October 26, 2005
Noam Chomsky a Pseudo-Intellectual
I just got finished reading Noam Chomsky's "Imperial Ambitions." My overall impression is that this guy is overrated as an intellectual. He makes claims without providing any evidence. One of my policy friends described Noam's methodology as "tautology." I think others might call it "strawman" argumentation.
Among my favorite quotes from the book:
"The Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia was one of the few actions in modern history that might properly called a humanitarian intervention."
"The United States will largely become a desert, and Europe frozen, due to global warming."
"The Soviets in the Cold War were legitmately frightened and threatened. If they were not, they might not have entered the arms race and built nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles."
Chomsky also praised democracy in Haiti and the Canadian health care system. These discussions were pretty laughable.
The truly interesting thoughts involved foreign policy. Some of his ideas were probably valid criticisms, if true. [I will discuss these in an upcoming post] But when he argued, again without evidence, that the only reason Bush is interested in Iraq, Iran, North Korea and Venezuela is because of oil reserves and pipelines, he lost my attention.
It is one thing to say that the "war is all about oil," but it is quite another thing to show some evidence of the motivations behind Congress and President Bush. Let us not forget that members of both parties supported the war, and that President Clinton also saw Iraq and North Korea as security threats. Did Clinton make these remarks, bomb Iraq and nearly go to war with N. Korea because of oil too?
The leftists are kind of silent on this question.
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3 comments:
The Canadian health care system isn't much to be desired, just ask those who have been on waiting lists for years.
You're an obvious idiot. The overthrow of Pol Pot -- whom the US basically installed as the US instituted a coup and bombed the country while a moderate was in place who kept off the far left and the far right -- was a humanitarian intervention. Most wars have been for colonialism, power struggles, and so on, including most of the US' wars. The other quotes seem accurate as well, and of course you don't provide evidence against them.
Chomsky has done brilliant work in Linguistics and his work spans to many other areas such as computer science, psychology, mathematics, as well.
The book is an interview book and it gives references to his political books which contain hundreds of footnotes.
I've looked at his footnotes. Many of them are footnoted to his own books. That is hillarious. Citing yourself as your own source!
I've begun reading Hegemony or Survival, by the way. One of his themes is that if only the US wouldn't act the way it does, the world wouldn't have so many problems. He seems to believe that the Soviets were really not a threat, but that the US made them a threat. Yet Chomsky is silent about the 20 million people killed by Stalin, the brutal invasion of Hungary and other imperial acts by the Soviets. I guess they can't be imperial because they are "socialists."
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