Mr. Vicchio explains Chomsky

[Gorgo]

In explaining how he's doesn't echo David Horowitz, Mr. Vicchio echoes David Horowitz by explaining Z Magazine.

"It is PARTISAN in it's radical left wing stance. It is a cesspool in that it gives opinion as fact, and takes facts for opinion.

They have a shrine to chomsky... yes, a real upstanding individual. I don't know why you seem to think any web site that promotes a man that honors mass murderers is reliable."

Now Mr. Vicchio will explain how Noam Chomsky honors mass murderers. I guess this is unlike Mr. Vicchio, who honors George Bush and his gang's illegal attack on the people of Iraq.

Please proceed, if you would be so kind, Mr. Vicchio.

[Nono]

Yeah, Vic has this thing against partisanship: he absolutely abhors it, as evidenced by his many uhh.. non-partisan posts.

[Mr.Vicchio]

First off, I never said I wasn't Partisan, nor have I said now or in the past that Partisanship is "bad".

I just have a rather strong dislike for people using Zmag as a crutch. I will attempt, though this is a very lengthy thing to do, Chomsky and Zmag are two fo the same birds and thus require a "long read" I will do this with various web sites and a simple google search to avoid my favorite nafarious "right wing smear" sites. Though some may be used herein:

Some of Chomsky's more enlightenning opinions, which are absurd to the core:

Is anti-Semitism on the increase? Ricardo Parreira, London [Chomsky]: In the West, fortunately, it scarcely exists now, though it did in the past. There is, of course, what the Anti-Defamation League calls "the real anti-Semitism", more dangerous than the old-fashioned kind: criticism of policies of the state of Israel and US support for them, opposition to a vast US military budget, etc. In contrast, anti-Arab racism is rampant. The manifestations are shocking, in elite intellectual circles as well, but arouse little concern because they are considered legitimate: the most extreme form of racism. http://www.pejmanesque.com/archives/005164.html Anti-semitism is taking a back seat in the west to anti-arabic rhetoric? Tell that to Isreal. One needs only look to the EU or UN to see the falsehood Chomsky is spouting here are a few choice selections of Noam Chomsky talking about Vaclav Havel, specifically the then-Czecholsovak president's Feb. 21, 1990 speech to a joint session of the United States Congress, and the reaction thereof. First, the section from Havel's speech that most likely made Chomsky's blood boil: Twice in this century, the world has been threatened by a catastrophe. Twice this catastrophe was born in Europe, and twice Americans, along with others, were called upon to save Europe, the whole world and yourselves. The first rescue provided significant help to Czechs and Slovaks. [...] At the same time, the United States made enormous strides. It became the most powerful nation on earth, and it understood the responsibility that flowed from this. Proof of this are the hundreds of thousands of your young citizens who gave their lives for the liberation of Europe, and the graves of American airmen and soldiers on Czechoslovak soil. But something else was happening as well: The Soviet Union appeared, grew, and transformed the enormous sacrifices of its people suffering under totalitarian rule into a strength that, after World War II, made it the second most powerful nation in the world. It was a country that rightly gave people nightmares, because no one knew what would happen and when to worsen the mood of its rulers, and what country it would decide to conquer and drag into its sphere of influence, as it is called in political language. All of this taught us to see the world in bipolar terms, as two enormous forces, one a defender of freedom, the other a source of nightmares. Europe became the point of friction between these two powers, and thus it turned into a single enormous arsenal divided into two parts. In this process, one half of the arsenal became part of that nightmarish power, while the other the free part bordering on the ocean and having no wish to be driven into it, was compelled, together with you, to build a complicated security system, to which we probably owe the fact that we still exist. So you may have contributed to the salvation of us Europeans, of the world and thus of yourselves for a third time: You have helped us to survive until today without a hot war this time, merely a cold one. --- Mr. Chomsky's response: Dear Alex, As a good and loyal friend, I can't overlook this chance to suggest to you a marvelous way to discredit yourself completely and lose the last minimal shreds of respectability that still raise lingering questions about your integrity. I have in mind what I think is one of the most illuminating examples of the total and complete intellectual and moral corruption of Western culture, namely, the awed response to Vaclav Havel's embarrassingly silly and morally repugnant Sunday School sermon in Congress the other day. We may put aside the intellectual level of the comments (and the response) -- for example, the profound and startlingly original idea that people should be moral agents. More interesting are the phrases that really captured the imagination and aroused the passions of Congress, editorial writers, and columnists -- and, doubtless, soon the commentators in the weeklies and monthlies: that we should assume responsibility not only for ourselves, our families, and our nations, but for others who are suffering and persecuted. This remarkable and novel insight was followed by the key phrase of the speech: the cold war, now thankfully put to rest, was a conflict between two superpowers: one, a nightmare, the other, the defender of freedom (great applause). I don't mean to equate a Vietnamese villager to Vaclav Havel. For one thing, I doubt that the former would have had the supreme hypocrisy and audacity to clothe his praise for the defenders of freedom with gushing about responsibility for the human race. It's also unnecessary to point out to the half a dozen or so sane people who remain that in comparison to the conditions imposed by US tyranny and violence, East Europe under Russian rule was practically a paradise. Furthermore, one can easily understand why an oppressed Third World victim would have little access to any information (or would care little about anything) beyond the narrow struggle for survival against a terrorist superpower and its clients. And the Pravda hack, unlike his US clones, would have faced a harsh response if he told the obvious truths. So by every conceivable standard, the performance of Havel, Congress, the media, and (we may safely predict, without what will soon appear) the Western intellectual community at large are on a moral and intellectual level that is vastly below that of Third World peasants and Stalinist hacks -- not an unusual discovery. Of course, it could be argued in Havel's defense that this shameful performance was all tongue in cheek, just a way to extort money from the American taxpayer for his (relatively rich) country. I doubt it, however; he doesn't look like that good an actor. Only Chomsky would have the unmitigated gall to make such a statement For example, in 1977 Chomsky denied Pol Pot's mass murder in Cambodia (he denies mass murder a lot too), by explaining that "such journals as the Far Eastern Economic Review, the London Economist, the Melbourne Journal of Politics, and others elsewhere, have provided analyses by highly qualified specialists who have studied the full range of evidence available, and who concluded that executions have numbered at most in the thousands[...]". http://www.moorelies.com/news/archiv...cfm?newsID=296 Those who took the trouble to look at these journals found out that this was a complete distortion. The Economist had written precisely the opposite of what Chomsky claims, and what he is referring to is a letter to the editor, protesting against The Economist’s view – which makes it a lie to invoke the magazine’s credibility against the evidence of massacres. As for the Far Eastern Economic Review, the author merely wrote that he had not found evidence of massacres, and that he doubted some of the stories, but he presented no evidence against them, and concluded that "the numbers killed are impossible to calculate" – not that they "numbered at most in the thousands". http://www.johannorberg.net/?page=di...&year=2004#262

I would go on but the choice meat was very deep stuff. Long paragrphs detailing Chomsky's denying there was a holocaust...

To briefly sum up Chomsky:
America is evil, the people puppets, the Soviet Union was wrongly charcterized as evil (though he has admitted it was an imperialistic power), Communism is a good thing.

I can see why you, Gorgo find Zmag and Chomsky as alluring and intelligent; they take the notion that Capitialism is evil, communism/socialism is good, human rights are only abused when America is involved, class warfare is thier bread and butter message. America is a land of dumb robots manipulated by the "jewish media" (I closed the window before I remembered where I grabbed that Chomsky Gem) to enrich the corperate bosses and further enslave the populace.

Chomsky would have done very well had he been born east of Berlin, and from his writtings and meandering drivvel, one can only conclude he often wished that were so.

[Gorgo]

Well, this isn't about the support of mass murder, but fwiw, what exactly does this mean?

"Anti-semitism is taking a back seat in the west to anti-arabic rhetoric? Tell that to Isreal. One needs only look to the EU or UN to see the falsehood Chomsky is spouting"

[Gorgo]

"Only Chomsky would have the unmitigated gall to make such a statement"

Please give a source for this statement about Vaclev Havel.

[G. Adams]

Quote by: Gorgo Well, this isn't about the support of mass murder, but fwiw, what exactly does this mean? "Anti-semitism is taking a back seat in the west to anti-arabic rhetoric? Tell that to Isreal. One needs only look to the EU or UN to see the falsehood Chomsky is spouting"

V, can you tell the difference between someone being anti-Israel and anti-Jew (I refrain from saying anti-semitic as arabs are semites)? Anti-islamic thought is on the rise, and while it would be true to say anti-jew though it also on the rise in Europe, this is largely among the expanding Islamic community we have here. So, in all, i wouldn't suggest anti-jew though is rising world wide, it's just people who do have a problem with jews are migrating.

[Gorgo]

I'll let Dan Clore do most of the work here. This is not a direct refutation of Norberg, but someone else, so some of the remarks will make no sense, but takes care of the general question: http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/jamesd.html

"In actual fact, Herman and Chomsky do give all of these sources in their lengthier treatment of the same subject in After the Cataclysm, Volume II of The Political Economy of Human Rights [PEHR II]. There, far from vague references to "academics [Herman and Chomsky are] embarrassed to name", we find full citations. The Far Eastern Economic Review published a series of articles by its Southeast Asia correspondent, Nayan Chanda (in particular, one in the May 1977 issue). He concluded that the number of executions was "possibly thousands", not the much greater numbers being bandied about at the time. Far from being fired for this heresy, he has since become the Deputy Editor of the journal.

Nor was the work published in the London Economist that of a "communist", although it is in fact a letter (and is also used by Nayan Chanda in his studies in FEER). In fact, far from being written by a communist, the letter (March 26, 1977) was written by W.J. Sampson, a statistician and economist, who had worked for the CIA-puppet government of Lon Nol (which the Khmer Rouge overthrew) in the office of central statistics, and had published several technical reports on the economy of Cambodia. He based his conclusions on interviews with refugees and other eyewitnesses. He concluded that slayings (executions) numbered "in the hundreds or thousands rather than in hundreds of thousands" with a much larger death toll from illness and starvation.

As for the Melbourne Journal of Politics, it published analyses by noted Cambodia scholar Ben Kiernan, whom James Donald has frequently cited as a credible source. Checking his later work in book form, we find that it is fully consistent with Herman and Chomsky's use of it. Perhaps this explains why Kiernan has both aided Herman and Chomsky in their work on Cambodia, and come to their defense when others have made charges similar to those of James Donald.

Donald's argument thus falls flat on its face when subjected to a cursory examination. The very worst "lie" he has found, is that Herman and Chomsky did not take care to specify that one reference to the London Economist was to a letter rather than an article -- when they did take care to point this out when they gave a full citation of it in the very next paragraph of the same review!"

[Paavo]

Nothing to do with Chomsky, but I do think anti-semitism (or, as G.Adams correctly pointed out, anti-Jew would be the better term) is "on the rise" outside of the US. I don't think it's a totally irrational thing, so to speak however;
People outside of the US are becoming more and more anti-Israel due to its horrible policies (and dragging the US with it, hence alot of anti-US sentiment in Europe and the Arab world), and when people point this out publically, they get smears of "anti-semite," "hater," and of course: "nazi." The smearing more often than not doesn't come from Israel, but from Jewish organisations in the respective places. So the people smeared who most probably hadn't even really thought about Jews as a group of people (outside Israel), get angry at Jews instead of Israel as a nation.

[Mr.Vicchio]

Quote by: Gorgo "Only Chomsky would have the unmitigated gall to make such a statement" Please give a source for this statement about Vaclev Havel.

Sorry I seem to have erased that link, one sec:

http://www.mattwelch.com/archives/000739.html

For some more indepth reading as to why I find Chomsky so unpalatable, here's a great read Gorgo. You might give the link a try...

http://www.wernercohn.com/Chomsky.html

[Gorgo]

While I think all of this is created by the same kind of people as Vicchio and Horowitz whose writings seem to show that they don't care about reality at all, I don't see anything which, even using the usual lies, supports the idea that Noam Chomsky "honors mass murderers".

Where is this support, Vicchio?

[Paavo]

I gather it's probably related to this:

Long paragrphs detailing Chomsky's denying there was a holocaust...

[Mr.Vicchio]

I gave you my support Gorgo, you only started this thread with the intent to do your usual drool, find some oen to agree with you on the web, and then pretend I had no point.

I only responded with the intent to shed light for others, not your benifit. You are hopeless in love with Noam and his allies.

BTW:

For example, in 1977 Chomsky denied Pol Pot's mass murder in Cambodia (he denies mass murder a lot too), by explaining that "such journals as the Far Eastern Economic Review, the London Economist, the Melbourne Journal of Politics, and others elsewhere, have provided analyses by highly qualified specialists who have studied the full range of evidence available, and who concluded that executions have numbered at most in the thousands[...]".

He has not, to my knowledge ever recanted that statement.

[Mr.Vicchio]

More indepth

"Even before this book was translated it was sharply criticized by Mr Noam Chomsky and Mr Gareth Porter. These two 'experts' on Asia claim that I am mistakenly trying to convince people that Cambodia was drowned in a sea of blood after the departure of the last American diplomats. They say there have been no massacres, and they lay the blame for the tragedy of the Khmer people on the American bombings. They accuse me of being insufficiently critical in my approach to the refugee's accounts. For them, refugees are not a valid source... "After an investigation of this kind, it is surprising to see that 'experts' who have spoken to few if any refugees should reject their very significant place in any study of modern Cambodia. These experts would rather base their arguments on reasoning: if something seems impossible to their personal logic, then it doesn't exist. Their only sources for evaluation are deliberately chosen official statements. Where is that critical approach which they accuse others of not having?"(55) http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/chomsky.htm Chomsky and Herman, in response, argue that if "a factor of 100 is relatively insignificant... then why bother to present alleged facts at all?" However, they continue, "If, indeed, the Cambodian regime was, as Lacouture believes, as monstrous as the Nazis at their worst, then his comment might be comprehensible, though it is worth noting that he has produced no evidence to support this judgment. But if a more appropriate comparison is, say, to France after liberation, where a minimum of 30-40,000 people were massacred within a few months with far less motive for revenge and under far less rigorous conditions than those left by the U.S. war in Cambodia, then perhaps a different judgment is in order."(60) If a serious study of the impact of Western imperialism on Cambodian peasant life is someday undertaken, it may well be discovered that the violence lurking behind the Khmer smile, on which Meyer and others have commented, is not a reflection of obscure traits in peasant culture and psychology, but is the direct and understandable response to the violence of the imperial system, and that its current manifestations are a no less direct and understandable response to the still more concentrated and extreme savagery of a U.S. assault that may in part have been designed to evoke this very response, as we have noted. Such a study may also show that the Khmer Rouge programs elicited a positive response from some sectors of the Cambodian peasantry because they dealt with fundamental problems rooted in the feudal past and exacerbated by the imperial system with its final outburst of uncontrolled barbarism."(111) Among all of Chomsky and Herman's troubling comments on Cambodia, this stands out. It is difficult to see this paragraph as anything other than blatant apologetics. If the Khmer Rouge were brutal, it was "understandable," since the policies of the United States were "designed to evoke this very response." Never mind that the scenes of warfare, death, and dismemberment carved into the stones of Angkor demonstrate that the "violence lurking behind the Khmer smile" has been around for at least 800 years: the "imperial system" is to blame. Evidence be damned. In a 1997 interview with Tom Morello, guitarist for the band Rage Against the Machine, Chomsky was similarly misleading with regard to the CIA's estimates: "In the Nixon years, for example, the bombing of inner Cambodia in 1973 was a monstrous crime. It was just massacring peasants in inner Cambodia. It isn't much reported here because nobody paid attention, but it was quite a part in helping create the basis for the Khmer Rouge. Well, the CIA estimate is that 600,000 people were killed in the course of those US actions, either directed or actually carried out by the United States."(144) Once again, Chomsky's reference is wrong: the report estimates 600,000 - 700,000 war-related deaths, on both sides, over the course of the entire civil war. It is not an estimate of those "killed in the course of US actions." In Chomsky's interpretation, however, only the US is to blame: the Khmer Rouge and the North Vietnamese, apparently, didn't kill anyone. On the subject of skepticism, Chomsky's willingness to rewrite history is at times startling. In the Z Magazine forum posting, cited earlier, Chomsky makes a number of claims which merit rebuttal: "US intelligence and Ponchaud, as we quoted, took a much more skeptical position than we did on refugee reports, but anyone who is even marginally serious about the matter understands all this -- of course, not those who don't give a damn about the suffering that refugees report, but are merely using it as an ideological weapon, specifically, as a justification for brutal atrocities. Recall that that was exactly the crucial issue at the time, as charges about the KR and the Vietnamese, many of them fabrications at a level that would have impressed Stalin (as we demonstrated), were being used as a justification for US atrocities in Central America and elsewhere. But credible evidence of atrocities existed then, which is why we condemned the brutality and crimes of the Khmer Rouge, and a lot more evidence came to light after we wrote, and after the reports of Ponchaud and State Department intelligence that we cited..."(169) Chomsky's claim that Ponchaud and the State Department took a more skeptical position with regard to refugee reports is sheer nonsense; it was Chomsky and Herman who claimed again and again that the refugee's claims were "unverifiable." And where was Chomsky's supposed condemnation of the brutality and crimes of the Khmer Rouge? There are offhand references to "major atrocities"(170) which were "substantial and often gruesome"(171) but no condemnation of that; instead, Chomsky suggests that the US is to blame for whatever the Khmer Rouge did. Chomsky goes on to make another claim that is even more surprising: "You might recall, perhaps, that we were probably the only commentators to rely on the most knowledgeable source, State Department intelligence. Our conclusion at the time was that it was probably the most reliable as well as by far the best informed, and subsequent revelations support that tentative judgment. They were avoided in the mainstream commentary because their conclusions didn't fit the propaganda line that was required to exploit the misery of the Cambodians to justify subjecting millions of other people to comparable misery, in Central America and elsewhere. Presumably that is also why the CIA demographic study of 1980, regarded as authoritative by US government specialists, is totally ignored..."(172) The only commentators to rely on State Department intelligence? This is a revision worthy of Orwell's 1984. Attentive readers will recall exactly the opposite of what Chomsky claims: In After the Cataclysm, Chomsky and Herman blasted Barron and Paul's reliance on "specialists at the State and Defense Departments." "I should add that I don't pay attention to what appears on the internet sites that you are referring to... But if you do find this interesting, I'd suggest that you switch to sites that are at a similar intellectual level but a much higher moral level: I have in mind neo-Nazi and neo-Stalinist sites, which I presume exist. There I suppose you'll find very similar arguments: denunciations of those who condemned Nazi and Stalinist crimes on the basis of the terror and atrocities of resistance forces and the horrible aftermath of the defeat of fascism and the collapse of the USSR... But the neo-Nazis and neo-Stalinists are on a far higher moral level, for the obvious reason: fortunately, they are in no position to exploit the terror of the resistance and the horrendous aftermath in order to justify, and carry out, terrible crimes. That is, they were unable to sink to the depravity of those whose sites you are reading, who exploit the suffering for which they share considerable responsibility in order to impose misery on others, to protect them from 'the Pol Pot left' in El Salvador (priests organizing peasants, for example), or from the 'Communists' elsewhere -- exactly as we wrote in the 70s, and as has been happening since."(191) http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/chomsky.htm

[Mr.Vicchio]

A few more arguements against Chomsky

Given Chomsky's well-known opposition to the exercise of American power, it's hardly surprising that his diatribes in recent years have targeted President Bush's antiterrorist doctrine of preventive war. Chomsky found a convenient parallel, in his thinking, between Bush's attack on Iraq's dictator and Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. So, at a blog entry of October 24, 2004 (at http://blog.zmag.org/index.php/weblo...ght_terrorists), Chomsky writes: "As for "pre-emptive strike," there has been a formal consensus on this since the UN Charter and the Nuremberg Tribunal. The formal consensus, the supreme law of the land in the US, bans the resort to force with narrow exceptions: when authorized by the Security Council, or in response to armed attack until the Security Council acts, in the latter case when "the necessity for action is instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment of deliberation." These principles were established because of explicit international rejection, led by the US, of doctrine that now prevails: that resort to force is legitimate if we "know"-that is, have some reason to believe-that someone has the intention of attacking us. That doctrine would, for example, justify Japan's attack on US military bases in Pearl Harbor and Manila. The Japanese could read the US press, with its lurid discussion of how US bombing could exterminate this inferior and vicious race by burning down Japan's wooden cities, and they knew that flying fortresses capable of bombing Japan from Pearl Harbor and Manila were coming off the Boeing Assembly line, so they "knew" that there was a serious threat of extermination, not just terror. Therefore, according to the "Bush doctrine," shared by Kerry and elites generally, Japan had every right to bomb Pearl Harbor and Manila. In fact, they had a far stronger case than the one enunciated by Colin Powell, etc.: that "intent and ability" suffice to allow the US to attack a country, committing the "supreme crime" of Nuremberg, which encompasses all the evil that follows-the crime for which any participants, such as the German foreign minister, were hanged." Much here deserves comment, including the question of legal constraints on US action putatively deriving from the UN Charter and the Nuremberg Tribunal and the implication that President Bush and many of his high officials and advisors should be hanged. But I must defer to those with some expertise on such matters. What one needs no expertise to understand is the debased quality of Chomsky's view that Japan's attacks on the Phillipines and Pearl Harbor could be seen as justified by the Bush doctrine. For this purpose, it is not even necessary to recall the political and historical context of the Japanese attacks -- namely, that they were a continuation of a policy of aggressive war and atrocities beginning in China in the 1930s andinvolving previous aggressions against British, Dutch and French holdings in Asia. One can forget all that and pretend that Japan and the United States were simply two otherwise peaceful powers facing each other in the Pacific. In such a framework, Professor Chomsky's logic is quite clear. He wishes to undermine Bush's doctrine justifying preventive war by showing that its historical application would see a surprise attack against America revealed as a justified, reasoned move on the part of the Japanese -- moreover, one vastly more justified than the US invasion of Iraq. Using this logic, Chomsky hopes to expose the doctrine as a groundless pseudojustification for American aggression. Chomsky's interpretation hangs on a specific claim: that the existence of US Boeing B17 flying fortress bombers loomed as an existential threat to Japan. The professor cites no evidence that the threat of these aircraft motivated Japan's attacks; he cites no Japanese sources, no American ones. This need not matter for his point, however. One can merely take the argument as a hypothetical. Chomsky's goal, after all, is not to provide a historical argument about the causes of the attack, but only to prove the illegitimacy of the Bush administration's policies. Chomsky essentially argues that the US B17 bomber force of 1941 was -- to use Cold War terminology -- a first-strike weapon capable of devastating Japan. Given the tacit assumption that the Japanese had no analogous weapon system capable of deterring the US, Chomsky implies that the Japanese attack might be interpreted as pragmatic and justified. But the facts, as usual, are against Chomksy. His claim that japan could have viewed the B17 as a threatening first-strike weapon is not only unsupported but absurd. Google's search engine provides a swift rebuttal: Data shows that the actual rangeth of a loaded B17 could not have permitted it to effectively bomb Japan -- not even from the Phillipines, lying at a distance of about 1800 miles from Japan. Raids starting from airfields near Pearl Harbor would have involved flights of twice that distance. And yet, most accounts specify the relevant range of a B17 with a full bomb load as 2000 miles or less. Since the range of an aircraft is the distance it can fly with a full fuel load before running out of fuel, a bomber can -- Kamikaze suicide pilots aside -- only raid targets at a distance of, at most, half its range (its combat radius). In the case of the B17, raids from the closer base in the Phillipines mentioned by Chomksy would have dropped their bombs in the water, not on Japanese cities. Technical range limitations are not the only thorns in Chomsky's theory. Of actual B17 bombers, there were few in 1941. The US had no more than 150 such aircraft available at that point (see "B17 in Pacific Theatre" at http://home.att.net/~jbaugher2/b17_20.html). At http://www.acepilots.com/planes/b17.html it is observed that of these, just 35 were stationed in the Philippines, 19 at Clark Field, Luzon and 16 at Del Monte, on Mindanao. Sixteen were in the Panama Canal Zone. And six were approaching Hickam Field on the morning of December 7th, 1941. Thus the existential threat invoked by Chomsky amounted to less than 50 B17s stationed in the Pacific. Recall that the huge raids B17s later made against Germany involved up to 1000 aircraft. Even if they could have reached Japan, a fleet of at most 150 planes, carrying the modest bomb loads of early B17s (two to three tons), could in no sense have been regarded as an existential threat to Japan, even ignoring the air defenses Japanese air force and ground antiaircraft fire would have provided. After WWII started, the US did in fact seek to bomb the Japanese home islands as soon as possible, for symbolic and home morale reasons. Had the then-existing B17s been an effective tool for such bombing, they probably would have been used. But instead, the US was forced to improvise the famous attack by General Dolittle, which involved the dangerous and unprecedented launch of US Army B25 light bombers carrying derisory bomb loads -- from an aircraft carrier, no less. At no time in the war did B17s bomb Japan. The real bombing campaign against Japanese home islands did not begin until the capture of islands capable of serving as air fields for the bigger and more powerful B29, a plane boasting twice the range of the B17. Note that these aircraft never used the Phillipines or Hawaii as bases for raids, either; after all, the range of the more formidable B29 was only 3250 miles. Thus, Chomsky's argument collapses from all sides. Rather than offering a fact-based account to justify the view that pre-WWII B17s could have been taken by rational Japanese planners as a potential first strike weapon capable of destroying their nation, Chomsky simply concocted a fantasy based either on his ignorance of military capabilities at the time or his utter indifference to these facts. Nothing in Chomsky's theory demostrates any relevance of the Bush doctrine to Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor or its motivations. The professor's argument only reflects his dogged efforts to spread the dishonest anti-American propaganda for which he made his name. If there are genuine objections to the Bush doctrine, text written by Noam Chomsky is of the last places to look for them. http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=16201 http://plaza.ufl.edu/slasher/antichomsky.htm

[Gorgo]

Okay. That's just nonsense. There is no denial of the Holocaust in any of Chomsky's work.

Quote by: Paavo I gather it's probably related to this:

[Gorgo]

Pay attention, 'V', I already refuted that.

Quote by: Mr.Vicchio BTW: For example, in 1977 Chomsky denied Pol Pot's mass murder in Cambodia (he denies mass murder a lot too), by explaining that "such journals as the Far Eastern Economic Review, the London Economist, the Melbourne Journal of Politics, and others elsewhere, have provided analyses by highly qualified specialists who have studied the full range of evidence available, and who concluded that executions have numbered at most in the thousands[...]". He has not, to my knowledge ever recanted that statement.

[Gorgo]

Thanks for posting lots of nonsense 'V', by Horowitz proteges like Matt Welch. None of which at a quick glance has anything to do with anyone but the U.S. government "honoring" mass murderers. Geesh. It will take some time to get through all of this. I'm busy doing other things today. Don't feel neglected if I don't get right back to you.

[Mr.Vicchio]

Of course not Gorgo, you're right Chomsky is a great and insightful man whose wroks against America, Capitialism and for Communism/socialism should be lauded by all freedom hating Americans.

My bad.

[jamesd]

Quote by: Gorgo In explaining how he's doesn't echo David Horowitz, Mr. Vicchio echoes David Horowitz by explaining Z Magazine. Now Mr. Vicchio will explain how Noam Chomsky honors mass murderers. I guess this is unlike Mr. Vicchio, who honors George Bush and his gang's illegal attack on the people of Iraq. Please proceed, if you would be so kind, Mr. Vicchio.

Wherever there is mass murder, wherever the tyrant's boot smashes into the face of a child, we can trust Chomsky to simultaneously deny, justify, and rationalize the mass murder, while explaining the child is a CIA agent.

The most infamous example is Chomsky's defense of the Khmer Rouge and their crimes with a multitude of outrageous lies: See http://www.jim.com/chomsdis.htm for a paragraph by paragraph comparison of what Chomsky claims his sources say about the Khmer Rouge, with what the sources actually said.

Of course, when the Soviet Union changed its line about the Khmer Rouge in 1979, Chomsky servilely, as always, changed his line also, so from being saints, the Khmer Rouge abruptly became demons.

[Gorgo]

Taking a break from painting here, but here's the thing. Vicchio made the statement that Chomsky "honors" mass murder. Now he's made a lot of statements about him minimizing mass murder (unlike Vicchio and Horowitz who are thrilled at Bush's mass murder), but nothing I've seen so far even remotely suggests that Chomsky "honors" any mass murderer. I've asked Vicchio to back that up. I admit I haven't looked at everything, but I don't see it yet. Maybe when I get into it in more depth.