Top 20 US Progressives: Noam Chomsky
Theorist.
By Jonathan Derbyshire Published 11 January 2012
When, in the immediate aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks, Christopher Hitchens began filing for divorce from the left (or from a section of it, at any rate), he would frequently use "Noam Chomsky" as a shorthand for all that he wanted to leave behind. In Hitchens's view, Chomsky was typical of a certain kind of leftist who saw, in the carnage, not a "hinge event" in world history, but rather the sorry confirmation of a "pre-existing world-view" - one in which American perfidy (and worse) is the salient geopolitical reality.
In a piece written the day after Mohamed Atta and his colleagues did their worst, Chomsky acknowledged that the attacks in New York and Washington, DC were "major atrocities" but insisted that, in scale, they did not "reach the level" of the toll exacted by the US attack on the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan in 1998, authorised by President Bill Clinton while he was mired in the Monica Lewinsky affair. Leaving aside the question of how one might compute the "collateral" casualties of such an attack, Hitchens asked whether one must not also take "intention and motive" into account. However wicked and sordidly political, Clinton's aim, he said, had not been "directly homicidal" in the way al-Qaeda's was. Chomsky ignored the question in his response to Hitchens: fine-grained casuistical analysis has never interested him. After all, his intellectual and academic reputation was made not in moral or political philosophy, but in the field of theoretical linguistics. Some commentators have tried to draw a direct link between his scientific and his political work, but Chomsky denies that there is any connection. The obligations that fell on him as a professional academic, he believes, were just those that any responsible intellectual ought to meet. Principal among them was "unmasking ideology [and] exposing the injustice and repression that exists in every society".
This was an especially onerous responsibility in the United States, which - as Chomsky put it in an essay written at the height of the Vietnam war - was, in his view, "the most aggressive country in the world, the greatest threat to world peace, and without parallel as a source of violence". Though the shape and contours of American power have changed in the four decades since, Chomsky's outlook has remained the same. What's more - and like his late erstwhile comrade Hitchens, in fact - he has never shown much interest in the kinds of distributional questions that preoccupy many political philosophers in the United States. He has pronounced on the global financial and economic crisis, but more by reflex than anything else. And even though he endorsed the Occupy Wall Street movement, one was much more likely to hear the names Slavoj Žižek or David Harvey in Zuccotti Park than Noam Chomsky. l
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Informative piece, Mr. Woods. Schweizer is an absolute idiot but much of the book is irrefutable.
I often wonder who I can't stand more, conservatives or liberals. It really is a difficult one as both sides are hypocrites, they are both manipulative and both lie about the other side. I suppose that's how libertarianism was born.
This article shows how perception of what a terrorist attack is can be skewed, america/Isreal bombing and killing thousands of civilians in the name of freedom/oppression is not terrorism ? but the attack on the world trade centre is ? yet both killed thousands of civilians ? you put your loved ones in Palestine/Iraq/afganistan let a plane drop a bomb on them because terrorists are belived to be nearby ? both are acts of terrorism anf that is all Chomsky is saying and much more.
Yeah, that's who Noam Chomsky is. Some old guy who had an exchange with the great Christopher Hitchens once.
Laughable.
The above piece is written by a person who follows Hitchens. And who does not know nothing about the work of Prof. Chomsky. Chomsky nailed Hitchens on many issues which Hitchens could not denied but rather built a huge fabrications against Chomsky. The person who writes this piece has ignored all the facts and debates. I do not think this person understands the term moral. It's too easy to read a piece like this.
If you really want to know about Chomsky then read him. Many have tried to have a pop at Chomsky, but really they are just jealous ego centric middle class 'intellectuals'. They care more about their ego then Truth. But, as Orwell said, the more educated you are the more brainwashed you are.
Chomsky is consistent and always cites sources of his info - which really annoys his critics.
BTW Chomsky is a anarchist-communist. The problem is the State and not just Capitalism.
Axmed: I presume from your post that English isn't your first language as much of it is semantic drivel. Please give examples of Hitchens being 'nailed' by Chomsky. More importantly, please give examples of these 'fabrications' Hitchens created against Chomsky
From "Do As I Say, Not As I Do: Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy:" ( A very good book)
One of the most persistent themes in Noam Chomsky's work has been class warfare. The iconic MIT linguist and left-wing activist frequently has lashed out against the "massive use of tax havens to shift the burden to the general population and away from the rich," and criticized the concentration of wealth in "trusts" by the wealthiest 1%. He says the U.S. tax code is rigged with "complicated devices for ensuring that the poor -- like 80% of the population -- pay off the rich."
But trusts can't be all bad. After all, Chomsky, with a net worth north of US$2-million, decided to create one for himself. A few years back he went to Boston's venerable white-shoe law firm, Palmer and Dodge, and, with the help of a tax attorney specializing in "income-tax planning," set up an irrevocable trust to protect his assets from Uncle Sam. He named his tax attorney (every socialist radical needs one!) and a daughter as trustees. To the Diane Chomsky Irrevocable Trust (named for another daughter) he has assigned the copyright of several of his books, including multiple international editions.
Chomsky favours massive income redistribution -- just not the redistribution of his income. No reason to let radical politics get in the way of sound estate planning.
When I challenged Chomsky about his trust, he suddenly started to sound very bourgeois: "I don't apologize for putting aside money for my children and grandchildren," he wrote in one e-mail. Chomsky offered no explanation for why he condemns others who are equally proud of their provision for their children and who try to protect their assets from Uncle Sam. (However, Chomsky did say that his tax shelter is OK because he and his family are "trying to help suffering people.")
Indeed, Chomsky is rich precisely because he has been such an enormously successful capitalist. Despite his anti-profit rhetoric, like any other corporate capitalist Chomsky has turned himself into a brand name. As John Lloyd recently put it in the lefty New Statesman, Chomsky is among those "open to being "commodified" -- that is, to being simply one of the many wares of a capitalist media market place, in a way that the badly paid and overworked writers and journalists for the revolutionary parties could rarely be."
Chomsky's business works something like this. He gives speeches on college campuses around the country at US$12,000 a pop, often dozens of times a year.
Can't go and hear him in person? No problem: You can go online and download clips from earlier speeches -- for a fee. You can hear Chomsky talk for one minute about "Property Rights"; it will cost you US79 cents. You can also buy a CD with clips from previous speeches for US$12.99.
But books are Chomsky's mainstay, and on the international market he has become a publishing phenomenon. The Chomsky brand means instant sales. As publicist Dana O'Hare of Pluto Press explains: "All we have to do is put Chomsky's name on a book and it sells out immediately!"
Putting his name on a book should not be confused with writing a book because his most recent volumes are mainly transcriptions of speeches, or interviews that he has conducted over the years, put between covers and sold to the general public. You might call it multi-level marketing for radicals. Chomsky has admitted as much: "If you look at the things I write -- articles for Z Magazine, or books for South End Press, or whatever -- they are mostly based on talks and meetings and that kind of thing. But I'm kind of a parasite. I mean, I'm living off the activism of others. I'm happy to do it."
Chomsky's marketing efforts shortly after Sept. 11 give new meaning to the term "war profiteer." In the days after the tragedy, he raised his speaking fee from US$9,000 to US$12,000 because he was suddenly in greater demand. He also cashed in by producing another instant book. Seven Stories Press, a small publisher, pulled together interviews conducted via e-mail that Chomsky gave in the three weeks following the attack on the Twin Towers and rushed the book to press. His controversial views were hot, particularly overseas. By early December 2001, the publisher had sold the foreign rights in 19 different languages. The book made the best-seller list in the United States, Canada, Germany, India, Italy, Japan and New Zealand. It is safe to assume that he netted hundreds of thousands of dollars from this book alone.
Over the years, Chomsky has been particularly critical of private property rights, which he considers simply a tool of the rich, of no benefit to ordinary people. "When property rights are granted to power and privilege, it can be expected to be harmful to most," Chomsky wrote on a discussion board for the Washington Post. Intellectual property rights are equally despicable, apparently. According to Chomsky, for example, drug companies who have spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing drugs shouldn't have ownership rights to patents. Intellectual property rights, he argues, "have to do with protectionism."
Protectionism is a bad thing -- especially when it relates to other people.
But when it comes to Chomsky's own published work, this advocate of open intellectual property suddenly becomes very selfish. It would not be advisable to download the audio from one of his speeches without paying the fee, warns his record company, Alternative Tentacles. (Did Andrei Sakharov have a licensing agreement with a record company?) And when it comes to his articles, you'd better keep your hands off. Go to the official Noam Chomsky Web site (www.chomsky.info) and the warning is clear: "Material on this site is copyrighted by Noam Chomsky and/or Noam Chomsky and his collaborators. No material on this site may be reprinted or posted on other web sites without written permission." (However, the Web site does give you the opportunity to "sublicense" the material if you are interested.)
Radicals used to think of their ideas as weapons; Chomsky sees them as a licensing opportunity.
Chomsky has even gone the extra mile to protect the copyright to some of his material by transferring ownership to his children. Profits from those works will thus be taxed at his children's lower rate. He also thereby extends the length of time that the family is able to hold onto the copyright and protect his intellectual assets.
In October, 2002, radicals gathered in Philadelphia for a benefit entitled "Noam Chomsky: Media and Democracy." Sponsored by the Greater Philadelphia Democratic Left, for a fee of US$15 you could attend the speech and hear the great man ruminate on the evils of capitalism. For another US$35, you could attend a post-talk reception and he would speak directly with you.
During the speech, Chomsky told the assembled crowd, "A democracy requires a free, independent, and inquiring media." After the speech, Deborah Bolling, a writer for the lefty Philadelphia City Paper, tried to get an interview with Chomsky. She was turned away. To talk to Chomsky, she was told, this "free, independent, and inquiring" reporter needed to pay US$35 to get into the private reception.
Corporate America is one of Chomsky's demons. It's hard to find anything positive he might say about American business. He paints an ominous vision of America suffering under the "unaccountable and deadly rule of corporations." He has called corporations "private tyrannies" and declared that they are "just as totalitarian as Bolshevism and fascism." Capitalism, in his words, is a "grotesque catastrophe."
But a funny thing happened on the way to the retirement portfolio.
Chomsky, for all of his moral dudgeon against American corporations, finds that they make a pretty good investment. When he made investment decisions for his retirement plan at MIT, he chose not to go with a money market fund or even a government bond fund. Instead, he threw the money into blue chips and invested in the TIAA-CREF stock fund. A look at the stock fund portfolio quickly reveals that it invests in all sorts of businesses that Chomsky says he finds abhorrent: oil companies, military contractors, pharmaceuticals, you name it.
When I asked Chomsky about his investment portfolio, he reverted to a "what else can I do?" defence: "Should I live in a cabin in Montana?" he asked. It was a clever rhetorical dodge. Chomsky was declaring that there is simply no way to avoid getting involved in the stock market short of complete withdrawal from the capitalist system. He certainly knows better. There are many alternative funds these days that allow you to invest your money in "green" or "socially responsible" enterprises.
They just don't yield the maximum available return.
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