Noam Chomsky
by Imraan
How very true. Why don’t more people in high office pay attention to what he has to say? He was deserving of the Presidential Medal of Freedom (not that he’d accept it) – not that despicable creature Peres.
There is no pit deep enough for these fundamentalist warmongers – ‘I think even Hell will spit out Netanyahu in disgust.’ We just wait, and pray for our Gazan brothers and sisters this day, who are so barbarically trapped in that tiny spec of land yet are enduring the harshest of realities.
Surely God is the best of Planners.
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What is it about me, Sam Shamoun, you want to know, besides that I am “barking mad”?
I think Chomsky has gotten into a rut. He doesn’t seem capable of questioning his own dogma. It’s especially annoying because I used to follow him so closely, about ten years ago.
Certainly, if you read his books (and they are published weekly or something), they get rather repetitive. Though I must say I enjoyed his Hegemony or Survival –as an interesting culmination of his ideas.
Any particular areas of Chomsky that you think he ought to analyse differently? Though I can’t always agree with him (with my being slightly more postmodernist-inclined and a fan of hermeneutics whereas he’s really stuck in ‘analytic’ mode)…he seems very consistent in his outrage, and he seems to try to be genuinely honest.
I’m slowly working my way through his collections on Anarchism, which are pretty interesting but very, very dry.
You are arriving at the same conclusion I arrived at not long ago. I used to be a follower of Chomsky. In fact, one of the few books I bought by Chomsky is “Hegemony or Survival.”
The fact is, he did do a lot of good by raising people’s awareness of the atrocities perpetrated by American governments; however, the problem is that he is no longer looking for the less obvious answers. He, as Christopher Hitchens has described his view of American history, has established a narrative of the American empire as “one genocide after another.” This gets old, and in fact, overlooks the great amount of good that America has done for the world. Yes, America has done plenty of bad things; however, consider all the hegemons of history. Is it even a contest which one has advanced humanity the most? I think that starting with the belief that America (and Israel) are the evil-doers before doing the research on the topic obviously slants your final verdict. This is what Chomsky does. It’s sad because he’s such an intelligent guy.
It’s good to hear you’re willing to go through all his stuff. I wouldn’t have the patience; however, I urge you to look a little critically at what he says. You might start seeing things that you didn’t notice before :)
Cheers