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

[Pressure]

There's no nuance in him being able to call out genocide, ethnic cleansing, nor war crimes by saying it could have been worse and attempting to parallel it with the west.

It's really sad that he polluted discourse via his associations with elite American institutions, ironically the same institutions his sycophants criticize, but I digress.

That said, merely making anticapitialism and anti American arguments doest make you smart.

And that's less of an insult to him as those who attempt to follow him in argumentation.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

There's no nuance in him being able to call out genocide, ethnic cleansing, nor war crimes by saying it could have been worse and attempting to parallel it with the west.

That's a meaningless statement. Have you not even understood his argument, or are you just pretending not to?

He frequently calls out war crimes by nations of every type. But he argues that America ONLY does it when their enemies are involved while ignoring their own such crimes and those of their allies, and thus America's accusations of genocide have turned into nothing more than a cynical political tool rather than any objective commitment to human rights.

Do you deny the truth in that? Can you actually argue against that? Because not one of Chomsky's haters has even addressed his real argument or any of his critique of America anywhere in this thread.

That said, merely making anticapitialism and anti American arguments doest make you smart.

And that's less of an insult to him as those who attempt to follow him in argumentation.

How many more times are you going to try to act superior while saying nothing?

Chomsky is an order of magnitude more intelligent and insightful than any of his critics posted in this thread. And those who are supporting Chomsky in the thread have shown a much deeper understanding of history than those arguing against him. There's a reason why Chomsky's supporters here are making detailed arguments based on actually reading his work and other histories while his detractors are just copy-pasting social media.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

The hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky​

by
Keith Windschuttle
On the philosopher’s record of defending authoritarian regimes.


Notice whenever far leftists get caught out defending their favorite genocidal regime of the week it’s always “how could I know?”. My response “What do you know and why should I listen to you?”

Keith Windschuttle, the right-wing editor of Quadrant who made a career of repeatedly denying racism and genocide of Aboriginals in Australia?

Keith Windschuttle - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

"The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803–1847 (2002), which accuses a number of Australian historians of falsifying and inventing the degree of violence in the past;[6]"

"The White Australia Policy (2004), a history of that policy which argues that academic historians have exaggerated the degree of racism in Australian history;[7]"

"The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume Three: The Stolen Generations 1881–2008, which argues the story of the "stolen generations" of Aboriginal children is a myth.

The wikpedia article for him is EXTENSIVE in how often he denies racism and other bad deeds by white Australians. He's been so prominent in his critique of left-wingers that that racist mass-murderer in Norway cited him as an inspiration for his acts.

"In the wake of the 2011 Norway attacks, Windschuttle did not deny that the perpetrator, Anders Behring Breivik, had read and praised statements he had made at a symposium in New Zealand in 2006,[14] but stressed that he was "still at a complete loss to find any connection between them and the disgusting and cowardly actions of Breivik". Windschuttle went on to add that "it would be a 'disturbing accusation' if people thought that he had ever used deliberately provocative language that might have caused Breivik to take up a rifle and shoot unarmed teenagers in cold blood".[15][16]"

Keith Windschuttle - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

You're so blindly copy-pasting anyone who criticizes Chomsky that you happily co-sign white deniers of racism, just so long as they support "the West".

 

[mastermind]

You're so blindly copy-pasting anyone who criticizes Chomsky that you happily co-sign racist white deniers of racism, just so long as they suppor "the West".

He is a Rhoades Scholar. It makes sense.

 

[Mister Terrific]

There's no nuance in him being able to call out genocide, ethnic cleansing, nor war crimes by saying it could have been worse and attempting to parallel it with the west.

Anyone that attempts to weigh one atrocity against another in order to prove one side is more evil than the other is always going to be a retched creature. Who’s first though when reading about women being gang raped and men being shot and thrown in ditches is “well wasn’t the Holocaust”. The UN and ICC coming out and calling it a genocide matters little as they are of course proxies as well.

Of course we know the reason Chomsky does this is because the U.S. must be the most evil regime in the world in order to justify his life’s work which is tearing down western civilization. Mao murdering 35 million and forcing families to eat each other pales in comparison to the United States. The bane of human existence. Anyone that follows the U.S. isn’t a sovereign country and has no independence. Look at the absolute bile he unleashed on Britain. “They aren’t an independent country”. What a cretin.

What’s amusing is an intellectual like Chomsky would’ve certainly been shot by any of these regimes. He wouldn’t have made it to 30. First whiff of dissent and they would’ve dragged him out behind a shed a put hot metal into his brain. Not just him anyone that corresponded with him or was even distantly related. Instead he’s lived to the ripe poor age of 94 in care, comfort of the west and all the adulation he could ever have hoped to received from his similar deluded sycophants. This in a country he calls worse for media than the Soviets. Apparently not getting a prime time slot on CNN is the same as getting beaten to death in a Soviet basement.

It’s why he is so dismissive of Eastern European dissidents. He feels a sort of guilt when weighed against men who actually died for their beliefs. I remember listening to Chapo Trap House at the start of the Russian invasion and absolute vitriol they heroes on Zelensky. How dare this Jewish puppet actually fight for his people. Ukrainian resistance was supposed to collapse like Afghanistan, Zelensky was supposed to flee with a bag of gold like the Afghan President and we were to herald further collapse of American prestige and power.

When that didn’t happen and the Ukrainians fought like lions and started winning battles and NATO and Europe and East Asia united against the threat they devolved into pure psychosis. If we don’t allow the Russian Lebensraum to occur we will face nuclear annihilation so you see we must surrender and somewhere Putin is rubbing his hands together at his cabal of useful idiots. Though I suspect if you started checking bank accounts we would quickly come to the conclusion the truth is more like paid idiots.

It's really sad that he polluted discourse via his associations with elite American institutions, ironically the same institutions his sycophants criticize, but I digress.

That said, merely making anticapitialism and anti American arguments doest make you smart.

And that's less of an insult to him as those who attempt to follow him in argumentation.

You hit the nail on the head. Without Chomsky’s credentials who do they have left? Brie Brie Joy and her dissertation on Hamasian democracy?

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Anyone that attempts to weigh one atrocity against another in order to prove one side is more evil than the other is always going to be a retched creature.

But that's exactly what you've been doing this entire thread.


You have never ONCE addressed a single one of Chomsky's criticisms of American actions. You just keep attacking his comparisons and trying to dispute his claim that America is no better than them. You can't do that by defending the USA on its own merits, so you keep deflecting to the actions of other countries over and over again.

Your last comment suggests that you don't even have a fukking clue what Chomsky is writing about. His ENTIRE THESIS is that the USA has failed to address war crimes and human rights violations when committed by itself or its enemies, but then cynically weaponizes claims of genocide when committed by its enemies. Nothing you've written in this entire thread addresses that at all. It's as if you're just blindly lashing out at him because he criticizes America, without even actually understanding what he says.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

I'll give one of the most blatant examples that underpines what Chomsky is talking about.


During the Reagan Administration, when Saddam Hussein was our ally, the USA helped him carry out chemical weapons attacks against the Kurds and Iranians and then helped run cover for him in front of the UN:

Exclusive: CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran

The U.S. knew Hussein was launching some of the worst chemical attacks in history -- and still gave him a hand.

foreignpolicy.com

Opinion | Halabja : America didn't seem to mind poison gas (Published 2003)

In calling for regime change in Iraq, George W. Bush has accused Saddam Hussein of being a man who gassed his own people. Bush is right, of course. The public record shows that Saddam's regime repeatedly spread poisonous gases on Kurdish villages in 1987

www.nytimes.com

OFFICERS SAY U.S. AIDED IRAQ IN WAR DESPITE USE OF GAS (Published 2002)

Unidentified senior US military officers say covert US program during Reagan administration provided Iraq with critical battle planning assistance at time when US intelligence agencies knew Iraqi commanders would employ chemical weapons against Iran; comments respond to query about gas warfare...

www.nytimes.com

U.S. Says It Monitored Iraqi Messages on Gas (Published 1988)

www.nytimes.com

Why the U.S. concealed its chemical weapons role in Iraq

From 2004 to 2011, the Pentagon covered up injuries to U.S. troops in Iraq from chemical weaponry supplied to Saddam Hussein by the U.S. and other countries in the 1980s, according to a disturbing, detailed report in the New York Times last week.

www.peoplesworld.org

Yet just 15 years later, when the son of Reagan's VP was now in power, the Bush Administration used those exact same attacks as part of its justification for going into Iraq and killing over 600,000 people:

"We know that the regime has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, VX nerve gas. Saddam Hussein also has experience in using chemical weapons. He has ordered chemical attacks on Iran, and on more than forty villages in his own country. These actions killed or injured at least 20,000 people, more than six times the number of people who died in the attacks of September the 11th."

President Bush Outlines Iraqi Threat

President Bush Monday provided a comprehensive assessment of the threat Saddam Hussein's regime poses to the security of the United States and the World and our commitment to confront it.

georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov

Loading…

www.jstor.org

An Inconvenient Truth

In 1988 US officials helped disguise Saddam's chemical attack on Halabja. But when it came time to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq, they acted outraged.

www.thenation.com

When Saddam was our ally, we could assist his war crimes and then help him cover them up.

When Saddam was our enemy, we could denounce those exact same crimes and use them as an excuse to invade and kill enormous numbers of civilians.



The average American policy maker doesn't give a flying fukk how many civilians die in Cambodia, Iraq, Serbia, Ukraine, Palestine, or any other poor country other than the degree to which it helps or hurts their current political narrative. America justifies killing people when it believes that killing serves its geopolitical objectives, it looks the other way from war crimes when it feels the nation committing those war crimes is serving America's political objectives, and it calls out war crimes when it believes it can use accusations of war crimes to its political advantage. THAT is the bullshyt hypocrisy that Chomsky is pointing out. THAT is the reason he keeps comparing America's actions to those of the nations we criticize.

Chomsky actually cares about our human rights violations and wants to stop them from happening. @Toussaint only cares about making sure that America looks good and its enemies look bad, regardless of what actually happens. If you look at our past interactions, @Toussaint is ALWAYS supporting the American military intervention and ALWAYS attacking our enemies, even when he admits that he hardly knows the facts of the case (and he often gets those facts wrong). But he doesn't care, because all he needs to know is which side America is on.

In that sense, @Toussaint is the perfect example of what Chomsky is talking about when he highlights American hypocrisy.

 

[Mister Terrific]

On Dissidence​

Noam Chomsky debates with Stefan Kubiak​

All quotes by Chomsky

Poland, of course,
was oppressed by Russian tyranny, as were the other countries and
the people of Russia itself. But only on rare occasions, such
as the invasion of Hungary, did that oppression begin to approach
what the US has done routinely to Latin America (to pick only one
example) during the same period (and to Central America and the
Caribbean, long before). Take, say, the treatment of dissidents.

In Poland, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere in Soviet domains they
had a hard time. But they didn’t expect anything like the fate
of the leading Jesuit intellectuals who had their brains blown
out by elite military forces armed, trained, and directed by the
US — and many others like them. One Polish priest was murdered
by the Polish police. During the 1980s, there were over a
hundred religious martyrs murdered — often after brutal torture
and rape — by US-run forces in Central America, including an
Archbishop, four American nuns working with the poor, etc. And
hundreds of thousands of peasants, working people, and others
were murdered, often with extreme brutality, during the same
decade, while four countries were devastated to the extent that
they may not recover.

But though Latin Americans suffered far more, their reactions
where far less self-centered. Central American Jesuits, for
example, have been very critical of US power, but that has not
led them to be uncritical of Soviet power. On the contrary, they
have been highly critical of Soviet tyranny and brutality, and
have always expressed great compassion, sympathy, and support for
dissidents in Eastern Europe whose oppression, while real, didn’t
come close to what they were suffering. Having worked with
oppressed people through much of the world, and read a good deal
of what they write, I know that pattern holds throughout the
world, with one exception: East Europe.

Thus I took personal initiatives in the case of Eastern European
dissidents — several of whom were finally released to go the
West in part as a result of these efforts — that far exceed
anything I did for dissidents in US domains who were suffering
much worse oppression. I don’t say that with pride. Rather, it
simply reflects the great ease of opposing repression in Eastern
Europe as compared with the enormous difficulty of even
discussing much worse repression when its roots are in domestic
power. There is nothing historically unique about this — we can
trace it back to classical Greece and the Bible. But we do no
one any service by denying very clear and plain facts.

Your historical remarks are interesting, but I do not think that
they are pertinent. Latin American intellectuals have a history
of hundreds of years of oppression, first in the colonial period,
more recently mostly by the US. The same is true of Africa,
which suffered far more under European rule than Eastern Europe
did — with the exception of Hitler and Stalin, who did compare
with standard European behaviour, for example, the behaviour of
King Leopold of Belgium, who murdered 10 million people in 20
years in his Congo possessions while greatly enriching himself
and Belgium, a feat that is impressive even by 20th century
standards (and that has virtually disappeared from history, since
the murder was carried out by the wrong hands). And the same is
surely true of the native American population of the US, who were
reduced from perhaps 8-10 million to 200,000 by 1900. But
nevertheless, they do not rush to Moscow to praise “the defenders
of freedom” or write other shameful nonsense about the marvels
that the Soviet tyrants brought to the world within their reach.

On Dissidence

The Noam Chomsky Website.

chomsky.info

Chomsky once again engaging in atrocity Olympics. Gotta love how he catches himself about to hold face lie about the suffering of Eastern Europeans when he catches himself “buh buh except Stalin”

Yeah jackass Stalin murdered a high end estimate of 60 million people and threw millions more in labor camps. Then he starts diverting to Belgium.

My God how can anyone take this dope seriously?

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Chomsky once again engaging in atrocity Olympics.

He is saying that White colonial powers have tended to treat non-White people far worse than they treat other White people.

Do you dispute that even for a moment?

Gotta love how he catches himself about to hold face lie about the suffering of Eastern Europeans when he catches himself “buh buh except Stalin”

Yeah jackass Stalin murdered a high end estimate of 60 million people and threw millions more in labor camps. Then he starts diverting to Belgium.

My God how can anyone take this dope seriously?

Do you really have NO idea what you just read?

He said that generally, White imperialists have treated oppressed White populations better than oppressed Black/Brown populations EXCEPT FOR HITLER AND STALIN, who stick out in history because they oppressed White people just as badly as other White imperialists had oppressed Native Americans, Africans, and Central Americans.

The fact that King Leopold was never demonized by the media the way Stalin was, even though Leopold arguably killed MORE people than Stalin did, helps demonstrate his point that the media looks at it differently when the victims are Africans.


Which part of that do you actually disagree with?

 

[wire28]

There's no nuance in him being able to call out genocide, ethnic cleansing, nor war crimes by saying it could have been worse and attempting to parallel it with the west.

It's really sad that he polluted discourse via his associations with elite American institutions, ironically the same institutions his sycophants criticize, but I digress.

That said, merely making anticapitialism and anti American arguments doest make you smart.

And that's less of an insult to him as those who attempt to follow him in argumentation.

Speak for yourself

America sucks

The Pulitzer should be here next week

 

[Professor Emeritus]

He is a Rhoades Scholar. It makes sense.

I mean holy shyt, just in his last two comments he:


1. Posted an essay by a white right-winger who has built his entire career on denying Australian racism and genocide

2. Attacked Chomsky for saying that White imperialists usually treat non-White populations worse than they treat White ones.



And he thinks that posting this shyt will make HL posters turn on Chomsky. At this point, @Toussaint is either a malfunctioning got or some psych-op trying to make Chomsky critics look ignorant.

 

[Mister Terrific]

Speak for yourself

America sucks

The Pulitzer should be here next week

Life’s work personified

 

[ADevilYouKhow]

In theory Marx and Engels wanted to eliminate people based on class and not race(tended to not work out that way in practice for reasons sometimes but oh well)

Surely just a coincidence that communist countries exterminated their minorities anyways. Odd though that China and modern day Russia are still at it(the ethnic cleansing and genocide stuff)when you think about it after all they are the saviors of the developing world

Anyways the West is far too decadent and not enough people are critical of that.


Food for thought

 

[Mister Terrific]

WikiTargeted​

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange preaches openness. But in Belarus, Europe’s last dictator is using once-secret U.S. cables to go after dissidents.​

In December 2010, Israel Shamir, a WikiLeaks content aggregator in Russia, traveled to Belarus with a cache of unredacted American diplomatic cables concerning Belarus. (At the time, these unredacted cables were not available online.) He met Lukashenko’s chief of staff, Vladimir Makei, handed over the documents to the government, and stayed in the country to observe the presidential elections. Lukashenko pronounced himself the winner on Dec. 19, 2010, with nearly 80 percent of the vote. His nearest opponent, the leading dissident Andrei Sannikov, is now serving out a five-year prison sentence and is reportedly being tortured.
The same month that Shamir was in Minsk on behalf of WikiLeaks, the American left-wing journal Counterpunch published an article by Shamir in which he extolled Lukashenko (“The president of Belarus … walks freely among his people”), derided the dictator’s opponents (“The pro-Western ‘Gucci’ crowd,” Shamir called them), and credited WikiLeaks with exposing America’s “agents” in Belarus (“WikiLeaks has now revealed how … undeclared cash flows from the U.S. coffers to the Belarus ‘opposition’ ”).
He has a Jewish-sounding name, but Shamir is a dangerous anti-Semite. Will Yakowicz, who interviewed Shamir in Moscow for a Tablet Magazine profile, concluded that he is an anti-Semitic Holocaust-doubter. An exhaustive investigation carried out by the Norwegian anti-racist magazine Monitor found that Shamir has a long history of association with European fascist parties. He has changed his name several times, published anti-Semitic articles, and falsely claimed to be a correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Shamir was also in the habit of offering himself as a speaker at white-supremacist conventions in return for a small fee, daily expenses, flight tickets, and hotel accommodations for him and his wife. (WikiLeaks has since tried to distance itself from Shamir, but recent revelations by a former WikiLeaks staffer suggest that he was an influential part of the organization.)
In January 2011, Soviet Belarus, a state-run newspaper, began serializing what it claimed to be extracts from the cables gifted to Lukashenko by Shamir. Among the figures “exposed” as recipients of foreign cash were Sannikov, the defeated opposition presidential candidate; Oleg Bebenin, Sannikov’s press secretary, who was found dead in suspicious circumstances months before the elections; and Vladimir Neklyayev, the writer and former president of Belarus PEN, who also ran against Lukashenko and is now under house arrest. Because virtually every opposition leader was already under arrest at the time Shamir leaked the cables, the publication of these documents served to bolster, rather than prompt, the regime’s crackdown in the immediate aftermath of the presidential elections.
But the damage inflicted by Shamir’s WikiLeaks cache didn’t end last year. As I learned from Sergey and other opposition figures, the leaked cables have harmed the lower rungs of the opposition movement. Having targeted the leadership of the opposition, Lukashenko is now going after dissident intellectuals. The hope? By the time Sannikov and his colleagues serve out their sentences, their base will have been decimated.

Belarus, Europe’s Last Dictatorship, Uses WikiLeaks to Target Dissidents

“If I am not arrested tomorrow, we can talk,” Sergey told me from his home in Minsk via Skype. We agreed to meet the next morning at Yakub Kolas Square, named for the famous Belarusian poet, where a protest against the regime of Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus’ president, was planned for 11 a.m...

www.tabletmag.com

This is why George Orwell made it his final mission to purge Tankies from the UK.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

This is why George Orwell made it his final mission to purge Tankies from the UK.

Right-wingers love to repeat Orwell's name as a magic incantation even though he fukking hated people like you. I already proved earlier in the thread that Chomsky and Orwell were on the same side, and both opposed the constant imperialist propaganda they saw emanating from the USA and UK. Do you think you understand Chomksy and Orwell less than the president of the George Orwell Society does?

Chomsky, Orwell and the Myth of Press Freedom

The US maverick intellectual Noam Chomsky cites Orwell’s views on thought control in free societies in his latest YouTube video. Richard Lance Keeble reports Noam Chomsky is an extraordinary man. Voted the world’s leading public intellectual in a 2005 poll, the 76-year-old Professor Emeritus at th

orwellsociety.com