The funny thing about Chomsky is that he's always criticized by the usual voices as a far-left sort. But it was my communist friend who finally convinced me he shouldn't be trusted, and his debate with Foucault was one of his greatest public foibles. He relies on gaps in your knowledge. So when he makes a grand historical claim, I look it up:

>As explained by Peter Linebaugh in his richly documented and stimulating history of Magna Carta, the Charter of the Forest called for protection of the commons from external power. The commons were the source of sustenance for the general population: food, fuel, construction materials, a form of welfare, whatever was essential for life.

>In thirteenth-century England, the forest was no primitive wilderness. It had been carefully nurtured by its users over generations, its riches available to all. The great British social historian R. H. Tawney wrote that the commons were used by country people who lacked arable land.

>By the eighteenth century, the charter had fallen victim to the rise of the commodity economy and capitalist practice and moral culture. As Linebaugh puts it, “The Forest Charter was forgotten or consigned to the gothic past.”

Contrast:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Merton (1235)

>It is considered to be the first English statute, and is printed as the first statute in The Statutes of the Realm. Containing 11 chapters, the terms of the statute were agreed at Merton between Henry[1] and the barons of England in 1235. [...] Amongst its provisions, the statute allowed a Lord of the Manor to enclose common land provided that sufficient pasture remained for his tenants, and set out when and how manorial lords could assert rights over waste land, woods, and pastures against their tenants.

England engaged in a long and openly political struggle between common and private property from the thirteenth to eighteenth century. The idea that anything was "forgotten" is simply impossible. There were riots, there were Acts of Parliament for and against enclosure, there were rebellions in 1381, 1450, 1549 and 1604, not to mention the Civil War.

But it's convenient for Chomsky's narrative to say "oh, England forgot".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_of_the_Forest

>For many years it was regarded as a development of great significance in England's constitutional history, with the great seventeenth-century jurist Sir Edward Coke referring to it along with Magna Carta as the Charters of England's Liberties,[5] and Sir William Blackstone remarking in the eighteenth century that:

>"There is no transaction in the antient part of our English history more interesting and important, than … the charters of liberties, emphatically stiled THE GREAT CHARTER and CHARTER OF THE FOREST …"[12]

It was so 'forgotten' in the eighteenth century that it featured highly in the discussions of several prominent English jurists.

He goes on to link this to the practice of fuel extraction for its impact on climate change -- presumably this is occurring because Russia, the Arab states, Mexico, Venezuela and Angola dwell in mistaken admiration for the English legal principles of the thirteenth century.

It is, in a word, nonsense. I no longer see Chomsky as a hardcore partisan, but more like a slightly higher-brow Malcolm Gladwell with a twinge of anti-imperialist flair. He manages to blame the British for an incredible number of things, I have to give him that.

But was the Magna Carta really the first time anyone conceived of "the presumption of innocence", as Chomsky would have us believe?

http://defensewiki.ibj.org/index.php/Rights_of_the_Accused_u...

>In fact, in an early hadith (recorded sayings of the Prophet by his companions), the Prophet stated: “Had men been believed only according to their allegations, some persons would have claimed the blood and properties belonging to others, but the accuser is bound to present positive proof.”

So! I see that Muhammad caused climate change with his fiendish presumption of innocence... if you buy Chomsky's argument, that is.