Hegemony or Survival: Noam Chomsky is alive, but he is one sick man

Noam Chomsky lives, contrary to Hugo Chavez’s misinterpreted statement to the contrary. Fine. I don’t wish death on anyone.

A few fanatics claim Chomsky is a brilliant man. But Chomsky has spent far too much of his life feeding the totalitarian monster. There’s nothing smart about that.

I’m convinced that Chomsky suffers from a mental disorder paralyzing that part of the brain that enables most human beings to see nations as places where real people live.

Mad metaphors. Chomsky instead sees nations as metaphors, and he perceives only the leader, not the people. I’ve described how this disability has manifest itself in the way personality worshippers see Cuba as Castro, or Castro as Cuba. They can’t imagine that Cuba is 11 million people imprisoned by Castro. To them, there’s only Castro, and since he’s on a relatively small, miserably poor island, he is the favored underdog; he must be a victim no matter how many Cubans he has tortured or murdered when the rest of us weren’t looking.

Chomsky sees the United States as big and powerful, and therefore bad. The fact that human freedom gives America its influence doesn’t matter to Chomsky. He can’t figure out that, if the people living in dictatorships suddenly were free, their creativity would be unshackled, too, and their nations eventually would claim a fair share of world influence. In his mind’s eye, he can’t see the people.

To those with Chomsky’s syndrome, the success of the thriving (big) nations has nothing to do with the freedom of their people; instead, thriving nations thrive because they stole something from the poor (little) nations.

World conquest. In Chomsky’s clouded view, a big, free nation ousts dictatorships not because it’s good for the people or the world, but because big bad Bush wants to rule the world and, to do it, he must beat up poor little Osama or Saddam or Ahmadinejad or Kim Jong-Il. Hence, the book title, “Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance.”

Start with Chomsky’s retarded premise, and all of his paranoid linguistics makes sense. Addition is subtraction. Multiplication is division. Freedom is fascism. To hell with people.

Chomsky simply cannot imagine people he cannot see. He cannot connect. He cannot understand how freedom inspires human progress, and he cannot empathize with the anguish of those in foreign lands who are forbidden to speak their minds.

Cruel exploitation. With Chomsky, it’s only the leaders who count, and it doesn’t matter how they govern or how they came to power. If a leader’s repression has crippled his economy or crushed “his people,” that doesn’t matter either. What matters is, if a nation is a chronic failure, its leader automatically represents goodness and victimhood. If a nation is a major success, its leader represents criminal conspiracies and cruel exploitation.

Noam Chomsky:

* “Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.”

* “I have often thought that if a rational fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system.”

* “If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.”

* “Resistance is feasible even for those who are not heroes by nature, and it is an obligation, I believe, for those who fear the consequences and detest the reality of the attempt to impose American hegemony.”

* “The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control – 'indoctrination,’ we might say - exercised through the mass media.”

* (Dismissing reports of 2 million Cambodians murdered in “the killing fields” of the Khmer Rouge:) “Space limitations preclude a comprehensive review, but such journals as the Far Eastern Economic Review, the London Economist, the Melbourne Journal of Politics, and others elsewhere, have provided analyses by highly qualified specialists who have studied the full range of evidence available, and who concluded that executions have numbered at most in the thousands; that these were localized in areas of limited Khmer Rouge influence and unusual peasant discontent, where brutal revenge killings were aggravated by the threat of starvation resulting from the American destruction and killing.”

*  “The invasion of Iraq had a number of motives, and one was to illustrate the new National Security Strategy, which declares that the United States will control the world permanently by force if necessary and will eliminate any potential challenge to that domination.”

Worst best. Chomsky’s sick world view inevitably perceives politics and economics in reverse. The leaders of open and democratic societies are bad. The leaders of secretive and oppressive societies are good. Never mind if dictatorship is too bleak to bear.

Chomsky will mention people in his writings, as if he cares, but humans seem an abstraction to him. Occasionally, he’ll even condemn dictatorship, but the reasoning is obtuse. Ultimately, the worse the dictator, the more Chomsky seems to like him.

No, I can’t admire Chomsky’s research or writing. It’s the counterproductive result of bizarro-world thinking. But his books aren’t the problem. The syndrome is. (As Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz has noted, someone buys Chomsky’s books, but no one actually reads them.)

Angry sorrow. In a way, I feel sorry for Chomsky. He cannot feel the joy most of us feel when the tyrants are toppled and oppressed people are freed. He never saw the problem. He couldn’t celebrate the solution.

But I’m angry, too. I feel much sorrier for the countless millions of innocents who today suffer horribly harsh lives in police states while emotionally retarded writers like Noam Chomsky provide pretty, pompous words to justify the suffering.

While most of us fight the monster, he feeds it. Chomsky doesn’t have to die to stop doing that. He should just stop doing that.

Frank Warner

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SEE ALSO: Hugo Chavez: Passing ugly as clever.

Comments

[Christopher Taylor]

Chomsky's mental disorder is easy to trace: he's a marxist. He just uses slightly different language to cover up that fact because he knows he'd be laughed out of school for being openly so. The man may or may not be a good linguist but he's a moron when it comes to world politics and economics.

[Kevin]

“The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control – 'indoctrination,’ we might say - exercised through the mass media.”

It's amazing how differently people can see things. He sees us as conforming to the ideological control of the MSM, and I see us as rebelling from it. It is my hope that he was right in the past, and I am right in the present and future.

[Danielle]

It is sad to see such lame examination of a man who has dedicated his life to peering at the goverments, and people of the world in order to fully understand the consequences of the past. If his book is narrowly focused it is because he attempts to dissect a rather complicated set of political agendas and foreign strategy into one cohesive thesis. I rather find your treatment of this man pathetic. But I suppose you feel that corruption and detestable actions only belong to the dictators and that all the cited questionable actions of our wonderful freedom loving leaders are just the hallucinations of a mad man.

[jj mollo]

I don't like to think I'm a fanatic, and I certainly don't agree with Chomsky's prescriptions, but I do think he is a brilliant man and intellectually honest. He has said that the U.S. is the greatest country in the world. He has also said that the U.S. is a failed state. This is really no different than what Winston Churchill said, that democracy is a terrible system of government. It just happens to be better than all the other ones we've tried.

What is it that bothers us about Chomsky? I think it's mostly that we recognize his brilliance and we have to square that with the fact that he disagrees with us so thoroughly. So why does he disagree with us? I think it's because he understands the U.S. well enough to know its faults, and he understands the suffering of other peoples, but he doesn't understand the power of unchecked adversarial ideologies to hurt us, and he doesn't understand that other peoples have not really chosen to live the way that they do.

He sees correctly that the mainstream media are pushing a particular ideology and assumes that it must be government propaganda. He sees that the average American accepts a certain set of viewpoints and assumes that they must be indoctrinated.

In short, his viewpoint is very different from ours and he supports it with elaborate argument and prodigious polemical efforts. He believes strongly in free speech and so do I. I applaud him for his efforts. I just wish we were persuasive enough to explain our own understanding of the world well enough to counteract his influence. This man is not Michael Moore or George Galloway.

[Frank Warner]

Dictatorships are 100 percent corrupt because they ask no consent of the governed and maintain power purely by force.

Their secrecy and lack of accountability are responsible for about 95 percent of the world's wars, genocides, mass executions and famines. Dictatorships also are to blame for 95 percent of all human rights abuses, including the denial of free speech, a free press, free elections, free political parties and independent courts in their nations.

Democracy, as imperfect as it is, produces nothing like the fearful stench and horror of totalitarian repression. And yet, whenever Chomsky has a chance to take sides, he stands with the dictators. (Churchill wasn't like that.)

Danielle, name one thing in Chomsky's 2003 book that makes sense. Give us a great quote.

The man plays with words. He sees a few dents in America's democratic armor, and he writes books and lectures calling that a disaster. He sees the world's oppressed naked and defenseless against their brutal oppressors, and he hardly says a word.

[Jason Reynard]

Whoever wrote this article is a complete moron and the reason there is problems with micro-media today. Apparently the author only looks at Chomsky quotes instead of all of the studies he has participated in. His comment referring to terrorism is talking about all of the aid and weapons we gave al-Quada when the Russians were there. We knew many Mujadeen fighters were unstable and selfish in their quest as the Russians did as well, but our "stop communism at all costs" attitude during the Cold War is what has gotten us into so many messes these days, stopping communism but sacrificing so many things and people in order to stop it. Your ignorant.

[Frank Warner]

Jason, your kind of thinking is what kept half of Europe enslaved for half a century and more.

The United States never aided al-Qaida. The U.S. aided the Afghan mujahadeen, and the aid worked well in throwing the Soviets out of Afghanistan and demoralizing the Communists to the point of collapse.

Then we left Afghanistan, and the Taliban moved in. Had we stayed, Chomsky would have complained that we stayed. Because we left, Chomsky complains that we left. That's the Chomsky disease at work.

[Jason]

I know I'm a little late to this post, but I couldn't pass this up. From the other Jason: "Your ignorant." Just classic.

[George Clarke]

Read any Great World History (I like Durant) and you will see that for the 10,000 years of recorded history, brutal dictatorship with no freedoms except for the top elite is the norm. The refinement of Anglo-Saxon constitutional freedom, exercised today mainly in the English-influenced countries, is probably a historical blip, reinforced by a few classically educated geniuses who were required to figure out how to bring forth a new nation on a newly settled shore. Of course we should spread this Great Idea to the whole world, but unfortunately it won't get spread without force. Marxism was not a coherent system, and never worked, not even for a day. Anglo-Saxon constitutionalism, reinforced by the Economics of Adam Smith has never failed where ever it was tried. Obviously, I disagree with Chomsky, and believe he is infected by adulation of that Failed God of the Atheists. He should read Witness by Whittaker Chambers and Darkness at Noon by that other great reformed Communist Kessler, I think his name is.

[Maureen]

Look. He's brilliant, but his brilliant linguistics theory just doesn't work. He's brilliant, but his brilliant political analysis doesn't work, either. When anybody tries to open a dialogue with him about the Mack truck-sized holes in his theories, he stops talking to them. He has not been a boon to any field.

So basically, Noam Chomsky is a brilliant fool whose major skill is collecting book contracts and impressing people for a moment with something that sounds good. He will end up more forgotten than Count Korzybski.

[jj mollo]

Wikipedia has not forgotten, although, he would have said that no one can be "recalled" by words on a page because the Word is not the Count.