Apropos of Chomsky, Andrew Sullivan pointed his readers to this piece by Antichomskyite. My response to Sullivan follows.
Thanks for the links. I agree that there are strong arguments against many of Chomsky’s theses (though “antichomskyite” makes a hash of many of them – see below), but the problem that you face is that by replying ad hominem you appear to concede (or at least to seek to avoid) the issue on the table. When Chomsky (as many others) refers to Nuremberg, what he is citing is the powerful and unequivocal argument against pre-emptive war made by the American prosecutors. I can’t believe that you don’t know this. Go ahead, shoot the messenger, rant against Chomsky if you like (though calling his quiet responses to Maher a “diatribe” is a real stretch), but the moral and legal question remains.
Geoff
PS Oh yes, antichomskyite.
How am I to make sense of a strawman like:
Apparently, we are to believe that the Soviet Union was the single most humane empire ever to exist in world history and, as soon as its subjects began to express minor disagreement with their political situation, it happily encouraged their independence and then allowed to go free like children at last taking their first, awkward steps away from their parents.
This has to qualify as one of the most obscenely immoral distortions of history I have ever read.
when only a few paragraphs earlier he quotes Chomsky as saying:
The Cold War provided that too. No matter how outlandish the idea that the Soviet Union and its tentacles were strangling the West, the “Evil Empire” was in fact evil, was an empire and was brutal. Each superpower controlled its primary enemy — its own population — by terrifying it with the (quite real) crimes of the other.
In crucial respects, then, the Cold War was a kind of tacit arrangement between the Soviet Union and the United States under which the US conducted its wars against the Third World and controlled its allies in Europe, while the Soviet rulers kept an iron grip on their own internal empire and their satellites in Eastern Europe — each side using the other to justify repression and violence in its own domains.
In fact Chomsky nowhere claims the Soviet Union was “humane”.
Later antichomskyite writes:
At least Chomsky does not attempt to parrot the propaganda line that the CIA overthrew Allende
Propaganda line? Well, as the CIA’s own documents indicate, the CIA worked assiduously but unsuccessfully to do just that. In fact Chomsky’s position on Chile corresponds closely to declassified analyses.
Look: Chomsky is a mecurial character. He has said some outrageous things; he’s also supplied some useful contrarian alternatives to self-justifying groupthink. In addition, Maher was right to have him on the show. Hell, he even had Ann Coulter on the other week. Arguing for the silencing of differing points of view is irrational and un-American.