From: orwell@reg.triumf.ca (BALDEN, RON)
Newsgroups: alt.activism.d
Subject: Usual libels against Chomsky (Was Re: Media Bias ...)
Keywords: Chomsky
Date: 21 Aug 92 03:01:00 GMT
Organization: TRIUMF: Tri-University Meson Facility
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41



jmc@SAIL.Stanford.EDU (John McCarthy): [my emphasis]
>If you think the left could ever agree that the media has a leftist
>bias, just try talking with Chomsky.  To him, and those who agree
>with him, everything to the right of themselves is rightist.  An
>apposite Chomsky statement is that what the U.S. needs **is not
>reform but denazification**.  If you take him literally, it means
>that he gets to kick anyone out of public life whom he regards as
>being a Nazi, and that covers a lot.

Refuting the constant flood of vicious libels against Noam Chomsky is
essentially a fulltime job.  Christopher Hitchens's essay on this
subject, "The Chorus and Cassandra", reprinted in his book, "Prepared
for the Worst" (1988; Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
Library of Congress catalogue number E876.H58) refutes the "standard"
main libels. 

To quote the beginning of Hitchens's essay:

""In his imperishable "Treatise on the Art of Political Lying," 
published in 1714, Dr. John Arbuthnot laid down a standard for 
falsifiers and calumniators that has yet to be excelled:

  "Detractory or defamatory lies should not be quite opposite to
  the qualities the person is supposed to have.  Thus it will not
  be found according to the rules of pseudology to report of a
  pious and religious prince that he neglects his devotions and
  would introduce heresy; but you may report of a merciful prince
  that he has pardoned a criminal who did not deserve it."

Chomsky's statement about denazification was made in the specific
context of the American war against Vietnam, and those figures in
the American establishment responsible for ordering and supporting
major war crimes.  The phrase appears in his introduction to
"American Power and the New Mandarins" (1969); following I quote the
context (from the Pelican edition, pg. 17, my ellipsis):

""... As a final illustration of the callousness of the American 
response to what the mass media reveal, consider a small item in the 
New York Times of 18 March 1968 headed, `Army Exhibit Bars Simulated 
Shooting at Vietnamese Hut'.  The item reports an attempt by the 
`peace movement' to disrupt an exhibit in the Chicago Museum of
Science and Industry:

   Beginning today, visitors can no longer enter a helicopter for 
   simulated firing of a machine gun at targets in a diorama of the 
   Vietnam Central Highlands.  The targets were a hut, two bridges and an 
   ammunition dump, and a light flashed when a hit was scored.

.. According to the Times report, `demonstrators particularly 
objected to children being permitted to "fire" at the hut, even 
though no people appear there or elsewhere in the diorama', which just 
shows how unreasonable peaceniks can be.  

What can one say about a country where a museum of science in a great 
city can feature an exhibit in which people fire machines guns from a 
helicopter at Vietnamese huts, with a light flashing when a hit is 
scored?  What can one say about a country where such an idea can even 
be considered?  You have to weep for this country.

These and a thousand other examples testify to moral degeneration on 
such a scale that talk about the `normal channels' of political action 
and protest becomes meaningless or hypocritical.  We have to ask 
ourselves whether what is needed in the United States is dissent --- or
denazification.  The question is a debatable one.  Reasonable people
may differ.  The fact that the question is even debatable is a 
terrifying thing.  To me it seems that what is needed is a kind of
denazification.  What is more, there is no powerful outside force that 
can call us to account -- the change will have to come from within.

[half a page on] ... We must guard against the kind of revolutionary
rhetoric that would have had Karl Marx burn down the British Museum 
because it was merely part of a repressive society.  It would be 
criminal to overlook the serious flaws and inadequacies in our 
institutions, or to fail to utilize the substantial degree of freedom 
that most of us enjoy, within the framework of these flawed 
institutions, to modify them or even replace them by a better social 
order.  One who pays some attention to history will not be surprised 
if those who cry most loudly that we must smash and destroy are later 
found among the administrators of some new system of repression.""
[Noam Chomsky, Introduction, "American Power and the New Mandarins,
pgs. 17-18 in Pelican paperback edition.] 

Ron Balden
Newsgroups: alt.activism.d,alt.activism