Where oh where are the critical thinkers around this fellow’s hatred of Putin, Russians, et al?

The culmination of Noam Chomsky’s arrogance and condescension came in 2003, on a C-SPAN interview:

The collapse of the Soviet Union is a small victory for socialism in my opinion. 

At odds with reality, Chomsky almost 20 yeaers ago, dovetails to his lack of reality around Nazi Ukraine and a Special Military Operation to de-Nato-fy, de-militarize, de-Nazify Ukraine. Imagine the tragedy witnessed in former Soviet states and the suffering inflicted since by triumphalist neoliberalism:

Then, after 1990, a bad health situation got worse. As the society collapsed so did life expectancy. In the 10 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there were somewhere between 3 million and 7 million excess deaths. (The Lancet)

The Global Research and Dissident Voice piece, “Is Noam Chomsky a Qualified Military Analyst?” by Kim Petersen attempts to understand Chomsky’s recent comments about how Russia is a Paper Tiger, how President Putin is Dumb and Dumber, and he even calls for bleeding Russia more and more by, well, you know, supporting the Army Merchants, the Offensive Weapons Oligarchs, the Weapons of Death Boys and Girls.

See his most recent photo, since the one used in the Global Research is decades old. I was informed of this piece by a friend, who stated:

Chomsky sets his inner Zionist free.

Of course, I had to state: “Sets his inner Zionist free? He is arrogant, overcited, and what a piece of shivering woke man, under lockdown, in Tucson of all places, where he stated on and on to Amy “Soros” Goodman’s show, Democracy Now, how he was locking himself down. In hot Tucson? Yammering, yammering and yammering. A hundred books? The more the messier. So many of his books are repetitions of collections of his essays of Op-Eds. 

And so why does Global Research use a forty year old photo of the guy? Look at him, under lockdown. He went nowhere in Tucson for almost two years. Held himself hostage because of the planned demic:

Here he is, quoted, with just more of the same old, but not really, because Russia is now having to be bled bled bled: “Virtually everything that Israel is doing, meaning the United States and Israel are doing, is illegal, in fact, a war crime. And many of them they defined as ‘grave breaches,’ that is, serious war crimes. This means that the United States and Israeli leadership should be brought to trial.”

However, if you dig deep you’ll find some folk labeling him as a CIA asset, as many have uncovered. However, here he is in 1995.

A look at Chomsky’s support for the appointment of John Deutch as head of the CIA in 1995.

In December 1995, The New York Times reported that Noam Chomsky approved of the appointment of his fellow MIT academic, John Deutch, as head of the CIA. (Until then Deutch had been No.2 at the Pentagon.) According to the report, Chomsky said,

‘[Deutch] has more honesty and integrity than anyone I’ve ever met in academic life, or any other life. If somebody’s got to be running the CIA, I’m glad it’s him.’

This not so surprisingly favorable attitude to Deutch was confirmed in an interview that appeared in the book Class Warfare in 1996. When asked about Deutch, Chomsky said:

‘We were actually friends and got along fine, although we disagreed on about as many things as two human beings can disagree about. I liked him. We got along very well together. He’s very honest, very direct. You know where you stand with him. We talked to each other. When we had disagreements, they were open, sharp, clear, honestly dealt with. I found it fine. I had no problem with him. I was one of the very few people on the faculty, I’m told, who was supporting his candidacy for the President of MIT.’ (source)

Not the first time Noam has approved of US and CIA. But, this is MIT, where his reputation was supposdly anti-militaristy. But when it comes to John Deutch, well, is this Noam’s lesser evilism for a guy with a long-standing role as a Pentagon adviser.

Deutch headed two Pentagon panels on Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. Along with Alexander Haig, Henry Kissinger and Donald Rumsfeld, he was also an influential advisor on President Reagan’s Scowcroft commission, which recommended the deployment of the MX missile in 1983.[3] Then, when the Cold War came to an end, he became very concerned that the US military was turning away from nuclear weaponry by, for instance, removing tactical nuclear weapons from ships and submarines.

MIT’s student activists called him the ‘War Provost’. One said Deutch’s activities had ‘really changed the atmosphere at MIT’ and complained that Deutch’s involvement made the university ‘more militaristic’. These activists evidently feared that if Deutch did become MIT President, as apparently Chomsky wanted, then the university would become even more deeply involved in military research of the most barbaric kind. (source)

Articles from MIT’s official newspaper, The Tech:

‘Examining John Deutch’s Pentagon connections’, The Tech, 27 May 1988 (Vol.108 Issue 26)
– Here it is reported that Deutch had encouraged MIT to apply for ‘army contracts for mycotoxin research’. Deutch’s enthusiasm for biological warfare research led another MIT Professor, Vera Kistiakowsky, to complain that ‘he has no business being in the education business.’

‘Twenty years later, MIT still doing military research projects’, The Tech, 24 February 1989, (Vol.109 Issue 6)
– In which Daniel Glenn says that ‘MIT is currently engaged in several hundred research projects for the Department of Defense. The following are examples of unclassified on-campus research: … “hardening of integrated circuits to withstand nuclear attack’’… “target identification using infrared radar” … “optical signal processing for’ missile guidance” … “arctic military facilities”… “application of composite materials for Army helicopter blades’’ … ‘’SDI space-based radar”.’

‘MIT research heavily dependent on defense department funding’, The Tech, 28 February 1989 (Vol.109 Issue7)
– Here Daniel Glenn reports that 80% of MIT’s research funding came from the Pentagon.

‘Teach-in focuses on research and activism’, The Tech, 7 March 1989 (Vol.109 Issue 9 p2, 16)
– In this article, one MIT nuclear engineering student says that Deutch had helped ‘MIT secure $2.3 million dollars in defense department funding for chemical and biological weapons research.’

A fuel-air bomb.

Articles from MIT’s activist paper, The Thistle:

‘Who is John Deutch’, The Thistle, (Vol.9 Issue7)
– In this article, a reference is made to Deutch’s innovative work on ‘fuel-air bombs, one of the most devastating non-nuclear weapons in existence’. The article also points out that as well as being a ‘a long-term advocate of US nuclear weapons build-up, [Deutch] is also a strong supporter of biological weapons, and of using chemical and biological weapons together in order to increase their killing efficiency.’

‘An open letter to [MIT] President Vest’, The Thistle, (Vol.9 Issue7)
– In this article, MIT’s Alternative News Collective writes that ‘Deutch not only supported research into chemical/biological weapons, … he pressured junior faculty into performing this research on campus.’ On the issue of the CIA, the Collective said, ‘How should MIT treat an Institute Professor who has just been chosen to lead a terrorist group? It is time that MIT fired John Deutch.’

‘Institute Professor John Deutch heads CIA: What next?’, The Thistle, (Vol.9 Issue7)
– This article asks, ‘What is the nature of MIT? Is it a “neutral” educational institution, or is it just another piece of the Pentagon-CIA-Weapons Manufacturers establishment, that has had – and continues to have – a negative impact on most of the world?’

An MX missile.

Extract from a letter to Chris Knight by Daniel Glenn, a former MIT student activist and author of some of the above articles:

I was not aware of Chomsky’s support of John Deutch and do find it surprising.

As part of my activism at MIT, I was part of a protest at my 1989 graduation ceremony in which we protested the hypocrisy of the administration and faculty for wearing black arm bands in support of the student movement at Tiananmen Square. The administration had banned the distribution of the student newspapers for the first time in MIT’s history, because we were publishing information about the interlocking directorships of John Deutch and other MIT administration officials and its connection to their support of military expenditures.

We smuggled copies of The Thistle into the graduation ceremony under our robes that detailed those connections. And four students, including myself, unfurled banners on the stage and shook John Deutch’s hand with a banner in the other that read: ‘MIT War Research Kills’. The banners were in the style of the Tiananmen Square student banners. … We did feel vindicated in our concerns about the direct line from MIT’s research funding and faculty connection’s to the military when John Deutch was appointed as Deputy Secretary of Defense and then CIA Director.

… I did take Noam Chomsky’s course on activism and society, and we did engage with him on a number of occasions about our political efforts with the university, and his presence at the university is one of the reasons I was willing to go to MIT. I thought that if he could be there, then I could learn from that institution in spite of its deeply troubling connections to the technology of warfare. I was surprised to learn that he was limited by the politics of academia to teaching within his primary subject area of linguistics, in spite of being such an esteemed intellectual in political science. The course we took from him was not an official course in the university.

I am a great admirer of Noam Chomsky, and would not want to disparage him in any way. I do find this particular issue interesting and somewhat troubling, but I do imagine that he had to make compromises of many kinds over his decades as a resident radical in an institution so entrenched in the military-industrial complex; and he its most profound and substantive critic.

.
For more on anti-militarist activism at MIT and Chomsky’s lack of support for this activism see:

‘Noam Chomsky, war research and student protests at MIT, 1967-1972’

and

‘Chomsky at MIT: Between the war scientists and the anti-war students’, by Chris Knight

Oh, the endless stream of Noam Chomsky boosters, and is he a hypcrite?

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. By that standard, the entire commentary and discussion of the so-called War on Terror is pure hypocrisy, virtually without exception. Can anybody understand that? No, they can’t understand it.

—Noam Chomsky, Power and Terror, 2003

Here, a decent look at Chomsky and his anti-communisim, his anti-Russia roots, but first his Syria perspective : “Noam Chomsky and the Compatible Left, Part I“
March 4, 2019. By writer, Roderic Day.

Noam Chomsky recently took to the pages of The Intercept to give his blessing to the US military’s occupation of Syria, solidifying his support for the Pentagon after years of having done so in slightly more anguished terms. As far as the occupation, the only concession to what might once have been considered “Leftist” values is the MIT professor’s acknowledgement that the US is motivated
by “power considerations” rather than “humanitarian objectives.” Today, the brief nod to realpolitik is what’s supposed to pass for a progressive anti-war stance.

The Intercept is really a natural fit for Chomsky to deliver this message. The nonagenarian professor has limited years left on earth, and when he passes, Glenn Greenwald and Pierre Omidyar’s website will probably become the new face of the permissible Left. That Chomsky lends his radical imprimatur to a US military occupation in its pages is a testament to what kind of a “Left” Chomsky has helped to create and is bequeathing to Greenwald and Omidyar.

Chomsky begins his career with US military funding in the mid-1950s:

I would like to express my gratitude to the Society of Fellows for having provided me with the freedom to carry on this research.

This work was supported in part by the U.S.A. Army (Signal Corps), the Air Force (Office of Scientific Research, Air Research and Development Command), and the Navy (Office of Naval Research); and in part by the National Science Foundation and the Eastman Kodak Corporation. 

His free speech absolutionism gets us his defense of murderous US officials:

Nothing should be done to impede people from teaching and doing their research even if at that very moment it was being used to massacre and destroy. … [A]s a spokesman for the Rosa Luxemburg collective, I went to see the President of MIT in 1969 to inform him that we intended to protest publicly if there turned out to be any truth to the rumours then circulating that Walt Rostow (who we regarded as a war criminal) being denied a position at MIT on political grounds. (source: “On Chomsky”)

And so it goes, Tarzie’s 2015 appraisal will appear definitive:

The high perch from which Chomsky tells us how free we are was likely only vacant because state agents murdered all consequential Black leaders and squashed every other left-wing movement. In the ensuing years, white guys writing books supplanted visionaries with megaphones while the prison population grew. (source)

A Letter on Justice and Open Debate

July 7, 2020 letter will be appearing in the Letters section of the magazine’s October issue. We welcome responses at letters@harpers.org

Chomsky lent his name to what was roundly jeered as a right-wing hit-job. And there it remains, in the illustrious company of Bari Weiss, Yascha Mounk, David Brooks, Anne Applebaum, J.K. Rowling, Francis Fukuyama, Steven Pinker, David Frum, Malcolm Gladwell, Matt Yglesias, and Fareed Zakaria!

However, read this letter whih “reads as a caustic reaction to a diversifying industry — one that’s starting to challenge institutional norms that have protected bigotry.”

Here, read a response to this absurd letter, for which Chomsky is a signatory:

“A More Specific Letter on Justice and Open Debate”

It is impossible to see how these signatories are contributing to “the most vital causes of our time” during this moment of widespread reckoning with oppressive social systems. Their letter seeks to uphold a “stifling atmosphere” and prioritizes signal-blasting their discomfort in the face of valid criticism. The intellectual freedom of cis white intellectuals has never been under threat en masse, especially when compared to how writers from marginalized groups have been treated for generations. In fact, they have never faced serious consequences — only momentary discomfort.