“He begins as a preacher to the world and ends as an intellectual crook.”
– Arthur Schlesinger
(Commentary, December 1969)
“Noam Chomsky skittles and skithers all over the political landscape to distract the reader’s attention from the plain truth.”
– Sidney Hook
(The Humanist, March-April 1971)
“In his ideological fanaticism he constantly shifts his arguments and bends references, quotations and facts, while declaring his ‘commitment to find the truth.’”
– Leopold Labedz
(Encounter, July 1980)
“Even on the rare occasions when Mr. Chomsky is dealing with facts and not with fantasies, he exaggerates by a factor of, plus or minus, four or five.”
– Walter Laqueur
(The New Republic, March 24, 1982)
“After many years, I came to the conclusion that everything he says is false. He will lie just for the fun of it. Every one of his arguments was tinged and coded with falseness and pretense. It was like playing chess with extra pieces. It was all fake.”
– Paul Postal
(The New Yorker, March 31, 2003)
In point by point style, Paul Bogdanor nails 200 absolute lies told by darling of the left Noam Chomsky.
Chomsky's political output is consistent with the rest of his oeuvre in one important respect: the method of argumentation. Across disciplines, he has long employed a variety of unscholarly techniques to insulate his conclusions from criticism. The linguist George Lakoff once identified Chomsky's tendency to "fight dirty when he argues. He uses every trick in the book." In the journal Artificial Intelligence, Margaret Boden, Professor of Cognitive Science at Sussex University, notesthat a review of her book by Chomsky is "a sadly unscholarly piece, guaranteed to mislead its readers about both the tone and the content of the book. It is also defamatory." In politics, Chomsky's preferred technique is vituperative abuse of his opponents. Take a few examples. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times is an "astonishing racist and megalomaniac". In disputing Chomsky's analogy between 9/11 and President Clinton's attack on a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, Christopher Hitchens "must be unaware that he is expressing such racist contempt". The French nation collectively has a "highly parochial and remarkably illiterate culture".
The irony of Chomskyan invective in the political sphere is that it is highly selective. Chomsky has never regretted his intervention in the 1980s on behalf of a Holocaust denier, Robert Faurisson. Chomsky has no sympathy with Holocaust denial, and if he had stuck to defending Faurisson's right to free expression he would have been right and principled. Instead, he wrote: "As far as I can determine, [Faurisson] is a relatively apolitical liberal of some sort." The point here is not the perversity of the judgement. It is the way in which Chomsky espouses supposedly universal principles while extravagantly failing to apply them. Liberals and left-wingers who see value in US interventionism are racists, frauds, apologists for state terror and so on. Yet a man like Faurisson who exemplifies all of these qualities is regarded differently.
Consider, too, Chomsky's writings on Indochina, the issue on which he became famous as a political controversialist. He did not only excoriate an unjust and brutal US war. He derided refugee accounts of horrors after the fall of Cambodia, pointedly referring to "alleged Khmer Rouge atrocities" and disputing a comparison of Pol Pot's rule to Nazi Germany. In an interview last year, Chomsky characteristically congratulated himself on the astuteness of this analysis, declaring: "If we were to rewrite it now, we'd do it exactly the same way."
Here is your chance to see Chomsky at his deceptive best. Download this book, read it, and pass it on. Let's smash the Chomsky myth.
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