[quote]GDollars37 wrote:
The guy’s a clown. Few would dispute his brilliance as a linguist, but as an apologist for communism and genocide he has few peers. He was a guest of those benevolent socialists in Hanoi at the same time Jane Fonda was, those same kindly nationalists who shot over 60,000 people (more than we lost in the whole war) within a couple of months of taking power in 1975.
I would be very interested if you could provide just one original quote where he’s apologizing for communists. This claim has been made often about him, but it is unsubstantiated.
I don’t understand how any smart, free-thinking person can take someone like Chomsky seriously. I read one of his books, What Uncle Same Really Wants, years ago, and even the basic premise of a slim (100 pages?) polemic like that is garbage:
If you read one thing by Chomsky, I would recommend the first chapter in “Manufacturing Consent”, which is quite an eye opener as to how the media works. This book is read by every aspiring journalist, and is required reading in political science courses in many countries. It sure sounds like he’s rather knowledgeable.
On a more personal note, I’ve been through the stage you might be experiencing. When I first read Chomsky, it was such a shock, it went so against everything I “knew”, that it was hard to believe. But, I like to read both sides, and what determined the issue for me is the plethora of original, relevant and serious sources he cites, sources which tend to be missing from right wing propaganda.
the majority of U.S. armed interventions in the Caribbean have been for political reasons, promotion of democracy, national security, not some payoff to United Fruit. Noam Chomsky is maybe marginally more credible than Michael Moore. Maybe.[/quote]
Whenever I hear the above comment, that the US is fighting for democracy and national security, I find it difficult to stay civil, but I’ll do my best; after all, I used to believe that stuff too. So, here’s the American political system in a nutshell (the argument applies to other so called “democracies” to varying degrees):
To get elected, a politician needs money to campaign. In the US, 70%-80% of campaign contributions come from business. If you want to know who has power in a place, whether it’s a government or a business, you don’t look at what they say (propaganda) or their circuses (elections); you look at who owns the place. In the US, that’s business. In turn, politicians serve their paymasters, or they won’t be there for long, and they know it. As for the public, who does have nominal power through elections, they can be “managed” through advertising (more big business) and news (yes, also big business). So it is not at all far fetched that foreign policy serves business interests.
I am not arguing here that Americans are stupid; they’re as smart as anybody else. But, people make decisions on the basis of the information they’re presented with, and in the US, it ain’t much. As a stark example, a poll sometime ago showed about half of Americans believe the US invaded Iraq because of 9/11, though the government never said so, they simply alluded to it, and it’s always been known that there is no connection. This is an example of the effectiveness of propaganda; there are many more.
And now, to the argument that they fight for democracy and national security. Let me dismiss national security first as being simply laughable; we worry about Panama, Haiti, Grenada, Cuba ?! Seriously, this is why the rest of the world tends to laugh at Americans. I’m not trying to be offensive, just consider, the world’s only superpower “defending” itself against some third world Caribbean islands… Come on! “Defending American interests” is a phrase that at least has the merit of being closer to the truth.
As for supporting democracy, it’s a lovely bit of propaganda, essential to be believed by the young men who do the killing and the dying, as well as by the lesser creatures we just have to police for their own good, but it’s just not borne out by the facts. Strictly speaking, the US doesn’t support democracies any more than they support dictatorships; what they support is client regimes. If they happen to be democracies, that’ fine, but dictatorships are actually prefered, since they’re more dependent on foreign support as opposed to popular support, and popular support is likely to demand certain things like minimum wage, better working conditions, corporate taxes etc., all of which are inimical to foreign business interests. A study was done a few years ago, I wish I could quote the source, that tried to correlate US support for regimes, and those regimes abuse of human rights, from suppressing negative reporting to torture and genocide. The study found the correlation to be positive and strong, meaning the worse the suppression of their own population, the stronger US support for these governments (which didn’t have to be dictatorships, btw). Examples are Indonesia in East Timor, Turkey murdering the Kurds, Israel occupying the Palestinians, and various military juntas in Central and South America. This is not coincidental, the whole point is to keep the population down, so that the local government can all the more depend on foreign support, and leave their country open to the benefits of “free trade”, i.e. colonial economic domination. This is all presented as supporting “stability”; Condoleeza Rice practically admitted this in a speech she gave in Egypt earlier this year.