1. Comment #85681 by BAEOZ on November 6, 2007 at 8:20 pm

That's gonna put a bit of a fly in the ointment of churches who wish to claim morality I think.
Will also annoy those creationists who try to debunk evolution with the tired argument "evolution predicts that...." followed by a nasty outcome that only shows their lack of understanding of evolution. We can now say evolution predicts that we'll love each other and it's only massive belief systems like religion that stops those of us who can empathise/be moral from empathising/being moral. Or, put another way: "without religion there would be good people doing good acts and bad people doing bad acts. Only with religion can good people do bad acts." Or did I miss the point with my brief skimming of the article?

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2. Comment #85719 by Fanusi Khiyal on November 6, 2007 at 11:54 pm

Ha. ha. ha. Consulting Noam Chomsky about morality. Good joke.

Isn't this the guy who praised the Soviet Union? Mao's China? Castro's Cuba? Chavez's regime? And who not only discounted the reports of Pol Pot's massacres, he actually discounted the testimonies of eyewitnesses of the killing fields?

I guess St. Noam's 'moral instinct' isn't working too well. And why can one still mention this man in polite company?

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3. Comment #85721 by eric.malitz on November 7, 2007 at 12:05 am

These results are pretty obvious. Its these results COMBINED with the 'changing moral zeitgeist' that fully removes morality from religion's hand.
Fanusi- do you have a reference for that stuff? Curious to read

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4. Comment #85729 by Fanusi Khiyal on November 7, 2007 at 12:45 am

eric you can find some of this on pages 302-304 of Francis Wheen's "How Mumbo-Jumbo conquered the world". It transpires that Chomsky also whinged that 'the positive side of the Khmer Rouge picture has been virtually edited out'.

You can find out alot more just by simple googling. Here is a good article on the subject:

http://newcriterion.com:81/archive/21/may03/chomsky.htm

Bottom line: This man should be regarded as we now regard those intellectuals of whom Orwell reports that they 'contrived to remain ignorant of the true events of Buchenwald for six years' even to the extent of ignoring the testimonies of survivors.

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5. Comment #85733 by Fanusi Khiyal on November 7, 2007 at 12:53 am

An addendum to the foregoing: Belief in a 'moral instinct' does not add up. As Hitchens observes, for the overwhelming majority of human history life was nothing but naked savagery. No evidence whatsoever of a 'moral instinct'.

I would very strongly recommend the analysis in Lee Harris's "Civilisation and its Enemies", on how we climbed from that terrible state. The bottom line is that man has no 'moral instinct'. He has some basic drives towards loyalty and association, within sharply defined, local parameters. Real morality - virtues such as justice, independence, compassion and so on - is the end result of a long and very painful process. To forget this is to end up with Chomsky's moral blindness.

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6. Comment #85779 by miskwaa on November 7, 2007 at 5:07 am

Khiyal; There are only two conclusions I can make from your statements regarding Chomsky. You are either deliberately lying or woefully ignorant. You are essentially repeating old propaganda speeches put out by the crazy right. Now to the other arguments; not all of life was naked savagery; it depended on where and who you were. Usually it involved being in or near large organized "civilizations" like Rome or the Mexica, with absurdist religious doctrines and organized theology.

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7. Comment #85786 by Fanusi Khiyal on November 7, 2007 at 5:35 am

I am getting really sick of this. There is always someone who believes it is enough to just insult me, and to randomly assert that I am wrong, without bringing the slightest facts. miskwaa has not given a single fact to refute what I have said. Is it, or is it not, true that Chomsky supported the Pol Pot regime, and discounted tales of the killing fields? Is it, or is it not, true that he supported Mao?

And, for the record, Francis Wheen is a lifelong socialist. Not a member of the VRWC.

Finally, I advise you to go back and look at some of the lectures on this site. Especially the one "We few, we happy few...". And maybe learn just a little about human evolutionary history.

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8. Comment #85792 by godisjustpretend on November 7, 2007 at 5:58 am

Fanushi: "Is it, or is it not, true that Chomsky supported the Pol Pot regime, and discounted tales of the killing fields?"

Not true, and not true.

Fanushi:"Is it, or is it not, true that he supported Mao?"

Not true.

Next...

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9. Comment #85793 by steve99 on November 7, 2007 at 5:59 am

Khiyal; There are only two conclusions I can make from your statements regarding Chomsky. You are either deliberately lying or woefully ignorant. You are essentially repeating old propaganda speeches put out by the crazy right.

Sorry, but I have to back Khiyal in this. Francis Wheen is a widely respected left-wing journalist and writer. To find a seriously devastating critique of Chomsky, read Nick Cohen's 'What's Left?'. Cohen is also a lifelong liberal. I am socialist, and I find Chomsky an embarassment.

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10. Comment #85811 by rcphelan on November 7, 2007 at 8:50 am

steve99 (#85793)

And Terry Eagleton is a well respected left-wing writer. It doesn't mean that his criticism of Dawkins is true.

Chomsky has probably over 2 million words in print, so discovering his thoughts from the source is always preferable to critics. Just because someone is a liberal does not, of course, mean they agree in all things. Chomsky has many lefty enemies who rail against him because of his stance on Israel. There is probably no one more accessible to find out what he actually believes than Chomsky, given the number of interviews he gives. He is rarely, if ever, inconsistent. His "support" for the Pol Pots of the world are always, always, a reference to his futile attempts to get the world to focus on other crimes from other states and attempting to put atrocities in perspective, not to excuse atrocities. Criticizing the US or Israel for official actions in no way should imply a love for their enemies. I agree he can take the love of the underdog a little far, but I don't see how anyone can seriously doubt the underlying morality, or his belief in an underlying moral instinct he champions against those who would subvert that instinct for various economic or political purposes.

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11. Comment #85826 by Fanusi Khiyal on November 7, 2007 at 9:28 am

In one ear, and out the other. Could godisjustpretend kindly come up with some references and proof of his dismissal of Wheen's scholarship? Else, I believe that none will think me unreasonable if I conclude that he is just an unworthy debatrer, fond of arbitrary assertions that have no basis in reality.

rcphelan , I have trouble taking your post seriously. You do not deny that Chomsky is an apologist for the regimes of Mao, of Pol Pot, of the Soviet Union etc. However, you have the temerity to ask something like this:

I don't see how anyone can seriously doubt the underlying morality

Here is the answer: If Chomsky honestly cared for humanity, if he had the slightest shred of morality or concern for the common man, then he would be ashamed to show himself in public after having endorsed such regimes. There were many honest, moral Communists who genuinely thought they were working for a better world. After they saw what they had helped to bring about, precisely because they honestly cared for humanity, they proved their sincerity by killing themselves.

To summarise, no man who has supported the regimes of Pol Pot and Mao can ever be trusted on any moral issue ever again. In exactly the same way, and for the same reason, that those intellectuals who refused to believe what happened at Buchenwald forever forfeited the right to be taken seriously by anyone of any moral standing and intellectual honesty at all.

I should also like to note that St. Noam's forebearance is only ever extended to tyrants and thugs and mass murderers. Not to civilised nations. For example, he claimed that if the Unites States went to war in Afghanistan after 9/11, 3 million Afghans would die in the process of ousting the Taliban. In some estimates he went as high as six million. In other words, he accused the United States of a crime on a par with that of the hollocaust. His evidence for this? Nonexistent. And what was the actually number? Five hundred. This is a 6000 to 1 error. You don't get to be this wrong and be taken seriously.

And you do not get to routinely apologise for the worst dictatorships in human history, while smearing the free world, and be taken seriously. I have no doubt that Noam Chomsky is driven by an instinct that he does not understand - that he does not dare to know the full nature of, or to understand consciously. I just know that the nature of that instinct is not moral.

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12. Comment #85828 by Bonzai on November 7, 2007 at 9:32 am

I don't know what is the controversy. It seems pretty reasonable that moral instincts such as empathy are hardwired. Where else can they come from if you don't believe in God?

It is also true that darker traits such as aggression are also hardwired. The role of nurture is a kind of "selection" that encourages some traits to flourish while suppressing others, but it cannot create a trait out of nothing if the tendency is not already there. Conditioning has to work on a biological substrate. Social conditioning "over-rides" instincts by promoting tendencies that are in some way opposite.

I think this is widely accepted among scientists, Chomsky's politics has nothing to do with it. I doubt that FK would go berserk if someone quotes Pinker instead of Chomsky to make the same point.

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13. Comment #85832 by Xenocratic on November 7, 2007 at 9:40 am

I feel I just have to way in on this one, considering that this article deals with one of the greatest intellectuals and truly moral men who has ever lived. Chomsky's achievements are already well documented so I won't waste my time dealing with them, but I am rather concerned that the poisoned and despicably demonic figure of Fanusi Khiyal may just sway a few people to believe the lies about Mr Chomsky that have been circulated by the far right to discredit him. Thank you godisjustpretend for discrediting Fanusi Khiyal's invidious lies that don't rise to the level of a bad fairytale. He asks us to not "just insult" or "to randomly assert that [he is] wrong, without bringing the slightest facts" so, Khiyal, where are your "facts" pertaining to these assertions regarding Chomsky? As someone who has forgotten more about him than you will ever know (not the only subject where this is true you pseudo-intellectual bigot) I can categorically assert that his point about the Khmer Rouge regime has only ever been about the exaggeration of the numbers killed during the Pol Pot years, 1975 - 79, by the Western media who basically thumb sucked the figure of 2 million. Chomsky later acknowledged that more than a million were indeed killed (estimates ranged but a reliable figure is around 1.5 million) but that doesn't change his and Edward Hermann's initial assertion that when it came to an Communist enemy state the western media, as ever, reported anything they pleased. There is even evidence, documented by Chomsky at the time, that some newspapers fabricated photos taken in Thailand which supposedly exposed the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime. But I suppose expecting someone who sees the world in black or white, good or evil, as you have demonstrated in the past, to understand these elementary points is probably impossible. The day you do even a fraction for other human beings that Chomsky has done throughout his life then you can perhaps cast judgement on him. Until such a day comes, which never will because you seem like the sort of cynically self righteous and unrepentantly selfish person who can only cast aspersive judgements on others while never actually doing any good yourself, save yourself a lot of trouble and simple keep your pathetically ill-informed opinions to yourself. Besides, anyone who states that "an appalling number of Moslems are primitive, brutal savages, addicted to violence, drunk on an appalling level of arrogance, and generally not just uncivilised but anti-civilised", which Fanusi did in another forum on this site, shouldn't be lecturing ANYONE on morality. The only person whose "'moral instinct' isn't working too well", is yours, you lying, morally bankrupt, subhuman, ultra right wing wastrel.

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14. Comment #85834 by Bonzai on November 7, 2007 at 9:48 am

To summarise, no man who has supported the regimes of Pol Pot and Mao can ever be trusted on any moral issue ever again.

When did Chomsky support Pol Pot?

Mao was more complicated. In the 1930's and 40's basically anyone with a conscience in China supported the Communists. Even the U.S. adviser to Cheung Kai Shek told Truman something to the effect that there would be no justice if the Nationalists didn't lose, given the extent of the regime's corruption and brutality. For about 10 years "New China" was indeed an inspiration for all developing countries and the CPC would have won any democratic election with a large margin. Chomsky wrote about Mao positively around that time and only briefly. It was only after the late 1950's that the Communists started shooting themselves on the foot, cumulating in the Cultural Revolution.

Mao was no nice guy, but most Chinese, even those who have a strong dislike for the Communists, don't think of Mao as Pol Pot or Stalin. That comparison is off base and indicates a complete ignorance of Chinese history.

P.S. What is your problem with Chavez? It is about time some leader actually uses Venezuela's oil wealth in a way that benefits the people rather than lining the pockets of the tiny, U.S. supported elite.

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15. Comment #85845 by steve99 on November 7, 2007 at 10:12 am

I agree he can take the love of the underdog a little far, but I don't see how anyone can seriously doubt the underlying morality, or his belief in an underlying moral instinct he champions against those who would subvert that instinct for various economic or political purposes.

I don't doubt that, but he has been somewhat less than rigorous about facts in these matters.

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16. Comment #85847 by Rtambree on November 7, 2007 at 10:14 am

All Chomsky does is generalise - so that if it's wrong for one country to invade, cause atrocities, etc, then it's wrong for other countries to do the same.

Chomsky treats the USA like it's just one more country - and applies the same standards to it that are applied to other countries. If it's wrong for Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan, then it's also wrong for the USA to invade Iraq, by the same rules and standards.

Much of Chomsky's writing is simply debunking the "exceptionalism" of western powers - i.e. they can be somehow deserve to be judged by different standards.

Chomsky doesn't spend any time criticising the far right loonies like Coulter or O'Reilly, but the supposedly "moderates" or "liberals" throughout history that have justified state violence in defence of the status quo.

For example, alot of the criticism on the Iraq war from the mainstream left is that it was incompetently handled e.g. no planning, exit strategy, too few troops, etc. In other words, the underlying issue about whether the invasion was criminal or not is ignored - only the issue about how efficiently it was carried out is allowed to be discussed.

It's good consciousness-raising. Chomsky is asking you to be a Martian and look at affairs as an objective observer. Which governments are responsible for much of the violence on the planet over the last generation or two?

Certainly the Soviet Union, Khmer Rouge, and despotic African and Middle Eastern regimes, but also many direct and indirect actions from the USA & Israel as well. Who are the chief weapons exporters? USA, Russia, China, UK, etc.

It's an either / or scenario i.e. either the west is responsible OR the commies / terrorists, etc, but both. And all parties are responsible for the atrocities that they commit.

If all participants are judged by the same standards, then that will lead to some uncomfortable conclusions about governments are we elect and re-elect.

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17. Comment #85848 by steve99 on November 7, 2007 at 10:17 am

When did Chomsky support Pol Pot?

Indirectly, in his criticism of Francois Ponchaud's book "Cambodia: Year Zero". He accused it of having an 'anti-communist bias and message'. His views on this matter were distinctly dodgy.

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18. Comment #85849 by Rtambree on November 7, 2007 at 10:20 am

12. Comment #85828 by Bonzai

Good point about Pinker and Chomsky. There's a lot of overlap about innateness in human nature, role of language, etc, and Pinker cites Chomsky quite often in his writings about linguistics.

The argument "Chomsky supported the Khmer Rouge" and therefore anything he says is wrong, smells like "Stalin was an atheist" and therefore anything atheists say is wrong.

Even if it was true, which it's not, what about the other 99.99% of his writing about corporate welfare, Indonesia and East Timor, Chile 1973, union legislation, atheism, media ownership, denouncing postmodernism, denouncing Marxism, Israel and West Bank, etc?

>>Indirectly, in his criticism of Francois Ponchaud's book "Cambodia: Year Zero". He accused it of having an 'anti-communist bias and message'. His views on this matter were distinctly dodgy.

Ha ha - is that the best ammunition you've got against Chomsky? A paraphrased book review of someone else's book written 30 years ago?

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19. Comment #85851 by 82abhilash on November 7, 2007 at 10:21 am

Fanusi, Chomsky never condoned the actions of Pol Pot, nor was fond of Stalinism. You may argue that he did not spend enough time criticizing the actions of such regimes and that will be correct. But there are enough people doing that already. His criticism is focused mainly towards the power systems in the US that uses its money power to manufacture consensus (by distorting truth and playing down important issues) and prevents discussions of real issues that affect the general public.

And if they indeed have succeeded, people like you will believe the lies and distortions propagated about him. I got a recommendation for you, listen to one of Chomsky's lengthy speeches or debates, and check whether you can verify what he said with what is in the public record. Then check how much of those facts where reported in the media. The results may interest and surprise you.

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20. Comment #85853 by steve99 on November 7, 2007 at 10:26 am

Chomsky never condoned the actions of Pol Pot

Perhaps not, but he was prepared to look the other way and pretend that no atrocities happened in case it tarnished the reputation of another communist regime. This is a matter of public record.

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21. Comment #85855 by Rtambree on November 7, 2007 at 10:38 am

>Perhaps not, but he was prepared to look the other way and pretend that no atrocities happened in case it tarnished the reputation of another communist regime.

Gee, you give Chomsky a lot of credit here. According to you, Steve99, Chomsky can single- handedly tarnish or cause not to be tarnished the reputation of a Communist regime.

C'mon be serious - the mainstream press does quite a good job at exposing the atrocities of official enemies. Cold War propaganda was a huge industry.

It's one's own atrocities that one needs to speak up about. These are often ignored in the mainstream press e.g. the thousands of innocents killed by the USA in Cambodia that not many know about.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Menu



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22. Comment #85859 by Bonzai on November 7, 2007 at 10:48 am

Steve,

Indirectly, in his criticism of Francois Ponchaud's book "Cambodia: Year Zero". He accused it of having an 'anti-communist bias and message'. His views on this matter were distinctly dodgy.

Sorry, I don't get your logic.

He was accusing P of dishonest journalism driven by an agenda. Whatever the merit of the accusation, that doesn't translate to "supporting Pol Pot". It is like calling people who opposed the Iraq war "Saddam lovers", it is a smear and a leap of logic. You can make the point that the U.S. invaded under false pretext without being a supporter of Saddam. I think that is pretty elementary.

His thesis is that the Western media, due to its own ideological commitment and biases, often uses a double standard and treats atrocities in a selective way and sidesteps American roles in these atrocities (the bombing of Cambodia prior to KR taking power). The body counts are then cynically exploited as ideological weapons to further America's selfish agendas. His writings on the topic should be read as commentaries about the U.S. media and ideological blinder rather than a primer of Cambodian history.

In a sense there is nothing new, Chomsky has been consistently making the same point for half a century. It is also not a very revolutionary idea for those of us who have some experience living in the world outside the U.S. and its allies.

Chomsky is actually very "American" in that he sees the world through its relationship with the U.S.. That is summarized in his assertion that it is pointless to protest against the atrocities of enemies because Americans can do nothing about them, but it is of vital importance to criticize violence carried out by "friends" because American action can make a difference. To Chomsky it is always a question of moral responsibility. Now I don't entirely agree because there are instances where Americans should protest against enemy atrocities and that may have an effect through international venues. But we should keep that in mind when reading Chomsky.

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23. Comment #85866 by steve99 on November 7, 2007 at 11:10 am

In a sense there is nothing new, Chomsky has been consistently making the same point for half a century. It is also not a very revolutionary idea for those of us who have some experience in the world outside the U.S. and its allies.

It may not be a very revolutionary idea, but I am afraid it has a bad smell to it. He is happy to criticise the West for a double standard, but will also look the other way, and give the benefit of the doubt to those who criticise anti-Western governments. He is part of a group of left-wingers who do this regularly - including John Pilger, George Galloway. I am left-wing, but I believe the same standards should be applied to all.

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24. Comment #85868 by Fanusi Khiyal on November 7, 2007 at 11:12 am

I can't believe some of the answers here. Could, first of all, anyone who doubts Chomsky's support of Pol Pot, either disprove what is cited in the article I have linked and/or prove Francis Wheen incorrect? Else, drop it. And yes, saying that the Pol Pot horrors weren't real and that the good side of that hellish regime was being ignored counts as support. At most you could argue that all he's been up to is Holocaust denial (and, yes, this qualifies).

Now, given that Chomsky's support of these tyrants is a matter of public record, I notice some people are trying to whitewash that. Rtambree this attempt is particuarly pathetic:

The argument "Chomsky supported the Khmer Rouge" and therefore anything he says is wrong, smells like "Stalin was an atheist" and therefore anything atheists say is wrong.

No, it isn't. Because the latter argument is attempting to draw a generalised statement from one individual to billions, and the former is drawing conclusions about an individual based on their stated positions. Chomsky has been wrong on so many moral issues, and not just wrong but absolutely wrong, actually aligning perfectly with evil and against good, that his judgement cannot, ever, be taken seriously again. Would you trust someone who had apologised for the Nazis to pass judgement on moral matters, ever again?

This isn't rocket science.

The next line of argument seems to be some bogus moral equivalence, trying to say that the regimes supported by Chomsky are equivalent to those of the free world, that the United States's invasion of Afghanistan is equivalent to the Soviet Union's. Here is the difference: The former was the direct response to a viscious attack against civilians, which was done to remove a criminal gang from power, and installed a democratic (at least as much as we can hope for in Afghanistan) government, under control of the Afghan people, and all of this was done with a record low number of casualties. The latter on the other hand, was a naked war of conquest, with the provable, deliberate mass murder of tens of thousands of civilians (quite aside from coalateral damage) intended to place Afghanistan under the tyrrany of the Soviets.

In addition, and this may be the most important thing I have written in a long time, there is this basic difference:

The moral stature of a nation isn't determined by how it treats the enemy in wartime as much as by how it treats its own in peacetime

The very idea that you can equate the United States with the likes of the USSR or Mao's China is ludicrous . And, Bonzai Mao killed thirty million people in just one famine, due to his reorganisation of farming. This was the worst famine in human history, and it is just one of Mao's many atrocities.

Any attempt to explain this away is what Hegel called 'The tyrrany of Abstract Thought'. Put briefly, it is preferring rationalist fantasies, to the actual, real human beings, who really suffer, and really die. It is the most contemptible egotism imaginable.

No matter how much rationalist bullshit is spouted about Mao, this doesn't change for one second those tens of millions who died because of him. And no matter how much one tries to avoid it, this is what Chomsky has repeatedly apologised for. It is that simple.

N.B.: I am ignoring xenocratic for rasons that will be obvious to anyone who knows our previous arguments. I do not engage with people who lie to my face.

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25. Comment #85875 by Bonzai on November 7, 2007 at 11:31 am

And, Bonzai Mao killed thirty million people in just one famine, due to his reorganisation of farming. This was the worst famine in human history, and it is just one of Mao's many atrocities.

It is generally agreed among historians that the famine was caused by a drought. It was exacerbated out of control because of covered up by local authorities. They were reporting great harvest even as the people were starving. There was no evidence that Mao was aware of it. On the contrary, all documented sources indicate that Mao thought everything was great and the people were happy. He escalated collectivization because all his data showed that it was a great success, so his action was quite rational given the information available to him.(A General, Peng, told Mao about the famine but he was dismissed because he was contradicted by all other reports, which turned out to be falsified)

So what we have was a break down of communication in a top-down authoritarian society where the leaders were completely out of touch with the people. Local officials lied either to avoid punishment or to get promotions. It was not a planned famine like Stalin did in the Ukraine.

Now you may say Mao was still to blame because he was the architect of a despotic system which had no accountability, gave incentives for local authorities to lie and insulated the leaders from the people. This is true but has to be understood in context. Mao didn't invent the system and the political culture of flattery and cover up, it has been like that for at least a thousand years if you know anything about Chinese history. Mao was in a way a typical Chinese Emperor and he was far from the worst in recent history.

Obviously you get your information about China just through U.S. news sound bites.

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26. Comment #85883 by Fanusi Khiyal on November 7, 2007 at 12:01 pm

It is generally agreed among historians that the famine was caused by a drought.

Sources please, or keep quiet. Because every reputable historian that I am aware of agrees that that nightmare was for the same reasons as the famines under Stalin: government mismanagement due to ideology. Not only that, but it seems to be to be gerenally agreed that famines are the result of human failure, not natural causes. Human failure in this case meaning government. So says Amartya Sen in his Poverty and Famines . So says David Arnold in Famine: Social Crisis and Historical Change . So says William A. Dando in The Geography of Famine.

And another thing I am fed up with is are comments like this:

Obviously you get your information about China just through U.S. news sound bites.

This kind of wanton generalisation about me, my background, and my sourses, is so common, and is always made without a shred of evidence. Could you please desist from it? Otherwise I shall have to conclude that you, Bonzai, obviously must be the misbegotten progeny of hippies whose haluciongen-soaked bloodstream crippled and altered your mental development to the point that you cannot appreciate fact, logic and evidence.

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27. Comment #85889 by Bonzai on November 7, 2007 at 12:29 pm

Sources please, or keep quiet.

Why do I have to do your research for you? Go to the library of the far east study department in a university near you and check out for yourself. Being able to read Chinese sources of course helps a lot.

Because every reputable historian that I am aware of agrees that that nightmare was for the same reasons as the famines under Stalin: government mismanagement due to ideology

Ideology of course played a role in that it created the pressure for local officials to lie in order to appease the Emperor. As I said, General Peng was honest and he lost his job and ended up in prison for telling the truth. But that was very far from saying that "Mao killed thirty million people" in a premeditated way like Stalin did.

When the extent of the famine was finally known. Mao was heavily criticized by his colleagues and he resigned tearfully as a result. He was eased out of power slowly and only managed to make a come back because of the Cultural Revolution. So please tell me what would have been his purpose of planning the death of so many people only to lead to his own loss of power?

Mao got his information from local reports and the newspapers. Talk to anyone from China they would tell you the newspapers were written for the leaders because no one else in their right minds believed in the blatant lies. That tells you something about how insulated the leaders were. I do have relatives in China.

So says Amartya Sen in his Poverty and Famines

Well Sen also said that capitalism in balance kills much more people than communism. In the book he made the point that China compared quite favourablh with India where a lot more people died because of starvation and malnutrition over the long run under capitalism.

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28. Comment #85895 by Fanusi Khiyal on November 7, 2007 at 12:37 pm

Why do I have to do your research for you?

Because you make a ridiculous assertion that is counter to everything I have ever read on this subject, and I cited no less than three top notch sources. Believe me, there's more where that came from.

If you are going to just arbitrarily assert things, and demand that someone else to the fact checking, then I submit that your point of view is utterly worthless to rational human beings, who may as well just spend the time of Wikipedia instead, which has the good grace to list its sources. This, I might add, is further supported by your comments about Sen, which seem strange to me, especially since I have trouble believing that anyone could think that India is capitalist, or at least has been capitalist for long; it was widely acknowledge that it was under a strangling socialism (the Economist said that in some ways the central planning of India put the Soviet Union to shame).

N.B.: While I should love to spend more time watching people try and defend the indefensible, I have to spend several days away, and so will not be able to continue this.

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29. Comment #85901 by Bonzai on November 7, 2007 at 12:49 pm

I know one of the sources you cited, namely Sen, and already I know you misrepresented him so why should I take your so called research seriously just because you dropped a few names?

The quality of your posts shows what your so called scholarship consists of.

I am not writing a dissertation. I am not obliged to provide sources. I don't have the books and journal articles(many of them are Chinese) in front of me. Anyone who wants to double check can go to a university library and it should be easy because what I stated was not a fringed opinion. BTW, "the black book of Communism" is not a reputable historical source.

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30. Comment #85906 by Fanusi Khiyal on November 7, 2007 at 12:56 pm

I know one of the source you cited, namely Sen, and already I know you misrepresented him so why should I take your so called research seriously?

Prove it, please, that I have misrepresented Sen. I cited Sen in support of the fact that famine is politically caused. Sen studied the 1943 Bengal famine, and also showed that during the 1983-84 drought in sub-Saharan africa, Ethiopia and the Sudan suffered famines while experiencing less declines in food production than Botswana and Zimbabwe. So, unless you are going to tell me that Sen doesn't say that famine is politically caused, with quotes to back it up... Although I notice that you do not even say that Sen says this or that - you just say I have 'misrepresented' him, without specifying how, so you can claim anything at a later point. Perfect.

I also notice that you are unable to deal with the central point of Chomsky's relentless support for tyrranny. Great. You can say that you have 'articles... many of them in Chinese' around somewhere, but until you actually produce them, I will have trouble believing you.

Other Comments by Fanusi Khiyal

31. Comment #85911 by Bonzai on November 7, 2007 at 1:05 pm

Prove it, please, that I have misrepresented Sen, I cited Sen in support of the fact that famine is politically caused

From Wikipedia

According to the work of Nobel prize winning economist and expert on famines Amartya Sen, most famines do not result just from lower food production, but also from an inappropriate or inefficient distribution of the food, often compounded by lack of information and indeed misinformation as to the extent of the problem. In the case of these Chinese famines, the urban population had protected legal rights for certain amounts of grain consumption. Local officials in the countryside competed to over-report the levels of production that their communes had achieved in response to the new economic organisation and thus local peasants were left with a much reduced residue.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Years_of_Natural_Disasters
(BTW, this is a source on the Chinese famine, it sure looks a lot closer to my version than yours)

"Politically caused" is a weaselly word. It can mean many different things such as mismanagement, planning errors, wrong headed policies and faulty information. These are all cited in the Wikipedia link above. But none of these suggests deliberate intent or knowledge on Mao's part as you have been trying to prove.

Western embargo against China was an important factor behind collectivization because China was under tremendous pressure to become self sufficient. Why don't you rail against the people who put the embargo in place if you are such a humanitarian? Crocodile's tears.

Other Comments by Bonzai

32. Comment #85916 by Bonzai on November 7, 2007 at 1:20 pm

I also notice that you are unable to deal with the central point of Chomsky's relentless support for tyrranny

How does Chomsky support tyranny? Does he give weapons and money to dictators in the Middle East, South and central America and Asia and train their torturers and assassins? Does he plot military take overs and coups to subvert democratically elected governments around the world?

So I am sorry, I don't know what the hell you're talking about.

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33. Comment #85934 by Rtambree on November 7, 2007 at 2:06 pm

>I also notice that you are unable to deal with the central point of Chomsky's relentless support for tyrranny

>Would you trust someone who had apologised for the Nazis to pass judgement on moral matters

Oh dear - is Fox News or Commentary your only source of information?

I've been reading many of Chomsky's books since about 1999 and he only speaks out AGAINST tyranny: Latin America, Middle East, East Timor, Africa, Israel, etc.

I also notice that when people try to smear Chomsky, such as happened in the Guardian last year, they have to resort to misquoting, quoting out of context, and outright lies, and the Guardian ended up having to apologise. This sort of thing happens time and time again.

Chomsky's premise is simple - all governments are responsible for their actions, and all are to be judged by the same standards. There should be no single country exempted - e.g. why does the USA not sign up to the International Criminal Court?Why does the USA often vote against 170+ countries in the UN General Assembly?

Other Comments by Rtambree

34. Comment #85938 by steve99 on November 7, 2007 at 2:19 pm

Chomsky's premise is simple - all governments are responsible for their actions, and all are to be judged by the same standards.

Unfortunately, Chomssky's actual words don't live up to this premise.

Other Comments by steve99

35. Comment #85974 by GSP on November 7, 2007 at 4:27 pm

The reason a lot of right-wingers (and in-denial lefties) hate Chomsky is because he is a vocal critic of the United States. People (especially Americans) cannot handle that. They live in a dream world in which the US can do no wrong. Chomsky's purpose in his political writings is mainly to educate about these matters.

The United States has forcefully invaded 30+ countries, not since its beginning, not in the last 100 years, but since the late 70s! This is appalling and the true mark of an imperialism the world would be better off without.

Other Comments by GSP

36. Comment #85979 by Rtambree on November 7, 2007 at 4:48 pm

>People (especially Americans) cannot handle that. They live in a dream world in which the US can do no wrong

There's a lot of brainwashing to overcome - it's like being in one big cult. To escape one has to jettison God, Jesus and the Bible, which many just can't face. And even if they do that, they then have to jettison worship of the flag and the free market, and all the hyperpatriotism and unquestioning support of whatever the President does. That's a lot of deprogramming.

Other Comments by Rtambree

37. Comment #86026 by Fanusi Khiyal on November 7, 2007 at 10:44 pm

Bonzai thank you for acknowledging that Sen says what I did: that famines are politically caused. I wonder how exactly one is supposed to believe that an absolute, totalitarian dictator such as Mao knew nothing, ah say nothing about the direct consequences of his own policies, the application of Marxist doctrine to farming.

And I also have some trouble believing this nonsense:

There's a lot of brainwashing to overcome - it's like being in one big cult

Actually, I think you will find that the cult is anti-Americanism. You can find the best analysis of this phenomenon here:
http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/3458371.html

Roughly speaking the idea that the media is biased towards America would come as a surprise to every single American conservative I know. Not to mention the Campuses; please compare the receptions that Ahmadinedjad and David Horowitz recieve.

GSP, in case you missed this, Imperialism is 'acting to gain and keep an empire'. Now, I challenge you to provide evidence of America's empire. Where are the colonies, the subject peoples, the treaty payers? Well? America is, in fact, the least imperialist power in human history. But please don't let facts get in the way. I'm sure you'll be able to explain how having a McDonald's - or whatever - is the same thing as being a 'colony'. I mean, you'll be wrong, but what else it new?

Rtambree I have already cited two sources for my comments. Now either disprove Francis Wheen or keep your asinine comments about Fox News to yourself and your blog. Apologising for Pol Pot is the moral equivalent of Holocaust denial at least . And this isn't a left or right issue, regardless of how much you try to paint it that way. There are plenty of leftists who are sickened by Chomsky. This is a matter of a basic loyalty towards truth, reason and a concern for human life.

And Bonzai his intellectual cheerleading for the worst tyrants qualifies as support. This may be a difficult concept, so I will spell it out again: Anyone who has apologised for the regimes of Mao, Castro, Pol Pot, Chavez, and the Soviet Union, has lost any moral credibility amids rational, moral people.

Amongs the irrational, irresponsible, of course, Chomsky still enjoys great support.

Now, if you will excuse me, I have to abandon this thread for the next several days.

Other Comments by Fanusi Khiyal

38. Comment #86059 by Rtambree on November 8, 2007 at 3:11 am

>America is, in fact, the least imperialist power in human history

God Bless America.

Other Comments by Rtambree

39. Comment #86060 by Xenocratic on November 8, 2007 at 3:13 am

Although facts in the real world don't seem to trouble Fanusi Khiyal's misconceptions in the least, just for the record I would like to refer to what Chomsky himself actually has to say on the various regimes he is supposed to be an apologist for:

Most of the following excerpts are taken from Understanding Power (Edited by Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel), published by Vintage in 2003, unless where otherwise stated:

"Pol Pot was obviously a major mass murderer, but it's not clear that Pol Pot killed very many more people – or even more people – than the United States killed in Cambodia in the first half of the 1970s. We only talk about "genocide" when other people do the killing.
So there's a lot of uncertainty about just what the scale of the Pol Pot massacre, but the best scholarly work in existence today estimates the deaths in Cambodia from all causes during the Pol Pot period in the hundreds of thousands, maybe as much as a million. Well, just take a look at the killing in Cambodia that happened in the first half of the decade from 1970 to 1975 – which is the period we're[the United States] responsible for: it was also in the hundreds of thousands." (page 92)

He provides some uncomfortable background to the rise of the Khmer Rouge :

"Furthermore, if you really want to be serious about it – let's say a million people died in the Pol Pot years, let's take a higher number – it's worth bearing in mind that when the United States stopped its attacks on inner Cambodia in 1975, American and other Western officials predicted that in the aftermath, about a million more Cambodians would die just from the effects of the American war. At the time that the United States withdrew from Cambodia, people were dying from starvation in the city of Phnom Penh alone – forget the rest of the country – at the rate of 100 000 a year. The last U.S A.I.D [Agency of International Development] mission in Cambodia predicted that there would have to be two years of slave labour and starvation before the country could even begin to get moving again.
So while the number of deaths you should attribute to the United States during the Pol Pot period isn't a simple calculation to make, obviously it's a lot – when you wipe out a country's agricultural system and drive a million people out of their homes and into a city as refugees, yeah, a lot of people are going to die. And the responsibility for their deaths is not with the regime that took over afterwards, it's with the people who made it that way.
And in fact, there's an even more subtle point to be made – but not an insignificant one. That is: why did Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge carry out their massacre in the first place? Well, there's pretty good evidence that the Khmer Rouge forces took power primarily because they were the only ones who were tough enough bastards to survive the U.S. attacks. And given the destructive psychological effects of the American bombings on the peasant population thee, some sort of violent outpouring was fairly predictable – and there was a big element of just plain peasant revenge in what happened. So the U.S. bombings hit a real peak of ferocity around 1973, and that's the same period in which the Pol Pot group started gaining power. The American bombardment was certainly a significant factor, possibly the critical factor, in building up peasant support for the Khmer Rouge in the first place; before that, they had been a pretty marginal element. Okay, if we were honest about the term "genocide", we would divide up the deaths in the Pol Pot period into a major part which is our responsibility, which is the responsibility of the United States." (page 92 – 93)

In The Cambridge Companion to Chomsky (edited by James McGilvray), published in 2005, Jean Bricmont, in his essay The Responsibility of the intellectual, writes the following:

"A related issue that aroused considerable fury among Chomsky's opponents was his alleged 'defence of Pol Pot'. Of course, no such defence ever occurred.
The man them of Chomsky & Herman (1979a, b, 1988) was a comparison between the response of the media to the Khmer Rouge massacres in Cambodia and to the Indonesian massacres in East Timor at the same time and similar scale (relative to population). In the first case, where the massacres could be blamed on an official enemy, virtuous indignation and gross exaggerations were the rule; in the case of a massacre committed by a friendly state (Indonesia), almost total silence. The issue for Chomsky and Herman was not the nature of the Khmer Rouge regime, which was certainly bad enough, but the propagandist attitude toward an official enemy, where the only rule is 'anything goes'. A mechanism much like religious bigotry is set in motion: everybody feels the need to show that he is more virtuous than his neighbour in denouncing the crimes of the enemy; facts need not be checked and the grossest lies are considered to prove only the sanctity of the authors. Similar mechanisms are at work nowadays concerning Iran or North Korea." (page 289 – 290)

Sound familiar to you, Fanusi?

On Cuba:

While Chomsky rightly notes that "many important and impressive things have been achieved…it's also been pretty tyrannical, so there's been an upside and a downside". (Understanding Power, page 149)

Just to inform Fanusi about those "important and impressive things" since he's probably been on another planet for the last few decades, Cuba has one of the highest literacy rates in the world, certainly the highest in Latin America, a health care system that ranks with many first world countries and has a very low infant mortality rate, again the lowest in Latin America and even lower than many states in the United States. So while I agree that Castro isn't exactly the world's best democrat, the amount of successes which he has unequivocally achieved have been highly notable, made even more so by the fact that since the early sixties the United States instituted an illegal embargo against Cuba and directed numerous terrorist operations against this small nation, such as blowing up a Cubana airliner which killed all seventy three passengers, and a factory which was blown up leading to the deaths of four hundred people. Seeing as though Fanusi Khiyal is such a great admirer of US foreign policy, it is worth noting that the deaths in Guatamala during the 1980s alone amounted to tens of thousands dead as a result of US military and diplomatic support, which is far more people than have been killed by Castro's regime since 1959. I've purposefully excluded references to the other violent Latin American regimes which the US government has supported over the decades, such as the Brazilian generals who first used death squads under the Kennedy Administration starting in 1962, to the tens of thousands killed in El Salvador, the neo-Nazis who ran Argentina for decades, the assassination of Salvador Allende in 1973 (the first September 11) which gave rise to the awful monster Augusto Pinochet and the deaths of thousands of Chileans, not to forget the terrorist war that the United States launched against Nicaragua using the Contra guerrillas to destabilise the democratically elected Sandinistas. It is interesting to note for those who, like Fanusi, cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the elementary truth about the terroristic nature of US foreign policy, that in 1986 the World Court condemned America's "unlawful use of force" (i.e. terrorism) in Nicaragua. They were the first such nation so condemned, and despite being ordered to pay reparations the government simply refused and increased the oppression.

In The Cambridge Companion to Chomsky (edited by James McGilvray), published in 2005, Jean Bricmont makes the following very good point:

"…imagine yourself being one of those two or three billion people (about half of mankind) that have to survive on more or less two dollars a day. What would be your view of the economic and social policies of the Cuban government, assuming that all relevant facts were available to you (of course, they are not available to the wretched of the earth, and for obvious reasons)? How would you weigh Cuban efforts to maintain public health, education and availability of basic necessities for the poor versus the limitations on civil liberties? Consider that these efforts continued long after Cuba had stopped being "subsidized" by the Soviet Union – and while it suffers from a very severe embargo as well as from numerous acts of sabotage caused by the single superpower, which forces them to divert resources to defence, counter-spying etc. Although Chomsky would certainly not use socio-economic rights to justify the abandonment of civil liberties, the contrast between the unequal emphases put on the two sorts of rights shows that the issue of 'relativism' is not quite as simple as it is portrayed in the dominant Western discourse." (page 291)
Chomsky stated in an interview that "Personally, I'd like to see the regime [that is, Castro's]overthrown by an internal libertarian revolution (and not that one alone)". Full transcript available at http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/other/lbbs9408-cuba.html.
As an interesting aside, a few years ago Chomsky and a number of other American intellectuals signed a letter condemning Castro for imprisoning some journalists. Chomsky actually received some flak from people on the left. I suppose all this goes to show that he is simply an unapologetic Cuba supporter, right?

On the Soviet Union:

"One of the issues which has devastated a substantial portion of the left in recent years, and caused enormous triumphalism elsewhere, is the alleged fact that there's been this great battle between socialism and capitalism in the twentieth century, and in the end capitalism won and socialism lost – and the reason we know that socialism lost is because the Soviet Union disintegrated. So you have big cover stories in The Nation about 'The End of Socialism', and you have socialists who all their lives considered themselves anti-Stalinist saying 'Yes, it's true, socialism has lost because Russia failed'. I mean, even to raise questions about this is something you're not supposed to do in our culture, but let's try it. Suppose you ask a simple question: namely, why do people like the editors at The Nation say that 'socialism' failed, why don't they say that 'democracy' failed? – and the proof that 'democracy' failed is, look what happened to Eastern Europe. After all, those countries also called themselves 'People's Democracies', real advanced forms of democracy. So why don't we conclude that 'democracy' failed, not just plain 'socialism' failed? Well, I haven't seen any articles anywhere saying, 'Look, democracy failed, let's forget about democracy'. And it's obvious why: the fact that they called themselves democratic doesn't mean that they were democratic. Pretty obvious, right?
Okay, then in what sense did socialism fail? I mean, it's true that the Soviet Union and its satellites in Eastern Europe called themselves 'socialist' – but they also called themselves 'democratic'. Were they socialist? Well, you can argue about what socialism is, but there are some ideas that are sort of at the core of it, like workers' control over production, elimination of wage labour, things like that. Did those countries have any of those things? They weren't even a thought there. Again, in the pre-Bolshevik part of the Russian Revolution, there were socialist initiatives – but they were crushed instantly after the Bolsheviks took power, like within months. In fact, just as the moves towards democracy in Russia were instantly destroyed, the moves towards socialism were equally instantly destroyed. The Bolshevik takeover was a coup – and that was perfectly well understood at the time, in fact. So if you look in the mainstream Marxist movement, Lenin's takeover was regarded as counter-revolutionary; if you look at independent leftists like Bertrand Russell, it was instantly obvious to them; to the libertarian left, it was a truism.
But that truism has been driven out of people's heads over the years, as part of a whole prolonged effort to discredit the very idea of socialism by associating itself with Soviet totalitarianism.
…hopefully with the fall of the Soviet Union we can at least begin to get past that barrier, and start recovering an understanding of what socialism could really stand for." (page 145 – 146)

"Now, just personally speaking, it turns out that I do spend a fair amount of effort talking about the crimes of official enemies – in fact, there are a number of people now living in the United States and Canada from the old Soviet Union and Eastern Europe who are there because of my own personal activities on their behalf. But I don't take great pride in that part of my work, particularly: I just do it because I'm interested in it. The most important thing for me, and for you, is to think about the greater consequences of your criticisms: what you can have the most effect on. And especially in a relatively open society like ours, which does allow a lot of freedom and dissent, that means American crimes primarily." (page 287)

Here's Chomsky's views on Marxism:

"I guess one thing that's unattractive to me about 'Marxism' is the very idea that there is such a thing. It's a rather striking fact that you don't find things like 'Marxism' in the sciences – like, there isn't any part of physics which is 'Einsteinianism,' let's say, or 'Planckianism' or something like that. It doesn't make any sense – because people aren't gods: they just discover things, and they make mistakes, and their graduate students tell them why they're wrong, and then they go on and do things better the next time. But there are no gods around. I mean, scientists do use the terms 'Newtonianism' and 'Darwinism', but nobody thinks of those as doctrines that you've got to somehow be loyal to, and figure out what the Master thought, and what he would have said in this new circumstance and so on. That sort of thing is just completely alien to rational existence, it only shows up in irrational domains.
So Marxism, Freudianism: any one of these things I think is an irrational cult. They're theology, so they're whatever you think of theology; I don't think much of it. In fact, in my view that's exactly the right analogy: notions like Marxism and Freudianism belong to the history of organised religion." (page 227)

Chomsky also once told an interviewer a few years ago that the fall of Communism is actually a "victory for socialism". Some apologist!

On China:

He considers China to be "a very brutal society" and to have "a brutal government"(page 292). He goes on to write that in China "you have women from farms who are locked into factories where they work 12 hours a day for essentially nothing, and sometimes a couple hundred of them will be burned to death because there's a factory fire and the factory doors have been locked so no one can leave, and so on and so forth". (page 292)
The comments regarding Mao that are constantly use to damn Chomsky were uttered in 1967 before he, or indeed anyone else, knew the full extent of the death toll from the famine and the cultural revolution. Even Keith Windschuttle in his notoriously inaccurate essay concedes this point by stating that "the full story did not come out for another two decades", thereby discrediting his own accusation. In a letter posted on ZNet to Leo Casey Chomsky wrote this very reasonable paragraph apropos Mao:

"To begin with, if we are even minimally serious, we apply to ourselves the standards we rightly apply to others: more precisely, harsher standards, because it is our actions for which we are responsible and that we can modify. In the case of official enemies who have committed crimes, we count not only those who they personally murdered, but those who died as a consequence of their acts. To move from abstract to concrete, consider the crimes of Communism in the 20th century. These have received enormous publicity, reaching a peak with the publication of the "Black Book" in France and then in the US, with major reviews in early 2000 expressing amazement and horror at the depths to which humans can descend. The centerpiece of the accusation was the Chinese famine of 1958-61, which accounted for 1/3 of the grim total. Of course, no one supposed that Mao literally murdered tens of millions of people, or that he "intended" that any die at all. Rather, these crimes were the outcome of institutional and ideological structures of the Maoist system, as discussed in the primary scholarly work on the topic by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen and his colleague Jean Dreze. These charges are unchallenged, and rightly so. I will not elaborate because I have done so elsewhere in a ZNet commentary in January 2000, reprinted and extended in 'Rogue States'. It is taken for granted, rightly of course, that the crimes are not mitigated by the obvious lack of intent. These are crimes that flow from deep-seated institutional and ideological structures, like the bombing of the Sudan, and innumerable more severe cases. Nor would the worst of the crimes of Communism be mitigated in the slightest if it were discovered that something in Mao's personal life might have had some role in the orders that led to the crime (as is speculated, dubiously in my view, with regard to this minor crime of the Clinton administration)."
(http://www.zmag.org/chomreply2.htm)

Chomsky also sheds some light as to why the likes of Fanusi Khiyal and other right wing lunatics throughout the Western world are so dead set against Chomsky's views as a man in the audience observes that the "major misunderstandings that are used against" Chomsky, including the fanciful belief that he is an apologist for Pol Pot, reflect "how much [his] views have been distorted and oversimplified in the press". Here's his response:

"But why is that surprising? First of all, this is not happening in the mass media, this is happening in the intellectual journals. And intellectuals are specialists in defamation, they're basically commissars – they're the ideological managers, so they are the ones who feel the most threatened by dissidence. The mass media don't care that much, they just ignore it, or say it's crazy or something like that. In fact, this stuff barely enters the national media; sure, you'll get a throwaway line saying, 'this guy's an apologist for this that and the other ting', but that's just feeding off the intellectual culture. The place where it's really done is inside the intellectual journals – because that's their speciality. They're commissars: it's not fundamentally different from the Communist Party.
And also, I'm a particular target for other reasons – a lot of what I write is a critique of the American liberal intellectual establishment, and they don't like that particularly". (page 206)

To even place Chavez' names with the likes of Pol Pot, Mao or even Castro, whom Chavez admires, reveals the depth of dishonesty lurking in the Fanusi Khiyal psyche. Because he probably reads the London Times or the Daily Telegraph or the New York Times instead of John Pilger or other alternative news sites, he won't realise that Hugo Chavez holds a world record for most democratic election wins. He has been democratically elected 5 times since 1998 and the reason that the 2002 coup attempt (supported by the United States) failed was because his popularity among Venezuela's poorest denizens is so great that there were mass protests that saw him restored to power in 48 hours. Chomsky has acknowledged the remarkable achievements of the Chavez regime, but he was hardly effusive when interviewed by the New York Times last year when Chavez referred to Chomsky's book, Hegemony or Survival(2003), at the UN General Assembly. In Failed States (2006), Chomsky quotes from an article by Irish journalist Hugh O'Shaughnessy:

"In Venezuela, where an oil economy has over the decades produced a sparkling elite of super-rich, a quarter of under-15s go hungry, for instance, and 60 per cent of people over 59 have no income at all. Les than a fifth of the population enjoys social security. Only now under President Chavez, the former parachute colonel elected to office in 1998, has medicine started to become something of a reality for the poverty-stricken majority in the rich but deeply divided – virtually non-functioning – society. Since he won power in democratic elections and began to transform the health and welfare sector which catered so badly to the mass of the population progress has been slow. But it has been perceptible – not least because Venezuela has joined with Cuba in a joint health strategy which has brought perhaps 20 000 Cuban doctors and other health professionals here and spread them around the country from Caracas to remote spots where Venezuelan doctors refuse to serve". (Irish Times, 17 September 2005)

Your antipathy towards Chavez suggests to me that you simply swallow everything the right wing Western media feeds you hook, line and sinker. I find it so strange that someone with Fanusi Khiyal's obvious lack of critical faculties could have found his way to a website devoted to science and reason. All you can produce in defence of your views is second hand knowledge from right wing hacks rather than any independent research on your part, a debasement of both the scientific method and reason.
As for your assertion that only 500 people were threatened with starvation in Afghanistan, that simply beggars belief. Where is the source for this information? In case you missed it, Afghanistan's population has been reduced to beggary by a decade of war with the Soviets, and another decade of inter-tribal warfare and the reign of the Taliban. You claim that Chomsky provides no evidence for his information yet in Hegemony or Survival, another book by him I'm sure you haven't read, Chomsky writes that "five days after 9-11, Washington demanded that Pakistan eliminate 'truck convoys that provide much of the food and other supplies to Afghanistan's civilian population', and caused the withdrawal of aid workers along with severe reduction in food supplies, thereby leaving 'millions of Afghans…at grave risk of starvation' – risk of what properly have been termed 'silent genocide'. Estimates of the numbers 'at grave risk of starvation' rose from 5 million before 9-11 to 7.5 million a month later"(page 128 - 129). In the notes to the chapter where this excerpt appears Chomsky provides his sources, namely John Burns writing in the New York Times, 16 September 2001 and Samina Ahmed's article in International Security 26, no. 3 (winter 2001 – 02). Earlier on Chomsky admitted that "Aid agencies, scholars, and others who properly warned of the risks in Afghanistan and Iraq were ridiculed when the worst, fortunately, did not come to pass"(page 78). Hindsight is always 20/20 vision, but that doesn't change the content of the original predictions, as any rational person should know. Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world so it is certainly more believable that millions could likely have faced starvation if aid agencies pulled out than the five hundred which you probably snatched from thin air, as you do most of your so-called "facts". Judging by the people whom you trust for accurate information I'm not surprised that your grasp of reality is very shaky.
You also dare to deliver a harangue against Chomsky's morality when you are an avowed supporter of the Iraq War. Apart from the fact that the invasion of a sovereign state constitutes the supreme international crime according to the final judgements at the Nuremburg trials, a recent study conducted using the same methodology as the one published in Lancet magazine last year reveals that as many as 1.2 million Iraqis have possibly been killed since the start of the war in 2003. This means that Bush and Blair bear responsibility for a death toll greater than the Rwandan genocide and also quite possibly the number killed under Pol Pot. Now before you spew on about how it's all because of sectarian violence, and nothing to do with the Coalition forces, another point to bear in mind about international law is that the occupying country bears all responsibility for what follows in the wake of an invasion.

I told you once before, Fanusi, not to mess with me on Chomsky, and once again you haven't heeded my warning. How many times do you want me to kick your backside on this? How many more times do you want me to expose you for the fraud and fool that you are? Not only are you a truly pathetic scholar who doesn't even bother reading the people he criticises, you're a sadomasochist to boot!


Expecting Keith Windschuttle to deliver a fair verdict on Noam Chomsky is akin to trusting Bill 'O Reilly's views on Michael Moore. His claim that "when it came to the real world of international politics Chomsky turned out to endorse a fairly orthodox band of socialist revolutionaries" who "included the architects of communism in Cuba, Fidel Castro and Che Guevera, as well as Mao Tse-tung and the founders of the Chinese communist state" he provides no evidence, other than the statements made in 1967 which Windschuttle himself explains were made without Chomsky knowing the full extent of the famine's damage to Chinese society. Furthermore, it is important to note that Windschuttle was once left wing who subsequently did an about face turn to become an apologist for Western crimes and all manner of right wing agendas. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about Windschuttle's "Political evolution":
"An adherent of the New Left in the 1960s and 70s, Windschuttle later moved to the right. This process is first evident in his 1984 book The Media, which was highly critical of the then academically fashionable Marxist theories of Louis Althusser and Stuart Hall. Windschuttle criticised these writers from the same empirical perspective as Marxist historian E. P. Thompson in Thompson's book 'The Poverty of Theory'. The first edition of 'The Media' attacked "the political program of the New Right" and set out a case favouring "government restrictions and regulation" and condemning "private enterprise and free markets"[2].However, the third edition in 1988 took a different view: "Overall, the major economic reforms of the last five years, the deregulation of the finance sector, and the imposition of wage restraint through the social contract of The Accord, have worked to expand employment and internationalize the Australian economy in more positive ways than I thought possible at the time."
This political evolution has continued since the early 1990s. In The Killing of History, Windschuttle defended the practices and methods of traditional empirical history against postmodernism, and praised historians such as Henry Reynolds. He currently argues that although at the time he believed that those left-wing historians he praised relied on traditional empirically-oriented approaches, he has subsequently discovered by checking their primary sources that some did not.
His principal argument, evident in The Killing of History, is that historians on both the left and right of the political spectrum have misrepresented and distorted history to support various political causes or ideological positions. With respect to Australian Aboriginal history, in The Fabrication of Aboriginal History he argues that it has been left-wing historians who have extensively misrepresented and fabricated historical evidence to support a political agenda.
Windschuttle argues that the task of the historian is to attempt to provide the reader with an empirical history as near to the objective truth as possible, based on analysis of all the available evidence. The political implications of an objective, empirical history are not the empirical historian's responsibility. A historian may have his or her own political beliefs but this should never lead them to falsify historical evidence.
However, critics such as the contributors to Whitewash, have argued that Windschuttle does not follow his own criteria as, in their view, his work invariably produces findings consistent with his political views. The contributors to Whitewash include historians whom Windschuttle has directly criticised for "fabricating" history. The key issue is whether the historical evidence, viewed objectively, supports the historical arguments made by Windschuttle or those of the historians he has criticised.
A frequent contributor to conservative magazines Quadrant and The New Criterion, Windschuttle's recent research disputes whether the colonial settlers of Australia committed widespread genocide against the Indigenous Australians and denies the claims by some left-wing historians that there was a campaign of guerrilla warfare against British settlement. Extensive debate on his claims has come to be called the History Wars. He argues against assertions, which he imputes to the current generation of academic historians, that there was any resemblance between racial attitudes in Australia and those of South Africa under apartheid and Germany under the Nazis."
For more on this deplorable human being read Gerard Henderson's article available at http://www.theage.com.au/news/Gerard-Henderson/The-trouble-with-Keith-Windschuttle/2004/12/06/1102182220823.html
He is thus morally dubious, to say the least, just as Christopher Hitchens is. Anything stated by Keith Windschuttle should be treated with great circumspection as his politics and personal integrity are greatly questionable, as are those of Hitchens. Christopher Hitchens has many meaningful and important things to say about religion, but when it comes to politics the man's views can, and should be, rejected outright. He is now virtually nothing but a shill for the Neocons with an extremist, genocidal agenda that even his old friends, such as Salman Rushdie, are disconcerted by. Pay Windschuttle no mind, as he is a petty little conservative lapdog who doesn't have the competence or intellect to even have a meaningful conversation with Chomsky, let alone the ability to deal with any of the famed linguist's political views. Windschuttle's brand of dishonest rhetorical gamesmanship is perfectly suited to the likes of Fanusi Khiyal who, akin to the religious people he disdains so much, are so fixated on a particular paradigm of interpretation that no amount of evidence will ever convince them that their views are irrational or just plain wrong.
Fanusi Khiyal fancies himself to be a humanitarian, but he hates people. He fancies himself a libertarian, but he hates freedom and dissent. He fancies himself to be against terrorism, but he supports the biggest terrorists on the planet, possibly in history. In short Fanusi Khiyal is the quintessential hypocritical intellectual Chomsky has spent his career critiquing. No wonder Fanusi hates him so much, because Chomsky holds up a mirror to the likes of him and reveals who they really are. The picture is never pretty, or remotely palatable, so they look away and insist on incessantly heaping venomous scorn on others. You are a disgrace, Fanusi Khiyal, and the really sad part about this fact is that you'll never realise it because your capacity for self reflection, one of the cornerstones of a truly rational person, seems to be entirely absent in your hateful personality.
In closing I would like to provide the closing paragraph of Jean Bricomont's essay in The Cambridge Companion to Chomsky as he perfectly summarises Chomsky's qualities and the lowly calibre of the likes of Fanusi Khiyal, Keith Windschuttle and other right wing apologists for Western atrocities:

"…if there is a sobering thought that one may have about the progress of civilization, it is that, at the same time as our proclaimed values have become more truly universal, there has been a considerable rise in hypocrisy. A leader who bases his rule mostly on, say, a racist ideology dos not need to be too hypocritical. But if a violent power such as the United States constantly invokes Christian charity, international law or human rights, it needs the help of an intellectual class who will distort the facts and spread illusions in order to maintain its rule. It is unfortunate that so many intellectuals are quite willing to play that role; but people like Chomsky also remind us that this choice is not inevitable and that intellectuals can, if they want, play an important role in the construction of a truly humane society. Indeed, the struggle to expose the hypocrisy of the rulers may very well be an important element in the next emancipatory stage of mankind, during which, amidst and against the present horrors of capitalism, a radical post-Marxist left will arise, one that will reclaim the values of the Enlightenment and hopefully make them realize their full potential". (page 294)

Other Comments by Xenocratic

40. Comment #86064 by Xenocratic on November 8, 2007 at 3:34 am

Anyone who can honestly write that "America is, in fact, the least imperialist power in human history" has "lost any moral credibility amidst rational, moral people", to quote someone on this thread. However, I think perhaps we're being too harsh on old Fanusi, because that statement of his, which only the most diehard Republicans could ever make, suggests that he is quite simply insane. He has completely lost touch with reality. It's as if the entire twentieth century has passed Fanusi by. Finally, the real Rip Van Winkle has emerged!
Obviously, Fanusi Khiyal must have missed the millions killed in Vietnam, the hundreds of thousands massacred throughout Latin America, the overthrow of democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh by the tyrannical Shah in 1953, the support for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, the support for Saddam Hussein through his worst atrocities, the suppression of the European anti-Nazi resistance after World War 2, providing decades long military support for one of the century's worst mass murderers, General Suharto of Indonesia(who Bill Clinton once called "my kind of guy"), not to mention the United States claiming the title of being the only nation to have dropped atomic bombs on a civilian population which killed hundreds of thousands of people and poisoned thousands more. I've just given some of the main lowlights of the United States' imperial adventures of the last sixty odd years which I advise Fanusi become acquainted with, lest he be seen as the laughing stock of richarddawkins.net, or indeed any forum where he shows his sorry self.

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