Steve Diamond <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Jim, it is certainly, I will agree, Chomsky's obsession to use an apparently
objective critique of the "western media" to make his political arguments,This is perverse, Steve. When C has a political point to make, he makes it directly. Why not take him at his word when he says that his subject is media and scholarly bias,a s it often (but not always) is?
but to ignore the politics behind this approach is to reward form over
substance.And the politics behind this supposed approach is what, exactly?
As far as madness goes, what is one to say about Thiago's closing remark:
"He [Chomsky] has been right all along [about the U.S.] - whatever the facts
may have been in Cambodia."
Facts, unfortunately for Chomsky, are stubborn things.
I wish you'd drop this canard. C is not a supporter of the KR or an apologist for the Killing Fields. Decades ago, back before the extent of the massacres were well known, he used the example of the media and scholarly response to initial reports coming out of Cambodia as one illustration among many of the tendency of the western press and academic establishment to go a bananas over nefarious massacres even on shabby evidence, while shrugging over benign ones like that in East Timor. As it happens, C was right about the shabbiness of the evidence at the time. He withheld judgment on the facts until they were better known, quite properly. He expressly said that the truth might be (as indeed it was) as bad as the p! ropagandists claimed. The people who said that there was a genocidal slaughter going on were right, but it was no credit to them--even a stopped clock is right twice a day. C''s main point, that nefarious massacres are played up while benign ones are played down, was and is valid. The current attitude towards Saddam Hussein, now that he's no longer our son of a bitch, illustrates this vividly.jks
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