Noam Chomsky: Guru of the Anti-American Left

Without question, the most devious, dishonest and, in this hour of his nation’s grave crisis, treacherous intellect in America belongs to MIT professor Noam Chomsky. On the 150 campuses that mounted  “teach-ins” and rallies against America’s right to defend herself after 9/11; on the streets of Genoa and Seattle where “anti-globalist” radicals have attacked the symbols of free markets and world trade; among the demonstrators at Vieques, Puerto Rico, who wish to deny our military its training grounds; and wherever young people manifest an otherwise incomprehensible rage against their country, the inspirer of their loathing and the instructor of their hate is more often than not this man.

There are many who ask how it is possible that our most privileged and educated youth should come to despise their own nation – a free, open, democratic society – and to do so with such ferocious passion. They ask how it is possible for American youth to even consider lending comfort and aid to the Osama bin Ladens and Saddam Husseins, and the Communists before them. A full answer would involve a search of the deep structures of the human psyche, and its irrepressible longings for redemption. But the short answer is to be found in the speeches and writings of an embittered academic and his intellectual supporters. For forty years, Noam Chomsky has turned out book after book, pamphlet after pamphlet and speech after speech with one message, and one message alone: America is the Great Satan, the true fount of evil in this world. In Chomsky’s demented universe, America is responsible not only for its own bad deeds, but for the bad deeds of others, including those of the terrorists who struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In this attitude he is the medium for all those who now search the ruins of Manhattan not for the victims and the American dead, but for the “root causes” of the catastrophe that befell them. A recent little pamphlet of Chomsky’s, What Uncle Sam Really Wants, has already sold 160,000 copies, but represents only a tiny sample of the Chomsky output.^[1] His venomous message is spread on tapes and CDs, and the campus lecture circuit; he is promoted at rock concerts by superstar bands such as Pearl Jam, Rage Against the Machine, and U-2, whose lead singer Bono called Chomsky a “rebel without a pause.” He is the icon of Hollywood stars like Matt Damon whose genius character in the Academy Award-winning film Good Will Hunting invokes Chomsky as the go-to authority for political wisdom. According to the Chicago Tribune, Noam Chomsky is “the most often cited living author. Among intellectual luminaries of all eras, Chomsky placed eighth, just behind Plato and Sigmund Freud.” On the Web, there are more chat room references to Noam Chomsky than to Vice President Dick Cheney and 10 times as many as there are to Democratic congressional leaders Richard Gephardt and Tom Daschle. This is because Chomsky is also the political mentor to the academic left, the legions of Sixties radicals who have entrenched themselves in American universities to indoctrinate students in their anti-American creeds. The New York Times calls Chomsky “arguably the most important intellectual alive,” and the pop music magazine Rolling Stone, which otherwise hardly acknowledges the realm of the mind, “one of the most respected and influential intellectuals in the world.”^[2]

In fact, Chomsky’s influence is best understood not as that of an intellectual figure, but as the leader of a religious cult – an ayatollah of anti-American hate. This cultic resonance is not unnoticed by his followers themselves. His most important devotee, David Barsamian, is an obscure public radio producer on KGNU in Boulder Colorado, who has created a library of Chomskyana on tape from interviews he conducted with the master, and converted into pamphlets and books. In the introduction to one such offering, Barsamian describes Chomsky’s power over his disciples in these words: “Although decidedly secular, he is for many of us our rabbi, our preacher, our rinpoche, our pundit, our imam, our sensei.”^[3]The theology that Chomsky preaches is Manichean, with America as its evil principle. For Chomsky no other nation’s evil, however great, can exceed America’s, while America is also the cause of evil in others. This is the key to the mystery of the attacks of September 11: The devil made them do it. In every one of the 150 shameful demonstrations that took place on America’s campuses on September 20, these were the twin themes of those who agitated to prevent America from taking up arms in her self-defense: America is responsible for the “root causes” of this criminal attack; America has done worse to others.

In his first statement on the terrorist attack, Chomsky’s response to Osama bin Laden’s calculated strike on a building containing 50,000 innocent human beings was to eclipse it with an even greater atrocity he was confident he could attribute to former president Bill Clinton. This infamous September 12 statement “On the Bombings” began:

The terrorist attacks were major atrocities. In scale they may not reach the level of many others, for example, Clinton’s bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext, destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and killing unknown numbers of people (no one knows, because the US blocked an inquiry at the UN and no one cares to pursue it).^[4]

The terrorists’ crimes were great but ours were greater. The opening reference to the actual attacks serves as a kind of rhetorical throat clearing for Chomsky so that he can get to the real culprit. It is a message that says, “Look away, America, from the injury that has been done to you, and contemplate the injuries you have done to them.” In point of fact – and just for the record – however ill conceived Bill Clinton’s decision to launch a missile into the Sudan, it was not remotely comparable to the World Trade Center massacre. It was, in its very design, precisely the opposite, a defensive response that attempted to minimize casualties. Clinton’s missile was launched in reaction to the blowing up of two of our African embassies, the murder of hundreds of innocent people and the injury to thousands, mostly African civilians. It was designed with every precaution possible to prevent the loss of innocent life. The missile was fired at night, so that no one would be in the building when it was hit. The target was selected because the best information available indicated it was not a pharmaceutical factory, but a factory producing biological weapons. Chomsky’s use of this incident to diminish the monstrosity of the terrorist attack is typical, an expression of his instinctive mendacity, and of the anti-American dementia that infuses everything he writes and says.

This same psychotic animus warps the historical perspective he offered to his disciples in an interview conducted a few days after the World Trade Center bombing. It was intended to present America as the devil incarnate – and to incite others to follow the jihadists’ example. This was the first time America itself – or as Chomsky put it the “national territory” – had been attacked since the War of 1812. Pearl Harbor doesn’t count because Hawaii was a “colony” at the time. The fact that it was a benignly run colony and that it is now a proud state of the Union counts for nothing, of course, in Chomsky’s calculus. “During these years [i.e., between 1812 and 1941], the US annihilated the indigenous population (millions of people), conquered half of Mexico, intervened violently in the surrounding region, conquered Hawaii and the Philippines (killing hundreds of thousands of Filipinos), and in the past half century particularly, extended its resort to force throughout much of the world. The number of victims is colossal. For the first time, the guns have been directed the other way. That is a dramatic change.”^[5] Direct the guns the other way! Listening to Chomsky, you can almost feel the justice of Osama bin Laden’s strike.

If you were one of the hundreds of thousands of young people who had been exposed to Chomsky’s propaganda, and the equally vile teachings of his academic disciples, you too would be able to extend your outrage against America into the present. According to Chomsky, in the first battle of the postwar struggle with the Soviet Empire, “the United States was picking up where the Nazis had left off.” According to Chomsky, during the Cold War, American operations behind the Iron Curtain included “a ‘secret army’ under US-Nazi auspices that sought to provide agents and military supplies to armies that had been established by Hitler and which were still operating inside the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe through the early 1950s.” According to Chomsky, in Latin America during the Cold War, U.S. support for legitimate governments against Communist subversion led to US complicity under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, in “the methods of Heinrich Himmler’s extermination squads.” According to Chomsky, there is “a close correlation worldwide between torture and U.S. aid.” According to Chomsky, America “invaded” Vietnam to slaughter its people, and even after America left in 1975, under Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, “the major policy goal of the US has been to maximize repression and suffering in the countries that were devastated by our violence. The degree of the cruelty is quite astonishing.”^[6] According to Chomsky, “the pretext for Washington’s terrorist wars [i.e., in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, Guatemala, Iraq, etc.] was self-defense, the standard official justification for just about any monstrous act, even the Nazi Holocaust.”^[7] In sum, according to Chomsky, “legally speaking, there’s a very solid case for impeaching every American president since the Second World War. They’ve all been either outright war criminals or involved in serious war crimes.”^[8] In light of these atrocities, what decent, caring human being would not want to see America and its war criminals brought to justice?

According to Chomsky – parroting his Marxist tutors^[9] – what America really wants is to steal from the poor and give to the rich. America’s crusade against Communism was actually a crusade “to protect our doctrine that the rich should plunder the poor.”^[10] That is why we busied ourselves in launching a new crusade against terrorism after the end of the Cold War: “Of course, the end of the Cold War brings its problems too. Notably, the technique for controlling the domestic population has had to shift… New enemies have to be invented. It becomes hard to disguise the fact that the real enemy has always been ‘the poor who seek to plunder the rich’ – in particular, Third World miscreants who seek to break out of the service role.”^[11] According to Chomsky, America is afraid of the success of Third World countries and does not want them to succeed on their own. Those who threaten to succeed like the Marxist governments of North Vietnam, Nicaragua and Grenada America regards as viruses. According to Chomsky, during the Cold War, “except for a few madmen and nitwits, none feared [Communist] conquest – they were afraid of a positive example of successful development. What do you do when you have a virus? First you destroy it, then you inoculate potential victims, so that the disease does not spread. That’s basically the US strategy in the Third World.”^[12] No wonder they want to bomb us.

Schooled in these big lies, taught to see America as Greed Incarnate and a political twin of the Third Reich, why wouldn’t young people – with no historical memory – come to believe that the danger ahead lies in Washington rather than Baghdad or Kabul? It would be easy to demonstrate how on every page of every book and in every statement that Chomsky has written the facts are twisted, the political context is distorted, often inverted, and the historical record systematically traduced. Every piece of evidence and every analysis is subordinated to the overweening purpose of Chomsky’s lifework, which is to justify an idée fixe – his pathological hatred of his own country. To do this, however, would take volumes, and there really is no need. Because every Chomsky argument exists to serve this end, a fact transparent in each offensive and preposterous claim he makes.

The attacks of September 11 presented a political problem for American leftists, like Chomsky, who knew better than to celebrate the event even though it was the realization of their agitations and dreams. For the destroyed buildings were the very symbols of the American empire with which they have been at war for fifty years. In a memoir published on the eve of the attack, the Sixties terrorist Bill Ayers recorded his joy at striking one of the targets: “Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon. The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them.”^[13] In the wake of September 11, Ayers, a “Distinguished Professor of Early Childhood Education” at the University of Illinois, had to feverishly backtrack and explain that these revealing sentiments of an anti-war leftist did not mean what they obviously do mean. Claiming to be “filled with horror and grief” over 9/11, Ayers attempted to reinterpret his terrorist years as an effort to explore his own struggle with “the intricate relationships between social justice, commitment and resistance.”^[14]

Chomsky is so much Ayers’ superior at the lie direct that he works the same denial into his account of the World Trade Center bombing itself. Consider first the fact that the Trade Center is the very symbol of American capitalism and “globalization” that Chomsky and his radical comrades despise. It is “Wall Street,” its twin towers filled on that fateful day with bankers, brokers, international traders, and corporate lawyers, the hated men and women of the ruling class who Chomsky claims run the global order. In other words, the twin towers are the Palace of the Great Satan himself, the object of Chomsky’s lifelong righteous wrath. But he is too clever and too cowardly to admit it. He knows that in the hour of the nation’s grief this is a third rail to be avoided, so he just rewrites the text: “The primary victims, as usual, were working people: janitors, secretaries, firemen, etc. It is likely to be a crushing blow to Palestinians and other poor and oppressed people.”

Chomsky’s message to his disciples – the young on our college campuses, the radicals in our streets, the moles in our government offices is also a message of action. To those who believe his words of hate, Chomsky has this instruction: “The people of the Third World need our sympathetic understanding and, much more than that, they need our help. We can provide them with a margin of survival by internal disruption in the United States. Whether they can succeed against the kind of brutality we impose on them depends in large part on what happens here.”^[15] This is the voice of the fifth column left. Disruption in this country is what the terrorists want, and what the terrorists need, and what the followers of Noam Chomsky will want to give them. Chomsky himself of course a Cambridge millionaire is too important to the struggle to take such risks himself.

In his address before Congress on September 19, President Bush reminded Americans: “We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20^th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions, by abandoning every value except the will to power, they follow in the path of fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way to where it ends in history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies.” The president was talking about the terrorists and their sponsors abroad. But he might just as well have been talking about their fifth column allies at home.

One of the typical illusions of the Chomsky cult is the belief that its guru is not the unbalanced dervish of anti-American loathing he appears to everyone else, but an analytic giant whose dicta flow from a painstaking and scientific inquiry into the facts. “The only reason Noam Chomsky is an international political force unto himself,” writes a typically fervid acolyte, “is that he actually spends considerable time researching, analyzing, corroborating, deconstructing, and impassionately [sic] explaining world affairs.” This conviction is almost as delusional as Chomsky’s view of the world itself. It would be more accurate to say of the Chomsky oeuvre – lifting a famous line from the late Mary McCarthy – that everything he has written is a lie, including the “ands” and the “the’s.”

Chomsky’s little masterpiece, What Uncle Sam Wants, draws on America’s actions in the Cold War as a database for its portrayal as the evil principle in global affairs.^[16] As Chomsky’s followers are quick to point out, a lot of facts do appear in the text or – more precisely – appear to appear in the text. On closer examination, every one of them has been ripped out of any meaningful historical context and then distorted so cynically that the result has about as much in common with the truth as Harry Potter’s Muggles Guide to Magic. In Chomsky’s narrative the bi-polar world of the Cold War appears as a world with only one pole. But in the real world, the Cold War was about America’s effort to organize a democratic coalition against an expansionist empire that conquered and enslaved more than a billion people. It ended, at the precise moment that the empire gave up and the walls that kept its subjects locked in came tumbling down. Chomsky is oblivious of this truth despite the fact that no one can really erase it from the historical record. In Chomsky’s world, the Soviet empire hardly exists, not a single American action is seen as a response to a Soviet initiative or conquest, and the Cold War is thus “analyzed” as though it had only one side, which makes the United States the aggressor in every case.

This is like writing a history of the Second World War without mentioning Hitler or noticing that the actions of the Axis powers influenced its events. But in Chomsky’s malevolent hands, matters get even worse. If one were to follow the Chomsky method one would list every problematic act committed by any party in the vast coalition attempting to stop Hitler, and would attribute every such act to a calculating policy of the United States. One would then put together a report card of these “crimes” and present it as the historical record. This record consisting of the worst acts the allies could be accused of, and the most dishonorable motives they may be said to have acted upon, would then constitute the data from which America’s portrait would be drawn. The result inevitably would be the great demon of Chomsky’s deranged fantasy life.

What Uncle Sam Really Wants begins with Chomsky’s description of America as having “benefited enormously” from the conflict in contrast to its “industrial rivals,” skipping over the 250,000 lives America lost, its generous Marshall Plan aid to those same rivals or, for that matter, its victory over Nazi Germany and the Axis powers. In Chomsky’s portrait, America in 1945 is, instead, a wealthy power that profited from others’ misery and is now seeking world domination. “The people who determine American policy were carefully planning how to shape the postwar world,” he asserts without evidence; “American planners – from those in the State Department to those on the Council on Foreign Relations (one major channel by which business leaders influence foreign policy) – agreed that the dominance of the United States had to be maintained.”^[17]

Chomsky never names the actual people who agreed that American policy should be world dominance, nor how they achieved unanimity in deciding to transform a famously isolationist country into a global power.^[18] For Chomsky, America has no internal politics that matter. Thus Chomsky does not bother to acknowledge or attempt to explain the powerful strain of isolationism specifically in the Republican Party – the party of Wall Street and the Council on Foreign Relations businessmen whom he claims determine policy. Above all, he does not explain why – if world domination was really America’s goal in 1945 – Washington disbanded its wartime armies overnight and brought them home.

Between 1945 and 1946 America demobilized the 1.6 million troops it had stationed in Europe, a fact immediately at odds with a desire for world dominance. By contrast, when the war ended, the Soviet Union maintained its 2 million-man army in place in the countries of Eastern Europe whose governments it had already begun to undermine and replace. It was the Soviet absorption of the formerly independent states of Eastern Europe in the years between 1945 and 1948 that triggered America’s subsequent rearmament, the creation of NATO, and the overseas spread of American power. These developments were designed to contain an expansionist Soviet empire and prevent a repetition of the appeasement process that had led to World War II. These facts never appear in Chomsky’s text. There is no excuse for this omission other than that Chomsky wants this history to be something other than it was. The Cold War, the formation of the postwar western alliances and the mobilizing of western forces was brought about by the Soviet conquest of Eastern Europe. That is why the Cold War ended as soon as the Iron Curtain fell and the states of Eastern Europe were free to pursue their independent paths. It was to accomplish this great liberation of several hundred million people, and not any quest for world domination that explains American Cold War policy, not Chomsky’s fantasy of a Wall Street cabal.

Having begun his account with an utterly false picture of the historical forces at work, Chomsky is ready to carry out a campaign of malicious slander against the democracy in which he has led a privileged existence for more than seventy years: “In 1949, US espionage in Eastern Europe had been turned over to a network run by Reinhard Gehlen, who had headed Nazi military intelligence on the Eastern Front. This network was one part of the US-Nazi alliance….”^[19] Let’s pause for a moment over this display of the Chomsky method. We have jumped – or rather Chomsky has jumped us – from 1945 to 1949, skipping over the little matter of the Soviet Union’s conquest of Eastern Europe. Instead of these matters, the reader is confronted with what appears to be a shocking fact about Reinhard Gehlen, which is quickly inflated into a big lie – a “US-Nazi alliance.” There was no such alliance and the United States used Gehlen,, not the other way around. The U.S did not turn over its intelligence network to anyone.

In 1949 all of Eastern Europe was occupied by the Red Army a state of affairs that continued until the end of the Cold War. All the regimes in Eastern Europe were police states and the two million Soviet troops were in an aggressive posture threatening the democratic states of Western Europe with invasion and occupation. In these circumstances, which Chomsky does not mention, the use of a German intelligence network with experience and assets in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was a reasonable measure to defend the democracies of the West.^[20] This episode was no Nazi taint on America, but a necessary part of America’s Cold War effort in the defense of democratic countries. With the help of the Gehlen network, the United States kept the Soviet expansion in check, and eventually liberated hundreds of millions of oppressed people in Eastern Europe from the horrors of their Communist regimes.

Chomsky recounts this history as though the United States had not defeated Hitler, but had joined him instead. According to Chomsky America’s real postwar agenda was establishing a Nazi world order – with business interests at the top and the “working classes and the poor” at the bottom. Therefore, “the major thing that stood in the way of this was the anti-fascist resistance, so we suppressed it all over the world, often installing fascists and Nazi collaborators in its place.”^[21] Claims like these give conspiracy theories a bad name. It would be tedious to run through all of Chomsky’s distortions. One will suffice: In 1947 a civil war in Greece became the first Cold War test of America’s resolve to prevent the spread of the Soviet empire. Chomsky presents the conflict as a struggle between the “anti-Nazi resistance,” and US-backed interests. In Chomsky’s words, these interests were “US investors and local businessmen” and “the beneficiaries [of U.S. policies] included Nazi collaborators, while the primary victims were the workers and the peasants….”^[22] The leaders of the anti-Communist forces in Greece were not Nazis and what Chomsky calls the “anti-Nazi resistance” was in fact the Communist Party and its fellow-travelers. What Chomsky leaves out of his account are the proximity of the Soviet Red Army to Greece, the intention of the Greek Communists to establish a Soviet police state, and the fact that their defeat paved the way for an unprecedented economic development benefiting all classes and the eventual establishment of a political democracy, which soon brought democratic socialists to power. No country in which Chomsky’s “anti-fascists: won, ever established a democracy or produced any significant betterment in the economic conditions of the great mass of its inhabitants. This puts a somewhat different color on every detail of what happened in Greece and what the United States did there. The only point of view from which Chomsky’s version of this history makes sense is the point of view of the Kremlin, whose propaganda points have merely been updated by the MIT professor.

A key chapter of What Uncle Sam Wants is called “The Threat of A Good Example.” In it, Chomsky offers his explanation for America’s diabolical behavior in Third World countries: “What the US-run contra forces did in Nicaragua, or what our terrorist proxies do in El Salvador or Guatemala, isn’t only ordinary killing. A major element is brutal, sadistic torture – beating infants against rocks, hanging women by their feet with their breasts cut off and the skin of their face peeled back so that they’ll bleed to death, chopping people’s heads off and putting them on stakes.”^[23] There are no citations in Chomsky’s text to support the claim either that these atrocities took place, or that the United States directed them, or that the United States was in any meaningful way responsible for them. But according to Chomsky, “US-run” forces and “our terrorist proxies” do this sort of thing routinely and everywhere: “No country is exempt from this treatment, no matter how unimportant.”^[24]

According to Chomsky, U.S. business is the evil hand behind all these policies, even when there is not a direct business interest at stake. “As far as American business is concerned, Nicaragua could disappear and nobody would notice. The same is true of El Salvador. But both have been subjected to murderous assaults by the U.S., at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and many billions of dollars.”^[25] Chomsky explains the paradox: “There is a reason for that. The weaker and poorer a country is, the more dangerous it is as an example (italics in original).^[26] If a tiny, poor country like Grenada can succeed in bringing about a better life for its people, some other place that has more resources will ask, ‘why not us?’”^[27] In other words, what Uncle Sam really wants is to control the world. This control means absolute misery for all the peoples that come under Uncle Sam’s sway; and this means the U.S. must prevent all the poor people in the world from realizing that there are better ways to develop than with U.S. investments. Chomsky gives the example of Grenada: “Grenada has a hundred thousand people who produce a little nutmeg, and you could hardly find it on a map. But when Grenada began to undergo a mild social revolution, Washington quickly moved to destroy the threat.”^[28] This is his entire commentary on the U.S. intervention in Grenada. It is his proof that the goal of U.S. policy is to prevent the threat of a good example.

Actually, something quite different took place in Grenada. In 1979, an internal coup established a Marxist dictatorship complete with a Soviet-style “politburo” (that’s what the new dictators called it). This was a tense period in the Cold War. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan, and Communist insurgencies armed by Cuba were spreading through Central America. Before long, Cuban military personnel began to appear in Grenada and were building a new airport capable of accommodating Soviet bombers. Tensions over the uncompleted airport developed between Washington and the Grenadian dictatorship. While this was taking place, there was another coup. It was led by the Marxist Minister of Defense who assassinated the Marxist dictator and half his politburo, including his pregnant Minister of Education. The new dictator put the entire island, including U.S. citizens resident there, under house arrest. It was at this juncture that the Reagan Administration sent in the Marines to protect U.S. citizens, stop the construction of the military airport and restore democracy to the island. The U.S. did this at the request of four governments of Caribbean countries who feared a Communist military presence in their neighborhood. A public opinion poll taken after the U.S. operation showed that 85% of the citizens of Grenada welcomed the U.S. intervention and America’s help in restoring their freedom.

There was no “threat of a good example” in Grenada and there are none anywhere in the world of progressive social experiments. There is not a single Marxist country that has ever provided a “good example” in the sense of making its economy better or its people freer. Chomsky is in denial about this most basic fact of 20^th century history: Socialism doesn’t work. Korea is an obvious model case. Fifty years ago, in one of the early battles of the Cold War, the United States military prevented Communist North Korea from conquering the anti-Communist South. Today Communist North Korea is independent of the United States and one of the poorest countries in the world. A million of its citizens have starved in the last few years, while its Marxist dictator has feverishly invested his country’s scarce capital in an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile program. So much for the good example.

South Korea is defended by 50,000 U.S. troops stationed along the border to prevent another Communist attack. For fifty years, U.S. businesses and investors have operated freely in South Korea. The results are interesting. In 1950, South Korea, with a per capita income of $250, was as poor as Cuba and Vietnam. Today it is an industrial power and its per capita income is more than twenty times greater than it was before it became an ally and investment region of the United States. South Korea is not yet a full-fledged democracy but it does have elections and more than one party and a press that provides its readers with information from the outside world. This is quite different from North Korea whose citizens have no access to information their dictator does not approve. Unlike the citizens of South Korea they are not free to leave their gulag state. It is pretty clear which side in these battles is afraid of the threat of a good example.

Communism was an expansive system that ruined nations and enslaved their citizens. But Chomsky dismisses America’s fear of Communism as a mere cover for America’s own diabolical practices. He explains the Vietnam War this way: “The real fear was that if the people of Indochina achieved independence and justice, the people of Thailand would emulate it, and if that worked, they’d try it in Malaya, and pretty soon Indonesia would pursue an independent path, and by then a significant area [of America’s empire] would have been lost.”^[29] This is a Marxist version of the domino theory. But of course, America did leave Indo-China, Cambodia and Thailand included, in 1975. Vietnam has pursued an independent path for 25 years and it is as poor as it ever was, one of the poorest nations in the world, while its people still live in a primitive Marxist police state.

After its defeat in Vietnam, the United States withdrew its military forces from the entire Indo-Chinese peninsula. The result was that Cambodia was over-run by the Khmer Rouge, the Communist forces that Noam Chomsky, the North Vietnamese and the entire American left had supported until then. The Khmer Rouge proceeded to kill two million Cambodians who, in their view, stood in the way of the progressive good example they intended to create. Chomsky earned himself a bad reputation by first denying and then minimizing the Cambodian genocide until the facts made denial impossible. Now, of course, he blames the Communist genocide on the United States.^[30] Chomsky also blames the United States and the ravages of the Vietnam War for the fact that Vietnam is still poor, and not a “good example”: “Our basic goal – the crucial one, the one that really counted – was to destroy the virus [of independent development], and we did achieve that. Vietnam is a basket case, and the U.S. is doing what it can to keep it that way.” ^[31] This is just a typical Chomsky falsehood, and a standard Chomsky excuse for every malfeasance of socialist regimes – the devil made them do it. Of course Japan and Germany were pulverized during the Second War, and were occupied by the United States. But they had capitalist, free-market economies, and quickly restored their economic prowess in the years that followed. The difference is that the victorious Vietnamese Communists were Marxists, and Marxism is a crackpot theory that doesn’t work. Every Marxist state has been an economic basket case.

Take another example, Cuba, which has not been bombed and has not suffered a war, but is poorer today than it was more than forty years ago when Castro took power. In 1959, Cuba was the second richest country in Latin America. Now it is the second poorest just above Haiti and Belize. Naturally, Chomskyites claim that the U.S. economic boycott is responsible. The devil made them do it. But the rest of the world trades with Cuba. Cuba not only trades with all of Latin America and Europe but receives aid from the latter. Moreover, in the 1970s and 1980s, the Soviet Union gave Cuba the equivalent of three Marshall Plans in economic subsidies and assistance, tens of billions of dollars. Cuba is a fertile island with a tropical climate. It is poor because it has followed Chomsky’s examples, and not America’s. It is poor because it is socialist, Marxist and Communist. It is poor because in Cuba, America lost the Cold War.

It is the Communist-Chomsky illusion that there is a way to prosperity other than the way of the capitalist market. This is what causes the poverty of states like Cuba and North Korea and Vietnam. The illusion that socialism promises a better future is also the cause of the Chomsky cult. It is the messianic hope that creates the progressive left. Insofar as it is believed, the choices appear to the believers as Manichaean – a battle between good and evil. Those who oppose socialism, Marxism, Communism embody worldly evil. They are the party of Satan, and their leader America is the Great Satan himself. What Uncle Sam Wants is an explication of this worldview, and Chomsky is its prophet. His great service to the progressive faith is to deny the history of the last hundred years, which is the history of progressive atrocity and failure. In the 20^th Century, progressives in power have killed more than a hundred million people in the attempt to realize their impossible dream. As far as Noam Chomsky is concerned, these catastrophes of the left never happened. “I don’t much like the terms left and right,” Chomsky writes in yet another screed called The Common Good. “What’s called the left includes Leninism [i.e., Communism], which I consider ultra-right in many respects…. Leninism has nothing to do with the values of the left – in fact, it’s radically opposed to them.” ^[32]

You have to pinch yourself when reading sentences like that. The purpose of such Humpty-Dumpty mutilations of language is perfectly intelligible, however. It is to preserve the faith. Lenin is dead. Long live Leninism. The Communist catastrophes can have “nothing to do with the values of the left” because if they did the left would have to answer for its deeds and confront the fact that it is morally and intellectually bankrupt. Progressives would have to face the fact that they killed 100 million people for nothing, for an idea that didn’t work.

The real threat of a good example is the threat of America, which has lifted more people out of poverty, within its borders and all over the world, than all the socialists and progressives put together since the beginning of time. To neutralize this threat, it is necessary to kill the American idea. This is, in fact, Noam Chomsky’s mission in life.

 

* This article was originally printed in two parts. The first was on:
Wednesday, September 26, 2001, http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=24447;
http://www.salon.com/2001/09/26/treason_2/
The second was on:
Wednesday, October 10, 2001, http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=24449;
http://www.salon.com/2001/10/08/chomsky_2/
The complete, unedited version of the above was printed as a pamphlet, The Ayatollah of Anti-American Hate, David Horowitz, Center for the Study of Popular Culture, 2001

^[1] Noam Chomsky, What Uncle Sam Really Wants, Odonian Press, 1992 (interviews with David Barsamian)

^[2] Ibid.

^[3] Noam Chomsky, Propaganda and the Public Mind, Interviews by David Barsamian, Cambridge, 2001 p. x. In the endpapers of the volume the NY Times is quoted praising Chomsky as “an exploder of received truths.” The Guardian(London): “One of the radical heroes of our age…A towering intellect…” The Times Literary Supplement: “Chomsky’s work … has some of the qualities of Revelations, the Old Testament prophets and Blake.”

^[4] Available at http://www.zmag.org

^[5] Interview, September 19, 2001. http://www.zmag.org

^[6] Noam Chomsky, What Uncle Sam Really Wants, Odonian Press, 1992, pp. 8, 18, 29, 31, 32, 56-58

^[7] Chomsky, Profit Over People, NY 1999, p. 102

^[8] Noam Chomsky, What Uncle Sam Really Wants, Odonian Press, 1992, p. 32

^[9] Chomsky has set up a smokescreen to the effect that he is a Pannekoek, Mattick, Kropotkin, Michael Albert anarcho-socialist. But since he has spent his intellectual life making excuses for and defending Stalinist regimes (Nicaragua’s is only the most obvious) and now Islamic fascist networks – only the terminally credulous will take these protestations seriously.

^[10] Op. cit. p. 79

^[11] Op. cit. p. 82

^[12] Op. cit. pp. 56-7

^[13] Bill Ayers, Fugitive Days, NY 2001, p. 256

^[14] Statement on the publisher’s website, http://www.beacon.org

^[15] Noam Chomsky, What Uncle Sam Really Wants, Odonian Press, 1992, p. 100

^[16] Chomsky op. cit. chapter 1, “The Main Goals of U.S. Foreign Policy.”

^[17] Ibid. pp. 7-8

^[18] What he does is to select quotes from isolated individuals and government documents that can be made to appear as though they lend credibility to his malicious distortions.

^[19] Chomsky, op. cit. p. 8 (In other words, p. 2 of Chomsky’s text).

^[20] Ibid. p. 8

^[21] Ibid. p. 14

^[22] Ibid. p. 16

^[23] Ibid. pp. 21-22

^[24] Ibid. p. 22

^[25] Ibid. p. 23

^[26] Ibid.

^[27] Ibid.

^[28] Ibid. p. 22

^[29] Ibid. pp. 23-4

^[30] Ibid. p. 59

^[31] Ibid. pp. 59-60

^[32] Noam Chomsky, The Common Good, Odonian Press, 1998 (Interviews with David Barsamian)