Noam Chomsky deconstructed

The Observer's foreign affairs editor, Peter Beaumont, is hardly uncritical of the United States - but he still does not like what he finds in the cunning linguist's latest book. (Via Arts & Letters Daily)

Reading Failed States, I had an epiphany: that by applying a Chomskian analysis to his own writing, you discover exactly the same subtle textual biases, evasions and elisions of meaning as used by those he calls 'the doctrinal managers' of the 'powerful elites'. The mighty Chomsky, the world's greatest public intellectual, is prone to playing fast and loose.

It is important to recognise this fact because the Chomskian analysis has become the defining dissident voice of the blogosphere and a certain kind of far-left academia. So a sense of its integrity is crucial. It is obsessively well-read, but rather famished in original research, except when it is counting how often the liberal media say this or that in their search for hidden, and sometimes not-so-hidden, bias. Crucially, it is not interested in debate, because balance is a ruse of the liberal media elites used to con the dumb masses. Chomsky is essential to save you, dear reader, from the lies we peddle.

And, boy, is it a big lie this time. What Chomsky is taking on now is America's claim to be the world's greatest democracy. Failed States posits, tendentiously, that the US has become the ultimate 'failed state', a term usually reserved for places like darfur. It is a terrorist state and a rogue state, a country that has brought us to the brink of annihilating darkness. These big claims are bolstered by his familiar arsenal of exaggeration, sarcasm and allusion...

...Chomsky chooses to deal with America's growing democratic deficit not by putting it under a microscope, but by reaching for hyperbole. He suggests an America in the grip of a 'demonic messianism' comparable to that of Hitler's National Socialism. Except that it isn't...

But what I find most noxious about Chomsky's argument is his desire to create a moral - or rather immoral - equivalence between the US and the greatest criminals in history. Thus on page 129, comparing a somewhat belated US conversion to the case for democracy in Iraq after the failure to find WMD, Chomsky claims: 'Professions of benign intent by leaders should be dismissed by any rational observer. They are near universal and predictable, and hence carry virtually no information. The worst monsters - Hitler, Stalin, Japanese fascists, Suharto, Saddam Hussein and many others - have produced moving flights of rhetoric about their nobility of purpose.'..

The same sort of intellectual dishonesty as that practised by Fast Eddie Said. Meanwhile, Robert Kagan examines the depths of mindless anti-Americanism.

Mark C.

Damian adds: now that he's blasphemed their living god, Beaumont is preparing for an onslaught of spam from the Chomsky cultists. My favorite quote in his review: "is that really what you see, Mr Chomsky, from the window of your library at MIT? Is it the stench of the gulag wafting over the Charles River? Do you walk in fear of persecution and murder for expressing your dissident views? Or do you make a damn good living out of it?"

Posted by markc at June 19, 2006 12:48 PM