I’ve spent some of my weekends listening to lectures of this prominent political commentator, Professor Noam Chomsky. He makes some strong claims, and appears to be extremely critical of American activity in foreign affairs. He also has some extravagant views on the hierarchy of power in the US, feeling that America is exceedingly pro-business at the expense of the middle class.
At least these are my generalized interpretations of what Noam Chomsky stands for. While these accusations resonate with me to some degree, I must say I feel skeptical of some of his claims. Looking for criticisms of Noam via Google, I find a Conservapedia article that does plenty to critique him, but to the extent that it appears laughably biased.
Does anyone know of any particular claims of Noam Chomsky that have been shown to be incorrect? The man seems to have respect for the facts, but his claims seem just too contrary to be trusted at face value.
Any other comments regarding bias / objectivity are also welcome.
Whenever i mention Noam Chomsky here in Australia, i automatically get branded as ‘Conspiracy Theorist’ posts deleted on local forums for same reason,
He denigrates the West, therefore is automatically cast down, ( but not out, not quite yet ) The People who disparage him, ( and John Pilger, Assange etc, do not want to hear any alternative viewpoint than the approved one.
of this much, at least, i am certain…
the wars we wage are NOT about control of Oil, not about the West building ever increasing numbers of US bases encircling both China and Russia.
no, no way, the wars we wage, are for THEIR benefit, right?
its Democracy, imposed…
For a long time he claimed the Cambodian Holocaust was a hoax, going so far as to publish an article in The Nation claiming this but eventually denied ever saying such a thing.
He also was caught manufacturing quotes which he falsely attributed to Harry Truman though, luckily for him, the Truman family didn’t sue him for libel.
Not sure when this occurred, but there isn’t to the best of my knowledge a cause of action for libel for the family of a dead person - if the libel occurs when the person is alive, the suit can sometimes continue after their death, but if the person is already dead, I don’t believe it is libel.
There’s another Chomsky thread about the exact same topic here and my comments on it in this post here - that I had to do a double take on, you started that thread as well.
Yeah, sorry about that. I was surprised how quickly the thread died considering the weight of the guy. I am hoping my rephrasing the OP will get more conversation going about this topic.
Arthur Schlessinger caught him in a lie for his book* American Power and the New Mandarins*. It was hugely embarrassing and the publishing company was forced to issue new, edited copies.
Chomsky pleaded that he was merely sloppy and intellectually irresponsible rather than being deliberately malicious, but most didn’t believe him.
As to the libel aspect, I though that the estate of a dead person could sue for libel. Thanks for the correction if I’m wrong.
Christopher Hitchens wrote a long article that dealt with this and other issues and it seems as with most criticisms of Chomsky in my opionion that if you actually look at the details the claims seem to be weaker than originally stated.
I’m not a libel lawyer, but from memory from law school, I think the suit has to be started when the person is alive. I honestly don’t know if you could shoehorn another claim in - let’s say you were the heir who owned the rights to Elvis’s musical catalog, and a false and malicious article reduced the value of that holding, I don’t know if you would have any cause of action, but I am pretty damn certain it wouldn’t be for libel.
Christopher Hitchens, while a wonderful writer is a polemicist and anyone who accepts his opinion as fact is being very foolish.
Here is the actual article Chomsky published in The Nation where he specifically claims that the Cambodian refugees are liars and that the Khmer Rouge most likely only killed a few thousand people and should be compared to the Free French fighting against the Nazis.
In fact, Chomsky’s article is almost exactly like various articles by David Irving and others who’ve claimed that while Hitler was a bad guy, only a few hundred thousand Jews were killed and that the Allies and the Jews had spread the lies to cover up allied war crimes and justify the founding of Israel.
If you wish to argue that Chomsky didn’t engage in Holocaust denial then you’d have to say the same for Irving.
You might be interested in this Q&A with Johann Hari about Chomsky. Hari is inclined to be sympathetic to Chomsky’s views but outlines several criticisms.
Here is another long pro and con analysis of Chomsky.
Paul Bogdanor’s archive of Chomsky criticism is extensive. It’s polemical and not meant to be objective, but similar repository’s of material supportive of Chomsky can be found out there as well.
Chomsky is as accurate as any other conspiracy theorist. He forms a conclusion first and then looks for evidence to support it. If the evidence for his conclusion isn’t strong enough, he’ll make up some more.
From what I’ve seen this applies to both his linguistic and his political work.
No worries, I just had that feeling of deja vu all over again.
One of my favorite parts from Distortions at Fourth Hand is this:
while earlier in the piece they wrote this:
Notice what Chomsky and Herman just did there? Info coming from the US government is “completely worthless,” yet information coming from the Cambodian Government in April 1976, i.e. the Khmer Rouge is taken at face value. The whole article skewers Ponchaud’s book and Lacouture’s review of it, “Ponchaud’s far more substantial work has an anti-Communist bias and message, but it has attained stardom only via the extreme anti-Khmer Rouge distortions added to it in the article in the New York Review of Books,” and dismiss it as distortions at fourth hand. While Hildebrand and Porter are praised, they “present a carefully documented study of the destructive American impact on Cambodia and the success of the Cambodian revolutionaries in overcoming it, giving a very favorable picture of their programs and policies, based on a wide range of sources,” this careful documentation being provided by the Khmer Rouge themselves.
As a background Lacouture was a leftist and had been pro-Khmer Rouge along with Chomsky, but was horrified with what happened when the Khmer Rouge took power and took to speaking out against them. One had to be drinking a lot of the Flavor Aid to think genocide wasn’t going on in Cambodia by 1977, but Chomsky had no problem swallowing it.
Chomsky’s overall thrust is pretty banal: all societies are run by powerful interests and the only way to maintain and expand common freedom is via popular struggle. And he really likes to hammer on moral premises, like if it’s bad when someone else does it then it’s bad when we do it too. Or we should recognize that the media’s job is to earn money, not to neutrally educate its audience. And so on.
He gets in a lot of trouble because he moralizes to his audience too much (I think he thinks the newer generations haven’t been very engaged) and gets too emotional and stretches/breaks the facts to make his case. Also, check out this short article. It’s a nice sounding theory, I suppose…until you realize the “good example” is totalitarian communism. That’s just stupid. Especially since he opposes communism as another top down system of control.
There was also an instance where he said something so weird about trade that I made a thread about it and no one else knew what he was talking about either. He said something to the effect that 30-40% of all international trade isn’t trade at all, just the shuffling of material within international companies. I don’t know if that’s true or not, I don’t even know if it really matters or what point he was even trying to make…but he’ll bust something like that out every once in awhile that makes you go huh?
I.e. it’s bad when someone else does it and it’s NOT bad when we do it. Or, we should recognize that the media’s job is NOT to earn money, but to neutrally educate its audience.
I’d agree wholeheartedly about the latter (especially with your note that Chomsky behaves exactly as many CT’ists do wrt politics) but I don’t quite follow the former. From what I’m aware of, Chomsky did most of his work on linguistics while the field was still in its infancy. To be sure, there had been work done in the 19th century by folks like Whitehead, but we hadn’t really gotten into the nitty gritty of cognitive linguistics much by the 20th century.
Chomsky, essentially, created an over-reaching theoretical framework to account for the fact that virtually every toddler on the planet is a ‘linguistic genius’, and while he made some mistakes, I’m not aware of any particularly sloppy thinking of anything he invented out of whole cloth.
Can you please elaborate or link a post where it was discussed on the Dope?
Here’s an old thread in which we discuss the quality of Chomsky’s arguments in linguistics:
Chomsky screwed up the state of argumentation in linguistics in the mid-1960’s through the mid-1970’s so badly that it’s hard to even begin to explain what a mess he made. I would recommend the books The Linguistics Wars by Randy Allen Harris and Ideology and Linguistic Theory by Geoffrey J. Huck and John A. Goldsmith for a detailed analysis of how bad things got. It’s not surprising that many people who were around then still resent the generally worthless quality of his linguistic argumentation.
“Libertarian socialism”?)