Chomsky wars

Is it not possible to believe Chomsky is a radical who sometimes gets things wrong? He seems to me rather like the a zealous prophet of anarchism at times, a Jeremiah, perhaps. And yet sometimes he shows geniune compassion and moral conviction, and is willing to speak it, and keep speaking it. And so he has followers and opponents.

Kamm –

First, Chomsky makes the same claim about the unnamed parliamentary inquiry in his new book, Failed States

Steven Poole –

This looks like a strong empirical case. (I haven’t checked it myself.)

Well perhaps you should, Steven? Five minutes searching Hansard would have been five minutes well spent. You might also check Kamm’s deluge of book reviews at Amazon and come to your own conclusions as to whether he is unwell.

Secretary of State for Defence, George Robertson
24 MARCH 1999

“Up until Racak earlier this year [Jan ’99] the KLA were responsible for more deaths in Kosovo than the Yugoslav authorities had been.”

…that one only has a “right” to call Srebrenica an act of “genocide” if one simultaneously denounces his favoured examples of killing in East Timor.

I don’t think this is what he’s saying there. And it’s really quite obvious what he’s saying there.

He’s simply accusing US/UK apologists (including Mr. Kamm, of course) of exaggerating crimes committed by the official enemies, while ignoring crimes committed by neutral actors, while whitewashing often much more serious crimes committed by the friends and allies.

You’ll find this theme in his almost every book and article, expressed in a number of different ways, and I don’t see any reason whatsoever to pretend that he is saying something different here.

Re. 4
As I understand it, the point is different –
“Should we attach any importance to the fact that leader X professes benign intent? No, we should not, because every leader professes benign intent. These claims do nothing to distinguish one leader from another.”

You’re second paraphrase “there are no more compelling reasons for taking Bush or Blair seriously when they talk about democracy” (my emphasis) attempts to reach beyond the claims made by Bush and Blair. You are not saying that we can distinguish their rhetoric from that of other leaders, you are saying that we have reasons other than their rhetoric for believing they are benign.

Phil, that is not how I read Chomsky’s statement. Rather, the announcement of benign intent is not proof of benign intent. Pretty simple. For proof, one looks at the past actions of a particular nation’s leadership — then one tries to get a view of the material interests of the nation — and finally one looks at the ideologies professed by the leadership. In the case of Hitler, for instance, one would look at the past domestic actions, such as the internment, torture and death of communists, union leaders, gays, pacifists and dissenters from 1933 onward; then one would look at the German interest in agriculture, oil, etc. And then one would try to understand the ideology of Naziism. In the case of Bush, one would look at the past actions of his cabinet — say, Rumsfeld’s role in propping up Saddam Hussein as he was slaughtering Kurds; then one would look at possible American material interests in the Middle East; then one would look at the ideology associated with the Bush administration’s foreign policy, neo-conservatism. The site of equivalency, here, is in the method of evaluating moral action, which is the same for all nations. Paradoxically, without that ideal equivalency on the level of method, you do get moral equivalency on the level of judgment — that is to say, every statement of benign intent would be treated as equivalent if you had no way of judging them. It is, in fact, Chomsky’s critics who have the moral equivalency problem.

There is no question of some conditional “right” to use the word, depending on what else you say about other crimes.

If you are talking literally about the “right” to free speech then of course this is true, but I’m equally sure it is not what Chomsky meant.

If you mean rather that it’s perfectly acceptable to apply the word, using a certain definition, to a particular case even though, one refuses to apply it to other cases which also fall under the defintition, then I don’t think your claim is true.

Ron F, Steven’s line about Kamm’s “strong empirical case” is clearly a reference to Chomsky’s use of Wheeler’s study, which is, just as Kamm says, a complete misrepresentation. Instead of quoting Robertson, show us where Wheeler says (or even implies) that the KLA killed 1500 people pre-bombing. Otherwise, stop berating Steven for making a claim that he didn’t actually make.

What can be shown of Chomsky’s writing, rather than asserted of his intent, is sometimes bad enough….

…Yet Chomsky’s critics appear to consider that such scattered observations are not sufficiently wounding blows to the Chomsky hydra. So it must be further asserted that he thinks Bush is a new Hitler, etc.

Although I admit to not having read more than a few snippets of Chomsky, this strikes me as the oddest aspect of his fame. All of the prominent attacks that I see are against this straw boogeyman with apparently limitless power and influence – I’ve heard someone accuse him of causing poverty in countries that have probably never heard of him – while his actual opinions, although different in every way, strike me as significantly wrong, but in a way that would require actual thought to rebut.

Engels, #2:

“I believe sincerely that Pol Pot was a radical who sometimes got things wrong.”

Who had number 2 for Chomsky and Pol Pot are “morally equivalent”?

Explain yourself. I understand both Mancunian English and Westphalian German, and that doesn’t parse in either.

Explain yourself.

Do I have to? Hmm, let’s see. This is a web blog. Aidan Kehoe is not my boss. Nope. It seems I don’t.

that doesn’t parse

Nor does “tangentally poison” but I didn’t complain at you, Aidan.

Well, Steven,

Now, note that Chomsky’s reason for using the “You can’t say A if you don’t also say B” argument is precisely the opposite of the Euston Manifesto authors’ reason for using the same argument. Chomsky argues that you cannot criticize crimes by other countries unless you also (or first) criticize crimes for which your own country shares responsibility. The Euston Manifesto, on the other hand, says that you cannot criticize the crimes of your own country unless you also (or first) criticize the crimes of other countries.

This sounds about right, but I’m simply baffled as to how you manage to find equivalency here.

Yes, you’re right – argument is precisely the opposite. What the Euston Manifesto does is called ‘hypocrisy’. So, what’s the opposite of ‘hypocrisy’ – ‘honesty’, I suppose?

Okay, what about this argument:

And why do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the beam that is in your own eye?

are you rejecting this one too as an equivalent to the Euston Manifesto?

Nah, I think it’s exactly the opposite: he is almost always taking about institutionalized phenomena. Here’s a quote on “good guys and bad guys” paradigm:

…the only way to justify having your boot on someone’s neck is that you are uniquely magnificent and they are uniquely awful.

For what it’s worth this is almost exactly a paraphrase of Just World Theory (sometimes called the Belief in a Just World hypothesis: BJW).

http://www.scu.edu/ethics/publications/iie/v3n2/justworld.html

Because we cannot accept the fact (and it is a fact) that the world is completely amoral, and that it is neither just, nor good, nor fair, we invent little moral stories such that it makes sense to us. So if we see someone suffering we work out a reason as to why they must have deserved it really. For psychological reasons, this impulse is probably even stronger when we are causing the suffering: we work out reasons why they must have ‘deserved it’. Likewise, the idea that ‘we’ are acting immorally is not an easy one to take, so we work out little stories as to why we ‘had to’ take the ‘difficult decisions’ because you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, or it’s for the greater good, or you have to be cruel to be kind, or sometimes people just don’t know what’s best for them (and ‘we’ do), and so forth.

Steven – It may be literal minded, but what Chomsky wrote was

Perhaps they have issued bitter condemnations of their Western allies (and Sweden). If so, they have a right to use the term ‘genocide‘ in the case of the terrible but much lesser crimes of Racak and Srebrenica.

You read him as implying the converse: that if they haven’t done so, then they don’t have the right. But he doesn’t actually say this.

Perhaps Chomsky’s point is that if they have issued such condemnations then this would be evidence that they are prepared to use the term consistently. But I don’t see a reason in this quotation for assuming that he thinks this is the only permissable evidence. I certainly think that weaker evidence would be acceptable, but I think that some evidence is required that people are prepared to use a term consistently, especially when it is one with a contested definition, like genocide.

Now it’s true that, just above in the same passage, he says that his opponents have a responsibility to denounce genocides in which their allies have been complicit, but I can’t see him making the strong claim you pin on him that if they fail in this responsibility then they forfeit their right to speak out.

The ‘denazification’ reference, IIRC, was made in response to an exhibition in some museum where children were invited to get into a model of a military chopper and shoot some Vietnamese peasants from a machine-gun. So, it was, of course, completely justified.

I think I know why—it’s because conservative critics of Chomsky are morally bankrupt and liberal critics of Chomsky are trying to distance themselves from “radicalism.”

I don’t think it’s just this. I think the reason Chomsky pisses of American liberals is more visceral: a combination of patriotism and the Just World hypothesis. As I see it, mainstream liberals do share these sentiments, albeit in a weaker form than conservatives.

Chomsky has a long track record of being too wrong on Yugoslavia for it to be an accident. Presumably this is because he’s unwilling to accept the existence of counterevidence to his the-US-sucks thesis.

“One might well find Chomsky’s choice of comparisons tasteless”

This seems strained. If I said, “You’re the freest and best poster on CT, and you are writing for your own pure self-interest to the detriment of the blogosphere, and the rhetoric in your posts reminds me of Goebbels’s”, that would surely be beyond tasteless.

“Why can’t someone take on his primary point, namely that US foreign policy has been really destructive in many parts of the world and that we should stop doing such bad things?”

Because US foreign policy is a complicated reaction to complex events and can’t be analyzed in the simplistic terms Chomsky demands? I rather suspect there’s a pretty big field of US foreign policy studies which might be consulted on such questions, if you care to look it up.

There can be no “reasoned critiques” of Chomsky because any effort to do so devolves first into an argument about exactly what it is that Chomsky said, then into an argument about the meanings of words (which is so not Chomsky’s branch of linguistics); then into a discussion of what constitutes moral equivalency. By the time its over, his critics and supporters are calling each other names, each one firmly believing that the other is an apologist for something or other without either side being clear about anything.

It’s the same every time – a waste of breath.

Steven – I suspect we are in broad agreement and I agree there are more important things to argue about. I also don’t feel entirely comfortable with the way Chomsky’s argument comes across in the passage you quote.

Because US foreign policy is a complicated reaction to complex events and can’t be analyzed in the simplistic terms Chomsky demands?

You put it so much more sensibly using “simplistic” than I did using “contrived”.

“Of course, criticizing Chomsky for sloppy and/or poorly phrased writing isn’t nearly as self-promotional as the alternative(s).”

The claim is that Chomsky’s phrasing isn’t sloppy, but calibrated to be as offensive to America’s self-image as possible (objective balanced truth be damned) while maintaining sufficient credibility or plausible deniability not to be dismissed out of hand by everyone. He’s a lot like Ann Coulter in this.

The problem with appeals to “complexity” is that they normally are used only to dismiss the overly simple analyst, without a demonstration of the appropriate level of complexity or nuance.

(I suppose that I should have stated Chomsky’s main point more strongly: “US foreign policy has been so near-uniformly destructive that our first instinct when we hear about a new foreign-policy initiative should be strong distrust.”)

The claim is that Chomsky’s phrasing isn’t sloppy, but calibrated to be as offensive to America’s self-image as possible

That’s a plausible interpretation of the fact I stated: Chomsky makes comparisons that produce implicature unrelated to the advancement of his comparisons’ stated purpose. That’s really all this thread boils down to — some ignore the implicature altogether, some focus upon it exclusively, and some form of heated conflict ensues. [That’s the trajectory nearly every re:Chomsky back-and-forth follows.]

I won’t claim that Chomsky is slipping this acrimonious implicature into his statements for sensational purposes. I like to give people the benefit of the doubt and call them untalented unless they confirm explicitly they are acting knowingly and maliciously.

The trouble is it is not possible to tell the truth about some things without offending large numbers of Americans.

US foreign policy has been so near-uniformly destructive

At which point you’ve lost your claim to credibility, of course. Now, perhaps you will further clarify by saying US military policy after World War Two has been so ineffective at Saving The World, and has produced so many undesirable consequences, that we should critically assess our reasoning before throwing our support into a new military venture, your assertion would become a kind of tautology.

If that’s truly all Chomsky means to say, it shouldn’t have taken him more than a pamphlet’s worth of writing to say it, and he wouldn’t be the subject of a CT thread today.

He makes comparisons because they are good meaningful comparisons.

In your opinion, does involving Hitler/Stalin/etc specifically manage to refine and illustrate his point with a minimum of additional/unnecessary implicature? If he replaced “Hitler” with “perceived opponent” would it detract from his explicit point, which is that we shouldn’t take statements of goodwill for granted?

P.S. The “see a shrink” ad hominem wasn’t necessary or appreciated. You’re usually far more respectful than that.

“pre” – Your first sentence is false as a matter of fact: as a third party I can objectively state that Adam’s “credibility” is intact.

“a” – So who does he think are the “good guys”? Pol pot, I presume?

Actually, forget it: this is a waste of time.

Sorry, Pre, I got carried away.

“pre” – Your first sentence is false as a matter of fact: as a third party I can objectively state that Adam’s “credibility” is intact.

(sigh) Misphrased and withdrawn. The claim that US foreign policy has been near-uniformly destructive is flatly false unless “foreign” gets mentally blotted out and replaced with “military” (which I think is what Adam more or less meant; we’re all typing fast).

Sorry, Pre, I got carried away.

Hey, no problem, it’s a Chomsky discussion, everybody gets carried away. See my especially silly use of “maliciously” earlier.

Actually that’s what I always find spectacularly interesting about these discussions. Chomsky could be taken apart in a sensible way by looking at each explicit claim he makes, and asking, could this have been said with equivalent specificity, but with less provocation? Nobody does this, and the discussion devolves into a bickering in which one side claims “yes Chomsky did actually say this or came close enough to saying it” and the other side says “if you look at what he is literally actually saying…”

…varying mix of idealism and self-interest

If I told you that a used-car dealer or a banker or a repo-man are motivated by a mix of idealism and self-interest – you’d just laugh, yet the foreign policiy is somehow completely different – Cheney & Co just have to have benign intentions and idealism.

Well, why not, maybe they do indeed have tons of idealism and benign intentions, but that’s irrelevant because as soon as they start acting on it – they are out of business, just like the hypothetic kind and gentle repo-man.

“Cheney & Co just have to have benign intentions and idealism.”

Yes but wouldn’t Chomsky assert that no American President since and including Roosevelt did not have benign intentions? So we’re not just talking about Cheney and Co.

“my impression was that he followed something like the Marxist view here in regarding the intentions (or rationalizations) of individual leaders as ultimately irrelevant to the objective institutional (or class-interest, etc.) reasons for their policies.”

As pointed out above, ignoring who was president in 2002/3 vs say 1978 will leave one in a bad way analyzing our foreign policy.

Or consider our actions in TFY – we didn’t like the slaughter, and we didn’t like the instability on the borders of our friends/important trading partners. We weren’t too distracted by other matters and had a president and Sec. of State inclined to make modest efforts at improving the world, esp. in neighborhoods we had some knowledge of – and this seemed like a good time to set a good example. So for a mix of reasons we intervened, with Nato but not the UN (so lawlessly according to some). To keep his viewpoint consistent Chomsky has to ascribe the above to plain imperialistic squashing of uppity innocent Serbia. He has (as described in a 2003(?) New Yorker article not online) to shout down a student who asks him if the US intervention in WWII was a positive act. He has to flirt with a holocaust denier like Faurisson and a tyrant like Pol Pot. He has to make bizarrely unuseful comparisons to Hitler. He leaves, as far as I know, no academic impact in policy analysis, else we could be arguing about work by his peer-reviewed epigones. (If any such exist, I’d love to take a look.)

“There can be no “reasoned critiques” of Chomsky because any effort to do so devolves first into an argument about exactly what it is that Chomsky said, then into an argument about the meanings of words (which is so not Chomsky’s branch of linguistics)”

Exactly. His statements usually strike me as having multiple possible interpretations that are all potentially valid. I think he does this on purpose – the typical “imply a radical message while maintaining plausible deniability” strategy, but I dont know for sure. Either way, committed haters and fanboys will always interpret his words to mean exactly what they want them to mean.

“I have always felt that the reason Chomsky attracts so much ire (as well as reverence) is his mastery of language.”

I’ve argued with liberal japonicus of the Obsidian Wings meta-site Hating on Charles Bird, a partial proponent of Chomsky, and he says Chomsky’s worst attribute is his awful prose. If he wrote more clearly he’d be easier to discuss – and it would be harder to read one’s biases into what he says.

“Cheney & Co just have to have benign intentions and idealism”

It’s hard to say it, but I think Cheney does have benign intentions – for example I’ve little doubt he thought post-intervention Iraq would be a much better place than under Saddam – but power, arrogance, and a willingness to deceive and be deceived are a bad mix. That this was followed post-invasion by (in my view) war crimes is another issue. Whether a satisfying solution to the Iraq situation (e.g., Saddam’s use of the sanctions regime [which I on the whole approved of] to punish his people) existed is yet another issue – the kind of question that’s much more interesting and important than the Chomskian reduction.

Yes, of course I’d claim it’s relevant. Moreover, that would rationally be the default belief.

It’d be anachronistic. When you continued on with your paragraph, you turned the statement around. “X is relevant to understanding Y” is not a symmetric statement, so “Iraq is relevant to understanding Korea” is not the same statement as “Korea is relevant to understanding Iraq”.

Call me crazy, but aren’t the Korea and Iraq policy of the United States primarily about projecting American power?

Meaning… Iraq is irrelevant to understanding Korea?

A high degree of ambiguity entered that discussion some place and it’s hardly worth unravelling. However, I feel like engaging for a bit.

So, let’s not be silly. In all possible ways? You could take the stance that everything is relevant to understanding everything else. I wouldn’t even go so far as to claim the brand of shoe on your left foot is “in all possible ways irrelevant to understanding Korea” — where there’s a will, there’s a way.

But if I wanted to spend 20-30 hours of research getting a better handle on what happened in Korea circa 1951, I wouldn’t be researching shoe sales, neither would I be researching what’s happened in 21st-century Iraq. That was, more or less, the point of the earlier assertion.

Anyone hearing or seeing it switches into a mental state where they lose the ability to parse non-trivial English sentences.

We shouldn’t have to parse. The writer should employ enough talent to minimize or eliminate all unnecessary ambiguity.

I could say out of the blue, “if you hunt down and slay your next online opponent, you should be prosecuted and go to prison, just like Charles Manson” and it would be a defensible, literally true statement. If you parse that statement, I:
(1) didn’t accuse you of being a murderous type
(2) didn’t say you were like Charles Manson

But what did I do? I brought all sorts of unnecessary comparisons into the mix when all I really meant to say is “I think you should be nicer to people who disagree with you online.” For that, as a writer, I should be held accountable. Maybe I’m a terrible comparison-writer, or maybe I really meant to provocatively compare you to Manson, but either way it’s reprehensible.

Louis Proyect, in general, quotations longer than ten lines or so should at least be accompanied by some comments of your own. As it stands it looks like you haven’t read through the CT discussion to this point, and were merely advertising the article instead of engaging in discussion.

That the Columbia article criticizes closed-mindedness and unwillingness to engage Chomsky makes your action seem a little hypocritical. Addressing the conversation, or appending your thoughts, would have gone a long way toward winning over link-clickers & engaged readers.

That many of these reasons were dumb or based on deception contigently unquashed or just plain mistaken doesn’t fit into the Chomskian reduction.

I like this statement more than the rest of what you said. Most opinion for-or-against the war in Iraq was centered around whether the ‘facts’ asserted by war proponents were indeed factual — for example, debating whether there really was an imminent danger of Iraq using Weapons of Mass Destruction against the United States. There wasn’t much debate about whether the U.S. had a moral responsibility to wait until those hypothetical WMD were actually used, although I’ve seen the topic meekly brought up from time to time among academics.

Verification was (and is) the crux dividing opinion.

South Korea is a success story for US foreign policy.

I know I’m going to regret this, but some might say South Korea was a success story despite US foreign policy. SK was a pretty brutal dictatorship for decades and that the democracy SK enjoys today has owes a lot more to the 1988 Olympics (and the fear of the Generals of an international backlash if the suppressed the student movement on the Olympic eve) than to US encouragement.

Given this decades long support of dictatorship, why did the U.S. bail out South Korea if not to project American power onto the border of China and the Soviet Union? And is the American occupation of Iraq not similar?

I’m not a big Chomsky fan, partly because, as an anarchist-communist myself, I don’t see most of his writing as aimed at me. Frankly, from what I’ve read, the apparent audience for his polemical writings are undergraduate Poli Sci majors who haven’t decided much about their own ideological stance yet.

And of course, he’s always trying to prick the most sensitive parts of the academic foreign policy establishment by including these invidious comparisons as discussed above. Frankly, I agree with those of you who’ve said that this makes him less effective as a foreign policy critic, but given his ideological background, did he really ever have any hope of becoming a truly effective one? Chomsky has tried to sit on the fence between respectable academic writing and anarchist agitation, and predictably this has failed to ingratiate him much with either side. His most vicious critics are the leftmost Zionists and the rightmost anarchists, which again, should surprise no one, since he’s been havering in the DMZ between the two for four decades.
So yes, OF COURSE he’s trying to get your goat with the Hitler/Stalin stuff, some of which he probably believes and some of which is inserted more for the pleasure of irritating those who are setting themselves up to be irritated by it.

On a smaller point: Korea/Iraq, maybe not; Mossadegh/Iraq, definitely.

“There wasn’t much debate about whether the U.S. had a moral responsibility to wait until those hypothetical WMD were actually used”

I’m a physicist and feel the slightest tinge of responsibility for Trinity etc., and Iraq’s progress towards getting an atomic bomb at the time of the Gulf War was shocking to me. I had little doubt the post-war post-sanctions Iraq had no such capability – but if I had mistakenly thought it did, that would have been a good reason to invade in my view. It’s an unfortunate historical fact that the “WMD” category is confusing to many or even most people – but even gods fight in vain against stupidity (another lack in Chomskian analysis I think).

In any case, I don’t think we would have wanted to wait to act until Haifa or Al Shuayba port was destroyed – in that non-existent world where Saddam was anywhere near getting nukes.

Iran is run by relatively sensible folk – even Pakistan is – and they are adding a great deal of danger to the world with their nuclear programs. I really wouldn’t want Saddam to have the ability to put an atomic bomb into a ship.

Do you recognize any differences between the respective governments of North and South Korea in 1950? Or were they, in your eyes, equivalent?

There was a war there in 1950. After the war, I do recognize the difference: one was communist and the other fascist; like, say, the USSR and Italy in 1937.

What’s your point? What does it have to do with the US leaders’ reasons for maintaining a fascist regime there – were the reasons idealistic or not?

engels: “So let me ask you again”

No, you may not, not until you’ve learned to read.

Rilkefan, I have to say, your last two comments haven’t been terribly informative. I asked you, very politely the first time, whether you really meant it when you said

good reasons to want to go in [to Iraq included] to protect access to the oil our economy (and hence to a large degree our lives) depends on, to convince the world we’re so strong and dangerous killing 3k of our civilians is unthinkable

and if so, whether you thought of yourself as a liberal. You responded by (i) answering a different question, (ii) saying I didn’t have a soul, (iii) calling me an idiot and (iv) telling me I can’t read.

If it’s not too much to ask, could you just answer my question?

If you want to say you didn’t actually mean what you said at first, that’s fine. But if you keep avoiding the question by changing the subject and insulting me, you will start to look a bit silly.

As Steven says, I’ve been corresponding with him on this and related issues over a little while. As we seem to have reached an impasse, I’ll post my comment here directly, and leave it at that. I should stress, however, that we have discussed only the substantive issue raised in this thread, and that’s what I’ll stick to. I generally try to stay out of internet discussions of my mental instability and services as a paid agent of imperialism, however great the autobiographical interest.

Chomsky’s invocation of comparisons to Nazi Germany is not mysterious. If you suggest, as Chomsky did in his first political book, that the US needs “a kind of denazification”, you are attributing Nazi-like characteristics of a non-trivial nature to US society. This heavily qualifies the notion that the US is a free, let alone the freest, society. When I pointed out this aspect of his political thinking, Chomsky claimed that I had misquoted him and also omitted crucial context. His first point was a falsehood and his second sophistry (the context that was so crucial was that grossest of state crimes, a museum exhibit of dubious taste).

I mention this, because Chomsky’s point applies to more than foreign policy. But it is in foreign policy that he finds direct analogies – not merely tasteless figures of speech – with Nazi Germany. In his most celebrated essay ‘The Responsibility of Intellectuals’, he says: “[O]ne must applaud the insistence of the Secretary of State on the importance of historical analogies, the Munich analogy, for example. As Munich showed, a powerful and aggressive nation with a fanatic belief in its manifest destiny will regard each victory, each extension of its power and authority, as a prelude to the next step.”

On an incidental point: I’ve indicated the problem of Chomsky and source material, even where the source is his own published writings. The issue that Steven raises of Chomsky’s remarks on the Kosovo war is another example. Chomsky does not name the parliamentary inquiry that comes to the conclusion he states, but it must be either the Foreign Affairs or the Defence Select Committee reports. And – to employ a Chomskyism – the master omits ‘crucial context’ there.

good reasons to want to go in [to Iraq included] to protect access to the oil our economy (and hence to a large degree our lives) depends on, to convince the world we’re so strong and dangerous killing 3k of our civilians is unthinkable (Rilkefan)

In fairness, Rilkefan, you seem to answer my question (as to whether you really mean this) in the affirmative, although you don’t give reasons and you immediately follow your answer with a defence of an entirely different claim, and with content-free insults.

But I think it’s fair to say that this is a pretty way out position for the 21st century. US oil interests are a good reason for invading another country. Demonstrating US power is a good reason for invading another country. I’m not going to argue with it here, but I wanted to get clear that it’s what you really think. If this kind of thinking is widespread among “liberals” then that seems to say something about the state of US politics.

engels:

If this kind of thinking is widespread among “liberals” then that seems to say something about the state of US politics.

Wonderfully enough, what it says is precisely the (extremely simple and easy to understand) point Chomsky makes.

He also makes the point that if you go outside the narrow spectrum you are called an idiot, soulness, etc.

“How this characterization of Chomsky’s “determination” is to be squared with the subject’s well-known assertions that the US is “in many respects” the “freest” and (without qualification) the “greatest” country in the world is mysterious.”

The problem is that Chomsky regularly asserts contradictory things–he isn’t using logic he is playing at demogogery. He is like a Rorschach test, you see what you want to see and omit what you don’t. Yes when it suits the structure of his emotional game he says that the US is in many respects the freest country. Yes when it fits his game he also says that it requires a de-Nazification.

When a man beats his wife and then brings her flowers, it is part of the ongoing emotional manipulation. Anyone who understands what is going on wouldn’t try to logically rationalize the two as conflicting issues to be resolved. Just because flower giving suggests affection from normal people doesn’t mean that it does from the wife beater. From a wife-beater it often represents a ploy or at very best a self-delusion. Why can’t we just accept that Chomsky did some influential work in a specialized area, but exhibits the overall logic of a loon outside that area? You don’t have to logically resolve his words–the man is crazy on the topic of US foreign policy.

Sebastian, So Chomsky is morally equivalent to someone who beats his wife?

Still, full credit to you Sebastian for not taking the Aidan Kehoe line (#2) that Chomksy “poison[ed] the field of linguistics”. Is this the Oliver Kamm position as well? I don’t know: I’m not an investment banker so I can’t read more then a few lines of his prose without falling asleep.

But to draw an analogy is not to say that two things are generally identical, especially when the analogiser takes pains explicitly to deny that they are.

This is a point that repeatedly escapes Mr. Kamm, who has spent the temporal equivalent of 78 blog entries exposing to the educated public his embarrassing ignorance of analogical reasoning. If this seems harsh, consider the following fragment, taking almost at random from Mr. Kamm’s vast corpus:

In my comment about Noam Chomsky earlier this week, I advanced three propositions. First, his central political notion is not about Vietnam, or Timor, or Palestine: it is that the US is equivalent to Nazi Germany.

As Leiter aptly observes, “one reason it is really important to learn how to read well is because if you don’t, you might grow up and make a real ass of yourself in public, and do so repeatedly, all because of inadequate reading skills.” (Oliver Kamm, Marko Attila Hoare, and the Importance of Being Able to Read)

engels: “Still, full credit to you Sebastian for not taking the Aidan Kehoe line (#2) that Chomksy “poison[ed] the field of linguistics””

Just for the record, “idiotic” wasn’t directly aimed at you. But apropos, you do know that Chomsky played a central but extremely divisive and self-contradictory role in modern linguistics?

steven: “why is it not sufficient to point out that what he writes is not true, when that is the case?”

Because he never corrects himself? Because even his obvious errors are seldom acknowledged by his most vehement supporters? Because his prose is sufficiently poor to make it often hard to pin down his argument? Because his arguments apparently aren’t separable from him, which suggests he’s not pushing a coherent position so much as an anti-US prejudice, something impossible to refute by addressing his particular points.

To be clear:

I am speaking of European aggression from the time period from about 1000 to the Renaissance. I dont think modern Western Imperialism has anything to do with the Dark Ages.

Engels,
You’re right. The idea that any sentance might be interpretable in multiple ways is assinine. Clearly there is one obviously true meaning to every collection of words – of which, naturally, you are the ultimate judge.
I was brainwashed at an early age to see language as an imperfect tool. Now I know the only tool is me.

“There was a war there in 1950. After the war, I do recognize the difference: one was communist and the other fascist; like, say, the USSR and Italy in 1937.

What’s your point? What does it have to do with the US leaders’ reasons for maintaining a fascist regime there – were the reasons idealistic or not?”

Well abb1, you do a fine job of not answering the question. You were replying to (although you snipped only a part), “The sttempted point re Korea was that we got into the Korean War for a variety of reasons, and we supported South Korea for a variety of reasons; and South Korea is a success story for US foreign policy.”

So I guess with your non-reply you accept that there may have been acceptable even idealistic reasons, based on the government, why we got into the Korean War.

After that, well yes, the U.S. supported and abetted a terrible military dictatorship. It did that for a variety of reasons, just as, say, the U.S. is supporting a terrible dictatorship in Egypt for a variety of reasons. Some were good reasons, some were bad, some were causal. At each step of the way the U.S. had individual decisions to make; and these decisions were generally not between good and bad, but bad and worse. And sometimes the U.S. made the worse or even the worst decisions. But I don’t think you can make a blanket assertion a la Chomsky that were no “idealistic” reasons at all – generally one would need to see South Korea in the context of the Cold War (that would be Free World vs. Soviet or Chinese Communism), and one would hope you could acknowledge that there was some idealism there.

To be clear, r4d20, what I find ridiculous is your claim that the “multiple possible interpretations” of what Chomsky wrote are all equally valid. If you really hold to some far out sub-Derridean view of the meaning of Chomsky’s statements as a beautifully elusive, polysemic and never-to-be-resolved chain of différance, perhaps you can admit that it would be somewhat unfair to blame Chomsky for this situation?

Re: “Steven: Do you think Chomsky was both (a) sane and (b) trying to tell the truth about the Khmer Rouge in 1977? – Brad deLong

“Why not? He just happened to be dead wrong, jumping to firm conclusions on the basis of limited information (as I believe he’s since admitted)…”

But… but… but… Chomsky wrote that “such journals as the Far Eastern Economic Review, the London Economist, the Melbourne Journal of Politics, and others elsewhere, have provided analyses by highly qualified specialists who have studied the full range of evidence available, and who concluded that executions have numbered at most in the thousands.” And none of that was true. None.

Jon raises a valid point: The people who tend to be most directly affected by US foreign policy often tend to find Chomsky’s views quite compelling.

Even if we finally decide that Chomsky is a lunatic, maybe it would be a good idea, on a procedural level, to bring the mother of one of the people “disappeared” under Pinochet, etc., to the table when discussing whether US foreign policy has been good or bad on balance. I know that sometimes non-Westerners are invited to testify, but it seems to me that they’re usually handpicked people who are going to aid the propaganda efforts.

adam kotsko: “Um, Brad—we’re going to need to see full tables of contents for those publications during the relevant period.”

Um, think I’m going to trust DeLong here. I imagine you have access to a fine university library if you’re actually skeptical and want a chance to show him up.

“maybe it would be a good idea, on a procedural level, to bring the mother of one of the people “disappeared” under Pinochet”

Yes, and let’s make every liberal blog show pictures of people tortured under Saddam – that’ll be really useful in determining the truth.

Or am I missing some odd irony in the above?

Rilkefan, The really ironic thing is that we supported Saddam during the period when he was committing his worst abuses! So we probably should go ahead and have those people on the panel, too.

I’m not trying to score fucking partisan points here.

I have never really read any Chomsky, so here is a constructive exercise: can anybody briefly summarize what they believe to be the programmatic part of Chomsky’s political/foreign policy writings?

I am fascinated by this discussion, but I don’t feel that I have a handle on what exact arguments he is making. Does he say things like the U.S. should adopt forieign policy x, y, and z? Or is more like the U.S. has a fucked up foreign policy for reasons x, y, and z?

What would a Chomskian foreign policy look like?

Since Professor DeLong saw fit to recycle from the archives of his blog his rather old and largely discredited attack on Chomsky, it is fair and appropriate to quote Edward Herman’s original reply to his post at length:

DeLong’s statement that Chomsky lied here is itself a plain lie. Our references were exactly correct. DeLong couldn’t find anything written by the Economist “staff,” but he knows full well that the reference was to a letter to the editor, published in and therefore provided by, the paper, by Cambodia demographer W. J. Sampson, an economist-statistician who was living in Phnom Penh and worked in close contact with the government’s central statistics office. Sampson’s work is cited with respect by Nayan Chanda, at the time the most highly respected journalist in Southeast Asia, writing for the Far Eastern Economic Review (ATC, 231f). Sampson was at least as “highly qualified [a] specialist” as anybody on the staff of the Economist. DeLong knows that we cited many other “highly qualified specialists” just one year later in After the Cataclysm, so his sneer about the “non-existence” of these sources is another dishonest suppression and shows that his own “good faith” and intellectual integrity are non-existent.

Now, just as DeLong knew “full well” that the references whose existence he denied were actually to be found in the journals referenced, so he knows fully and doubly well that the pieces from the Economist and the Far Eastern Economic Review existed after Herman published his reply.

This raises a question: Do you think DeLong was both (a) sane and (b) trying to tell the truth about Chomsky in 2002? Given that, is there any reason to think that he is (a) sane and (b) trying to tell the truth about Chomsky today?

Engels, “Normally, Sebastian, we think of people as being either crazy or not. Not crazy only on a particular subject.”

Really? I think that is a very limited definition of crazy.

I think there are a large number of otherwise normal people who are positively obsessed with race. They lead pretty much normal lives yet when they see a black man or a Jewish man some completely irrational chain of psuedo-logic goes off in their brain. They would do perfectly well with your financial transactions or testing some molecule in a biological lab, but you wouldn’t want them to have anything to do with any decision on a racial topic.

People with moderate amounts of paranoia are pretty crazy on the topic of people watching them, but often do fine with other stuff until they let the paranoia consume them. And it isn’t as if Chomsky has done much in linguistics lately.

In fact the sucessful scientist who is a shining light in his specialty and a loon outside of it is an easily recognizable character to anyone who watches science regularly.

Adam Kotsko, “Sebastian, So Chomsky is morally equivalent to someone who beats his wife?”

That was almost a Chomskyesqe analogy wasn’t it? :) I’m OF COURSE not trying to draw a moral equivalence between Chomsky and a wife-beater. I’m merely pointing out that with a wife-beater you don’t try to rationalize the contradictory bits of information by accepting it at face value. A wife-beater isn’t really expressing love for his wife when he brings flowers to her afterwards. The normal meaning of the expressive act does not apply. It is part of his emotionally manipulative game to keep her under his thumb for later acts of abuse. It is part of his ploy to keep her off balance, to keep her blaming herself, to keep her thinking “He isn’t such a bad guy, maybe he really loves me and if I just tried harder not to set him off we would be fine.”

When you are aware of the manipulative game, the gift part of the cycle of abuse looks much different. You don’t interpret it as an honest profession of love. You interpret it as the deception that it really is.

So after Chomsky beats me, I shouldn’t accept his flowers at face value? I’m confused.

#143-Hmm. Like I said, rilkefan already indicated he believes that exactly, so “asking” him over several posts = badgering him = useless posturing/hostility = wasting everyone’s time (which is, apparently, your beef with me).

As for my perspective, (i) no and (ii) especially no. And furthermore I agree that a 21st-century liberal should, ideally, know better. I hope you feel that reading my opinion on the matter was an optimal use of your 3-5 seconds.

However, I know of plenty of liberals, notably including T. Roosevelt & Robert McNamara & William J. Perry & –maybe– even Harold Brown, whose espousals/actions would indicate disagreement on (i) and/or (ii) well within the “liberal spectrum” of the past 100 years. So it’s not mind-bogglingly inconceivable for a liberal to say such things.

pre, see 135.

rilkefan, see who wrote #135, and whom was quoted in #146 (from #140) — your objection to my statement seems to be based on something that was said by someone else. Which I can understand, since I jumped in, but your response didn’t respond to (sigh) this meta-ing is a waste of time.

To cut to the quick, I think adam was being silly with a rhetorical flourish, so –disregarding whatever that flourish was about–: do you agree with the content of #140 and/or #150?

Like I said, rilkefan already indicated he believes that exactly, so “asking” him over several posts = badgering him = useless posturing/hostility = wasting everyone’s time (which is, apparently, your beef with me).

Gosh, “pre” this is fascinating, isn’t it? Yes, you are wasting my time. I wasn’t “asking” him, I was asking him, ok? I didn’t believe he believed that. Call me stupid or naive if you wish, but please don’t call me a liar. Better still, go and badger someone else. Call me single-minded but I was hoping to have a discussion about Chomsky. Preferably with someone who has something to say.

Pablo Stafforini needs to crawl back into his hole. Or develop a sense of shame.

The first thing Edward Herman cites–Nayan Chandha’s article in the Far Eastern Economic Review–does not say what Chomsky and Herman claimed it said: Chandha was skeptical of refugee accounts of the scale of mass killings, but in no wise did Chandha conclude that “executions have numbered at most in the thousands.”

The second thing Edward Herman cites–demographer W.J. Sampson’s March 1977 letter to the editor of the _Economist_–reported that Sampson had a European friend who had bicycled around Phnom Penh in the days after its fall and saw and heard of executions only of politicians and bomber pilots. But Edward Herman, Pablo Stafforini, and their batshit insane fellows take Sampson’s letter and call it an “analys[i]s… [that] studied the full range of evidence available.” Only Edward Herman, Pablo Stafforini, and their batshit insane fellows could possibly take Sampson’s view that “executions could be numbered in hundreds or thousands rather than in hundreds of thousands” and turn it into a “conclusion” that “executions have numbered at most in the thousands.”

But I’m not telling Stafforini anything he doesn’t already know, am I? He knows what incredibly thin gruel Chomsky and Herman serve up to back their lies in their “Distortions at Fourth Hand,” doesn’t he? His hope is that too few people will actually check the originals, isn’t it?

People who want to learn more about the lies of Chomsky, Herman, and Stafforini should go and read Chomsky and Herman’s original http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/chombookrev.htm, and follow it up with Bruce Sharp’s http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/chomsky.htm, which is, I think, the best thumbnail of this.

Well, Sebastian, I think you are not using the word “crazy” literally, then, but as a figure of speech. (Your example of paranoia is not really relevant, because “being watched by people” is not a topic, in the sense that, say, foreign policy is.)

But I think understand what you are driving at. People whom I read and respect can suffer from strange, irrational bouts of “craziness” on particular issues. I’ve heard it even happens to economists.

BTW Sebastian, this academics-should-stick-to-what they-know-about-because-they-tend-to-go-crazy-when-let-out-of-their-cages schtick is anti-intellectual, and it is an attempt to limit the scope for democratic political discussion. But you knew that.

“BTW Sebastian, this academics-should-stick-to-what they-know-about-because-they-tend-to-go-crazy-when-let-out-of-their-cages schtick is anti-intellectual, and it is an attempt to limit the scope for democratic political discussion. But you knew that.”

No, I didn’t know that. I’m happy for intellectuals to go beyond their initial scope when they aren’t crazy in the new sphere. That just doesn’t include Chomsky on foreign policy.

“A”:

After that, well yes, the U.S. supported and abetted a terrible military dictatorship. It did that for a variety of reasons, just as, say, the U.S. is supporting a terrible dictatorship in Egypt for a variety of reasons. Some were good reasons, some were bad, some were causal. At each step of the way the U.S. had individual decisions to make; and these decisions were generally not between good and bad, but bad and worse. And sometimes the U.S. made the worse or even the worst decisions. But I don’t think you can make a blanket assertion a la Chomsky that were no “idealistic” reasons at all – generally one would need to see South Korea in the context of the Cold War (that would be Free World vs. Soviet or Chinese Communism), and one would hope you could acknowledge that there was some idealism there.

If this is supposed to justify maintaining a fascist regime against the will of the population, then any regime is justified – Stalin’s, Pol Pot’s, Saddam’s. They all had lofty goals and reluctantly resorted to oppression, as the ‘least bad’ option.

Installing and maintaining a fascist regime for the sake of a “Free World” doesn’t make any more sense than maintaining a Stalinist regime for the sake of a “Workers’ Paradise”.

See how comparison with Stalin and Pol Pot comes natural here? It’s practically impossible to avoid.

And also I think that communist ideology is much more idealistic than both fascist and ‘free world’. I would rather entertain the notion that Pol Pot was an idealist than Eisenhower. Not that it makes Pol Pot’s actions more acceptable, of course.

Although I’m half a dozen comments below his, I can hear Prof. DeLong’s hyperventilation from here. He is apparently offended that I have brought to the attention of the readers of this weblog his false and outlandish insinuation that the pieces referenced by Chomsky did not actually exist. By a twisted retroactive interpretation of his original comment, Prof. DeLong now wants us to believe that his point wasn’t existential, but substantial: the pieces did exist, but their content wasn’t fully reflected in the paraphrase supplied by Chomsky.

Perhaps what’s motivating Prof. DeLong’s ire is that I once used his blog to expose the pathological lies about Chomsky that one of his commenters was spreading. Speculations aside, if there is anyone who needs to “crawl back into his hole” or “develop a sense of shame” is Prof. DeLong himself, for conversationally implying that Chomsky had fabricated references, and for having explicitly questioned his sanity.

The Khmer Rouge story, of course, fits the same pattern as the Kosovo story: there is an official enemy, government propaganda machine goes into high gear and no story fitting the official narrative needs any checking whatsoever, as we saw recently – people are fed to lions, put thru meat grinders, jails for children, 2 million dead, 5 million dead, 10 million dead – yeah, pile it on, who’s counting!

November 20, 2003, Tony Bliar: “We’ve already discovered, just so far, the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves.”

July 18, 2004, the Guardian: “Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by Tony Blair that ‘400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves’ is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses have so far been uncovered.”

And so on and so forth, yes – so on and so forth.

And, of course, any expression of scepticism, any alternative interpretation has to be scrutinized like you wouldn’t believe by paid propagandists and amateurs alike, thousands of pages will be writen to examine a single pharagraph from all possible angles, the worst possible interpretation has to be always assumed and, of course, in this case no benefit of the doubt whatsoever will be given, the only choice is insanity or dishonesty.

So, tell me: who is being dishonest here?

#158: you seem to be confusing Chomsky and Marx, or perhaps Adam Smith. The things that make Chomsky different from Michael Moore are not those that make him stand out in the slightly wider tradition of writing books about politics.

To me, Chomsky’s really distinctive feature is his americo-centrism.

Soru, I think Chomsky can be forgiven for the tacit assumption that the Islamic conquests of certain portions of Europe, given that they occurred centuries before, are not relevant to the time period he is addressing (i.e., the modern era).

Couldn’t you say the same about anything pre-20th century? The two big categories for time periods are ‘living memory’ and ‘history’. If something happens for the first time in living memory, then surprise is justified.

In any case, of the three non-western powers (counting Russia as western) that had the plausible capability to win a war with one or more western nations (China, Japan, and the Ottoman Empire), two did make or join in such an attack.

Rilkefan: “Is there any thinkers out there [snip insult to abb1] who claim there are clear ways of determining the right foreign policy in Africa, the ME, Asia, etc. etc.? That one can try to do X and expect X to happen and bad consequences Y and Z not to follow?”

That is not the same thing. A policy can be right or wrong irrespective of the consequences and their likelihoods.

Also, to your latest post (I haven’t read all in between): Few americans, even few american politicians, know how horrible the Pinochet regime was, or know of the US involvement in bringing it about. I don’t think it’s manipulative to show them. It certainly is not the same thing as invented atrocities (incubator story) or arranged “illustrative” photos. Those starving in the third world rarely do so because of a willed US policy, however, Pinochet’s dictatorship was a willed US policy at the time.

Mr Kamm (who, one must never forget, is not a disinterested observer, but is instead a highly partisan proponent of Tony Blair’s foreign policy) would be on stronger ground if he didn’t talk such total bollocks.

‘This is evasive, bar your last point, on which you’re right (though my point about the type of arguments used in these discussions and by one author of this blog stands). Here again is Chomsky’s chosen analogy: “[O]ne must applaud the insistence of the Secretary of State on the importance of historical analogies, the Munich analogy, for example. As Munich showed, a powerful and aggressive nation with a fanatic belief in its manifest destiny will regard each victory, each extension of its power and authority, as a prelude to the next step.” He is clearly saying the US is the same type of actor in international affairs as Nazi Germany, and making an implicit associated judgement upon it. The distinctive characteristic of Nazi crimes was not that it shot its victims, but that it gassed and incinerated them in a genodical campaign.’

It is certainly true that Nazi Germany amongst many other states, attacked sovereign states which posed no threat to them (although it is insufficiently noticed that Hitler invariably claimed that some threat actually existed). It is also true that this is considered a crime by all impartial observers (‘impartial’ used in a specific (though accurate) sense here to exclude Mr Kamm who, as noted, is not in any sense impartial). It is also true that other states have carried out similar actions. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, a sovereign state which posed no threat to him (or Iraq). At the time he was widely compared to Hitler, although he did not commit genocide in Kuwait. Did Mr Kamm proclaim that such talk of moral equivalence was immoral then? He did not. The inference one must draw, therefore, is that Mr Kamm believes that invading a sovereign state is a bad thing, indeed (according to the Nuremberg judges) the worst thing, whether carried out by Hitler or Saddam Hussein, or against the Falkland Islands by Chile, or whatever.

Note, incidentally: in making this comparison, I am not drawing an analogy. I am not saying Hitler’s invasion of Poland is like Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. I am saying (from the point of view of international law) it was the same thing. The crime is to invade another sovereign state which poses no threat to you, and it remains the same crime whether carried out by Hitler or Pinochet or Suharto or Morocco or the United States in Iraq.

So Mr Kamm’s statement should be glossed as follows: ‘Chomsky and a great many other experts on international law is clearly saying the US is the same type of actor in international affairs as Nazi Germany in this particular respect, and moreover he is right by definition. ‘ In fact, how could he (and the many other international lawyers who agree with him, a point ignored by Kamm) be wrong? If invading a sovereign state is wrong (unless authorised by the UN) it’s wrong, and that’s the end of the debate. In this respect therefore, the US resembles Germany (and Saddam Hussein, and perhaps a more illuminating comparison, the British Empire in India and the US in the Philippines). Again, how could it be otherwise?

The last statement of Mr Kamm’s Blairite polemic, is of course completely incoherent, irrational, irrelevant, illogical and false. The Nazis of course DID shoot their victims as well as gas them and so what if they shot them all and didn’t gas any? And in any case what has this got to do with anything? Unless you are implying the Germans invaded Russia to exterminate the Jews (they didn’t) this is completely irrelevant. Chomsky has nowhere and at any point claimed that the US has a plan to exterminate the Jews (or homosexuals, or the Roma, or the Poles).

The key point which Kamm wants to avoid is: either you agree that invading a sovereign state which poses no threat to you (to repeat, without UN authorisation) is wrong, or you don’t. Kamm doesn’t. He believes that this (and in fact any) moral/legal rule can be broken, but only by the United States (he will deny this, but his denials are wothless). There is a name for this position, and it is ‘moral relativism’. It should also be pointed out that Mr Kamm is quite the fan of ‘moral equivalence’ but only when the equivalence is in the favour of United States, the country to which he apparently feels he has a patriotic allegiance. For example, the democratically elected President of Venezuela, he terms ‘a bully and a thug with a contempt for constitutional government.’ I hope it’s not stretching things when I point out that Saddam Hussein was frequently also termed a ‘thug’ by Kamm, indeed a fascist thug. Chavez is also termed an ‘authoritarian populist’.

Kamm has also gone out of his way to present the Respect Party as a neo-Nazi organisation indistinguishable from the BNP. This is ‘moral equivalence’ with a vengeance: it is also vapid (and grotesquely offensive). I might go through the ‘tick list’ and ask what precisely this means. Is he implying that George Galloway has, or plans to, gas Jews? Is he implying that if the Respect party ever formed a government the UK would invade Poland? No. Meaning is use. For Kamm to compare someone to Hitler merely means that that person disagrees with the foreign policy of Tony Blair, for which Mr Kamm has been such an assiduous propagandist. And gathering by his increasingly frequent appearances in the Times and other media outlegs, it’s quite a lucrative business.

Steven– in his 9-11 book Chomsky says:

” in much of the world , the US is regarded as a leading terrorist state and with good reason” ( 2001 p23).

Discussing Bin Laden he says:

” his call for the overthrow of corrupt and brutal regimes of gangsters resonates quite widely as does his indignation against the atrocities that he and others attribute to the US ,hardly without reason ” ( 2001 p 61 ).

On the face of it this is an endorsment of those reasons ; he is saying that the view in question is justified . But if this is right then the moral equivalence criticism people make says something like this : Chomsky believes that there are good reasons to regard US as a terrorist state but this implies that US is very simmilar ( use of power , lack of accountability, flouting international law , aggresive ) to other terrorist states such as Nazi Germany so to that extent ( intellectually you are commited to what your position entails )Chomsky is commited to the view that US is very similar to Nazi Germany.
In other words the criticism goes through even if the equivalence is implied only .

The key point which Kamm wants to avoid is: either you agree that invading a sovereign state which poses no threat to you (to repeat, without UN authorisation) is wrong, or you don’t. Kamm doesn’t. He believes that this (and in fact any) moral/legal rule can be broken, but only by the United States (he will deny this, but his denials are wothless).
Arguing that it can be right to invade a “sovereign state which poses no threat to you” is completely different from arguing that the United States has absolute moral authority and is the only country that can ever be right to do this. His denials are not worthless — but if you’re in the business of perscribing to certain people views that they don’t hold then claiming that you know what they really believe can be quite useful.

There is a name for this position, and it is ‘moral relativism’.

I think you should probably learn what the term means before you start using it.

It should also be pointed out that Mr Kamm is quite the fan of ‘moral equivalence’ but only when the equivalence is in the favour of United States, the country to which he apparently feels he has a patriotic allegiance. For example, the democratically elected President of Venezuela, he terms ‘a bully and a thug with a contempt for constitutional government.’ I hope it’s not stretching things when I point out that Saddam Hussein was frequently also termed a ‘thug’ by Kamm, indeed a fascist thug. Chavez is also termed an ‘authoritarian populist’.
Unless you can demonstrate that Kamm has drawn a direct comparison between Chavez and Hussein then you really don’t have any valid point. He calls Chavez an “authoritarian populist” because that’s exactly what he is.

Kamm has also gone out of his way to present the Respect Party as a neo-Nazi organisation indistinguishable from the BNP. This is ‘moral equivalence’ with a vengeance: it is also vapid (and grotesquely offensive). I might go through the ‘tick list’ and ask what precisely this means.
I don’t think he’s presented the Respect Party as a “neo-nazi organization”. He has represented Respect as being equivalent to the BNP.

‘ “[O]ne must applaud the insistence of the Secretary of State on the importance of historical analogies, the Munich analogy, for example. As Munich showed, a powerful and aggressive nation with a fanatic belief in its manifest destiny will regard each victory, each extension of its power and authority, as a prelude to the next step.” He is clearly saying the US is the same type of actor in international affairs as Nazi Germany, and making an implicit associated judgement upon it’

I simply find it remarkable, bizarre … just remarkable … that Oliver Kamm would expect anyone to take his assertion seriously. At what perversely stunted level of reading comprehension must one pitch oneself, voluntarily and with full prejudice there can be no doubt, to cast a slur like this?

Brad deLong’s argument above belongs in a different universe to this kind of thing. I’m frankly shocked.

ray — I would like to be able to pin Chomsky’s view down on this topic so that it can be evaluated. But assuming that he is commited to the US is a terrorist state view I would say this is because of impoverished method that underwrites this type of “history/political science” , I see it as a kind of Lysenkoism or creation science and it gives similar results. The mystery to me is how he falls for it ( this is a person who could see the shortcommings of behaviourism ).

re: 166
Oliver Kamm would do well to avoid linguistics. Pinker has never ‘rejected’ Chomsky’s theories. He (and Daniel Dennett) are strongly opposed to Chomsky’s rejection of evolutionary explanations for language, however:

Pinker discusses Noam Chomsky’s “enormous” impact on him, as well as his profound differences with Chomsky concerning the evolution of humans’ innate ability to acquire language.link

Kamm’s reference to Newmeyer is from a Prospect article, which might not be your best source for linguistic analysis. As Randy Harris notes in his review of Newmeyer’s _Generative Linguistics: A Historical Perspective_

Newmeyer is, I’ve said, the most important historian of generative linguistics. But he’s more than a historian (some would say less, for the same reason): he’s an apologist, an advocate, a friend indeed, of generative grammar, especially of those generative positions most closely associated with Chomsky. It’s not that he blindly follows Chomsky; his “Rules and principles”, perhaps the finest single paper of his career, is motivated by a rejection of the accretionary picture of generative history that Chomsky (1986) offers … But Newmeyer seldom misses an opportunity to pass favourable judgement on Chomsky’s theories, goals, or methods. And he very regularly protects them against attack from without. Chapters 2, 4, 6, 8, 9, and 10 are–though this is not all they are–clear celebrations of Chomsky and/or his ideas.

I come from a non-Chomskyan branch of linguistics, and I pretty much agree with most criticisms of Chomsky’s linguistics. But pretending that people who actually support his ideas reject them suggests that you are not interested in accuracy and this calls into question your other statements

“Kamm’s reference to Newmeyer is from a Prospect article, which might not be your best source for linguistic analysis.”

I apologise to readers for having initially understated just how incompetent #183 was. Of course the reference to Newmeyer is from a Prospect article. I wrote the article.

Good grief.

zdenek, it would have been useful if you said that Chomsky looks for facts to confirm his theory, rather than the impenetrable “assuming that he is commited to the US is a terrorist state view I would say this is because of impoverished method that underwrites this type of “history/political science” , I see it as a kind of Lysenkoism or creation science and it gives similar results.“

My apologies for not realizing that you were speaking of a previous linked article. My eye caught the mention of Pinker, Postal and Newmeyer. I’m also sorry that my pseudonymous status doesn’t meet with your expectations, however, I do wonder if Pinker said that he ‘rejects’ Chomsky’s theories or if Fredrick Newmeyer made similar assertions. But since you feel qualified enough to write about the current state of linguistics in Prospect, I’m surprised you are hesitant to display your knowledge here.

Re: “The discussion seems to be mainly about whether these pre-9/11 intellectual practices are sufficient, or if, as Brad Delong or Oliver Kamm would prefer, we ought to categorise Chomsky a priori as someone who is beyond the pale of serious discussion, whose arguments one should never bother to consider and whose name one can not mention without being told to shut up.”

Look: back in 1977, when I read Chomsky and Herman’s “Distortions at Fourth Hand,” I believed it. I believed that such journals as the Far Eastern Economic Review, the London Economist, the Melbourne Journal of Politics, and others elsewhere, [had] provided analyses by highly qualified specialists who have studied the full range of evidence available, and who [had] concluded that executions have numbered at most in the thousands; that these were localized in areas of limited Khmer Rouge influence and unusual peasant discontent.

Chomsky and Herman tricked me.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

I don’t think there is any contradiction in saying that the US is both free and in need of denazification. It seems like a contradiction to people who think it is a logical impossibility for free countries to commit crimes against humanity, but obviously that isn’t the case. I don’t think (and Chomsky wasn’t saying) that the US is as bad as Nazi Germany.

On other issues–there was no significant moral difference between North and South Korea in 1950. One side was a murderous fascist dictatorship and the other was a murderous Stalinist dictatorship. The Korean War was conducted on all sides with enormous brutality against the civilian population and in a more just world, the leaders of North and South Korea and the US and China would have been tried as war criminals.

The one thing that does make the Korean War a just war (though does not excuse the bombing of civilian populations or the orders to shoot refugees) was the fact that North Korea started it. So that makes it justifiable in a way that the Iraq invasion was not.

On the dreary subject of Chomsky criticism–it’s not important. Chomsky was extremely important to a lot of us before the advent of the Web–nowadays if you want an alternative view of US foreign policy there are countless sites you can visit. One can agree with much or most of what Chomsky says about US foreign policy without feeling the need to defend everything he has ever said.

Re: #193, and I have to make this the last, because I’m disinclined to carry on repeating myself. No, I am not competent to discuss the state of linguistics; that’s why, when commissioned to write an opinion piece on Chomsky as public intellectual, I sought and obtained the advice of leading figures in his academic field, whose assistance I properly acknowledged in the article, having first checked that they would be content for me to do this. I don’t see how I could reasonably have done more, whereas the “pro” Chomsky commentator whose article also accompanied the public intellectuals poll, Robin Blackburn, clearly did less. Blackburn managed to confuse the name of Chomsky’s teacher Zellig Harris with that of the Korea specialist Selig Harrison (the error was later corrected in the online version of the article, but was published in the print edition).

As I have never said Professors Pinker or Newmeyer “reject” Chomsky’s ideas, I’ll refrain from repeating my impressions of your contribution to the discussion, and direct you to #194 and to Bob Borsley’s illuminating comment written for my web site.

But I ought to have realised that the only place where that would happen would be among the commenters on this blog, whose complaints do not much occupy me.

Good for you, Oliver: your aristocratic aloofness from all this mud slinging is preserved. Wait, you’ve been hacking away at this thread for almost 24 hours. And you are a professional mud slinger. Whoops: my bad.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

But, Brad, I don’t see the evidence that Chomsky even fooled you twice. As far as I can see, you just keep repeating the same 30-year-old example.

Sebastian, produce a hyperbolic metaphor. People here tried talking about Korea – it didn’t pan out.

If you’re right, it souldn’t be too difficult to produce a grossly exaggerated claim.

it even seems to be getting worse, or at least more obvious

That does rather suggest the Chomsky approach is ineffective, and a different argument strategy (maybe more reality-based, more personalised, with more pop-culture references, or just simpler prose) might work better.

Of course, it is possible to suggest that absent Chomsky, the US would have been worse. Maybe it would never have felt the need to disown Saddam as an ally, let alone topple him.

Thank you for the book recommendation, which is useful, unlike the comments within which it is wedged.

I believe the emotional energy released in these discussions has much to do with recapitulationist intellectual vanity. I guess that many of the folks both commenting and reading here were introduced to Chomsky’s political writing in high school, college, or in some comparatively early stage of intellectual development. The power of Chomsky’s ideological analysis (particularly in its purest camera obscura sense) can easily overwhelm such impressionable sorts. But, as you reads more widely in political analysis (or become more progressively indoctrinated, what have you), the need to distinguish your increasingly sophisticated views from those of Chomsky–and particularly from of his naive admirers–becomes ever stronger. How could I ever have been taken in by that simplistic anti-imperialism, that monomaniacal anti-Americanism, etc. This narcissism of minor difference then manifests in unremitting scorn, with the inevitable internet regression heightening tensions.

I, regrettably, thought at a relatively early age that muscular New Republicisms defined the liberal edge of serious political discourse and that such as Chomsky was fit only for dope-smoking hippies and addled Guevarists. I would sometimes watch “Capital Gang.” Upon returning to his political writings a few years later, I came to realize that I was wrong. I now look at anti-Chomsky comments by Delong and others in this thread with an emotional revulsion in addition to disinterested intellectual disagreement, because I’m considerably ashamed that I once might have found them sympathetic.

If that strikes you as amateur psychologizing of the most embarrassing sort, see De Man on the “resistance to theory.”

I accept Chomsky’s occasional singlemindedness and refusal to compromise. He does ask readers to check his sources. He has a horror of being a cult-leader. He distrusts charisma. When he calls critics “neo-Stalinists,” it’s with a hint of gentle regret and love for their hypocritical sin.

Since you show an interest in my book suggestions, you may also want to look at Goldsmith and Huck’s _Ideology and Linguistic Theory: Noam Chomsky and the Deep Structure Debates_, which consists of annotated interviews of the principles of (and this is Postal’s term) ‘The Linguistic Wars’. I promise, that will be the last one, so you are now free to move on to more fertile fields.

he is an incredibly poor writer

But if Chomsky so dumb, why ain’t he poor, Sebastian? Surely you’re not saying that a writer that incompetent could succeed on the oh-so-meritocratic American market? Or conversely, if you and the numerous other literary critics on this thread are so much more capable of penning a daming critique of Anglo-American imperialism then Chomsky, why haven’t… well, it doesn’t matter. Typical librul player haters, I say.

I’m not even sure if a majority of Chomsky’s ‘statements’ are factually understandable

Examples, please?

JFTR too, I cited Pinker because I was accused of misrepresenting him, or rather – and sneakily – contriving to make it sound as if I was misrepresenting him even if I wasn’t actually doing so, and even though I had scrupulously consulted competent specialists in the field. As this tortuous conclusion was itself founded on misrepresentation, I don’t feel it would have been honest to treat the intervention with respect, even if its author is in other contexts learned and astute.

Migawd, it’s like watching two dozen Wiley Coyotes looking for the Roadrunner Chomsky.

Chomsky reminds me of Mark Twain’s story about the man who remembered everything. He is particularly incomprehensible to those who remember nothing, such as the rejection of elections in Korea that led to the breakdown of re-unification talks, and, eventually the Korean War. Hint- it was the U.S. that refused to participate in the elections.

If you want to understand Chomsky (I don’t care one way or the other) you need to develop a knowledge base of world events as seen from outside the U.S. propaganda bubble.

“And yet, it bears repeating, far far more people on earth agree with Chomsky’s perspective than Sebastian’s.”

Wow, I’m convinced. I believed in evolution until just now, but the wisdom of crowds obviously trumps intelligent informed viewpoints.

“Exaggerated and perverse” is a good description of Chomsky’s attacks on the US – the Nazi stuff is a good example. The US does bad _and_ good – and does both for bad and good reasons – and a reasoned critique would acknowledge that.

Rilkefan – For political issues, as opposed to scientific ones, we are more inclined to pay “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind”.

“Chomsky’s books are not works of fiction and they are not read as such by his supporters.”

Well at least half of the claims in that sentence are definitely true.

“You may find this hard to believe, Sebastian, but his supporters read his books as polemical texts which are advancing a general theory based on particular factual claims”

I don’t find it hard to believe at all. People read the Koran that way too.

“which are, for the most part, true.”

So you say. That’s fabulous. :)

“So I don’t really see how your example is relevant.”

I see you don’t. But I don’t think you are being totally honest. You understand my example. You deny its relevance because you don’t like what the example suggests. Sort of like a Nazi analogy mentioned above….

“he is an incredibly poor writer
He is a brilliantly succesful writer

Sorry, Sebastian, did I omit some context?”

Nope, that is a correct impression of my views. Another incredibly poor writer who is brilliantly successful–L. Ron Hubbard. Have you ever tried to slog through his fiction much less his ‘non-fiction’? Funny how the cult-like following seems analogous too. The categories aren’t as mutually exclusive as you seem to think. No one with any understanding of music would call Madonna anything other than an ok singer but on the other hand she is a freaking brilliant entertainer and pop idol. Come to think of it, the best analogy for Chomsky is almost certainly Rush Limbaugh. Fantastically popular on his side. Reviled by the other side. Hedges and retreats from his more ridiculous claims. Blusters through the other ones. Belittles his enemies as not being able to understand his keen insight…

What is the difference between Chomsky and Rush?

One is a raving, demogogic loon who drives his enemies nutso and the other uses oxycontin.

lj, I’m missing the sleight – is my #214 incorrect?

That is – I take it Chomsky’s not the Newton of linguistics. I thought his ideas were of central importance but that the later ones had come to contradict the earlier ones, and that he had defended each with unusual vitriol and divisiveness. And that linguistics doesn’t have a unified field theory. So the sentence above seems kind of uncontroversial and uninteresting to me. If Fritz (unknown to me in my total ignorance) doesn’t agree, can’t one find well-known linguists X and Y who do? And if so, so what?

You may believe the truths which Lewis wants to illustrate or not. But if you read it to find out what demons are ‘really’ like you are missing the point.

Chomsky is somewhat like that.

Chomsky’s supporters read Chomsky to find out what US foreign policy is really like. So according to to the “logic” of your “analogy” they are “missing the point”. So the only people who truly grok Chomsky are his detractors, like yourself, who read him as, what?, a fictional author who provides incidental revelations about the depravity of leftwing politics? Sorry, but as an analysis of the meaning of any literary text, that seems perverse.

People read the Koran that way too.

So fine: say that Chomsky’s supporters are like a religious cult. That is a tired old left-bashing cliché but unlike your analogy it has the virtue of being halfway coherent.

“which are, for the most part, true.”

So you say. That’s fabulous.

Actually, my point was only that they are read this way by his proponents (see above). But if you want to say this, fine. But then after considering your entertaining analogies and enjoying the broad sweep of your cultural allusions, from C.S. Lewis to Madonna, it appears we have returned to square one. Chomsky’s supporters think that most of his factual claims are true. You say they are not. And your evidence for this is – what?

he’s undoubtedly the World’s Greatest Showman

Have you seen him tap dance?

“he is a brilliant entertainer.”

He is a brilliant entertainer of his audience.

I’m not in Madonna’s audience (except in so far as she sometimes attracts world-class songwriting/producing), and she doesn’t do much for me. (Indulging myself given the above thread) I’ve listened to some of Hitler’s speeches and however effective an orator he was supposed to be, I just find him a ranting loon – I’m not in his audience. I’m not in Chomsky’s audience – I want to read clear, reasoned, defended, balanced views, not polemic. That no one has developed a clear, reasoned, defended, balanced critique of the US starting out from Chomsky’s writing (please correct me if I’m wrong here – point me to the academic journal or book) is damning.

Sebastian‘s comparison to Rush Limbaugh strikes me as quite good – not quite as good as my Ann Coulter comparison though, because Chomsky gets a lot of criticism from the left and Rush doesn’t (far as I know anyway) get any from the right.

Engels, you have a point and sometimes I do come more directly to Chomsky’s defense. But the reason most of us read Chomsky on political issues is because we think he’s basically correct about the evils of American foreign policy. If that’s the case–

A) We should be able to confirm it from other sources
and
B) convincing people that America is guilty of atrocities is more important than getting into debates over whether Chomsky is a saint or a demon.

I think A and B are both true. It might seem unfair to Noam to avoid citing him directly most of the time. (I don’t say one should never cite him). But the real reason (IMO) that Chomsky is such a whipping boy is because it gives the center-left to far-right an excuse to avoid the real issues. They’d much rather talk about Chomsky’s real or imagined sins than whether what he says about US atrocities is strongly supported by the evidence.
If most people ever come to understand this, they’ll look at Noam as someone who has been pointing this out for decades, sometimes making mistakes of his own, but fundamentally correct on the basic issue. More or less the way we look at the abolitionists today.

Sebastian, I’d take your C.S. Lewis Screwtape comparison more seriously except that it’s clear you don’t take it seriously. You don’t seem to think Chomsky has anything important to tell his readers. By the way, if we’re looking for other writers to compare to Noam, I’d nominate Mark Twain in his later anti-imperialist years.

engels:

Have you seen him tap dance?

Sure, but my favorite part of his act is when he sings “Little Red Corvette” in his tight leather jumpsuit while surrounded by nine white tigers! The first time I saw that is when I decided I had to begin parroting his exaggerated and perverse political claims with cult-like devotion!

rilkefan:

Sebastian’s comparison to Rush Limbaugh strikes me as quite good

Yes, they’re directly comparable, except for that radio show on 600 stations part. But that’s of no significance whatsoever, at least for those of us who are intelligent and informed.

Rilkefan, if you want to go further with the Screwtape comparison, fire away. I’m not sure exactly where Sebastian was going with it.. I suppose there’s a similarity in the heavy-handed irony that both Lewis and Chomsky use. Lewis does it better.

One of the reasons I find Chomsky’s view of the world plausible (purely factual questions aside) is because I’m a Lewis fan and Screwtape was the second Lewis book I read (the first being my favorite Lewis book “Till We Have Faces”.) Anyway, for at least some of us Christians, it’s entirely to be expected that powerful people in any given culture will be self-deluded about the nobility of their own motives and deeply offended by anyone who questions them. I read Chomsky accusing American elites of being self-deluded pursuers of their own self interest, all the while convincing themselves that everything they do is for the best of motives and as a Christian and C.S. Lewis fan I think “Well, yeah. That’s what humans are like.”

Where I tend to disagree with Chomsky is that he seems to think that “the people” would be shocked and horrified if they knew what was done in their name. He’s a romantic who thinks it’s all the fault of the evil elites at the top. I’m not so sure about that.

And that Limbaugh is a vicious moron…

Rilkefan – It’s one of Chomsky’s big claims that you can not properly address the questions he wants to within the field of academic political science. You may think that’s rubbish, but it does mean it is not an immediate knockdown argument to his position to point out that he does not have a large following within that field. But seeing as you are a vocal critic of Chomsky, I’m sure I don’t need to inform you of what his views are…

Donald Johnson, please cite evidence for this quote of yours: “Where I tend to disagree with Chomsky is that he seems to think that “the people” would be shocked and horrified if they knew what was done in their name. He’s a romantic who thinks it’s all the fault of the evil elites at the top. I’m not so sure about that.”

I don’t remember him saying anything like this. I think your quote is essentially a dishonest caricature.

Mr Kamm –

Your drama queen act in this thread is a bit…overwrought. If you don’t want to comment don’t comment; if you don’t want to comment further, don’t comment further. Regardless, please don’t embarrass yourself with the good ol’ ‘I simply must stop wasting my time with these Philistines’ routine.

Oh, and jon, you said:

the man is crazy on the topic of US foreign policy.

And yet far, far more people on earth would agree with Chomsky’s views than Sebastian’s.

You then implied strongly that ‘billions’ of people share Chomsky’s views of American foreign policy and the work of nations.

I’d be stunned if you were off by only three orders of magnitude here. Substantive stuff aside, that’s just a silly claim. I simply can’t believe that Chomsky’s apparent overarching fantasy – of sinister American elites turning the world into their bloody playground – is particular common. Certainly a general antipathy toward American attitudes and interests, yes…and aren’t you ashamed to live in such a world? Actually don’t answer that; I’m not checking back in this thread.

(Unlike Mr Kamm.)

Sebastian’s comparison to Rush Limbaugh strikes me as quite good

Yes, they’re directly comparable, except for that radio show on 600 stations part. But that’s of no significance whatsoever, at least for those of us who are intelligent and informed.

And the fact that Rush gets the dubious honor of Interviewing the Dark One on a semi-regular basis.

And Sebastian,when will you be enlisting?

“Yes, they’re directly comparable, except for that radio show on 600 stations part. But that’s of no significance whatsoever, at least for those of us who are intelligent and informed.”

You’re not so intelligent and informed that you noticed the sovereign fact (given the discussion is about their rhetorical strategies) that they have different names.

“It’s one of Chomsky’s big claims that you can not properly address the questions he wants to within the field of academic political science. You may think that’s rubbish”

Well, I prefer to think of it as convenient.

“This hypothesis is supported by the fact that it’s a common perception among his audience”

I think this is another convenient feature of his work, as noted above. If it were clear, it wouldn’t be possible for one to read one’s own prejudices into it, and it would be more subject to attack, and it would be amenable to boring study – as is, the casual Chomsky supporter can read a few essays and not feel bad about getting a deep familiarity with his stuff because, well, it’s just too boring.

I’ll admit that throughout this conversation I’ve intentionally been making Chomsky-style analogies.

Well now, my evil leftwing comrades, we have been truly outmanoeuvred. Don’t you see? Sebastian has been employing Chomskyan tactics all along!!! So if anyone succeeds in criticising his increasing tortuous arguments, and Sebastian loses the argument, that very loss will be ours, and Noam Chomsky’s! And if noone does, then Sebastian will have won the argument! Damn. Why couldn’t I think of that?

I agree with liberal japonicus about jonathan’s 12:27 post. I think that does explain a fair amount of the anti-Chomsky animus you sometimes find on the left.

Jon, thanks for the John Cleese tip. Sebastian and maybe Rilkefan probably thank you too (if they enjoyed Screwtape).

Sebastian, your analogy to Lewis seems weak to me, but I’ll let it drop. This thread is probably dying now anyway.

Sebastian:

Don’t you see just the slightest bit of irony in attacking the utility of a moderate-fit metaphor while defending Chomsky on a thread that mentions his denazification analogy? Just a touch? :)

Jeebus cripes almighty. The point is that what you’ve come up with is not a moderate-fit metaphor. It’s about as close to a zero-fit metaphor as you can get.

Is this really so hard to understand? I suppose it is. One almost universal trait I’ve noticed in contemporary U.S. conservatives is the complete inability to construct accurate analogies. The 10th grade English teacher in me is sometimes tempted to put together an online course to which I can direct people who want to learn this valuable skill.

“If Noam Chomsky can say ‘To me it seems that what is needed is a kind of denazification,’ then I can compare I.F Stone to Father Coughlin! I can compare Martin Luther King to George Wallace! It’s exactly the same!!!”

Sorry: no. It’s not, and you can’t. Those who don’t understand this will be held back until they complete the semester on analogies.

The problem with the denazification analogy is that Chomsky does not bother to describe how his denazification would work in the freer society that is the United States.

The problem with this statement is that it is untrue.

“There is, of course, no more powerful force that can call us to account. The change will have to come from within. The fate of millions of poor and oppressed people throughout the world will be determined by our ability to carry out a profound ‘cultural revolution’ in the United States.”

[…]

“Whether we aim for reform or revolution, the early steps must be the same: an attempt to modify political and moral consciousness and to construct alternative institutional forms that reflect and support this development. Personally, I believe that our present crisis is in some measure, moral and intellectual rather than institutional and that reason and resistance can go a certain way, perhaps a long way, toward ameliorating it.”

Is denazifiaction such a vague term? I haven’t studied the history but my understanding is that it involved:
(1) putting those with direct responsibility for crimes on trial;
(2) excluding the small-fry, who were complicit in those crimes, from public office;
(3) educating the general public by putting evidence of atrocities squarely before them.

These things couldn’t be done in the USA in 1968 in the same way as they could be done in post-war Germany. Really, it would have had to start with (3), which is I imagine exactly how Chomsky would describe what he was doing. Get public opinion aroused and (1) is certainly doable; (2) is trickier because you can’t really reconcile due legal process with punishment of people who are only peripherally involved in crimes. Probably that would have had to be dispensed with.

I don’t see what’s vague about it. Procedures exist for bringing powerful people to justice if the will is there.

The amount of confusion over the term “denazification” here indicates to me an unwillingneess to engage in Chomsky’s real ideas. Imperialist democracies like the USA and Great Britain rest on “consent”, not repression. Under the framework of parliamentary rules and a free press, corporate power ensures that the wishes of the permanent government are carried out. This permanent government is not elected. It is made up of functionaries in the State Department, CIA, the Council on Foreign Relations and a myriad of bodies sensitive to the needs of oil companies and other multinationals.

Nazism took root in Germany because the old parliamentary system, symbolized by the Weimar republic, was failing to produce the kind of consensus that existed in wealthier imperialist democracies.

When Chomsky calls for denazification, he is mainly interested in the impact that this would have *outside* the imperialist democracies, not within them. For people living in the neocolonies of the USA and Great Britain, there is little to choose from between the Stars and Stripes, the Union Jack and the Swastika.

—

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n05/port01_.html
The British declared the Kenya Emergency in 1952, when seven years of restless dissatisfaction with British rule culminated in the full-scale rebellion known as Mau Mau. It was very largely the struggle of the Kikuyu, the country’s majority ethnic group – about 1.5 million in a native population of five million – who had lost much of their land to white settlers and had moved into reservations or continued farming as tenants. The Emergency saw out two prime ministers – Churchill and Eden – and ended in January 1960. In that time, Mau Mau supporters killed at least 2000 African civilians and inflicted some 200 casualties on the army and police. In all, 32 white settlers died in the rebellion. For their part, the British hanged more than 1000 Kikuyu, detained at least 150,000 and, according to official figures, killed around 12,000 in combat, though the real figure, in David Anderson’s view, is ‘likely to have been more than 20,000’. In addition, Caroline Elkins claims, up to 100,000 died in the detention camps.

“As this ‘tortuous’ conclusion is based on Pinker’s own words, I’m not sure how that follows.”

Well, because you attributed to me a claim I hadn’t put, and then shifted your ground to claiming that even if I hadn’t put it I had sneakily made it sound as if I had. You did so, moreover, despite my having clearly explained that the passage whose tricky elisions so excited you had been compressed from a more detailed version in the normal process of editing an author’s copy, after it had been read by two leading authorities in the field, whose gracious help I sought and properly acknowledged at the end of the published article. This was, again as I have said, more effort than the other commissioned author, Robin Blackburn, appears to have expended, as he managed to confuse the name of Chomsky’s teacher with that of a scholar in an unrelated field. I still believe that I was justified in my choice of adviser, one an editor of the Journal of Linguistics, sooner than trust to a pseudonymous commenter on a blog, so I suppose we shall have to differ on this.

Brendan posted Chomsky’s explanation of this in 162, didn’t he?
“Field-Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery saw the objective of the allied forces in Germany as ‘to change the heart, and the way of life, of the German people’. Denazification involved a cultural and ideological change, to proceed side-by-side with economic reconstruction. We can certainly ask whether three and two-thirds million Germans in the US Zone were more guilty of complicity in war crimes than any Americans. And we can ask whether a cultural and ideological change in the United States, at the very least, is not imperative if many others, who fear neither pain nor death, are not to be spared the fate of Vietnam.’”

“a kind of denazification” = “a deep cultural and ideological change” One could argue that it isn’t similar to de-nazification if it doesn’t involve banning political parties, Chomsky could reply that the similarity is in the scale of the cultural change he is talking about.

When I said you could go Oliver, I really meant it. You have my leave.

He is about invective through pseudo-analogy.

Perhaps you read him this way, Sebastian, but that’s because you choose to focus exclusively on his rhetoric at the expense of what he is saying. For example, many commentators above have gone some way to explaining what Chomsky means by de-nazification. You have not, as far as I can see, offered much in the way of substantive criticism of it, but you have been vocal in your complaints that it should not be labelled “de-nazification”. This seems to me a rather weak response.

Of the two substantive objections you have offered –

(i) that it might conflict with liberal protections
(ii) that America has no Nazi party

– I think only the first is of real importance, yet it would at least be interesting if you were to pursue it. But of course you can’t do that, because it would mean conceding what is for most people at issue in this discussion, which is that Chomsky, whether you agree with him or not on a given issue, is someone who deserves to be taken seriously.

rilkefan,
trying to get something together on HoCB, but I’d ask you to consider that the denazification quote comes from 1968, the height of the Vietnam war and that seems to be what has exercised Oliver Kamm and Sebastian.

The two questionable areas that seem to be on the minds of serious doubters of Chomsky are Cambodia and Yugoslavia. With Cambodia, one could make the argument that it was US destabilization that led to the situation. That Chomsky was wrong about Pol Pot, I think, I would agree, but in the context of the times, I tend to cut him some slack, though I know others don’t.

As for Yugoslavia, could I suggest that we still really don’t know enough to draw a final judgement? Admitedly attention is elsewhere, but I still don’t know if enough time has passed to be able to tell if Chomsky’s prejudices aided him or blinded him. However, he has been at this for 40 years. For some, this means that he has hammered on the same note over and over, for others, they might suggest he was prescient. However, it seems very very hard to admit that it might be a little of both.

Don’t you, guys, think that rhetorical exclamation: “We have to ask ourselves whether what is needed in the United States is dissent – or denazification” prompted by NYT’s labeling the protest against barbaric exhibition as ‘extreme’ can only be milked so much before you begin to sound loony?

Maybe as well ratification of international treaties, firm commitment to international law, laws against covert operations in other countries, outlawing of interference in the electoral processes of other countries, outlawing psyops campaigns against the American people and determined prosecutions of violations of any of these things.

Actually, I am thinking that the problem may be more intractable than Chomsky would care to admit. Maybe the US is in need of a deMammonification program rather than a deNazification program. How do you combat that? The society as a whole worships wealth, accumulation, consumption, luxury, avarice and that is reflected in the foreign policy. We should have started adressing the energy situation with mandatory conservation and efficiency measures with the proven technologies already at hand. But no one wants to invest that extra amount in conservation for their homes, office buildings, or factories.

What would be really cool is an extensive network of Maglev trains.

rilkefan,

I’ll say the same sort of thing I’d say to a Limbaugh proponent – show me he does stuff I can agree with and rely on and learn from.

I would suggest a thorough reading of Manufacturing Consent which is in my humble opinion the single best explanation as to why our mass media has turned into such a propaganda tool.

“so why did you begin your response to me by telling me about the lack of utility of the denazification metaphor?”

I was drawing a distinction between the kind of language someone would use if he wanted a debate on how to best implement public education and appropriate punishment (the defense of the metaphor which is offered)and what he would use if he were engaging mostly in rabble-rousing (similar to Rush Limbaugh). You agree that the the denazification metaphor was not useful for the purpose of debating or implementing such a policy. We disagree about why this is so. I suggest that the linguist uses this and other such metaphors with similar consequence because his purpose is other than to delve in to a policy debate.

You seem to suggest that he chooses such counterproductive metaphors because….. this professor of linguistics is unaware of how language works? He is too stupid to figure it out? I’m not sure what you would suggest.

But in any case, I was not merely talking about the lack of utility of the denazification metaphor if the purpose were meaningful debate. I was talking about why someone like Chomsky might choose to use such language. I believe the answer is that his purpose is not the purpose you ascribe to him.

I talked about it in response to your question because while we agree that the metaphor is not useful for debate, we disagree about why Chomsky nevertheless uses it.

“You seem to be discounting in principle the possibility that anyone could be a polemicist and also “delve into a policy debate” – which, to labour the point, would be news to lovers of eg Swift, not that I want to draw any “literary equivalence” between Swift and Chomsky.”

Once again you are totalizing my argument. I’m suggesting that Chomsky is not both a polemicist and someone who (in his political writings) is interested in delving into a policy debate. Is it impossible to do both? No. Does Chomsky tend far more to the former rather than the latter? Yes. Enough that it is fair to say that the polemics seem more important than the policy debate? Yes.

Does Rush Limbaugh do both? Yes. Does he tend to focus far more on the polemics? Yes. Hence my analogy between the two of them on the issue of polemics.

Would I agree that Chomsky has absolutely nothing true to say? Of course not. But like listening to Rush, I strongly suspect that it isn’t worth trying to wade through his junk to find the little nugget.

Chomsky is cool.

Rilkefan, “fair” harsh criticism is pretty much what I think Fisk and Chomsky dish out. There are often complex reasons why nations commit atrocities–I don’t think the US and Israel are unique in that regard. My comments about Chomsky critics don’t necessarily apply to each and every one that exists, but in my experience people who attack Chomsky usually don’t preface their remarks by saying “Of course the US really does have the blood of countless innocent people on its hands–I just think the reasons are sometimes more complex than Noam makes it out to be. ” If that were the case, I’d probably be in the Chomsky critic corner a good part of the time.

But my “no need to cite Chomsky” policy works here too. If one is interested in the reasons why the US foreign policy is often so shameful, there are other people who’ve noticed that our actions and the reasons for them don’t necessarily match up with the noble rhetoric. At some point I intend to buy and read Stephen Kinzer’s latest book “Intervention”, which I gather is about this very topic.

“Of course the US really does have the blood of countless innocent people on its hands”

But this is ridiculously a) emotional b) reductive c) simplistic d) etc etc. If you ask me or I dare say Sebastian or DeLong or Kamm, we’ll forthrightly say that some of our 60s/70s conduct in Southeast Asia was criminal, that our Latin American policy under Reagan was horrible, that our neglect of Rwanda was shameful, that we should have been smart enough to help Africa instead of just throw money at it, that we have supported a lot of vicious dictators (sometimes for arguably good reasons). Several of the above think Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld would be tried for war crimes in a just world. Maybe there are rabid Chomsky opponents out there, but you’re not talking to them.

Kamm has been exposed as a liar. And when he is corrected in a comment, he deletes the comment.

Read two examples where Kamm gets it wrong about Chomsky. When it is pointed out to him, he deletes the comments. Kamm is intellectually dishonest. See Problems with Oliver Kamm

Pejman Yousefzadeh points out that Oliver Kamm makes the mistake of claiming a paraphrase from Chomsky is a quote from the New York Times. The actual quote from the NYT was posted in a comment on Kamm’s blog but Kamm deleted it.

I posted a comment that corrected his claim that Israel does not target civilians. HE REMOVED IT. Oliver Kamm is a denier. He claims Israel “doesn’t target civilians” when the fact is Israel does target and kill civilains.

Kamm ignores the context of the Wheeler quote by not quoting the sentence right before the one he quotes:

“The difficulty with this criticism is that it relies on the assumption that, in the absence of NATO bombing, the Serbs would have ended their killings and forced expulsion of ethnic Albanians.”

the very next sentence is then:
“It is estimated that some 500 Kosovars had been killed and 400,000 displaced in the year leading up to NATO’s action, but the justification for intervention was that without it many more Albanians would have been killed and forcibly driven from their homes.”

Kamm ignores what Wheeler was writing about: the Serbs and their killings of Kosovo Albanians. Kamm wants us to think it is logical to assume that the “500 Kosovars” killed refers to both Serbs and Albanians.

Yeah, you know you really blew your credibility on this as far back as comment #2, so…

It’d be simplistic to say that “America has the blood of countless innocent people on its hands” if I went on to say “and that’s all that needs to be said on the subject and I don’ t want to hear about why the decisions were made and you can’t make me, so just leave me to my moral condemnations.” But I don’t. I don’t say that about anyone’s atrocities.

You don’t, but Rilkefan & Co. do, of course. They won’t go digging and looking under every stone for intricacies in actions of any country outside US and Israel. They are hypocritical apologists for these two countries and they won’t find any redeeming circumstances in actions of Arafat or Castro or any other official enemy. And that’s a natural phenomenon, and that’s the most natural way for the US media to report news and opinions, and that’s why it’s not necessary to emphasise Serbian or Pol Pot’s atrocities – they have already been emphasised and exaggerated to the fullest extent possible. By describing and emphasising Serbian atrocities you don’t add anything, you’re just helping official propagandists – why? they’ll manage.

re: 310,
Steven, I don’t know why Clark would have thought that the violence would have been limited to “that stage.” If Clark was willing to acknowledge that the bombing would produce some violence he really should have known that there was a real possibility that it would produce a lot more violence. I find it hard to believe that the massacres were unpredictable, and if Nato was too incompetent to see them coming, then that also says something important about Nato’s ability to carry out humanitarian military actions. Regarding 309, I think I would deny that I was totally throwing out “moral responsibility” (our decisions do have consequences after all) although I do think that there is a certain (and very popular) form of moral responsibility that both rests on a false sense of autonomy and is a dangerous distraction. And I don’t know if they were, but the massacres may have been “part of the causal mechanism that produced the ceasefire.” The point is that one could have achieved a peaceful solution to this without the bombing and thus without the massacres.

So why would anyone expect US foreign policy to operate in the interests of the people of the world when the US government is only accountable to US citizens (and not very accountable at that)?

Hear, hear.

This was my letter to Samantha Powers after her review of Hegemony or Survival in the NYT in 2004

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D06E1DE1F3FF937A35752C0A9629C8B63&pagewanted=print

Of course, I never got an answer

I just read your review of Hegemony or Survival, and I wanted to ask you if you’ve read Chomsky more broadly, because I think that if you had you’d know that he has strong responses to every one of your criticisms.

You say

“Chomsky is wrong to think that individuals within the American government are not thinking seriously about the costs of alliances with repressive regimes”

Chomsky does say that individuals within the American government think seriously about the costs of alliances with repressive regimes. Chomsky says they are rational within an irrational framework and decide to ally themselves with them because their institutional role is to protect and expand American power, which is often done through dictators who crush their populations and guarantee the US military bases, cheap labor, control over resources etc, even though they may delude themselves into thinking they’re doing it for good reasons.

you say

“he is also wrong to suggest that it would be easy to get the balance right between liberty and security, or democracy and equality — or to figure out what the hell to do about Pakistan.”

Like he says, what to do about Pakistan is easy: stop supporting its terrorism. This he says, is not as important as stopping our own terrorism which is what we should be worrying about primarily.

I think you’ll find out if you read more Chomsky, that according to him liberty/security democracy/equality are false dichotomies. True democracy leads to equality and liberty to security– especially the security of the future of the species. These are the core of his anarchist ideals. Your dichotomy seems to be based on the assumption taken by leaders that elites care about democracy and that liberty/security have been won and preserved by government/corporate elites. As Chomsky says, democracy in this context means domination by business elements.

you say

“For Chomsky, the world is divided into oppressor and oppressed. America, the prime oppressor, can do no right, while the sins of those categorized as oppressed receive scant mention… It is inconceivable, in Chomsky’s view, that American power could be harnessed for good”

Chomsky has often repeated that people who are oppressed are often also oppressors, although not as much as powerful states, so I don’t think the 1st statement is quite accurate. Apart from the fact that he quite convincingly proves that institutional factors with their concentrations of power (e.g. in the US) are the cause of most problems, the reason why he concentrates on the crimes of the US is because he is a US citizen i.e. he shares responsibility for the crimes and he can do more about them than about the crimes of, say, Russia. As Chomsky has said there doesn’t have to be a relation between the internal freedom of a country and its external behavior (e.g. ancient Greece) The internal freedom in the US was won by popular struggles such as the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the labor movement etc, while those who conduct foreign policy are elites who follow institutional imperatives and who often called these struggles “anti-American”

Saying that Chomsky thinks that “America can do no right” is misleading, it’d be more accurate to say that he believes that

“states act morally to the extent they can be compelled to do so by the general population. People are moral entities, but not states and corporations, which cause leaders and intellectuals who conduct foreign policy to internalize the values that will help them get ahead in the hierarchy–believing they’re doing good while following monstrous institutional imperatives”

Also, like you mention later in the review, you admit that Chomsky is right in saying that professions of benign intent on the part of leaders carry no information, because they’re so predictable and universal.

that’s why, like you say:

“…he deems American foreign policy inherently violent and expansionist; he is unconcerned with the motives behind particular policies, or the ethics of particular individuals in government.”

if you agree with Chomsky that our leader’s “ethics and motives” (i.e. professions of benign intent) as we conclude from their words carry no information, why would he (or anybody) be concerned about them? Why would you even mention it?

Chomsky analyzes the motives and ethics of the institutional imperatives that drive US foreign policy by analyzing the facts.

You say:

“Thus, the billions of dollars in foreign aid earmarked each year for disaster relief, schools, famine prevention, AIDS treatment, etc– and the interventions in Kosovo and East Timor have to be explained away”

As statistics show, and Chomsky documents, the US gives a smaller percentage of its wealth to these causes than any other industrialized country in the world, while the US surpasses everyone else in providing “military aid” i.e. instigating violence and murder all over the world to maintain elite control.
Furthermore, one could use your argument to justify the actions of totalitarian states like the Soviet Union which also gave money to foreign aid, disaster relief etc
Chomsky does document what the US did in Kosovo, as well as the US’ massive support for one of the worst genocides of the 20th century in East Timor

you say:

President Clinton, he says, ”was flying Al Qaeda and Hezbollah operatives to Bosnia to support the U.S. side in the ongoing wars.” And ”radical Islamists” have taken over in Kosovo, leading to a ”Taliban phenomenon.” These are far-fetched claims that he doesn’t adequately back up.

Chomsky’s claims (as he documents in his footnotes) are backed by the NYT, the Boston Globe, The Guardian and Isa Blumi, an expert on Kosovo. Are these unreliable sources?

you say

“And since he considers the United States the leading terrorist state, little distinguishes American air strikes in Serbia undertaken at night with high-precision weaponry from World Trade Center attacks timed to maximize the number of office workers who have just sat down with their morning coffee.”

First of all, as Chomsky proves in Hegemony or Survival, the entire documentary record shows that the ethnic cleansing happened as a result of the US bombing, which had been predicted to elicit a brutal Serbian response. And most of the killings the year prior had been attributed to the CIA-backed KLA guerrillas. These are irrefutable facts which you don’t mention but which you substitute with what Chomsky calls the “fixed and unquestionable presuppositions” which lay at the core of the western media propaganda system.
Clinton’s savage bombing which you hail as “humanitarian”and of “high precision” was truly murderous and it elicited horrendous atrocities.
Also, the US helped instigate the conflicts that led to the various massacres in that war. Clinton largely turned a blind eye towards atrocities committed by separatist forces (like the massacres in Gospic and Krajina). The “humanitarian” claim is also not credible because Clinton ignored other genocides such as Rwanda, (or Liquica in Timor right at about the same time, as Chomsky explains in Hegemony or Survival) and even funded Turkey’s genocide against the Kurds, which occurred at roughly the same time and resulted in the slaughter of tens of thousands of Kurds. In fact, if you count the people killed by the US-led sanctions on Iraq and various other atrocities, such as the bombing of Sudan, arms shipments to Israel, Colombia etc Clinton killed as many people as Pol Pot.

You seem to be claiming that “there is no moral equivalence” something that, as Chomsky has often repeated, is a line used as a method of trying to prevent criticism of foreign policy and state decisions.

JEREMY PAXMAN:
You seem to be suggesting or implying, perhaps I’m being unfair to you, but you seem to be implying there is some moral equivalence between democratically elected heads of state like George Bush or Prime Ministers like Tony Blair and regimes in places like Iraq.

NOAM CHOMSKY:
The term moral equivalence is an interesting one, it was invented I think by Jeane Kirkpatrick as a method of trying to prevent criticism of foreign policy and state decisions. It has a meaningless notion, there is no moral equivalence whatsoever.

Also, you may not know that under the law, premeditated murder and recklessness (when an accused is actually aware of the potentially adverse consequences to the planned actions, but has gone ahead anyway, exposing a particular individual or unknown victim to the risk of suffering the foreseen harm but not actually desiring that the victim be hurt) as you may argue is sometimes the case in US foreign policy are both under the category of “malice” and comparing them in this context is only the task of apologists.

You say:

“When he agrees with a claim, Chomsky introduces it with the word ”uncontroversially” or credits it to ”distinguished authorities.” Those who don’t share his viewpoint don’t simply disagree; they are the ”prevailing intellectual culture” or the ”educated classes.” This is a thinker far too accustomed to preaching to an uncritical choir.”

Firs of all, have you named a single one of Chomsky’s “distinguished authorities” that wasn’t? if you knew Chomsky or what it means to be a dissident in the US, you’d know that Chomsky is nothing but “too accustomed to preaching to an uncritical choir.” Furthermore, it is not a matter of agreeing or not agreeing. I mean, 2 plus 2 equals 4 is not a matter of opinion; when someone presents overwhelming evidence and documentation like Chomsky does, it truly is “uncontroversial” and those who don’t believe it and keep supporting their dear leaders and waving the flag regardless of evidence, can be nothing but indoctrinated servants of power (what most intellectuals have been throughout history)

And by the way, Americans should not be the only ones humanized through descriptions; not only Americans “drink coffee in the morning” while they get murdered. All those brown and yellow people who got murdered and crippled by the US and by your tax dollars (many times more than on 9/11) are also human and also “drank coffee in the morning” (maybe tea)– although maybe they couldn’t afford it because of the exploitation of US corporations or because of people like Clinton’s secretary Madeleine Abright, who said that murdering 500,000 Iraqi Children was “worth it”

Ray, fuсk you. Lots of smart, credible people think similar things about Chomsky; if you truly think no-one who has made policy for the US in the last 40 years is to be believed whether in office or out of it, then I have no interest in your opinion, your particular religion holds no attraction for me.

don q: “the people who run the US can barely give a damn about the people living in the US, what leads you to believe that they give a damn about anyone else?”

Look, to say that about Carter and Clinton and Clark and an endless list of liberals and many conservatives is just loony. Loopy. Lalalandish. You want to make the argument that American actions are less motivated by idealism than the American narrative has it – go ahead: that has the dual advantage of being in accord with your ideology and being true. Oh, and it would be useful.

Look, to say that about Carter and Clinton and Clark and an endless list of liberals and many conservatives is just loony. Loopy. Lalalandish.

We live in the wealthiest country in the world, how many children will go to bed hungry tonite? and how much would it cost to prevent that from happenning?

I don’t want to get overly involved in a discussion about a book I have not read (Wheeler’s), especially about the author’s use of a particular term in that book. But Poole writes: “On the first point, Kamm is wrong. Plainly, when Wheeler says “Kosovars”, he means Kosovo Albanians. Let us not assume, as Kamm is so quick to assume of Chomsky, that this is a malicious distortion, but attribute it instead merely to sloppy scholarship.” Poole is quite right at the outset – but does “sloppy scholarship” refer to Wheeler’s varying use of the terms or Kamm’s misreading of Wheeler?

Wheeler appears to recognise that those who identify themselves as Kosovar are usually those who might also be called “Kosovar Albanian” and may identify as “ethnic Albanian”; Serbs, seeing Kosova as no more than a province of Greater Serbia, would usually identify themselves as Serb and not Kosovar (much as somebody from Cheltenham, when asked his nationality, responds English and not Gloucestershirian). Wheeler’s assumption that Kosovar is essentially synonymous with Kosovar Albanian is not particularly sloppy.

The term Kosovar Albanian is not a very good term either: it assumes that the person is really from another country (Albania). Certainly many Kosovars have close cultural and linguistic ties to Albania, but to insist that this group of mostly-Muslim, non-Serb Kosovars call themselves Kosovar Albanians hints of the Serb proganda about outside invaders occupying their (read, Serb) land. So insisting upon this terminology, though commonly accepted by those outside of Kosova who are trying to figure out what is going on, is problematic.

The point is that Wheeler has to deal with a bunch of ambiguous terms; if he is inconsistent, I would rather look to the context to see if his inconsistency occurs at points where there would be too much ambiguity (e.g., generally using “Kosovar” to refer to non-Serbs in Kosova, but using “Kosovar Albanian” in a sentence where “Kosovar” is just too frankly ambiguous). So, I must assume that Wheeler is not here being accused of “sloppy scholarship”.

Glibly taking Wheeler out of context (and here the context requires that one is attuned to various inconsistent, ambiguous and rhetorically-complex assignations of ethnicity) is the real sloppy scholarship.

Shorter Rilkefan – “La! La! La! You’re not paying attention! La! La! La! I can’t hear you!”

Are you ready to pay the price for a just world…

Here are a few thoughts about justice, Rilkefan. Think of it as a set of rules which you have to follow. Not a set of polite requests that it would be, like, super if you followed, but don’t worry if you’ve made other plans, darling. It is not something that you can trade off for a faster car or a bigger TV. It includes things like: not invading other countries on the flimsiest of pretexts, not flouting international law, not allowing more than 5 million children to die every year from hunger when we could easily prevent that from happening.

if it means you and your children not starving but living in abject poverty by US standards?

But this is, to use a phrase you used earlier on, “emotional”, as well as, in addition, being simply untrue. If every person in the developed world gave 1% of his income to direct foreign aid, that would have a tremendous, positive effect on the levels of absolute poverty worldwide. I dare say most of us could sacrifice a far higher proportion than that and not see any significant decline in our standard of living. As to the costs of complying with international law and adopting a non-aggressive military stance, I can’t speculate here, except to say that on any reasonable estimate they are far smaller than those in your hysterical rhetorical question, arguably even being negative, but as I said above, non-compliance is not a moral option.

Rilkefan wrote: “Because a) people are demonstrably willing to help their neighbors b) because the interests of the people of the world are to a great extent our interests c) because we have acted in benevolent ways, and the world counts on us to do so, however much they complain about the fact we have the strength to act.”

Rilkefan, my understanding of the dispute between us centers on the level of importance to be attached to intentions/character vs. incentives/accountability. I think that your comments about the unwillingness of people to give substantial sums of their personal income to starving people in the third world actually bears my point out nicely. Yes, you are right about point a.: almost everyone is well meaning and benevolent. But as you yourself point out, there are serious limits to our benevolence; so much so, that many ethicists take the limits of our benevolence to be a fatal flaw of moral theories that require us to give substantial sums of our of personal income to third world countries. (I actually think they’re wrong but for rather complicated reasons.) In any case, given that our capacity for benevolent action is quite limited, why would we expect a government that is (weakly) accountable to us to be able to do operate in the interests of the people of the world? Even leftist politicians have to worry about getting swing voters to vote for them, and I suspect that many swing voters are not willing to acknowledge that we have any obligation to protect the lives of non-Americans, especially when doing so would cost the lives of American soldiers. One of the crucial problems with a humanitarian justification of the bombing of Kosovo was the failure of Nato to use ground troops to defend the lives of Albanians and Serbs. The American public does not want to see its soldiers coming home in body bags, but dead American soldiers (a lot of them, I think) would be the cost of a competent humanitarian intervention, one that did not produce more harm than good. (Just think for a second about the US media’s lack of attention to Iraqi causalities, the US reliance on aerial bombing in Iraq, and the US failure to provide security in Iraq.) Given our limited capacity for benevolent action, any attempt to establish that US foreign policy is benevolent (not merely influenced by fickle and fleeting benevolent intentions but actually competently benevolent) has the burden of proof placed upon it. The assumption that US foreign policy is ruthlessly self interested should, at least, be our starting point.

Your point C. seems to me to just beg the question. And your point B. is massively debatable. Certainly many US policy analysts think that the interests of non-American people routinely has little to do with US self interest. And in cases when the two overlapped, this would demand a kind of far sightedness that is difficult to achieve in American politics. Think, for a second, about the enormous percentage of the American population that does not get that the war in Iraq has damaged the perception of the US abroad. Or think about the pathetic degree of American interest in helping the Palestinians (merely a bunch of terrorists in many Americans’ eyes). This is despite the fact that getting the Palestinians a fair deal would obviously reduce anti-American sentiment around the world and thus reduce the threat of terrorism to Americans. (How it would affect American financial and military interests in the region is perhaps a different matter.)

Concerning Clark, I don’t think that I have actually argued that he has “intentionally made the world worse.” I’m saying that there were huge constraints (no dead Americans, etc.) placed upon Clark and the entire Nato intervention that made a benevolent outcome of this intervention a near impossibility. This, for me, is not a matter of intentions at all, but rather a matter of accountability (and Nato was simply not accountable to the people who they were supposed to be saving). In fact, my biggest regret about Clark as a person is that he doesn’t have his crap together enough to mount a decent campaign for president. Your fixation on character and intentions leads me to suspect that you’re falling into a “Great Man” theory of history. And I suspect it’s our devotion to “Great Man” history that got so many of us up in arms about the Chomsky passage that began this thread. If you believe that good policy is primarily a product of good intentions, I would like to know why you aren’t supporting a monarchy (or dictatorship) for Americans? Surely it would be less of a burden on us if we just had a wise and benevolent king. Perhaps you think Clark would make a good king?

Shorter Rilkefan – Chomsky is an extremist loon. And the world will soon know I’m right, when humanity finds its destiny as the willing subjects of a new race of benevolent Robot Kings.

I think the US has done nearly the best possible job for the Palestinians under several admins, given the complex constraints you surely recognize.

ROTFLMAO!!!!

Now that was the funniest joke, I’ve heard all week long considering that we have spent the last fourty years telling the Israelis “Go For It, feel free to take as much of the west bank as you want” and the Palestinians “tough shit”.