The SICK Liberal Mind of Noam Chomsky: Part II Method and Madness
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.
By David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com |
--
"I am for socialism, disarmament, and ultimately, for abolishing the
state itself as an instrument of violence and compulsion. I seek
social ownership of property, the abolition of the properties class,
and sole control of those who produce wealth. Communism is the goal.
It all sums up into one single purpose -- the abolition of dog-eat-dog
under which we live. I don't regret being part of the communist
tactic. I knew what I was doing. I was not an innocent liberal. I
wanted what the communists wanted and I traveled the United Front road
to get it."
-- Roger Baldwin, Co-Founder ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union)
--
Left-wing liberals are EVERYTHING they accuse the right of being. They
are mean, vicious, hateful, greedy, cold-hearted, closed-minded,
selfish, intolerant, bigoted and racist.
.
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