I'm a big Chomsky fan, but we have to be aware of his limitations without accepting Shatz-type crap.
For better or for worse, Chomsky is most concerned with what's logical and what fits available empirical evidence, while avoiding a double standard (e.g., seeing Iraqi lives as worth less than U.S. lives). He's absolutely right and has shown again and again that the US foreign policy elite is criminal and that the lap-dogs of the official media are, well, lap-dogs. But the problem is that Chomsky doesn't seem to care about his own P.R. -- or that he mostly "preaches to the converted." This creates openings for the Shatzes and Walzers of the world.
I'm begining to suspect that Chomsky has Asperger's syndrome (borderline autism) like my son. At least I'll my son that, because I want him to see that someone with AS can be very successful and help the world in a gigantic way. I'm still feeling bad about using Bill Gates as an example of that. (However, it did get Guthrie to behave.)
------------------------
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Louis Proyect [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Wednesday, October 09, 2002 8:15 AM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED];
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: [PEN-L:31158] 8 ways to smear Chomsky
>
>
> CounterPunch, October 9, 2002
>
> Eight Ways to Smear Noam Chomsky
> by LAWRENCE MCGUIRE
>
> I just read a recent article in The Nation, 'The Left and
> 9/11' (September
> 23, 2002) by Adam Shatz, which purports to be a measured
> analysis of the
> differences between the so-called 'Left' in the United States
> over the war
> in Afghanistan and in Iraq. In reality the article is a clever
> misrepresentation of Chomsky, and of others who share his
> view of U.S.
> foreign policy.
>
> Just as there is more than one way to skin a cat, there is
> more than one
> way to smear Chomsky. I counted eight in Shatz's article.
>
> 1. Accuse him of being 'anti-American':
>
> "The MIT linguist and prolific essayist Noam Chomsky has emerged as a
> favorite target of those keen on exposing the left's
> anti-Americanism."
>
> "While Falk [unlike Chomsky] did not evaluate the war through the
> distorting prism of anti-Americanism,"
>
> I'll point out the obvious: Noam Chomsky is American, so how
> can he be
> against himself? For that matter I am American and I've never
> read anything
> Chomsky wrote that was anti-me. If Shatz means that Chomsky
> consistently
> opposes the foreign policy of the United States Government, then why
> doesn't he say it? The phrase 'the distorting prism of
> anti-Americanism'
> has no political meaning. It is the responsibility of any
> citizen of a
> democracy to oppose the policy of their government if they
> think it is
> illegal, immoral, or both.
>
> 2. Accuse Chomsky of being unsympathetic to the victims of
> the September
> 11th atrocities:
>
> "Although Chomsky denounced the attacks, emphasizing that
> "nothing can
> justify such crimes," he seemed irritable in the interviews
> he gave just
> after September 11, as if he couldn't quite connect to the emotional
> reality of American suffering. He wasted little time on the attacks
> themselves before launching into a wooden recitation of
> atrocities carried
> out by the American government and its allies."
> "The problem was not so much Chomsky's opposition to US
> retaliation as the
> weirdly dispassionate tone of his reaction to the carnage at
> Ground Zero,
> but, as Todd Gitlin points out, "in an interview undertaken
> just after
> September 11, the tone was the position."
>
> This reminds me of King Lear's rage when Cordelia doesn't
> express her love
> in the proper way, while his other daughters Regan and
> Goneril do so with
> hypocritical effusions of false affection. As Kent says in
> response 'Nor
> are those empty hearted whose low sounds reverb no hollowness'.
>
> Since when, in any serious assessment of a person's political
> position, do
> you judge a person according to how you perceive their tone
> rather than by
> the words they speak? I wonder what would have satisfied
> Shatz and Gitlin?
> For Chomsky to break down crying when talking about September
> 11th? By what
> almighty right do they judge any person's emotional response
> to a human
> catastrophe?
>
> 3. Accuse, by implication, Chomsky and others of actually
> being happy (the
> code word here is 'glee') that 3,000 people were killed in a
> terrorist
> attack on September 11th. Shatz is more careful here. He repeats an
> assertion of Michael Walzer, editor of Dissent, about certain unnamed
> people who felt 'glee' over the attacks, then he uses the
> word as if people
> had actually felt 'glee', then he tells us that Micahel
> Walzer's focus of
> attack is Chomsky.
>
> In "Can There Be a Decent Left?", an essay in the spring
> Dissent, Michael
> Walzer--who lent his signature to "What We're Fighting For," a prowar
> manifesto sponsored by the center-right Institute for American
> Values--accused the antiwar left of expressing "barely
> concealed glee that
> the imperial state had finally gotten what it deserved."
> (When I asked him
> to say whom he had in mind, he said: "I'm not going to do
> that. Virtually
> everyone who read it knew exactly what I was talking about.")
>
> Unlike most Americans, leftists didn't have to ask the
> question "Why do
> they hate us?"--and not because of any glee that the chickens
> had come home
> to roost.
>
> At Dissent's first editorial board meeting after the attacks,
> the liveliest
> topic of conversation was reportedly Chomsky, whom Walzer
> appears to regard
> as an even greater menace to society than Osama himself.
>
> This is the classic sneaky attack by innuendo. If Shatz wants
> to repeat
> such slanderous accusations about Noam Chomsky then he should
> have the
> courage to do so openly.
>
> full: http://www.counterpunch.org/mcguire1009.html
>
>
> Louis Proyect
> www.marxmail.org
>
>
