Thread: Noam Chomsky: A Linguistic Genius

Originally Posted by Accidental Ajarn

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More silliness and yet another attempt (up to how many now?) to make this thread about me.

It is all about you now AA. The discussion on Chomsky finished pages ago.

We all agreed that he's a rather remarkable fellow.

I would say that anything by Chomsky has more substance than your offerings, but when it comes to comedy value you put Chomsky in the shade.

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Here is a list of 200 of them. This has been posted before, but not read by you.

http://www.paulbogdanor.com/200chomskylies.pdf

Like I said previously, I do not make my living by writing anti-Chomsky articles, but I have read enough to know he is full of shit.

However others have spent the time to actually examine his work. Here are a few samples.

Citation: “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] that these were localized in areas of limited Khmer Rouge influence and unusual peasant discontent…”

“Distortions at Fourth Hand,” The Nation, June 25, 1977.


Source: The “analyses” amounted to a journalist’s report relying on a statement by Pol Pot (Far Eastern Economic Review); a reader’s letter to the editor (Economist); and an essay by a leftist student in an undergraduate magazine (Melbourne Journal of Politics).


Nayan Chanda, Far Eastern Economic Review, October 29, 1976; W.J. Sampson, Letters, The
Economist, March 26, 1977; Ben Kiernan, “Cambodia in the News; 1975/76,” Melbourne Journal of Politics, December 1975-January 1976. Three years later, Kiernan acknowledged the genocide and became an apologist for the brutal dictatorship imposed by communist Vietnam.

A lie by Chomsky


Citation: “That one [US] bombing [of a factory in Sudan], according to the estimates made by the German Embassy in Sudan and Human Rights Watch, probably led to tens of thousands of deaths.”

Interview, Salon.com, January 16, 2002.


Source: The “estimate” by the German Embassy was an ex-Ambassador’s self-described “guess” based on no evidence. Human Rights Watch publicly denied giving any estimate

Werner Daum, “Universalism and the West,” Harvard International Review, Summer 2001; Carroll Bogert, Communications Director of Human Rights Watch, “Noam Needs a Fact-Checker,” Salon.com, January 22, 2002.

Another Chomsky lie

Chomsky’s lie “the [American] bombing [of Cambodia], which the CIA estimates killed around 600,000 people, mobilised the Khmer Rouge…””

A Rational Reaction,” The Liberal, UK, December 2004-January 2005. Cf.: “from the time of the first sustained US bombings [of Cambodia] in March 1969 through April 1975… 600,000 people were killed, according to CIA estimates,” Deterring Democracy (Vintage, 1992), p72.

The Truth: The CIA estimate referred to “war-related deaths” caused by all sides, not to the death toll from the bombing, which was not discussed. The CIA noted that the figures were “debatable” and concluded: “None of these estimates is well founded.” The 600,000 figure may have been invented by Pol Pot himself, and is more than twice the actual number of war-related deaths.

Marek Sliwinski, Le G?nocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse D?mographique (L’Harmattan, 1995), p48

Chomsky’s Lie: “The crime of the Sandinistas was to carry out successful development… they immediately began to divert resources to the poor part of the population.”

Latin America: From Colonization to Globalization (Ocean Press, 1999), p57.

The Truth: For decades, Nicaragua had experienced some of the fastest economic growth in the hemisphere. Within a few years of Sandinista rule, wages had been fixed below poverty level and there was mass unemployment. There were shortages of nearly all basic goods, with inflation at 30,000%. Government studies found that three-quarters of schoolchildren suffered from malnutrition, while living standards were lower than Haiti. The World Bank found that Nicaragua was on the economic level of Somalia. Even the Soviet bloc blamed the regime for wrecking the country.

Roger Miranda and William Ratliff, The Civil War in Nicaragua (Transaction, 1993), pp183-4.

Chomsky’s Lie: “In fact Stalin was supporting Chiang Kai-Shek against the Chinese revolution. The subsequent and rather brief alliance was in part the result of US policies.”

On Power and Ideology: The Managua Lectures (South End Press, 1987), p52.

The Truth: During 1945-9, Stalin directed the transfer of 400,000 Chinese communist troops and 20,000 cadres, provided military equipment for 600,000 men, supplied critical tanks and artillery, helped to build munitions factories essential to the Chinese communist victory, and guided the political and economic decisions of the Chinese communist leadership.

Douglas J. Macdonald, “Communist Bloc Expansion in the Early Cold War,” International Security, Winter 1995-6, pp172-3. See also Michael M. Sheng, Battling Western Imperialism: Mao, Stalin and the United States (Princeton University Press, 1997) and Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War (University of North Carolina Press, 2001), pp38-48.

Sabang

Want more evidence of Chomsky's lies?

http://www.paulbogdanor.com/morris-chomsky.pdf

Well respected in academia?

Here 's what Morris in the Harvard International Review (hardly a right-wing blog) wrote of Chomsky and his co-writer Herman.

“The authors are totalitarian political ideologues with an intense emotional commitment to the cause of anti-Americanism. Operating on the principle that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” they have wholeheartedly embraced the struggle of two of the world’s most ruthlessly brutal regimes.”

H-Net Discussion Networks - Chomsky: A Principled Dissenter [Nichols]=“

Chomsky is not the first simplistic Marxist to criticize the United States, and in fact his analyses are pedestrian and predictable: big business owns America and reshapes the world to suit the interests of capital, etc etc. It's a common enough criticism on the extreme left, and there's nothing shocking or worth fighting over to be found in it.

What many of us find objectionable, however, is Chomsky's fundamental hypocrisy and dishonesty. (There was, for example, an article this springi n the online version of the The New Criterion called "The Hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky.") Chomsky's writing is meant to mislead and to distort.(Saying he's big in Turkey, by the way, means nothing. Propaganda always finds an audience.) He is a practitioner of the Big Lie approach to political debate: if a falsehood is stated baldly and loudly enough, it'll get by. Let me present a few examples (out of many) and readers can judge for themselves. Here's a gem from the New Mandarins (1967): "Three times in a generation American technology has laid waste a helpless Asian country," that is, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.This is a statement that is so simplistic and dishonest one can only marvel at Chomsky's audacity in saying it. Imperial Japan, helpless? North Korea, rolling its tanks to the Pusan perimeter and coming within awhisker of conquering the peninsula, helpless? But Chomsky is smart enough to know one thing: if he puts it on the printed page, some less perceptive reader will assume it to be true, and the propaganda will have worked its purpose.”