt at character assassination. Pity, as I used to like the Guardian for decades.

David Aaronovitch:

quote:

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Chomsky implicitly, had most certainly denied the massacre [at Srebenica]

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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,22369-2084190,00.html

For a summary of what really happened:

quote:

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... is clear that the Guardian's distortions were so obvious on this occasion -- and so obviously damaging to its reputation -- that the editors felt obliged to respond seriously to complaints.

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http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=9188

But what does Aaronovitch care?

He and a lot of others just don't like critique, or the truth - it seems.

[ 15 March 2006: Message edited by: VanLuke ]

[ 16 March 2006: Message edited by: VanLuke ]

quote:

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Originally posted by Heavy Sharper:
American moral relativism, you say?

Which three communist leaders -- adovcates of Stalinism and anti-revisionism -- have had the most brutal and repressive regimes and are predominantly responsible for people associating the left with totalitarianism?

Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Nicolae Ceausescu.

Which three communist leaders have been American allies at one point in time or another?...

[ 11 March 2006: Message edited by: Heavy Sharper ]

---

Stalin was the antithesis to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis who were aided and abetted by western industrialists and banking elite. Without communist Joe, the rest of the world becomes lebensraum at some point and a really cheap source of labour for the likes of IG Farben and Krupps to Henry Ford and Prescott Bush.

Mao, too, was the polar opposite to U.S. and British-backed Chiang Kai Chek, credited with the deliberate murder of over ten million Chinese before fleeing to Taiwan with the bank of China and imperial treasures.

quote:

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Chancellor of Germany
As German bombs fell on London and Nazi tanks rolled over U.S. troops, Sosthenes Behn, president and founder of the U.S. based ITT corporation. met with his German representative to discuss improving German communication systems. ITT was designing and building Nazi phone and radio systems as well as supplying crucial parts for German bombs. Our government knew all about this, for under presidential order, U.S. companies were licensed to trade with the Nazis. The choice of who would be licensed was odd, though: while Secretary of State Breckinridge Long gave the Ford Motor Company permission to make Nazi tanks, he simultaneously blocked aid to German-Jewish refugees because the U.S. wasn't supposed to be trading with the enemy.
Other U.S. companies trading with the Third Reich were General Motors, DuPont, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Davis Oil Co., and the Chase National Bank. President Roosevelt did not stop them fearing a scandal might lead to another stock market crash or lower U.S. morale. Besides, the same companies that traded with Hitler were supplying the U.S., and some corporate leaders threatened to withdraw their support if Roosevelt exposed them. Henry Ford was a good friend of Hitler's. His book The Internatonal Jew had inspired Hitler's Mein Kampf. The Fuehrer kept Ford's picture in his office, and Ford was one of only four foreigners to receive Germany's highest civilian award. As for Sosthenes Behn, at the end of the war, he received the highest civilian award for service to his country - the United States of America.

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Yes, while conservatives in Britain and France were busy appeasing Hitler and Roosevelt happy to let London and Birmingham and Sheffield get their living daylights bombed out, Stalin had already spent fifteen years studying Mein Kampf. He underlined important references to Bolsheviks and Jews. Hitler sent a photographer with Ribbentrop to discover whether or not Stalin's ear lobes were Jewish or Aryan. Uncle Joe knew he was dealing with the devil himself.

At the start of barbarossa, they fully expected the Nazis would occupy the Kremlin in about six weeks time.

quote:

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Yes, while conservatives in Britain and France were busy appeasing Hitler

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While it is true that the Conservative government of Neville Chamberlain appeased Hitler at the time of Munich, (1938), Stalin appeased Hitler during the period 1939-1941.

If anything the Hitler-Stalin pact was worse thasn anything that the British Conservatives did.

Poles and Czechs felt the world had abandoned them. Everyone knew that Hitler was violating WWI non-proliferation by building war ships, tanks(ford) and troop carriers(GM). Stalin knew it was a matter of time before German aggression against the revolution part two was underway.

[ 17 March 2006: Message edited by: Fidel ]

The essay is here.

The essay is about five months old, and was apparently thrown together from Schweizer's 'book' just as Chomsky had been named top intellectual by the Prospect.

The Post's decision to publish it five months after its best-before date probably has to do with the fact that a few letter writers offered decent defences of Chomsky in the pages of the Post in the days after Kay's sorry excuse for a book review.

[ 21 March 2006: Message edited by: sgm ]