Just found this op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal and agree with the author wholeheartedly. I think he explains the problem of both the American supremacy and of Republican dominance within that supremacy.

This one is dedicated to Herofix but I think many of you will enjoy it!

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

Ah, yes, the everybody's jealous theory.

The author, being British, must be aware that his own country has a (very admirable) trait of lauding her own dissidents as well.  So the US is not the only country where those who hold people in the ruling class accountable for their actions are respected by some people abroad and some of their own compatriots at home.

And another thing that rings very false to me in this article is the use of 'rage' when speaking about Chomsky's writing.  Rage is the last thing I get from it.  And of course another thing that rings false is the accusation that Chomsky 'blames the US for everything' which is just not factually true.  But you know that, and you know I know that.

I'm afraid that last paragraph sadly resembles a pile of muddled nonsense. And nobody whose primary interest was self-promotion would ever dress like Noam Chomsky.

Did Theodore Donald "Donny" Kerabatsos pop in yesterday???

Oh never mind...

Do you completely disregard the "jealousy theory," Andrew? And Jamie, your argument isn't terribly convincing -- a muddled last paragraph and Chomsky's non-dapper wardrobe? What about some of the substance of the article? Nothing hit the mark? I count on you two guys for intellectual honesty and these dismissals are a little . Cut me some slack here.

No, Chomsky doesn't blame the US for everything. Maybe Andrew has a point there since all generalizations are untrue. To be fair, the author should have included Israel. Seriously, I'm hard pressed to come up with any Chomsky off the cuff praise for America of the past hundred years. Geez, I listen to his talks whenever he's on Pacifica Radio, CSPAN or any talk show. I was reading his books back when they were hard to find in the USA in the early 80s. I don't think it's unfair to say that in the Chomsky world view, the two worst international culprits are: 1. the USA, land of his birth and 2. Israel, home to half the world's population of those sharing his heritage.

Not given to rage? There is quiet rage you know. I think it's an apt description. You cannot possibly see the US in a grim and sinister way without being ruffled to your core. You cannot possibly be a longtime Cassandra without experiencing some level of frustration and yes, rage, even if it's quiet, controlled professorial rage. You'd have to be something less than human or something less than genuine if you didn't react angrily to a state you describe as an evil hegemony.

My point is that there's an out of whack asymmetry to Noam's lecture circuit message. When you're buried up to your eyeballs under an ever-growing stack of one set of grievances, it's impossible to see past that pile to any other variables. That view is definitionally false. It's like describing how electricity works by focusing only on your light switch, the lighting fixture and the bulb but ignoring the wiring within the wall, the wiring leading to power poles outside, the power station nearby and the entire power grid in the city. Your knowledge may be all true and accurate but the overall outlook is limited and false.

To me, a former leftist who once revered Noam Chomsky as a spokesman who was sharp, educated, and non-hysterical in his presentation, his obvious shortcomings have become crystal clear as I listen to him ramble on with the same tired play book of gripes. I looked to him for the most in depth intellectual explanations for why I should distrust everything done by my country's miltary industrial complex.  There was the extra added cachet of near obscurity back in those days too. (I learned about Chomsky from Gore Vidal)

Lastly, I've never take you for one given to 'hero worship,' Herofix! I'd be surprised if you didn't agree with at least some of the points in that article. You don't even have to confide those points to me. I know you know. Furthermore, I'll bet you felt slightly distanced from that crowd of sycophants at the Noam Chomsky lecture you attended. (Not sure if you did attend, now that I think about it; but had you gone, I know it would be true.) Don't forget -- the writer of the article is a philosopher which should offer some degree of credibility.

Susan

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

Ah, The Wall Street Journal ----that well-known fountainhead of truth....

I find it very suggestive that the Journal would go out of its way to criticise Mr. Chomsky, who whatever else he is, is simply a strongly-willed private citizen, while ignoring, in the same context, organized enormities such those perpetrated by the Bush regime ---which, at last count, is responsible for well over 100,000 deaths, the re-writing of the Geneva conventions, denial of Habeas Corpus to prisoners, and torture.  But we all have our priorities.

 "There are no hereditary kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution."--US District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in her ruling against the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program

"My French is poor, but my heart is rich.  I love France- the art-making, art-loving, and art-supporting people of France." -David Lynch

That's true Gavin, about the WSJournal.  It is no Amy Goodman website, that is for sure. 

Anyway Chomsky is the " Controlled Asset of the New World Order" and covers for their offenses. Please educate yourself to the real TRUTH. Chomsky has kept the gullible left in check since the 60.s !!

 http://educate-yourself.org/cn/noamchomskygatekepper26sep05.shtml

Hold on just a minute!  IS THAT GAVIN RESPONDING TO A POST?!?!

What a milestone!

Susan 

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

Oh Gazette!!  Damn you!

A half an hour's detailed response wiped out by an automatic logout.

Oh, poor Andrew!  Did you experience the accidental highlighting and accidental hitting of any key and then --

POOF! 

Gawd, I hate when that happens.  It's a good idea to "preview" along the way, so at least you have some of your original thoughts to fall back on.

And I was so looking forward to a half-hour's worth of Andrew rethinking the article and finding himself agreeing with me!  Oh well, I can be satisfied with that knowledge even if the actual words are lost in cyber-space.

Susan 

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

No, I just got timed out.  Must have taken too long writing it.  I should really write my long posts in Word first.

It was so witty, informative and refreshing a post as well.  I will try to recreate the magic sometime this weekend, but I can't even bear thinking about doing it all over again now.

When I write something long, I try to remember to Select All and Copy before clicking Post Message.  I usually still forget, but remembering to has saved me some heartache once or twice...

Do we all have the same problem with highlighting though?  Mine is hypersensitive.  If I try to highlight-delete one or two letters, the thingie will still do a whole sentence or paragraph.  Then, when I push delete, I will lose the whole sentence or paragraph.   Hey, I just discovered a new feature!

Cool!

Susan 

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

>>Nuart wrote:  "Don't forget -- the writer of the article is a philosopher which should offer some degree of credibility..."

Ahh yes, The Wall Street Journal ---that well-known organ for philosophical thought…..  No doubt people such as Tucker Carlson, David Brooks, and Charles Krauthammer regard it as such.  But while I’m sure that one can find certainly a philosophy expressed within The Wall Street Journal’s pages,  I doubt you’d find that The Wall Street Journal is accredited by the American Philosophical Society or any other such philosophical organizations.

“Suddenly, on December 24 1979, Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan and the electricity of war surged through Soviet society.  On January 22, the physicist Andrei Sakharov, en route to a seminar, was detained by the police and immediately exiled, without even a semblance of judicial process, to the closed city of Gorky for having, nearly alone in a nation of 270,000,000, protested the invasion of Afghanistan.…  The newspapers made it quite clear what the proper attitude toward Sakharov should be: a naïve scientist meddling in things he knew nothing about, led astray by his Jew wife, Elena Bonner.  He should consider himself lucky to be treated so humanely.  People who break ranks when the country is at war deserve harsher punishment than a comfortable apartment in a well-supplied city like Gorky…  (...) ....As a protest against the Soviet presence in Afghanistan, America, West Germany, and Japan would boycott the 1980 Olympics in Moscow…”

No doubt Mr. Sakharov, too, felt a certain "rage" about the various abuses in the USSR---but why then should that constitute any dimunition of his message or his logic?  (Actually, what most often comes through in Chomsky's speeches, at least to me, is not "rage", in any sense, but rather his abundant sense of humor-- though of course these laughs are perhaps not apparent to those on the receiving end.)

>>Roger Scruton wrote: "It is proof of Prof. Chomsky's success that his diatribes are distributed by his American publishers around the world, so as to end up in the hands of America's critics everywhere – Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez included."

 I don’t think Mr. Scruton need worry very much.  The various wrongs of America against Latin America would be known to Jugo Chavez even if there were not a Noam Chomsky to reveal them to him.  Mr. Chomsky could not influence Latin America any more than the colonial oppression of Latin America has taught him.

 Consider, too, the title of Roger Scruton's Wall Street Journal essay:  "If Only Chomsky Had Stuck to Syntax" ---as if there is any sort of contradiction between Chomsky’s work with linguistics and his political analysis.  Any reasonable study of Chomsky’s works, however, reveals them to form a complete whole, Chomsky’s view of US foreign policy having a direct origin in his studies of the development of language within the human mind.  Indeed, much of Chomsky’s political writing: his often hilarious analysis of The New York Times, his devastating study of Christian theologian Reinhold Neibhur, etc.,  is, in fact, linguistic in nature.

As John Lyons writes, in his study of Chomsky’s linguistic work for the series Modern Masters (1970):

In Chomsky’s essay “The Responsibility of Intellectuals”, published in 1968 in The Dissenting Academy, edited by Theodore Roszak,  Chomsky himself outlines what he believes are the standards and responsibilities of the intellectual in the social order, particularly with regard to American foreign policy and war atrocities ---incidentally explaining his own  rational impetus as he does so.

“Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions.  In the Western world, at least, they have the power that comes from political liberty, from access to information and freedom of expression.  For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us.  The responsibilities of intellectuals, then, are deeper than what [Dwight] Macdonald calls the ‘responsibilities of peoples’, given the unique privileges that intellectuals enjoy.

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

Curious to me is Gavin’s comparison of Chomsky to a Soviet dissident of all people. Topsy turvy, no ? Chomsky a 1960's and 70's anti capitalist intellectual and Soviet Socialist booster?

" American arch liberals and  leftists worshiped the Soviet Union as the salvation of the human race until Soviet implosion in the 1980s produced incontrovertible evidence of socialists’ brutal liquidation of tens of millions of dissidents, and of the near poverty of the entire population outside the ruling clique of Socialist Party members."      As Thomas E. Brewton puts it.

I guess that comparison is an example of Gavin's Chomskylike " humor " ?

I guess Chomsky and company have endured in Amerika the moral equivalent of what the Soviet dissidents suffered. No way. 

By now, this will to power is not so much cloaked in idealism as it is drowned in its fatuity.

http://www.chomsky.info/articles/19670223.htm

It's in there.

"Such intellectual contributions as these suggest the need for a correction to De Gaulle's remark, in his Memoirs, about the American "will to power, cloaking itself in idealism." By now, this will to power is not so much cloaked in idealism as it is drowned in fatuity. And academic intellectuals have made their unique contribution to this sorry picture."

Jordan .

Jordan .

>>”Curious to me is Gavin’s comparison of Chomsky to a Soviet dissident of all people. Topsy turvy, no ? Chomsky a 1960's and 70's anti capitalist intellectual and Soviet Socialist booster?”

I know that historical revisionism comes naturally to red-baiters……. but even you must realize that the best and most incisive criticism of the Soviet Union was penned by one who was both a socialist and an anarchist: namely George Orwell.  And, indeed, Chomsky is the one intellectual who I would cite as being the only equal to Orwell, both in terms of intellectual rigor and life-long committment, today.  Interestingly, George Orwell’s true name, which he forsook as being too “upper class”, was Eric Blair, and it is interesting to compare this earlier Blair with that later Blair, Tony Blair, whose labor party has fallen so far of late from the standards set by this earlier, and much better man, whose like is found so rarely today.

 "There are no hereditary kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution."--US District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in her ruling against the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program

"My French is poor, but my heart is rich.  I love France- the art-making, art-loving, and art-supporting people of France." -David Lynch

Gavin, have you read the Orwell biography that Christopher Hitchens wrote?

Susan 

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

 "There are no hereditary kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution."--US District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in her ruling against the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program

"My French is poor, but my heart is rich.  I love France- the art-making, art-loving, and art-supporting people of France." -David Lynch