I have studied in detail what I consider to be Chomsky’s misdirection over the
past 20-plus years. It was the ex-Yugoslavia wars that brought him to my attention
(after having learned so much from him in earlier years). I could also, of
course, have noted his supportive stance toward the
Khmer Rouge - which to this
day he declines to renounce.
In this talk, Vlad has many perceptive and
analytical things to say, but on some points I think he is too easy on Chomsky,
especially on the question of integrity. I offer you my detailed analysis of
significant positions that Chomsky took on the Yugoslav wars, where I caught him
out on false statements that he had every reason to know were false. The
mitigating factor might be that his fan base expects him to be the authority on
every issue, and he seems to have caught that disease himself, regardless of how
little he actually knows – and he is no expert on Yugoslavia. Please see
Noam Chomsky's denial of Serbian war crimes
, and for more, consult my Chomsky index .
I didn’t understand as well at the time I produced those
pages, but Ukraine has been a clarifying experience for me. (Syria could
have been, had I paid a little more attention.) I thought, in my work on
Kosovo and Bosnia, that progressives suffered from a lack of access to basic
facts. It turns out that the way to account for that appearance is that the
problem has been fundamentally ideological. Namely, a strain of Left thought
has been anti-imperialist as applied to US actions but not to those of
competing empires. This is an illustration of the inability of some to hold
two opposing concepts in one’s mind at the same time and figure out how to
process them. In its simplest form, it can be reduced to “The enemy of my
enemy is my friend.” Surely this is not worthy of Chomsky’s intellect, but
he propagates and panders to it, with his followers lapping it up. (It is
noteworthy that Lenin understood this issue, as applied to the Russian
Empire that he inherited, but he was outmaneuvered and outlived by Stalin.
Elements of the Left have been getting it wrong ever since.)
That puts
Chomsky in the category of an ideologue. A friend of mine wrote that “you
are an ideologue when you no longer have ideas; your ideas have you.”