Chomsky

solidgold
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Re: Chomsky

Post by solidgold » Sat Mar 31, 2018 5:51 am

kidoftheblackhole wrote:
Sat Mar 31, 2018 1:00 am
Then they do a quick change and reject Marx's definition of alienation (which, again, only applies to Young Marx to begin with) which involved the relationship to labor and production. Instead, they redefine it as a free form concept that encompasses virtually any passable definition of the word "alienation". This is an upfront rejection of materialism (not that the world is made of matter but rather that thinking is bound to the underlying reality).
This is right on the money; you certainly diagnosed an issue I couldn't quite put my finger on. Thanks for that.

Wish you could shadow me as my translator.

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blindpig
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Re: Chomsky

Post by blindpig » Tue Nov 13, 2018 4:22 pm

Chomsky's net worth is $5M.

just sayin'
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Chomsky

Post by chlamor » Tue Dec 25, 2018 3:01 pm

Chomsky Among “Progressives” Calling for US Military Involvement in Syria
Since most progressive figures would never publicly call for extending a U.S.-led military occupation, this petition shows that the war propaganda in Syria – particularly as it relates to the Kurds – has been highly effective in subverting the progressive anti-war left as it relates to the Syrian conflict.

by Whitney Webb

NEW YORK – On Monday, the New York Review of Books published an open letter and petition aimed at securing Western support for putting pressure on Turkey to end its occupation of Afrin, opposing further Turkish incursions into Syria, and backing autonomy for Rojava — the region of Northern Syria that has functioned autonomously since 2012 after its administration was taken over by U.S-allied Kurdish factions. Authored by the Emergency Committee for Rojava, it has since been signed by well-known progressive figures such as Noam Chomsky and Judith Butler in its bid to organize efforts for the fulfillment of the group’s demands.

Those demands are entirely focused on U.S. government policy. The petition asks the government to “impose economic and political sanctions on Turkey’s leadership, . . . embargo sales and delivery of weapons from NATO countries to Turkey, . . . insist upon Rojava’s representation in Syrian peace negotiations,” and – most paradoxically of all — “continue military support for the SDF [Syrian Democratic Forces],” the Kurdish-majority group that has acted as a U.S. proxy and has been accused of ethnic cleansing in its bid to construct a Kurdish ethnostate in Northern Syria.

The group’s first three demands are reasonable, in the sense of seeking to punish Turkey for its illegal invasion of Syrian territory. However, they are also rather fanciful, in the sense that the U.S. government is highly unlikely to stop weapons sales or to sanction Turkey, which it needs to court in order to prevent Ankara from pivoting towards Russia. Indeed, the U.S. — by refusing to support the Kurds during the battle for Afrin – made it clear that its “alliance” with Syrian Kurds is opportunistic and very much secondary to the U.S.’ relationship with Turkey.

The third demand is equally unlikely to come about, as Turkey has previously called the involvement of Syrian Kurds in peace talks unacceptable and has essentially issued an “it’s either us or them” ultimatum. In addition, past attempts to invite the Kurds to participate in the peace talks have been rejected by Western nations, including the United States, in order to please Turkey.

More recently, Kurds themselves refused to attend peace talks earlier this year over the Turkish occupation of Afrin in light of the lack of international response to that event. However, even prior to the occupation of Afrin, Syrian Kurds had declared they were “not bound” by any decisions made during Syrian peace talks, thereby weakening the peace process.

Yet, beyond the impractical nature of the petition’s first three demands, the final demand – that the U.S. continue military support for the Syrian Democratic Forces – is by far the most unusual, in the sense that well-known progressive figures, in signing this petition, are asking for the continued U.S. occupation of Syria and for increased military and financial support for the U.S. proxy forces, the SDF.

While most progressive figures, likely including those who signed the petition, would never publicly call for extending a U.S.-led military occupation, this petition shows that the war propaganda in Syria – particularly as it relates to the Kurds – has been highly effective in subverting the progressive anti-war left as it relates to the Syrian conflict.

Indeed, the Kurds in Syria have long been romanticized by Western media for having built “the world’s most progressive democracy” and for being trailblazers for gender equality and gay rights. While the Kurds have incorporated some progressive policies, the realities on the ground are more nuanced. Furthermore, the U.S.’ “support” for Rojava, which the petition seeks to extend, is hardly helping progressive or even Kurdish causes.

Distinguishing the Kurds and the SDF

Since the rise of Daesh (ISIS) in the Syrian conflict, Western media has placed the Kurds on a pedestal and has long treated them as the only “effective” fighters against the terrorist group. However, praising the local Kurdish militias for their fighting prowess has since given way to praising the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), even though the two could not be more different.

While the SDF does boast a significant portion of Kurds among its ranks, it is not expressly Kurdish and is an umbrella group of several militias. Though this itself is not concerning, the identities of many of its Arab fighters do give cause for concern. For instance, one of the groups operating under the SDF’s banner is the Deir Ezzor Military Council (DMC) — a group whose fighters were former members of Daesh and al-Nusra (Syria’s Al-Qaeda affiliate), who were “retrained” by U.S. forces in Northern Syria after surrendering to the SDF and U.S.-backed forces in Raqqa. In addition, tribes that were formerly allied with Daesh have joined forces with the SDF over the past year.

The loosely-knit coalition of Syrian rebel groups known as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), are armed, trained and backed by the U.S. The group is currently engaged in the early stages of battle in the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa, Syria.

The loosely-knit coalition of Syrian rebel groups, including Kurdish factions, known as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), are armed, trained and backed by the U.S. (SDF Photo)

In addition to hosting former members of Daesh and other terror organizations among its ranks, the SDF also regularly collaborates with Daesh in Northeastern Syria in targeting Syrian and Russian forces. Though the Kurds and Daesh are ostensible “enemies,” they have been shown to move amongst each other like allies, and Kurds have even worked alongside Daesh in coordination with U.S. special forces. Perhaps, then, it is little surprise that the SDF allowed Daesh terrorists to leave Raqqa peacefully last June as they took the city.

This collaboration with groups like Daesh, which the SDF has been praised in the West for fighting, has led to major defections of Kurds from the SDF — including SDF’s former spokesman Talal Silo, who accused the group of making secret deals with terrorists.

Along with their troubling ties and collaboration with Daesh, the SDF have participated in war crimes in Syria, in tandem with U.S. forces, and have been accused of ethnic cleansing in order to justify the establishment of a Kurdish ethnostate in Arab-majority areas of Northern Syria.

For instance, in the battle for Raqqa, the SDF — along with the U.S.-led coalition — committed war crimes, such as using chemical weapons and cutting off water supplies to Raqqa, which is still without water nearly a year after its “liberation.” The SDF also played a key role in the operation that left, by some estimates, as many as 8,000 dead and 160,000 more driven from their homes. The operation also left 80 percent of the city completely uninhabitable, and as many as 6,000 bodies are still believed to be buried in the rubble six months after the joint U.S-led coalition/SDF operation concluded.

Some journalists, such as Andrew Korybko, asserted that Raqqa’s civilian population was directly targeted because it was highly unlikely that any Arab, or non-Kurd for that matter, living in Arab-majority Raqqa would freely choose to live in a “Kurdish-dominated statelet” as a second-class citizen instead of choosing to have equal standing within the Syrian Arab Republic. In other words, the operation was, in part, targeting civilians who could resist Raqqa’s annexation by the U.S.-backed Kurds instead of Daesh forces, who were allowed to escape and were later re-assimilated into the SDF. The UN, however, has claimed that the SDF’s removal of Arab populations from Raqqa was done out of “military necessity” and thus did not constitute “ethnic cleansing.”

Have progressives thought through what they’re asking for?

Aside from the SDF, asking the U.S. to maintain its support of the group also means asking the U.S. to continue its illegal occupation of Syria. As MintPress has previously reported, the U.S.’ occupation of Syria is aimed at partitioning the country and preventing Syria’s Northeast from again coming under the control of the Syrian government.

Though partition has also been a goal of some U.S.-allied Kurdish nationalists, who have sought to use the division of Syria as a launching pad for an independent “Kurdistan,” the U.S. in recent months has made it clear that the partition of Northeastern Syria will not benefit the Kurds as much as Wahhabi Sunnis whose ideology is virtually indistinguishable from that of Daesh.

Early last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s new National Security Advisor John Bolton was working with U.S.-allied Middle Eastern nations to form an “Islamic coalition” that would replace the U.S. troops currently present in Northeastern Syria with an army composed of soldiers from nations like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Egypt. This coalition would be a permanent military “stabilizing force” in the region.

In addition to pushing for foreign Arab soldiers to police Rojava, the Trump administration has also sought Saudi commitment to funding the reconstruction of the region. Saudi Arabia — known for its deplorable treatment of religious and ethnic minorities, and funding terror groups like Daesh — and its Gulf allies are highly unlikely to support the Kurds’ nationalist aims as well as their “progressive” direct democracy and promotion of gender equality and gay rights. Indeed, Saudi Arabia is the complete opposite of the Western progressive view of the Kurds, as it is a dictatorial monarchy well known for its repression of women and minorities and execution of members of the LGBT community. However, it is also the country that the U.S. is seeking to give the leading role in governing the area of Syria it currently occupies.

In effect, by asking for the continuation of U.S. military presence in Syria in order to aid the SDF, the Emergency Committee for Rojava is actually undermining the “progressive” Kurds they seek to support — and aiding yet another U.S. government attempt at nation-building, which is likely to result in a Wahhabist enclave that would differ little from a Daesh-led “caliphate.”

The Emergency Committee for Rojava’s efforts come amid major attempts aimed at defending and extending the U.S.’ illegal involvement in Syria. However, this petition is aimed at Western progressives, the group that has historically opposed illegal U.S. military occupations and wars in the past. Given how it has enticed well-known members of the progressive community, the petition shows that the push for Western “humanitarian” intervention in Syria is stronger than ever.

https://www.mintpressnews.com/noam-chom ... ia/241129/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QoUYP7gU1I

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to Noam Chomsky, one of the world’s best-known dissidents. He’s institute professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught for more than 50 years. Juan González and I spoke to him live on Democracy Now! on Tuesday’s program. After the broadcast, we continued the conversation. I asked him to talk about the situation in Syria, as well as the broader Middle East.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Syria is a horrible catastrophe. The Assad regime is a moral disgrace. They’re carrying out horrendous acts, the Russians with them.

AMY GOODMAN: Why the Russians with them?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, pretty simple reason: Syria is their one ally in the whole region. Not a close ally, but they do have—their one Mediterranean base is in Syria. It’s the one country that’s more or less cooperated with them. And they don’t want to lose their one ally. It’s very ugly, but that’s what’s happening.

Meanwhile, there have been—it’s kind of like the North Korean case we were discussing. There have been possible opportunities to terminate the horrors. In 2012, there was an initiative from the Russians, which was not pursued, so we don’t know how serious it was, but it was a proposal to—for a negotiated settlement, in which Assad would be phased out, not immediately. You know, you can’t tell them, “We’re going to murder you. Please negotiate.” That’s not going to work. But some system in which, in the course of negotiations, he would be removed, and some kind of settlement would be made. The West would not accept it, not just the United States. France, England, the United States simply refused to even consider it. At the time, they believed they could overthrow Assad, so they didn’t want to do this, so the war went on. Could it have worked? You never know for sure. But it could have been pursued. Meanwhile, Qatar and Saudi Arabia are supporting jihadi groups, which are not all that different from ISIS. So you have a horror story on all sides. The Syrian people are being decimated.

AMY GOODMAN: And the U.S. now sending 400 more troops to Syria. But if the U.S. has a better relationship with Russia, could that change everything?

NOAM CHOMSKY: It could lead to some kind of accommodation in which a negotiated diplomatic settlement would be implemented, which would by no means be lovely, but it would at least cut down the level of violence, which is critical, because the country is simply being destroyed. It’s descending to suicide.

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/4/5/t ... is_a_moral

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blindpig
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Re: Chomsky

Post by blindpig » Tue Mar 05, 2019 12:29 pm

Noam Chomsky and the Compatible Left, Part I
Posted on March 4, 2019
Noam Chomsky recently took to the pages of The Intercept to give his blessing to the US military’s occupation of Syria, solidifying his support for the Pentagon after years of having done so in slightly more anguished terms. As far as the occupation, the only concession to what might once have been considered “Leftist” values is the MIT professor’s acknowledgement that the US is motivated by “power considerations” rather than “humanitarian objectives.” Today, the brief nod to realpolitik is what’s supposed to pass for a progressive anti-war stance.

The Intercept is really a natural fit for Chomsky to deliver this message. The nonagenarian professor has limited years left on earth, and when he passes, Glenn Greenwald and Pierre Omidyar’s website will probably become the new face of the permissible Left. That Chomsky lends his radical imprimatur to a US military occupation in its pages is a testament to what kind of a “Left” Chomsky has helped to create and is bequeathing to Greenwald and Omidyar.

To get an idea of the before-and-after picture, consider two recent pieces from Alfred McCoy, a historian who, like Chomsky, has produced radical scholarship for almost half a century. McCoy has done some of the best work on the CIA’s role in the global heroin trade, the relationship between foreign counterinsurgency and domestic policing, and the United States’ peerless role in developing and exporting new forms of torture. McCoy claims that while researching his landmark book The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, he came under attack by CIA mercenaries; after its publication, McCoy was monitored by the CIA and audited by the IRS, and ultimately had to move to Australia for 11 years in order to keep working. Here is part of a 2015 article on American hegemony, where McCoy explains how the US’s superpower status shares DNA with Nazi Germany and what effects this has had on the world:

So the United States, as the planet’s last superpower or, in Schmitt’s terms, its global sovereign, has in these years repeatedly ignored international law, following instead its own unwritten rules of the road for the exercise of world power. Just as Schmitt’s sovereign preferred to rule in a state of endless exception without a constitution for his Reich, so Washington is now well into the second decade of an endless War on Terror that seems the sum of its exceptions to international law: endless incarceration, extrajudicial killing, pervasive surveillance, drone strikes in defiance of national boundaries, torture on demand, and immunity for all of the above on the grounds of state secrecy. Yet these many American exceptions are just surface manifestations of the ever-expanding clandestine dimension of the American state. Created at the cost of more than a trillion dollars since 9/11, the purpose of this vast apparatus is to control a covert domain that is fast becoming the main arena for geopolitical contestation in the twenty-first century.

Much of the torture that became synonymous with the era of authoritarian rule in Asia and Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s seems to have originated in U.S. training programs that provided sophisticated techniques, up-to-date equipment, and moral legitimacy for the practice… CIA interrogation training became synonymous with serious human rights abuses, particularly in Iran, the Philippines, South Vietnam, Brazil, and Uruguay.

The previous segment is in line with the bulk of his scholarship. Now here are some conclusions from a 2017 Intercept interview with co-founder Jeremy Scahill, on the subject of America’s imperial decline and the rise of a multipolar world:

The British empire was relatively benign. Yes, it was a global power, there were many excesses, many incidents, one can go on, but when it was all over, they left the Westminster system of parliament, they left the global language, they left a global economy, they left a culture of sports, they created artifacts like the BBC.

So the US empire has been, and we’ve had our excesses, Vietnam, we could go on. Afghanistan. There are many problems with the U.S. exercise of its power but we have stood for human rights, the world has had 70 years of relative peace and lots of medium size wars but nothing like World War I and World War II… Our successor powers, China and Russia, are authoritarian regimes. Russia’s autocratic, China’s a former communist regime. They stand for none of these liberal principles.

So you’ll have the realpolitik exercise of power, all the downsides with none of the upsides, with none of the positive development. I mean we’ve stood for women’s rights [note: Russia passed women’s suffrage 3 years before the US], for gay rights [Russia legalized gay sex 10 years before the US], for human progress [Russia has a higher literacy rate than the US], for democracy [Russia extended the franchise universally 48 years before the US]. You know we’ve been flawed in efficacy, but we’ve stood for those principles and we have advanced them. So we have been, on the scale of empires, comparatively benign and beneficent. And I don’t think the succeeding powers are going to be that way.

Getting radical scholars—and scholars with radical reputations—to sound like they’re writing for Foreign Affairs magazine is very much The Intercept’s stock-in-trade. “The day after Trump threatened to militarily intervene in Venezuela,” writes Stansfield Smith, “Jeremy Scahill posted his interview with Eva Golinger on The Intercept. Venezuelan-American lawyer Eva Golinger, the author of The Chávez Code: Cracking US Intervention in Venezuela, is known as an outstanding defender of Venezuela during the Chavez era. She hardly goes as far in anti-Maduro criticisms as Scahill, who may fit what Shamus Cooke characterized as ‘the intellectually lazy ‘pox on both houses’ approach that has long-infected the U.S. left,’” according to Smith. “Yet within her valuable analysis, and precisely because of her valuable analysis, both in the interview and in her article Golinger makes some statements that require correction,” he wrote, enumerating 11 points where Golinger provided Washington-friendly misrepresentations of the Venezuelan government. She responded with the popular twofer of claiming lived experience and accusing her critic of hating women.

The billionaire-owned publication is just the latest loudest voice among the permissible “Left,” an ecosystem of which Chomsky is still the most recognizable face. Since the late 1960s, Chomsky has both reflected and shaped this milieu. A reverent 1997 book on the MIT professor written by Robert Barsky, which advertises itself as the closest thing we’ll get to a Chomky autobiography, contains a major section titled “the Milieu Chomsky Helped to Create,” attesting to the professor’s privileged place in this world. If one considers radical according to its true definition—solving a problem by striking at its root—then it is a world of dissenters who are less radical than ever.

The “Left” has taken quite a journey from the 1960s, the beginning of Chomsky’s career as a political commentator, to now. During that time, what people perceive as “the Left” transformed from something which was usually opposed to the status quo and genuinely radical into something more like what CIA official Cord Meyer called the “compatible left,” an agglomeration of “liberals and pseudo-intellectual status seekers who are easily influenced” by the elites that they purport to challenge, in the words of Doug Valentine. One of the primary purposes of “courting the compatible left,” according to Valentine, was to “court Socialists away from Communists” and into safe channels. Chomsky is a uniquely useful figure for demonstrating how these changes happened, although his more recent work owes a great debt to Barack Obama. The latter’s presidency was a powerful fulcrum for shifting the wider culture of left-liberalism—of which Chomsky is an avatar and gatekeeper—far to the right.

Both have played large roles in turning the Western “Left” into what it is today.


What Made Radicals Radical? What Made “the Left” Leftist?

But before delving more into what America’s most famous dissident is saying now, it’s necessary to get a general sense of the radical political ecosystem in the late 1960s—the point at which Chomsky began his ascent to national prominence. One of the reasons why revolution seemed not only possible but, to many, even inevitable was due to the diverse network of interests and progressive groups working towards similar goals. The radical coalition included a substantial left-liberal milieu of which Chomsky would eventually become the pre-eminent figurehead.

There are plenty of left-liberal activists from the era who can make for a useful case study in taking the temperature of this milieu, but Carl Oglesby might be the most illuminating. Oglesby was a labor activist who became a president of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Like Chomsky, he also published books and articles of political analysis, and like Chomsky, he identified as a non-Marxist Leftist. In his 1967 essay “Vietnamese Crucible, he called for activists to look beyond the “socialist radical, the corporatist conservative, and the welfare-state liberal” and seek answers from the traditions of “American democratic populism” and “the American libertarian right.”1 “Crucible” was a 170-page analysis of American capitalism and imperialism, particularly as it related to Vietnam and the Cold War, the “first major statement in book form from the ‘New Left.’” Unlike Chomsky, Oglesby’s eminence as a radical analyst and scholar was due to his status as a movement leader, not due to his elevation by ruling class institutions like the New York Review of Books and MIT.

Oglesby described himself as a “radical centrist” and a “centrist libertarian.” He delves into this in his memoirs, where he describes his political beliefs and says that they make him “a centrist rather than a typical New Leftist.”2 “Chomsky is regularly identified by the media as a prominent anarchist/libertarian communist/anarcho-syndicalist (pick as many as you like),” observes one of Chomsky’s many chroniclers. “More importantly he places himself within this political spectrum.”3 But it would be the height of idealism to put stock in the idea that people’s self-professed political identities carry much weight. There are all sorts of reasons why someone would fail to correctly situate themselves politically, beyond just being incorrect. In 2008, when the Bush brand was radioactive, Bill O’Reilly called himself an anarchist, too. Filmmaker John Milius describes himself as either an anarchist or a fascist depending on his mood. Tim Allen recently said that he’s not really a Trump supporter per se, more of “kind of an Anarchist.”

Yet despite Oglesby’s self-identification, his place in the struggle caused him to develop the sort of organically materialist thinking that comes from marrying objective study to revolutionary action. In the pages of his seminal 1976 book The Yankee and Cowboy War, which remains one of the best books on America’s ruling classes, he ended up sounding like a Communist:

The distinction between the East Coast monopolist and the Western tycoon entrepreneur is the main class-economic distinction set out by the Yankee/Cowboy perspective. It arises because one naturally looks for a class-economic basis for this apparent conflict at the summit of American power. That is because one must assume that parties without a class-economic base could not endure struggle at that height.

The whole thrust of the Yankee/Cowboy interpretation…posits a divided social-historical American order, conflict-wracked and dialectical rather than serene and hierarchical, in which results constantly elude every faction’s intentions because all conspire against each and each against all.

Also worth quoting is Oglesby’s dissection of a piece by liberal columnist Andrew St. George, who purports to explain Vietnam and Watergate through psycho-history and “inept empire” bumbling:

St. George knows or surmises that a conflict shoots through the CIA, through the presidency, through the entire executive system, and that effective presidential command and control are the more deeply in doubt the deeper one goes into the heart of the national defense and security establishments. Then why try to explain breakdowns, when they occur, as though they were the result of “turning away from reality, from empirical data, provable facts, rational truth, toward image-making and self-deception?” Why ignore the overwhelming differentials of policy and faction at play in these breakdowns? It is not Nixon himself, the Joint Chiefs, or the CIA whom Nixon, the Chiefs, and the CIA are deceiving, it is only ordinary people. Nixon knew he was secretly bombing Cambodia. The Joint Chiefs knew they were secretly bombing exempted targets in North Vietnam. The defense and security establishment knew that “peace with honor” was a slogan with a hatch in the bottom, and that the “peace mandate” Nixon would secure with it was prestructured for easy transmutation into a war mandate. Watergate cannot be reduced to a question of Nixon’s personal psychology. He was not deceiving himself, only others. He was not deceiving his class.

Whatever words he chose to describe himself, Oglesby’s analysis was moving towards something objectively Marxist, because his radical movement necessitated a Marxist analysis if there was any hope of understanding reality accurately, acting on it, and then changing it. Oglesby’s work is a useful lesson in how the nature of the era’s liberatory struggles forced even the “centrists” to act and think in a substantively radical way if they wanted to be effective instead of irrelevant.

The nature of the struggle meant that plenty of revolutionaries ended up following similar intellectual paths. Malcolm X began his adult life as a petty criminal before gaining what the Nation of Islam called knowledge of self and joining the conservative black nationalist NOI. But his revolutionary work was a liberation struggle and not an academic exercise, so as theory was tested and revised, X came to sound like a Communist. “Show me a capitalist and I’ll show you a bloodsucker,” he said in 1964 after returning from his final trip to Africa. He even delivered lessons in dialectical and historical materialism, like “Capitalism used to be like an eagle, but now it’s more like a vulture… It’s only a matter of time in my opinion before it will collapse completely.” He explained the base-superstructure relationship in terms that anyone could understand, analogizing capitalism surrendering white supremacy or evolving into socialism as akin to a chicken laying a duck egg: “A chicken just doesn’t have it in it to produce a duck egg. It can’t do it. […] The system in this country cannot produce freedom for the Afro-American. It is impossible, period.”4 He came to see race and class as interlinked, and explained that the annihilation of white supremacy would not come without the end of capitalism, as he said in a speech delivered 3 days before his murder: “It is incorrect to classify the revolt of the Negro as simply a racial conflict of black and white, or as a purely American problem. Rather, we are today seeing a global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter.”5 This was increasingly common. In response to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech, where King connected imperialism abroad to white supremacy at home, an FBI memorandum warned that King’s condemnation was “a direct parallel of the communist position on Vietnam.”6

The subtitle to Oglesby’s The Yankee and Cowboy War is Conspiracies from Dallas and Beyond. The book is a thoroughly researched and compellingly argued analysis of America’s two main ruling class power blocs, what he terms the “Yankees” of the Eastern establishment and the newer, more petty-bourgeois “Cowboys” of the South and Sun Belt economies. Like hundreds of other researchers, Oglesby believed that a coalition of reactionary interests orchestrated a coup in Dealey Plaza, and he posits numerous major events in then-recent history as battles in this war between the ruling blocs.

At that point in time, there was no overwhelming stigma associated with what is today termed “conspiracy theorism,” partially because there was so much evidence of covert action. Author and researcher Peter Dale Scott uses the term “deep politics” or “parapolitics” to describe the political forces that act under the surface of the everyday public political procedures. Oglesby elaborates:

We see the expressions and symptoms of clandestine America in a dozen places now—the FBI’s COINTELPRO scheme, the CIA’s Operation Chaos, the Pentagon’s Operation Garden Plot, the large-scale and generally successful attempts to destroy legitimate and essential dissent in which all the intelligence agencies participated, a campaign whose full scope and fury are still not revealed. We see it in the ruthlessness and indifference to world, as well as national, opinion with which the CIA contracted its skills out to ITT to destroy democracy’s last little chance in Chile. We see it as well, as this book argues, in the crime and cover-up of Dealey Plaza, the crime and cover-up of Watergate.

Clandestinism is not the usage of a handful of rogues, it is a formalized practice of an entire class in which a thousand hands spontaneously join. Conspiracy is the normal continuation of normal politics by normal means.

In 1991 there was a surge of interest in the JFK assassination due to Oliver Stone’s film JFK. A couple years later, Chomsky responded with the strange statement that “the left has just been torn to shreds because they see CIA conspiracies… secret governments [behind] the Kennedy assassination. This kind of stuff has just wiped out a large part of the left.” As is the case when he’s counseling compliance, Chomsky provides no evidence to support his claim.

The idea that theories not accepted by the mainstream media should be ignored is a recurrent theme with America’s greatest dissident. But during the 1960s and ‘70s, plenty of radicals and left-liberals engaged in good research and analysis of covert action and weren’t afraid to propose conclusions based on the evidence. Dalton Trumbo used the work of two major conspiracy researchers as the basis for a proto-JFK titled Executive Action, released in 1973. In a making-of documentary about the film, Executive Producer Edward Lewis and star Burt Lancaster discuss what brought them to the film. What they have to say illustrates both that it was even possible for a political radical to influence mainstream tastemakers, and that those mainstream figures were more willing and able to consider unsanctioned narratives about the world:

Lancaster: The subject matter, and the possibility of saying that a conspiracy was the result of the president’s death was a little shocking to me. It was something I didn’t want to believe.

Lewis: We then arranged a meeting for him, Trumbo, and myself. Dalton told him how he became converted to believing in the film, gave him the books. Burt, who’s a very serious actor, began reading.

Lancaster: And slowly I began to develop the feeling that there was a very strong possibility on the basis of the evidence and the things that I read, that Kennedy could very well have been killed by a conspiracy.

Mae Brussell, the era’s most prominent left-liberal anti-fascist conspiracy researcher, said that analysis of the Kennedy assassination had a major effect on opening up the field of radical analysis. “If Kennedy’s assassination had one purpose, it may have been to open up the field of muckraking and exposing, because from the time of World War I up through Kennedy’s death, so many, many crimes and murders were done and covered up. But this might have been the straw that broke the camel’s back.” Alternative theories about the Kennedy assassination were so common that the CIA invented the “conspiracy theory” slur in 1967, in document #1035-960, which proposed using “friendly elite contacts” and “propaganda assets” (their words) in the media to promote that idea that “charges of the critics are without serious foundation, and that further speculative discussion only plays into the hands of the opposition. Point out also that parts of the conspiracy talk appear to be deliberately generated by Communist propagandists. Urge them to use their influence to discourage unfounded and irresponsible speculation” (It’s all very similar language to that used by Cass Sunstein in his 2008 article on combating “conspiracy theories”). “In spite of the risks, assassination is sometimes the most efficient technique for eliminating opponents of the state,” writes Al Szymanski, “The major drawback of assassination is that should it ever be exposed as the work of the state or the capitalist class, a very serious legitimacy crisis could ensue.”7

Speaking about the assassination of JFK, artist/activist Dick Gregory said “If we would like to believe that the FBI would do all this viciousness and all of these things to an individual and would stop short of killing him, then we’re out of our minds. In America today, if we believe the CIA would deal with foreign assassinations and would not consider that at home, that’s like saying ‘the mafia runs crooked gambling tables in South America but honest ones in America.’ It just ain’t true.” Gregory saw no contradiction between theorizing about elite conspiracies based on an analysis of evidence and his wider activist work. He even ran for president in 1968 on a ticket with Mark Lane, author of the JFK conspiracy analysis Rush to Judgment, an act which earned Gregory a spot on Nixon’s enemies list. Gregory and Lane also co-authored a book analyzing the case for Federal involvement in the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. A jury in a civil trial later found in favor of a conspiracy in the King murder, to no ill-effect on the health or credibility of “the Left.”

This period revealed such conspiracies as the CIA’s wide-ranging involvement in creating front groups to influence, shape, and police the wider radical culture, a conspiracy theory confirmed and elaborated on in publications from Ramparts to Redstockings to The Berkeley Barb. The flagship publication of the underground press, Paul Krassner’s The Realist, was home to Mae Brussell’s column, so readers could see the case for a given conspiracy and derive their own conclusions. Great, substantive radical analysis of covert actions continued into the 1990s through publications like Phil Agee’s CovertAction Information Bulletin, a journal to which Chomsky has himself contributed.

The doctrine of plausible deniability means that we’ll never see an invoice from the Mafia to J. Edgar Hoover for the assassination of Martin Luther King, but since such, yes, conspiracies are part of how the ruling class maintains power, theorizing soundly on them is an essential element of understanding that power. Moreover, disavowing conspiracy analysis altogether opened up an enormous entry point for fascists and other creatures of the extreme-right to successfully vacuum up curious information-seekers.* Noam Chomsky does not explain why, if “conspiracy theories” had such a deleterious effect on “the Left,” the CIA went to such great lengths to stigmatize them. Despite the fact that he’s beaten the “coincidence theory” drums for decades, Chomsky occasionally shows that he really does understand that conspiracies are an essential part of ruling class praxis. He did so in 2017 when he blamed Donald Trump for masterminding false-flag terrorist attacks that hadn’t even happened (if it’s counterproductive to theorize about real events, surely it’s infinitely more foolish to peddle conspiracy theories about imaginary things, as Chomsky did here).

Many more ideas that Chomsky would help turn into “common knowledge” would have looked and sounded very strange to those engaged in the liberation struggles of that era.

Take his instruction for people to vote Democrat, a demand which has gotten so unwavering and tendentious that Chomsky now refuses to brook any argument (observe the note at the top). As the black liberation struggle intensified and moved from seeking legal redress to revolutionary change, movement leaders including Dr. King and Malcolm X identified white liberals and moderates as bigger obstacles to creating a truly democratic society. Malcolm X had for many years thought very little of the various American communist and socialist parties, mostly due to their rejection of the progressive aspects of black nationalism and their advocacy of “lesser evil” alliances with the Democratic Party. X compared taking guidance from groups with these shortcomings to drinking from a bottle with “the skull and crossbones on the label” in 1964.8 That same year, when he was asked about the Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater campaigns, X pointed out that

If Johnson had been running all by himself, he would not have been acceptable to anyone. The only thing that made him acceptable to the world was that the shrewd capitalists, the shrewd imperialists, knew that the only way people would run toward the fox would be if you showed them a wolf. So they created a ghastly alternative. And it had the whole world—including people who call themselves Marxists—hoping that Johnson would beat Goldwater.

I have to say this: Those who claim to be enemies of the system were on their hands and knees waiting for Johnson to get elected—because he is supposed to be a man of peace. And at that moment he had troops invading the Congo and South Vietnam!9

Author and journalist Robert Vernon echoed the sentiment a year later in a critique of a posthumous hatchet-job on Malcolm X written by liberals Bayard Rustin and Tom Kahn:

Note carefully whom Rustin and Kahn single out as enemies. Not the power structure, but the racist power structure, i.e. the Dixiecrats and other who oppose civil rights overtly. These certainly are enemies of black people, but they are not the only enemies we have in this God’s country.

One conspicuous enemy of black people not listed here is His Imperial Highness, Emperor of the Congo, South Vietnam, and the Dominican Republic, and Lord and Master of the Seven Seas and All Shores Adjacent Thereto. Eastland and Goldwater are not the ones who run this racist country, although they do have much to say. They could be considered the enemy only by liberals who are concerned exclusively with integration, civil right, and assimilation of middle-class Negroes into this best of all possible societies.10

https://lorenzoae.wordpress.com/2019/03 ... #more-1511

Continued
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Re: Chomsky

Post by blindpig » Tue Mar 05, 2019 12:34 pm

Chomsky and the Compatible Left Part 1, continued

When “lesser evilists” talk about a Democratic Party still substantively beholden to America’s working class, they’re describing the party of 50 years ago much more than they are the part of today. But even during this era, the idea that workers owed the Dems their votes, even only for strategic reasons, would have sounded very strange. In May 1968, a month after Dr. King’s assassination, movement leaders went ahead with the Poor Peoples’ March. Only a few years after Lyndon Johnson and a Democratic Congress passed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, King’s successor Ralph Abernathy declared “We have been taught by 200 and 5 years of bitter experience that we cannot trust the leadership of this nation. We cannot trust the elected representatives of Congress. We cannot trust the Administration, whether Republican or Democrat, to fulfill the promise of America to the disinherited.”11

James Kunen, an SDS activist who chronicled a year of rebellion at Columbia University in 1968, said “I will give [America] one more chance. But if the Democrats do not nominate [Eugene McCarthy], whom against my better judgment I love, or if they do nominate [McCarthy] and he turns out to be what I suspect but won’t admit he is, then I will have no recourse but to acknowledge that democracy is not only dead, but is also not about to be revived through democratic means.12 Another former activist recounts that “Most of us who have built the antiwar movement demonstration by demonstration, dorm meeting after dorm meeting, are so sickened by the corruption of American politics that we refuse to participate” in the 1968 election.

In their book on the Black Panther Party, Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr. describe what the Democratic Party did next: “At the disastrous Chicago convention in August 1968, the Democratic Party leadership had pushed through a prowar candidate and prowar platform against the will of the Democratic Party base and lost the presidency as a result. But since then, the Democratic Party leadership had increasingly called for an end to the Vietnam War.”13 Regardless, 5 years later, Mae Brussell said “I was a registered Democrat in those days [the Kennedy era]. I wouldn’t support the Democrats now because there is no ‘Democratic’ Party. There’s just one party in Washington and it’s called the Military-Industrial Party.”

During this time, radicals did not look primarily towards the Democratic Party for alliances and inspiration, but to the newly post-colonial world. All this writing and theorizing was in service of revolution, so those who had done so successfully were natural sources for guidance. “They say travel broadens your scope,” Malcolm X told a meeting of the Militant Labor Forum in 1964, “and recently I’ve had an opportunity to do a lot of it in the Middle East and Africa…I noticed that most of the countries that have recently emerged into independence have turned away from the so-called capitalistic system in the direction of socialism.”14 X called the Congo’s first president, Patrice Lumumba, “the greatest black man to ever walk the African continent.” He pointed to the cases of Algeria, Kenya, and China as examples of why armed struggle was the path to liberation. “In late 1964, Malcolm X sought to collaborate with Cuban-Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara in his upcoming secret campaign to assist the Lumumbists in Congo… Malcolm X was attempting to recruit African-American veterans into an ‘Afro-American Brigade’ that would have fought alongside the Cubans and the Congolese in 1965.”

One chronicler notes that in the case of the SDS “early international contacts with representatives of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, the Republic of North Vietnam, Cuba, European Communist parties, and assorted Third World guerrilla groups were important in forging an international perspective for the Movement in its later stages.” A New Republic columnist noted that “the most striking fact about the young radicals was the extent to which they identified with the Viet Cong.”15 Julius Lester, a spokesman for SNCC and speechwriter for Stokely Carmichael, wrote that “we are trying to follow in the footsteps of Lenin, Mao, and Fidel.” Eldridge Cleaver travelled to Cuba, Algeria, China, and North Korea; the Black Panther Party’s required reading list included Malcolm X, Mao, Frantz Fanon, and Che Guevara. “We must establish a true internationalism with other anticolonial peoples,” said George Jackson, “Only then can we expect to be able to seize the power that is rightfully ours, the power to control the circumstances of our day-to-day lives.” “Comrade Che is alive,” wrote Lester after the Argentine’s assassination, “on East 103rd street.”16

In contrast, Chomsky said “Guevara was of no interest to me; this was mindless romanticism, in my view.”17 Speaking of mindless romanticism, even then, as the eyes of Western revolutionaries were looking to Cuba, Africa, and Asia, the professor was pointing to the anarchist Erewhon of Spain circa-1936 as “the most convincing example” how to do revolution—namely, “a very sudden, spontaneous” revolution. In contrast to those post-colonial Third World states beginning the path to self-determination, Chomsky highlighted this lovely sounding place as “a nearly classic example” of non-violent revolution to be emulated, “which was successful at least for a year or two in developing a collective society with mass participation and a very high degree of egalitarianism and even economic success.” These comments were part of a debate with several thinkers including Hannah Arendt and Susan Sontag on the subject of non-violence. Unlike the others, Chomsky at least had positive things about the socialist societies being built in China, Vietnam, and Cuba (Arendt said “As to the Viet Cong terror, we cannot possibly agree with it, just as we couldn’t agree with the terror of the National Liberation Army in Algeria. People who did agree with this terror and were only against the French counter-terror, of course, were applying a double standard.” And as liberals know, hypocrisy is the worst crime of all, certainly worse than colonialism). But to have inveighed against these revolutions at this time would have been to lose all credibility in activist circles, which is why you’d be hard-pressed to find revolutionaries of the era who had much interest in the thoughts of Hannah Arendt.

Nevertheless, while making these concessions to prevailing radical sentiment, Chomsky muddied the water quite a bit by using the term “non-violence” interchangeably with the concept of “enjoying popular support” and then proposing that revolution would happen as it “did” in Spain, through “a possibility of spontaneous revolution” which would somehow restrict itself to using violence only in ways that were morally unimpeachable. If so few revolutions conform to the Chomsky template it may be because for the people of Algeria, the Congo, Cuba, and Vietnam, life under imperialism and colonialism was intolerable. They couldn’t wait for morally pure revolutions that erupted everywhere non-hierarchically because they were not making revolutions in heaven, where such ideal conditions are possible. They had to radically change this world under the constraints that existed in real life. Chomsky sometimes invokes anarchish-sounding ideas to compel compliance: when arguing that bombing Libya would be a “humanitarian intervention,” he said “it would be too strong to hold that [the burden of proof for believing the White House] can never be satisfied in principle—unless, of course, we regard nation-states in their current form as essentially holy.” This is a non-sequitor—it does not follow logically that one who doesn’t believe in Western “humanitarian interventions” “regards nation-states as holy,” but it does help Chomsky paint skeptics and anti-imperialists as people motivated by irrational worship of the nation-state.

Towards the end of the discussion, a man in the audience made the points that 1) the Cuban revolution was both violent and enjoyed widespread popular support, 2) the discussion did not touch on the major revolutionary factor in American life, namely black resistance, and 3) the discussion was mostly academic navel-gazing: “It seems to me that until you can begin to show—not in language and not in theory, but in action—that you can put an end to the war in Vietnam, and an end to American racism, you can’t condemn the violence of others who can’t wait for you.” In his hagiography of Chomsky, Robert Barsky muses that the professor’s work “is built upon particular precepts that are explained with regard to individual issues (Vietnam, Cambodia, the Middle East), but that it implicitly poses, without fully answering, questions… Chomsky will not tell us how to act.”18 “[T]he question about which I have least to say…is the question of the forms resistance should take,” the professor said in an article published in December 1967 titled “On Resistance.” Chomsky claimed to agree that the recent Pentagon protests had signaled a shift from “dissent to resistance,” but he was far less clear about what either term actually entailed, other than to say that “resistance requires careful thought, and I do not pretend to have very clear ideas about it.” In this area, Professor Chomsky has provided the most useful framework for understanding the difference between himself and the rest of the radical milieu. Speaking on the subject of scientific inquiry, Chomsky explains the dichotomy between problems and mysteries:

Our ignorance can be divided into problems and mysteries. When we face a problem, we may not know its solution, but we have insight, increasing knowledge, and an inkling of what we are looking for. When we face a mystery, however, we can only stare in wonder and bewilderment, not knowing what an explanation would even look like.

For countless activists, changing the world was a problem to be solved. For Chomsky, it was and remains a mystery to bedevil us. For some reason, of all the revolutionaries of the era, the man who would become the face of the Western “Left” was one of the few people who wasn’t grappling with the issue of how to actually make revolution.

And while Chomsky had few ideas about what activists should do, he also differed from his peer group in that he had lots of idea about what activists shouldn’t do. “Dissent and resistance are not alternatives but activities that should reinforce each other,” he said, adding that tax refusal and draft resistance were two acceptable options. However, other than these two techniques, it was still time to mostly talk (“I think it should be emphasized that the days of ‘patiently explain’ are far from over”) and not do anything too extreme (“The argument that resistance to the war should remain strictly nonviolent seems to me overwhelming”). The professor conceded that America’s war machine could theoretically be hampered by non-violent means like strikes and sabotage, but “I am skeptical, however, about their possible effectiveness.” Moreover, direct action would be too dangerous to the protestors (“Forcible repression would not, therefore, prove very difficult”) and the real danger would be to the engineers and graduate students whose Pentagon-funded research was benefiting the scientific community when it wasn’t exterminating the Vietnamese (“Therefore the long-range threat [of strikes and sabotage], whatever it proved to be, would be to American humanistic and scientific culture”). Finally, anti-war protestors had to be circumspect about applying too much pressure to the unconvinced: “We must not, I believe, thoughtlessly urge others to commit civil disobedience, and we must be careful not to construct situations in which young people will find themselves induced, perhaps in violation of their basic convictions, to commit civil disobedience.” So ultimately, after a couple thousand words ostensibly “on resistance,” one was left with a general sense that the war was bad and that only a couple tactics which would result in incarceration (not paying your taxes and evading the draft) were legitimate.

The New York Review of Books received a couple letters in response to “On Resistance,” to which Chomsky responded. One writer, William X, identified himself as a black revolutionary who had been forced underground, and he raised many good points about what kind of counsel the professor was offering the movement:

Chomsky’s article is unsatisfactory for reasons he himself admits to—he does not see where resistance is going and he does not believe that the organized draft resistance he discusses will be very effective. I feel the difficulty lies in a too narrow view of resistance: while Chomsky feels the Washington demonstrations and anti-war protest generally are aspects of (or only “symbolize”?) the move “from dissent to resistance,” all he writes about is one form of draft resistance and various forms of dissent. Are the current demonstrations a move from dissent to resistance or not?

I hope I have begun to make several points clear. The first is that the most effective anti-war activities are those which are the most disruptive, the most costly, those which most undermine the authority of the government domestically and in its war policy. In this light the ghetto rebellions must be seen as one of the activities which most affect the war — and therefore those elements of the white middle class opposed to the war must work to protect participants (whether or not they agree with the aims or means of those involved, I would say). The anti-war and anti-draft demonstrations are also in this category.

Because the above is so, the kind of specific draft resistance Chomsky and “The Resistance” advocate is the least effective—it causes men to volunteer for prison. […] I have met others, both black and white. I think we would agree that Chomsky’s notion of the alternatives—the military, prison, or exile—is too limited, constrained by lack of experience and by lack of a full comprehension of what is to be done. Our attitude is, prison or exile, yes, before the military—but the cost of trying to catch us will be theirs. We have work to do, or simply lives to live, and don’t intend to make their job easier or our lives more miserable.

William X seems to have had much clearer ideas on resistance and the wider movement, so we might wonder why The New York Review of Books didn’t offer him a column instead of the MIT professor. In response, Chomsky reiterated that draft resistance was the way to go—although when pressed about the shortcomings of this tactic, he said that “No one can evaluate the effectiveness of various tactics with any precision,” which makes one wonder what’s the point of the exercise. While the pseudonymous William X mentioned numerous concrete ways that direct action helped hobble the war machine even without shutting down the Pentagon, Chomsky said quite a lot of words without saying much of consequence (“resistance can be, and I feel quite generally is, undertaken as a political act”) before coming back around to his initial claim that draft resistance is the one good option, with the not-terribly-substantive rationale that it “raise[s] the general level of political and moral consciousness.” The professor did not engage with X’s point that the cause would be better serviced by radicals aiding their communities, rather than martyring themselves in prison, other than to adjure that “Punishment of resisters will deepen this disaffection [with the government], and may channel it in new directions.” He offered no evidence for this claim. As far as the black militancy giving the ruling class its greatest nightmares, Chomsky simply said “I have said nothing about ghetto rebellions. These may affect the war, in one or another way, but they are not acts undertaken with the end of bringing about American withdrawal, and must, I think, be considered in a totally different context.”

For what it’s worth, the government of North Vietnam and the Vietnamese National Liberation Front did not believe that black rebellion was of a “totally different context,” and they very much felt that these affected the war. According to a CIA cable from August 1967:

Neither the American bombing raids nor the spiraling food prices and rice shortages seriously affect the morale of the North Vietnamese. The race riots and the emerging “black power” movement in the United States, which the North Vietnamese government considers the beginnings of a popular revolution in the United States, have had a most salubrious effect on the North Vietnamese morale. The North Vietnamese government believes the Civil Rights disturbances will force the United States to divert money and manpower from its commitment in the Vietnam War.

The United States Government will be forced to divert large sums of money to educational, housing and social reforms to maintain the loyalty of the underprivileged elements and prevent them from joining the ranks of the Civil Rights dissidents. The North Vietnamese believe that the United States will have to maintain more troops in the United States to control the rioters.

In a diplomatic cable from the same month, North Vietnam’s Ambassador to China, Ngo Loan, articulated that North Vietnam was comfortable setting conditions for talks with the US because “world opinion was against the US and that negro riots in the US were part of this overall picture” (pp. 5-6). The cable continues:

He [Ambassador Ngo] also pointed out that the American position was weakened by the pressure of world opinion on the US and by the internal problems of the Americans, particularly the recent race riots which he considered had a direct connection with the resistance of the American negroes against the war in Vietnam. In this connection he recalled that the French did not REPEAT not lose Vietnam at Dien Bien Phu, but in Paris.

It’s not very hard to understand the connection: every National Guard and Airborne infantry unit tied down in America’s cities was a unit incapable of exterminating the Vietnamese. Uprisings and sabotage rooted in the anti-racist struggle, as happened on the aircraft carriers Kitty Hawk and Constellation, meant ships that couldn’t fire on Vietnam. One didn’t need access to classified signals intercepts to deduce this, either. In spring 1965, professor Robert Browne advocated for combining the black freedom and anti-war movements on the grounds that “the civil rights movement represents the moral conscience of America and therefore belongs in the vanguard of the Vietnam protest.”19 At the end of an April 1968 anti-war conference in New York, SNCC telegrammed a message to NLF representatives which said “our effort to destroy domestic colonization of black people is an aid to your struggle. Our two peoples have a common enemy and a common victory to win.”20 So on this crucial issue, Chomsky demonstrated an extraordinary myopia, at the very least. He was surely one of only very few thinkers whose advice during this era amounted to “talk” and “get arrested.”

In 1967, scholars and activists from around the world met in Stockholm, Sweden to hold a war crimes tribunal for American imperialism in Vietnam. The tribunal was named after the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, who organized the body and is often identified as Chomsky’s primary intellectual antecedent. SNCC’s Julius Lester provided a blistering criticism of the tribunal that should be read in full. Lester’s 1969 book Revolutionary Notes is a fascinating text to compare to Chomsky’s work from the same period because it comments on many of the same events and phenomena from the perspective of a black radical activist, rather than that of a white anti-Communist academic. So in December 1967, a month and a half after the March on the Pentagon, Chomsky took to numerous fora, including the his New York Review of Books article “On Resistance” and the debate with Arendt and Sontag, to parse the finer points of non-violence (and offer few conclusions other than “draft resistance is a good idea, most other things aren’t”). In contrast, Lester’s article on violence is a page and a half long, and begins with “Violence is neither good nor evil. It is. So if we are going to fight to humanize America, i.e. make revolution, let us not concern ourselves with moral arguments overt the necessity of violence.” Chomsky said that while dissent and resistance were complementary, he didn’t really have clear ideas about the latter—other than the fact that the only moral way to resist was to volunteer for prison. In his August 1967 essay “Protest and Resistance,” Lester wrote “To resist is not to go to jail when sentenced, but only when caught and surrounded… To resist is to make the President afraid to leave the White House because he will be spat upon wherever he goes to tell his lies.” (p. 4) Lester even wrote a brief article on American media which contains the nucleus of Herman and Chomsky’s critique enumerated in Manufacturing Consent: “the New York Times is more ‘liberal’ because it is opposed to the bombing of North Vietnam. The Daily News is conservative because it wants the bombing escalated. Yet the two newspapers agree that ‘communism’ should be stopped.”21

Lester’s article on the Russell Tribunal in particular is interesting for how it anticipates and critiques the phenomenon of which the MIT professor would be the exemplar; namely, the shift in radicalism’s center-of-gravity from activism and revolution to academia and journalism. It’s worth quoting at length, especially in the light of Chomsky’s contemporary ideas about the inherent power of information, his claim that public opinion constitutes a “superpower,” his support of “free speech absolutism,” and his revising the history of what actually ended the Vietnam War (“a group of women standing quietly”):

To accomplish its task, the Tribunal brought together some of the greatest intellectual minds of the West—Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Isaac Deutscher, as well as such European radicals as Lelio Basso, Italian Socialist; Vladimir Dedijer, former Yugoslav partisan; and Mehmet Ali Aybar, Turkish socialist.

These were the people who sat for eight days listening to the evidence that had been collected by the four investigating teams sent to North Vietnam, and the evidence was overwhelming. For the first time, it was proven conclusively that the U.S. was systematically bombing schools, churches, hospitals, hamlets, cities, and dikes. It was brought out that the U.S. was using a new kind of antipersonnel bomb.

The Tribunal’s judgment was, of course, that the U.S. was guilty of aggression in Vietnam, that the U.S. was guilty of bombing civilians in North Vietnam. Having said that, what was said? The judgment had not changed the political reality, which was the war in Vietnam.

The judgment had been made. They had not been silent, as had the citizens of Germany when the smoke from the crematoria had filled their nostrils. They had marshaled many documents of evidence to show that the U.S. had broken international law.

Of course they had. The world is not governed by law, but by power, and the U.S. had the power to break or make any law that is in its interest to do so.

Thus, the law is a fiction and will remain so until Justice takes off her blindfold, puts down the scales, and picks up a machine gun… Many Third World political activists viewed the Tribunal as did a diplomat from Mali, who said “What is the Tribunal going to do? Give Johnson four years in jail?”

America is fighting for its own salvation, and you can publish a million photographs of napalmed babies and by the time you’ve finished, you’ll have a million more to publish.

Since World War II, a mystique has grown up around “acts of conscience,” as if it were enough, in and of itself, to speak out in the face of injustice. Undoubtedly it is better to speak than not to speak, but the result is too often the same—the political realities remain unchanged.

Aside from the information that the Tribunal has amassed and published, it was probably more of a danger than an asset. In an age of revolution, an “act of conscience” is a luxury that cannot be afforded. As Fidel Castro has said, “The job of a revolutionary is to make revolution.” The effect of the Tribunal was not toward revolution. Even if it had been toward disruption it would have been more valuable. But it refused to deal with the question of racism [When Lester’s fellow SNCC delegate Courtland Cox discussed the racial element of black GIs being sent to die in Vietnam, “it was Isaac Deutscher who said in patronizing tones, ‘I trust, gentlemen, that we will not inject race into the discussion.’ And he continued into various clichés about race not being that important, etc.”] But it refused to deal with the question of racism; it refused to place U.S. aggression in Vietnam in an international context.

Thus, the nature of the war has only been dimly illuminated and the war itself remains unchallenged. Instead, we have more napalmed babies to contemplate and more atrocities to shock our moral consciences, while David Rockefeller opens a branch of Chase Manhattan in Saigon and the U.S. builds an American-style suburb for 50,000 servicemen outside Saigon and expressways to lead into that city and Danang.

In and of itself, there is nothing wrong with a war crimes tribunal. But the manner in which the session at Stockholm was run amounts to an abdication of responsibility if one’s aim is to be politically effective. If the only aim was to salve the consciences of a few European radicals, I’m certain that they are sleeping well these nights, though the bombs still fall.22

Lester writes that numerous Asian delegates grew frustrated by the insistence that race be kept out of the tribunal and tried to leave; they had to be repeatedly entreated to stay. The American delegates, including Oglesby of the SDS and Cox of SNCC, tried to leave at one point because they did not see any relevance of the tribunal to their anti-war activism; they, too, had to be talked into staying. According to Tom Hayden, Oglesby used to agree with Chomsky that a well-reasoned anti-imperialist argument could convince bourgeois systems managers to lay down their arms. “He used to think you could argue with Pentagon intellectuals like Robert McNamara and get them to change their minds… But he later decided there would have to be a fundamental power shift.” Chomsky has, if anything, gone the other way. Lester even took aim at the “what about their agency?” crowd decades before analysis of the international dictatorship of the United States came to be derided as an example of reverse-Orientalist America-centric solipsism, as so many blue-checks do today: “Sartre’s reply was, ‘America is not the center of the world.’ No, it isn’t. It is the world.” Notice, too, how it was white intellectuals chastising black revolutionaries for being inordinately fixated on America. Reflecting on how Sartre thwarted “every attempt to broaden the scope and approach of the Tribunal,” Lester mused that “I couldn’t help but feel that Sartre was as much my enemy as LBJ.”23

In December 1967, Chomsky was already saying that “we live under conditions of almost unparalleled freedom.” At this point, the murders of civil rights activists like Medgar Evers were well known, especially in radical circles. As early as 1958, four months after Malcolm X was designated Elijah Muhammad’s successor, a mole in the Nation of Islam named John Ali passed the plans for Malcolm X’s Queens apartment to the FBI. The NYPD invaded X’s home and fired into his office, though they missed killing him. His food was poisoned in Cairo in 1964 (X claimed that the waiter was a white man whom he’d seen in New York), and he was successfully assassinated in 1965. X had been denied entry into France a few weeks before his death despite having entered the country successfully within the previous year, and one African diplomat told journalist Eric Norden that it was because the French government knew his assassination was imminent and didn’t want it to happen on their soil. “The United States is beginning to murder its own citizens,” the diplomat said.24

Hundreds of prominent artists, including Ernest Hemingway, Pearl S. Buck, George Bernard Shaw, and Sinclair Lewis, were monitored by the FBI (they usually incurred Hoover’s ire for their opposition to fascism in the ‘30s and ‘40s). David J. Garrow says “well before 1950 most Americans in public life realized that the FBI’s enemies list was one that no self-concerned person wanted to be chosen for.”25 Richard Wright, the first bestselling black American author, was on the list, and when his best friend Ollie Harrington ribbed him about his “paranoia,” Wright said that “any black man who is not paranoid is in serious shape. He should be in an asylum and kept under watch.”26 It was common practice for prominent activists, particularly black ones, to have their passports revoked, and Wright was investigated by HUAC and had his passport revoked twice. He sought refuge in France, where he was monitored by America’s secret police. One author writes that state intimidation was prevalent enough among the 30,000 Americans in Paris that they “espoused different views in public and in private. If they read left-wing newspapers, they did so in the privacy of their homes.”27 Wright told French media about his surveillance and American racism before dying of a heart attack at 52 despite being in decent health and not suffering heart trouble (Ollie Harrington and Wright’s daughter, Julia, believe it was an assassination). Wright died the year before Paul Robeson was MK-ULTRA’d in Moscow. Robeson’s passport had been confiscated, too. A Supreme Court ruling returned it to him, but when he chose to continue his activism, the CIA poisoned him. The core of the Black Panther Party convened in 1966 and police harassment was routine by the next year. In October 1967, Huey Newton was involved in a shootout with Oakland police for which he was tried for murder. He claimed that it was a police assassination attempt on his life, a claim that was supported by the later release of a CIA hit list with his name on it.

Operation CHAOS began in August 1967; it would eventually have computerized files on 300,000 dissidents. One Puerto Rican activist involved in the anti-war and independence movements described the typical treatment meted out to people like him: “The FBI and the CIA started to visit my neighborhood, the boarding house where I live and the one where I had lived, the places I often go to, the place where I used to work.”28 “The fear of surveillance being as effective as surveillance itself,” writes Doug Valentine, “the result was that many Americans refrained from writing letters to their representatives or otherwise participating in the democratic process, knowing that to do so was to risk wiretaps on their phones, FBI agents’ reading their mail, being blackmailed for past indiscretions, made victims of vicious rumor campaigns, losing their jobs, or worse.”29 Covert actions against radicals were so widespread that even Joseph Califano, President Johnson’s top aide and the man responsible for coordinating the White House’s response to domestic unrest, was shocked at how many conspiracies were carried out. After the Church and Pike Committee revelations, Califano marveled “I had to wonder… were there two White Houses in 1967?”30 Muhammad Ali, America’s most famous anti-war resister, said that his April 1967 decision to refuse induction had “jeopardize[d] my life walking the streets of the South and all of America.”31 James Kunen describes turning on the TV one night and seeing something that disturbed him:

[O]n the Les Crane show were the founder of the W.E.B. DuBois Clubs and a former member of a DuBois Club. The former member had for two years worked as an undercover agent for the Chicago police, infiltrating the DuBois Club in San Francisco. He was with the Red Squad of the police, and all the while he was a member of the John Birch Society.

He supported the HUAC’s Luce Report, which recommended issuing ID cards to blacks and shipping suspicious individuals to detention camps… He was a backwards and hateful man, and he was in the employ of the police. So, there are secret police. There are red squads. There are agents and provocateurs. There are. I know that. It makes me sick. You know that, too.32

Malcolm X called 1964 “one of the most violent years in the history of America.”33 What Chomsky described as a time of “almost unparalleled freedom” another author calls the beginning of “what must have been one of the most violent periods in American history since the labor struggles of the 1890s.”34 At the same time, many activists were operating under fewer illusions than Chomsky: “The myths of freedom that exist in this country have lulled us into thinking that we can preach revolution under the constitutional provisions of free speech and thereby escape the consequences of that preaching,” wrote Lester. “That is true only as long as the preaching does not constitute a threat to the system. America loves a part of that preaching because it indicates the weaknesses that need to be eradicated if the system is to preserve itself.”35 Case-in-point: the CIA, through its Congress for Cultural Freedom, published excerpts of Richard Wright’s Black Power in several of its magazines (including Encounter) in order to demonstrate that the US was dealing with the blight of Jim Crow. Then it murdered him.

As far as the effects of anti-communism’s increasing stranglehold among the intellectuals of the permissible Left following the revolutionary high tide,** I’ll leave the last word to this CIA report on the rightward shift of the French intelligentsia:

Anti-Americanism formerly also stood as a mark of intellectual status… Now, the opposite is true; finding virtues in America—even identifying good things about US Government policies—is looked upon as an indication of discerning judgment.

This climate of intellectual opinion will almost certainly make it very difficult for anyone to mobilize significant opposition among intellectual elites to US policies in Central America, for example. It is also likely to deny to other European intellectuals—notably, in Scandinavia and West Germany—who are hostile to US policies and interest the powers [and] now need to create a West European consensus on transitional issues, such as disarmament.

It’s great that Chomsky and other anti-communist scholars helped bring light to the Reagan White House’s genocidal dirty wars in Latin America. It’s less great that their Red-bashing and “neither Washington nor Moscow” equivocation helped enable the slaughter of over half a million people. But at least we got a lot of devastating Chomsky lectures out of it.



Part 2 coming soon



* One of the main reasons why most the conspiracy community offers so much wild speculation, utter bullshit, anti-Semitism, and fascism is because left-liberal academics surrendered this field to the ultra-right. It is impossible to calculate how many curious and skeptical people fascists successfully propagandized with racist trash by practically owning the field of conspiracy theorism, but even one is too many, particularly given that this did not need to happen at all. The CIA invented “conspiracy theories” as a delegitimizing slur, Chomsky and generations of status-conscious writers made it happen, and then generations of people slunk away from analysis of covert actions out of fear of being labeled insane. Fascists saw this wide-open field and took full advantage of it. Why would they have done any differently?

If an internet user gets an odd feeling about the Islamic State’s origin story, and justifiably thinks they detect the fingerprints of Langley, to whom will a Google search direct them? Progressive scholars who take “conspiracy” analysis seriously, like Peter Dale Scott, Douglas Valentine, Michael Parenti, Robert Parry, Dave Emory, Russ Baker, or John Potash are as obscure as Chomsky’s fans claim the MIT professor is. That user might see Chomsky say “there is no merit to conspiracy theories circulating in the region that hold that the US planned the rise of this extraordinary monstrosity.” Since Chomsky offers little evidence for his contention, a person who values critical thinking might keep searching so that they can make up their own mind, and they will see a lot of circumstantial evidence which does indeed implicate Washington—like the fact that numerous ISIS commanders (including their minister of war) were trained by Blackwater. If they keep searching they will most likely stumble upon Alex Jones, whose InfoWars operation is handsomely funded and who is happy to offer speculation mixed in with heavy doses of anti-Semitic nonsense and extreme-right misinformation.

Willis Carto, one of the central figures in American Holocaust denial, began an effort to widen his appeal at least as early as 1984, when he founded something called the Populist Party. Carto’s Populist Party borrowed the name from the earlier labor party and plastered it onto a group for white supremacists and other fascists. Anti-Semitism at their first major meeting was so prevalent that “one group of farm activists from the Midwest left the meeting after complaining that too many of the attendees were obsessed with Jews.” [Chip Berlet & Matthew Nemiroff Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort, The Guilford Press, 2000. p. 191]

At the same time, Carto had something of a small media empire. His Noontide Press publishing house put out books with such charming titles as Auschwitz: Truth or Lie—An Eyewitness Report, Hitler At My Side, and For Fear of the Jews. His magazine Spotlight, on the other hand, began aggressively recruiting the sort of people who had, prior to the 1980s, had their ideas taken seriously by radicals. The first was Air Force Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, the primary inspiration for the “Mister X” composite character in Oliver Stone’s JFK. Prouty wrote a 1973 book called The Secret Team, but in the mid-1980s he was hired by Spotlight and Carto added loads of anti-Semitic misinformation to Prouty’s work. What Prouty called “the Secret Team,” Carto rechristened “the Secret Jewish Team.” CIA whistleblower Victor Marchetti co-authored a best-selling Agency exposé in 1973 titled The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, which Langley tried to suppress via legal action. Marchetti, too, was recruited by Spotlight in 1989, as was author Mark Lane several years later.

The 1980s were a period replete with very real conspiracies, conspiracies which went all the way from the jungles of Latin America, the mountains of Central Asia, and America’s inner cities to the Oval Office. These included Reagan’s October surprise, Iran-Contra, the CIA’s involvement in the crack epidemic, Operation Cyclone, the dirty wars in Latin America, etc. Progressive journalists including Robert Parry and Gary Webb did great work exposing many of these conspiracies, as did the Christic Institute, which among other tasks successfully sued the perpetrators of the 1978 Greensboro massacre. Still, at this point, anti-conspiracist hardliner Chip Berlet observed that “chances are that when the talk turns to conspiracy the same sources will be cited: the Christic Institute; the right-wing, anti-Semitic Liberty Lobby and its Spotlight newspaper; and Lyndon LaRouche publications.” (As someone with beliefs about political power, Berlet believes many conspiracy theories: “Chip Berlet repeatedly denounces conspiracy investigations while himself spending a good deal of time investigating Lyndon LaRouche’s fraudulent financial dealings, conspiracies for which LaRouche went to prison. Berlet never explains why the LaRouche conspiracy is a subject worthy of investigation but not the JFK conspiracy.”)

Most whistleblowers are conservatives seeking to reform the system, but the abdication of conspiracy analysis by left-liberal thinkers certainly made it easier for disillusioned insiders to be courted by fascists. When Stone asked Prouty about his involvement with Carto and the Institute for Historical Review, the Colonel said he was “neither a racist nor an anti-Semite… but merely a writer in need of a platform.”



** Some notes on anti-Communism during the height of the radical era:

Many of the nascent radical movements repudiated the Communist movements of the past, in order to emphasize their ideological independence. Longtime activist Peter Bohmer says that one of the biggest failings of the movement was making these concessions to official anti-Communism and failing to learn from the earlier radical movements: “We didn’t do enough of this in the 1960’s and 1970’s, e.g. learning from those who faced repression during the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950’s. We need to build multi-generational movements and groups.”
Anti-communism among the various New Left groups was a mixed bag—James Kunen of the SDS wrote “We have red flags flying from the roof. I explain to a cop on the sidewalk below that these stand for revolution, not for communism.” [Kunen, The Strawberry Statement, p. 31] Despite all the concessions that the New Left made to official anti-Communism, Chomsky was still substantially more prone to Red-bashing than his contemporaries. In his Firing Line appearance he agreed with William F. Buckley that the People’s Democracies of Eastern Europe were places where “Stalinist imperialism very brutally took control and still maintains control.” Compare this to Carl Oglesby’s “Vietnamese Crucible,” which refers to the same events as “Stalin’s seizures within East Europe to build a buffer zone against aggression from a rebuilt Germany.” [Oglesby, Containment & Change, p. 16]
“The new left movement of the 1960’s grew up independently of the Marxist-Leninist tradition. Its roots were in the pacifist and social democratic tradition. It moved to Marxism-Leninism because of identification with the struggles of the Cubans, Vietnamese and Chinese (during their Cultural Revolution). The characteristics of these three revolutions did not seem to us to have anything in common with the image of Communism/Soviet Union that we had been conditioned to accept, and thus we became strongly predisposed to a Maoist type argument that the Soviet Union’s brand of ‘Communism’ really was a capitalist of the Nazi type, i.e., what we had believed all along, while the ‘Communism’ of China, Cuba and Vietnam was a qualitatively different phenomenon–people’s power, or the realization of the true; socialist ideas of equalitarianism, democracy and control of production by the common people. The Maoist alternative allowed formerly strongly anti-communist youth to easily make the transition to Marxism without having to, question the fabricated stereotype of Soviet communism they had grown up with, while romanticizing Cuban, Vietnamese and Chinese Communism, portraying the two types as having nothing in common.”
Writing about the Warsaw Pact intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968, Julius Lester said: “This will undoubtedly be interpreted by some as covert approval of Russian intervention in Czechoslovakia. It is not. Nor is it disapproval. Perhaps the correct position on the matter is that taken by China and Cuba—condemnation of both Russia and Czechoslovakia. Neither country is a model of socialism that anyone is following, and serious questions can be raised about whether either country is totally worthy to be called socialist. But all of that is irrelevant to our infant movement’s taking sides because we see pictures of tanks entering a city and, like well-conditioned animals, we scream that he at whom the tank is aimed has been wronged. This kind of reaction reveals an all too typical American syndrome—apolitical morality. [Lester, “The Russian Occupation of Czechoslovakia,” Revolutionary Notes, p. 162]
Works Cited:

1. Carl Oglesby, “Vietnamese Crucible,” Containment and Change, pp. 164-65

2. Carl Oglesby, Ravens in the Storm: A Personal History of the 1960s Antiwar Movement, Scribner, 2010. p. 53

3. Noam Chomsky, Chomsky on Anarchism, AK Press, 2005. p. 7

4. Malcolm X Speaks, ed. George Breitman, Grove Press, 1965. p. 33

5. Ibid., pp. 35-39

6. Frank Donner, Age of Surveillance, Vintage Press, 1981. p. 218

7. Albert Szymanski, The Capitalist State and the Politics of Class, Winthrop Publishers, 1978. p. 306

8. Breitman, Malcolm X Speaks, p. 28-29

9. Ibid., pp. 201-2

10. Ibid., pp. 128-29

11. Ralph Abernathy, quoted in Igor Geevsky & Viktor Smelov, U.S. Documents Reveal Conspiracy to Stifle Dissent in America, Novosti Press Agency, 1978, p. 91

12. James Kunen, The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary, Random House, 1969. p. 151

13. Joshua Bloom & Waldo E. Martin, Jr., Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party, University of California Press, 2016, p. 347

14. Breitman, Malcolm X Speaks, p. 32

15. Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS: The rise and development of the Students for a Democratic Society, Vintage Books, 1973. p. 262 https://archive.org/details/sds_kirkpatrick_sale

16. Julius Lester, Revolutionary Notes, Grove Press, Inc., 1969, p. 152; p. 6

17. Robert Barsky, Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent, The MIT Press, 1997, p. 134

18. Ibid., p. 148

19. Robert L. Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America: an Analytic History, Doubleday Anchor, 1970 p. 45

20. Ibid., pp. 255-56

21. Lester, Revolutionary Notes, p. 51; p. 41; p. 4

22. Ibid., pp. 9-18

23. Ibid., p. 19

24. Karl Evanzz, The Judas Factor: the Plot to Kill Malcolm X, Basic Books, 1993, p. 278. Kwame Nkrumah and Gamal Nasser believed X’s assassination to be imminent, too, so they offered him positions in their respective governments, but he declined because his struggle was in America.

25. David J. Garrow, The FBI and Martin Luther King: From “Solo” to Memphis, W. W. Norton & Company, 1981. p. 79

26. Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright: the Life and Times, The University of Chicago Press, 2001 p. 490-91

27. Ibid., p. 452

28. Juan M. Rivera-Negrón, “Mobilize the People,” We Won’t Go: Personal Accounts of War Objectors, ed. Alice Lynd, Beacon Press, 1968. p. 148

29. Doug Valentine, The Phoenix Program, p. 326

30. Joesph Califano, quote in Nikolai Yakovlev, Washington Silhouettes: a Political Roundup, Progress Publishers, 1985. p. 261

31. Muhammad Ali, “The Champ,” We Won’t Go, pp. 230-1

32. Kunen, The Strawberry Statement, p. 138

33. Evanzz, The Judas Factor, p. 212

34. Sale, SDS, p. 5

35. Lester, “Legalisms of Repression,” Revolutionary Notes, p. 34

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Re: Chomsky

Post by blindpig » Wed Mar 06, 2019 12:59 pm

Noam Chomsky and the Compatible Left, Part II
Posted on March 5, 2019

America’s Greatest Dissident

All of this is crucial context because Chomsky’s defenders compare him favorably to Fox News cretins and State Department snakes. But this is not a useful analytical comparison because Chomsky was not intended to supplant Bill O’Reilly and Madeleine Albright, which is why he never replaced those people in the propaganda system of which he is a part. Those whom MIT hired him to replace were all those movement leaders, thinkers, and revolutionaries who were more substantively radical than him, which is why he did replace those people.

Chomsky has enjoyed a sinecure at one of America’s wealthiest and most Pentagon-connected universities because he steers people away from all the more radical ideas mentioned above, ideas which once defined the intellectual substance of “the Left.” In 1972, if someone had wandered into a GI café, SNCC meeting, or Panther safehouse and claimed that conspiracies are a distraction, people must vote Democrat, information is itself powerful, or the law has an inherent power to constrain the state, they would’ve been looked at as though they claimed to be from Mars. The mass movements of the twentieth century meant that it was no longer possible for these radical critiques of the status quo to remain invisible. The ruling class couldn’t make these critiques not exist overnight—their choice was between radical critiques in the service of revolutionary change, and radical critiques which were flawed enough to be tolerable, shift people away from direct action, and foster the illusion of intellectual freedom. If the ruling class was to steer idealistic progressives away from excessively radical ideas they would have slowly shift things over the course of decades. There was no other choice.

A long-term approach is the only one that could work, since so many ideas that Chomsky has popularized would’ve destroyed anyone’s credibility among radical audiences circa 1970. It’s entertaining to watch him shred William F. Buckley on Firing Line, but the reason it was him doing it and not someone more radical is because he has reliably pulled punches in power-serving ways when it matters. Many of the things for which he is credited—serving as most Westerners’ intro to the Left, being hated by Republicans, getting written by Pat Tillman during the Ranger’s disillusionment, getting quoted by Hugo Chávez at the UN General Assembly, etc.—are things which would have happened to anyone occupying his position. His best work, namely the voluble criticisms on American foreign policy and his critique of the media, was also done without the anarcho-liberalism by Michael Parenti. If Chomsky didn’t have so many more flaws than the rest of the radical milieu circa 1967, when The New York Review of Books put him on the map, he would’ve met the same fate as the dozens of professors purged from academia during that era.1 When Carl Oglesby died in 2011, his obituaries in the New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post, Guardian, and Politico all neglected to mention The Yankee and Cowboy War or Oglesby’s radical scholarship—which is the fate that befalls any work that crosses those lines that Chomsky so assiduously observes.

This doesn’t mean that Chomsky’s work has never been censored, nor that he’s never incurred official disfavor or been ignored. He has certainly produced work radical enough to merit censorship, otherwise he would’ve never been believable as the face of the Western Left. Chomsky’s books have been banned in prisons and by the government of the Republic of Korea under the country’s draconian national security law. When Chomsky and Edward Herman’s book Counter-Revolutionary Violence was released by Warner Modular Publications, an executive at Warner Communications tried to pulp the entire run of the already published book, and then shuttered Warner Modular. This is a form of censorship known as “privishing,” and though most authors never do anything sufficiently rebellious to provoke the censorious impulses of their editors, it is common enough practice, and victims include Gerald Colby, Richard Barnet, and Mark Dowie. Colby, for instance, authored a 1974 book about the Du Pont family which publisher Prentice-Hall found excessively critical, and then “privished” into non-existence. When Colby sued the publisher for breach of contract, a three-judge appeals panel ruled against him, calling his book “a Marxist view of history.”2

But along with his scholarship, Chomsky was making what are, especially in hindsight, clear concessions to the elite institutions whose favor he enjoyed. Even beyond the many areas enumerated elsewhere in which Chomsky was more conservative than his peer group, we might consider what was said and done at MIT during the headiest days of the anti-war movement.

During this period, MIT’s various departments were researching helicopters, smart bombs and counterinsurgency techniques for the war in Vietnam and, as Chomsky says, “a good deal of [nuclear] missile guidance technology was developed right on the MIT campus.” As Chomsky elaborates, “[MIT was] about 90% Pentagon funded at that time. And I personally was right in the middle of it. I was in a military lab… the Research Laboratory for Electronics.” By 1969, student activists were actively campaigning “to stop the war research” at MIT.

MIT had six of its anti-war student activists sentenced to prison terms. Chomsky says MIT’s students suffered things that “should not have happened.” However, Chomsky has also claimed that MIT has “quite a good record on civil liberties.”

One of Chomsky’s biographers writes that in 1969, the Pentagon and NASA funded two MIT laboratories: Draper was working on inertial guidance systems while Lincoln was, according to Chomsky, “engaged in some things that involved ongoing counterinsurgency.” In his debate with Arendt and Sontag et al, the professor advocates non-violence because “The Institute of Defense Analysis which is run by a consortium of ten major Eastern universities—Columbia, Princeton, MIT, and so on—has been working on crowd control, which means control of blacks, students, peace demonstrators. And the technology for doing this is extremely efficacious and will only improve.” Since language is an indispensable part of the “human terrain system,” we can surmise that the great dissident probably played some role in improving this crowd-control technology. He once told Amy Goodman that during the war “I happened to be working in a laboratory [at MIT] which was 100 percent supported by the three armed services.”

Universities have been such an essential part of the military industry that one LA Times columnist wrote “The only two atomic weapons ever dropped on an enemy—the bombs that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki—could easily have borne the legend: ‘Designed by the University of California as a service to the people of the United States.’”3 During the Vietnam War, historian Michael Klare dubbed universities “America’s fourth Armed Services,” and pointed out that there was an “extraordinary concentration of scientists and engineering talent at MIT” working for the Pentagon. In 1966, MIT spokesman Edward B. Hanify said:

MIT is in the front rank of the forces of science dedicated to the essential research which the Government of the United States considers indispensible to the National Defense. It is a scientific arsenal of democracy.

“MIT has, in fact, become fixed in the popular imagination as the very paradigm of university-military collaboration,” in Klare’s words.4 Tensions were growing between MIT’s leadership, which naturally sought to continue its lucrative relationship with the Pentagon, and anti-war students, who understood that MIT was a major node in the military industry that was destroying millions of lives in Vietnam and around the world. There was a large strike at MIT on May 4th 1969 to protest MIT’s involvement in the military industry, which lead to “press accounts of young scientists who have quit defense research to work on environmental problems—or who quit science altogether to become full-time political activists,” according to Klare. Dr. John S. Foster, Jr., the Pentagon’s Director of Defense Research and Engineering, observed that the unrest would force military research into the hands of more cooperative but “less competent” institutions, which was precisely the point.5

Chomsky proposed a middle ground: “Chomsky maintains that it was impossible at that time for MIT and its researchers to sever ties with the military-industrial complex and continue to function. What he proposed then he stands by even today: universities with departments that work on bacterial warfare should do so openly, by developing departments of death. His intention was to inform the general population of what was going on so that individuals could make informed and unencumbered decisions about their actions.” In the midst of an anti-war movement engaged in shutting down the war machine at home and “turning the guns around” in Vietnam, Chomsky argued that it was impossible to stop MIT’s part in the imperial slaughter, and thus it would be ideal to emphasize “systems of a purely defensive and deterrent character” (as though such a thing were possible) and add an element of informed consent. While giving weapons designers better information to opt in or out of helping exterminate people might be nice for their consciences, the professor elides the fact that this offers nothing to the victims of imperialism. The only way for MIT students to stop the slaughter of the Vietnamese was to shut down MIT, which Chomsky opposed. James Kunen describes participating in a protest at Columbia and writing in chalk “I am sorry about defacing the walls, but babies are being burned and men are dying, and this University is at fault quite directly.”6 Chomsky’s ideas about informed consent sound very nice, and he even addresses himself to bourgeois clerks in some of his books in hopes that they’ll walk away from the war machine. But as far as the efficacy of this approach, we might consider that all of Chomsky’s great anti-war commentary hasn’t even been able to stop Noam Chomsky from working for the Pentagon. He also defended his involvement with MIT because the university is not “totalitarian,” whatever that means.

In short, wrote Robert Barsky,

Chomsky’s position on this issue is that no formal constraints should be put on research. So at this important time the professor took what he calls a ‘pretty extreme position,’ and indeed ‘one that might be hard to defend had anyone ever criticized it,’ which he describes as follows: ‘Nothing should be done to impede people from teaching and doing their research even if at that very moment it was being used to massacre and destroy.’7

Chomsky said as much in “On Resistance,” when he warned that direct action to shut down the war machine should be avoided because “the long-range threat would be to American humanistic and scientific culture.” He neglected to explain why ending imperial wars would hurt “American humanistic culture,” rather than making American culture more humane. Here, Chomsky not only differed from the radical consensus of the era, but was diametrically opposed to it. Julius Lester wrote that the only way to “humanize America” was to “make revolution.” Stokely Carmichael said the same thing. During one anti-war protest, Paul Potter of the SDS said “the war goes on; the freedom to conduct that war depends on the dehumanization not only of Vietnamese people but of Americans as well.”8 In 1969, the Chicago Daily Defender, a black-oriented progressive journal, heralded Black Panther protests at Yale as a measure that “may provide the dynamism for the reformation of American society…Yale has now become the focus for justice for the Black Panthers. With the singular exception of a few isolated incidents, the New Haven institution is going peacefully and serenely about the business of transforming a sick society into a healthy consortium.”9 Radicals of the era mostly believed that protesting America’s worst institutions would make the country more humane. Chomsky claimed the opposite, allegedly out of a vague commitment to principles of free speech and unfettered intellectual inquiry.

This emphasis on the liberatory power of information is a theme which has suffused both Chomsky’s work in particular and increasingly defined the wider Western Left since the radical heyday. It is an idea which does not come from what could be considered the radical tradition, which saw collective action—not appeals to reason—as the wellspring of freedom, power, and progress. For example, in his “Ballots or Bullets” speech, Malcolm X said “Black people are fed up with the dillydallying, pussyfooting, compromising approach that we’ve been using toward getting our freedom. We want freedom now, but we’re not going to get it saying ‘We Shall Overcome.’ We’ve got to fight until we overcome.” One SDS leader said that their belief was that “freedom lies in collective, class struggle.”10 In a September 1969 letter collected in his book Soledad Brother, George Jackson wrote “There are those among us, we must admit, who cannot take any sizable amount of freedom. They are in the majority! You cannot relate to them with ideals. They have fallen beyond caring about ideals. The only thing that will make them move is a push, no explanation, just a shove.”

In contrast, Chomsky’s emphasis on “A truly independent press” as “a foundation for a truly free and democratic society” is liberal, not radical. It inverts a radical understanding of how the press works and whom it serves—a “truly free and democratic society” comes first, and only then could one hope to enjoy a “truly independent” press. Of course, the question of how to create a truly free and democratic society is the most important one, and it was the question with which the revolutionaries of the era were grappling while Chomsky was counseling them to get arrested and go easy on MIT. “The only relationship the press can have to any radical or revolutionary organization is negative, to be used as tools for the government,” wrote Julius Lester, so “it must be realized that the press and television can in no way be used by the left to communicate with people. It is not the function of the press to report; its function is to shape opinion.”11 Lester here is demonstrating a grasp of what Marx said about those owning the means of production likewise owning the means of mental production. Lester also spoke to the utility of appealing to the oppressor’s conscience by quoting “what a New York businessman told an Abolitionist, the Rev. Samuel May, in the spring of 1845, when the good cleric had come to the businessman with moral arguments against slavery.”

“Mr. May,” the businessman told him, “we are not such fools as not to know that slavery is a great evil and a great wrong… We cannot afford, sir, to let you and your associates succeed in your endeavor to overthrow slavery. It is not a matter of principle with us. It is a matter of business necessity. We cannot afford to let you succeed… We do not mean to allow you to succeed. We mean, sir, to put you Abolitionists down—by fair means, if we can, by foul means, if we must.”12

In this important area, Chomsky sounds most like the progressive liberals of the era, not the radicals. Gerald W. Johnson, for instance, was an author, essayist, and journalist whom one biographer called “one of the most eloquent spokespersons for America’s adversary culture.” He was friends with H. L. Mencken and was a prominent liberal opponent of McCarthyism and the Red Scare at a time when it mattered. In Peril and Promise: An Inquiry into Freedom of the Press, Johnson extols the virtues of his profession, saying that the journalist is both “socially dangerous” and “socially necessary,” because “the highest attainable freedom is contingent upon the fullest and most accurate information; so those agencies whose function is the dissemination of information are crucial… journalism alone is concerned almost equally with public affairs, spiritual affairs and educational, which is to say, cultural affairs.” Thus the journalist “has wider opportunities, whether for good or evil, than either the politician or the educator.”13

For his part, Johnson enjoyed a long and illustrious career as a man of letters. Despite his repudiations of McCarthy, he was reliably anti-Communist and produced work extolling the virtues of the free enterprise system and “Americanism.” He worked for many years for Adlai Stevenson, who as America’s ambassador to the UN called criticisms of Washington “irrational, irresponsible, insulting and repugnant,” among other things. Johnson won a Peabody Award, a Sydney Hillman Foundation Award, and a DuPont Commentators’ Award. Alfred du Pont’s widow created the latter award as “as a tribute to the journalistic integrity and public-mindedness of her late husband,” and the Columbia School of Journalism calls it the “the most prestigious award in television and radio news, the broadcast equivalent of the Pulitzer Prizes.” She founded the award in 1942, the year America entered World War II, and almost certainly did so to rescue her late husband’s reputation since his company was one of the biggest Western supporters of Mussolini and Hitler. Johnson was not responsible for the actions of Ambassador Stevenson or the DuPont Corporation, but his relationship to these elite functionaries and corporate foundations demonstrates how the ruling class selects “eloquent spokespeople of America’s adversary culture” based on their having one foot firmly in the elite world. How could it be any other way? The “truth shall set you free” vision of freedom advocated by Chomsky and Johnson, so popular with the liberal intelligentsia, is quite alien to the radical tradition. Power, said Malcolm X, “real power, comes from conviction which produces action, uncompromising action. It also produces insurrection against oppression.”

It’s true that the radical movements of fifty years ago were strong enough that they forced their ideas into the public eye. But even at the time, radical ideas were not suddenly free from the predictable constraints. James Kunen, then a teenaged rebel at Columbia University, describes being booked on a local talk show to be interviewed by a host named Alan Burke. Burke’s booking secretary assured Kunen that Burke would be receptive because he is “kind and liberal.”

For the first few seconds of the show I am too nervous to speak, but then I become involved and settle down. I can handle my opponent, I can handle the almost unanimously negative questions from the audience, I can try to handle the invective of Mr. Burke, who contrary to assurances soon becomes my antagonist. But I have some problem with the station breaks, which always follow Burke’s most cutting remarks, and with an overly enthusiastic member of the audience who jumps up to lead applause after each remark against me, effectively preventing me from answering them. It turns out that this clapper is the prompter who cues the audience when to applaud, according to the instructions given them before the show.

I am dubbed a “deranged anarchist” and Mr. Burke concludes the show with the suggestion that I stick to panty raids, which he says are “more constructive.”14

Compare this sort of treatment to Noam Chomsky’s long exchange with William F. Buckley on Firing Line. Chomsky was never given his own hour-long show, but he also was able to expound on his ideas at length in various fora without the sort of interruptions and invective directed at Kunen. Maybe it was just because Chomsky had an encyclopedic recall of so many facts and figures; i.e. because he was simply the best and smartest radical voice. The subsequent rise of a media ecosystem which sustains people like Chomsky, Amy Goodman, and Glenn Greenwald would seemingly confirm that there’s a market for this. But as Chomsky differed from the rest of the radical milieu in crucial ways, so did he differ from Kunen. Kunen came from a radical movement, while Chomsky enjoyed a high position at one of America’s wealthiest universities. As a college student, Kunen’s stances on any number of matters were probably unpredictable, while Chomsky had by that point established his more conservative, pacifist, and anti-Communist bona fides. As a radical activist, Kunen engaged in direct action. Chomsky not only heralded the power of information, he deplored most forms of direct action, and he said so. According to one writer:

During the time Chomsky was involved with protests against the war in Vietnam, he was always hostile—like Theodor Adorno—to on-campus protests that got in the way of pursuing the Truth. It was one thing to march against the war; it was another thing entirely to occupy a building that was dedicated to counter-insurgency research. According to Barsky, Chomsky admired “the challenge to the universities” but thought their rebellions were “largely misguided,” and he “criticized [them] as they were in progress at Berkeley (1966) and Columbia (1968) particularly. This is corroborated by Norman Mailer, who spent time with Chomsky in a jail cell after being arrested at the Pentagon protest in 1969: “He had, in fact, great reservations about the form that the 1968 student uprisings ultimately took.”

One activist/academic points out that despite Chomsky’s “extraordinary” memory, the professor recounts this period with some odd changes:

MIT was a major military contractor, and much of what happened there was funded by the Pentagon. Even Chomsky’s work was supported by the military. In the late 1960s, as the student movement reached its peak, war research on campus came under increasing attack, particularly projects being done at two MIT labs. [Chomsky recalls] the political line-up: right-wing faculty wanted to keep the labs, liberal faculty wanted to break relations with the labs formally (so that the same work would be done but invisibly), while “the radical students and I wanted to keep the labs on campus, on the principle that what is going to be going on anyway ought to be open and above board….” But this obscures the fact that most radical students, as well as many liberal students, wanted first and foremost to stop the war research and thus to convert the labs to non-military pursuits. We didn’t want the war research to go on in divested labs, nor did we want it to go on in affiliated labs. We wanted the war research stopped, period.

Chris Knight discusses many more examples of how Chomsky defended and made excuses for MIT, both during this crucial time in the anti-war movement and in subsequent decades:

Back in 1969, MIT’s student radicals were keen to take direct action against the university’s war research by, among other things, occupying the office of its president, Howard Johnson. Again, Chomsky took a different position and at one point, according to one of his academic colleagues, he joined with other professors in standing in Johnson’s office to prevent the students from occupying it. As he said later about the 1960s student tactic of occupation, “I wasn’t in favor of it myself, and didn’t like those tactics.”

Adopting a quite different tone, however, Chomsky told Time magazine that Johnson was an “honest, honorable man” and, in 1970, it seems he even attended a faculty party held to celebrate Johnson’s success at coping with a year of student protests.

Still more puzzling was Chomsky’s attitude when Walt Rostow visited MIT in 1969. Rostow was one of those prominent intellectuals whom Chomsky had so eloquently denounced in his ‘Responsibility of Intellectuals’ article. As an adviser to both President John Kennedy and President Lyndon Johnson, Rostow had been one of the main architects of the war in Vietnam. In particular he was the strategist responsible for the carpet bombing of North Vietnam.

Against this background, it was hardly surprising that when Rostow arrived at MIT, his lecture was disrupted by students furious at his presence on their campus. Far from associating himself with such student rage, however, when Chomsky heard that Rostow was hoping to return to his former job at MIT, he actually welcomed the prospect. Then, when he heard that the university was poised to reject Rostow’s job application for fear of more student disruption, Chomsky went to Howard Johnson and threatened to lead MIT’s anti-war students to “protest publicly” —not against—but in favor of Rostow being allowed back to the university.

Rostow wasn’t the only powerful militarist at MIT to receive support from Chomsky. Twenty years later, Chomsky was, as he says, ‘one of the very few people on the faculty’ who supported John Deutch’s bid to become university President… Fearing that the university was about to become even “more militaristic,” MIT’s radicals—with the notable exception of Chomsky—joined others on the faculty to successfully block Deutch’s appointment. Then, later, when President Clinton made Deutch No.2 at the Pentagon and, in 1995, Director of the CIA, student activists demanded that MIT cut all ties with him. Chomsky once again disagreed… Of course, the most remarkable thing about all this is that, throughout this entire period, Chomsky was churning out dozens of brilliantly argued articles and books denouncing the CIA and the US military as criminals, their hands dripping in blood.

“Rostow not only strongly influenced White House intelligence planning but served as a liaison to the intelligence community, including the CIA,” writes Frank Donner. At MIT, Rostow “became a leading and ‘witting’ figure in a CIA front (it was subsidized by the CIA and headed by a former CIA official), the Center for International Studies.”15 MIT students worried that Professor Rostow might do things like turn their school into a home for covert CIA think tanks had fears that were actually quite well founded.

Chomsky is whitewashing his role at MIT considerably, seeing as he did quite a lot more than just teach there. But he asks prospective critics to consider the following: “Did you ever hear anyone suggest that Marx shouldn’t have worked in the British Museum, the very symbol of British imperialism?”16 That is indeed not a common contention, mostly due to the fact that the British Museum was the symbol of British imperialism, while MIT’s role in American imperialism was quite a lot more than merely symbolic.

MIT was a major center for military research and development—missile guidance systems, crowd suppression, and counterinsurgency warfare are three areas of research that Chomsky himself has highlighted. He participated in at least one of those. At the time Marx was in the library stacks, Britain was waging a war of ghastly brutality in India. If, at this important time, the British Museum was developing new and innovative ways to exterminate the people of India in their quest to throw off the shackles of colonial slavery; and Marx’s research was involved in developing these fearsome new weapons (to the extent that his research was “100 percent” funded by the military); and if Marx defended the museum from students who would shut it down; and he also went well out of his way to help various British generals, viceroys, and proconsuls get jobs at the museum over the objections of the radical student body, then and only then would Chomsky be making a good analogy. And, to answer the professor’s question, yes, it is quite likely that not only would many people object to Marx’s role, those looking objectively at his actions and not his radical reputation would suggest that he was helping the Crown perpetrate a slaughter.

It is ultimately more useful to consider Chomsky’s role at MIT than what he was saying or doing anywhere else. Even leaving aside the fact that Chomsky seems quite comfortable with misrepresenting his role in the history of this period—falsely portraying himself as aligned with student radicals rather than opposed to them—it is standard operating procedure for liberals to denounce something bad in the abstract while defending specific instances of that bad thing, or blanching at actual solutions to the problem. Biographer Hazel Rowley describes Richard Wright encountering this very dynamic over and over during a lecture tour in the mid-‘40s: “he was shocked by the vast ignorance about race in America. He met people of good will who abstractly wanted to do something to help, but they seemed frightened when he made concrete suggestions.”17 “There is a class of whites who call themselves liberals,” wrote Julius Lester, “who will agree with everything a revolutionary may say up to the point of agreeing to what must be done to solve the problem.”18

At that point in time, Chomsky was just one commentator among many; at a time when what would today be called the movements’ “thought leaders” were activists and revolutionaries, not writers and thinkers.19 As a man best known as a radical MIT professor, it is in this capacity that he should be primarily judged. To adapt the Chomsky rule slightly, his own concern was primarily the terror and violence carried out by his own university. For the important reason that; namely, he could have done something about it. So even if MIT was responsible for two percent of the violence in the world, it would be that two percent he would be primarily responsible for. And that is a simple ethical judgment. That is, the ethical value of one’s actions depends on their anticipated and predictable consequences. It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century.

In various forums, draft resistance was the only concrete political action that Chomsky ratified for American activists. One of Chomsky’s significant contributions during the anti-war heyday was founding the activist non-profit RESIST, which was first oriented towards draft resistance. Like the wider radical movements, there was ideological heterogeneity in the ranks of draft resisters. Some did so out of religious pacifism, some due to black nationalism, etc. One draft resister, Stephen Fortunato, explained that he refused to serve based on his Christian faith, a nonviolence tract by Leo Tolstoy, and the work of such Chomsky-like anti-war intellectuals as A. J. Muste and Bertrand Russell.20 But Fortunato was a rare exception. Just like the wider radical movements, most draft resisters followed a path that involved an initial connection with the fight against American racism, and then they drew inspiration from the national liberation struggles of the global south. Go through contemporary accounts of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines who were incarcerated for defying the Vietnam draft and there is a remarkable adherence to this pattern.

continued
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Re: Chomsky

Post by blindpig » Wed Mar 06, 2019 1:03 pm

Part II, continued

PFC James Johnson of the Fort Hood Three: “Now there is a direct relationship between the peace movement and the civil rights movement. The South Vietnamese are fighting for representation, just like ourselves.”21
David Mitchell, 1966: “I became continually more aware of the aggressive and dangerous nature of America’s policies. My examination of such policies was first sparked by Cuba and the attempts to turn back the Cuban Revolution and regain an economic and political stranglehold over the Cuban nation.”22
Tom Bell, 1967: “So often, radicalization comes from travel—to the third world, to Europe, or the American South—where a view of the true nature of American society is more obvious.”23
John Otis Sumrall, 1967: “For me personally, I would feel just like the KKK over there. Denying those people freedom of choice, just like black people are denied freedom of choice in the US. So that’s why I want to stay here and fight for freedom in the United States.”24
“John”: “I was never a hippy, but was early a political activist: civil rights demonstrations, protesting the Cuban invasion, all that.”25
“Hank”: “Involved in what was then known as the civil rights movement. Started working with CORE my junior year in high school. I was also going out at the time with a girl from Cuba—she told me a lot about Fidel. It was funny, because in school we were discussing Cuba at the time and what she was telling me was in direct conflict with what I was being taught.”26
It’s great that Chomsky approved of and enabled draft resistance, but these people were not looking to him for guidance. As a radical professor at MIT, the area where Chomsky demonstrated the most influence to oppose or enable American imperialism was with radical students at MIT. Draft resisters mostly looked to anti-racist activists and third world revolutionaries—the people most likely to heed Chomsky’s advice were radicals on his campus. He may have issued blistering condemnations of American imperialism in any number of journals, but in the one realm where he had a tremendous impact at the time when it mattered, he defended America’s war machine. His record as far as protecting his parent institution from the radical activists trying to shut it down is extensively well documented, and it is radically at-odds with his radical reputation.

Chomsky himself points out that his positions were “pretty extreme” and “would have been hard to defend” relative to the rest of the American radical movement—although he has also made the contradictory claim that “the radical students and I wanted to keep the labs on campus,” which is, to put it mildly, not true. More representative of prevailing radical sentiment was Peter Bohmer of San Diego State University (SDSU), a professor and activist who both disagreed with MIT’s war work and acted to stop it. Bohmer was ultimately fired by the fiat of SDSU President Donald Walker, acting on “secret information,” over the objections of students and the department. A contemporary report from the Harvard Crimson recounted that the “secret information” which got him sacked “apparently concerns Bohmer’s arrest and conviction for participation in a political demonstration on January 16, 1970 at MIT.” Bohmer recounts:

After three lengthy hearings that all ruled in my favor, and in spite of very large demonstrations supporting me, the State University system still fired me although I was voted best teacher by students at San Diego State University. Even the conservative American Economics Association ruled it was a case of political discrimination but after a lengthy court case, California Supreme Court ruled that San Diego State U did not have to restore my faculty position.

Bohmer continued his activist work despite his firing in 1972, being charged later that year with attempting to block a train delivering military material. That same year, despite the official end of COINTELPRO a year earlier, the FBI ordered a fascist vigilante group to assassinate Bohmer. Bohmer has remained an activist into the current decade. Unlike Chomsky, who usually concludes interviews today by saying something like making revolution is “not very hard,” the activist Bohmer warned in 2010 that “Although Cointelpro officially ended in 1971, it has continued although in a somewhat less extreme form without the name up to September 11th 2001. Since then we are going backwards towards more police powers, infiltration and framing of activists.”

Chomsky incurred plenty of disfavor in the halls of power during this period of radical ferment. But if he hadn’t been so accommodating of MIT’s military industry work, he would likely have been out of a job, as was Bohmer. If he had participated in shutting down the war machine he criticized, instead of making excuses for it, he may have even been marked for death, as was Bohmer.

Chomsky’s explanations for his own prominence leave a lot to be desired. In 1995, he told Barsky that at the end of the 1960s, “We confidently expected that I’d be in jail in a few years. In fact, that is just what would have happened except for two unexpected events: 1) the utter (and rather typical) incompetence of the intelligence services, which could not find the real organizers of resistance, though it was transparent, and kept seeking hidden connections to North Korea, Cuba, or wherever…as well as mistaking people who agreed to appear at public events as ‘leaders’ and ‘organizers’; and 2) the Tet offensive, which convinced American business that the game wasn’t worth the candle.”27 There are some things here that are true enough: by 1969, a significant part of the ruling class, including Wall Street, began to consider that the Vietnam War was not worth the costs. Chomsky also makes the accurate assessment that people like him who spoke at rallies were not the leaders and organizers of these radical movements.

But his description of incompetence and bumbling on the part of America’s secret police bears little resemblance to reality. The FBI, CIA, military intelligence, and local PDs were actually quite adept at identifying and “neutralizing” the “real organizers of resistance,” as the professor acknowledges when discussing the history of COINTELPRO. America’s secret police successfully identified Bohmer as a subversive, for example, and carried out plots against him. The FBI and CIA claimed that they were looking for the “real” foreign instigators of the era’s radical movements, but this was a pretext to expand their budgets and policing powers (programs like Operation CHAOS). If Chomsky really believes this, then he is taking establishment lies at face value contrary to a wealth of available evidence. After the 1968 Chicago DNC, for example, the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI field office told Hoover that “Effectively tabbing as communist or communist-backed the more hysterical opponents of the President on the Vietnam question in the midst of the presidential campaign would be a real boon to Mr. Johnson.”28 Internal documents attesting to the fact that this was merely a pretext, including memoranda between CIA director Richard Helms and the Johnson and Nixon White Houses, were released in the mid-‘70s during the Church Committee hearings, so when the professor told Barsky this, his bad information was two decades out-of-date. Chomsky’s contention that the state’s repressive apparatus was too distracted by apocryphal Kremlin plots to discipline him is not plausible.

The professor himself sometimes claims that he managed to circumvent the Herman/Chomsky propaganda model by doing good linguistics scholarship, but he’s not highlighted as the pre-eminent voice of the Western left because of his insights on phonemes and morphemes. When the professor is asked why he is so famous if his propaganda model is correct, he has said “it has nothing to do with me, it has to do with marginalizing the public,” which is confusing and still does nothing to explain why he is famous. Marginalizing the public from what? The purpose of a propaganda machine is to brainwash the public, not marginalize them.

It’s also not true: the concept of “marginality” as he and Ed Herman use it in Manufacturing Consent refers to dissident figures and media outlets, not the public. There are two references to the poor as marginal members of the public, but contrary to what Chomsky said in that Q&A, the propaganda model as it’s discussed in the book is clearly about the marginalization of media figures:

“We have long argued that the ‘naturalness’ of these processes, with inconvenient facts allowed sparingly and within the proper framework of assumptions, and fundamental dissent virtually excluded from the mass media (but permitted in a marginalized press), makes for a propaganda system that is far more credible and effective in putting over a patriotic agenda than one with official censorship.”
“A propaganda model…traces the routes by which money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalize dissent…”
“The elite domination of the media and marginalization of dissidents that results from the operation of these filters…”
“an advertising-based media system will gradually increase advertising time and marginalize or eliminate altogether programming that has significant public-affairs content.”
“The steady flow of ex-radicals from marginality to media attention shows that we are witnessing a durable method of providing experts who will say what the establishment wants said.”
“Even if ad-based media cater to an affluent (‘upscale’) audience, they easily pick up a large part of the ‘downscale’ audience, and their rivals lose market share and are eventually driven out or marginalized.”
Chomsky does not respond to the question of why he’s famous by debunking, he responds by dissembling. Either Herman wrote all of Manufacturing Consent and Chomsky hasn’t actually read it, or Chomsky is lying because it’s impossible for the West’s most famous academic to be considered “marginal.” To figure out which it is, we might consider Chomsky’s 1996 exchange with the BBC’s Andrew Marr. Marr challenges Chomsky about the propaganda model and asks whether the professor believes Marr is being disingenuous, to which Chomsky replies “what I’m saying is, if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.” Chomsky says nothing about “marginalizing the public.” Here, as in Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky explains that the propaganda model is about keeping dissident thought and radical thinkers out of the public eye. It is only when he himself is the subject that the propaganda model starts to mean new things.

In another interview he is asked again about his marginalization, and he replies with the bizarre and even more confusing statement that “the matter of being forced to the margins is a matter of fact, and the fact is the opposite of what this claim [sic], the fact is it is much easier to gain access to the major media than it was 20 years ago.” You probably need a doctorate in linguistics to parse the koan-like phrase “it is a fact, and the fact is the opposite,” but sure: his marginalization is a fact, and the fact is the opposite, which is that it’s easier to access the major media than ever. At least this sounds like a long-overdue admission from the most famous intellectual in the Anglophone world that he is not marginalized in any meaningful sense of the world.

But when Charlie Rose asked him about what is ridiculously called his “marginalization,” Chomsky replied that it was natural, “otherwise they [the media] wouldn’t be performing their societal function.” He does not reconcile this with his contradictory statement that the propaganda model did not refer to marginalizing dissidents at all, but the public. He doesn’t explain how the media can simultaneously marginalize him because that is “their societal function” and yet “the fact is it is much easier to gain access to the major media than it was 20 years ago.” Neither does he offer evidence for the mystifying claim that it’s easier to access the major media than ever before. But ultimately he’s totally correct: it is the media’s job to marginalize dissenting voices, and he really does have easier access to the mass media than ever. He leaves it to the power of celebrity and the pull of conformity to ensure that his fans don’t question why this is.

In one of the numerous hagiographies of America’s greatest dissenter, Wolfgang Sperlich summarizes the shift from revolution to writing which Chomsky embodied:

Forms of internal repression in the US were mainly of subtle but effective variety, such as COINTELPRO… Given such repression at home, the US activists retreated into what they knew best: dissent by speaking out and writing. One of the champions of this activist genre was going from strength to strength: Noam Chomsky.29

This account of what happened to the liberation struggles of yesteryear is typical: it posits an America mostly free of “totalitarian” things like overt state repression; it holds that dissenters shifted seamlessly from activism to commentary; and it claims that Chomsky’s star rose based mostly on his own merits, rather than the rewards-and-sanctions system that defines the propaganda machine. At least this admits that the United States has what would be called “political repression” at all. Far more representative of what passes for “common knowledge” is the following: “the FBI fought their battles against modern and progressive tendencies in American society but this hardly ever resulted in effective censorship, let alone in the imprisonment or execution of people because of their political, artistic, or intellectual convictions.”30

Internal repression did and does exist in the United States, but it was not mostly subtle, it was mostly overt. The presence of police—with guns, clubs, dogs, tear gas, and firehoses—is not subtle. Burning crosses are downright ostentatious. Deployment of the National Guard to put down urban uprisings was common practice—there were over 1,000 urban uprisings between 1960 and the mid-‘70s, which means hundreds of instances of tanks, armored personnel carriers, and columns of soldiers invading American cities. According to the most conservative estimates, between 1965 and ’67, around 130 black men were killed and 28,000 arrested in various instances of urban unrest (when you consider that 43 people were killed in Detroit in July 1967 alone, those numbers seems way too low).31 The McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950 established a concentration camp system (6 were completed) where accused subversives would be interned in the case of national emergency; Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, and Martin Luther King all warned that this law could be used against their movements.32 In 1950, the FBI actually drew up a list of 12,000 accused subversives who were to be rounded up and held in Guantánamo Bay-style indefinite detention–the only reason they weren’t is that Truman declined Hoover’s demands to incarcerate them. After the riots that followed MLK’s assassination, the Army drew up apocalyptic plans under the rubric of Operation Garden Plot to deploy brigades to 25 cities to wage an open counterinsurgency war. If resistance to the status quo had intensified in the 1970s, rather than waned, the Pentagon was ready to turn American cities into “scenes of destruction approaching those of Stalingrad during World War II,” in the words of one Army general.

During the Chicago DNC protests, George McGovern said that the police violence was a “blood bath” which “made me sick to my stomach,” and he’d “seen nothing like it since the films of Nazi Germany.”33 C. Kilmer Myers, a California bishop, said that Governor Ronald Reagan’s 1968 crackdown on UC student protests was redolent of the “strong-armed and brutal methods which I as a student observed in Germany in 1939.”34 “[S]evere repressive measures, including the alleged framing of militant student leaders on campus on murder and rioting charges and police and National Guard invasions of black campuses, were reportedly employed at a host of schools,” wrote one professor.35 The brutality towards campus unrest escalated to the famous massacre at Kent state, where 4 activists were shot (a fifth victim was clubbed to death elsewhere on campus), and another spate of killings at Jackson State. “The spectacle of American soldiers killing American citizens had a chilling effect on many people, many of whom suddenly realized that dissent was as dangerous in the United States as it was in South Vietnam,” writes Doug Valentine. “Nixon himself articulated those murderous impulses when he told his staff, “Don’t worry about decisiveness. Having drawn the sword, stick it in hard. Hit ’em in the gut. No defensiveness.”36 More common were massacres like the one in Orangeburg, South Carolina in 1968, where police killed 3 activists and injured dozens for the crime of trying to desegregate a bowling alley. Julius Lester elaborates:

The Orangeburg Massacre comes after eight years of beatings, jailings, and murders of blacks and whites in the course of the black liberation movement. There were thirteen blacks killed during the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964, the four young girls killed in the church bombing in Birmingham, Jimmy Lee Jackson and the hundreds killed in Watts, Newark, Detroit, and Harlem. But nothing seems more truly red, white, and blue Star-Spangled Banner My Country ‘Tis of Thee American than three dead and fifty wounded for trying to desegregate a bowling alley. One gets the feeling that if the students had been trying to desegregate two bowling alleys, South Carolina would have dropped the Bomb.37

Maybe one could make the argument that finding your mail tampered with, or hearing the telltale click of a phone tap, counted as unobtrusive repression. But even the “subtle” repressive actions like COINTELPRO weren’t particularly low-key. One component of the program was a form of intimidation known in FBI memoranda as “harassment arrests,” whose name is self-explanatory. Then there were the dozens (and possibly hundreds, or more) of assassinations, the non-subtlety of which was intended to send a clear message. For instance, the last leader of the American Indian Movement, John Trudell, accumulated one of the longest FBI files and was warned to stop his activism or he would be punished. In 1979, Trudell lead a protest in Washington, DC and burned an American flag in front of FBI headquarters. Hours later, a fire began at his Nevada home, killing his wife, mother-in-law, and his three children. There’s something to consider, lest someone believe Chomsky’s claim that we enjoy unparalleled freedom. It’s true enough that when the status quo is secure, you probably won’t get in trouble for burning the flag (although cops can and might arrest you for it, if they feel like it). But if that act of non-violent, non-coercive, Constitutionally protected free speech is part of something that’s a genuine threat, they may go ahead and murder your entire family. They did it to John Trudell.

Perhaps if COINTELPRO had been as subtle as Sperlich claims it was, Trudell might have continued his activism. Instead, he took up poetry and music.

All this not-at-all-subtle repression had the intended effect of destroying much of the activist community. As the people most threatening to the capitalist system were murdered or imprisoned, there was a parallel project to erase the substance of what these radical movements did and stood for. For future liberal historians to say that “activists retreated into speaking out and writing,” they would need to convert the revolutionaries into people who had just been describing things all along.

After leaving the Nation of Islam and moving towards socialism, for instance, Malcolm X founded the Organization for Afro-American Unity and began devising concrete plans for changing the world. Charging the United States with committing genocide against African-Americans had been a major nightmare for the ruling classes when black communists including Paul Robeson and William L. Patterson tried to do so in the 1950s. Biographers Karl Evanzz and George Breitman both point out that Malcolm X’s similar plan to pass a UN resolution condemning the US as a colonial power, with the help of newly post-colonial African governments, terrified the American power elite. By December 1964—a period Malcolm X told Alex Haley was the high point in his life—his efforts looked sure to succeed. On December 16th, he told an audience at Harvard that African “statesmen are beginning to connect the criminal, racist acts practiced in the Congo with similar acts in Mississippi and Alabama.”38 Two months later, before X could attend the Bandung Conference of the non-aligned countries as the representative of black America, he was murdered. Karl Evanzz points out that some of X’s African contacts who had been working with him were assassinated at the same time, supporting the theory that his murder had Federal fingerprints.39 “[R]ejection of Martin Luther King’s peculiar version of Gandhism is not in itself a program,” observed Robert Vernon, which is why X “addressed himself to the difficult task of getting an organization off the ground, of developing a program for the immediate struggle and a long-range program for the long haul, of soliciting and sifting through new ideas and fresh thinking, making contacts with allies abroad.”40

In order to turn these radical movements into a “compatible left,” step one was to erase the fact that the revolutionaries had been doing anything other than talking—since talking would be the primary remit of the “compatible left.” So the liberal Bayard Rustin, for one, wrote 3 articles shortly after the murder of the man eventually known as El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, characterizing the martyred leader as “not a hero of the movement, but a victim of the ghetto” and “a conservative force” who “never had many actual followers” and was “moving toward the mainstream of the civil rights movement.” Despite X’s work organizing black Americans into a conscious revolutionary force (“we need a Mau Mau” to win freedom, he’d said), and coordinating international solidarity to turn back the tide of American global power, Rustin described X as “having described the evil [with] no program for attacking it.”41 Several more prominent Lefty critics said some variation of this; cofounder of the future Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Irving Howe wrote that “Malcolm, intransigent in words and nihilistic in reality, never invoked the possibility or temptations of immediate struggle; he never posed the problems, confusions and risks of maneuver, compromise, retreat. Brilliant Malcolm spoke for a rejection so complete it transformed him into an apolitical spectator.”42 Subsequent generations of people paid to tell us what to think have solidified the notion that Malcolm X was ultimately a misguided malcontent. This is the subtext of Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, a book intended to supplant X’s autobiography as the definitive word on the late revolutionary. In his paean to the Obama presidency We Were Eight Years in Power, Ta-Nehisi Coates describes X as “more an expression of black America’s heart than of its brain,” whose “political vision was never complete like that of Martin Luther King, who hewed faithfully to…nonviolence.”43 Marable and Coates equate non-violence with political coherence much like Chomsky equated non-violence with popular support.

Thus, the past was re-written to make the “Left” something that is primarily concerned with describing the world, rather than changing it. Some former revolutionaries got tenured positions and continued to produce revolutionary scholarship while staying in something close to total obscurity. There was also a body of writers and commentators, safely ensconced in academia and foundations, producing radical writing without the radical action that had so threatened the system. As Herman and Chomsky put it in Manufacturing Consent, “The steady flow of ex-radicals from marginality to media attention shows that we are witnessing a durable method of providing experts who will say what the establishment wants said.” Dissidents who were a genuine threat to the system were murdered, imprisoned, or scared off. Those who were given platforms were often safe ones who could be relied upon to provide an ersatz, safe facsimile of robust radical resistance. The more searing their condemnations, the more effective they are for pushing acceptance of the status quo when the time comes. Arthur Silber, in a post that needs to be read, calls this “embalmed dissent.” Silber describes “embalmed dissent” as that commentary which provides a lucid liberatory critique, and “holds out the promise of change—but then tells you it’s too difficult, it carries too much risk, it might be possible, but it’s not something we’d actually want to do.” It’s not hard to see Chomsky’s 1967 essay “On Resistance” as the ur-text of this genre, particularly given passages like this one:

One must then consider in what ways it is possible to pose a serious threat. Many possibilities come to mind: a general strike, university strikes, attempts to hamper war production and supply, and so on.

Personally, I feel that disruptive acts of this sort would be justified were they likely to be effective in averting an imminent tragedy. I am skeptical, however, about their possible effectiveness. At the moment, I cannot imagine a broad base for such action, in the white community at least, outside the universities. Forcible repression would not, therefore, prove very difficult.

A more apt title might’ve been “On Submission.” The one accurate part of Sperlich’s account is that Chomsky became the champion of this genre, but it was not the product of immaculate conception, it was no accident, and it was not due to the quality of his commentary.

Part III coming soon



Works Cited:
1. Albert Szymanski, Human Rights in the Soviet Union, Zed Books, 1984, p. 192; Chapter 4 of Frederic Lee, A History of Heterodox Economics: Challenging the mainstream in the twentieth century, Routledge, 2011

2. Michael Parenti, History as Mystery, City Lights Publishers, 2001 p. 188 and Chapter 5 generally

3. Kenneth Lamott, Anti-California: Report from our First Parafascist State, Little Brown, 1971, p. 154

4. Michael Klare, “The Military Research Network—America’s Fourth Armed Service,” Taking Power: the Sources and Consequences of Political Challenge, ed. John C. Leggett, Harper & Row Publishers, 1973. p. 387

5. Ibid., p. 197

6. James Kunen, The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary, Random House, 1969, p. 22

7. Robert F. Barsky, Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent, The MIT Press, 1998, p. 140

8. Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS: The rise and development of the Students for a Democratic Society, Vintage Books, 1973, p. 123 https://archive.org/details/sds_kirkpatrick_sale

9. Joshua Bloom & Waldo E. Martin, Jr., Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party, University of California Press, 2016, p. 263

10. Sale, SDS, p. 317

11. Julius Lester, Revolutionary Notes, Grove Press, Inc., 1969, p. 53

12. Ibid., pp. 13-14

13. Gerald W. Johnson, Peril and Promise: An Inquiry into Freedom of the Press, Harper & Brothers, 1958, p. 28

14. Kunen, The Strawberry Statement, p. 53-54

15. Frank Donner, Age of Surveillance, Vintage Press, 1981, pp. 260-1

16. Barsky, Noam Chomsky, p. 141

17. Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright: the Life and Times, The University of Chicago Press, 2001, pp. 322

18. Lester, Revolutionary Notes, pp. 74-75

19. In The Troubles, historian Joseph Conlin sneers at and mocks essentially every action and person involved in the radical movements of the 1960s and ‘70s: Huey Newton was, among other things, “Bright but pampered and lazy” and had a “magnetism unlikely to attract adults” [pp. 150-51]; the Panthers provided only a “veneer” of ideological substance [p. 156]; Julius Lester was “a Negro New Leftist who was an early exploiter of bourgeois white guilt as well as a victim of its delusions” [p. 178]; Malcolm X, too, was in Conlin’s summary guilty of peddling self-flagellation to liberals racked with white guilt. But Chomsky gets no mentions in Conlin’s book, possibly just because he was not a particularly consequential figure in radical circles, but maybe because Conlin approved of Chomsky’s extremely conservative attitudes towards resistance. Joseph Conlin, The Troubles: a jaundiced glance back at the movement of the 60’s, Watts, 1982.

20. Stephen Fortunato, Jr., and Others, “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” We Won’t Go: Personal Accounts of War Objectors, ed. Alice Lynd, Beacon Press, 1968, p. 81

21. James Johnson, “The Fort Hood Three,” We Won’t Go: Personal Accounts of War Objectors, ed. Alice Lynd, Beacon Press, 1968, p. 187

22. David Mitchell, “What is a Criminal?,” We Won’t Go, pp. 92-3

23. Tom Bell, “Organizing Draft Resistance,” We Won’t Go, p. 219

24. John Otis Sumrall, “Freedom at Home,” We Won’t Go, p. 91

25. Willard Gaylin M.D., In the Service of Their Country: War Resisters in Prison, The Viking Press, 1968, p. 223

26. Ibid., p. 88

27. Barsky, Noam Chomsky, p. 126

28. Donner, Age of Surveillance, p. 218

29. Wolfgang B. Sperlich, Noam Chomsky, Reaktion Books, 2006. p. 85

30. Joes Segal, Art and Politics: Between Purity and Propaganda, Amsterdam Universal Press B.V., 2016. p. 77

31. Robert Ivanov, Blacks in United States History, Progress Publishers, 1985, p. 245

32. “Internal Security Act,” Encyclopedia of Japanese Internment, ed. Gary Y. Okihiro, Greenwood, 2013. p. 71

33. Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Signet Books, 1968, p. 171

34. Lamott, Anti-California, p. 165

35. Robert L. Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America: an Analytic History, Doubleday Anchor, 1970, p. 259

36. Doug Valentine, The Phoenix Program.

37. Lester, Revolutionary Notes, p. 66

38. Karl Evanzz, The Judas Factor: the Plot to Kill Malcolm X, Basic Books, 1993, pp. 270-72

39. Ibid., pp. 311-13

40. Malcolm X Speaks, ed. George Breitman, Grove Press, 1965, p. 132

41. Ibid., pp. 82-93

42. Ibid., p. 93

43. Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: an American Tragedy, One World, 2017, p. 100

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Re: Chomsky

Post by blindpig » Sun Nov 03, 2019 11:57 pm

The United States has produced very few anti-imperialists. Noam Chomsky is not among them.

what's left Chomsky, Noam Chomsky, Social imperialism, Soft Left, Syria November 3, 2019 8 Minutes

Imperialism has penetrated the fabric of our culture, and infected our imagination, more deeply than we usually think.—Martin Green. [1]

[Americans] have produced very, very few anti-imperialists. Our idiom has been empire.—William Appleman Williams. [2]

November 3, 2019

By Stephen Gowans

In a recent Intercept interview with the beautiful soul Mehdi Hassan, Noam Chomsky resumed his efforts to recruit the political Left into a scheme to support US imperialism.

In the interview, Chomsky spoke about his reasons for trying “to organize support for opposition to the withdrawal” of US troops from Syria. US troops ought to remain in Syria, he said, to deter a planned Turkish invasion and to prevent what he warned would be the massacre of the Kurds. Yet weeks after the Turks moved into northeastern Syria nothing on the scale of massacres had occurred.

The high-profile anarchist, former champion of international law, and one-time outspoken critic of wars of aggression, supports the uninterrupted invasion of Syria by US forces, despite the fact that the invasion is illegal and contravenes the international law to which he had so frequently sung paeans.


http://www.barakabooks.com/
But the principles he once upheld appear to have been sacrificed to the higher goal of defending the anarchist-inspired YPG, the Kurdish group which had sought and received support from Washington to establish a Kurdish mini-state in Syria in return for acting as a Pentagon asset in the US war on the Arab nationalist government in Damascus. In this, the YPG recapitulated the practice of political Zionism, offering to act as muscle in the Levant in exchange for imperialist sponsorship of its own political aspirations. For Chomsky, the desired end-state—what he would like the political Left to rally in support of—is the restoration of the status-quo ante, namely, robust US support for a Kurd mini-state in Syria.

Washington’s illegal military intervention has been the guarantor of the YPG’s aspirations to create a state on approximately one-third of Syrian territory. A YPG state east of the Euphrates would be an asset to the US imperialist project of expanding Washington’s already considerable influence in the Middle East. A Kurd-dominated state under the leadership of the YPG would function as what some have called a second Israel. As Domenico Losurdo put it in a 2018 interview,

In the Middle East, we have the attempted creation of a new Israel. Israel was an enclave against the Arab World, and now the US and Israel are trying to realize something similar with the Kurds. That doesn’t mean to say that the Kurds don’t have rights and that they haven’t been oppressed for a long time, but now there’s the danger of them becoming the instruments of American imperialism and Zionism. This is the danger—this the situation, unfortunately. [3]

To make the US invasion palatable to the political Left, Chomsky misrepresents the US aggression as small-scale and guided by lofty motives. “A small US contingent with the sole mission of deterring a planned Turkish invasion,” he says, ‘is not imperialism.” But the occupation is neither small, nor guided by a mission limited to deterring a planned Turkish invasion. Either Chomsky’s grasp of the file is weak, or he’s not above engaging in a spot of sophistry.

Last year, the Pentagon officially admitted to having 2,000 troops in Syria [4] but a top US general put the number higher, 4,000. [5] But even that figure was, according to the Pentagon, an “artificial construct,” [6] that is, a deliberate undercount. On top of the infantry, artillery, and forward air controllers the Pentagon officially acknowledges as deployed to Syria, there is an additional number of uncounted Special Operations personnel, as well as untallied troops assigned to classified missions and “an unspecified number of contractors” i.e., mercenaries. Additionally, combat aircrews are not included, even though US airpower is critical to the occupation. [7] There are, therefore, many more times the officially acknowledged number of US troops enforcing an occupation of parts of Syria. Last year, US invasion forces in Syria (minus aircrew located nearby) operated out of 10 bases in the country, including “a sprawling facility with a long runway, hangars, barracks and fuel depots.” [8]

In addition to US military advisers, Army Rangers, artillery, Special Operations forces, satellite-guided rockets and Apache attack helicopters [9], the United States deployed US diplomats to create government and administrative structures to supersede the legitimate government of the Syrian Arab Republic. [10]

“The idea in US policy circles” was to create “a soft partition” of Syria between the United States and Russia along the Euphrates, “as it was among the Elbe [in Germany] at the end of the Second World War.” [11]

During the war on ISIS, US military planning called for YPG fighters under US supervision to push south along the Euphrates River to seize Syria’s oil-and gas-rich territory, [12] located within traditionally Arab territory. While the Syrian Arab Army and its allies focused on liberating cities from Islamic State, the YPG, under US direction, went “after the strategic oil and gas fields,” [13] holding these on behalf of the US government. The US president’s recent boast that “we have secured the oil” [14] was an announcement of a longstanding fait accompli.

The United States has robbed Syria of “two of the largest oil and gas fields in Deir Ezzour”, including the al-Omar oil field, Syria’s largest. [15] In 2017, the United States plundered Syria of “a gas field and plant known in Syria as the Conoco gas plant” (though its affiliation with Conoco is historical; the plant was acquired by the Syrian Gas Company in 2005.) [16] Russia observed that “the real aim” of the US forces’ (incontestably denominated) “illegal” presence in Syria has been “the seizure and retention of economic assets that only belong to the Syrian Arab Republic.” [17] The point is beyond dispute: The United States has stolen resources vital to the republic’s reconstruction, using the YPG to carry out the crime (this from a country which proclaims property rights to be humanity’s highest value.)

Joshua Landis, a University of Oklahoma professor who specializes in Syria, has argued that by “controlling half of Syria’s energy resources…the US [is] able to keep Syria poor and under-resourced.” [18] Bereft of its petroleum resources, and deprived of its best farmland, Syria is hard-pressed to recover from a war that has left it in ruins.

To sum up, the notion that the US occupation is small-scale is misleading. The Pentagon acknowledges that it deliberately undercounts the size of its contingent in Syria. But even if there are as few US boots on the ground in Syria as the US military is prepared to acknowledge, that still wouldn’t make the US intervention trivial.

US boots on the ground are only one part of the occupation. Not counted are the tens of thousands of YPG fighters who operate under the supervision of US ground forces, acting as the tip of the US spear. These troops, it should be recalled, acted as muscle for hire to seize and secure farmland and oil wells in a campaign that even US officials acknowledge is illegal. [19]

Another part of the occupation—completely ignored by Chomsky—is US airpower, without which US troops and their YPG-force-multiplier would be unable to carry out their crimes of occupation and theft. US fighter jets and drones dominate the airspace over the US occupation zone. Ignoring the significant role played by the US Air Force grossly distorts the scale of the US operation.

What’s more, Chomsky’s reference to the scale of the intervention as anodyne is misdirection. It is not the size of an intervention that makes it imperialist, but its motivations and consequences.


http://www.barakabooks.com
Additionally, Chomsky completely misrepresents the aim of the US occupation. It’s mission, amply documented, is to: sabotage Damascus’s reconstruction efforts by denying access to revenue-generating territory; to provide Washington with leverage to influence the outcome of any future political settlement; and to block a land route over which military assets can easily flow from Tehran to its allies Syria and Hezbollah. [20] In other words, the goal of the occupation is to impose the US will on Syria—a textbook definition of imperialism.

The idea that it is within the realm of possibility for Washington to deploy forces to Syria with the sole mission of deterring aggression is naïveté on a grand scale, and entirely at odds with the history and mechanisms of US foreign policy. Moreover, it ignores the reality that the armed US invasion and occupation of Syrian territory is an aggression itself. If a man who has been called the principal critic of US foreign policy can genuinely hold these views, then Martin Green’s contention that “Imperialism has penetrated the fabric of our culture, and infected our imagination, more deeply than we usually think,” is surely beyond dispute.

The US occupation, then, is more substantial than Chomsky alleges; it is an aggression under international law, not to say under any reasonable definition; the claim is untenable that the sole motivation is to deter Turkish aggression; and the US project in Syria is imperialist. All the same, one could still argue that US troops should not be withdrawn because their presence protects the YPG and the foundations of the mini-state is has built. If so, one has accepted the YPG’s and political Zionism’s argument that it is legitimate to rent oneself out as the tool of an empire in order to achieve one’s own narrow aims, even if it is at the expense of the right of others to be free from domination and exploitation.

Quoted in William Appleman William, Empire as a Way of Life, IG Publishing, 2007, p. 10.
Ibid. p. 33-34.
Domenico Losurdo, “Crisis in the Imperialist World Order,” Revista Opera, March 2, 2018
Nancy A. Yousef, “US to remain in Syria indefinitely, Pentagon officials say, The Wall Street Journal, December 8, 2017.
Andrew deGrandpre, “A top US general just said 4,000 American troops are in Syria. The Pentagon says there are only 500,” The Washington Post, October 31, 2017.
John Ismay, “US says 2,000 troops are in Syria, a fourfold increase,” The New York Times, December 6, 2017; Nancy A. Yousef, “US to remain in Syria indefinitely, Pentagon officials say,” The Wall Street Journal, December 8, 2017.
Ibid.
Dion Nissenbaum, “Map said to show locations of US forces in Syria published in Turkey,” The Wall Street Journal, July 19, 2017.
Michael R. Gordon, “In a desperate Syrian city, a test of Trump’s policies,” The New York Times, July 1, 2017.
Nancy A. Yousef, “US to send more diplomats and personnel to Syria,” The Wall Street Journal, December 29, 2017.
Yaroslav Trofimov, “In Syria, new conflict looms as ISIS loses ground,” The Wall Street Journal, September 7, 2017.
Ibid.
Raj Abdulrahim and Ghassan Adnan, “Syria and Iraq rob Islamic State of key territory,” The Wall Street Journal, November 3, 2018.
Michael R. Gordon and Gordon Lubold, “Trump weights leaving small number of troops in Syria,” The Wall Street Journal, October 21, 2019.
Abdulrahim and Adnan, November 3, 2018.
Ibid.
Raja Abdulrahim and Thomas Grove, “Syria condemns US airstrike as tension rise,” The Wall Street Journal, February 8, 2018.
Joshua Landis, “US policy toward the Levant, Kurds and Turkey,” Syria Comment, January 15, 2018.
Michael Crowley, “’Keep the oil’: Trump revives charged slogan for new Syria troop mission,” The New York Times, October 26, 2019.
Gordon Lubold and Nancy A. Youssef, “US weights leaving more troops, sending battle tanks to Syria,” The Wall Street Journal, October 24, 2019; Gordon and Lubold, October 21, 2019.

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"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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