The king of “America Bad” geopolitical analysis Noam Chomsky, likely on his way out.

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88m3 said:
silence on this
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He's 95 and just had a stroke and you are upset he's not responding to every daily update on Twitter. :dead:


I'm glad you upped the thread tho, Nathan Robinson had the perfect response to the people that @Mister Terrific gets his copy-pastes from:




www.currentaffairs.org

Before Smearing Chomsky, Try Reading Him

Noah Smith launches a facile attack on Noam Chomsky’s foreign policy scholarship that demonstrates some common failures of comprehension.
www.currentaffairs.org www.currentaffairs.org


Blogger Noah Smith—rather tastelessly, in my opinion—seized the moment to write an attack on Chomsky’s work, which he called an “obituary for Chomsky’s ideas on foreign policy.” It is very poorly researched and repeats a number of illogical and ignorant tropes that are commonly found in criticisms of Chomsky. But it provides me an opportunity to clear up these erroneous interpretations, so that no one need repeat them ever again.

Before diving in, I should note that while my own style of responding to critics is usually more affable and empathetic (remember, I am proof that “not all Bernie Bros are angry young men”), Chomsky is known for being somewhat withering and dismissive toward those who attack him without showing signs of having read his work. I’m going to respond to Smith a bit more in the Chomsky vein, because Chomsky is unwell and can’t respond to his critics at the moment,2 and because I think Smith’s attack is about as dishonest and ignorant as a piece of writing can be.

First, let’s remember that the usual practice among serious scholars making accusations is to provide at least one piece of evidence to support them. Smith does not do this. He argues that Chomsky’s foreign policy thinking is based around the central idea that “America is the sole agent of imperialism and conflict in the world.” Smith calls this idea “just wrong.” Indeed, it is just wrong, but it’s not clear what that has to do with Noam Chomsky, who has never said any such thing. Smith doesn’t present any quotes of Chomsky saying anything remotely like it. Smith does cite a random person on Twitter saying something fatuous about how if empires are against American imperialism, then you should support those empires. I would note, however, that Noam Chomsky, who thinks Twitter is worthless, has produced over 80 books on politics alone (in addition to at least 30 on linguistics), and if it’s Chomsky’s view that “America is the sole agent of imperialism and conflict in the world,” it should not be difficult to find him expressing this view. Smith presents nothing of the kind. He can’t, since it’s a fabrication of Chomsky’s views.

In fact, it’s a statement Chomsky would reject utterly for reasons that are obvious to anyone who has read his work. Smith has therefore made up a view and falsely attributed it to Chomsky, a serious act of intellectual malpractice. But I should not be surprised to read this coming from Smith, someone who thinks the minimum wage should be abolished and Donald Trump deserves a Nobel Peace Prize. (Just kidding. In fact, Smith does not think either of those things, but he does apparently believe we can just make things up, accuse people of believing them, and cite nothing to show they actually do believe them. And so I assume I’m entitled to do the same.)

Smith says that “America bad” is the “core of Chomsky’s foreign policy thought” (his emphasis) and that for Chomsky, “the U.S. is the villain in every drama.” He cites, for instance, Chomsky’s “defense of Putin,” claiming that Chomsky “defended Russia’s conduct of its unprovoked war of conquest in Ukraine.” As Carl Beijer points out, this type of criticism of Chomsky has been common for years, and he quotes several critics who have claimed, for instance, that Chomsky “blames the U.S. government for virtually every ill around the world” and thinks America is the “fount of evil in the world.”

It’s trivial to show that these claims are false. A few minutes of Googling and you’ll find records of Chomsky condemning Turkey’s treatment of the Kurds (a cause he has been involved with for a long time), attacking Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his Islamophobia and authoritarian tendencies, signing a petition condemning China’s treatment of its Uyghur minority, and accusing the Hugo Chavez regime in Venezuela of an “assault on democracy.” Here he is praising Iranian protesters who rise up against their regime (“the whole structure of the regime is oppressive and authoritarian and undermines basic civil and other human rights; and protesting against it is not only honorable, but courageous.”) Here he is supporting Soviet dissidents in the ’70s against their repressive government. Here he is criticizing Australian climate policy, and here he is condemning the right-wing Brazilian government of Jair Bolsonaro. I can find you Chomsky comments on Latin American dictatorships, apartheid South Africa, Israel’s occupation of Palestine, French imperialism, the British empire, Saudi Arabia, Suharto’s Indonesia, Pinochet’s Chile, Franco’s Spain, and on and on. In fact, once when I brought up the long U.S. history of disguising crimes as idealism, he replied by cautioning that in this respect “We’re no different from others.” So the idea that Chomsky thinks the U.S. is the world’s only villain is a bald-faced lie.

The error of thinking that Chomsky’s worldview is “America bad” does not come from a careful study of his work, but from a mistaken inference. (In my Chomsky-mode, I would describe it as an “utter failure to grasp the most elementary logic.”) From the fact that most of Chomsky’s political writing consists of criticism of U.S. foreign policy, critics infer that he believes other countries do not commit crimes, or are not aggressive and expansionist, or are somehow “good.” But he has clarified over and over again that his focus on the U.S. cannot and should not be taken to imply excuses for the crimes of others. Instead, as Beijer notes, he talks primarily about the U.S. because he believes we have a primary responsibility to expose and stop our own government’s crimes:



I restrict myself to the discussion of American terror…because I feel that we have some responsibility about it….I don’t talk about, you know, I’ve never written about the terror carried out by both sides in Nigeria let’s say. I don’t like it, obviously, but I don’t see any point in my giving them good or bad marks for it. On the other hand, if we were carrying out the terror, I would very definitely write about it.



This would be obvious in any other context. If a Russian or Iranian dissident wrote nothing but books about Russian or Iranian crimes, we would not assume that because they don’t write about other countries, their “worldview” is “Russia bad” or “Iran bad,” or they thought their countries were the source of all the world’s evil. And we would see immediately that anyone who did accuse them of this, rather than responding to their arguments and evidence, was either very, very stupid, or simply trying to smear and discredit them. To talk much more about your own country’s crimes is perfectly legitimate—and, Chomsky would argue, morally obligatory.. Chomsky explained this well in the ’80s to David Frum, who similarly accused him of being less interested in crimes committed by other countries. Frum picked a bad example (the persecution of the Kurds, whom Chomsky had been publicly supportive of for years), but Chomsky pointed out that we should care more about our own crimes, because they are our crimes, and if we are responsible for 2 percent of the world’s violence, because it’s the violence we can most easily stop, it’s okay if it occupies 100 percent of your attention. I’ve always thought that Chomsky should explain this more, because it’s such an important rejoinder to the most common criticism of his work, but he thinks it’s such an elementary, obvious point that it basically shouldn’t even need spelling out.
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lol at Robinson even using the "America bad" phrasing.


There are a LOT more receipts than that in the article, but I'm not quoting to copy much more because most of Chomsky's critics have proven incapable of reading anything with more characters than Twitter.


www.currentaffairs.org

Before Smearing Chomsky, Try Reading Him

Noah Smith launches a facile attack on Noam Chomsky’s foreign policy scholarship that demonstrates some common failures of comprehension.
www.currentaffairs.org www.currentaffairs.org
 
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☑︎#VoteDemocrat said:
Again, as we’ve all said…Ukraine’s invasion was the straw that broke the tankie’s back. All of the shills got exposed.
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Notice the extreme difficulty these posters have in actually quoting Chomsky, much less quoting him saying anything at all wrong. Nathan Robinson had a response for this too.


www.currentaffairs.org

Before Smearing Chomsky, Try Reading Him

Noah Smith launches a facile attack on Noam Chomsky’s foreign policy scholarship that demonstrates some common failures of comprehension.
www.currentaffairs.org www.currentaffairs.org

But what about Chomsky’s “defense of Putin”? That might indeed be evidence that Chomsky thinks “the U.S. is the villain in every drama,” if Chomsky had ever made a “defense of Putin.” In fact, he has described Putin’s invasion as “the kind of war crime for which Nazis were hanged at Nuremberg, a crime of aggression comparable to the US invasion of Iraq and the Hitler-Stalin invasion of Poland.” The only evidence offered is an interview with the New Statesman in which Chomsky noted that Russia’s destruction in Ukraine was more restrained than U.S. destructiveness in Iraq. This is not a defense of Russia, but a variation on one of Chomsky’s common points: if we (rightly) condemn an adversary country for some crime, why do we not condemn and put our own leaders on trial when they commit worse crimes?

Smith’s passage on Russia is in fact very odd in its reasoning:



The defense of Putin, in particular, shows how “America bad”, rather than any economic theory of geopolitics, is at the core of Chomskyism. Regarding the Cold War, or America’s wars in the Middle East, Chomsky could at least make a superficially plausible case that U.S. actions had economic motivations — opening up new markets, or controlling oil supplies. But Vladimir Putin’s Russia was already wide open to U.S. exports before the war — it was only U.S. sanctions in response to the invasion that pulled these companies out of Russian markets. And the war also caused oil prices to spike, due to the temporary disruption of Russian supplies. Furthermore, Putin’s regime is a capitalist one, with many of the trappings of fascism. No matter — Chomsky simply ignores economics and assumes that the U.S. opposes Russian conquest purely out of a desire for hegemony. Socialism, and its attendant materialist interpretation of conflict, is more peripheral to Chomskyan theory than anti-Americanism.



As we have already seen, there is no “defense of Putin” either stated or implied, in what Chomsky has written on the subject. But this passage is a thick knot of additional stupidities. It’s incredibly peculiar. Smith explains that a crude “materialist interpretation of conflict,” such as the kind he would expect a “socialist” like Chomsky to apply, does not successfully explain U.S. policy toward Russia. Then he says that Chomsky doesn’t apply such an “economic theory of geopolitics,” which must mean that instead of being a socialist, he is simply anti-American. It’s an interesting move to criticize a theory that Chomsky doesn’t apply and then seemingly criticize him for not applying it.

Now, first, one reason that Chomsky doesn’t apply the crude “materialist interpretation of conflict” is that Chomsky doesn’t believe in applying crude theories and is not a Marxist. But also, Smith does not put forth the actual argument that U.S. economic interests (rather than a principled belief in helping Ukraine) drive its policy toward Russia. Smith waves away any such notion by pointing to the fact that Russia was open to U.S. businesses before the war and isn’t now, but all you have to do is open the pages of the Wall Street Journal to read about how the war in Ukraine is good for the American economy and the defense industry in particular. (A fact noted by Smith himself!) Chomsky’s argument is not that Putin was justified in invading, but that the U.S. knowingly took actions it knew would make an invasion more likely and declined to try to facilitate a diplomatic settlement, in part because a long war in Ukraine, while it might be terrible for Ukrainians, is actually good from the narrow perspective of “U.S. interests.”
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As usual, Chomsky's classic line plays well here. Can't claim to be criticizing Chomsky's ideas if you haven't even articulated Chomsky's actual ideas.


Chomsky responded to one of these critics who asked “What do you think of my criticisms of your ideas?” by replying “I don’t detect any criticisms of my ideas.” Noah Smith’s piece is more of the same. How does his criticism of Chomsky’s ideas hold up? There is no criticism of Chomsky’s ideas.
 
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Professor Emeritus said:
Notice the extreme difficulty these posters have in actually quoting Chomsky, much less quoting him saying anything at all wrong. Nathan Robinson had a response for this too.


www.currentaffairs.org

Before Smearing Chomsky, Try Reading Him

Noah Smith launches a facile attack on Noam Chomsky’s foreign policy scholarship that demonstrates some common failures of comprehension.
www.currentaffairs.org www.currentaffairs.org






As usual, Chomsky's classic line plays well here. Can't claim to be criticizing Chomsky's ideas if you haven't even articulated Chomsky's actual ideas.


Chomsky responded to one of these critics who asked “What do you think of my criticisms of your ideas?” by replying “I don’t detect any criticisms of my ideas.” Noah Smith’s piece is more of the same. How does his criticism of Chomsky’s ideas hold up? There is no criticism of Chomsky’s ideas.
Click to expand...
I can’t recall it verbatim because I listened to the audio when the interview was done and I again I came away with the notion that even after all the caveats he still blamed “The West” for “encroaching” on Russia.

How much more rope do you need?
 
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88m3 said:
apnews.com

Today in History: July 11, the fall of Srebrenica

1798: U.S. Marine Corps formally re-established by a congressional act. 1804: Aaron Burr mortally wounds Alexander Hamilton during a pistol duel. In 1859, Big Ben chimes for the first time.
apnews.com apnews.com

I wonder if Chomsky released anything
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*burrrr* you…see…Srebrenica was caused by….US encroachment on….burrrrrr….Serbian territory….also we cannot be sure that….all of the deaths were….caused by…..Serbian forces….Also by my…own…definition…of genocide what…occurred was not….a genocide…but a little light almost microscopic example…of preemptive..ethnic…moving…
 
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☑︎#VoteDemocrat said:
I can’t recall it verbatim because I listened to the audio when the interview was done and I again I came away with the notion that even after all the caveats he still blamed “The West” for “encroaching” on Russia.

How much more rope do you need?
Click to expand...
Apparently the “U.S”. gave verbal “assurances” to Russia that the U.S. wouldn’t expand NATO. This is categorically false as no such agreement exists and has been denied by Russian leadership. As we know US foreign policy was changed from administration to administration so even if there was verbal communication to that extent it would mean very little over the course of 30 fukking years and 5 presidencies.This is besides the fact that no U.S. administration has expressed any willingness to admit Ukraine into NATO. However what does exist are several treaties with guaranteeing Ukrainian sovereignty.

What’s funny is Putin views these western traitors as useful idiots. He laughed in Tuckers face when he tried to give the same justification for Putin’s war. Putin was like “nah, Ukraine is Russia that’s the reason” and brought out a history book. I would love Putin to debate Chomsky or what’s left of him.
 
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Mister Terrific said:
Apparently the “U.S”. gave verbal “assurances” to Russia that the U.S. wouldn’t expand NATO. This is categorically false as no such agreement exists and has been denied by Russian leadership. As we know US foreign policy was changed from administration to administration so even if there was verbal communication to that extent it would mean very little over the course of 30 fukking years and 5 presidencies.This is besides the fact that no U.S. administration has expressed any willingness to admit Ukraine into NATO. However what does exist are several treaties with guaranteeing Ukrainian sovereignty.

What’s funny is Putin views these western traitors as useful idiots. He laughed in Tuckers face when he tried to give the same justification for Putin’s war. Putin was like “nah, Ukraine is Russia that’s the reason” and brought out a history book. I would love Putin to debate Chomsky or what’s left of him.
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I dont get why they just reverse-windmill-dunk the opinions EASTERN European locals who DO NOT want to join/rejoin the Neo-Slavic Russian empire.
 
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☑︎#VoteDemocrat said:
I can’t recall it verbatim because I listened to the audio when the interview was done and I again I came away with the notion that even after all the caveats he still blamed “The West” for “encroaching” on Russia.

How much more rope do you need?
Click to expand...



As I already said:
Professor Emeritus said:
As usual, Chomsky's classic line plays well here. Can't claim to be criticizing Chomsky's ideas if you haven't even articulated Chomsky's actual ideas.


Chomsky responded to one of these critics who asked “What do you think of my criticisms of your ideas?” by replying “I don’t detect any criticisms of my ideas.” Noah Smith’s piece is more of the same. How does his criticism of Chomsky’s ideas hold up? There is no criticism of Chomsky’s ideas.
Click to expand...


Take time out of your spamming to read the article, then respond to what he actually says about Russia in full.

www.currentaffairs.org

Before Smearing Chomsky, Try Reading Him

Noah Smith launches a facile attack on Noam Chomsky’s foreign policy scholarship that demonstrates some common failures of comprehension.
www.currentaffairs.org www.currentaffairs.org
 
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