If you want to know what the average student at UC Santa Cruz is thinking, it's exactly that. The so-called 'critical mind' is not the least bit critical. Perhaps critical of the "establishment", but as far as the student-professor relation is concerned, they are preaching to the choir. As John J. Ray states, "The naive scholar who searches for a consistent Leftist program will not find it. What there is consists only in the negation of the present."
It's almost as if I am back in community college, where the professor continues with her lecture in front of a silent class - half of them drank too much the previous night, didn't get enough sleep, or are busy thinking about other things. The other half are bored out of their minds.
Here, it's different. The students are not silent because they are bored. They are silent because they have no objection to what the professor is saying.
The university system and all of academia have this unhealthy fixation with diversity. What does it really mean? Sure, you can paint each robot in your robot army all different colors. You can change their shapes and sizes, but fundamentally they are all still robots. Academia loves to speak their volumes about how having lots of people who look different make higher education better, even if all those people are more or less ideologically homogeneous. If we're all thinking and doing the same things, does it really matter how we look?
Today the instructor (feminist studies graduate student, mind you) put on a DVD of a Noam Chomsky lecture, complete with a packed lecture hall of wide-eyed and attentive college students ready to greedily lap up everything that St. Noam speaks without hesitation or question.
The theme of the lecture was that the world's terrorists are the US and Israel. No mention of the centuries of terror and slaughter that Jews and Christians have faced as a result of their dhimmitude in the Middle East. No mention of the massive bombing campaigns carried out by Hezbollah against anyone associated with the US or Israel. No, the world's worst terrorists are the US and Israel, which have only become world and regional superpowers, respectively, in the last 30 years. Chomsky has a very limited view of history, and refuses to acknowledge his double standards.
His "thesis #1" was that we are all hypocrites in regard to our views on terrorism. Well, if that's true Mr. Chomsky, where do you fit into the subject of "we all"? Are you a hypocrite as well, or are you conveniently shielded from criticism because you're the one lecturing? Are you so focused on the speck in the eyes of others that you can't or won't see the log embedded in your own short-sighted vision of global politics?
Chomsky may be aware that is was CIA-backed Lebanese that detonated the car bomb that killed 80 worshippers as they left a Beiruit mosque instead of Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, an ex-leader of Hezbollah, yet frames the claim that the attempt was directly done by the CIA and in the context of total Lebanese innocence and not retaliation for attacks by Hezbollah.
Chomsky rationalizes, excuses, and downplays terrorism that is not committed by the US or Israel. It seems that one finds it easier to point the fingers at large things than at small things, no matter how minor or grievous the acts in question are. He is opposed to US "hegemony", yet sees no problem with UN hegemony. To Chomsky, the UN can do no wrong. He is still highly critical of US action in the former Yugoslavia, yet finds little to say about the same UN that essentially allowed the Srebrenica massacre (of Muslims, no doubt!) to occur under Dutch auspices.
Chomsky is the type who slams the US on its foreign policy in Iraq, but would join the legions of drones in condemning the US for not doing anything to free Iraq from the murderous Baathists had the US instead gone the diplomatic route, just as we are with the genocide in Darfur. US refusal to intervene in Iraq would probably have prompted hemp-wearing Community Studies majors across the US to add a "Free Iraq" bumper sticker to the back of the Prius their parents bought (so they could look hip and environmentally responsible, all while allowing Toyota to use massive amounts of toxins and heavy metals in the manufacture of the batteries) for them, alongside the Obama '08 and "Free Darfur" "Free Burma" and "Free Tibet" stickers.
That's what the aggregation of international law, "condemnation", and UN Resolutions have culminated in: bumper stickers. That's the only thing they have to show. It's a big boost for capitalism. I mean, who wouldn't delight in making the adage "a fool and his money are soon parted" a reality?
Chomsky's beloved international law and the UN are somehow institutions to be respected, yet no other nation or coalition of nations have ever been able to put pressure on the US or Israel. Condemnation and scorn are the only tools the UN has at its disposal, as if the multiple failed resolutions commanding Saddam Hussein to allow weapons inspectors free reign of all Iraqi facilities weren't enough evidence to showcase the toothlessness of the UN.
If Chomsky is so concerned about double standards, berates others for having them, and then refuses to acknowledge his own, why have standards in the first place? Leftism rejects all objectivity, and standards would imply some form of objectivity. If he is so concerned about US hegemony, wouldn't it have a better net result for the European Union, the African Union, the Arab League, and the Asian states to bring the US down on its knees either through economic or military force? Chomsky is opposed to violence, but that all depends on who is carrying out the violence and how well Chomsky is prepared to rationalize it.
Chomsky has been quick to declare that Israeli and US leadership should be detained, charged with war crimes, and then sentenced, but Keith Windschuttle says in a New Criterion article:
"No matter how great the crimes of the regimes he has favored, such as China, Vietnam, and Cambodia under the communists, Chomsky has never demanded their leaders be captured and tried for war crimes. Instead, he has defended these regimes for many years to the best of his ability through the use of evidence he must have realized was selective, deceptive, and in some cases invented."
He has downplayed the horrific acts of Slobodan Milosevič's regime, citing Western "aggression" as a catalyst for the subsequent attempts at ethnic cleansing. Chomsky is not averse to making up information that suits his views, no matter how fiercely he criticizes others for the same behaviour. His statements that the US attack on the al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory caused "tens of thousands of deaths" was strongly refuted by Human Rights Watch - who never made an official investigation to determine the number of dead as a direct result of the attack. Here, Chomsky is practically pulling figures out of thin air. The Tomahawk missile strike disrupted food distribution, not to mention the hostility against US aid groups working in the Sudan, so the "tens of thousands of deaths" still would have occured due to the Sudan's internal condition of civil war and famine.
Chomsky frequently uses the word "obvious" in describing unverified and uncited statements about events that he makes. Anyone who criticizes his description of those events would be identified as someone who cannot see the obvious; someone who is ignorant - that old word that the Left loves to throw at anyone they disagree with. Who's going to take you seriously if you're IGNORANT? It's just another way of shutting down criticism and establishing Chomsky-ites and other members of the Left as the omniscient ones. He uses the phrase "too obvious to talk about" as if to say "this is not open to discussion", yet such an assumption is in direct violation of his first thesis of "we are all hypocrites". I found, and continue to find to this present moment, his glaring hypocrisy and narcissism to be absolutely sickening.
Here is a man who is fabulously wealthy - in a First World nation, not an authoritarian Third World country like the ones he so zealously defends without little regard to their own behavior - who decries tax shelters and concentration of wealth, yet the Hoover Institute clearly shows that Chomsky himself has made use of trusts to guard his ill-gotten wealth (what else can you call a massive sum of money made in a capitalist nation by a mainstream critic of capitalism?). When confronted about his tax shelter, Chomsky rationalized his hypocrisy by stating that he is setting aside the money for his children and grandchildren, which I'm pretty sure those other rich people are doing, too. He went on to shift the attention away from himself in saying that he and his family shouldn't be criticized because they are "trying to help suffering people".
Does he think about the environmental destruction that comes as a result from the trees cut down to make the paper for his books? Does he even care? Like so many other authors and celebrities on the Left, it's not likely they really care as long as they can get their point across. It's a "necessary sacrifice" or "using the system against itself", much like Al Gore's 221,000 kWh-using mansion/office along with the private jets that he takes to and from colleges when giving commencement speeches.
Speaking of taxes and the "rich", the IRS data still adamantly refuses to corroborate the claims of the wealth redistributionists. New data points to the fact that while the top 1% of income earners receive 22% of all income, they end up paying 40% of income taxes. If that isn't enough, the entire top 50% pay 97% of all income taxes. Who's really isn't paying their "fair share"? The poor use the most social services, yet most of them are receiving aid that they did not and will not pay for.
On top of that, the US has a higher corporate tax rate than the "sustainable and progressive" EU! It's easy to stop businesses from moving jobs overseas: we lower the cost of doing business. The purpose of a business is to supply a product and to offer an attractive target for investors. Businesses should have no allegiance to a government, and they should be able to do business with whomever they want, at least within legal boundaries. Stop taxing profitability and the efficient use of resources at present levels, and we can at least slow down the rate of outsourcing. Just as labor will look for the best possible wages and operating conditions, business will do the same.
What is Chomsky's complaint with the wealthy, who would still be financing the overwhelming bulk (and even more so than now!) of an expanded welfare state under an Obama administration? Wouldn't this be his dream come true - the evil and exploitive capitalists getting their just desserts at the hands of a black socialist? Chomsky is in favor of the estate tax and income redistribution, but only on the condition that it's not his own estate or his own income. After all, he has to support his family and "suffering people", so making an exception for him is completely legitimate.
The sad reality that the rest of my class took Chomsky's words at face value and without objection points to a greater problem - the refusal to criticize their own views and the "revolutionary" views that are presented to them by instructors who are presenting it as the Gospel truth, and nothing less. Just as David Horowitz said, there are plenty of feminists who have written critiques on their own movements, yet the bulk of Feminist Studies (or Womens' Studies, as it's called at most universities) majors will only read texts extolling the virtues of feminism and doing nothing but tearing down any legitimacy of masculinity. Like Chomsky implies, it should just be "obvious". To go against the "revolutionary" doctrine is to admit that one is uneducated, ignorant, racist/sexist/classist/ageist/homophobic/Islamophobic/et cetera, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
The Left pushes the doctrine of self-criticism and self-reflection, on the condition that they are exempt from the same activities.
3 comments:
Hey MV - loved what you have said. Here are some thoughts I have found on the psychology of Noam Chomsky:
What do Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Noam Chomsky and George Soros have in common?
They were/are all radicals, born to Jewish parents, had no Jewish identity and hurt Jews (not to mention non-Jews).
The term "non-Jewish Jew" is generally attributed to the Jewish historian Isaac Deutscher, who wrote an essay by that name in 1954. The term describes the individual who, though born a Jew (Judaism consists of a national/peoplehood identity, not only a religious one), identifies solely as a citizen of the world and not as a Jew, either nationally or religiously.
Noam Chomsky has devoted much of his life to working against America and Israel. He is alienated from the very two identities into which he was born. Indeed he has vilified both his whole life. To cite but one example, he traveled to Lebanon to appear with Hizbollah leader Sayyed Nasrallah and lend his support to a group that is committed to the annihilation of Israel and is officially listed as a terrorist organization by the United States.
Some recent news items about Jews aiding enemies of the Jews:
Last week, professor Noam Chomsky went to Lebanon to speak at the headquarters of Hezbollah. As described by the BBC, not a media friend of Israel, "Hezbollah's political rhetoric has centered on calls for the destruction of the state of Israel," and Hezbollah has been "synonymous with terror, suicide bombings and kidnappings." The terror group's views on the need to annihilate the Jewish state are identical to those of Hamas and Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Chomsky announced his support for Hezbollah and its need to be militarily strong.
Jews siding with the Jews' enemies or even actually fomenting Jew-hatred has a history that long predates Chomsky, Finkelstein, leftist Jewish professors and the Neturei Karta. Karl Marx, though baptized a Christian, was the grandson of two Orthodox rabbis but wrote one of the most anti-Semitic tracts of the 19th century, "On the Jewish Question." In it he wrote, among other anti-Semitic charges, that "Money is the jealous god of Israel, beside which no other god may exist."
How is one to explain these Jews who work to hurt Jews?
I think the primary explanations are psychological. As I wrote in a previous column, it is almost impossible to overstate the pathological effects of thousands of years of murder of Jews -- culminating in the Nazi Holocaust, when nearly all Jews on the European continent were murdered -- have had on most Jews.
It is not coincidental that Norman Finkelstein's parents went through the Holocaust or that Yisroel Dovid Weiss's grandparents were murdered in the Holocaust. But even Jews who lost no relatives in the Holocaust fear another outbreak of anti-Jewish violence, and given the Nazi-like anti-Semitism in the Muslim world today, that is not exactly paranoia.
One way to deal with this is to side with the enemy. Consciously or not, the Jew who sides with those dedicated to murdering Jews feels that he will be spared. He becomes the "good Jew" in the anti-Semites' eyes. How else to explain the visit of a Jew named Noam Chomsky to Lebanon to support Hezbollah or the fact that Chomsky wrote the foreword to a French book denying the Holocaust? How else to explain Norman Finkelstein telling cheering German audiences that the Jewish state is morally the same as the Nazis? How else to explain rabbis visiting Tehran to extol the Holocaust-denying regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran that seeks to exterminate Israel?
The other psychological explanation is related. The Jew -- specifically the radical Jew -- who sympathizes with Jew-haters wishes to announce to the world that he is not really like other Jews. While the other Jews are moored in provincial Jewish ethnic or religious identity, he is a world citizen who no more identifies with the Jews' fate than with the fate of Iroquois Indians.
The prevalence of Jew-hating Jews would be no more than an interesting study of psychopathology were it not for one additional fact: All these Jews (except for the fringe Neturei Karta rabbis) also hate America. And they do the same damage to this country -- aiding the enemies of America just as they do the enemies of the Jews.
Keep up the great writing and great thinking, MV!
Who's "MV"?
Anyway, Chomsky is just another self-loathing Jew, and a smug prick on top of that.
Who's MV? Why it is Modern Viking!!!
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