Chomsky just came top of the Public Intellectuals poll I blogged separately, so a couple of links to old Chommers from an erstwhile fan (moi).
First, an interview with him in the Guardian:
Emma Brockes interview: Noam Chomsky
Monday October 31, 2005
The Guardian
Then a comment on the interview:
Oliver Kamm on Brockes' interview with Chomsky
Blog
Oct 2005
Then something from a current fave of mine, Paul Berman, on Chomsky:
Paul Berman on Noam Chomsky
and then a longer article on Chomsky and the "Left Revisionists" in general, about the left's hypocritical attitude, especially in regard to Bosnia:
The Left Revisionists
Marko Attila Hoare
November 2003
And all of that started by a recent comment from Dan in this thread, which referred me here.
8 comments:
In the in the interests of balance here are some responses to the Noam interview in the Guardian. The letter writers feel he was hard done by.
Well, the first guy says this:
Chomsky has never said that the Khmer Rouge were "not as bad as everybody makes out". He has said that they killed fewer people than the American "secret" bombing, which in turn laid the groundwork for the predictable rise of the KR.
Well I've read "Manufacturing Consent", and Chomsky most definitely says both.
This guy does go on to make a good point:
Remember that the Americans later supported the KR at the UN, fully aware of their crimes, when the Vietnamese attempted to remove them from power.
The North Vietnamese were a disgusting bunch of Stalinists (a point glossed over by Chommers), but their overthrow of the KR was their finest contribution to humankind, and should not have been opposed by anyone.
Quick q: does NC literally say the Khmer Rouge were "not as bad as everybody makes out" or is he being paraphrased?
Paraphrased.
Well, then this sentence sounds like it is factually accurate after all:
'Chomsky has never said that the Khmer Rouge were "not as bad as everybody makes out".'
:)
I'd agree to fatuously accurate.
Perhaps, though I feel that precision is no bad thing.
As an ex-fan of Mr Chomsky, this seems a fair review to me.
Noam Chomsky
Oliver Kamm
Standpoint Mag: January 2009
...
Chomsky's political output is consistent with the rest of his [linguistics] oeuvre in one important respect: the method of argumentation. Across disciplines, he has long employed a variety of unscholarly techniques to insulate his conclusions from criticism. The linguist George Lakoff once identified Chomsky's tendency to "fight dirty when he argues. He uses every trick in the book." In the current issue of the journal Artificial Intelligence, Margaret Boden, Professor of Cognitive Science at Sussex University, notesthat a review of her book by Chomsky is "a sadly unscholarly piece, guaranteed to mislead its readers about both the tone and the content of the book. It is also defamatory." In politics, Chomsky's preferred technique is vituperative abuse of his opponents. Take a few examples. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times is an "astonishing racist and megalomaniac". In disputing Chomsky's analogy between 9/11 and President Clinton's attack on a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, Christopher Hitchens "must be unaware that he is expressing such racist contempt". The French nation collectively has a "highly parochial and remarkably illiterate culture".
The irony of Chomskyan invective in the political sphere is that it is highly selective. Chomsky has never regretted his intervention in the 1980s on behalf of a Holocaust denier, Robert Faurisson. Chomsky has no sympathy with Holocaust denial, and if he had stuck to defending Faurisson's right to free expression he would have been right and principled. Instead, he wrote: "As far as I can determine, [Faurisson] is a relatively apolitical liberal of some sort." The point here is not the perversity of the judgement. It is the way in which Chomsky espouses supposedly universal principles while extravagantly failing to apply them. Liberals and left-wingers who see value in US interventionism are racists, frauds, apologists for state terror and so on. Yet a man like Faurisson who exemplifies all of these qualities is regarded differently.
Consider, too, Chomsky's writings on Indochina, the issue on which he became famous as a political controversialist. He did not only excoriate an unjust and brutal US war. He derided refugee accounts of horrors after the fall of Cambodia, pointedly referring to "alleged Khmer Rouge atrocities" and disputing a comparison of Pol Pot's rule to Nazi Germany. In an interview last year, Chomsky characteristically congratulated himself on the astuteness of this analysis, declaring: "If we were to rewrite it now, we'd do it exactly the same way."
Chomsky's output is vast, and not always wrong. He was early and right in condemning Western acquiescence in Indonesia's subjugation of East Timor (though typically he cannot now acknowledge that the reversal of that policy has provided a casus belli for Islamist terrorism). But he cannot be accused of disinterested opposition to oppression. His political writings will last, if at all, only as a monument to Xenophon's definition of the sophist as one who sells wisdom to pupils for pay.
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