The Hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky
RCMan
By Keith Windschuttle
NewCriterion.com | May 2, 2003
There's a famous definition in the Gospels of the hypocrite, and the
hypocrite is the person who refuses to apply to himself the standards
he applies to others. By that standard, the entire commentary and
discussion of the so-called War on Terror is pure hypocrisy, virtually
without exception. Can anybody understand that? No, they can't
understand it.
—Noam Chomsky, Power and Terror, 2003
Noam Chomsky was the most conspicuous American intellectual to
rationalize the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.
The death toll, he argued, was minor compared to the list of Third
World victims of the "far more extreme terrorism" of United States
foreign policy. Despite its calculated affront to mainstream opinion,
this sentiment went down very well with Chomsky's own constituency. He
has never been more popular among the academic and intellectual left
than he is today.
Two books of interviews with him published since September 11, 2001
both went straight onto the bestseller lists.[1] One of them has since
been turned into a film entitled Power and Terror, now doing brisk
business in the art-house movie market. In March 2002 the film's
director, John Junkerman, accompanied his subject to the University of
California, Berkeley, where in a five-day visit Chomsky gave five
political talks to a total audience of no fewer than five thousand
people.
Meanwhile, the liberal news media around the world has sought him out
for countless interviews as the most promi- nent intellectual opposed
to the American response to the terrorist attacks. Newspaper articles
routinely open by reminding readers of his awesome intellectual
status. A profile headlined "Conscience of a Nation" in the English
daily The Guardian declared: "Chomsky ranks with Marx, Shakespeare,
and the Bible as one of the ten most quoted sources in the
humanities—and is the only writer among them still alive." The New
York Times has called him "arguably the most important intellectual
alive."
Chomsky has used his status, originally gained in the field of
linguistics, to turn himself into the leading voice of the American
left. He is not merely a spokesman. His own stance has done much to
structure left-wing politics over the past forty years. Today, when
actors, rock stars, and protesting students mouth anti-American
slogans for the cameras, they are very often expressing sentiments
they have gleaned from Chomsky's voluminous output.
Hence, to examine Chomsky's views is to analyze the core mindset of
contemporary radicalism, especially the variety that now holds so much
sway in the academic and arts communities.
Chomsky has been a celebrity radical since the mid-1960s when he made
his name as an anti-Vietnam War activist. Although he lost some of his
appeal in the late-1970s and 1980s by his defense of the Pol Pot
regime in Cambodia, he has used September 11 to restore his
reputation, indeed to surpass his former influence and stature. At
seventy-four years of age, he is today the doyen of the American and
much of the world's intellectual left.
He is, however, an unconventional academic radical. Over the past
thirty years, the left in the humanities has been smitten by high
theory, especially neo-Marxist, feminist, and postmodernist philosophy
out of Germany and France. Much of this material was arcane enough in
its own language but in translation it elevated obscurantism to a
badge of prestige. It inundated the humanities with relativism both in
epistemology and moral philosophy.
In contrast, Chomsky has produced no substantial body of political
theory of his own. Nor is he a relativist. He advocates the pursuit of
truth and knowledge about human affairs and promotes a simple,
universal set of moral principles. Moreover, his political writings
are very clear, pitched to a general rather than specialist audience.
He supports his claims not by appeals to some esoteric conceptual
apparatus but by presenting plain, apparently factual evidence. The
explanation for his current appeal, therefore, needs to be sought not
in recent intellectual fashions but in something with a longer
history.
Chomsky is the most prominent intellectual remnant of the New Left of
the 1960s. In many ways he epitomized the New Left and its hatred of
"Amerika," a country he believed, through its policies both at home
and abroad, had descended into fascism. In his most famous book of the
Sixties, American Power and the New Mandarins, Chomsky said what
America needed was "a kind of denazification."
Of all the major powers in the Sixties, according to Chomsky, America
was the most reprehensible. Its principles of liberal democracy were a
sham. Its democracy was a "four-year dictatorship" and its economic
commitment to free markets was merely a disguise for corporate power.
Its foreign policy was positively evil. "By any objective standard,"
he wrote at the time, "the United States has become the most
aggressive power in the world, the greatest threat to peace, to
national self-determination, and to international cooperation."
As an anti-war activist, Chomsky participated in some of the most
publicized demonstrations, including the attempt, famously celebrated
in Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night, to form a human chain around
the Pentagon. Chomsky described the event as "tens of thousands of
young people surrounding what they believe to be—I must add that I
agree—the most hideous institution on this earth."
This kind of anti-Americanism was common on the left at the time but
there were two things that made Chomsky stand out from the crowd. He
was a scholar with a remarkable reputation and he was in tune with the
anti-authoritarianism of the student-based New Left.
At the time, the traditional left was still dominated by an older
generation of Marxists, who were either supporters of the Communist
Party or else Trotskyists opposed to Joseph Stalin and his heirs but
who still endorsed Lenin and Bolshevism. Either way, the emerging
generation of radical students saw both groups as compromised by their
support for the Russian Revolution and the repressive regimes it had
bequeathed to eastern Europe.
Chomsky was not himself a member of the student generation—in 1968 he
was a forty-year-old tenured professor—but his lack of party
membership or any other formal political commitment absolved him of
any connection to the Old Left. Instead, his adherence to anarchism,
or what he called "libertarian socialism," did much to shape the
outlook of the New Left.
American Power and the New Mandarins approvingly quotes the
nineteenth-century anarchist Mikhail Bakunin predicting that the
version of socialism supported by Karl Marx would end up transferring
state power not to the workers but to the elitist cadres of the
Communist Party itself.
Despite his anti-Bolshevism, Chomsky remained a supporter of socialist
revolution. He urged that "a true social revolution" would transform
the masses so they could take power into their own hands and run
institutions themselves. His favorite real-life political model was
the short-lived anarchist enclave formed in Barcelona in 1936–1937
during the Spanish Civil War.
The Sixties demand for "student power" was a consequence of this brand
of political thought. It allowed the New Left to persuade itself that
it had invented a more pristine form of radicalism, untainted by the
totalitarianism of the communist world.
For all his in-principle disdain of communism, however, when it came
to the real world of international politics Chomsky turned out to
endorse a fairly orthodox band of socialist revolutionaries. They
included the architects of communism in Cuba, Fidel Castro and Che
Guevera, as well as Mao Tse-tung and the founders of the Chinese
communist state. Chomsky told a forum in New York in December, 1967
that in China "one finds many things that are really quite admirable."
He believed the Chinese had gone some way to empowering the masses
along lines endorsed by his own libertarian socialist principles:
China is an important example of a new society in which very
interesting and positive things happened at the local level, in which
a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based
on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding
had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step.
When he provided this endorsement of what he called Mao Tse-tung's
"relatively livable" and "just society," Chomsky was probably unaware
he was speaking only five years after the end of the great Chinese
famine of 1958–1962, the worst in human history. He did not know,
because the full story did not come out for another two decades, that
the very collectivization he endorsed was the principal cause of this
famine, one of the greatest human catastrophes ever, with a total
death toll of thirty million people.
Nonetheless, if he was as genuinely aloof from totalitarianism as his
political principles proclaimed, the track record of communism in the
USSR—which was by then widely known to have faked its statistics of
agricultural and industrial output in the 1930s when its own
population was also suffering crop failures and famine—should have
left this anarchist a little more skeptical about the claims of the
Russians' counterparts in China.
In fact, Chomsky was well aware of the degree of violence that
communist regimes had routinely directed at the people of their own
countries. At the 1967 New York forum he acknowledged both "the mass
slaughter of landlords in China" and "the slaughter of landlords in
North Vietnam" that had taken place once the communists came to power.
His main objective, however, was to provide a rationalization for this
violence, especially that of the National Liberation Front then trying
to take control of South Vietnam. Chomsky revealed he was no pacifist.
I don't accept the view that we can just condemn the NLF terror,
period, because it was so horrible. I think we really have to ask
questions of comparative costs, ugly as that may sound. And if we are
going to take a moral position on this—and I think we should—we have
to ask both what the consequences were of using terror and not using
terror. If it were true that the consequences of not using terror
would be that the peasantry in Vietnam would continue to live in the
state of the peasantry of the Philippines, then I think the use of
terror would be justified.
It was not only Chomsky who was sucked into supporting the maelstrom
of violence that characterized the communist takeovers in South-East
Asia. Almost the whole of the 1960s New Left followed. They opposed
the American side and turned Ho Chi Minh and the Vietcong into
romantic heroes.
When the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia in 1975 both Chomsky and the
New Left welcomed it. And when news emerged of the extraordinary event
that immediately followed, the complete evacuation of the capital
Phnom Penh accompanied by reports of widespread killings, Chomsky
offered a rationalization similar to those he had provided for the
terror in China and Vietnam: there might have been some violence, but
this was understandable under conditions of regime change and social
revolution.
Although information was hard to come by, Chomsky suggested in an
article in 1977 that post-war Cambodia was probably similar to France
after liberation at the end of World War II when thousands of enemy
collaborators were massacred within a few months. This was to be
expected, he said, and was a small price to pay for the positive
outcomes of the new government of Pol Pot. Chomsky cited a book by two
American left-wing authors, Gareth Porter and George Hildebrand, who
had "presented a carefully documented study of the destructive
American impact on Cambodia and the success of the Cambodian
revolutionaries in overcoming it, giving a very favorable picture of
their programs and policies."
By this time, however, there were two other books published on
Cambodia that took a very different line. The American authors John
Barron and Anthony Paul called their work Murder of a Gentle Land and
accused the Pol Pot regime of mass killings that amounted to genocide.
François Ponchaud's Cambodia Year Zero repeated the charge.
Chomsky reviewed both books, together with a number of press articles,
in The Nation in June 1977. He accused them of publishing little more
than anti-communist propaganda. Articles in The New York Times
Magazine and The Christian Science Monitor suggested that the death
toll was between one and two million people out of a total population
of 7.8 million. Chomsky mocked their total and picked at their
sources, showing some were dubious and that a famous photograph of
forced labor in the Cambodian countryside was actually a fake.
He dismissed the Barron and Paul book partly because it had been
published by Reader's Digest and publicized on the front page of The
Wall Street Journal, both of them notorious anti-communist
publications, and partly because they had omitted to report the views
of journalists who had been to Cambodia but not witnessed any
executions.
Ponchaud's book was harder to ignore. It was based on the author's
personal experience in Cambodia from 1965 until the capture of Phnom
Penh, extensive interviews with refugees and reports from Cambodian
radio. Moreover, it had been favorably reviewed by a left-wing author
in The New York Review of Books, a publication for which Chomsky
himself had often written. Chomsky's strategy was to undermine
Ponchaud's book by questioning the credibility of his refugee
testimony. Acknowledging that Ponchaud "gives a grisly account of what
refugees have reported to him about the barbarity of their treatment
at the hands of the Khmer Rouge," Chomsky said we should be wary of
"the extreme unreliability of refugee reports":
Refugees are frightened and defenseless, at the mercy of alien forces.
They naturally tend to report what they believe their interlocutors
wish to hear. While these reports must be considered seriously, care
and caution are necessary. Specifically, refugees questioned by
Westerners or Thais have a vested interest in reporting atrocities on
the part of Cambodian revolutionaries, an obvious fact that no serious
reporter will fail to take into account.
In 1980, Chomsky expanded this critique into the book After the
Cataclysm, co-authored with his long-time collaborator Edward S.
Herman. Ostensibly about Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, the great
majority of its content was a defense of the position Chomsky took on
the Pol Pot regime. By this time, Chomsky was well aware that
something terrible had happened: "The record of atrocities in Cambodia
is substantial and often gruesome," he wrote. "There can be little
doubt that the war was followed by an outbreak of violence, massacre
and repression." He mocked the suggestion, however, that the death
toll might have reached more than a million and attacked Senator
George McGovern's call for military intervention to halt what McGovern
called "a clear case of genocide."
Instead, Chomsky commended authors who apologized for the Pol Pot
regime. He approvingly cited their analyses that the forced march of
the population out of Phnom Penh was probably necessitated by the
failure of the 1976 rice crop. If this was true, Chomsky wrote, "the
evacuation of Phnom Penh, widely denounced at the time and since for
its undoubted brutality, may actually have saved many lives." Chomsky
rejected the charge of genocide, suggesting that
the deaths in Cambodia were not the result of systematic slaughter and
starvation organized by the state but rather attributable in large
measure to peasant revenge, undisciplined military units out of
government control, starvation and disease that are direct
consequences of the US war, or other such factors.
After the Cataclysm also presented a much more extended critique of
refugee testimony. Chomsky revealed his original 1977 source for this
had been Ben Kiernan, at the time an Australian graduate student and
apologist for the Pol Pot regime, who wrote in the Maoist-inspired
Melbourne Journal of Politics. What Chomsky avoided telling his
readers, however, was that well before 1980, the year After the
Cataclysm was published, Kiernan himself had recanted his position.
Kiernan had spent much of 1978 and 1979 interviewing five hundred
Cambodian refugees in camps inside Thailand. They persuaded him they
were actually telling the truth. He also gained a mass of evidence
from the new Vietnamese-installed regime. This led him to write a mea
culpa in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars in 1979. This was a
left-wing journal frequently cited by Chomsky, so he must have been
aware that Kiernan wrote: "There can be no doubting that the evidence
also points clearly to a systematic use of violence against the
population by that chauvinist section of the revolutionary movement
that was led by Pol Pot." Yet in After the Cataclysm, Chomsky does not
acknowledge this at all.
Kiernan later went on to write The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and
Genocide under the Khmer Rouge 1975–79, a book now widely regarded as
the definitive analysis of one of the most appalling episodes in
recorded history. In the evacuation of Phnom Penh in 1975, tens of
thousands of people died. Almost the entire middle class was
deliberately targeted and killed, including civil servants, teachers,
intellectuals, and artists. No fewer than 68,000 Buddhist monks out of
a total of 70,000 were executed. Fifty percent of urban Chinese were
murdered.
Kiernan argues for a total death toll between April 1975 and January
1979, when the Vietnamese invasion put an end to the regime, of 1.67
million out of 7.89 million, or 21 percent of the entire population.
This is proportionally the greatest mass killing ever inflicted by a
government on its own population in modern times, probably in all
history.
Chomsky was this regime's most prestigious and most persistent Western
apologist. Even as late as 1988, when they were forced to admit in
their book Manufacturing Consent that Pol Pot had committed genocide
against his own people, Chomsky and Herman still insisted they had
been right to reject the journalists and authors who had initially
reported the story. The evidence that became available after the
Vietnamese invasion of 1979, they maintained, did not retrospectively
justify the reports they had criticized in 1977.
They were still adamant that the United States, who they claimed
started it all, bore the brunt of the blame. In short, Chomsky still
refused to admit how wrong he had been over Cambodia.
Chomsky has persisted with this pattern of behavior right to this day.
In his response to September 11, he claimed that no matter how
appalling the terrorists' actions, the United States had done worse.
He supported his case with arguments and evidence just as empirically
selective and morally duplicitous as those he used to defend Pol Pot.
On September 12, 2001, Chomsky wrote:
The terrorist attacks were major atrocities. In scale they may not
reach the level of many others, for example, Clinton's bombing of the
Sudan with no credible pretext, destroying half its pharmaceutical
supplies and killing unknown numbers of people.
This Sudanese incident was an American missile attack on the Al-Shifa
pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, where the CIA suspected Iraqi
scientists were manufacturing the nerve agent VX for use in chemical
weapons contracted by the Saddam Hussein regime. The missile was fired
at night so that no workers would be there and the loss of innocent
life would be minimised. The factory was located in an industrial area
and the only apparent casualty at the time was the caretaker.
While Chomsky drew criticism for making such an odious comparison, he
was soon able to flesh out his case. He told a reporter from salon.com
that, rather than an "unknown" number of deaths in Khartoum, he now
had credible statistics to show there were many more Sudanese victims
than those killed in New York and Washington: "That one bombing,
according to estimates made by the German Embassy in Sudan and Human
Rights Watch, probably led to tens of thousands of deaths." However,
this claim was quickly rendered suspect. One of his two sources, Human
Rights Watch, wrote to salon.com the following week denying it had
produced any such figure. Its communications director said: "In fact,
Human Rights Watch has conducted no research into civilian deaths as
the result of US bombing in Sudan and would not make such an
assessment without a careful and thorough research mission on the
ground."
Chomsky's second source had done no research into the matter either.
He was Werner Daum, German ambassador to Sudan from 1996 to 2000 who
wrote in the Harvard International Review, Summer 2001. Despite his
occupation, Daum's article was anything but diplomatic.
It was a largely anti-American tirade criticizing the United States'
international human rights record, blaming America for the 1980s
Iran-Iraq war, accusing it of ignoring Iraq's gassing of the Kurds,
and holding it responsible for the purported deaths of 600,000 Iraqi
children as a result of post-1991 economic sanctions. Nonetheless, his
comments on the death toll from the Khartoum bombing were not as
definitive as Chomsky intimated. Daum wrote:
It is difficult to assess how many people in this poor African country
died as a result of the destruction of the Al-Shifa factory, but
several tens of thousands seems a reasonable guess. The factory
produced some of the basic medicines on the World Health Organization
list, covering 20 to 60 percent of Sudan's market and 100 percent of
the market for intravenous liquids. It took more than three months for
these products to be replaced with imports.
Now, it is hard to take seriously Daum's claim that this "guess" was
in any way "reasonable." He said there was a three-month gap between
the destruction of the factory and the time it took to replace its
products with imports. This seems an implausibly long interval to ship
pharmaceuticals but, even if true, it is fanciful to suggest that
"several tens of thousands" of people would have died in such a brief
period.
Had they done so, they must have succumbed to a highly visible medical
crisis, a pandemic to put the SARS outbreak in the shade. Yet no one
on the spot, apart from the German ambassador, seems to have heard of
it.
Anyone who makes an Internet search of the reports of the Sudanese
operations of the several Western aid agencies, including Oxfam,
Médecins sans Frontières, and Norwegian People's Aid, who have been
operating in this region for decades, will not find any evidence of an
unusual increase in the death toll at the time. Instead, their major
health concern, then and now, has been how the Muslim Marxist
government in Khartoum was waging civil war by bombing the civilian
hospitals of its Christian enemies in the south of the country.
The idea that tens of thousands of Sudanese would have died within
three months from a shortage of pharmaceuticals is implausible enough
in itself. That this could have happened without any of the aid
organizations noticing or complaining is simply unbelievable.
Hence, Chomsky's rationalization for the September 11 attacks is every
bit as deceitful as his apology for Pol Pot and his misreading of the
Cambodian genocide.
"It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to
expose lies," Chomsky wrote in a famous article in The New York Review
of Books in February 1967. This was not only a well-put and memorable
statement but was also a good indication of his principal target. Most
of his adult life has been spent in the critique of other
intellectuals who, he claims, have not fulfilled their duty.
The central argument of American Power and the New Mandarins is that
the humanities and social sciences had been captured by a new breed of
intellectuals. Rather than acting as Socratic free thinkers
challenging received opinion, they had betrayed their calling by
becoming servants of the military-industrial state. The interests of
this new mandarin class, he argued, had turned the United States into
an imperial power. Their ideology demonstrated
the mentality of the colonial civil servant, persuaded of the
benevolence of the mother country and the correctness of its vision of
world order, and convinced that he understands the true interests of
the backward peoples whose welfare he is to administer.
Chomsky named the academic fields he regarded as the worst
offenders—psychology, sociology, systems analysis, and political
science—and held up some well-known practitioners, including Samuel
Huntington of Harvard, as among the worst examples. The Vietnam War,
Chomsky claimed, was designed and executed by the new mandarins.
In itself, Chomsky's identification of the emergence of a new type of
academically trained official was neither original nor radical.
Similar critiques had been made of the same phenomenon in both western
and eastern Europe for some time. Much of his critique had been
anticipated in the 1940s in a book from the other end of the political
spectrum, Friedrich von Hayek's Road to Serfdom, which identified the
social engineers of the welfare state as the greatest internal threats
to Western liberty. Chomsky offered a leftist version of the same
idea, writing:
There are dangerous tendencies in the ideology of the welfare state
intelligentsia who claim to possess the technique and understanding
required to manage our "postindustrial society" and to organize the
international society dominated by the American superpower.
Yet at the very time he was making this critique, Chomsky himself was
playing at social engineering on an even grander scale. As he
indicated in his support in 1967 for the "collectivization and
communization" of Chinese and Vietnamese agriculture, with its
attendant terror and mass slaughter, he had sought the calculated
reorganization of traditional societies. By his advocacy of
revolutionary change throughout Asia, he was seeking to play a role in
the reorganization of the international order as well.
Hence, apart from occupying a space on the political spectrum much
further to the left than the academics he criticized, and apart from
his preference for bloodshed over more bureaucratic techniques,
Chomsky himself was the very exemplar of the new mandarin he purported
to despise.
He was, in fact, one of the more successful examples of the breed.
There has now been enough analysis of the Vietnam War to demonstrate
conclusively that the United States was not defeated militarily. South
Vietnam was abandoned to its fate because of the war's political costs
at home. The influence of radical intellectuals like Chomsky in
persuading the student generation of the 1960s to oppose the war was
crucial in elevating these political costs to an intolerable level.
The result they helped produce, however, was far worse than any
bureaucratic solution that might have emanated from the behavioral
sciences of the 1960s. From our present vantage point, we can today
see the long-term outcome of the choice Chomsky posed in 1967 between
the "comparative costs" of revolutionary terror in Vietnam versus the
continuation of private enterprise agriculture in the Philippines.
The results all favor the latter. In 2001, the average GDP per head in
the Philippines was $4000. At the same time, twenty-five years of
revolution in Vietnam had produced a figure of only half as much, a
mere $2100. Even those Vietnamese who played major roles in the
transformation are now dismayed at the outcome. The former Vietcong
General Pham Xuan An said in 1999: "All that talk about ‘liberation'
twenty, thirty years ago, all the plotting, all the bodies, produced
this, this impoverished broken-down country led by a gang of cruel and
paternalistic half-educated theorists."
These "half-educated theorists" were the very mandarins Chomsky and
his supporters so badly wanted to succeed and worked so hard to
install.
As well as social science practitioners and bureaucrats, the other
representatives of the intelligentsia to whom Chomsky has long been
hostile are the people who work in the news media.
Although his politics made him famous, Chomsky has made no substantial
contribution to political theory. Almost all his political books are
collections of short essays, interviews, speeches, and newspaper
opinion pieces about current events. The one attempt he made at a more
thoroughgoing analysis was the work he produced in 1988 with Edward S.
Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass
Media. This book, however, must have been a disappointment to his
followers.
Media studies is a huge field ranging from traditional defenses of the
news media as the fourth estate of the democratic system, to the most
arcane cultural analyses produced by radical postmodernist theorists.
Chomsky and Herman gave no indication they had digested any of it.
Instead, their book offers a crude analysis that would have been at
home in an old Marxist pamphlet from the 1930s. Apart from the
introduction, most of the book is simply a re-hash of the authors'
previously published work criticizing media coverage of events in
central America (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua) and in
south-east Asia (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia), plus one chapter on
reporting of the 1981 KGB-Bulgarian plot to kill the Pope.
To explain the role of the mass media, Chomsky and Herman offer their
"propaganda model." This claims the function of the media is
to amuse, entertain and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the
values, beliefs and codes of behavior that will integrate them into
the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of
concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfil
this role requires systematic propaganda.
This is true, they maintain, whether the media operate in liberal
democracies or under totalitarian regimes. The only difference is that
in communist and other authoritarian societies, it is clear to
everyone that the media are instruments of the dominant elite. In
capitalist societies, however, this fact is concealed, since the media
"actively compete, periodically attack and expose corporate and
governmental malfeasance, and aggressively portray themselves as
spokesmen for free speech and the general community interest."
Chomsky and Herman argue that these attacks on authority are always
very limited and the claims of free speech are merely smokescreens for
inculcating the economic and political agendas of the privileged
groups that dominate the economy.
The media, they note, are all owned by large corporations, they are
beholden for their income to major national advertisers, most news is
generated by large multinational news agencies, and any newspaper or
television station that steps out of line is bombarded with "flak" or
letters, petitions, lawsuits, and speeches from pro-capitalist
institutes set up for this very purpose.
There are, however, two glaring omissions from their analysis: the
role of journalists and the preferences of media audiences. Nowhere do
the authors explain how journalists and other news producers come to
believe they are exercising their freedom to report the world as they
see it. Chomsky and Herman simply assert these people have been duped
into seeing the world through a pro-capitalist ideological lens.
Nor do they attempt any analysis of why millions of ordinary people
exercise their free choice every day to buy newspapers and tune in to
radio and television programs. Chomsky and Herman fail to explain why
readers and viewers so willingly accept the world-view of capitalist
media proprietors. They provide no explanation for the tastes of media
audiences.
This view of both journalists and audiences as easily-led, ideological
dupes of the powerful is not just a fantasy of Chomsky and Herman's
own making. It is also a stance that reveals an arrogant and
patronising contempt for everyone who does not share their politics.
The disdain inherent in this outlook was revealed during an exchange
between Chomsky and a questioner at a conference in 1989 (reproduced
in Chomsky, Understanding Power, 2002):
Man: The only poll I've seen about journalists is that they are
basically narcissistic and left of center. Chomsky: Look, what people
call "left of center" doesn't mean anything—it means they're
conventional liberals and conventional liberals are very
state-oriented, and usually dedicated to private power.
In short, Chomsky believes that only he and those who share his
radical perspective have the ability to rise above the illusions that
keep everyone else slaves of the system. Only he can see things as
they really are.
Since the European Enlightenment a number of prominent intellectuals
have presented themselves as secular Christ-like figures, lonely
beacons of light struggling to survive in a dark and corrupting world.
This is a tactic that has often delivered them followers among
students and other idealistic youths in late adolescence.
The phenomenon has been most successful when accompanied by an
uncomplicated morality that its constituency can readily absorb. In
his ruminations on September 11, Chomsky reiterated his own apparently
direct and simple moral principles. Reactions to the terrorist
attacks, he said, "should meet the most elementary moral standards:
specifically, if an action is right for us, it is right for others;
and if it is wrong for others, it is wrong for us."
Unfortunately, like his declaration of the responsibility of the
intellectual to speak the truth and expose lies, Chomsky himself has
consistently demonstrated an inability to abide by his own standards.
Among his most provocative recent demands are for American political
and military leaders to be tried as war criminals. He has often
couched this in terms of the failure by the United States to apply the
same standards to itself as it does to its enemies.
For instance, America tried and executed the remaining World War Two
leaders of Germany and Japan, but failed to try its own personnel for
the "war crime" of dropping the atomic bomb on Japan. Chomsky claims
the American bombing of dams during the Korean War was "a huge war
crime … just like racist fanaticism" but the action was praised at
home. "That's just a couple of years after they hanged German leaders
who were doing much less than that."
The worst current example, he claims, is American support for Israel:
virtually everything that Israel is doing, meaning the United States
and Israel are doing, is illegal, in fact, a war crime. And many of
them they defined as "grave breaches," that is, serious war crimes.
This means that the United States and Israeli leadership should be
brought to trial.
Yet Chomsky's moral perspective is completely one-sided. No matter how
great the crimes of the regimes he has favored, such as China,
Vietnam, and Cambodia under the communists, Chomsky has never demanded
their leaders be captured and tried for war crimes. Instead, he has
defended these regimes for many years to the best of his ability
through the use of evidence he must have realized was selective,
deceptive, and in some cases invented.
In fact, had Pol Pot ever been captured and tried in a Western court,
Chomsky's writings could have been cited as witness for the defense.
Were the same to happen to Osama bin Laden, Chomsky's moral
rationalizations in his most recent book—"almost any crime, a crime in
the street, a war, whatever it may be, there's usually something
behind it that has elements of legitimacy"—could be used to plead for
a lighter sentence.
This kind of two-faced morality has provided a model for the
world-wide protests by left-wing opponents of the American-led
coalition's war against Iraq. The left was willing to tolerate the
most hideous acts of state terrorism by the Saddam Hussein regime, but
was implacable in its hostility to intervention by Western democratic
governments in the interests of both their own security and the
emancipation of the Iraqi people. This is hypocrisy writ large.
The long political history of this aging activist demonstrates that
double standards of the same kind have characterized his entire
career.
Chomsky has declared himself a libertarian and anarchist but has
defended some of the most authoritarian and murderous regimes in human
history. His political philosophy is purportedly based on empowering
the oppressed and toiling masses but he has contempt for ordinary
people who he regards as ignorant dupes of the privileged and the
powerful. He has defined the responsibility of the intellectual as the
pursuit of truth and the exposure of lies, but has supported the
regimes he admires by suppressing the truth and perpetrating
falsehoods. He has endorsed universal moral principles but has only
applied them to Western liberal democracies, while continuing to
rationalize the crimes of his own political favorites. He is a
mandarin who denounces mandarins. When caught out making culpably
irresponsible misjudgments, as he was over Cambodia and Sudan, he has
never admitted he was wrong.
Today, Chomsky's hypocrisy stands as the most revealing measure of the
sorry depths to which the left-wing political activism he has done so
much to propagate has now sunk.
Rick
> The Hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky
> By Keith Windschuttle
> NewCriterion.com | May 2, 2003
>
> As an anti-war activist, Chomsky participated in some of the most
> publicized demonstrations, including the attempt, famously celebrated
> in Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night, to form a human chain around
> the Pentagon. Chomsky described the event as "tens of thousands of
> agree-the most hideous institution on this earth."
>
> This kind of anti-Americanism was common on the left
STOP RIGHT THERE, Mr. Windbag. So protesting the Pentagon
is "anti-Americanism"? So protesting this institution, who is in fact
America's one and only permanent government, who, upon their
election, immediately brainwashes every President and member of
congress into believing imminent threats to our national security lurk
under every rock, who has squandered more money than any
institution in the history of mankind, who, to avoid the peace
dividend that was due to the American people after WWII has
been creating a constant stream of boogeymen around the world
since 1945, whose main purpose is not to defend the country but
to keep itself in business and growing, is "anti-Americanism"?
Mr. Windbag has a lot of gall.
> at the time but
> there were two things that made Chomsky stand out from the crowd. He
> was a scholar with a remarkable reputation and he was in tune with the
> anti-authoritarianism of the student-based New Left.
>
> At the time, the traditional left was still dominated by an older
> generation of Marxists, who were either supporters of the Communist
> Party or else Trotskyists opposed to Joseph Stalin and his heirs but
> who still endorsed Lenin and Bolshevism. Either way, the emerging
> generation of radical students saw both groups as compromised by their
> support for the Russian Revolution and the repressive regimes it had
> bequeathed to eastern Europe.
That's unadulterated bullshit. The "traditional left" in America is
not and never has been socialist, nor Communist. Look up the
word "liberal" in any dictionary. Traditional American liberals
(before the radical right, Roger Ailes and his ilk managed to
pervert the word into the epithet it is today) advocated personal
responsibility, personal liberty, a limited size and scope of
government and freedom from government interference.
[..]
> Chomsky has declared himself a libertarian and anarchist but has
> defended some of the most authoritarian and murderous regimes in human
> history. His political philosophy is purportedly based on empowering
> the oppressed and toiling masses but he has contempt for ordinary
> people who he regards as ignorant dupes of the privileged and the
> powerful. He has defined the responsibility of the intellectual as the
> pursuit of truth and the exposure of lies, but has supported the
> regimes he admires by suppressing the truth and perpetrating
> falsehoods. He has endorsed universal moral principles but has only
> applied them to Western liberal democracies, while continuing to
> rationalize the crimes of his own political favorites. He is a
> mandarin who denounces mandarins. When caught out making culpably
> irresponsible misjudgments, as he was over Cambodia and Sudan, he has
> never admitted he was wrong.
>
> Today, Chomsky's hypocrisy stands as the most revealing measure of the
> sorry depths to which the left-wing political activism he has done so
> much to propagate has now sunk.
So by the end of his sorry article Mr. Windbag manages to paint
the whole of "left-wing political activism" with Chomsky's brush.
Yes, Chomsky has been wrong about some things, but they pale
in number to the things about which he's been exactly correct.
And I suspect a similar detailed expose on Mr. Windbag's past
opinions (or just about anyone else's) would yield for more
erroneous and hypocritical results.
RickW
Mr_B...@reservoirdogs.com
>
> STOP RIGHT THERE, Mr. Windbag. So protesting the Pentagon
> is "anti-Americanism"?
No, dumb-ass. But protesting the Pentagon in such a way that demonstrates
a clear desire to turn America into a communist state and change our entire
way of life to something similar to the old USSR certainly is anti-
American. You and Chomsky can both shove it where the sun don't shine.
============================
Mr_Blonde Presents the: "MORON OF THE MONTH" Club:
WeThePopTarts,
============================
Rick
> >> This kind of anti-Americanism was common on the left
> >
> > STOP RIGHT THERE, Mr. Windbag. So protesting the Pentagon
> > is "anti-Americanism"?
>
> No, dumb-ass. But protesting the Pentagon in such a way that demonstrates
> a clear desire to turn America into a communist state and change our entire
> way of life to something similar to the old USSR certainly is anti-
> American. You and Chomsky can both shove it where the sun don't shine.
The event was to protest the Vietnam War you idiot, and history
has proven the protestors were on the correct side of the issue.
RickW
Dan Clore
>
> The Hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky
> By Keith Windschuttle
> NewCriterion.com | May 2, 2003
Maybe the Criterion is New, but this article is just the
same old shit. It's just a compilation of previous
prevarications about Chomsky, ranging from outright lies to
deliberately out-of-context quotations, etc etc etc. I doubt
this author even bothered to invent any new lies--those
interested in refuting it can simply refer to old articles
refuting the same lies.
--
Dan Clore
Now available: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://www.wildsidepress.com/index2.htm
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1587154838/thedanclorenecro
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/
News for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
"It's a political statement -- or, rather, an
*anti*-political statement. The symbol for *anarchy*!"
-- Batman, explaining the circle-A graffiti, in
_Detective Comics_ #608
coondawg
"Dan Clore" <cl...@columbia-center.org> wrote in message
news:3EB3BC1B...@columbia-center.org...
> RCMan wrote:
> >
> > The Hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky
> > By Keith Windschuttle
> > NewCriterion.com | May 2, 2003
>
> Maybe the Criterion is New, but this article is just the
> same old shit. It's just a compilation of previous
> prevarications about Chomsky, ranging from outright lies to
> deliberately out-of-context quotations, etc etc etc. I doubt
> this author even bothered to invent any new lies--those
> interested in refuting it can simply refer to old articles
> refuting the same lies.
>
> --
> Dan Clore
such as? if it is so asy to do, why haven't you done it?
The Axis of Weasel
<Mr_B...@ReservoirDogs.com> wrote:
>>> This kind of anti-Americanism was common on the left
>>
>> STOP RIGHT THERE, Mr. Windbag. So protesting the Pentagon
>> is "anti-Americanism"?
>
>No, dumb-ass. But protesting the Pentagon in such a way that demonstrates
>a clear desire to turn America into a communist state and change our entire
>way of life to something similar to the old USSR certainly is anti-
>American. You and Chomsky can both shove it where the sun don't shine.
You are, of course, lying abot Chomsky, but I'm curious, Bill: do you
think the consistutuion forbids communism?
>
>============================
>Mr_Blonde Presents the: "MORON OF THE MONTH" Club:
>WeThePopTarts,
>============================
****************
"By my estimation, since the war started, the 24-hour
cable news networks, in conjuction with their military
analysts, have dropped more than 30 megatons of precision-
guided manure on the American people."
-- Aaron McGruder, "The Boondocks"
Not dead, in jail, or a slave? Thank a liberal.
Pay your taxes so the rich don't have to.
Mr_B...@reservoirdogs.com
>>demonstrates a clear desire to turn America into a communist state and
>>change our entire way of life to something similar to the old USSR
>>certainly is anti- American. You and Chomsky can both shove it where
>>the sun don't shine.
>
> You are, of course, lying abot Chomsky, but I'm curious, Bill: do you
> think the consistutuion forbids communism?
>
I am lying about Chomsky??? Show me EXACTLY where I made any statement
about Chomsky at all??? I guess your reading comprehension needs
improvement, as there isn't a single lie anywhere above in my post.
Perhaps you're just a liberal moron...
Harvey
> >
> > The Hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky
> > By Keith Windschuttle
> > NewCriterion.com | May 2, 2003
>
> Maybe the Criterion is New, but this article is just the
> same old shit. It's just a compilation of previous
> prevarications about Chomsky, ranging from outright lies to
> deliberately out-of-context quotations, etc etc etc. I doubt
> this author even bothered to invent any new lies--those
> interested in refuting it can simply refer to old articles
> refuting the same lies.
Are you saying Chomsky was right about Pol Pot? Actually, I'm glad you guys
on the left hang on to Chomsky. He's the bankrupt intellectual star that
leads to the sort of ridiculous hypocritical extremes you've been driven to
lately in the defense of yet another mass murderer... all the while feebly
proclaiming you aren't, in fact, defending him, when it's clear that it's
exactly what you are doing.
Keep it up! You are transparent.
Harvey
>
> --
> Dan Clore
>
> Now available: _The Unspeakable and Others_
> http://www.wildsidepress.com/index2.htm
> http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1587154838/thedanclorenecro
> Lord We˙rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
James A. Donald
On Sat, 3 May 2003 05:00:34 -0700, "Rick" <m...@privacy.net>
wrote:
> STOP RIGHT THERE, Mr. Windbag. So protesting the Pentagon is
> "anti-Americanism"?
Justifying and rationalizing the murder of thousands of
Americans is anti americanism.
Chomsky's attitude to both his fellow Americans and his fellow
Jews resembles Pol Pot's attitude to his fellow Cambodians.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
jv3ZGIQ+h1atDOA3G0RVMrWXtIr1jASmnXId9uky
4M9DFzzxxW3OjYSTXKguRQeTeA8hgVQBoIgPTK96f
brian turner
This piece has some good points, but is has plenty of distortions and
factual errors too.
> The Hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky
> By Keith Windschuttle
> NewCriterion.com | May 2, 2003
[snipped]
> Chomsky is the most prominent intellectual remnant of the New Left of
> the 1960s. In many ways he epitomized the New Left and its hatred of
> "Amerika,"...
Has he ever used this term? If not, doesn't this imply, dishonestly,
that he did?
>... a country he believed, through its policies both at home
> and abroad, had descended into fascism.
He also called it the freest country in the world.
> ...Its democracy was a "four-year dictatorship"...
Where is this quote from?
> For all his in-principle disdain of communism, however, when it came
> to the real world of international politics Chomsky turned out to
> endorse a fairly orthodox band of socialist revolutionaries. They
> included the architects of communism in Cuba, Fidel Castro...
I read him say (late 1980s or early 1990s interview I think?) that he
thought Castro was dictator, "sometimes brutal" while a "teddy bear"
in comparision with some pro-US dictatorships, and that while he
admired their health care achievements he hoped the regime was
overthrown by a liberatarian revolution.
> ...as well as Mao Tse-tung and the founders of the Chinese
> communist state. Chomsky told a forum in New York in December, 1967
> that in China "one finds many things that are really quite admirable."
Most Chinese feel the same way, that the Mao era had both admirable
and hated and morally reprehensible elements. There is tremendous
nostalgia today in China for certain policies of that era. This has
become so common that the majority of western scholars writing about
popular attitudes in China must and are addressing it.
> He believed the Chinese had gone some way to empowering the masses
> along lines endorsed by his own libertarian socialist principles:
>
> "China is an important example of a new society in which very
> interesting and positive things happened at the local level, in which
> a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based
> on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding
> had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step."
>
> When he provided this endorsement of what he called Mao Tse-tung's
> "relatively livable" and "just society," Chomsky was probably unaware
> he was speaking only five years after the end of the great Chinese
> famine of 1958-1962, the worst in human history. He did not know,
> because the full story did not come out for another two decades, that
> the very collectivization he endorsed was the principal cause of this
> famine, one of the greatest human catastrophes ever, with a total
> death toll of thirty million people.
This person is mistaken about what Chomsky is referring to. The
collectivization Chomsky praised was the "Socialist High Tide" of
1955-56, not the "Great Leap Forward" (1958-60) which caused the
famine. The article that influenced Chomsky was "Leadership and Mass
Mobilization in the Soviet and Chinese Collectivization Campaigns of
1929-30 and 1955-56: A Comparison" China Quarterly July-Sept. 1967.
(see Chomsky Reader page 417).
The Great Leap Forward was a move well beyond collectivization to
massive utopian socialist arrangements. After 1962, China reformed
small collective farms, which produced very rapid growth in
agricultural output from 1962-67, which led up to Chomsky's 1967
comments.
Second problem with the comments above is-- it is PRECISELY because
Chomsky was right about positive things happening at the local level
in rural China that the 1959-61 famine was the biggest in human
history, and not just a major famine in line with many others [see
Mike Davis _Late Victorian Holocausts_ for examples of modern famines
in China, Africa, India]. The population demographer Judith Banister,
one of the main sources for the 30 million excess deaths figure
(_China's Changing Population_ Stanford University Press 1987),
refers (page 83) to an "extraordinary mortality decline" in the 1950s,
which she attributes to both cessation of warfare AND the
redistribution of land, wealth, and public health programs targeted at
the poor. So because the crude death rate was so remarkably low in
1958 (compared to countries with equal starting points after 8 years
of rule), deaths "above the normal" during 1959-61 were so high by
historical standards. An incidentally, on page 85 Banister notes that
immediately after the famine, the mortality stats continued this trend
and the results "have been impressive".
Of course, egalitarian anti-poverty gains were not the only thing or
even the main thing Chomsky praised the collectivization for. He also
admired the participatory nature of the collectivization process as
described in Bernstein's article and also in the 1980 book _Peasant
China in Transition: The Dynamics of the Development Towards Socialism
1949-1956_ by Vivienne Shue, a case study of Henan province land
reform and collectivization. Numerous western village studies/village
histories from the 1980s and 1990s communicate the same message, with
some case-by-case variations of course.
The Chomsky critic author could critique this conclusion, citing
counterevidence if he could find it, but doesn't.
[snipped]
> In fact, Chomsky was well aware of the degree of violence that
> communist regimes had routinely directed at the people of their own
> countries. At the 1967 New York forum he acknowledged both "the mass
> slaughter of landlords in China" and "the slaughter of landlords in
> North Vietnam" that had taken place once the communists came to power.
He did more than acknowledge it, he said it was morally wrong.
> His main objective, however, was to provide a rationalization for this
> violence, especially that of the National Liberation Front then trying
> to take control of South Vietnam. Chomsky revealed he was no pacifist.
[snipped]
> Yet at the very time he was making this critique, Chomsky himself was
> playing at social engineering on an even grander scale. As he
> indicated in his support in 1967 for the "collectivization and
> communization" of Chinese and Vietnamese agriculture, with its
> attendant terror and mass slaughter, ...
There was no terror and slaughter associated with collectivization of
agriculture in China which is precisely why Chomsky said positive
things about it.
[snipped]
> ...From our present vantage point, we can today
> see the long-term outcome of the choice Chomsky posed in 1967 between
> the "comparative costs" of revolutionary terror in Vietnam versus the
> continuation of private enterprise agriculture in the Philippines.
>
> The results all favor the latter. In 2001, the average GDP per head in
> the Philippines was $4000. At the same time, twenty-five years of
> revolution in Vietnam had produced a figure of only half as much, a
> mere $2100...
This is misleading. The Philippines was already vastly richer than
Vietnam in 1976. Snapshots tell us far less than growth rates over
time. In the 1980s and 1990s, Vietnam's growth rate was faster and
more equitably distributed than the Philippines. China's life
expectancy has always towered above the Philippines despite being far
poorer (not because of slower growth, China has always had much faster
growth, but because of different starting points).
coondawg
"Harvey" <resear...@netscape.net> wrote in message
news:68Tsa.320$eJ2.66@fed1read07...
>
> "Dan Clore" <cl...@columbia-center.org> wrote in message
> news:3EB3BC1B...@columbia-center.org...
> > RCMan wrote:
> > >
> > > The Hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky
> > > By Keith Windschuttle
> > > NewCriterion.com | May 2, 2003
> >
> > Maybe the Criterion is New, but this article is just the
> > same old shit. It's just a compilation of previous
> > prevarications about Chomsky, ranging from outright lies to
> > deliberately out-of-context quotations, etc etc etc. I doubt
> > this author even bothered to invent any new lies--those
> > interested in refuting it can simply refer to old articles
> > refuting the same lies.
>
>
> Are you saying Chomsky was right about Pol Pot? Actually, I'm glad you
guys
> on the left hang on to Chomsky. He's the bankrupt intellectual star that
> leads to the sort of ridiculous hypocritical extremes you've been driven
to
> lately in the defense of yet another mass murderer... all the while feebly
> proclaiming you aren't, in fact, defending him, when it's clear that it's
> exactly what you are doing.
>
> Keep it up! You are transparent.
>
> Harvey
they defend him by saying he only compared pol pot favorably to other
genocidal tyrants and tried to equate what the US did to pol pot'r rule.
hey he isn't as bad as hitler and we are just as bad.
that's how it sums up
Samuel K.
> >
> > The Hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky
> > By Keith Windschuttle
> > NewCriterion.com | May 2, 2003
>
> Maybe the Criterion is New, but this article is just the
> same old shit. It's just a compilation of previous
> prevarications about Chomsky, ranging from outright lies to
> deliberately out-of-context quotations, etc etc etc. I doubt
> this author even bothered to invent any new lies--those
> interested in refuting it can simply refer to old articles
> refuting the same lies.
>
> --
> Dan Clore
I don't see any lies about Chomsky in this article. The only
"outrights lies" I can see is your litany asserting that Windschuttle
is wrong in his analysis of Chomksy. Care to tell us which ones are
the "deliberately out-of-context quotations"?
And can you prove that Chomsky did not - as Windschuttle, and numerous
other critics have alleged, quite correctly - downplay the genocide
committed by the Khmer Rouge while at the same time venerating those
sources which painted an optimistic picture of the as benevolent
revolutionaries whose crimes, if any, were the understandable response
to previous US actions?
Or that Chomsky's monstrous equation of the September 11 attacks with
the bombing of Sudan was anything but a vain attempt to downplay the
first event by holding up unproven speculation about the second event
as though it were fact - while, incidentally, implying that those who
disputed his comparision were showing "racist contempt" for the
Sudanese?
We could go on, but one of the more amusing features of the
Chomsky-groupies is their inability to see flaws in their great man,
to see his hypocrisy and his capacity to lie and to evade
responsibility for his politically motivated distortions.
Sam.
keith
> news:3EB3BC1B...@columbia-center.org...
> > RCMan wrote:
> > >
> > > The Hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky
> > > By Keith Windschuttle
> > > NewCriterion.com | May 2, 2003
> >
> > Maybe the Criterion is New, but this article is just the
> > same old shit. It's just a compilation of previous
> > prevarications about Chomsky, ranging from outright lies to
> > deliberately out-of-context quotations, etc etc etc. I doubt
> > this author even bothered to invent any new lies--those
> > interested in refuting it can simply refer to old articles
> > refuting the same lies.
>
>
> Are you saying Chomsky was right about Pol Pot? Actually, I'm glad you guys
> on the left hang on to Chomsky. He's the bankrupt intellectual star that
> leads to the sort of ridiculous hypocritical extremes you've been driven to
> lately in the defense of yet another mass murderer... all the while feebly
> proclaiming you aren't, in fact, defending him, when it's clear that it's
> exactly what you are doing.
I hav eno idea what Chomsky said about Pol Pot, but I personally have
not heard Chomsky say anything that wasn't eminently sensible. he
certainly didn't rationalize the attack on the WTC. He *did* say that
the US government had little moral authority to criticize the
terrorists given the US record against governments we don't like, but
only right wingers who want to stifle dissent equate that with
*support* for the terrorists.
Keith
Craig Franck
> I hav eno idea what Chomsky said about Pol Pot, but I personally have
> not heard Chomsky say anything that wasn't eminently sensible.
First you claim you never heard Chomsky say something
stupid.
> He *did* say that
> the US government had little moral authority to criticize the
> terrorists given the US record against governments we don't like,
Then you write that. If the US has little moral authority to
criticize terrorist for blowing up skyscrapers and killing
thousands of people, on what grounds can we criticize
them?
>but
> only right wingers who want to stifle dissent equate that with
> *support* for the terrorists.
By saying the US is no better than the worst terrorists
roaming the planet, and therefore "ha[s] little moral authority
to criticize [them]", (I imagine much less to actually do
something about them), you are supporting terrorists in
that you are creating a situation for them to flourish by
attempting to paralize the one country best equipted to
do something about them. It's not direct support, but of
the "useful idiot" type.
--
Craig Franck
craig....@verizon.net
Cortland, NY
dogbert
:
>"keith" <keit...@yahoo.com> wrote
>
>> I hav eno idea what Chomsky said about Pol Pot, but I personally have
>> not heard Chomsky say anything that wasn't eminently sensible.
>
>First you claim you never heard Chomsky say something
>stupid.
>
>> He *did* say that
>> the US government had little moral authority to criticize the
>> terrorists given the US record against governments we don't like,
>
>Then you write that. If the US has little moral authority to
>criticize terrorist for blowing up skyscrapers and killing
>thousands of people, on what grounds can we criticize
>them?
>
>>but
>> only right wingers who want to stifle dissent equate that with
>> *support* for the terrorists.
>
>By saying the US is no better than the worst terrorists
>roaming the planet,
US military and foreign policy is of course much worse. These small scale
terrorists are in a penny ante game, while our rackets operate on all
continents and kill by the millions - though if you're talking about the
ultimate effect - the prevention of economic development for most of
humanity while we rob them blind - billions of premature deaths is more
like it.
> and therefore "ha[s] little moral authority
>to criticize [them]", (I imagine much less to actually do
>something about them), you are supporting terrorists in
>that you are creating a situation for them to flourish by
>attempting to paralize the one country best equipted to
>do something about them.
Of course we do a lot about terrorism. In the first place we directly
commit a lot of it, hire and support others to commit even more, and
frequently attack other countries, especially when there is a specter of
independent economic development or democracy.
We thereby breed some terror against us or our flunkies, which we of course
use as a pretext when we don't have any other one handy, like a pipsqueak
starving 3rd world country being about to attack us - to start the whole
cycle of terror, subversion and attack all over again.
Isn't it grand beng the only Evil Empire left around?
Of course, if we were talking about the interests of the people of the US
and the rest of the world being free of terror, US paralysis would be a
wonderful thing, but it is just wishful thinking. There are enough idiots
like yourself supporting American terrorism and aggression against the rest
of the world for the game to keep going on for a long time yet.
>It's not direct support, but of
>the "useful idiot" type.
__________
. . .Infestiores Americani, quorum superbiam frustra per obsequium et
modestiam effugeris. Raptores orbis, postquam cuncta vastantibus defuere
terrae, iam et mare scrutantur: si locuples hostis est, avari, si pauper,
ambitiosi; quos non Oriens, non Occidens satiaverit. Soli omnium opes atque
inopiam pari adfectu concupiscunt. Auferre trucidare rapere falsis
nominibus imperium, atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Dan Clore
> Dan Clore <cl...@columbia-center.org> wrote in message news:<3EB3BC1B...@columbia-center.org>...
> > RCMan wrote:
> > >
> > > The Hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky
> > > By Keith Windschuttle
> > > NewCriterion.com | May 2, 2003
> >
> > Maybe the Criterion is New, but this article is just the
> > same old shit. It's just a compilation of previous
> > prevarications about Chomsky, ranging from outright lies to
> > deliberately out-of-context quotations, etc etc etc. I doubt
> > this author even bothered to invent any new lies--those
> > interested in refuting it can simply refer to old articles
> > refuting the same lies.
> I don't see any lies about Chomsky in this article. The only
> "outrights lies" I can see is your litany asserting that Windschuttle
> is wrong in his analysis of Chomksy. Care to tell us which ones are
> the "deliberately out-of-context quotations"?
Pretty much all of them.--If not actually all of them.
There's no source cited for most of them, so it's hard to
tell.
> And can you prove that Chomsky did not - as Windschuttle, and numerous
> other critics have alleged, quite correctly - downplay the genocide
> committed by the Khmer Rouge while at the same time venerating those
> sources which painted an optimistic picture of the as benevolent
> revolutionaries whose crimes, if any, were the understandable response
> to previous US actions?
>
> Or that Chomsky's monstrous equation of the September 11 attacks with
> the bombing of Sudan was anything but a vain attempt to downplay the
> first event by holding up unproven speculation about the second event
> as though it were fact - while, incidentally, implying that those who
> disputed his comparision were showing "racist contempt" for the
> Sudanese?
Thank you for repeating some of the outright lies in the
article. And you said you never saw them--
--
Dan Clore
Now available: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://www.wildsidepress.com/index2.htm
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1587154838/thedanclorenecro
Lord We˙rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
Dan Clore
>
> "Dan Clore" <cl...@columbia-center.org> wrote in message
> news:3EB3BC1B...@columbia-center.org...
> > RCMan wrote:
> > >
> > > The Hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky
> > > By Keith Windschuttle
> > > NewCriterion.com | May 2, 2003
> >
> > Maybe the Criterion is New, but this article is just the
> > same old shit. It's just a compilation of previous
> > prevarications about Chomsky, ranging from outright lies to
> > deliberately out-of-context quotations, etc etc etc. I doubt
> > this author even bothered to invent any new lies--those
> > interested in refuting it can simply refer to old articles
> > refuting the same lies.
> such as? if it is so asy to do, why haven't you done it?
I might address the article directly later, but there's
really nothing new in it, so there's not much point. Those
who know about the subject will already know that it's
filled with falsehoods and not much else.
keith
> "keith" <keit...@yahoo.com> wrote
>
> > I hav eno idea what Chomsky said about Pol Pot, but I personally have
> > not heard Chomsky say anything that wasn't eminently sensible.
>
> First you claim you never heard Chomsky say something
> stupid.
>
> > He *did* say that
> > the US government had little moral authority to criticize the
> > terrorists given the US record against governments we don't like,
>
> Then you write that. If the US has little moral authority to
> criticize terrorist for blowing up skyscrapers and killing
> thousands of people, on what grounds can we criticize
> them?
That's because that's not stupid. The US government has much blood on
it's hands, from toppling Democratic governments in Guatemala, Iran
and Chile, supporting Central American dictators who killed thousands
and thoussands of their own people, from supporting Sadaam Hussein for
years etc.
>
> >but
> > only right wingers who want to stifle dissent equate that with
> > *support* for the terrorists.
>
> By saying the US is no better than the worst terrorists
> roaming the planet, and therefore "ha[s] little moral authority
> to criticize [them]",...
How do you judge better or worse in circumstances like these. It's
likely that Sadaam Huseein would have done even worse than the US if
*he* had had the power we have, but teh fact remains: the US has
overthrown democracy and supported the dictators who killed or
tortured many millions of people. That doesn't give us much room to
talk, morally.
> (I imagine much less to actually do
> something about them), you are supporting terrorists in
> that you are creating a situation for them to flourish by
> attempting to paralize the one country best equipted to
> do something about them. It's not direct support, but of
> the "useful idiot" type.
I don't agree. Our hypocritical support for tyranical regimes (when we
think that serves our interests) while moralizing when we are victims
of what we have inflicted on others makes it more likely, not less,
that we will be victimized. If we take the attitude that *Candidate*
Bush suggested--humility--rather than the attitude that he takes now,
we'd be better off.
Keith
brian turner
[deleted]
> "Samuel K." wrote:
> > Or that Chomsky's monstrous equation of the September 11 attacks with
> > the bombing of Sudan was anything but a vain attempt to downplay the
> > first event by holding up unproven speculation about the second event
> > as though it were fact - while, incidentally, implying that those who
> > disputed his comparision were showing "racist contempt" for the
> > Sudanese?
> Thank you for repeating some of the outright lies in the
> article. And you said you never saw them--
>
> --
> Dan Clore
I don't think Chomsky's 9/11 vs Sudan statement was "monstrous",
that's ridiculous, nor do I think there is any downplay of 9/11, but
other than that I don't see what's inaccurate about Samuel's
statement. Chomsky relied on speculation to equate the 9/11 and Sudan
bombings and vilified Christopher Hitchens for questioning this.
Dave Gower
"RCMan" <rcma...@excite.com> quoted
> The Hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky
I agree that he is certainly that, but after watching him on television I
get a more disturbing impression. The man is clinically depressed. You can
see it in his expression, hear it in his voice. Clinical depression is a
serious form of mental illness. That is probably also the most powerful
condemnation one can make of his sad band of faithful followers.
Craig Franck
> "Craig Franck" <craig....@verizon.net>
>
> >"keith" <keit...@yahoo.com> wrote
> >>but
> >> only right wingers who want to stifle dissent equate that with
> >> *support* for the terrorists.
> >
> >By saying the US is no better than the worst terrorists
> >roaming the planet,
>
> US military and foreign policy is of course much worse.
That's obviously an extremist point of view. The US military
doesn't do state sponsored terrorism. The US military has by
winning two world wars as well as the cold war done more to
ensure the freedom of more people than any other institution
on the planet.
Name one good thing that terrorists have done.
> These small scale
> terrorists are in a penny ante game, while our rackets operate on all
> continents and kill by the millions - though if you're talking about the
> ultimate effect - the prevention of economic development for most of
> humanity while we rob them blind - billions of premature deaths is more
> like it.
The notion that the US and the West gets its wealth by
stealing from poor countries is so sophomoric and weak that
it puts all of your opinions in jeopardy of being dismissed as
idyllic blather.
The US creates wealth, not consume it. A good one-day rally
on Wall Street creates more wealth than the average GDP of a
third world country, so I don't know what it is we are stealing
from them. Yes, they often have terrible labor conditions, but
they are roughly equivalent to the labor standards in this country
100 years ago. It's going to take a long time before everyone
has close to what we have.
> > and therefore "ha[so] little moral authority
> >to criticize [them]", (I imagine much less to actually do
> >something about them), you are supporting terrorists in
> >that you are creating a situation for them to flourish by
> >attempting to paralyze the one country best equipped to
> >do something about them.
>
> Of course we do a lot about terrorism. In the first place we directly
> commit a lot of it,
That's a lie. The attempt to defend terrorism by stating there
is a moral equivalency with what the US does is intellectually
and morally bankrupt.
> hire and support others to commit even more, and
> frequently attack other countries, especially when there is a specter of
> independent economic development or democracy.
The US is against democracy? That's like saying Microsoft is
an evil, anti-capitalist entity because they happen to be a
monopoly. The US has done more to ensure democracy than
anyone else. People who say otherwise are either stupid, or liars.
> Isn't it grand being the only Evil Empire left around?
That is only true in your deluded mind.
> Of course, if we were talking about the interests of the people of the US
> and the rest of the world being free of terror, US paralysis would be a
> wonderful thing, but it is just wishful thinking.
"US paralysis" would only cause the Europeans or the
Chinese or terrorists or the Russians to step in and start
screwing things up for themselves. You are a fool if you
don't realize this, a person whose understanding of global
politics is at a comic-book level. Believing the US is the
source of all the bad in the world is like believing all we
need is Superman and our troubles would be over.
> There are enough idiots
> like yourself supporting American terrorism and aggression against the rest
> of the world for the game to keep going on for a long time yet.
That's because we understand how the world works, and
you obviously don't.
Craig Franck
> "Craig Franck" <craig....@verizon.net> wrote
> > "keith" <keit...@yahoo.com> wrote
> >
> > > I hav eno idea what Chomsky said about Pol Pot, but I personally have
> > > not heard Chomsky say anything that wasn't eminently sensible.
> >
> > First you claim you never heard Chomsky say something
> > stupid.
> >
> > > He *did* say that
> > > the US government had little moral authority to criticize the
> > > terrorists given the US record against governments we don't like,
> >
> > Then you write that. If the US has little moral authority to
> > criticize terrorist for blowing up skyscrapers and killing
> > thousands of people, on what grounds can we criticize
> > them?
>
> That's because that's not stupid. The US government has much blood on
> it's hands, from toppling Democratic governments in Guatemala, Iran
> and Chile, supporting Central American dictators who killed thousands
> and thoussands of their own people, from supporting Sadaam Hussein for
> years etc.
So when terrorists crash planes into buildings and kill thousands
of people, we are not in a position to say that was an awfully
bad thing for you to do? I can't believe, even in the Chomsky
group, that someone actually believes that.
> > >but
> > > only right wingers who want to stifle dissent equate that with
> > > *support* for the terrorists.
> >
> > By saying the US is no better than the worst terrorists
> > roaming the planet, and therefore "ha[s] little moral authority
> > to criticize [them]",...
>
> How do you judge better or worse in circumstances like these. It's
> likely that Sadaam Huseein would have done even worse than the US if
> *he* had had the power we have, but teh fact remains: the US has
> overthrown democracy and supported the dictators who killed or
> tortured many millions of people. That doesn't give us much room to
> talk, morally.
Much of US foreign policy that is so repugnant to people
centered around the global containment of Communism. It
was often a tough call, but we were up against a bigger
evil than isolated dictators.
Dan Clore
This is simply laughable.
--
Dan Clore
Now available: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://www.wildsidepress.com/index2.htm
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1587154838/thedanclorenecro
Lord We˙rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
Jez
> "dogbert" <dog...@dogbert.edu> wrote
>
> > "Craig Franck" <craig....@verizon.net>
> >
> > >"keith" <keit...@yahoo.com> wrote
<<Snippage>>>>.
> The notion that the US and the West gets its wealth by
> stealing from poor countries is so sophomoric and weak that
> it puts all of your opinions in jeopardy of being dismissed as
> idyllic blather.
So all the Oil, Gold, Silver and all the other mineral resources
we use are all taken from Western countries eh?
Jezus ! How dumb can you get.
--
Ho hum
Jez
"Few of us can easily surrender our belief that
society must somehow make sense. The thought
that the State has lost its mind and is punishing so
many innocent people is intolerable. And so the
evidence has to be internally denied."
- Arthur Miller
Jez
> "keith" <keit...@yahoo.com> wrote
>
> > "Craig Franck" <craig....@verizon.net> wrote
>
> > > "keith" <keit...@yahoo.com> wrote
>
> Much of US foreign policy that is so repugnant to people
> centered around the global containment of Communism. It
> was often a tough call, but we were up against a bigger
> evil than isolated dictators.
>
Bullshit.
The playing up of the Communist threat was to ensure
money for the Military/industrial cartels.
And for repression in the USA.
Just as 'Terrorism' is being used today.
As started by Regan in the 80's after the wall fell.
Same reasons, different excuse.
You probably know that, but are so terrified by
your media conjured demons as to render you incapable of
rational thought.
They've been playing you all for fools for so-long now
you've actually become fools.
Just what they want.
Now they can lower your standard of living even
further.
How fun for you.
Jez
> Dave Gower wrote:
> > "RCMan" <rcma...@excite.com> quoted
> >
> > > The Hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky
> >
> > I agree that he is certainly that, but after watching him on television
I
> > get a more disturbing impression. The man is clinically depressed. You
can
> > see it in his expression, hear it in his voice. Clinical depression is a
> > serious form of mental illness. That is probably also the most powerful
> > condemnation one can make of his sad band of faithful followers.
>
> This is simply laughable.
>
Indeed.
Why are they all so afraid to face the truth?
I always thought Americans were brave people, not mindless robots
afraid to think for themselves.
Gabrielle Rapagnetta
>Dave Gower wrote:
>> "RCMan" <rcma...@excite.com> quoted
>>
>> > The Hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky
>>
>> I agree that he is certainly that, but after watching him on television I
>> get a more disturbing impression. The man is clinically depressed. You can
>> see it in his expression, hear it in his voice. Clinical depression is a
>> serious form of mental illness. That is probably also the most powerful
>> condemnation one can make of his sad band of faithful followers.
>
>This is simply laughable.
Quite.
Clinical depression is charactized by:
--Loss of interest or pleasure in activities, such as hobbies or
spending time with family/friends
Chomsky has maintained his hobbies for decades and constantly talks
about spending time with his grandkids.
--Inability to concentrate, remember things, or make decisions
He's a walking encyclopedia of 20th century history.
--Constant fatigue or loss of energy
He maintains a constant schedule of activities.
--Restlessness or decreased activity
His speeches and writing have increased recently and his focus has
become even more poignant.
--Recurrent thoughts of suicide or death
David Gower only wishes...
Harvey
> coondawg wrote:
> >
> > "Dan Clore" <cl...@columbia-center.org> wrote in message
> > news:3EB3BC1B...@columbia-center.org...
> > > RCMan wrote:
> > > >
> > > > The Hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky
> > > > By Keith Windschuttle
> > > > NewCriterion.com | May 2, 2003
> > >
> > > Maybe the Criterion is New, but this article is just the
> > > same old shit. It's just a compilation of previous
> > > prevarications about Chomsky, ranging from outright lies to
> > > deliberately out-of-context quotations, etc etc etc. I doubt
> > > this author even bothered to invent any new lies--those
> > > interested in refuting it can simply refer to old articles
> > > refuting the same lies.
>
> > such as? if it is so asy to do, why haven't you done it?
>
> I might address the article directly later, but there's
> really nothing new in it, so there's not much point. Those
> who know about the subject will already know that it's
> filled with falsehoods and not much else.
Hmmm... more hedging based on your superior knowledge... very Chomsky-like.
He seems to me to be very willing to hear the other side of the coin and
you're not even trying.
Harvey
Harvey
"dogbert" <dog...@dogbert.edu> wrote in message
news:3hg9bvcqmgg7a3u9t...@4ax.com...
Craig Frank rebuts you quite well on this I think. But I'll add this: you
Chomskyites tend to take some general philisophical truths and turn them
into large practical lies. Just like Chomsky pushes, or pushed, Pol Pot as a
great practical idea, and just as you're pushing America as the great world
terrorist now. People don't buy that on a gut level anymore than they look
at what Pol Pot did in Cambodia and buy that as a wonderful solution for the
world's problems, or the view you like to push that Iraq under Hussein was
no worse, maybe better, than America under Bush.
But you keep making the argument, though... which is fine with me. No one
really buys it outside of the usual bunch of useful idiots.
Harvey
Woodard R. Springstube
news:3eb55f41$0$4861$cc9e...@news.dial.pipex.com:
>
> "Dan Clore" <cl...@columbia-center.org> wrote in message
> news:3EB55C2B...@columbia-center.org...
>> Dave Gower wrote:
>> > "RCMan" <rcma...@excite.com> quoted
>> >
>> > > The Hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky
>> >
>> > I agree that he is certainly that, but after watching
>> > him on television
> I
>> > get a more disturbing impression. The man is clinically
>> > depressed. You
> can
>> > see it in his expression, hear it in his voice. Clinical
>> > depression is a serious form of mental illness. That is
>> > probably also the most powerful condemnation one can
>> > make of his sad band of faithful followers.
>>
>> This is simply laughable.
>>
>
> Indeed.
>
> Why are they all so afraid to face the truth?
>
> I always thought Americans were brave people, not mindless
> robots afraid to think for themselves.
>
The mindless robots are on the left. They have to have
somebody like Chomsky to tell them what to think. They cannot
come to terms with the fact that Marxism is a failed system
that can only be kept in power by brutal repression in any
country where it exists. They cannot come to terms with the
idea that some things work better when they are not part of
some type of socialist system.
The ultimate proof that the left are mindless robots is their
projection on the conservatives and the left's fixation on
Limbaugh. The left has a fixation on Limbaugh. They think
that if Rush went away, then conservatism would die. They
think that most conservatives listen to Limbaugh to find out
what to believe (just like the leftists listen to Chomsy).
What a hoot. Most conservatives whom I know were conservative
long before Limbaugh came on the scene. They may listen to
him occasionally for the _entertainment_ value, but not for
information. The left actually takes Rush seriously and don't
even have the sense to know that he is really another
entertainer, not a political thinker. But, the left believes
that Limbaugh is what energizes the right. Listen, just
because you haven't had any thought that you didn't hear from
Chomsky or some Democratic party shill, don't think that the
rest of the country is as dumb as you are.
The Axis of Weasel
A friend of mine corresponds with him and notes that Chomsky will take
time to write a three page handwritten letter every couple of months
or so.
This certainly doesn't sound like someone with clinical depression to
me.
I could ask my friend, but I suspect my only reply would be an
egnimatic smile, or perhaps a query as to why it would matter to me.
He's a retired psychiatrist, you see.
Josh Dougherty
news:3eb55d32$0$4851$cc9e...@news.dial.pipex.com...
>
> "Craig Franck" <craig....@verizon.net> wrote in message
> news:k5cta.39751$xw4....@nwrdny01.gnilink.net...
> > "dogbert" <dog...@dogbert.edu> wrote
> >
> > > "Craig Franck" <craig....@verizon.net>
> > >
> > > >"keith" <keit...@yahoo.com> wrote
>
> <<Snippage>>>>.
>
>
> > The notion that the US and the West gets its wealth by
> > stealing from poor countries is so sophomoric and weak that
> > it puts all of your opinions in jeopardy of being dismissed as
> > idyllic blather.
>
> So all the Oil, Gold, Silver and all the other mineral resources
> we use are all taken from Western countries eh?
>
> Jezus ! How dumb can you get.
I liked where he said that variation in the stock market "creates wealth".
Josh
MikeSoja
<zeppn...@finestplanet.com> posted:
>A friend of mine corresponds with him and notes that Chomsky will take
>time to write a three page handwritten letter every couple of months
>or so.
>This certainly doesn't sound like someone with clinical depression to
>me.
>I could ask my friend, but I suspect my only reply would be an
>egnimatic smile, or perhaps a query as to why it would matter to me.
>He's a retired psychiatrist, you see.
Um, lessee, Chomsky hand writes three page letters every other month
to a psychiatrist, and you conclude he's not depressed?
Hmmmmm.
Mike Soja
keith
> "keith" <keit...@yahoo.com> wrote
>
> > "Craig Franck" <craig....@verizon.net> wrote
>
> > > "keith" <keit...@yahoo.com> wrote
> > >
> > > > I hav eno idea what Chomsky said about Pol Pot, but I personally have
> > > > not heard Chomsky say anything that wasn't eminently sensible.
> > >
> > > First you claim you never heard Chomsky say something
> > > stupid.
> > >
> > > > He *did* say that
> > > > the US government had little moral authority to criticize the
> > > > terrorists given the US record against governments we don't like,
> > >
> > > Then you write that. If the US has little moral authority to
> > > criticize terrorist for blowing up skyscrapers and killing
> > > thousands of people, on what grounds can we criticize
> > > them?
> >
> > That's because that's not stupid. The US government has much blood on
> > it's hands, from toppling Democratic governments in Guatemala, Iran
> > and Chile, supporting Central American dictators who killed thousands
> > and thoussands of their own people, from supporting Sadaam Hussein for
> > years etc.
>
> So when terrorists crash planes into buildings and kill thousands
> of people, we are not in a position to say that was an awfully
> bad thing for you to do? I can't believe, even in the Chomsky
> group, that someone actually believes that.
I sure didn't mean to say that! My point was: when our government
condemns those kind of terrorist actions without admitting the
terrorism we've done, it rings quite hollow. We've got no business
jumping on our high horse.
>
> > > >but
> > > > only right wingers who want to stifle dissent equate that with
> > > > *support* for the terrorists.
> > >
> > > By saying the US is no better than the worst terrorists
> > > roaming the planet, and therefore "ha[s] little moral authority
> > > to criticize [them]",...
> >
> > How do you judge better or worse in circumstances like these. It's
> > likely that Sadaam Huseein would have done even worse than the US if
> > *he* had had the power we have, but teh fact remains: the US has
> > overthrown democracy and supported the dictators who killed or
> > tortured many millions of people. That doesn't give us much room to
> > talk, morally.
>
> Much of US foreign policy that is so repugnant to people
> centered around the global containment of Communism. It
> was often a tough call, but we were up against a bigger
> evil than isolated dictators.
That's the point: we rationalized our support of evil as a means to a
greater end, just like the terrorists do.
Keith
Craig Franck
> "Craig Franck" <craig....@verizon.net> wrote
> > The notion that the US and the West gets its wealth by
> > stealing from poor countries is so sophomoric and weak that
> > it puts all of your opinions in jeopardy of being dismissed as
> > idyllic blather.
>
> So all the Oil, Gold, Silver and all the other mineral resources
> we use are all taken from Western countries eh?
We pay good money for those things. Are you suggesting Arab
countries give us oil for free? Last time I checked, there was a
price fixing scheme called OPEC that generates billions for the
ME.
Craig Franck
> I liked where he said that variation in the stock market "creates wealth".
It does, in a sense. A thousand dollars of MS IPO stock
peaked out at around ten million dollars. You are not just
moving money around when the economy grows, although
in the stock example, you need to sell some and then spend
it on tangibles.
Craig Franck
> "Craig Franck" <craig....@verizon.net> wrote
> > Much of US foreign policy that is so repugnant to people
> > centered around the global containment of Communism. It
> > was often a tough call, but we were up against a bigger
> > evil than isolated dictators.
> >
> Bullshit.
>
> The playing up of the Communist threat was to ensure
> money for the Military/industrial cartels.
> And for repression in the USA.
If you think there is some vast cabala of Trilateralites
and voodoo Capitalists running the world, there's nothing
I can do for you.
> You probably know that, but are so terrified by
> your media conjured demons as to render you incapable of
> rational thought.
You're right. We have nothing to be afraid of. Thank God
guys like you aren't running the show.
Gabrielle Rapagnetta
That money is not necessarily so good. To paraphrase this argument,
"we get resources from poor countries and they get pieces of paper".
If the money that developing countries are receiving from the U.S. was
"good money" then it really shouldn't upset the suits in Washington
when a developing nation decides to nationalize its industries.
But it is not "good money" and it rarely makes it into the hands of
the people who actually to have to live and work in the conditions of
a third world country. So long as developing nations do not
nationalize and keep u.s. dollars as their reserve currency that money
will, in effect, stay in the hands of the U.S..
The resources, however, generate some GDP and then get rushed off to a
landfill as quickly as possible. And some people call that "freedom"!
Sheer madness.
Josh Dougherty
> "Jez" <hell...@NOTSPAMdsl.pipex.com> wrote
>
> > "Craig Franck" <craig....@verizon.net> wrote
>
> > > The notion that the US and the West gets its wealth by
> > > stealing from poor countries is so sophomoric and weak that
> > > it puts all of your opinions in jeopardy of being dismissed as
> > > idyllic blather.
> >
> > So all the Oil, Gold, Silver and all the other mineral resources
> > we use are all taken from Western countries eh?
>
> We pay good money for those things. Are you suggesting Arab
> countries give us oil for free?
No, they sell it to us at a price that is acceptable to us or they get
bombed, the leader gets assasinated, or the goverment gets overthrown or
undermined some other way.
> Last time I checked, there was a price fixing scheme called OPEC that
generates billions for the
> ME.
Last time I checked, there was a price fixing scheme called: you sell it to
us, and within this price range, or we kill you.
Josh
Craig Franck
> "Craig Franck" <craig....@verizon.net> wrote
> > Much of US foreign policy that is so repugnant to people
> > centered around the global containment of Communism. It
> > was often a tough call, but we were up against a bigger
> > evil than isolated dictators.
>
> That's the point: we rationalized our support of evil as a means to a
> greater end, just like the terrorists do.
But our greater ends are better than theirs. Defeating the
Soviets and the socialist system without a WWIII is not
a minor undertaking. As long as the number of democracies
keep going up (and they have doubled recently: half the
world's population now lives in countries considered mostly
or partly democratic), I say we are on the right track.
brian turner
[deleted]
> The mindless robots are on the left. They have to have
> somebody like Chomsky to tell them what to think. They cannot
> come to terms with the fact that Marxism is a failed system
> that can only be kept in power by brutal repression in any
Is this a throw-away line, or is there some argument underlying it?
If the latter -- What is the Marxist system? Marx was very hazy about
what he was for. And "Marxists" after he died had widely varying
ideas; Eduard Bernstein, Rosa Luxemburg, and Leonid Brezhnev had three
quite different interpretations of Marxism and proposals for society.
If the "Marxist system" means just Soviet style central planning and
nothing else, what's the relevance of the comment? Chomsky and most
of the left today don't argue for Soviet style central planning.
And what's the criteria for failure? China's economy from 1970-1990
grew much faster than any country in Latin America over that time
period, despite privately owned firms larger than mom-and-pop
contributing a statistically negligible % of GNP in any year.
Certainly there were ample problems, but if this record is a "failure"
what does that say about Latin America that was gradually and unevenly
phasing in the IMF model in this period?
And why did a largely socialist economy in Israel after 1947 require
no (internal) repression to set up and maintain for some time?
(Socialist Zionists were heavily influenced by Marxism). Could it be
that the repression in the communist world was not necessary, but
rather a choice of those dictators and parties? At least we can say
these are murky issues not so simplistic as claimed.
James A. Donald
On Sat, 03 May 2003 23:07:04 GMT, "coondawg"
<coon...@atnotspambi.com> wrote:
> they defend him by saying he only compared pol pot favorably
> to other genocidal tyrants and tried to equate what the US
> did to pol pot'r rule.
Well that is what they say, but it is not true. Chomsky argued
the Khmer Rouge was similar to the French Resistance, and the
US similar to Nazi Germany occupying France.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
m1nOyTJKSJ4+DZMffg7/XC0STK8FGkxOkQqhCxum
4Z40Fukanu68YApgn/1MekGwsvMOw524n4igT04vV
James A. Donald
On 3 May 2003 16:34:13 -0700, keit...@yahoo.com (keith) wrote:
> I hav eno idea what Chomsky said about Pol Pot, but I
> personally have not heard Chomsky say anything that wasn't
> eminently sensible.
Oh come on.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
zm/8xp0Gp1ez+//DId2tZAZTaSdBV4akbJVchHDR
4eJu90o+cknnbbKQC5+y02Vgz50zu6oWjCAXk7hEH
dogbert
:
>"dogbert" <dog...@dogbert.edu> wrote
>
>> "Craig Franck" <craig....@verizon.net>
>>
>> >"keith" <keit...@yahoo.com> wrote
>
>> >>but
>> >> only right wingers who want to stifle dissent equate that with
>> >> *support* for the terrorists.
>> >
>> >By saying the US is no better than the worst terrorists
>> >roaming the planet,
>>
>> US military and foreign policy is of course much worse.
>
>That's obviously an extremist point of view.
No, it is simply an accurate statement of fact. A view that is held by a
probable majority of the human beings on the planet.
>The US military
>doesn't do state sponsored terrorism.
As NC was fond of pointing out, we even do it officially. The US
government gives official definitions of "State-sponsored Terrorism" (bad)
and "Low Intensity Warfare" (good, because we do it) . Lo and behold, they
are the same.
>The US military has by
>winning two world wars as well as the cold war done more to
>ensure the freedom of more people than any other institution
>on the planet.
Ho, ho, ho. Not to denigrate the effect of winning of the second world war
(you really think the first had good effects? - wouldn't have been better
to just stay out?) haven't you noticed that practically everything we have
done since - including putting Fascist/ Nazi collaborators back into power
everywhere immediately after that war - has been to destroy democracy
whenever it rears its ugly head? To destroy freedom wherever we see people
having too much? E.g. our terrorist armies in Central America in the 80s;
the motivation for our attack on Vietnam. Take a look at William Blum's
books for systematic catalogues.
>
>Name one good thing that terrorists have done.
Nothing. I include US official terrorists ( the big stakes game) and nuts
like Osama. Of course the empire frequently calls people who are fighting
for their freedom against foreign (neo)colonialism or our local flunkies
"terrorists."
>
>> These small scale
>> terrorists are in a penny ante game, while our rackets operate on all
>> continents and kill by the millions - though if you're talking about the
>> ultimate effect - the prevention of economic development for most of
>> humanity while we rob them blind - billions of premature deaths is more
>> like it.
>
>The notion that the US and the West gets its wealth by
>stealing from poor countries is so sophomoric and weak that
>it puts all of your opinions in jeopardy of being dismissed as
>idyllic blather.
Indeed, but I did not say that we do get our wealth that way. We are
wealthy countries that happen to engage in frequent murder, torture,
robbery and pillage of poor ones, because our internal elites feel like it,
and no one is strong enough to stop our criminal elites (whose actions are
generally supported by the elites of other rich nations of course - we're
just the enforcers since their populations are slightly less stupid than
ours,)
>
>The US creates wealth, not consume it. A good one-day rally
>on Wall Street creates more wealth than the average GDP of a
>third world country, so I don't know what it is we are stealing
>from them.
You are amazingly ignorant if you think that stock prices going up creates
real wealth (in certain conditions it could be part of real wealth
creation, but always? - in speculative bubbles? - too silly to argue with.)
Your silly statement is entirely illogical and irrelevant even if it were
true. How does wealth creation here contradict the fact of our thefts
there?
>Yes, they often have terrible labor conditions, but
>they are roughly equivalent to the labor standards in this country
>100 years ago. It's going to take a long time before everyone
>has close to what we have.
It would take a lot shorter time if we stopped attacking them and robbing
them of what little they have, imposing grossly unjust and predatory
trading arrangements on them like the WTO, and using international agencies
such as the World Bank and the IMF as agents of their economic destruction
and perpetual servitude and indebtedness.
>> > and therefore "ha[so] little moral authority
>> >to criticize [them]", (I imagine much less to actually do
>> >something about them), you are supporting terrorists in
>> >that you are creating a situation for them to flourish by
>> >attempting to paralyze the one country best equipped to
>> >do something about them.
>>
>> Of course we do a lot about terrorism. In the first place we directly
>> commit a lot of it,
>
>That's a lie. The attempt to defend terrorism by stating there
>is a moral equivalency with what the US does is intellectually
>and morally bankrupt.
Of course no one defends terrorism here - unless you mean yourself by your
ridiculous denial of the fact that the US frequently commits and supports
terrrorism and much worse.
Of course there is no moral equivalency - whatever that means -
the US government is at a lower moral level than any other entity on the
planet, by any reasonable measure. Osama and Co just don't have the power
to commit the crimes the US does. You don't get to be Hitler unless you're
the Fuhrer first.
>
>> hire and support others to commit even more, and
>> frequently attack other countries, especially when there is a specter of
>> independent economic development or democracy.
>
>The US is against democracy?
Yes, of course. It is one of the most persistent themes of our foreign
policy. Why not read Chomsky's book on the subject?
>That's like saying Microsoft is
>an evil, anti-capitalist entity because they happen to be a
>monopoly. The US has done more to ensure democracy than
>anyone else.
Ho, ho, ho.
Yeah, right. How many countries does one need to name that had their
regimes changed because they were democratically elected and reflecting the
will of their peoples - but not the mafiosi who run our government? Chile,
Nicaragua, Iran, etc. ad infinitum. Venezuela is a probable current case.
>People who say otherwise are either stupid, or liars.
Uh, you mean well-informed and awake, unlike the sheeple like yourself who
love to listen to the fairy tales the man on the TV puts them to sleep with
every night.
>
>> Isn't it grand being the only Evil Empire left around?
>
>That is only true in your deluded mind.
>
>> Of course, if we were talking about the interests of the people of the US
>> and the rest of the world being free of terror, US paralysis would be a
>> wonderful thing, but it is just wishful thinking.
>
>"US paralysis" would only cause the Europeans or the
>Chinese or terrorists or the Russians to step in and start
>screwing things up for themselves. You are a fool if you
>don't realize this, a person whose understanding of global
>politics is at a comic-book level. Believing the US is the
>source of all the bad in the world is like believing all we
>need is Superman and our troubles would be over.
No, it is just the source of most of the political evil in the world. I am
quite aware that the US has become the enforcer of an elite international
consensus. If the US did nothing on its own but just enforced say the UN
GA consensus, we would have a relative paradise. Of course if it
disappeared there would be a power vacuum which others would step into, but
these other nations have not been anywhere near as aggressive as we have,
and there is little reason to expect they would be - China has always kept
to its own cultural sphere - the last time it tried to aggress - against
Vietnam - what the hell were they thinking - it got taught a lesson.
Russia has far too many internal problems, and the Europeans have a very
pacifist population that would prevent major US -scale imperial mass murder
rampages. Adding in "the terrorists" just shows whose understanding is on
a comic book level.
>> There are enough idiots
>> like yourself supporting American terrorism and aggression against the rest
>> of the world for the game to keep going on for a long time yet.
>
>That's because we understand how the world works, and
>you obviously don't.
No, you understand some fairy tales - who doesn't- which of course are not
believed in by the racketeers who who rock you to sleep with them.
Don't you see how implausible your fairy tale is? The one wonderful
uber-nation that does nothing but good deeds around the world all at its
own expense, opposed by all those baddies who just do evil because they're
well, evil, y'know.
Versus the reasonable and true picture of states behaving as states always
have behaved - and of course the most miltarily powerful one, with the
least constraints on its behavior, behaving the worst, working at the
behest of its elites in a barbaric and criminal fashion, for their own
temporary enrichment?
Dan Clore
Well, then, find me something in there that hasn't been
addressed before. I don't think you can do it.
--
Dan Clore
Now available: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://www.wildsidepress.com/index2.htm
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1587154838/thedanclorenecro
Lord We˙rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
Dan Clore
> "dogbert" <dog...@dogbert.edu> wrote in message
> news:3hg9bvcqmgg7a3u9t...@4ax.com...
> > On Sun, 04 May 2003 01:56:22 GMT, "Craig Franck"
> <craig....@verizon.net>
> > >"keith" <keit...@yahoo.com> wrote
> > US military and foreign policy is of course much worse. These small scale
> > terrorists are in a penny ante game, while our rackets operate on all
> > continents and kill by the millions - though if you're talking about the
> > ultimate effect - the prevention of economic development for most of
> > humanity while we rob them blind - billions of premature deaths is more
> > like it.
>
> Craig Frank rebuts you quite well on this I think. But I'll add this: you
> Chomskyites tend to take some general philisophical truths and turn them
> into large practical lies. Just like Chomsky pushes, or pushed, Pol Pot as a
> great practical idea,
Which he never did. He actually pointed out over and over
and over that he was *not* doing so, and explained the
difference between that and what he was saying over and over
and over.
> and just as you're pushing America as the great world
> terrorist now. People don't buy that on a gut level anymore than they look
> at what Pol Pot did in Cambodia and buy that as a wonderful solution for the
> world's problems, or the view you like to push that Iraq under Hussein was
> no worse, maybe better, than America under Bush.
Where did anyone push the idea that "America under Bush" is
worse than "Iraq under Hussein"?
Dan Clore
> Dan Clore <cl...@columbia-center.org> wrote in message news:<3EB4C660...@columbia-center.org>...
> > "Samuel K." wrote:
> > > Or that Chomsky's monstrous equation of the September 11 attacks with
> > > the bombing of Sudan was anything but a vain attempt to downplay the
> > > first event by holding up unproven speculation about the second event
> > > as though it were fact - while, incidentally, implying that those who
> > > disputed his comparision were showing "racist contempt" for the
> > > Sudanese?
>
> > Thank you for repeating some of the outright lies in the
> > article. And you said you never saw them--
> I don't think Chomsky's 9/11 vs Sudan statement was "monstrous",
> that's ridiculous, nor do I think there is any downplay of 9/11, but
> other than that I don't see what's inaccurate about Samuel's
> statement. Chomsky relied on speculation to equate the 9/11 and Sudan
> bombings and vilified Christopher Hitchens for questioning this.
Well, maybe it's speculation, but only in the same sense as
*any* estimate of such deaths must be. In the case of
Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, for instance, even after a
couple decades of scholars making extensive studies of the
period, the scholarly estimates range from 500,000 to 1.7
million killed. (As a sidenote, also consider that the
article slams Chomsky & Herman for questioning figures of 1
to 2 million, given out in the period 1975 to early 1977,
before the majority of these deaths took place in the great
purges of late 1977 through 1978. Further, these implausibly
estimates often gave these figures for executions rather
than for all excess deaths, whereas starvation, disease, and
overwork accounted for far more of them than execution.)
That's a difference of over a million out of a total less
than 2 million.
In the case of the Sudan pharmaceutical factory, it's much
harder to estimate the actual numbers, without someone
undertaking this sort of task. But even just doing a web
search, I can easily find accounts that belie the writer's
claim that no one noticed an excess of deaths due to the
destruction of the al-Shifa factory and the consequent lack
of drugs to treat malaria, tubercolosis, etc. For instance,
a film-maker who interviewed the factory's owner for a
documentary had this to say:
"About seven and a half million are infected annually by
malaria, with 35-45,000 losing their lives. In 1999 [Sudan]
had its single biggest epidemic of malaria. Many more died
in the period the Al-Shifa factory has been out of business
and prices doubled. It is estimated 10,000 lives have been
lost."
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/feb2003/samu-f24.shtml
According to the Sudan Catholic Information Office's Sudan
Monthly Report:
"[February] 22 [1999]: A malaria epidemic in Sudan is the
result of last year's US missile attack on the country's
main pharmaceutical factory, the foreign minister said. 'We
have an acute shortage in malaria-treatment drugs and other
drugs,' foreign minister Mustafa Osman Ismail said in a
statement to the official Sudan News Agency."
http://www.peacelink.it/africa/scio/month_34.html
The UK Guardian tells us:
"But if Eltayeb is alive to the absurdity of American
hi-tech pitted against 'a simple factory in one of the
poorest countries in the third world', he can also count the
cost. Al-Shifa was one of only three medium-sized
pharmaceutical factories in Sudan, and the only one
producing TB drugs - for more than 100,000 patients, at
about £1 a month. Costlier imported versions are not an
option for most of them - or for their husbands, wives and
children, who will have been infected since. Al-Shifa was
also the only factory making veterinary drugs in this vast,
mostly pastoralist, country. Its speciality was drugs to
kill the parasites which pass from herds to herders, one of
Sudan's principal causes of infant mortality. Since the
bombing, 'people have gone back to doing without,' says
Eltayeb, with a shrug."
Eltayeb continues:
"But this was just as much an act of terrorism as at the
twin towers - the only difference is we know who did it,"
Eltayeb says. "I feel very sad about the loss of life there,
but in terms of numbers, and the relative cost to a poor
country, this was worse."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4268146,00.html
A medical report from 2002 tells us that:
"Malaria, diarrhoea, and acute respiratory infection are the
major diseases in Sudan. Malaria is now considered endemic
throughout the country. In two years, the prevalence rate
rose from 195/1,000 to 250/1,000."
http://www.db.idpproject.org/Sites/idpSurvey.nsf/wViewCountries/5B670E1D1C1970F0C1256CDE0077BEF2
The Boston Globe reported:
"Thus, tens of thousands of people - many of them children -
have suffered and died from malaria, tuberculosis, and other
treatable diseases."
http://www.droitvp.org/El_Shifa_Truth.html
Finally, a source that I do not trust (due to the author's
ideology) gives this figure:
"The destruction of al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory has also
caused the deaths of another 150,000 people since 1998."
http://www.muslimedia.com/archives/world01/afghan-wait.htm
That's a sample.
--
Dan Clore
Now available: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://www.wildsidepress.com/index2.htm
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1587154838/thedanclorenecro
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
Dan Clore
> "Dan Clore" <cl...@columbia-center.org> wrote in message
> news:3EB55C2B...@columbia-center.org...
> > Dave Gower wrote:
> > > "RCMan" <rcma...@excite.com> quoted
> > > > The Hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky
> > >
> > > I agree that he is certainly that, but after watching him on television
> I
> > > get a more disturbing impression. The man is clinically depressed. You
> can
> > > see it in his expression, hear it in his voice. Clinical depression is a
> > > serious form of mental illness. That is probably also the most powerful
> > > condemnation one can make of his sad band of faithful followers.
> >
> > This is simply laughable.
> >
> Indeed.
Maybe we need to propose a new psychiatric category: Couch
Potato Delusory Disorder.
--
Dan Clore
Now available: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://www.wildsidepress.com/index2.htm
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1587154838/thedanclorenecro
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
keith
> "keith" <keit...@yahoo.com> wrote
>
> > "Craig Franck" <craig....@verizon.net> wrote
>
> > > Much of US foreign policy that is so repugnant to people
> > > centered around the global containment of Communism. It
> > > was often a tough call, but we were up against a bigger
> > > evil than isolated dictators.
> >
> > That's the point: we rationalized our support of evil as a means to a
> > greater end, just like the terrorists do.
>
> But our greater ends are better than theirs. Defeating the
> Soviets and the socialist system without a WWIII is not
> a minor undertaking.
That's the rationalization. We claimed that supporting evil was
necessary to oppose the allegedly greater evil of communism, they (The
Al-Qaeda terrorists) claim murdering civilians is necessary to oppose
the greater evil of the anti-God US. Hitler said it genocide wa
necessary to save humanity from it's inferiors. Every evil supporting
government similarly rationalizes evil. But evil is still evil, and
unless your conscience is completely atrophied you can tell evil.
Keith
Harvey
Shall I wash your car for you while I'm at it?
Harvey
Harvey
"Gabrielle Rapagnetta" <{[N0-SPpam]}cut...@gmx.net> wrote in message
news:p0dbbvot8uaj41n6k...@4ax.com...
This is interesting. So what do you suggest? A return to the gold standard?
Barter? What?
Harvey
Harvey
"Josh Dougherty" <jdoc1...@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:vbjta.54476$ey1.5...@newsread1.prod.itd.earthlink.net...
Ah, I see. So Jimmy Carter bombed the hell out of the ME to end the oil
embargo, did he? Funny, that missed all the papers.
Harvey
Woodard R. Springstube
news:66dc0679.03050...@posting.google.com:
> "Woodard R. Springstube" <springst...@Diespammer.net>
> wrote in message
> news:<Xns93719C2981C4...@205.197.247.129>...
> [deleted]
>> The mindless robots are on the left. They have to have
>> somebody like Chomsky to tell them what to think. They
>> cannot come to terms with the fact that Marxism is a
>> failed system that can only be kept in power by brutal
>> repression in any country where it exists. [...]
>
> Is this a throw-away line, or is there some argument
> underlying it? If the latter -- What is the Marxist system?
> Marx was very hazy about what he was for. And "Marxists"
> after he died had widely varying ideas; Eduard Bernstein,
> Rosa Luxemburg, and Leonid Brezhnev had three quite
> different interpretations of Marxism and proposals for
> society.
It makes no difference what the interpretation are and the
proposals are. In the end, it is likely to involve common
elements. Many of the proposals that I have read amount to
nothing more than "happy talk" without substantive meaning.
The implimentation is where it will degenerate into the same
old repression. Furthermore, the very vagueness of Marx on
the subject, beyond his talk of the dictatorship of the
proletariate, is dangerous since it allows almost anything in
the name of Marxism.
>
> If the "Marxist system" means just Soviet style central
> planning and nothing else, what's the relevance of the
> comment? Chomsky and most of the left today don't argue
> for Soviet style central planning.
So what? Either you are going to have central planning or you
are going to have a market. But, with government control of
the means of production (the most likely outcome of any
attempt to socialize the means of production) the decisions
are going to be made for political reasons. In the end, it
will degenerate into the same old repression.
>
> And what's the criteria for failure? China's economy from
> 1970-1990 grew much faster than any country in Latin
> America over that time period, despite privately owned
> firms larger than mom-and-pop contributing a statistically
> negligible % of GNP in any year.
And, the Chinese still have a repressive government that
stifles dissent. If Chomsky were in China, criticizing that
government the way he does in the US, he would end up in
prison or worse very quickly. I remind you that China uses
the death penalty for more than murder and still tortures
dissent. Check out China on the Amnesty International
website.
>Certainly there were ample
> problems, but if this record is a "failure" what does that
> say about Latin America that was gradually and unevenly
> phasing in the IMF model in this period?
>
> And why did a largely socialist economy in Israel after
> 1947 require no (internal) repression to set up and
> maintain for some time? (Socialist Zionists were heavily
> influenced by Marxism). Could it be that the repression in
> the communist world was not necessary, but rather a choice
> of those dictators and parties? At least we can say these
> are murky issues not so simplistic as claimed.
But, do you not have a problem with Israel's record on human
rights? And, Israel was not a fully socialist economy.
The fact is that a socialist economy is likely to be co-opted
by some brutal dictator. Also, an element of repression is
necessary, if for no other reason than to control the free
rider problem. In any event, Israel is not a good example of
socialism in action, since there were some very special
circumstances there. First, was the presence of so many
European Jewish refugees at Israel's founding. They brought
with them their literacy and skills. Second, Israel was
surrounded with nations that had vowed to "push the Jews into
the sea." The Israelis took those threats seriously and
banded together to prevent a repetition of the recent genocide
that had occurred in Europe. That gave them a cohesion that
most societies lack.
Dan Clore
Sure--it could use it.
Dan Clore
Here's an idea:
::: Flaxscrip & Hempscrip :::
by Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson
Flaxscrip was first introduced into Discordian groups by
the mysterious Malaclypse the Younger, K.S.C., in 1968.
Hempscrip followed the year after, issued by Dr. Mordecai
Malignatus, K.N.S. (In the novel, taking one of our few
liberties with historical truth, we move these coinages
backward in time and attribute hempscrip to the Justified
Ancients of Mummu.)
The *idea* behind flaxscrip, of course, is as old as
history;
there was private money long before there was government
money. The first revolutionary (or reformist) use of this
idea, as a check against galloping usury and high interest
rates, was the foundation of "Banks of Piety" by the
Dominican order of the Catholic Church in the late middle
ages. (See Tawney, _Religion and the Rise of Capitalism_.)
The Dominicans, having discovered that preaching against
usury did not deter the usurer, founded their own banks
and provided loans without interest; this "ethical
competition"
(as Josiah Warren later called it) drove the commercial
banks
out of the areas where the Dominicans practiced it. Similar
private currency, loaned at a low rate of interest (but not
at no interest), was provided by Scots banks until the
British
government, acting on behalf of the monopoly of the Bank of
England, stopped this exercise of free enterprise. (See
Muellen,
_Free Banking_.) The same idea was tried successfully in the
American colonies before the Revolution, and again was
suppressed by the British government, which some heretical
historians regard as a more direct cause of the American
Revolution than the taxes mentioned in most schoolbooks.
(See Ezra Pound, _Impact_, and additional sources cited
therein.)
During the nineteenth century many anarchists and
individualists
attempted to issue low-interest or no-interest private
currencies. _Mutual Banking_, by Colonel William Greene, and
_True Civilization_, by Josiah Warren, are records of two
such
attempts, by their instigators. Lysander Spooner, an
anarchist
who was also a constitutional lawyer, argued at length that
Congress had no authority to suppress such private
currencies
(see his _Our Financiers: Their Ignorance, Usurpations and
Frauds_). A general overview of such efforts at free
enterprise,
soon crushed by the Capitalist State, is given by James M.
Martin in his _Men Against the State_, and by Rudolph Rocker
in
_Pioneers of American Freedom_ (an ironic title, since his
pioneers all lost their major battles). Lawrence Labadie, of
Suffern, N.Y., has collected (but not yet published) records
of
1,000 such experiments; one of the present authors, Robert
Anton
Wilson, unearthed in 1962 the tale of a no-interest
currency,
privately issued, in Yellow Springs, Ohio, during the 1930s
depression. (This was an emergency measure by certain local
businessmen, who did not fully appreciate the principle
involved,
and was abandoned as soon as the "tight-money" squeeze ended
and
Roosevelt began flooding us all with Federal Reserve notes.)
It is traditional among liberal historians to dismiss such
endeavors as "funny-money schemes." They have never
explained
why government money is any less hilarious. (That used in
the
U.S. now [1975], for instance, is actually worth 47 percent
of
its "declared" face value). All money is funny, if you stop
to
think about it, but no private currency, competing on a free
market, could ever be quite so comical (and tragic) as the
notes
now bearing the magic imprint of Uncle Same -- and backed
only
by his promise (or threat) that, come hell or high water, by
God
he'll make it good by taxing our descendants into the
infinite
generation to pay the interest on it. The National Debt, so
called, is of course, nothing else but the debt we owe the
bankers who "loaned" this money to Uncle after he kindly
gave
them the credit which enabled them to make this loan.
Hempscrip
or even acidscrip or peyotescrip could never be quite so
clownish
as this system, which only the Illuminati (if they really
exist)
could have dreamed up. The system has but one advantage: It
makes
bankers richer every year. Nobody else, from the industrial
capitalist or "captain of industry" to the coal-miner,
profits
from it in any way, and all pay the taxes, which become the
interest payments, which makes the bankers richer. If the
Illuminati did not exist, it would be necessary to invent
them --
such a system can be explained in no other way, except by
those
cynics who hold that human stupidity is infinite.
The idea behind hempscrip is more radical than the notion of
private-enterprise currency per se. Hempscrip, as employed
in
the novel, depreciates; it is, thus, not merely a
*no-interest*
currency, but a *negative-interest* currency. The lender
literally
pays the borrower to take it away for a while. It was
invented by
German business-economist Silvio Gesell, and is described in
his
_Natural Economic Order_ and in professor Irving Fisher's
_Stamp
Script_.
Gresham's Law, like most of the "laws" taught in
State-supported
public schools, is not quite true (at least, not in the form
in
which it is usually taught). *"Bad money drives out good"
holds
only in authoritarian societies, not in libertarian
societies.*
(Gresham was clear-minded enough to state explicitly that he
was
only describing authoritarian societies: *his* formulation
of his
own "Law" begins with the words "If the king issueth two
moneys ...,"
thereby implying the State must exist if the "Law" is to
operate.)
*In a libertarian society, good money will drive out the
bad.*
This Utopian proposition -- which the sane reader will
regard with
acute skepticism -- has been seen to be sound by a
rigorously
logical demonstration, based on the axioms of economics, in
_The
Cause of Business Depressions_ by Hugo Bilgrim and Edward
Levy.
[footnote]
Economists can "prove" all sorts of things from axioms and
few of
them turn out to be true. Yes. We saved for a footnote the
information that at least four empirical demonstrations of
the
reverse of Gresham's Law are on record. Three of them,
employing
small volunteer communities in frontier U.S.A. circa
1830-1860,
are recorded in Josiah Warren's _True Civilization_. The
fourth,
employing contemporary college students in a psychology
laboratory,
is the subject of a recent Master's thesis by associate
professor
Don Werkheiser of Central State College, Wilberforce, Ohio.
[Appendix Vau of The Illuminatus! Trilogy]
djinn
news:79263874f910f0f7...@news.mybinaries.com:
> --
> On 3 May 2003 16:34:13 -0700, keit...@yahoo.com (keith) wrote:
>> I hav eno idea what Chomsky said about Pol Pot, but I
>> personally have not heard Chomsky say anything that wasn't
>> eminently sensible.
>
> Oh come on.
>
Hey, for proper values of 'sensible'. :)
Harvey
So you seriously suggest a negative interest currency?
Harvey
Harvey
I seriously doubt it needs it more than mine. But at the end of the process,
you still haven't answered coondawg's question, using a process that is very
much like Chompsky, indeed.
Harvey
Craig Franck
> That's the rationalization. We claimed that supporting evil was
> necessary to oppose the allegedly greater evil of communism, they (The
> Al-Qaeda terrorists) claim murdering civilians is necessary to oppose
> the greater evil of the anti-God US.
Perhaps, but they're idiots. Your argument of equivalency
only works by remaining completely blind to the difference
in outcome. If temporarily supporting evil leads to world
peace, that's the price you pay. Not to do it would be more
immoral than doing it.
Are you like those PETA people? You find a cure for cancer,
and they don't care because they think it's evil to experiment
on animals, so you're no better than someone who beats
animals to death for fun. If that's your logic, fine, but a debate
with someone like that would be pretty pointless.
Craig Franck
> "Craig Franck" <craig....@verizon.net> wrote
>
> >"dogbert" <dog...@dogbert.edu> wrote
> >> US military and foreign policy is of course much worse.
> >
> >That's obviously an extremist point of view.
>
> No, it is simply an accurate statement of fact. A view that is held by a
> probable majority of the human beings on the planet.
I would suggest it's closer to 1 in 10.
> >The US military
> >doesn't do state sponsored terrorism.
>
> As NC was fond of pointing out, we even do it officially. The US
> government gives official definitions of "State-sponsored Terrorism" (bad)
> and "Low Intensity Warfare" (good, because we do it) . Lo and behold, they
> are the same.
Both terrorists and armed forces kill people, but it's not
murder if you're involved in legal warfare. NC, as usual, is
simply flat out wrong. (I do agree the reasoning is a bit
circular, but accepting the fact that, for example, the
government can "steal" by passing laws is just part of
adjusting to society. A friend recently had a $45,000 car
held hostage, with no due process, (booted) for $175 in
parking fines.No one but the government could get away
with that.)
> >The US military has by
> >winning two world wars as well as the cold war done more to
> >ensure the freedom of more people than any other institution
> >on the planet.
>
> Ho, ho, ho. Not to denigrate the effect of winning of the second world war
> (you really think the first had good effects? - wouldn't have been better
> to just stay out?)
No.
> haven't you noticed that practically everything we have
> done since - including putting Fascist/ Nazi collaborators back into power
> everywhere immediately after that war - has been to destroy democracy
> whenever it rears its ugly head? To destroy freedom wherever we see people
> having too much?
Now you're just being silly. The US is the world's only
superpower, and the number of democracies has doubled
recently. Half the Earth's population now lives in total or
partial democracies. You're really hallucination at this
point. I submit that if a country as powerful as the US
was bent on destroying democracy and freedom, we'd
be doing a much better job of it. This is one of the most
obvious cases of reality crashing into your almost mythic
falsehoods about the US.
Answer this: was the US at all responsible for the freeing
of Eastern Europe? People who agree that we were tend
to give the US much more credit than you do (to put it
mildly) for doing good things.
> E.g. our terrorist armies in Central America in the 80s;
That explains why, with the notable exception of Cuba,
the Western Hemisphere is a haven for democracy.
> >
> >Name one good thing that terrorists have done.
>
> Nothing.
At least we agree on something.
> >> These small scale
> >> terrorists are in a penny ante game, while our rackets operate on all
> >> continents and kill by the millions - though if you're talking about the
> >> ultimate effect - the prevention of economic development for most of
> >> humanity while we rob them blind - billions of premature deaths is more
> >> like it.
> >
> >The notion that the US and the West gets its wealth by
> >stealing from poor countries is so sophomoric and weak that
> >it puts all of your opinions in jeopardy of being dismissed as
> >idyllic blather.
>
> Indeed, but I did not say that we do get our wealth that way.
Fine. Do you still stand by your assertion that "billions"
( > 2billion) have died prematurely from actions of the
"US racket"? That's almost 1/3 of the entire population
of the entire planet (http://cometoseek.com/you.html),
and I'm certain doesn't take into account how Western
medicine has almost doubled average life expectancy.
> >The US creates wealth, not consume it. A good one-day rally
> >on Wall Street creates more wealth than the average GDP of a
> >third world country, so I don't know what it is we are stealing
> >from them.
>
> You are amazingly ignorant if you think that stock prices going up creates
> real wealth (in certain conditions it could be part of real wealth
> creation,
You call me "amazingly ignorant," and in the next
sentence you say we are in a qualified agreement.
> but always? - in speculative bubbles? - too silly to argue with.)
"A good one-day rally on Wall Street creates more wealth
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
than the average GDP of a third world country,"
One of the things that spurred the real estate boom in the
90s was the stock market. People would sell stock as
profit taking, and then pay $300,000 in cash for property.
> Your silly statement is entirely illogical and irrelevant even if it were
> true. How does wealth creation here contradict the fact of our thefts
> there?
Most countries don't have any wealth to steal when
compared to the US economy.
[...]
> Of course there is no moral equivalency - whatever that means -
Now you're pulling a Chomsky. Moral equivalency means
the same general level of morality. Some people think
cheating on your spouse is morally equivalent to cheating
on your boyfriend or girlfriend; some think it's worse.
> the US government is at a lower moral level than any other entity on the
> planet, by any reasonable measure.
Even than North Korea? It's frightening to think there
are people out there who think like you do.
> >> hire and support others to commit even more, and
> >> frequently attack other countries, especially when there is a specter of
> >> independent economic development or democracy.
> >
> >The US is against democracy?
>
> Yes, of course. It is one of the most persistent themes of our foreign
> policy.
There is no way you can make an argument for that.
>Why not read Chomsky's book on the subject?
Because he's just as confused as you are.
> Don't you see how implausible your fairy tale is? The one wonderful
> uber-nation that does nothing but good deeds around the world
I don't believe that, I'm just suggesting that your pathological
hatred for the US government is more than a bit twisted.
Craig Franck
> "Woodard R. Springstube" wrote
> > The mindless robots are on the left. They have to have
> > somebody like Chomsky to tell them what to think. They cannot
> > come to terms with the fact that Marxism is a failed system
> > that can only be kept in power by brutal repression in any
> > country where it exists. [...]
>
> Is this a throw-away line, or is there some argument underlying it?
> And what's the criteria for failure? China's economy from 1970-1990
> grew much faster than any country in Latin America over that time
> period, despite privately owned firms larger than mom-and-pop
> contributing a statistically negligible % of GNP in any year.
They were also heavily subsidized by the fact that they
were stealing Western technology (R&D in China, to this
day, consists basically of reverse engineering mostly US
and EU stuff), and had a huge influx of people into urban
centers from rural areas.
> And why did a largely socialist economy in Israel after 1947 require
> no (internal) repression to set up and maintain for some time?
> (Socialist Zionists were heavily influenced by Marxism). Could it be
> that the repression in the communist world was not necessary, but
> rather a choice of those dictators and parties?
My belief is that any form of socialism requires expert
planning and execution to work even marginally well, so
Marxist governments have used repression to stay in
power.
>At least we can say
> these are murky issues not so simplistic as claimed.
China is interesting in that they are becoming more of
a hybrid. Capitalism has an advantage in that, since its
economics isn't state run theology, they can introduce
elements of socialism where it makes sense (medicine,
social services). And it also seems in practice easier to
get right. You need something that works in spite of what
the government does, not because of what it does.
Mekong Network
> In the case of
> Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, for instance, even after a
> couple decades of scholars making extensive studies of the
> period, the scholarly estimates range from 500,000 to 1.7
> million killed.
Who still considers the figure of only 500,000 to be even remotely
plausible? I don't think any scholar other than Michael Vickery ever
believed the toll was that low, even before the the discovery of
additional mass graves in the Nineties.
As far as I can tell, estimates of 1.5 to 1.7 million are the norm,
and there is some pretty compelling evidence that the toll is higher.
As of 1999, the Documentation Center of Cambodia had isolated 20,492
mass graves, containing 1,112,829 remains, described as "victims of
execution."
regards,
Bruce
http://www.mekong.net/cambodia
Josh Dougherty
news:67874ff1.03050...@posting.google.com...
> > Dan Clore <cl...@columbia-center.org> wrote:
> > In the case of
> > Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, for instance, even after a
> > couple decades of scholars making extensive studies of the
> > period, the scholarly estimates range from 500,000 to 1.7
> > million killed.
>
> Who still considers the figure of only 500,000 to be even remotely
> plausible?
I'll let Dan answer that, but it seems to me that the question is not who
considers it plausible now. It's who considered them plausible in the mid
70's when Chomksy was writing his "apologia" for the Khmer Rogue.
> I don't think any scholar other than Michael Vickery ever
> believed the toll was that low, even before the the discovery of
> additional mass graves in the Nineties.
Wouldn't new evidence discovered in the 90's be irrelevent to what Chomsky
had written in the 70's, since he certainly could not base conclusions or
questions on evidence that was, well, not in evidence?
> As far as I can tell, estimates of 1.5 to 1.7 million are the norm,
Dan said:
(As a sidenote, also consider that the article slams Chomsky & Herman for
questioning figures of 1
to 2 million, given out in the period 1975 to early 1977, before the
majority of these deaths took place in the great
purges of late 1977 through 1978. Further, these implausibly estimates often
gave these figures for executions rather
than for all excess deaths, whereas starvation, disease, and overwork
accounted for far more of them than execution.)
You didn't take issue with this, so I'm assuming that you agree, more or
less, that Dan is being accurate here.
Josh
brian turner
> >> [snipped]... Marxism is a
> >> failed system that can only be kept in power by brutal
> >> repression in any country where it exists. [...]
> >
> > Is this a throw-away line, or is there some argument
> > underlying it? If the latter -- What is the Marxist system?
> > Marx was very hazy about what he was for. And "Marxists"
> > after he died had widely varying ideas; Eduard Bernstein,
> > Rosa Luxemburg, and Leonid Brezhnev had three quite
> > different interpretations of Marxism and proposals for
> > society.
> It makes no difference what the interpretation are and the
> proposals are. In the end, it is likely to involve common
> elements. Many of the proposals that I have read amount to
> nothing more than "happy talk" without substantive meaning.
For many, especially anti-market leftist anarchists, I agree.
However, that's certainly not so for one of the Marxists I mentioned,
Eduard Bernstein.
> The implementation is where it will degenerate into the same
> old repression. Furthermore, the very vagueness of Marx on
> the subject, beyond his talk of the dictatorship of the
> proletariate, is dangerous since it allows almost anything in
> the name of Marxism.
What is meant by 'dictatorship of the proletariat' is also vague, only
a little less so. Marx praised the 1871 Paris Commune as an example
of it, and supposedly Engels said DOTP meant a democratic republic
like the American one (see Hal Draper _TDOTP: From Marx to Lenin_).
It doesn't make much sense to me to criticize the "Marxist system"
when there is no agreed upon definition as far as I know.
> > If the "Marxist system" means just Soviet style central
> > planning and nothing else, what's the relevance of the
> > comment? Chomsky and most of the left today don't argue
> > for Soviet style central planning.
> So what? Either you are going to have central planning or you
> are going to have a market. But, with government control of
> the means of production (the most likely outcome of any
> attempt to socialize the means of production) the decisions
> are going to be made for political reasons. In the end, it
> will degenerate into the same old repression.
I agree that attempts at a totally non-marketized economy will not be
anything like the ideal but I see no reason why they'd require
repression, they just wouldn't work very well. But anyway, I don't
know that Chomsky is against markets. When asked once in a chat, he
dodged the question. On the other side, he also dodged questions
about "Parecon" a supposedly anarchist (but in practice would be
bureaucratic nightmare) planning system.
> > And what's the criteria for failure? China's economy from
> > 1970-1990 grew much faster than any country in Latin
> > America over that time period, despite privately owned
> > firms larger than mom-and-pop contributing a statistically
> > negligible % of GNP in any year.
>
> And, the Chinese still have a repressive government that
> stifles dissent. If Chomsky were in China, criticizing that
> government the way he does in the US, he would end up in
> prison or worse very quickly. I remind you that China uses
> the death penalty for more than murder and still tortures
> dissent. Check out China on the Amnesty International
> website.
Ok, I was fishing for your definition of success and failure. Usually
when people say the "Marxist system" failed in every case (instead of
saying "usually or "often" failed), they mean didn't produce economic
growth. However, if you mean failed in protecting human rights, I
agree, China failed. Though lots of non-socialist third world states
failed in that regard as well, to varying degrees.
But then I'd point out that we don't know what would have happened in
numerous democratic socialist attempts in the third world, because
nearly all of them were destroyed by rightist violence before they had
a fair chance, and a few (Nagy in Hungary, Dubcek in Czechoslovakia,
etc) by the USSR.
> > Certainly there were ample
> > problems, but if this record is a "failure" what does that
> > say about Latin America that was gradually and unevenly
> > phasing in the IMF model in this period?
> >
> > And why did a largely socialist economy in Israel after
> > 1947 require no (internal) repression to set up and
> > maintain for some time? (Socialist Zionists were heavily
> > influenced by Marxism). Could it be that the repression in
> > the communist world was not necessary, but rather a choice
> > of those dictators and parties? At least we can say these
> > are murky issues not so simplistic as claimed.
> But, do you not have a problem with Israel's record on human
> rights?
I have a problem with their awful treatment of the Palestinians
outside Israel proper over the decades, and might have some much
milder complaints about internal discriminatory policies (I hear, I
don't know the details) but other than that I have no problems with
their human rights record internally.
> And, Israel was not a fully socialist economy.
I have no figures, but I suspect that early on, the majority of output
was coming from state or cooperative firms and farms.
Anyway, only utopian extremists call for a fully socialist economy.
Consider Alec Nove's _The Economics of Feasible Socialism_, that calls
for small business being fully private.
> The fact is that a socialist economy is likely to be co-opted
> by some brutal dictator. Also, an element of repression is
> necessary, if for no other reason than to control the free
> rider problem.
Free rider problems abound under capitalism as well. I assume you are
talking about the specific free rider problem of labor. Unless I'm
missing something, there would seem to be an easy solution. If
someone free rides, and this can be monitored/verified, they should be
fired or have their wages downgraded or whatever. Even Marx was
against perfect egalitarianism, or that's what I gather from some
limited reading.
> In any event, Israel is not a good example of
> socialism in action, since there were some very special
> circumstances there.
I agree, that's a valid point.
> First, was the presence of so many
> European Jewish refugees at Israel's founding. They brought
> with them their literacy and skills.
Yeah, socialism works better the higher the education :)
> Second, Israel was
> surrounded with nations that had vowed to "push the Jews into
> the sea." The Israelis took those threats seriously and
> banded together to prevent a repetition of the recent genocide
> that had occurred in Europe. That gave them a cohesion that
> most societies lack.
True.
djinn
> "Mekong Network" <camb...@aol.com> wrote in message
> news:67874ff1.03050...@posting.google.com...
>> > Dan Clore <cl...@columbia-center.org> wrote:
>> > In the case of
>> > Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, for instance, even after a
>> > couple decades of scholars making extensive studies of the
>> > period, the scholarly estimates range from 500,000 to 1.7
>> > million killed.
>>
>> Who still considers the figure of only 500,000 to be even remotely
>> plausible?
>
> I'll let Dan answer that, but it seems to me that the question is not
> who considers it plausible now. It's who considered them plausible in
> the mid 70's when Chomksy was writing his "apologia" for the Khmer
> Rogue.
>
If you're going to say who considered them plausible *then*, the scholarly
estimates don't even matter, since they weren't in at the time. The people
who had some way of knowing - those who talked to refugees in particular,
intelligence analysts, diplomatic personnel - were quite often making much
higher estimates. The disturbing part that Chomsky played was in trying to
distract from the people who were trying to uncover what was really
happening and bring it to light.
>> I don't think any scholar other than Michael Vickery ever
>> believed the toll was that low, even before the the discovery of
>> additional mass graves in the Nineties.
>
> Wouldn't new evidence discovered in the 90's be irrelevent to what
> Chomsky had written in the 70's, since he certainly could not base
> conclusions or questions on evidence that was, well, not in evidence?
>
Well, we can tell from evidence in the 90's what was really happening. i.e.
was Chomsky right or not. There is now effectively no way to deny what did
happen. Whether Chomsky should have known about it at the time is addressed
above.
>> As far as I can tell, estimates of 1.5 to 1.7 million are the norm,
>
> Dan said:
> (As a sidenote, also consider that the article slams Chomsky & Herman
> for questioning figures of 1
> to 2 million, given out in the period 1975 to early 1977, before the
> majority of these deaths took place in the great
> purges of late 1977 through 1978. Further, these implausibly estimates
> often gave these figures for executions rather
> than for all excess deaths, whereas starvation, disease, and overwork
> accounted for far more of them than execution.)
>
> You didn't take issue with this, so I'm assuming that you agree, more
> or less, that Dan is being accurate here.
>
You yourself said that figures uncovered *after* the period in discussion
don't reflect on what people thought *during* the period. During that time
people who were hearing about events tended to give very high estimates of
deaths, because that's what the available evidence showed.
There were consistent unrelated stories about the kind and number of
atrocity almost from the very beginning. Many people didn't even consider
fleeing Cambodia until they had witnessed a murder or vicious beating.
Chomsky's comment on this mass of eyewitness testimony was that it should
be taken with great caution.
He'd never make an intelligence analyst.
Mekong Network
> > "Mekong Network" <camb...@aol.com> wrote in message
> > > In the case of
> > > Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, for instance, even after a
> > > couple decades of scholars making extensive studies of the
> > > period, the scholarly estimates range from 500,000 to 1.7
> > > million killed.
> >
> > Who still considers the figure of only 500,000 to be even remotely
> > plausible?
>
> I'll let Dan answer that, but it seems to me that the question is not who
> considers it plausible now. It's who considered them plausible in the mid
> 70's when Chomksy was writing his "apologia" for the Khmer Rogue.
Actually, my question IS, "Who considers it plausible now?" I wasn't
addressing anything that Chomsky said here.
> > I don't think any scholar other than Michael Vickery ever
> > believed the toll was that low, even before the the discovery of
> > additional mass graves in the Nineties.
> Wouldn't new evidence discovered in the 90's be irrelevent to what Chomsky
> had written in the 70's, since he certainly could not base conclusions or
> questions on evidence that was, well, not in evidence?
As noted, I was not discussing Chomsky... but for what it is worth,
facts which came to light in later years actually ARE relevant to what
was written in the Seventies. Some of the earlier estimates of the
death toll were based on extrapolations from refugee accounts, working
on the assumption that these accounts represented some sort of a
statistical norm. The current forensic evidence tends to refute those
who suggested that refugee accounts were not a trustworthy source.
More to the point, however, If you wish to discuss Chomsky, why limit
discussion to what he wrote in the Seventies? Some of his relatively
recent comments in the Z Magazine forums suggest that he still
considers Vickery's estimates plausible, and given the number of
bodies exhumed, that does not seem reasonable.
> > As far as I can tell, estimates of 1.5 to 1.7 million are the norm,
> Dan said:
> (As a sidenote, also consider that the article slams Chomsky & Herman for
> questioning figures of 1
> to 2 million, given out in the period 1975 to early 1977, before the
> majority of these deaths took place in the great
> purges of late 1977 through 1978. Further, these implausibly estimates often
> gave these figures for executions rather
> than for all excess deaths, whereas starvation, disease, and overwork
> accounted for far more of them than execution.)
>
> You didn't take issue with this, so I'm assuming that you agree, more or
> less, that Dan is being accurate here.
Dan is correct that the largest number of executions occurred in
'77-'78. However, the article does not "slam Chomsky" for disputing
the death toll in 1977; it says that Chomsky "mocked the suggestion,
however, that the death toll might have reached more than a million"
in _After the Cataclysm_. That book was written in 1979, AFTER the
Vietnamese invasion and the flood of refugees to the Thai border had
provided ample evidence that Cambodia was every bit as bad as the
refugees had claimed.
My site has had, for many years, an archived Usenet debate on the
Cambodia controversy, but it isn't particularly detailed, and my own
opinions on some of the topics discussed there have changed over the
years. I'm currently completing a much longer article on the subject,
much of which centers on _After the Cataclysm_, and I would be happy
to email it to anyone who would like to see it when it is done.
regards,
Bruce
http://www.mekong.net/cambodia
djinn
news:67874ff1.03050...@posting.google.com:
> My site has had, for many years, an archived Usenet debate on the
> Cambodia controversy, but it isn't particularly detailed, and my own
> opinions on some of the topics discussed there have changed over the
> years. I'm currently completing a much longer article on the subject,
> much of which centers on _After the Cataclysm_, and I would be happy
> to email it to anyone who would like to see it when it is done.
>
> regards,
> Bruce
> http://www.mekong.net/cambodia
>
I'd like to see it.
Dan Clore
> > Dan Clore <cl...@columbia-center.org> wrote:
> > In the case of
> > Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, for instance, even after a
> > couple decades of scholars making extensive studies of the
> > period, the scholarly estimates range from 500,000 to 1.7
> > million killed.
>
> Who still considers the figure of only 500,000 to be even remotely
> plausible?
Maybe no one. The figure is from Carlyle Thayer in a
US-government publication called _Problems of Communism_.
It's a relatively old estimate.
> I don't think any scholar other than Michael Vickery ever
> believed the toll was that low, even before the the discovery of
> additional mass graves in the Nineties.
Vickery's figure was higher than that, 750,000, with a big
margin of error.
> As far as I can tell, estimates of 1.5 to 1.7 million are the norm,
> and there is some pretty compelling evidence that the toll is higher.
> As of 1999, the Documentation Center of Cambodia had isolated 20,492
> mass graves, containing 1,112,829 remains, described as "victims of
> execution."
Thanks for that information. Can you give a more precise
citation?
djinn
> Mekong Network wrote:
>> > Dan Clore <cl...@columbia-center.org> wrote:
>
>> > In the case of
>> > Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, for instance, even after a
>> > couple decades of scholars making extensive studies of the
>> > period, the scholarly estimates range from 500,000 to 1.7
>> > million killed.
>>
>> Who still considers the figure of only 500,000 to be even remotely
>> plausible?
>
> Maybe no one. The figure is from Carlyle Thayer in a
> US-government publication called _Problems of Communism_.
> It's a relatively old estimate.
>
>> I don't think any scholar other than Michael Vickery ever
>> believed the toll was that low, even before the the discovery of
>> additional mass graves in the Nineties.
>
> Vickery's figure was higher than that, 750,000, with a big
> margin of error.
>
>> As far as I can tell, estimates of 1.5 to 1.7 million are the norm,
>> and there is some pretty compelling evidence that the toll is higher.
>> As of 1999, the Documentation Center of Cambodia had isolated 20,492
>> mass graves, containing 1,112,829 remains, described as "victims of
>> execution."
>
> Thanks for that information. Can you give a more precise
> citation?
>
Genocide project
this is for the Documentation Center. It gave a 404 error though, so it may
be down
brian turner
> estimates often gave these figures for executions rather
> than for all excess deaths, whereas starvation, disease, and
> overwork accounted for far more of them than execution.)
> That's a difference of over a million out of a total less
> than 2 million.
>
> In the case of the Sudan pharmaceutical factory, it's much
> harder to estimate the actual numbers, without someone
> undertaking this sort of task. But even just doing a web
> search, I can easily find accounts that belie the writer's
> claim that no one noticed an excess of deaths due to the
> destruction of the al-Shifa factory and the consequent lack
> of drugs to treat malaria, tubercolosis, etc. For instance,
> a film-maker who interviewed the factory's owner for a
> documentary had this to say:
[snipped evidence on disease outbreak deaths in Sudan post-bombing]
I did not realize that so many had said that. So, on that I stand
corrected. But I still think 9/11 and the Sudan bobming are not
comparable, and thus Hitchens didn't deserved to be smeared as showing
"racist contempt". The intention of Clinton wasn't to kill tens of
thousands by disease. If compensation wasn't offered in the form of
aid (???) upon evidence of such shortages/disease outbreaks appearing,
that would be worse, arguably criminal, but still not remotely like Al
Qaeda's crime. AQ intended to kill far more than 3,000 people. On
9/11, they'd surely wished to kill everyone in both towers, and
bystanders, which would be like 100,000 I think. And further, they
are limited by resources greatly. If they had the nuclear weapons
Clinton had access to, we all know what would happen. Like I said, I
don't think Chomsky intended to play down 9/11 as he's often charged
with, he just couldn't let a paragraph pass without hurling a barb at
the US goverment.
James A. Donald
On 4 May 2003 21:28:36 -0700, bk...@hotmail.com (brian turner)
wrote:
> Is this a throw-away line, or is there some argument
> underlying it? If the latter -- What is the Marxist system?
> Marx was very hazy about what he was for.
Not so. Communist manifesto laid it out clearly enough -- run
the economy like the army -- Trotsky's war communism, Pol Pot's
shock brigades are the purest Marxism.
> And "Marxists" after he died had widely varying ideas; Eduard
> Bernstein, Rosa Luxemburg, and Leonid Brezhnev had three
> quite different interpretations of Marxism and proposals for
> society.
Eduard Bernstain was different, but that was because did not
think himself interpreting Marxism, but revising it. The
difference between Luxemburg and Brezhnev may seem large to
you, but seem minuscule to me. They both agreed on whacking
the peasants.
> If the "Marxist system" means just Soviet style central
> planning and nothing else, what's the relevance of the
> comment? Chomsky and most of the left today don't argue for
> Soviet style central planning.
They claim there is some big difference between the way the
Soviets did it, and the way they propose to do it, but the
difference is either slight, or in the direction of a purer
Marxism, more centralization rather than less -- look at the
endless debates with Tom Wetzel. He claims what he proposes is
decentralized, but it is the same old stuff -- sometimes Soviet
style, sometimes Pol Pot style -- he is not very consistent.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
+6xQ9Tw/oQeXBCiUvhzi3R35XQjLd1agSbv0/h7e
4x7FG7KMZqdpg/3pkws8qVnpe9N0+cR8dmUXsSAPh
James A. Donald
> I'm currently completing a much longer article on the subject,
> much of which centers on _After the Cataclysm_, and I would be happy
> to email it to anyone who would like to see it when it is done.
I would like to see that.
Josh Dougherty
news:66dc0679.03050...@posting.google.com...
I can't be sure, but I don't think the dead or their relatives would really
care what Clinton's "intentions" were, nor do I think it changes whether
it's international terrorism or not.
Josh
Mekong Network
> > Mekong Network wrote:
> > As far as I can tell, estimates of 1.5 to 1.7 million are the norm,
> > and there is some pretty compelling evidence that the toll is higher.
> > As of 1999, the Documentation Center of Cambodia had isolated 20,492
> > mass graves, containing 1,112,829 remains, described as "victims of
> > execution."
>
> Thanks for that information. Can you give a more precise
> citation?
Hi Dan --
This was from an article on the Documentation Center of Cambodia's
website, written by Craig Etcheson: "The Number - Quantifying Crimes
Against Humanity in Cambodia." It has been either moved or removed
from the site. I'll try to get permission to repost the article;
failing that, I can email you a copy.
regards,
Bruce
http://www.mekong.net/cambodia
Craig Franck
> Harvey wrote:
> > and just as you're pushing America as the great world
> > terrorist now. People don't buy that on a gut level anymore than they look
> > at what Pol Pot did in Cambodia and buy that as a wonderful solution for the
> > world's problems, or the view you like to push that Iraq under Hussein was
> > no worse, maybe better, than America under Bush.
>
> Where did anyone push the idea that "America under Bush" is
> worse than "Iraq under Hussein"?
Oh, come on. I'm reading this in the Chomsky group, and
nothing so outrageous can be said about the US that one
of you guys won't swear it's true.
"dogbert" <dog...@dogbert.edu> wrote in message news:7j8cbvo6rbbqdniui...@4ax.com...
>the US government is at a lower moral level than any other
>entity on the planet, by any reasonable measure.
It follows from this that America under Bush is at a lower
moral level than N. Korea or Iraq under Saddam.
We also learn from Mr. Dogbert that:
"[the US is out] to destroy democracy whenever it rears
its ugly head"
"it [the US] is just the source of most of the political evil
in the world"
Of course, it wouldn't be a Chomskyite rant without the "H"
word:
"Osama and Co just don't have the power to commit the
crimes the US does. You don't get to be Hitler unless
you're the Fuhrer first."
And that's from just *one* article.
If you ever find yourself writing "where did anyone push the
idea that X," where X is the most outrageous thing about the
US you can imagine, someone almost certainly did on a.f.n-c.
keith
> "keith" <keit...@yahoo.com> wrote
>
> > That's the rationalization. We claimed that supporting evil was
> > necessary to oppose the allegedly greater evil of communism, they (The
> > Al-Qaeda terrorists) claim murdering civilians is necessary to oppose
> > the greater evil of the anti-God US.
>
> Perhaps, but they're idiots.
Idiots? I don't think so. Deluded? In my opinion they are.
> Your argument of equivalency
> only works by remaining completely blind to the difference
> in outcome.
What difference in outcome? The right wing wrongly believed that right
wing dictatorship, torture and murder was the only way to defend
against communist dictatorship, torture and murder, and they wrongly
believed that death squad murder and torture to prevent *possible*
communist take-over was a fair price. The deluded Al-Qaeda people are
similarly mistaken about the costs and the benefits of *their* terror.
> If temporarily supporting evil leads to world
> peace, that's the price you pay. Not to do it would be more
> immoral than doing it.
>
> Are you like those PETA people? You find a cure for cancer,
> and they don't care because they think it's evil to experiment
> on animals, so you're no better than someone who beats
> animals to death for fun. If that's your logic, fine, but a debate
> with someone like that would be pretty pointless.
Al Qaeda doesn't murder for fun; they murder to fight the (allegedly)
Godless to promote the (alleged) will of God. They are wrong, as were
the US right wing supporters of death squad terrorism.
Keith
Dan Clore
Well, thanks for trying, but all of this, in context,
appears to refer to the conduct of the US government abroad,
not to conditions within the US, which is what I would take
your paraphrase to refer to. So, as silly and hyperbolical
as much of this might be, it does not seem to be an example
of what you had claimed.
Dan Clore
> > Dan Clore <cl...@columbia-center.org> wrote:
> > > Mekong Network wrote:
> > > As far as I can tell, estimates of 1.5 to 1.7 million are the norm,
> > > and there is some pretty compelling evidence that the toll is higher.
> > > As of 1999, the Documentation Center of Cambodia had isolated 20,492
> > > mass graves, containing 1,112,829 remains, described as "victims of
> > > execution."
> >
> > Thanks for that information. Can you give a more precise
> > citation?
> This was from an article on the Documentation Center of Cambodia's
> website, written by Craig Etcheson: "The Number - Quantifying Crimes
> Against Humanity in Cambodia." It has been either moved or removed
> from the site. I'll try to get permission to repost the article;
> failing that, I can email you a copy.
Thanks. That's enough for me.
BTW, I recently came across a very interesting article,
"Metaphors of the Khmer Rouge" by John Marston, in the
anthology _Cambodian Culture Since 1975: Homeland and
Exile_, ed. Ebihara, Mortland, and Ledgerwood (1994, Cornell
University Press). It gives a kind of analysis I would like
to see much more of. It looks like it hasn't yet made its
way to the Web, so I'd like to scan and post it sometime
(probably not sometime soon), but I would want someone who
knows Khmer to proofread it.
Craig Franck
> > > Where did anyone push the idea that "America under Bush" is
> > > worse than "Iraq under Hussein"?
> >
> > Oh, come on. I'm reading this in the Chomsky group, and
> > nothing so outrageous can be said about the US that one
> > of you guys won't swear it's true.
> >
> > "dogbert" <dog...@dogbert.edu> wrote in message
news:7j8cbvo6rbbqdniui...@4ax.com...
> >
> > >the US government is at a lower moral level than any other
> > >entity on the planet, by any reasonable measure.
> >
> > It follows from this that America under Bush is at a lower
> > moral level than N. Korea or Iraq under Saddam.
[...]
> Well, thanks for trying, but all of this, in context,
> appears to refer to the conduct of the US government abroad,
> not to conditions within the US, which is what I would take
> your paraphrase to refer to. So, as silly and hyperbolical
> as much of this might be, it does not seem to be an example
> of what you had claimed.
This is interesting. I took "any reasonable measure"
to mean "by any measure." So if we factored in
domestic policy or factored out foreign policy, the
US would win hands down as the evilest. It is also
odd to compare only US foreign policy to Iraq's
both foreign and domestic policy.
Perhaps dogbert could clarify this. If his statement
would translate into "US foreign policy is more evil
than N. Korean foreign policy," that statement is far
less outrageous, since N. Korea is for the most
part currently only being evil to the people within its
own boarders.
Also, if one were to assert a government was "evil,"
one would have to account for why domestic policy
or relations with some countries was possibly quite
good, yet there were lapses into black-heartedness
that surpassed all others when it came to particular
relations, because such things could point to the fact
that some behavior is actually being misunderstood.
I think if supporters of Chomsky, such as dogbert,
would qualify their statements to read something
like "US policy with regard to X is evil," rather than
make global characterizations, they would make
far stronger arguments.
Craig Franck
> "Craig Franck" <craig....@verizon.net> wrote
> > Your argument of equivalency
> > only works by remaining completely blind to the difference
> > in outcome.
>
> What difference in outcome?
The fact that we had a worthy goal and a successful strategy.
Whether is was the best or only workable strategy is another
question.
Good Goal Successful
US: Contain or wipe out Yes Yes
Communism
Terrorist Do God's will No No
by killing infidels
As a point of fact, I do not believe it is true that the US had to
behave as badly as the Soviets in many situations in order to
contain and beat them. If your point is neither the US nor the
terrorists strategies are ideal, therefore they're the same, fine.
I don't agree, but I get your point.
warren stupidity
<craig....@verizon.net> wrote:
>"keith" <keit...@yahoo.com> wrote
>
>> "Craig Franck" <craig....@verizon.net> wrote
>
>> > Your argument of equivalency
>> > only works by remaining completely blind to the difference
>> > in outcome.
>>
>> What difference in outcome?
>
>The fact that we had a worthy goal and a successful strategy.
>
>Whether is was the best or only workable strategy is another
>question.
>
> Good Goal Successful
>US: Contain or wipe out Yes Yes
> Communism
>
>Terrorist Do God's will No No
> by killing infidels
>
Which of course begs the question. It is the methods used to achieve
the stated goals that are the issue here, unless you are simply making
the statement that any actions undertaken to stop communism were
justified. Perhaps that is what you are saying, and if so then you
should of course have agreed with those who, in the 30's, thought we
should side with fascism in the struggle against world communism. In
that you are supporting the equivalent policies of the 50-80's, that
would not be much of a stretch.
The goals of al qaeda are not: 'do god's will by killing infidels'.
Their goals are quite similar to the religious fundamentalist wing of
the republican party in our country: to establish social systems based
on strict religious moral principles. Killing infidels is a means, not
a goal, and under your equation we can ignore the means as long as the
goals are 'just' and the outcome is 'successful'.
And, by the way, as the fundamentalist wars are not over, it is a bit
premature to claim that al qaeda is not successful.
==
Mark Roddy
"Further, the process of transformation,
even if it brings revolutionary change, is
likely to be a long one, absent some
catastrophic and catalyzing event like a
new Pearl Harbor."
-- Project for a New American Century,
-- the neocon cabal's blueprint for world empire.
http://www.newamericancentury.org
keith
> "keith" <keit...@yahoo.com> wrote
>
> > "Craig Franck" <craig....@verizon.net> wrote
>
> > > Your argument of equivalency
> > > only works by remaining completely blind to the difference
> > > in outcome.
> >
> > What difference in outcome?
>
> The fact that we had a worthy goal and a successful strategy.
>
> Whether is was the best or only workable strategy is another
> question.
>
> Good Goal Successful
> US: Contain or wipe out Yes Yes
> Communism
Death squads an overturning democratic governments was not a necessary
part of containing communism. The millions of people killed or
tortured was part of the outcome and it wasn't even necessary.
>
> Terrorist Do God's will No No
> by killing infidels
That depends on whether or not it really is God's will (I think it is
not). But the point is: we are hypocrites if we comdemn terrorism as a
method when we apply it ourselves. OUr objection to Al-Qaeda reduces
to: they are wrong about the will of God.
>
> As a point of fact, I do not believe it is true that the US had to
> behave as badly as the Soviets in many situations in order to
> contain and beat them. If your point is neither the US nor the
> terrorists strategies are ideal, therefore they're the same, fine.
> I don't agree, but I get your point.
They have at least this one similarity: they justified horrific crimes
because (allegedly) they were needed to achieve a(n allegedly) greater
good.
Keith
Leonard Pulver
That is if you are accepting Chumpsky's words at face
value. How can you ever accept even a weather report
from a man who has never told the truth since high
school. (He is 73 yrs now).
djinn
> so I'd like to scan and post it sometime
> (probably not sometime soon), but I would want someone who
> knows Khmer to proofread it.
>
Bruce is probably your man, but I'll proof it for you if you want.
Mekong Network
>
> BTW, I recently came across a very interesting article,
> "Metaphors of the Khmer Rouge" by John Marston, in the
> anthology _Cambodian Culture Since 1975: Homeland and
> Exile_, ed. Ebihara, Mortland, and Ledgerwood (1994, Cornell
> University Press). It gives a kind of analysis I would like
> to see much more of. It looks like it hasn't yet made its
> way to the Web, so I'd like to scan and post it sometime
> (probably not sometime soon), but I would want someone who
> knows Khmer to proofread it.
>
You're right, that's a very good article. There's an article in the
same book on Khmer proverbs that I thought was interesting, too.
By the way... I did receive permission from Craig Etcheson to post the
"Quantifying Crimes" article. If you'd like to check it out, it's
here:
http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/toll.htm
He has a book coming out soon, "Crimes of the Khmer Rouge." If you're
on the Camnews mailing list, you'll probably hear more about it. I
suspect someone will post a notice once it is available.
regards,
Bruce
brian turner
[...]
> I sure didn't mean to say that! My point was: when our government
> condemns those kind of terrorist actions without admitting the
> terrorism we've done, it rings quite hollow. We've got no business
> jumping on our high horse. [...]
But you should be careful about comdenming the current government for
the crimes of past governments decades ago. I'd say the overwhelming
majority of people in the Bush administration and Congress had nothing
to do with things like arming Central American death squads, propping
up Suharto, bombing Laos, etc., therefore, they have nothing to
apologize for. Some that were around then worked against such things.
Yes, there are a few here and there like Elliot Abhrams who were
involved, but I don't think we should be condemning the other 99% for
what they did. For example: Paul Wolfowitz, I understand, has been
writing since the 1970s that the US shouldn't be in the business of
establishing friendly dictatorships.
Josh Dougherty
news:<ba696799.03050...@posting.google.com>...
>
> [...]
> > I sure didn't mean to say that! My point was: when our government
> > condemns those kind of terrorist actions without admitting the
> > terrorism we've done, it rings quite hollow. We've got no business
> > jumping on our high horse. [...]
>
>
> But you should be careful about comdenming the current government for
> the crimes of past governments decades ago. I'd say the overwhelming
> majority of people in the Bush administration and Congress had nothing
> to do with things like arming Central American death squads, propping
> up Suharto, bombing Laos, etc., therefore, they have nothing to
> apologize for. Some that were around then worked against such things.
> Yes, there are a few here and there like Elliot Abhrams who were
> involved, but I don't think we should be condemning the other 99% for
> what they did.
You may want to look up a few guys named Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Otto
Reich and John Negroponte...among others. You may want to also take another
look at the Congress.
But in the first place, I'm not sure how much I follow the idea that the
crimes of the State are wiped clean every 4 to 8 years because some new (and
usually not so new) bunch from the same circle comes in and takes over from
the last bunch. Some things, particularly in foreign policy, seem to remain
strikingly consistent in many ways, regardless of which guy is in the white
house.
> For example: Paul Wolfowitz, I understand, has been
> writing since the 1970s that the US shouldn't be in the business of
> establishing friendly dictatorships.
Yet at his first opportunity, Afghanistan, he did exactly that.
Josh
Clay Smith
<jdoc1...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
>> For example: Paul Wolfowitz, I understand, has been
>> writing since the 1970s that the US shouldn't be in the business of
>> establishing friendly dictatorships.
>
>Yet at his first opportunity, Afghanistan, he did exactly that.
Well, that's not exactly true. I mean, it's true that the Karzai
government is the creation of the US and is not regarded as legitimate
by much of anyone in Afghanistan who doesn't have a social security
number. The native Afghanis regard it as a joke with body guards.
However, I don't think it's accurate to call it a "dictatorship." A
dictatorship is - by definition, I think - in control of the country
in which it resides. The Karzai government is barely even in control
of one city. Afghanistan is ruled - if one can actually use the term
"ruled" in this context - by miscelaneous warlords who spend an awful
lot of time fighting each other. Actually, if we wanted to be really
literal about it, we'd have to say that Afghanistan is currently ruled
by the US military. I mean, it's not like the US army is over there
setting up ministries and issuing visas and printing currency and
setting tax policy. No, they're certainly not ruling the country in
that sense. However, they are presently the only organization or force
in the country that can go more or less where it pleases and kill
anyone it chooses. That means that, in so far as anyone there is in
charge, they are.
Clay
warren stupidity
<ClaySm...@softhome.net> wrote:
>On Thu, 08 May 2003 06:25:29 GMT, "Josh Dougherty"
><jdoc1...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
>>
>>> For example: Paul Wolfowitz, I understand, has been
>>> writing since the 1970s that the US shouldn't be in the business of
>>> establishing friendly dictatorships.
>>
>>Yet at his first opportunity, Afghanistan, he did exactly that.
>
>Well, that's not exactly true. I mean, it's true that the Karzai
>government is the creation of the US and is not regarded as legitimate
>by much of anyone in Afghanistan who doesn't have a social security
>number. The native Afghanis regard it as a joke with body guards.
>However, I don't think it's accurate to call it a "dictatorship." A
>dictatorship is - by definition, I think - in control of the country
>in which it resides. The Karzai government is barely even in control
>of one city.
Good point. Karzai is the puppet-dictator of Kabul.
Samuel K.
To the extent that your comments have any truth to them, that may also
reflect the fact that the world tends to stay distressingly the same
and successive presidential administrations must make the same of
choice dealing with dictatorships. Though it seems in the world of
those who find favour with the arguments of Chomsky that sort of
Realpolitik is only permissible when ideologically favoured regimes
are in question;
However, I think you overgeneralise. Consider for example (and to
differ from previous comments on him) Eliot Abrams role in changing
the Reagan Administration's relationship with Pinochet regime in Chile
from uncritical support to actively pressuring Pinochet to step aside
and democratise. Abrams claims that as a consequence of his actions he
figures "prominently as a villian for trying to get rid of Pinochet.
That view is widespread on the right" (quoted in John Ehrman, The Rise
of Neoconservatism, p.160).
The example of Abrams and Pincohet, and Carter and the Shah of Iran,
Reagan and Marcos, but also Reagan and Jose Duarte (El Salvador)
suggests that there isn't any consistency in US foreign policy towards
dictatorships and human rights abuses from President to President, or
even with each presidential term.
> > For example: Paul Wolfowitz, I understand, has been
> > writing since the 1970s that the US shouldn't be in the business of
> > establishing friendly dictatorships.
>
> Yet at his first opportunity, Afghanistan, he did exactly that.
Well, hello. Is there anybody in there? Do you remember the Taliban?
Fine chaps. Maybe they weren't the least bit democratic, but if
Wolfowitz didn't put them there they must be an "unfriendly"
dictatorship and thus quite alright. In this enviroment of ideological
struggle against the imperialist US specious arguments about
installing "friendly dictatorships" are absolutely admissible.
And do you remember the Bonn Agreement, under which the Afghans - who
have not experienced anything approaching a democracy since the
mid-1970s - are to be delivered a democratic government in June 2004?
Whether that will work is another matter, the prognosis is not good,
the Bonn Agreement's timeframe, quite frankly, is too optimistic; but
it commits all parties to a democratic form of government!
Though I suppose you wouldn't have been happy unless they held
elections under UN supervision within a month of the Taliban's fall.
Or if the US really cracked down hard on the warlords and other such
characters in Afghanistan (unless you know of another plausible and
peaceful way to deal with well-armed thugs) except that you would
inevitably start whinging about US imperialism and oppression of
Afghans...
Samuel K.
James A. Donald
On Thu, 08 May 2003 06:25:29 GMT, "Josh Dougherty"
> idea that the crimes of the State are wiped clean every 4 to
> 8 years because some new (and usually not so new) bunch from
> the same circle comes in and takes over from the last bunch.
Sound reasoning.
Now let us apply the same reasoning to the socialist left, and
recollect one hundred and fifty years of unfailing support for
tyranny and slavery, for the powerful against the powerless,
for the master and against the victim, recollect one hundred
and seventy five years of lies defending cruelty and arrogant
power.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
cn2ccQqh5ULI+ov5dVuXAOiFayTHEgZocZKvd1AA
4/XRO4RrINZ3YBu1+iRG5Sox/5zhSoQfhGjkaYsMa
James A. Donald
On Thu, 08 May 2003 03:02:50 -0500, Clay Smith
> Karzai government is the creation of the US and is not
> regarded as legitimate by much of anyone in Afghanistan who
> doesn't have a social security number. The native Afghanis
> regard it as a joke with body guards. However, I don't think
> it's accurate to call it a "dictatorship." A dictatorship is
> - by definition, I think - in control of the country in which
> it resides. The Karzai government is barely even in control
> of one city. Afghanistan is ruled - if one can actually use
> the term "ruled" in this context - by miscelaneous warlords
> who spend an awful lot of time fighting each other.
If they spend an awful lot of time fighting each other, when
was the last battle between them?
The enemies of those who now rule Afghanistan are also the
enemies of the US, people who skulk in neighboring countries
and mount intrusions. Surely this is evidence that the
warlords, allied to each other and perhaps to Kazai (though the
latter is less clear) exercise a lot more control over
aghanistan than the Pakistani government exercises over large
parts of Pakistan
Aghanistan is firmly in the control of people who are allied,
not necessarily to the US, and certainly not allied to the
State Department, but are allied to the Pentagon, because their
enemies are our own.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
KnZ4iankNVx3KC4XtUngToTJWJSN81R0aKNx/3SU
4obom8n+s3lYl+4bqlspwUicFa4GLtwCDyENspKQI
Mekong Network
> > (probably not sometime soon), but I would want someone who
> > knows Khmer to proofread it.
> >
>
> Bruce is probably your man, but I'll proof it for you if you want.
The only way I could personally proof it would be if all the sayings
were filled with Khmer obscenities! ;-)
Actually, though, I could ask my wife to review it if you'd like.
regards,
Bruce
http://www.mekong.net/cambodia
keith
> keit...@yahoo.com (keith) wrote in message news:<ba696799.03050...@posting.google.com>...
>
> [...]
> > I sure didn't mean to say that! My point was: when our government
> > condemns those kind of terrorist actions without admitting the
> > terrorism we've done, it rings quite hollow. We've got no business
> > jumping on our high horse. [...]
>
>
> But you should be careful about comdenming the current government for
> the crimes of past governments decades ago. I'd say the overwhelming
> majority of people in the Bush administration and Congress had nothing
> to do with things like arming Central American death squads, propping
> up Suharto, bombing Laos, etc., therefore, they have nothing to
> apologize for.
I think your point is good (and also a little troubling). It's
troubling because our leadership represents our nation and our
*nation* committed these attrocities; if our leaders would publicly
renounce those horrific policies that would make it clear that we have
renounced those kinds of policies for the future.
> Some that were around then worked against such things.
> Yes, there are a few here and there like Elliot Abhrams who were
> involved, but I don't think we should be condemning the other 99% for
> what they did. For example: Paul Wolfowitz, I understand, has been
> writing since the 1970s that the US shouldn't be in the business of
> establishing friendly dictatorships.
Perhaps he did, but he also supports an agressive military policy to
make the world the way we think it ought to be. To conduct such a
militaristic policy requires us to at least tacitly support oppressive
regimes, giving them aid they can use to oppress opponents within
their country. We've done that to get support for our war with
Afghanistan and our general war on terror. Aiding oppressive regimes
when they crush opposition isn't much different from imposing
oppressive regimes on the opposition. We haven't changed that policy.
Keith
Josh Dougherty
news:c023d791.03050...@posting.google.com...
The choices remain the same because the interests that control foreign
policy remain the same. They aren't choices that "must" be made in the same
way.
> Though it seems in the world of
> those who find favour with the arguments of Chomsky that sort of
> Realpolitik is only permissible when ideologically favoured regimes
> are in question;
>
> However, I think you overgeneralise. Consider for example (and to
> differ from previous comments on him) Eliot Abrams role in changing
> the Reagan Administration's relationship with Pinochet regime in Chile
> from uncritical support to actively pressuring Pinochet to step aside
> and democratise. Abrams claims that as a consequence of his actions he
> figures "prominently as a villian for trying to get rid of Pinochet.
> That view is widespread on the right" (quoted in John Ehrman, The Rise
> of Neoconservatism, p.160).
I don't think I overgenaralized. I didn't say there were no differences
whatsoever from one to the next. I said that many fundamental things remain
strikingly consistent, and I don't believe your (quasi) exceptions change
that.
> The example of Abrams and Pincohet, and Carter and the Shah of Iran,
> Reagan and Marcos, but also Reagan and Jose Duarte (El Salvador)
> suggests that there isn't any consistency in US foreign policy towards
> dictatorships and human rights abuses from President to President, or
> even with each presidential term.
>
> > > For example: Paul Wolfowitz, I understand, has been
> > > writing since the 1970s that the US shouldn't be in the business of
> > > establishing friendly dictatorships.
> >
> > Yet at his first opportunity, Afghanistan, he did exactly that.
>
> Well, hello. Is there anybody in there? Do you remember the Taliban?
Of course. And?
> Fine chaps. Maybe they weren't the least bit democratic, but if
> Wolfowitz didn't put them there they must be an "unfriendly"
> dictatorship and thus quite alright.
I don't know where you're getting this from. I didn't say it or imply it.
What I said was, at the first opportunity for "regime change" initiated by
Wolfowitz & co., they "established a friendly dictatorship", despite what
Wolfowitz was supposedly pontificating about in the 70s. It's a simple
statement of fact.
As far as supposed "democracy" to be established at some time in the future,
well....I'll believe that when I see it.
Josh
Clay Smith
wrote:
> --
>On Thu, 08 May 2003 03:02:50 -0500, Clay Smith
>> Well, that's not exactly true. I mean, it's true that the
>> Karzai government is the creation of the US and is not
>> regarded as legitimate by much of anyone in Afghanistan who
>> doesn't have a social security number. The native Afghanis
>> regard it as a joke with body guards. However, I don't think
>> it's accurate to call it a "dictatorship." A dictatorship is
>> - by definition, I think - in control of the country in which
>> it resides. The Karzai government is barely even in control
>> of one city. Afghanistan is ruled - if one can actually use
>> the term "ruled" in this context - by miscelaneous warlords
>> who spend an awful lot of time fighting each other.
>
>If they spend an awful lot of time fighting each other, when
>was the last battle between them?
>
>The enemies of those who now rule Afghanistan
As I pointed out, it's extremely misleading to say that anyone "rules
Afghanistan."
are also the
>enemies of the US, people who skulk in neighboring countries
>and mount intrusions. Surely this is evidence that the
>warlords, allied to each other and perhaps to Kazai (though the
>latter is less clear)
I'm sorry, but if you wanted to argue that the warlords are in any
serious sense of the term, "allied to Karzai," that would be a very
tough case to make. Since we get precious little info out of
Afghanistan, we don't know for certain that they're not co-operating
with Karzai in some fashion, but all the evidence *I've* seen has
indicated precisely the opposite. So I disagree that it's "less
clear" whether Krazai has any sort of alliance with the warlords. I
think it would be far more accurate to say that we do not currently
have any reason to think that such an alliance exists.
>exercise a lot more control over
>aghanistan than the Pakistani government exercises over large
>parts of Pakistan
Not sure exactly how much control that psychopath in Pakistan
exercises over each region within his country, but Pakistan does have
an actual central government rather than a bunch of competing
warlords. And when the head of that government says "I'm running
Pakistan" he comes a hell of a lot closer to telling the truth than
Karzai would if he said "I'm running Afghanistan."
>
>Aghanistan is firmly in the control of people who are allied,
>not necessarily to the US, and certainly not allied to the
>State Department, but are allied to the Pentagon, because their
>enemies are our own.
Not sure how true this is. I can see how the warlords would see al
queda as a threat, like a rival gang. On the other hand, i've yet to
see any evidence that they're especially enthusiastic about wiping
them out.
But even if you're correct on this point, ... well, then, so what?
Afghanistan still has a joke for an "official" central government. It
still has nothing that even sorta kinda looks like democracy. It still
has the warlords and the poverty and the violence. And it still has
lots and lots of US troops, who probably aren't gonna let the
situation change a whole lot, at least not until they get what they
want.
Clay
James A. Donald
Clay Smith
> > > if one can actually use the term "ruled" in this context
> > > - by miscelaneous warlords who spend an awful lot of time
> > > fighting each other.
James A. Donald:
> > If they spend an awful lot of time fighting each other,
> > when was the last battle between them?
Clay Smith
> As I pointed out, it's extremely misleading to say that
> anyone "rules Afghanistan."
So long as Taliban dare not walk in daylight in Afghanistan,
and Americans can walk day or night, who cares? We won, they
lost, and the current situation in Afghanistan reflects that
reality. Our allies have the guns, our enemies furtively sneak
in from Pakistan and Iran, and furtively withdraw back to
there.
> I'm sorry, but if you wanted to argue that the warlords are
> in any serious sense of the term, "allied to Karzai," that
> would be a very tough case to make. Since we get precious
> little info out of Afghanistan, we don't know for certain
> that they're not co-operating with Karzai in some fashion,
> but all the evidence *I've* seen has indicated precisely the
> opposite. So I disagree that it's "less clear" whether
> Krazai has any sort of alliance with the warlords. I think it
> would be far more accurate to say that we do not currently
> have any reason to think that such an alliance exists.
The people you are incorrectly calling warlords nominally obey
him. Wether they actually obey him is doubtful, but there is
no open breach between them and him. He pretends to command,
they pretend to obey, much the same arrangement as past Afghan
Kings enjoyed. That is a good deal stronger than an alliance,
though it is weaker than a unitary army. It resembles the
relationship between a feudal King and his truculent barons --
less than a unitary nation, more than an alliance.
In any case, who cares whether they obey him or not, so long as
they do fight our common enemies, and do not fight us?
> Not sure how true this is. I can see how the warlords would
> see al queda as a threat, like a rival gang. On the other
> hand, i've yet to see any evidence that they're especially
> enthusiastic about wiping them out.
Observe all conflicts with Taliban and Al Qaeda aligned forces
occur a short distance from the border. This would seem to
indicate sufficient enthusiasm for wiping them out.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
sPW2cMQNfVI1jlDHq8OL7HbQfYZdp3+YyOMROU+0
4y3dCLnMdF1OXVWhE+8k8LxbvQ2ukQ3/0GdO+Bg2d
Clay Smith
wrote:
>
>Clay Smith
>> As I pointed out, it's extremely misleading to say that
>> anyone "rules Afghanistan."
>
>So long as Taliban dare not walk in daylight in Afghanistan,
>and Americans can walk day or night, who cares?
I recall the following exchange from some Charles Bronson movie:
Bronson: (To woman) I have something important to tell you.
Woman: (worried) What is it?
Bronson: Boykins is dead.
Woman: That's it? Boykins is dead? That's no big deal.
Bronson: Maybe not to you, but it was of some importance to Boykins.
Maybe you don't give a flying fuck about the government (or lack there
of) in Afghanistan, but I think it's safe to say that the Afghanis
care a great deal about it. Remember that huge humanitarian crisis
that was looming as the US invaded about two years ago? Starvation,
disease, all that sort of thing? Remember how everyone was desperate
to get the relief workers in there as fast as possible to provide food
and medicine and what not? Well, they did get to go in at some point
and presumably alleviated the situation to some extent. But now,
according to a report I read the other day, they're being shot. That's
right; the warlord gangs are shooting relief workers. So relief
agencies are pulling their people out. So the Afghanis could be facing
the same problems all over again. At the very least, they've got to be
concerned about the fact that, no matter what they do or don't want
and no matter what they do or don't do, there are still lots of people
with lots of guns running around hell bent on killing someone.
Civilians are getting shot, al quedeans are getting shot.... it's not
a safe place to be. Generally speaking, in human history, we deal with
such situations with instruments such as governments, laws, and law
enforcement. If those things don't work, we usually form an army or at
least a miltia. The Afghanis can't do any of these things. They may
not even be able to feed themselves.
So yeah, my guess is they're pretty conerned about the situation. Of
course, if it were a choice between having a central government or
knowing for sure where their next meal will come from, I'm sure most
of them would choose the latter. However, I expect they've long since
realized that the one has a great deal to do with the other.
>
>> I'm sorry, but if you wanted to argue that the warlords are
>> in any serious sense of the term, "allied to Karzai," that
>> would be a very tough case to make. Since we get precious
>> little info out of Afghanistan, we don't know for certain
>> that they're not co-operating with Karzai in some fashion,
>> but all the evidence *I've* seen has indicated precisely the
>> opposite. So I disagree that it's "less clear" whether
>> Krazai has any sort of alliance with the warlords. I think it
>> would be far more accurate to say that we do not currently
>> have any reason to think that such an alliance exists.
>
>The people you are incorrectly calling warlords nominally obey
>him. Wether they actually obey him is doubtful, but there is
>no open breach between them and him. He pretends to command,
>they pretend to obey, much the same arrangement as past Afghan
>Kings enjoyed. That is a good deal stronger than an alliance,
>though it is weaker than a unitary army. It resembles the
>relationship between a feudal King and his truculent barons --
>less than a unitary nation, more than an alliance.
I'm sorry, but that's just silly. In a fuedal relationship, as with
kings and barons, there's some sort of sharing of power. The king
provides something - like land or armies or weapons - and the barrons
provide something - probably soldiers or money or cattle or horses -
and they form an alliance. Each party brings something to the table
and each benefits from the end result. In theory anyway. I mean, it's
hardly a democratic arrangment and it's totaly barbaric by our
standards today, but at least you could say that it's an actual
government, that it might be workable in the right circumstances, and
that there's at least some thought given to the sharing of power. It'd
be better, probably, than an absolute dictatorship under, say, Hitler
or Mussolini.
In Afghanistan, the situation isn't even that good. Karzai brings
nothing to the table. He has no power. The US military has said that
when it goes out to a particular area to shoot at suspcted Al
Quedeans, they have to make some kind of arrangment with the warlord
who runs that particular area. Karzai's approval carries no weight, no
currency with these guys. They don't give a fuck about him. They don't
have an alliance with him.
There's "no open breach" between them, you say. Well, that's kind of
like saying there's no open breach between the Queen of England and
Parliament. And there isn't. Why? Because the queen holds no power.
She's just there to look pretty. She doesn't even *have* a political
agenda. Technically speaking, she isn't even involved in the political
life of the country, unless you count her role as a sort of diversion
for the public. But even so, she's still in better shape than Karzai.
Hell, at least the queen of england doesn't live in constant fear of
getting her head blown off. I mean, Karzai can't even leave his office
without dodging a couple of bullets.
>
>> Not sure how true this is. I can see how the warlords would
>> see al queda as a threat, like a rival gang. On the other
>> hand, i've yet to see any evidence that they're especially
>> enthusiastic about wiping them out.
>
>Observe all conflicts with Taliban and Al Qaeda aligned forces
>occur a short distance from the border. This would seem to
>indicate sufficient enthusiasm for wiping them out.
It does? Well, even assuming it's the Afghani warlords who are doing
the 'wiping out,' (you didn't specify that you were talking about the
warlords as opposed to the US military, but I assume that's what you
meant), I expect that the fact that the conflicts take place close to
the border indicates primarily that those being attacked are based in
- or on their way back from - Pakistan. I don't see that it indicates
anything about the enthusiasm of the warlords for their assigned task.
I mean, they might be thrilled to be out murdering the talibanis and
the al quedeans (if that is indeed who we're shooting. Has anyone seen
any reports that attempted to verify independently who or what these
people are that we're capturing and/or killing?), but I wouldn't know
it from what I've been reading. If you've got any evidence on the
subject, I'd certainly like to see it.
Clay
Bud Keith
"James A. Donald" <jam...@echeque.com> wrote in message
news:5fde602e68c95c3e...@news.mybinaries.com...
> --
> Clay Smith
> > > > if one can actually use the term "ruled" in this context
> > > > - by miscelaneous warlords who spend an awful lot of time
> > > > fighting each other.
>
> James A. Donald:
> > > If they spend an awful lot of time fighting each other,
> > > when was the last battle between them?
These Warlords are tribal leaders and theirl fighting is contunuous, you
might say that they do not have pitched battles in the military sense.