If Noam Chomsky's apologetics for genocide and terrorism and his consistent dishonesty bother you, too, Sash Castel has assembled a pair of links that will make it much easier to squish Chomskyite followers. At least, if you're unlucky enough to know any.
Almost 2 years after it was first published, Pejmanpunit's post of Feb. 27, 2002 calling Chomsky "A Rasputin for Our Time" still stands tall with its concise bullet points and additional sources.
With these two resources alone, you'll be able to more than hold your own in future firefights. So, now that you're intellectually locked and loaded, remember that there's no season on Chomskyites! No bag limit, either.
UPDATE: LGF has some additional suggestions.
No bag limit? Well then, if unrestricted hunting of a species can result in the extinction of that species or the significant decline of that species to a very restricted and dwindling ecosphere, where for Pete's sake can I get a license? I want to contribute to helping an endangered species become more endangered! Please, oh please.
Amritas is a good source for Anti-Chomskyans in his supposed field of expertise, linguistics. Too many posts to link - just keep scrolling.
Any list that includes notorious liars like Werner Cohn and David Horowitz is somewhat dubious. Chomsky is far from endangered - he sold so many books after 9-11 that his publishers started reprinting his books that had been out of print for years. It's still SRO to see one of his talks in person, and he is booked 2 years in advance. I guess his critics aren't too effective.
Ken, "popular" does not always equal "right".
Angua,
True enough - but Chomsky's growing popularity refutes George's "endangered species" comment.
Ken is right - Chomskyites aren't rare.
Then again, neither were passenger pigeons.
Found this blog through LGF. Nice work! esp. Convert Stories - perhaps I should write mine ;)
I started blogging recently, and I started with Chomsky:
…By stealing other people’s work, using a lot of long senseless words, and making up fancy bulls**t, the pathetic charlatan Naum Chomsky was able to convince a number of unfortunate lemming “intellectuals” that he was a genius.
http://www.anti-com.com/cgi-bin/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=870
Please read the whole article - maybe you like it!
I think that Chomsky's growing popularity is part of a broader trend, and his ideas should be exposed for the fraud they contain, and his persona and his cult following - ridiculed.
CHOMSKY SUCKS - RUMSFELD ROCKS
Just a minor point; what you meant to say is that there is an open season on Chomskyites. No season on them would mean they could not be hunted.
Joe: I not only detest Chumpsky's political views, but his professional ones! I was forced to take Computational Linguistics in grad school, and it is my considered belief that Chumpsky set silicon speech understanding back twenty years (although Amritas says 50)! Even as we speak the Incredibly Stupid Theory of Deep Grammer is being forced down the throats of college students everywhere!
Joe: I see the top thread has been corrupted-- maybe we can still addrees the topic here.
Considering how memes are propagated in our culture, universities are a potent source of memetic enforcement. My question to Josh Yelon was not intended to be flippant. Is there some difference that predisposes the choice of a college major? Can a linkage be established between domains of expertise and political ideaology? Are students of linguistics destined to be liberals? Well, Amritas is not, but he is something of an outlier.
My point is, the memetic reinforcement in this example is very strong. Once a student has chosen linguistics as a major, it is a near certainty that his training will be in Chompskyan linguistics. This student's brain may be more or less receptive to liberal ideology, but the receptors are preprogrammed to accept chompskyan ideology. Most probably the receptors do not distinguish between linguistics and politics at the biochemical level.
And I guess I really just wanted to see if I was banned. :)
Chomsky. It's not a comment on his eating habits. ;-)
Awwwwwwwah, Gary, can't I be allowed my bit of memetic fun? :-(
Needs more seasoning. Or maybe more cow-bell.
But, hey, if it's intentional, don't let me get in your way. No drooling, though, please.
nice site i really like it
nice site i really like it
[Drive-by dump of the text of an entire "play", already posted elsewhere. Deleted by Marshal.]
Kropotkin Beard got the spelling wrong. The name is spelled "Sandinistas," not "Sandanistas", as Beard has it.
Augusto Sandino practiced torture with his machete during the 1920's. The three kinds of cuts with the machete are described by his sympathetic biographer in The Sandino Affair by professor Neill Macaulay of Florida.
Despite its pretentious title, the Journal of Historical Review is a little journal published in southern California by Nazi apologists by what is called the Institute for Historical Review.
In 1986-7, Robert Faurisson published there an article in defence of Rudolf Hoss, the Nazi commandant at Auschwitz (vol 7, no. 4). Other articles try to descredit the Nazi death camps.
Gentle reader, you will recall that Chomsky sweetly called Faurisson "a relatively apolitical liberal."
In 1985, Chomsky himself appeared in the Journal (vol.7. no. 1) The neo-Nazis recognize a fellow-traveller from MIT. A wink is as good as a nod.
Greg said:
"In 1986-7, Robert Faurisson published there an article in defence of Rudolf Hoss, the Nazi commandant at Auschwitz (vol 7, no. 4). Other articles try to descredit the Nazi death camps."
Yes? So?KB
"Gentle reader, you will recall that Chomsky sweetly called Faurisson "a relatively apolitical liberal.""
Well, given that's what Faurisson called himself in the Manufacturing Consent I don't see a problem. After all, I've actually seen idiots call Chomsky a communist, so what do you expect?KB
"In 1985, Chomsky himself appeared in the Journal (vol.7. no. 1) The neo-Nazis recognize a fellow-traveller from MIT. A wink is as good as a nod."
Yes, Chomsky's a Nazi. Have you ever read a book?KB
Chomsky perfected many of the rhetorical tricks of the Holocaust Denial trade; e.g., "After the Cataclysm".
Here's a summary of 100 Chomsky lies:
http://www.paulbogdanor.com/100chomskylies.pdf
"KB" (aka Kropotkin Beard) is a buffoonish troll who surfs the net looking for sites where he can "defend" his lord and master, Ayatollah Noam Chomsky, mainly by insulting those who dare to criticize Chomsky's crackpot political ramblings and copious historical fabrications. One of KB's favourite tactics was to write lame "satires" lampooning supposed "anti-Chomskyites" and leave them all over cyberspace like goat droppings. As a blog commenter, KB is as close to being a raving madman as you're ever likely to find.
BMcB said:
"Chomsky perfected many of the rhetorical tricks of the Holocaust Denial trade; e.g., "After the Cataclysm"."
Really? Have any examples, or did you just read this on the bathroom wall somewhere? Once again, a whine with no evidence.kb
"Here's a summary of 100 Chomsky lies:
http://www.paulbogdanor.com/100chomskylies.pdf"
I highly recommend everyone go here as well. You can get a compilation of many of the illiterates all together. It's saves one time. But rather than referring us to someone else's "interpretation" of Chomsky's writings, all of which have been debunked, why don't you get off your lazy butt and give us some evidence from your own study of the topic? What?! Never read him? Hmmm....Is NOT studying the topic before rambling about it like you have something taught in home-schooling?kb
Shaven McBeard goeson to ramble:
"KB" (aka Kropotkin Beard) is a buffoonish troll who surfs the net looking for sites where he can "defend" his lord and master, Ayatollah Noam Chomsky"
Notice that there is no evidence given for anything. Notice that he doesn't say how I "troll". Notice how he says I "defend" Chomsky, when, in actuality, I rarely mention his name at all, as I'm usually only saying that he doesn't have the positions which are incorrectly attributed to him. Notice how that simply because I know his works, and buffoons like McBeard don't know his works, that this makes him my "lord and master". Notice how he uses simplistic name calling as he obviously has no game. He doesn't mention in what way Chomsky is Ayatollaesque at all. Nothing. Zero. Zip. There's nothing here other thank drunken Rushite opinion based on nothing.kb
"mainly by insulting those who dare to criticize Chomsky's crackpot political ramblings"
Insulting someone who persists on putting forth ignorant ass notions which have nothing to do with reality is a service which you should thank me for. I mean, it's quite embarrassing to hear supposed grownups running around making statements which amount to little more than 2+2=11teen. I welcome criticisms, and always have, as long as they're being made by someone who has actually studied the topic first and have some idea about what they're talkinig about. And if you actually knew what "I did" on the internet you'd see this mentioned in most every comment section I've even made.(Yet another indication of his illiteracy and tendency to lie)However, when someone who knows nothing about the subject starts pretending to, then I tell them that they're wrong, and then prove that they're wrong, as you would have also noticed had you read anything I've written. (ps. Notice, once again, how he gives no evidence that Chomsky has ever made a "crackpot ramble" in his life. Well, where's the evidence? There's not a sentence in the Paul B. link which has anything. Nothing at all. SImply because there are 20 like-minded idiots who believe that 2+2=11teen hardly makes their rambling more legit.kb
"and copious historical fabrications."
Really? Where? I've read all of his books and haven't seen what you're referring to. And you, as one would expect, give nothing. So, you're just blowing smoke, like most self-proclaimed anti-Chomskyites.kb
"One of KB's favourite tactics was to write lame "satires" lampooning supposed "anti-Chomskyites""
That's not a "tactic". That's simply a fact. True, it IS like shooting already dead fish in a barrell, but most deserve it. Were they simply honest, admitted that they knew nothing about what they were "trying" to talk about it, ask questions about that which they didn't know, like good little students, learning something, or even more radical, actually read him for themselves, then there would be no problem. However, folks like you don't do this. You're little more than an unwitting pseudo-patrotic propagandist, as I've already demonstrated.kb
"and leave them all over cyberspace like goat droppings."
And? Did you wish to try and respond to one, say what's wrong with it, challenge something, etc....or were you just going to sit there and whine like to rightwing neo-conartists always do?You have no game or you be challenging something. I'll be waiting.kb
"As a blog commenter, KB is as close to being a raving madman as you're ever likely to find."
As has been demonstrated by you? Once again, no evidence. On the other hand a rational person would look at your opening comments and conclude the same about you. But you wouldn't understand this. Perhaps a challenge of some sort? Still waiting.(snore)kb
I've just read "The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism: The Political Economy of Human Rights, Volume I. By Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman. South End Press, 1979."
The pseudo-scholarly appearance of this book - replete with quotations and footnotes - should fool no-one: this is a work of propaganda, in which American allies are furiously attacked and communist dictatorships relentlessly excused. Perhaps its most noteworthy feature is the assertion that �Washington has become the torture and political murder capital of the world� (p16), although not one of the reactionary crimes cited by the authors amounts to even a microscopic fraction of the tens of millions who had just been massacred or starved to death in the People�s Republic of China or the millions who were dying at that very moment at the hands of communist tyrants in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, let alone the countless victims of near-genocidal Soviet client regimes, from Ethiopia to Uganda.
Needless to say, Chomsky and Herman flatly deny the post-war atrocities in Vietnam, congratulating the communist dictatorship on its �miracle of reconciliation and restraint� involving �close to zero retribution deaths� (p28) and concluding that there has been �no bloodbath, so far as is known; nothing like what happened in France� after the Second World War (pp79-80). The statement is remarkable, both for its denial of crimes against humanity and for its suggestion that had such crimes taken place, the victims would have deserved no more sympathy than Nazi collaborators. Needless to say, Chomsky and Herman suppress the abundant contemporary accounts of repression and brutality, and they do not even hint at the massacre of perhaps 200,000 South Vietnamese - with victims beheaded, eviscerated or buried alive - or the mass killings in concentration camps or the mass expulsions that drowned 200,000-250,000 boat people. Could any reader, no matter how diligent, guess the truth from these pages?
Hardly less shameful is the whitewashing of massive communist atrocities during the war, such as the claim that Viet Cong success was based on �understanding and trying to meet the needs of the masses� (p340), or the suggestion that the terrorists are �not likely to resort to bloodbaths� because they seek the support of the peasants (p341). The reader is not told that Viet Cong death squads butchered some 37,000 civilians, or that the victims - typically doctors, teachers, social workers and their families - died after sadistic torture and mutilation: �Sometimes they chop off a finger or a hand, just as a warning. In other instances, they disembowel a man or impale him alive before the eyes of his fellow villagers�. Omissions such as these would make Orwell cringe.
Having denied these atrocities - surely some of the most hideous crimes in living memory - Chomsky and Herman turn to �the two most important mythical bloodbaths,� namely the North Vietnamese land reform and the Viet Cong massacres at Hue (p341). On the pre-war slaughter in North Vietnam, they rely on a long-refuted piece of communist agitprop by Gareth Porter, who fabricated mistranslations of sources, smeared witnesses as CIA agents, treated North Vietnamese official statistics as gospel truth and would later argue that Cambodia�s killing fields did not exist - the evidence being that the Khmer Rouge said so. By contrast, they simply ignore the numerous eye-witnesses who testified that 50,000-100,000 were massacred and many more starved to death.
On the massacre at Hue, Chomsky and Herman quote from a captured document in which the Viet Cong boast of having �eliminated� thousands of people, but they dismiss the evidence because �nowhere in the document is it claimed or even suggested that any civilians had been executed� (p348). So �eliminated� does not mean �executed.� No satirist could invent such an argument. They do not mention the many other Viet Cong documents recording the massacres, such as the report boasting that they had �annihilated members of various reactionary political parties, henchmen, and wicked tyrants� in Hue. Nor do they disclose that North Vietnam also admitted communist responsibility for the bloodbath, gloating at �the hooligan lackeys who had owed blood debts to the Tri-Thien Hue compatriots and who were annihilated� in the Tet Offensive.
Quite simply, there is no limit to the absurdity of the denials in this book: we are even told that �the apparent absence of retributory killings in post-war Vietnam� proves that there was no massacre at Hue (p353). Applying this logic elsewhere, perhaps we can imagine some neo-Nazi tract which defends the claim that the Kristallnacht pogrom was a hoax with the assertion that the Holocaust never happened. Note that such analogies are rather generous to Chomsky and Herman, since the atrocities they deny are far less widely known than their Nazi equivalents, therefore much more easily concealed.
Like all sophisticated propaganda, this book contains particles of truth. The authors are right to condemn Indonesian atrocities in East Timor. But can we take their indignation seriously, when they zealously defend communist mass murderers in Vietnam? Is anyone impressed by double standards on genocide?
Someone blows KB just wrote above:
Well, I'll save you the trouble. There isn't one line of truth in anything written here, including his assertion that he read the book in question. I mean, at least for his sake I hope this was a lie. It's better to have not read it and simply collected a few lies from other ignorant-ass anti-Chomsky illiterates, than to actual have read it and simply interpreted it this far off. I think it would be difficult for anyone who has graduated from at least third grade of elementary school to come up with the ideas expressed here. So, once again, I hope SBKB (Someone Blows KB)chooses the lesser outright lying, than the less "honorable" not to mention embarrassingly ignorant just-can't-read-and-understand-basic-sentences-path. He actually said "apologetics" somewhere as if there was one instance in the book somewhere. I'll assume he saw Elvis dancing with Big Foot on a UFO there, too, somewhere. There is probably more evidence for this. Anyway, SBKB offers nothing, but opinion, old outdated and WAAAAY long ago disproven assertions, out of context mis-representations, and, well, you know. All the usual characteristics of the anti-Chomsky ilk. It's actually quite funny though they don't know why. For those of you familiar with the topic, or any of Chomsky's work for that matter, the ramblings above are little more than bathroom gossip. The entire premise if off from what Chomsky and Herman set out to do, which they make quite clear, at least to those who can read and comprehend simple sentences. They take no position at all, nor was their point to try and take a position. If you "think" you see one, this is more a statement of your own indoctrination rearing it's butt-ugly head, than it is anything they've written, or not, as in this case. Here, let's refer this poor soul to the film 'Manufacturing Consent' which came out in about, what, 88', which covers all of this in great detail. I mean, we all knew that those suseptible to the anti-Chomsky disorder/disease were a little slow, but the world really IS round. It isn't flat. And as soon as you try and understand this, the sooner you won't make yourself look like an idiot in public day after day. How embarrassing for you this "should" be. I'm almost embarrassed for you. It's like every time I watch Bush speak, I sit and wit for the next idiotic statement, and feel as if he just farted during a quiet part as he was singing a Celine Dion song on American Idle (puns intended). Your statements here regarding Chomsky are sort of the same. It's just so embarrassing that you haven't a clue that each time you repeat these old debunked notions, that you are, in fact, supporting Chomsky's theses regarding propaganda. You are unwittingly helping him, charlatan. Anyway, anything you can offer is more than welcome. Bitch-slap you soon. KB