[Jeanette X]

There's a famous definition in the Gospels of the hypocrite, and the hypocrite is the person who refuses to apply to himself the standards he applies to others.

So...I should dismiss the entire left based on the hypocrisy you accuse Chomsky of? By the same logic, should I dismiss all of Christianity based on the hypocrisy I have seen in its practioners?

Noam Chomsky was the most conspicuous American intellectual to rationalize the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. The death toll, he argued, was minor compared to the list of Third World victims of the far more extreme terrorism; of United States foreign policy.

So comparing 9/11 to certain U.S. foreign policies equals rationalizing 9/11? Excuse me but I don't follow the train of logic here.

Newspaper articles routinely open by reminding readers of his awesome intellectual status.

Don't all interviews open with an introduction on the person?

As an anti-war activist, Chomsky participated in some of the most publicized demonstrations, including the attempt, famously celebrated in Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night, to form a human chain around the Pentagon. Chomsky described the event as “tens of thousands of young people surrounding what they believe to be—I must add that I agree—the most hideous institution on this earth.”

This kind of anti-Americanism...

So anti-war=anti-Americanism? Bullshit.

For all his in-principle disdain of communism, however, when it came to the real world of international politics Chomsky turned out to endorse a fairly orthodox band of socialist revolutionaries.

As opposed to what better alternative?


[img]When he provided this endorsement of what he called Mao Tse-tung’s “relatively livable” and “just society,” Chomsky was probably unaware he was speaking only five years after the end of the great Chinese famine of 1958–1962, the worst in human history. He did not know, because the full story did not come out for another two decades, that the very collectivization he endorsed was the principal cause of this famine, one of the greatest human catastrophes ever, with a total death toll of thirty million people. [/img]

How did the collectivzation cause the famine? Explain.

If it were true that the consequences of not using terror would be that the peasantry in Vietnam would continue to live in the state of the peasantry of the Philippines, then I think the use of terror would be justified.

Funny how there is no source for this quote...

Well I'll be back later with more comments. Ta ta.