Tom Veil wrote...
Did you read my full paragraph? Quoting zmag was not the only criteria >I mentioned.
Sorry, sir. Next time I'll try harder to decypher your dogmatic rantings.
Noam Chomsky is no true anarchist. Chomsky is a commie pinko >totalitarian.
Well, since you put it that way, it's GOT to be true.
Chomsky denied the Cambodian holocaust, and is on record as having praised
North Vietnam as some sort of democratic worker's paradise. He has defended,
rationalized, and denied acts of terror, mass-murder and slavery.
No, and this is probably worth the attempt at rational discussion. First of all, however, it's important to realize that Chomsky is not merely a 'commie' version of yourself. He's not arguing the "yes" to your "no". With respect to the Cambodia issue, Chomsky is pointing out how US agit-prop and media take advantage of our lack of certainty with respect to the real numbers. Chomsky estimates that only 800,000 are verifiable via publically accessible documentation. This is a very different thing from saying only 800,000 died. Here's Chomsky on the issue:
"Whether these estimates are right or wrong, no one knows, and no one cares. There is a doctrine to be established: we must focus solely on the (horrendous) crimes of Pol Pot, thus providing a retrospective justification for (mostly unstudied) US crimes, and an ideological basis for further "humanitarian intervention" in the future -- the Pol Pot atrocities were explicitly used to justify US intervention in Central America in the '80s, leaving hundreds of thousands of corpses and endless destruction. In the interests of ideological reconstruction and laying the basis for future crimes, facts are simply irrelevant, and anyone who tries to suggest otherwise is targeted by a virulent stream of abuse. That runs pretty much across the spectrum, an instructive phenomenon. But one consequence is that no one can give a serious answer to the question you raise, because it is about US crimes."
As for the Cambodia issue, I think the US government's complicity in 'inadvertently' bringing the KR into power is a good precedent for what we're doing in the Middle East. (What I still can't understand is how the CIA could not have known that Lon Nol could not have held back the KR, while Sihuanouk understood the issue. The only possible explanation is that the CIA was blinded by knee-jerk anticommunism and would not tolerate Sihoanouk's interaction with them, even though they were are force that should not have been ignored, particularly when armed by the Chinese.)
> More importantly, however, is the fact that Chomsky often develops some very
> strong counter-arguments to US agit-spew.
So does Kevin Alfred Strom.
Yes, but the difference is that Chomsky is not an idiot (though zmag doesn't have as many nice big jpegs as Strom's site, so maybe they are just a bunch of silly commies).
In the end, Chomsky is more important then "wrong" or "right". Even if every position Chomsky takes is somehow "wrong" in the grand sceme of things, if you're going to disagree you should study Chomsky carefully, study the sources he quotes, then open your yap. (I would suggest that Osama bin Laden is another such source.)
As for being "blacklisted", that's OK, I'm not looking for a job in a trailer park right now (I'll keep my job on Wall Street, thank you).
-TD
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