The Sick Mind of Noam Chomsky David Horowitz David Horowitz is editor-in-chief of FrontPageMagazine.com and president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture - Copyright 2001 Salon.com WITHOUT QUESTION, the most
devious, the most dishonest and -- in this hour of his nation's grave
crisis - the most treacherous intellect in America belongs to MIT
professor Noam Chomsky. On the 150 campuses that have mounted
"teach-ins" and rallies against America's right to defend
herself; on the streets of Genoa and Seattle where
"anti-globalist" anarchists have attacked the symbols of
markets and world trade; among the demonstrators at Vieques who wish to
deny our military its training grounds; and wherever young people
manifest an otherwise incomprehensible rage against their country, the
inspirer of their loathing and the instructor of their hate is most
likely this man. There are many who ask how it is
possible that our most privileged and educated youth should come to
despise their own nation - a free, open, democratic society - and to do
so with such ferocious passion. They ask how it is possible for American
youth to even consider lending comfort and aid to the Osama bin Ladens
and the Saddam Husseins (and the Communists before them). A full answer
would involve a search of the deep structures of the human psyche, and
its irrepressible longings for a redemptive illusion. But the short
answer is to be found in the speeches and writings of an embittered
academic and his intellectual supporters. For forty years, Noam Chomsky
has turned out book after book, pamphlet after pamphlet and speech after
speech with one message, and one message alone: America is the Great
Satan; it is the fount of evil in the world. In Chomsky's demented
universe, America is responsible not only for its own bad deeds, but for
the bad deeds of others, including those of the terrorists who struck
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In this attitude he is the
medium for all those who now search the ruins of Manhattan not for the
victims and the American dead, but for the "root causes" of
the catastrophe that befell them. One little pamphlet of Chomsky's
- What Uncle Sam Really Wants - has already sold 160,000 copies (1), but
this represents only the tip of the Chomsky iceberg. His venomous
message is spread on tapes and CDs, and the campus lecture circuit; he
is promoted at rock concerts by superstar bands such as Pearl Jam, Rage
Against the Machine, and U-2 (whose lead singer Bono called Chomsky a
"rebel without a pause"). He is the icon of Hollywood stars
like Matt Damon whose genius character in the Academy Award-winning film
Good Will Hunting is made to invoke Chomsky as the go-to authority for
political insight. According to the Chicago
Tribune, Noam Chomsky is "the most often cited living author. Among
intellectual luminaries of all eras, Chomsky placed eighth, just behind
Plato and Sigmund Freud." On the Web, there are more chat room
references to Noam Chomsky than to Vice President Dick Cheney and 10
times as many as there are to Democratic congressional leaders Richard
Gephardt and Tom Daschle. This is because Chomsky is also the political
mentor of the academic left, the legions of Sixties radicals who have
entrenched themselves in American universities to indoctrinate students
in their anti-American creeds. The New York Times calls Chomsky
"arguably the most important intellectual alive," and Rolling
Stone - which otherwise does not even acknowledge the realm of the mind
- "one of the most respected and influential intellectuals in the
world."(2) In fact, Chomsky's influence is
best understood not as that of an intellectual figure, but as the leader
of a secular religious cult - as the ayatollah of anti-American hate.
This cultic resonance is recognized by his followers. His most important
devotee, David Barsamian, is an obscure public radio producer on KGNU in
Boulder Colorado, who has created a library of Chomsky screeds on tape
from interviews he conducted with the master, and has converted them
into pamphlets and books as well. In the introduction to one such
offering, Barsamian describes Chomsky's power over his disciples:
"Although decidedly secular, he is for many of us our rabbi, our
preacher, our rinpoche, our pundit, our imam, our sensei."(3) The theology that Chomsky
preaches is Manichean, with America as its evil principle. For Chomsky
no evil however great can exceed that of America, and America is also
the cause of evil in others. This is the key to the mystery of September
11: The devil made them do it. In every one of the 150 shameful
demonstrations that took place on America's campuses on September 20,
these were the twin themes of those who agitated to prevent America from
taking up arms in her self-defense: America is responsible for the
"root causes" of this criminal attack; America has done worse
to others. In his first statement on the
terrorist attack, Chomsky's response to Osama bin Laden's calculated
strike on a building containing 50,000 innocent human beings was to
eclipse it with an even greater atrocity he was confident he could
attribute to former president Bill Clinton. Chomsky's infamous September
12 statement "On the Bombings" began: The terrorist attacks were major
atrocities. In scale they may not reach the level of many others, for
example, Clinton's bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext,
destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and killing unknown numbers
of people (no one knows, because the US blocked an inquiry at the UN and
no one cares to pursue it).(4) Observe the syntax. The opening
reference to the actual attacks is clipped and bloodless, a kind of
rhetorical throat clearing for Chomsky to get out of the way, so that he
can announce the real subject of his concern - America's crimes. The
accusation against Clinton is even slipped into the text, weasel
fashion, as though it were a modifier, when it is actually the
substantive message itself. It is a message that says: Look away,
America, from the injury that has been done to you, and contemplate the
injuries you have done to them. It is in this sleight of hand that
Chomsky reveals his true gift, which is to make the victim, America,
appear as an even more heinous perpetrator than the criminal himself.
However bad this may seem, you have done worse. In point of fact - and just for
the record - however ill-conceived Bill Clinton's decision to launch a
missile into the Sudan, it was not remotely comparable to the World
Trade Center massacre. It was, in its very design, precisely the
opposite - a defensive response that attempted to minimize casualties.
Clinton's missile was launched in reaction to the blowing up of two of
our African embassies, the murder of hundreds of innocent people and the
injury to thousands, mostly African civilians. It was designed with
every precaution possible to prevent the loss of innocent life. The
missile was fired at night, so that no one would be in the building when
it was hit. The target was selected because the best information
available indicated it was not a pharmaceutical factory, but a factory
producing biological weapons. Chomsky's use of this incident to diminish
the monstrosity of the terrorist attack is a typical Chomsky maneuver,
an accurate measure of his instinctive mendacity, and an index of the
anti-American dementia, which infuses everything he writes and says. This same psychotic hatred
shapes the "historical" perspective he offered to his
disciples in an interview conducted a few days after the World Trade
Center bombing. It was intended to present America as the devil
incarnate - and therefore a worthy target of attack for the guerilla
forces of "social justice" all over the world. This was the
first time America itself - or as Chomsky put it the "national
territory" - had been attacked since the War of 1812. Pearl Harbor
doesn't count in Chomsky's calculus because Hawaii was a
"colony" at the time. The fact that it was a benignly run
colony and that it is now a proud state of the Union counts for nothing,
of course, in Chomsky's eyes. During these years [i.e.,
between 1812 and 1941], the US annihilated the indigenous population
(millions of people), conquered half of Mexico, intervened violently in
the surrounding region, conquered Hawaii and the Philippines (killing
hundreds of thousands of Filipinos), and in the past half century
particularly, extended its resort to force throughout much of the world.
The number of victims is colossal. For the first time, the guns have
been directed the other way. That is a dramatic change.(5) Listening to Chomsky, you can
almost feel the justice of Osama bin Laden's strike on the World Trade
Center. If you were one of the hundreds
of thousands of young people who had been exposed to his propaganda -
and the equally vile teachings of his academic disciples - you too would
be able to extend your outrage against America into the present. o According to Chomsky, in the
first battle of the postwar struggle with the Soviet Empire, "the
United States was picking up where the Nazis had left off." o According to Chomsky, during
the Cold War, American operations behind the Iron Curtain included
"a 'secret army' under US-Nazi auspices that sought to provide
agents and military supplies to armies that had been established by
Hitler and which were still operating inside the Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe through the early 1950s." o According to Chomsky, in Latin
America during the Cold War, U.S. support for legitimate governments
against Communist subversion led to US complicity under John F. Kennedy
and Lyndon Johnson, in "the methods of Heinrich Himmler's
extermination squads." o According to Chomsky, there is
"a close correlation worldwide between torture and U.S. aid." o According to Chomsky, America
"invaded" Vietnam to slaughter its people, and even after
America left in 1975, under Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, "the
major policy goal of the US has been to maximize repression and
suffering in the countries that were devastated by our violence. The
degree of the cruelty is quite astonishing." (6) o According to Chomsky,
"the pretext for Washington's terrorist wars [i.e., in Nicaragua,
El Salvador, Chile, Guatemala, Iraq, etc.] was self-defense, the
standard official justification for just about any monstrous act, even
the Nazi Holocaust." (7) o In sum, according to Chomsky,
"legally speaking, there's a very solid case for impeaching every
American president since the Second World War. They've all been either
outright war criminals or involved in serious war crimes."(8) What decent, caring human being
would not want to see America and its war criminals brought to justice? According to Chomsky, what
America really wants is to steal from the poor and give to the rich.
America's crusade against Communism was actually a crusade "to
protect our doctrine that the rich should plunder the poor."(9)
That is why we busied ourselves in launching a new crusade against
terrorism after the end of the Cold War: Of course, the end of the Cold
War brings its problems too. Notably, the technique for controlling the
domestic population has had to shift... New enemies have to be invented.
It becomes hard to disguise the fact that the real enemy has always been
'the poor who seek to plunder the rich' - in particular, Third World
miscreants who seek to break out of the service role.(10) According to Chomsky, America is
afraid of the success of Third World countries and does not want them to
succeed on their own. Those who threaten to succeed like the Marxist
governments of North Vietnam, Nicaragua and Grenada America regards as
viruses. According to Chomsky, during the Cold War, "except for a
few madmen and nitwits, none feared [Communist] conquest - they were
afraid of a positive example of successful development. "What do
you do when you have a virus? First you destroy it, then you inoculate
potential victims, so that the disease does not spread. That's basically
the US strategy in the Third World.".(11) No wonder they want to bomb us. Schooled in these big lies,
taught to see America as Greed Incarnate and a political twin of the
Third Reich, why wouldn't young people - with no historical memory -
come to believe that the danger ahead lies in Washington rather than
Baghdad or Kabul? It would be easy to demonstrate
how on every page of every book and in every statement that Chomsky has
written the facts are twisted, the political context is distorted (and
often inverted) and the historical record is systematically traduced.
Every piece of evidence and every analysis is subordinated to the
overweening purpose of Chomsky's lifework, which is to justify an idée
fixe - his pathological hatred of his own country. It would take volumes, however,
to do this and there really is no need. Because every Chomsky argument
exists to serve this end, a fact transparent in each offensive and
preposterous claim he makes. Hence, the invidious comparison of
Clinton's misguided missile and the monstrous World Trade Center attack.
In fact the Trade Center and the
Pentagon targets of the terrorists present a real political problem for
American leftists, like Chomsky, who know better than to celebrate an
event that is the almost predictable realization of their agitations and
their dreams. The destroyed buildings are the very symbols of the
American empire with which they have been at war for fifty years. In a
memoir published on the eve of the attack, the 60s American terrorist
Bill Ayers recorded his joy at striking one of these very targets:
"Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon.
The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally
going to get what was coming to them."(12) In the wake of September
11, Ayers - a "Distinguished Professor of Education[!] at the
University of Illinois- had to feverishly backtrack and explain that
these revealing sentiments of an "anti-war" leftist do not
mean what they obviously do. Claiming to be "filled with horror and
grief," Ayers attempted to reinterpret his terrorist years as an
effort to explore his own struggle with "the intricate
relationships between social justice, commitment and
resistance."(13) Chomsky is so much Ayers'
superior at the lie direct that he works the same denial into his
account of the World Trade Center bombing itself. Consider first the
fact that the Trade Center is the very symbol of American capitalism and
"globalization" that Chomsky and his radical comrades despise.
It is Wall Street, its twin towers filled on that fateful day with
bankers, brokers, international traders, and corporate lawyers - the
hated men and women of the "ruling class," who - according to
Chomsky - run the global order. The twin towers are the palace of the
Great Satan himself. They are the belly of the beast, the object of
Chomsky's lifelong righteous wrath. But he is too clever and too
cowardly to admit it. He knows that, in the hour of the nation's grief,
the fact itself is a third rail he must avoid. And so he dismisses the
very meaning of the terrorists' target in these words: The primary victims, as usual,
were working people: janitors, secretaries, firemen, etc. It is likely
to be a crushing blow to Palestinians and other poor and oppressed
people. Chomsky's deception which
attempts to erase the victims who were not merely "janitors,
secretaries, firemen, etc.," tells us more than we might care to
know about his own standard of human concern. That concern is exclusively
reserved for the revolutionary forces of his Manichean vision, the Third
World oppressed by American evil. Chomsky's message to his disciples in
this country, the young on our college campuses, the radicals in our
streets, the moles in our government offices, is a message of action and
therefore needs to be attended to, even by those who will never read his
rancid works. To those who believe his words of hate, Chomsky has this
instruction: The people of the Third World
need our sympathetic understanding and, much more than that, they need
our help. We can provide them with a margin of survival by internal
disruption in the United States. Whether they can succeed against the
kind of brutality we impose on them depends in large part on what
happens here.(14) This is the voice of the Fifth
Column left. Disruption in this country is what the terrorists want, and
what the terrorists need, and what the followers of Noam Chomsky intend
to give them. In his address before Congress
on September 19, President Bush reminded us: "We have seen their
kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the
20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions,
by abandoning every value except the will to power, they follw in the
path of fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism. And they will follow that
path all the way to where it ends in history's unmarked grave of
discarded lies." President Bush was talking about
the terrorists and their sponsors abroad. But he might just as well have
been talking about their fifth column allies at home. It's time for Americans who love
their country to stand up, and defend it. ONE OF THE TYPICAL ILLUSIONS of
the Chomsky cult is the belief that its imam and sensei is not the
unbalanced dervish of anti-American loathing he appears to everyone
else, but an analytic giant whose dicta flow from a painstaking and
scientific inquiry into the facts. "The only reason Noam Chomsky is
an international political force unto himself," writes a typically
fervid acolyte, "is that he actually spends considerable time
researching, analyzing, corroborating, deconstructing, and
impassionately [sic] explaining world affairs." This conviction is
almost as delusional as Chomsky's view of the world itself. It would be
more accurate to say of the Chomsky oeuvre -- lifting a famous line from
the late Mary McCarthy -- that everything he has written is a lie,
including the "ands" and "the's." Chomskyites who read "The
Sick Mind of Noam Chomsky (Part I)" have complained that
"there is not one single comment ...that contradicts Chomsky's
research." Consequently, my refutation of Chomsky was not achieved
"by reasoned argument or detailing the errors of fact or logic in
his writings and statements, but by character assassination and the
trivializing of Chomsky's strongly held beliefs through accusations that
they were unpatriotic." I confess to being a little
puzzled by this objection. Having described Chomsky's equation of
post-World War II America with Nazi Germany, it did not actually occur
to me that additional refutation was required. Not, at any rate, among
the sound of mind. It is true, on the other hand -- as will become
apparent in this sequel -- that the adulators of Chomsky share a group
psychosis with millions of others who formerly worshipped
pre-Chomskyites, like Lenin, Stalin, and other Marxist worthies, as
geniuses of the progressive faith. Now to the facts. Chomsky's little masterpiece,
What Uncle Sam Wants, draws on America's actions in the Cold War as a
database for its portrayal as the Evil One in global affairs. As Chomsky
groupies are quick to point out, a lot of facts do appear in the text or
- more precisely - appear to appear in the text. On closer examination,
every one of them has been ripped out of any meaningful historical
context and then distorted so cynically that the result has about as
much in common with the truth as Harry Potter's Muggles Guide to Magic. In Chomsky's telling, the
bi-polar world of the Cold War is viewed as though there were only one
pole. In the real world, the Cold War was about America's effort to
organize a democratic coalition against an expansionist empire that
conquered and enslaved more than a billion people. It ended, when the
empire gave up and the walls that kept its subjects locked in, came
tumbling down. In Chomsky's world, the Soviet empire hardly exists, not
a single American action is seen as a response to a Soviet initiative,
and the Cold War is "analyzed" as though it had only one side.
This is like writing a history
of the Second World War without mentioning Hitler or noticing that the
actions of the Axis powers influenced its events. But in Chomsky's
malevolent hands, matters get even worse. If one were to follow the
Chomsky method, for example, one would list every problematic act
committed by any part or element in the vast coalition attempting to
stop Hitler, and would attribute them all to a calculating policy of the
United States. One would then provide a report card of these
"crimes" as the historical record itself. The list of crimes -
the worst acts of which the allies could be accused and the most
dishonorable motives they may be said to have acted upon -- would then
become the database from which America's portrait would be drawn. The
result inevitably would be the Great Satan of Chomsky's deranged fantasy
life. In What Uncle Sam Really Wants,
Chomsky begins with the fact of America's emergence from the Second
World War. He describes this fact characteristically as the United
States having "benefited enormously" from the conflict in
contrast to its "industrial rivals" -- omitting in the process
any mention of the 250,000 lives America lost, its generous Marshall
Plan aid to those same rivals or, for that matter, its victory over Nazi
Germany and the Axis powers. In Chomsky's portrait, America in 1945 is,
instead, a wealthy power that profited from others' misery and is now
seeking world domination. "The people who determine American policy
were carefully planning how to shape the postwar world," he asserts
without evidence. "American planners - from those in the State
Department to those on the Council on Foreign Relations (one major
channel by which business leaders influence foreign policy) - agreed
that the dominance of the United States had to be maintained." Chomsky never names the actual
people who agreed that American policy should be world dominance, nor
how they achieved unanimity in deciding to transform a famously
isolationist country into a global power. America, in short, has no
internal politics that matter. Chomsky does not bother to acknowledge or
attempt to explain the powerful strain of isolationism not only in
American policy, but in the Republican Party - the party of Wall Street
and the Council on Foreign Relations businessmen whom he claims exert
such influence on policy. Above all, he does not explain why -- if world
domination was really America's goal in 1945 - Washington disbanded its
wartime armies overnight and brought them home. Between 1945 and 1946, in fact,
America demobilized 1.6 million troops. By contrast, the Soviet Union
(which Chomsky doesn't mention) maintained its 2 million-man army in
place in the countries of Eastern Europe whose governments it had
already begun to undermine and destroy. It was, in fact, the Soviet
absorption of the formerly independent states of Eastern Europe in the
years between 1945 and 1948 that triggered America's subsequent
rearmament, the creation of NATO, and the overseas spread of American
power, which was designed to contain an expansionist Soviet empire and
prevent a repetition of the appeasement process that had led to World
War II. These little facts never appear in Chomsky's text, yet they
determine everything that followed, especially America's global
presence. There is no excuse for this omission other than that Chomsky
wants this history to be something other than it was. History has shown
that the Cold War, the formation of the postwar western alliances and
the mobilizing of western forces -- was principally brought about by the
Soviet conquest of Eastern Europe. That is why the Cold War ended as
soon as the Berlin Wall fell, and the states of Eastern Europe were
freed to pursue their independent paths. It was to accomplish this great
liberation of several hundred million people -- and not any American
quest for world domination -- that explains American Cold War policy.
But these facts never appear on Chomsky's pages. Having begun the story with an
utterly false picture of the historical forces at work, Chomsky is ready
to carry out his scorched earth campaign of malicious slander against
the democracy in which he has led a privileged existence for more than
seventy years. "In 1949," Chomsky writes -- reaching for his
favorite smear - "US espionage in Eastern Europe had been turned
over to a network run by Reinhard Gehlen, who had headed Nazi military
intelligence on the Eastern Front. This network was one part of the
US-Nazi alliance...." Let's pause for a moment so that
we can take a good look at this exemplary display of the Chomsky method.
We have jumped - or rather Chomsky has jumped us - from 1945 to 1949,
skipping over the little matter of the Red Army's refusal to withdraw
from Eastern Europe, and the Kremlin's swallowing of its independent
regimes. Instead of these matters, the reader is confronted with what
appears to be a shocking fact about Reinhard Gehlen, which is quickly
inflated it into a big lie - an alleged "US-Nazi alliance."
The factoid about Gehlen, it must be said, has been already distorted in
the process of presenting it. The United States used Gehlen -- not the
other way around, as Chomsky's devious phrase ("US espionage ...
had been turned over") implies. More blatant is the big lie itself.
There was no "US-Nazi alliance." The United States defeated
Nazi Germany four years earlier, and by 1949 - unlike the Soviet Union
-- had imposed a democracy on West Germany's political structure as a
condition of a German peace. In 1949, West Germany, which was
controlled by the United States and its allies, was a democratic state
and continued to be so until the end of the Cold War, forty years later.
East Germany, which was controlled by the Soviet Union (whose policies
Chomsky fails to examine) was a police state, and continued to be a
police state until the end of the Cold War, forty years later. In 1949,
with Stalin's Red Army occupying all the countries of Eastern Europe,
the Communists had established police states in each one of them and
were arresting and executing thousands of innocent people. These
benighted satellite regimes of the Soviet empire remained police states,
under Soviet rule, until the end of the Cold War forty years later. The
2 million-man Red Army continued to occupy Eastern Europe until the end
of the Cold War forty years later, and for every one of those years it
was positioned in an aggressive posture threatening the democratic
states of Western Europe with invasion and occupation. In these circumstances - which
Chomsky does not mention -- the use of a German military intelligence
network with experience and assets in Eastern Europe and the Soviet
Union was an entirely reasonable measure to defend the democratic states
of the West and the innocent lives of the subjects of Soviet rule. Spy
work is dirty work as everyone recognizes. This episode was no
"Nazi" taint on America, but a necessary part of America's
Cold War effort in the cause of human freedom. With the help of the
Gehlen network, the United States kept the Soviet expansion in check,
and eventually liberated hundreds of millions of oppressed people in
Eastern Europe from the horrors of the Communist gulag. Chomsky describes these events
as though the United States had not defeated Hitler, but had made a pact
with the devil himself to attack the innocent: "These operations
included a 'secret army' under US-Nazi auspices that sought to provide
agents and military supplies to armies that had been established by
Hitler and which were still operating inside the Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe through the early 1950s." This typical Chomsky
distortion of what actually took place is as bold a lie as the Communist
propaganda the Kremlin distributed in those years, from which it is
cynically cribbed. Having equated America with Nazi
Germany, in strict imitation of Stalinist propaganda themes, Chomsky
extends the analogy through the whole of his fictional account of the
episodes that made up the Cold War. According to Chomsky, establishing a
Nazi world order - with business interests at the top and the
"working classes and the poor" at the bottom -- was America's
real postwar agenda. Therefore, "the major thing that stood in the
way of this was the anti-fascist resistance, so we suppressed it all
over the world, often installing fascists and Nazi collaborators in its
place." Claims like these give
conspiracy theories a bad name. It would be tedious (and would
add nothing to our understanding) to run through all of Chomsky's
perversely distorted cases, which follow the unscrupulous model of his
account of the Gehlen network. One more should suffice. In 1947 a civil
war in Greece became the first Cold War test of America's resolve to
prevent the Soviet empire from spreading beyond Eastern Europe.
Naturally, Chomsky presents the conflict as a struggle between the
"anti-Nazi resistance," and US backed (and "Nazi")
interests. In Chomsky's words, these interests were "US investors
and local businessmen," and -- of course -- "the beneficiaries
included Nazi collaborators, while the primary victims were the workers
and the peasants...." The leaders of the
anti-Communist forces in Greece were not Nazis. On the other hand, what
Chomsky calls the "anti-Nazi resistance" was in fact the
Communist Party and its fellow-traveling pawns. What Chomsky leaves out
of his account, as a matter of course and necessity, are the proximity
of the Soviet Red Army to Greece, the intention of the Greek Communists
to establish a Soviet police state if they won the civil war, and the
fact that their defeat paved the way for an unprecedented economic
development benefiting all classes and the eventual establishment of a
political democracy which soon brought democratic socialists to power. Needless to say, no country in
which Chomsky's "anti-fascists" won, ever established a
democracy or produced any significant betterment in the economic
conditions of the great mass of its inhabitants. This puts a somewhat
different color on every detail of what happened in Greece and what the
United States did there. The only point of view from which Chomsky's
version of this history makes sense is the point of view of the Kremlin,
whose propaganda has merely been updated by the MIT professor. A key chapter of Chomsky's
booklet of lies is called "The Threat of A Good Example." In
it, Chomsky offers his explanation for America's diabolical behavior in
Third World countries. In Chomsky's fictional accounting, "what the
US-run contra forces did in Nicaragua, or what our terrorist proxies do
in El Salvador or Guatemala, isn't only ordinary killing. A major
element is brutal, sadistic torture - beating infants against rocks,
hanging women by their feet with their breasts cut off and the skin of
their face peeled back so that they'll bleed to death, chopping people's
heads off and putting them on stakes." There are no citations in
Chomsky's text to support the claim either that these atrocities took
place, or that the United States directed them, or that the United
States is in any meaningful way responsible. But, according to Chomsky,
"US-run" forces and "our terrorist proxies" do this
sort of thing routinely and everywhere: "No country is exempt from
this treatment, no matter how unimportant." According to Chomsky, U.S.
business is the evil hand behind all these policies. On the other hand,
"as far as American business is concerned, Nicaragua could
disappear and nobody would notice. The same is true of El Salvador. But
both have been subjected to murderous assaults by the U.S., at a cost of
hundreds of thousands of lives and many billions of dollars." If
these countries are so insignificant, why would the United States bother
to treat them so monstrously, particularly since lesser atrocities
committed by Americans - like the My Lai massacre - managed to attract
the attention of the whole world, and not just Noam Chomsky? "There
is a reason for that," Chomsky explains. "The weaker and
poorer a country is, the more dangerous it is as an example (italics in
original). If a tiny, poor country like Grenada can succeed in bringing
about a better life for its people, some other place that has more
resources will ask, 'why not us?'" It's an interesting idea. The
logic goes like this: What Uncle Sam really wants is to control the
world; U.S. control means absolute misery for all the peoples that come
under its sway; this means the U.S. must prevent all the little, poor
people in the world from realizing that there are better ways to develop
than with U.S. investments or influence. Take Grenada. "Grenada has
a hundred thousand people who produce a little nutmeg, and you could
hardly find it on a map. But when Grenada began to undergo a mild social
revolution, Washington quickly moved to destroy the threat." This
is Chomsky's entire commentary on the U.S. intervention in Grenada. Actually, something quite
different took place. In 1979, there was a coup in Grenada that
established a Marxist dictatorship complete with a Soviet-style
"politburo" to rule it. This was a tense period in the Cold
War. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan, and Communist
insurgencies armed by Cuba were spreading in Central America. Before
long, Cuban military personnel began to appear in Grenada and were
building a new airport capable of accommodating Soviet bombers. Tensions
over the uncompleted airport developed between Washington and the
Grenadian dictatorship. In the midst of all this, there was another coup
in 1983. This coup was led by the Marxist Minister of Defense who
assassinated the Marxist dictator and half his politburo, including his
pregnant Minister of Education. The new dictator put the entire island -
including U.S. citizens resident there -- under house arrest. It was at
this point that the Reagan Administration sent the marines in to protect
U.S. citizens, stop the construction of the military airport and restore
democracy to the little island. The U.S. did this at the request of four
governments of Caribbean countries who feared a Communist military
presence in their neighborhood. A public opinion poll taken after the
U.S. operation showed that 85% of the citizens of Grenada welcomed the
U.S. intervention and America's help in restoring their freedom. There was no "threat of a
good example" in Grenada and there are none anywhere in the world
of progressive social experiments. There is not a single Marxist country
that has ever provided a good example in the sense of making its economy
better or its people freer. Chomsky seems to have missed this most basic
fact of 20th century history: Socialism doesn't work. Korea would seem
an obvious model case. Fifty years ago, in one of the early battles of
the Cold War, the United States military prevented Communist North Korea
from conquering the anti-Communist South of the country. Today Communist
North Korea is independent of the United States and one of the poorest
countries in the world. A million of its citizens have starved in the
last couple of years, while its Marxist dictator has feverishly invested
his country's scarce capital in an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile
program. So much for the good example. In South Korea, by contrast,
there are 50,000 U.S. troops stationed along the border to defend it
from a Communist attack. For fifty years, nefarious U.S. businesses and
investors have operated freely in South Korea. The results are
interesting. In 1950, South Korea - with a per capita income of $250 was
as poor as Cuba and Vietnam. Today it is an industrial power and its per
capita income is more than twenty times greater than it was before it
became an ally and investment region of the United States. South Korea
is not a full-fledged democracy but it does have elections and more than
one party and a press that provides it with information from the outside
world. This is quite different from North Korea whose citizens have no
access to information their dictator does not approve. Who do you think
is afraid of the threat of a good example? Communism was an expansive
system that ruined nations and enslaved their citizens. But Chomsky
dismisses America's fear of Communism as a mere "cover" for
America's own diabolical designs. He explains the Vietnam War this way:
"The real fear was that if the people of Indochina achieved
independence and justice, the people of Thailand would emulate it, and
if that worked, they'd try it in Malaya, and pretty soon Indonesia would
pursue an independent path, and by then a significant area [of America's
empire] would have been lost." This is a Marxist version of the
domino theory. But of course, America did leave Indo-China - Cambodia
and Thailand included -- in 1975. Vietnam has pursued an independent
path for 25 years and it is as poor as it ever was - one of the poorest
nations in the world. Its people still live in a primitive Marxist
police state. After its defeat in Vietnam, the
United States withdrew its military forces from the entire Indo-Chinese
peninsula. The result was that Cambodia was over-run by the Khmer Rouge
(the "reds"). In other words, by the Communist forces that
Noam Chomsky, the Vietnamese Communists and the entire American left had
supported until then. The Khmer Rouge proceeded to kill two million
Cambodians who, in their view, stood in the way of the progressive
"good example" they intended to create. Chomsky earned himself
a bad reputation by first denying and then minimizing the Cambodian
genocide until the facts overwhelmed his case. Now, of course, he blames
the genocide on the United States. Chomsky also blames the United
States and the Vietnam war for the fact that "Vietnam is a basket
case" and not a good example. "Our basic goal - the crucial
one, the one that really counted - was to destroy the virus [of
independent development], and we did achieve that. Vietnam is a basket
case, and the U.S. is doing what it can to keep it that way." This
is just a typical Chomsky libel and all-purpose ruse. (The devil made
them do it.) As Chomsky knew then and knows now, the victorious
Vietnamese Communists are Marxists. Marxism is a crackpot theory that
doesn't work. Every Marxist state has been an economic basket case. Take a current example like
Cuba, which has not been bombed and has not suffered a war, but is
poorer today than it was more than forty years ago when Castro took
power. In 1959, Cuba was the second richest country in Latin America.
Now it is the second poorest just before Haiti. Naturally, Chomskyites
will claim that the U.S. economic boycott is responsible. (The devil
made them do it.) But the whole rest of the world trades with Cuba. Cuba
not only trades with all of Latin America and Europe, but receives aid
from the latter. Moreover, in the 1970s and 1980s, the Soviet Union gave
Cuba the equivalent of three Marshall Plans in economic subsidies and
assistance -- tens of billions of dollars. Cuba is a fertile island with
a tropical climate. It is poor because it has followed Chomsky's
examples, and not America's. It is poor because it is socialist, Marxist
and Communist. It is poor because it is run by a lunatic and sadist. It
is poor because in Cuba, America lost the Cold War. The poverty of Cuba
is what Chomsky's vision and political commitments would create for the
entire world. It is the Communist-Chomsky
illusion that there is a way to prosperity other than the way of the
capitalist market that causes the poverty of states like Cuba and North
Korea and Vietnam, and would have caused the poverty of Grenada and
Greece and South Korea if America had not intervened. The illusion that socialism
promises a better future is also the cause of the Chomsky cult. It is
the illusion at the heart of the messianic hope that creates the
progressive left. This hope is a chimera, but insofar as it is believed,
history presents itself in terms that are Manichaean -- as a battle
between good and evil. Those who oppose socialism, Marxism, Communism
embody worldly evil. They are the party of Satan, and their leader
America is the Great Satan himself. Chomsky is, in fact, the imam of
this religious worldview on today's college campuses. His great service
to the progressive faith is to deny the history of the last hundred
years, which is the history of progressive atrocity and failure. In the
20th century, progressives in power killed one hundred million people in
the attempt to realize their impossible dream. As far as Noam Chomsky is
concerned, these catastrophes of the left never happened. "I don't
much like the terms left and right," Chomsky writes in yet another
ludicrous screed called The Common Good. "What's called the left
includes Leninism [i.e., Communism], which I consider ultra-right in
many respects.... Leninism has nothing to do with the values of the left
- in fact, it's radically opposed to them." You have to pinch yourself when
reading sentences like that. The purpose of such
Humpty-Dumpty mutilations of the language is perfectly intelligible,
however. It is to preserve the faith for those who cannot live without
some form of the Communist creed. Lenin is dead. Long live Leninism. The
Communist catastrophes can have "nothing to do with the values of
the left" because if they did the left would have to answer for its
deeds and confront the fact that it is morally and intellectually
bankrupt. Progressives would have to face the fact that they killed 100
million people for nothing -- for an idea that didn't work. The real threat of a good
example is the threat of America, which has lifted more people out of
poverty -- within its borders and all over the world -- than all the
socialists and progressives put together since the beginning of time. To
neutralize the threat, it is necessary to kill the American idea. This
is, in fact, Noam Chomsky's mission in life, and his everlasting
disgrace. (1)Noam Chomsky, What Uncle Sam
Really Wants, Tucson, 1986 (interviews with David Barsamian) (2)Ibid. (3)Noam Chomsky, Propaganda and
the Public Mind, Interviews by David Barsamian, Cambridge, 2001 p. x. In
the endpapers of this volume the NY Times is quoted praising Chomsky as
"an exploder of received truths." The Guardian (London):
"One of the radical heroes of our age...A towering
intellect..." The Times Literary Supplement: "Chomsky's work
... has some of the qualities of Revelations, the Old Testament prophets
and Blake." ONE OF THE TYPICAL ILLUSIONS of
the Chomsky cult is the belief that its imam and sensei is not the
unbalanced dervish of anti-American loathing he appears to everyone
else, but an analytic giant whose dicta flow from a painstaking and
scientific inquiry into the facts. "The only reason Noam Chomsky is
an international political force unto himself," writes a typically
fervid acolyte, "is that he actually spends considerable time
researching, analyzing, corroborating, deconstructing, and
impassionately [sic] explaining world affairs." This conviction is
almost as delusional as Chomsky's view of the world itself. It would be
more accurate to say of the Chomsky oeuvre -- lifting a famous line from
the late Mary McCarthy -- that everything he has written is a lie,
including the "ands" and "the's." Chomskyites who read "The
Sick Mind of Noam Chomsky (Part I) I)" have complained that
"there is not one single comment ...that contradicts Chomsky's
research." Consequently, my refutation of Chomsky was not achieved
"by reasoned argument or detailing the errors of fact or logic in
his writings and statements, but by character assassination and the
trivializing of Chomsky's strongly held beliefs through accusations that
they were unpatriotic." I confess to being a little
puzzled by this objection. Having described Chomsky's equation of
post-World War II America with Nazi Germany, it did not actually occur
to me that additional refutation was required. Not, at any rate, among
the sound of mind. It is true, on the other hand -- as will become
apparent in this sequel -- that the adulators of Chomsky share a group
psychosis with millions of others who formerly worshipped
pre-Chomskyites, like Lenin, Stalin, and other Marxist worthies, as
geniuses of the progressive faith. Now to the facts. Chomsky's little masterpiece,
What Uncle Sam Wants, draws on America's actions in the Cold War as a
database for its portrayal as the Evil One in global affairs. As Chomsky
groupies are quick to point out, a lot of facts do appear in the text or
- more precisely - appear to appear in the text. On closer examination,
every one of them has been ripped out of any meaningful historical
context and then distorted so cynically that the result has about as
much in common with the truth as Harry Potter's Muggles Guide to Magic. In Chomsky's telling, the
bi-polar world of the Cold War is viewed as though there were only one
pole. In the real world, the Cold War was about America's effort to
organize a democratic coalition against an expansionist empire that
conquered and enslaved more than a billion people. It ended, when the
empire gave up and the walls that kept its subjects locked in, came
tumbling down. In Chomsky's world, the Soviet empire hardly exists, not
a single American action is seen as a response to a Soviet initiative,
and the Cold War is "analyzed" as though it had only one side.
This is like writing a history
of the Second World War without mentioning Hitler or noticing that the
actions of the Axis powers influenced its events. But in Chomsky's
malevolent hands, matters get even worse. If one were to follow the
Chomsky method, for example, one would list every problematic act
committed by any part or element in the vast coalition attempting to
stop Hitler, and would attribute them all to a calculating policy of the
United States. One would then provide a report card of these
"crimes" as the historical record itself. The list of crimes -
the worst acts of which the allies could be accused and the most
dishonorable motives they may be said to have acted upon -- would then
become the database from which America's portrait would be drawn. The
result inevitably would be the Great Satan of Chomsky's deranged fantasy
life. In What Uncle Sam Really Wants,
Chomsky begins with the fact of America's emergence from the Second
World War. He describes this fact characteristically as the United
States having "benefited enormously" from the conflict in
contrast to its "industrial rivals" -- omitting in the process
any mention of the 250,000 lives America lost, its generous Marshall
Plan aid to those same rivals or, for that matter, its victory over Nazi
Germany and the Axis powers. In Chomsky's portrait, America in 1945 is,
instead, a wealthy power that profited from others' misery and is now
seeking world domination. "The people who determine American policy
were carefully planning how to shape the postwar world," he asserts
without evidence. "American planners - from those in the State
Department to those on the Council on Foreign Relations (one major
channel by which business leaders influence foreign policy) - agreed
that the dominance of the United States had to be maintained." Chomsky never names the actual
people who agreed that American policy should be world dominance, nor
how they achieved unanimity in deciding to transform a famously
isolationist country into a global power. America, in short, has no
internal politics that matter. Chomsky does not bother to acknowledge or
attempt to explain the powerful strain of isolationism not only in
American policy, but in the Republican Party - the party of Wall Street
and the Council on Foreign Relations businessmen whom he claims exert
such influence on policy. Above all, he does not explain why -- if world
domination was really America's goal in 1945 - Washington disbanded its
wartime armies overnight and brought them home. Between 1945 and 1946, in fact,
America demobilized 1.6 million troops. By contrast, the Soviet Union
(which Chomsky doesn't mention) maintained its 2 million-man army in
place in the countries of Eastern Europe whose governments it had
already begun to undermine and destroy. It was, in fact, the Soviet
absorption of the formerly independent states of Eastern Europe in the
years between 1945 and 1948 that triggered America's subsequent
rearmament, the creation of NATO, and the overseas spread of American
power, which was designed to contain an expansionist Soviet empire and
prevent a repetition of the appeasement process that had led to World
War II. These little facts never appear in Chomsky's text, yet they
determine everything that followed, especially America's global
presence. There is no excuse for this omission other than that Chomsky
wants this history to be something other than it was. History has shown
that the Cold War, the formation of the postwar western alliances and
the mobilizing of western forces -- was principally brought about by the
Soviet conquest of Eastern Europe. That is why the Cold War ended as
soon as the Berlin Wall fell, and the states of Eastern Europe were
freed to pursue their independent paths. It was to accomplish this great
liberation of several hundred million people -- and not any American
quest for world domination -- that explains American Cold War policy.
But these facts never appear on Chomsky's pages. Having begun the story with an
utterly false picture of the historical forces at work, Chomsky is ready
to carry out his scorched earth campaign of malicious slander against
the democracy in which he has led a privileged existence for more than
seventy years. "In 1949," Chomsky writes -- reaching for his
favorite smear - "US espionage in Eastern Europe had been turned
over to a network run by Reinhard Gehlen, who had headed Nazi military
intelligence on the Eastern Front. This network was one part of the
US-Nazi alliance...." Let's pause for a moment so that
we can take a good look at this exemplary display of the Chomsky method.
We have jumped - or rather Chomsky has jumped us - from 1945 to 1949,
skipping over the little matter of the Red Army's refusal to withdraw
from Eastern Europe, and the Kremlin's swallowing of its independent
regimes. Instead of these matters, the reader is confronted with what
appears to be a shocking fact about Reinhard Gehlen, which is quickly
inflated it into a big lie - an alleged "US-Nazi alliance."
The factoid about Gehlen, it must be said, has been already distorted in
the process of presenting it. The United States used Gehlen -- not the
other way around, as Chomsky's devious phrase ("US espionage ...
had been turned over") implies. More blatant is the big lie itself.
There was no "US-Nazi alliance." The United States defeated
Nazi Germany four years earlier, and by 1949 - unlike the Soviet Union
-- had imposed a democracy on West Germany's political structure as a
condition of a German peace. In 1949, West Germany, which was
controlled by the United States and its allies, was a democratic state
and continued to be so until the end of the Cold War, forty years later.
East Germany, which was controlled by the Soviet Union (whose policies
Chomsky fails to examine) was a police state, and continued to be a
police state until the end of the Cold War, forty years later. In 1949,
with Stalin's Red Army occupying all the countries of Eastern Europe,
the Communists had established police states in each one of them and
were arresting and executing thousands of innocent people. These
benighted satellite regimes of the Soviet empire remained police states,
under Soviet rule, until the end of the Cold War forty years later. The
2 million-man Red Army continued to occupy Eastern Europe until the end
of the Cold War forty years later, and for every one of those years it
was positioned in an aggressive posture threatening the democratic
states of Western Europe with invasion and occupation. In these circumstances - which
Chomsky does not mention -- the use of a German military intelligence
network with experience and assets in Eastern Europe and the Soviet
Union was an entirely reasonable measure to defend the democratic states
of the West and the innocent lives of the subjects of Soviet rule. Spy
work is dirty work as everyone recognizes. This episode was no
"Nazi" taint on America, but a necessary part of America's
Cold War effort in the cause of human freedom. With the help of the
Gehlen network, the United States kept the Soviet expansion in check,
and eventually liberated hundreds of millions of oppressed people in
Eastern Europe from the horrors of the Communist gulag. Chomsky describes these events
as though the United States had not defeated Hitler, but had made a pact
with the devil himself to attack the innocent: "These operations
included a 'secret army' under US-Nazi auspices that sought to provide
agents and military supplies to armies that had been established by
Hitler and which were still operating inside the Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe through the early 1950s." This typical Chomsky
distortion of what actually took place is as bold a lie as the Communist
propaganda the Kremlin distributed in those years, from which it is
cynically cribbed. Having equated America with Nazi
Germany, in strict imitation of Stalinist propaganda themes, Chomsky
extends the analogy through the whole of his fictional account of the
episodes that made up the Cold War. According to Chomsky, establishing a
Nazi world order - with business interests at the top and the
"working classes and the poor" at the bottom -- was America's
real postwar agenda. Therefore, "the major thing that stood in the
way of this was the anti-fascist resistance, so we suppressed it all
over the world, often installing fascists and Nazi collaborators in its
place." Claims like these give
conspiracy theories a bad name. It would be tedious (and would
add nothing to our understanding) to run through all of Chomsky's
perversely distorted cases, which follow the unscrupulous model of his
account of the Gehlen network. One more should suffice. In 1947 a civil
war in Greece became the first Cold War test of America's resolve to
prevent the Soviet empire from spreading beyond Eastern Europe.
Naturally, Chomsky presents the conflict as a struggle between the
"anti-Nazi resistance," and US backed (and "Nazi")
interests. In Chomsky's words, these interests were "US investors
and local businessmen," and -- of course -- "the beneficiaries
included Nazi collaborators, while the primary victims were the workers
and the peasants...." The leaders of the
anti-Communist forces in Greece were not Nazis. On the other hand, what
Chomsky calls the "anti-Nazi resistance" was in fact the
Communist Party and its fellow-traveling pawns. What Chomsky leaves out
of his account, as a matter of course and necessity, are the proximity
of the Soviet Red Army to Greece, the intention of the Greek Communists
to establish a Soviet police state if they won the civil war, and the
fact that their defeat paved the way for an unprecedented economic
development benefiting all classes and the eventual establishment of a
political democracy which soon brought democratic socialists to power. Needless to say, no country in
which Chomsky's "anti-fascists" won, ever established a
democracy or produced any significant betterment in the economic
conditions of the great mass of its inhabitants. This puts a somewhat
different color on every detail of what happened in Greece and what the
United States did there. The only point of view from which Chomsky's
version of this history makes sense is the point of view of the Kremlin,
whose propaganda has merely been updated by the MIT professor. A key chapter of Chomsky's
booklet of lies is called "The Threat of A Good Example." In
it, Chomsky offers his explanation for America's diabolical behavior in
Third World countries. In Chomsky's fictional accounting, "what the
US-run contra forces did in Nicaragua, or what our terrorist proxies do
in El Salvador or Guatemala, isn't only ordinary killing. A major
element is brutal, sadistic torture - beating infants against rocks,
hanging women by their feet with their breasts cut off and the skin of
their face peeled back so that they'll bleed to death, chopping people's
heads off and putting them on stakes." There are no citations in
Chomsky's text to support the claim either that these atrocities took
place, or that the United States directed them, or that the United
States is in any meaningful way responsible. But, according to Chomsky,
"US-run" forces and "our terrorist proxies" do this
sort of thing routinely and everywhere: "No country is exempt from
this treatment, no matter how unimportant." According to Chomsky, U.S.
business is the evil hand behind all these policies. On the other hand,
"as far as American business is concerned, Nicaragua could
disappear and nobody would notice. The same is true of El Salvador. But
both have been subjected to murderous assaults by the U.S., at a cost of
hundreds of thousands of lives and many billions of dollars." If
these countries are so insignificant, why would the United States bother
to treat them so monstrously, particularly since lesser atrocities
committed by Americans - like the My Lai massacre - managed to attract
the attention of the whole world, and not just Noam Chomsky? "There
is a reason for that," Chomsky explains. "The weaker and
poorer a country is, the more dangerous it is as an example (italics in
original). If a tiny, poor country like Grenada can succeed in bringing
about a better life for its people, some other place that has more
resources will ask, 'why not us?'" It's an interesting idea. The
logic goes like this: What Uncle Sam really wants is to control the
world; U.S. control means absolute misery for all the peoples that come
under its sway; this means the U.S. must prevent all the little, poor
people in the world from realizing that there are better ways to develop
than with U.S. investments or influence. Take Grenada. "Grenada has
a hundred thousand people who produce a little nutmeg, and you could
hardly find it on a map. But when Grenada began to undergo a mild social
revolution, Washington quickly moved to destroy the threat." This
is Chomsky's entire commentary on the U.S. intervention in Grenada. Actually, something quite
different took place. In 1979, there was a coup in Grenada that
established a Marxist dictatorship complete with a Soviet-style
"politburo" to rule it. This was a tense period in the Cold
War. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan, and Communist
insurgencies armed by Cuba were spreading in Central America. Before
long, Cuban military personnel began to appear in Grenada and were
building a new airport capable of accommodating Soviet bombers. Tensions
over the uncompleted airport developed between Washington and the
Grenadian dictatorship. In the midst of all this, there was another coup
in 1983. This coup was led by the Marxist Minister of Defense who
assassinated the Marxist dictator and half his politburo, including his
pregnant Minister of Education. The new dictator put the entire island -
including U.S. citizens resident there -- under house arrest. It was at
this point that the Reagan Administration sent the marines in to protect
U.S. citizens, stop the construction of the military airport and restore
democracy to the little island. The U.S. did this at the request of four
governments of Caribbean countries who feared a Communist military
presence in their neighborhood. A public opinion poll taken after the
U.S. operation showed that 85% of the citizens of Grenada welcomed the
U.S. intervention and America's help in restoring their freedom. There was no "threat of a
good example" in Grenada and there are none anywhere in the world
of progressive social experiments. There is not a single Marxist country
that has ever provided a good example in the sense of making its economy
better or its people freer. Chomsky seems to have missed this most basic
fact of 20th century history: Socialism doesn't work. Korea would seem
an obvious model case. Fifty years ago, in one of the early battles of
the Cold War, the United States military prevented Communist North Korea
from conquering the anti-Communist South of the country. Today Communist
North Korea is independent of the United States and one of the poorest
countries in the world. A million of its citizens have starved in the
last couple of years, while its Marxist dictator has feverishly invested
his country's scarce capital in an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile
program. So much for the good example. In South Korea, by contrast,
there are 50,000 U.S. troops stationed along the border to defend it
from a Communist attack. For fifty years, nefarious U.S. businesses and
investors have operated freely in South Korea. The results are
interesting. In 1950, South Korea - with a per capita income of $250 was
as poor as Cuba and Vietnam. Today it is an industrial power and its per
capita income is more than twenty times greater than it was before it
became an ally and investment region of the United States. South Korea
is not a full-fledged democracy but it does have elections and more than
one party and a press that provides it with information from the outside
world. This is quite different from North Korea whose citizens have no
access to information their dictator does not approve. Who do you think
is afraid of the threat of a good example? Communism was an expansive
system that ruined nations and enslaved their citizens. But Chomsky
dismisses America's fear of Communism as a mere "cover" for
America's own diabolical designs. He explains the Vietnam War this way:
"The real fear was that if the people of Indochina achieved
independence and justice, the people of Thailand would emulate it, and
if that worked, they'd try it in Malaya, and pretty soon Indonesia would
pursue an independent path, and by then a significant area [of America's
empire] would have been lost." This is a Marxist version of the
domino theory. But of course, America did leave Indo-China - Cambodia
and Thailand included -- in 1975. Vietnam has pursued an independent
path for 25 years and it is as poor as it ever was - one of the poorest
nations in the world. Its people still live in a primitive Marxist
police state. After its defeat in Vietnam, the
United States withdrew its military forces from the entire Indo-Chinese
peninsula. The result was that Cambodia was over-run by the Khmer Rouge
(the "reds"). In other words, by the Communist forces that
Noam Chomsky, the Vietnamese Communists and the entire American left had
supported until then. The Khmer Rouge proceeded to kill two million
Cambodians who, in their view, stood in the way of the progressive
"good example" they intended to create. Chomsky earned himself
a bad reputation by first denying and then minimizing the Cambodian
genocide until the facts overwhelmed his case. Now, of course, he blames
the genocide on the United States. Chomsky also blames the United
States and the Vietnam war for the fact that "Vietnam is a basket
case" and not a good example. "Our basic goal - the crucial
one, the one that really counted - was to destroy the virus [of
independent development], and we did achieve that. Vietnam is a basket
case, and the U.S. is doing what it can to keep it that way." This
is just a typical Chomsky libel and all-purpose ruse. (The devil made
them do it.) As Chomsky knew then and knows now, the victorious
Vietnamese Communists are Marxists. Marxism is a crackpot theory that
doesn't work. Every Marxist state has been an economic basket case. Take a current example like
Cuba, which has not been bombed and has not suffered a war, but is
poorer today than it was more than forty years ago when Castro took
power. In 1959, Cuba was the second richest country in Latin America.
Now it is the second poorest just before Haiti. Naturally, Chomskyites
will claim that the U.S. economic boycott is responsible. (The devil
made them do it.) But the whole rest of the world trades with Cuba. Cuba
not only trades with all of Latin America and Europe, but receives aid
from the latter. Moreover, in the 1970s and 1980s, the Soviet Union gave
Cuba the equivalent of three Marshall Plans in economic subsidies and
assistance -- tens of billions of dollars. Cuba is a fertile island with
a tropical climate. It is poor because it has followed Chomsky's
examples, and not America's. It is poor because it is socialist, Marxist
and Communist. It is poor because it is run by a lunatic and sadist. It
is poor because in Cuba, America lost the Cold War. The poverty of Cuba
is what Chomsky's vision and political commitments would create for the
entire world. It is the Communist-Chomsky
illusion that there is a way to prosperity other than the way of the
capitalist market that causes the poverty of states like Cuba and North
Korea and Vietnam, and would have caused the poverty of Grenada and
Greece and South Korea if America had not intervened. The illusion that socialism
promises a better future is also the cause of the Chomsky cult. It is
the illusion at the heart of the messianic hope that creates the
progressive left. This hope is a chimera, but insofar as it is believed,
history presents itself in terms that are Manichaean -- as a battle
between good and evil. Those who oppose socialism, Marxism, Communism
embody worldly evil. They are the party of Satan, and their leader
America is the Great Satan himself. Chomsky is, in fact, the imam of
this religious worldview on today's college campuses. His great service
to the progressive faith is to deny the history of the last hundred
years, which is the history of progressive atrocity and failure. In the
20th century, progressives in power killed one hundred million people in
the attempt to realize their impossible dream. As far as Noam Chomsky is
concerned, these catastrophes of the left never happened. "I don't
much like the terms left and right," Chomsky writes in yet another
ludicrous screed called The Common Good. "What's called the left
includes Leninism [i.e., Communism], which I consider ultra-right in
many respects.... Leninism has nothing to do with the values of the left
- in fact, it's radically opposed to them." You have to pinch yourself when
reading sentences like that. The purpose of such
Humpty-Dumpty mutilations of the language is perfectly intelligible,
however. It is to preserve the faith for those who cannot live without
some form of the Communist creed. Lenin is dead. Long live Leninism. The
Communist catastrophes can have "nothing to do with the values of
the left" because if they did the left would have to answer for its
deeds and confront the fact that it is morally and intellectually
bankrupt. Progressives would have to face the fact that they killed 100
million people for nothing -- for an idea that didn't work. The real threat of a good
example is the threat of America, which has lifted more people out of
poverty -- within its borders and all over the world -- than all the
socialists and progressives put together since the beginning of time. To
neutralize the threat, it is necessary to kill the American idea. This
is, in fact, Noam Chomsky's mission in life, and his everlasting
disgrace. (4)Available at www.znet.org (5)Interview, September 19,
2001. www.znet.org (6)What Uncle Sam Really Wants,
pp. 8, 18, 29, 31, 32, 56-58 (7)Chomsky, Profit Over People,
NY 1999, p. 102 (8)What Uncle Sam Really Wants,
p. 32 (9)Ibid. p. 79 (10)Ibid. pp. 82 (11)Ibid. pp. 56-7 (12)Bill Ayers, Fugitive Days,
NY 2001, p. 256 (13)Statement on the publisher's
website, www.beacon.org (14)What Uncle Sam Really Wants,
p. 100 |
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