"A study of Chomsky's stands on particularly dreadful actions such as JFK's assassination, 9/11, and with regard to the roles of the CIA and FBI, shows Chomsky to be a de facto defender of the status quo's most egregious outrages and their covert agency engines. He conducts his de facto defence of the Empire he appears to oppose through applying the very propaganda methods against which he has warned, including use of the derogatory phrase "conspiracy theorist," which in one context he has characterized as "something people say when they don't want you to think about what's really going on."His recommendation that people practice "intellectual self-defence" is well taken. But how many could dream the person warning you is one of the most perilous against whom you'll need to defend yourself? That he is the fire marshal who wires your house to burn down, the lifeguard who drowns you, the doctor with the disarming bedside manner who administers a fatal injection? If Noam Chomsky did not exist, the diaboligarchy would have to invent him. To the New World Order he is worth 50 armoured division. ".....Barrie Zwicker, Towers of Deception
=============================I was unfamiliar with the literary skills and oratorical persuasiveness of Noam Chomsky until a few years ago when I first heard him over KPFK (Pacifica) radio. I quickly found myself recording his talks off the radio and listening to them carefully. I was greatly impressed. Whether he's talking about the corruptive influence of the corporate mentality in American society or the sins of the Bush regime, you can't help but be impressed by the cogency of his arguments and the acuteness of his mind. Chomsky is one sharp cookie, to be sure, but is the Massachusetts Instistute of Technology professor really the liberal, leftist, anti-government 'critic' that we are led to believe he is, or does he function more as a gatekeeper, feigning the role of muckraker and champion of injustice, while all the time carrying water for the very power structures that he claims to rail against? Is he really exposing government collusion in criminal and treasonous behavior, or is he containing the limits of that exposure within certain 'acceptable' corridors of public discourse?These articles by Michael Morrissey, Barrie Zwicker, Bob Feldman, Daniel Abrahamson, Joe Lockard, and Benjamin Merhav among others, may get you thinking twice about Noam Chomsky and similar nationally touted "critics" of the government. Chomsky, in particular, is thought of as the creme-de-la-creme of anti-government muckrakers while he simultaneously embraces every facet of the government's cover story when it comes to who was responsible for killing JFK, or the origin of AIDS, or the Vietnam War turn-around following the JFK assassination, or 9-11. Despite appearances to the contrary, Chomsky sides with the government's version of events with virtually every major 'conspiracy' scandal to emerge in the past 45 years.Noam's nearly pristine reputation got a huge bump recently when Hugo Chavez, the President of Venezuela, mentioned Noam Chomsky's latest book, Hegemony and Survival, in a speech given at the UN on September 20, 2006 where Chavez characterized George Bush as "El Diablo." Chomsky's position on the New York Times best seller list rose from somewhere around 700 to number 1 practically overnight and he sold something like 60, 000 copies within a day. I'm sure Noam welcomed the bump to his bank account along with the publicity, but how many more thousands now, around the world, will be led along those very same "corridors" of carefully crafted thought that I once strolled?Ken Adachi
=========================Review by Joe Lockard
http://educate-yourself.org/cn/lockardreviewschomsky11mar02.shtml
March 11, 2002http://bad.eserver.org/reviews/2002/2002-3-11-4.49PM.html/view?searchterm=Noam%20chomsky9-11 by Noam Chomsky
To give the man due credit, it's hard to think of another radical who so robustly represents the failure of progressive thought in the United States as Noam Chomsky.Chomsky lives in a Newtonian universe of leftism where political mass and gravitational effects are predictable, and where good and bad actors spin in a foreordained social dance. All political developments are subject to interpretation within this now-ossified model, enunciated beginning with his opposition to the Vietnam War in the 1960s. This is a peculiarly American model that, while identified within the US left's core literature, resists global manifestations of class difference and capitalism-as-system as explanatory contributions towards the problems it addresses. The American-ness of this model lies in its insistence on the rule of pragmatic facts, or as William James phrased it, in a turn towards alleged "concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power."Although Chomsky has been criticized many times for this anti-economistic and anti-theoretical blindness, he has not made any substantive changes in his analytic style. And it is style in which he engages, since labor, capital and markets are notably absent from his writing. Government actions happen largely by themselves in Chomsky's model, but the social propulsion behind those actions lies beyond germane discussion.In the land of uninterpreted facts, blandness rules. Style is quintessential within politics, whatever horrified and righteous protests from promoters of substance to the exclusion of style. It is precisely the earnestness of style that appeals to such sober-minded believers who take up the latest Chomsky pronunciamento as a substitute for a quiet evening of self-flagellation.For all of Chomsky's insistence on common-sense analysis and historical rigor, he indulges in constant subject changes and historical ellipsis. As this small volume of seven post-attack Chomsky interviews exemplifies, he slides off the subject of September 11 like it was a well-polished playground slide just waiting for a head-dive. In Chomsky's politics such events are epiphenomena to incorporate within his decades-long lecture and established intellectual model. September 11 only provides the excuse and book title; this is an interpretive chapbook for guidance to the political faithful.The excursion begins with a simple postulate from which flows all manner of derivatives: the United States is the leading terrorist state. Mr. Smith isn't going to Washington; Mr. Smith is going to Terrorism Central. Why ever do Chomsky-quoters wonder why their hero isn't invited to address a special joint session of Congress?Chomsky prefers to indict the history of European colonization reaching back quite literally to Columbus, as if this provided any assistance towards formulating a policy response to events not yet six months past. Rather, this retrospective invocation accepts a view of world history as simplistically bifurcated as any Samuel Huntington has produced. In this historical meta-perspective, the collapse of the WTC twin towers was no more than natives returning fire at European civilization. By locating his initial analysis of 9/11 events within an overarching accusation against the US as the illegitimate product of a half-millenium's worth of imperialistic sin, Chomsky only recapitulates the basic theme of 1993's Year 501. Despite his own arguments, in the sixth of these interviews Chomsky precisely rejects two-civilization theories. Acceptability seems to depend on who uses such reductions.No nation-state exists without an inheritance of pre-foundational violence and a history of violent self-maintenance, so adopting the pose of History's prosecutor-general provides no analytic light with which to examine the contemporary American Empire. Al-Qaeda operatives did not hijack and crash airliners as a belated protest over the empire-building 1848 war against Mexico. They did so for their own reasons, apparently religio-cultural xenophobia, and certainly not out of compassion for the struggles of other peoples for self-determination.At street level, historical awareness of colonialism and imperialism does not equate with the realities of political decision-making after morning coffee. Chomsky's reductionism operates at the level of opposed global cultures and nation-states, which is not too different from the classical political science formulations of Henry Kissinger or Samuel Huntington from otherwise inimical points of view. All three built analytic philosophies within the academic trap of compassionless determinism, where model-meisters rule.The entire book does not contain more than one word of sympathy or solidarity towards September 11 victims. Chomsky's stern philosophical style does not embrace empathy, which for better or worse represents the contested heartland of American politics. This is a remarkable absence, unconscionable for its dismissal of human lives as sub-history. As a political traumatologist speaking to the international press (a majority of interviews published here are with European media), Chomsky adopts the manner of a Puritan minister on the fate of sinners in the United States. In his unrelenting moral sobriety, Chomsky remains incapable of articulating rhetoric of sympathetic and passionate identification with a US voting public that can alter national policies. September 11 becomes only another excuse to exercise moral castigation.In the one moment that Chomsky does utter sympathy for the day's victims, he manages to simultaneously mischaracterize global reaction as "virtually unanimous" in its outrage. Yet it was precisely the approval voiced over Al-Jazeera and in other regional media that worked to define the global fault lines that have developed in the attack's wake. It was not only an act that caused massive human suffering, but it is difficult to imagine another act that could work to such mutual advantage for Western racists and Islamic cultural isolationists.Faced with a need to find international justice and social peace between the United States, Europe and the Middle East, where is Chomsky? Actually, still discussing Nicaragua. Lengthy and repeated passages address the Reagan administration's policies towards the Sandinista government as an example of terrorism and illegitimate state violence, once condemned by the World Court. Ollie North clones may well populate the Pentagon and need regular applications of pesticide from Congress, but this is not the topic at hand. Chomsky has mastered digression in pursuit of high ideals.Chomsky's digressions are a means of avoiding unpalatable conclusions. He uses this same technique in the present book as much as on previous excursions into print. For example, nearly all of The New Military Humanism's discussions of the Racak massacre concerns events in East Timor, where he points out unassailably that many more were murdered in Dilli than in Racak. Yet what relevance does this observation bear to the question of whether NATO should act in defense of European Moslem minorities being massacred and expelled from their homes? None at all, other than as an argumentative diversion.Listening this past week to Milosevic at bar in the Hague inveigh against NATO hegemony and appropriate the language of anti-globalism, nausea rises to the gorge upon realizing that this unrepentant defense of genocide relies on the same arguments that Chomsky made and continues to deploy in 9-11. It is telling that Chomsky-style arguments gain use as a defense of violence on the grounds that it represents opposition to political hegemonism, as if this were sufficient justification of itself. So, while deploring Bin Laden, Chomsky can describe him as but another noxious product of the American Empire.That is much, much too simple, for Bin Laden and al-Qaeda are violent theo-fascists who represent a public safety menace and need more effective address than armchair citations of international law chapter and verse. The means of peaceful redress against the Bush administration and its business cronies are well-known in this relatively democratic society. Dealing with a right-wing administration is a political contest within a civil society; dealing with a violent religious underground is a very different species of contest. To frame the questions precisely, what are the legitimate and effective means of social defense against an international theo-fascist movement, and how can its originating causes be ameliorated? It is such questions that Chomsky entirely begs off.In the end, there is an unmistakable stench of the Old Guard arising from this book. The usual suspects (Ruggiero, Barsamian, Albert) conduct mostly e-mail interviews with the Man, he repeats previous musings interlaced with fresh news, and an editor adds some overseas material in order to rush a hot manuscript to the printer barely a month after the September 11 attacks. This is the inside talking with the inside, then publishing a lazy version of a quickie book. Sadly, this can pass for progressive politics in the United States.9/11 is available from Seven Stories Press
Created by geoff
Last modified 2004-08-11 06:55 PM
Copyright © 2002 by Joe Lockard. All rights reserved.
Noam Chomsky & Government Complicity in 911
=====================================By Bob Feldman
http://educate-yourself.org/cn/noamchomskydismissesgovtcomplicity.shtmlOriginal title
From the Archives: Noam Chomsky & JFKhttp://www.questionsquestions.net/topics/gatekeeper_ncjfk.htmlIn January of 2002, Noam Chomsky was asked the following question by an audience member at a speaking engagement for FAIR in New York: "Is there credible evidence that some part of the US government was complicit in the 9/11 attacks?" His answer: "That's an internet theory and it's hopelessly implausible. Hopelessly implausible. So hopelessly implausible I don't see any point in talking about it." As a matter of fact, the accusation of evidence for USG complicity had been made just days before by former top German minister and widely recognized intelligence expert Andreas von Buelow in an interview with Tagesspiel, adding weight to a number of independent investigations that had already been very effectively raising serious questions for several months. No, not quite an "internet theory."For those who had spent every spare minute of their time for months studying the issue of 9/11 prior knowledge and discovering the utter absurdity of the official narrative, Chomsky was obviously out to lunch. But, you can't fault him for not being consistent. His attitude, post-9/11, is in many ways a repeat of an episode a decade ago, when he and a handful of other "leftist" figures signed onto a savage establishment media attack on Oliver Stone and his film JFK, which brought an interpretation of the JFK assassination conspiracy to the public. In addition to defending the Warren Commission report's "lone gunman" findings, these anticonspiratorialists made a peculiar far-fetched hedge, claiming that the assassination did not result in any significant changes to US policy or the political power structure, and hence need not concern Left political analysis in the slightest!Hmmm. Not only have the latter arguments been very soundly demolished by recent (mainstream) historical work, but another recent news item made light of the whole situation, although it slipped by with very little notice during the uproar over Israel's incursion into Palestinian territory last Spring. This was the completion of a top-flight official scientific study of audio recordings from Dealey Plaza, reported in the Washington Post, which finally confirmed the existence of a second gunman at the notorious "grassy knoll" with almost total certainty (repeating the results of a similar study carried out for the House Assassinations Cmte. in the 1970s). So, now science has spoken: those who continue to accept the "lone gunman" findings of the Warren Commission Report are, well, frauds.Still, a lot of people seem gullible enough to believe that "America's leading intellectual dissident" can be trusted to give them the real scoop on 9/11; his lightweight pamphlet, '9/11', has been a bestseller, becoming for many the default "dissident" view of the "War on Terror". Meanwhile, a number of political scholars and security experts are now openly discussing the very strong evidence suggesting that 9/11 was probably an inside job and the al Qaeda terrorists were setup patsies, with the overwhelmingly critical implication that the trigger for the "War on Terrorism" was a fabricated deception. Chomsky, true to form, seems to pretend the evidence doesn't exist.There is one piece of documentation, however that Chomsky did seem to find interesting, which he made sure to include in his book's appendix: The US State Department's Report on Foreign Terrorist Organizations, from the Office of the Coordinator of Counterterrorism.
From Jeffrey Blankfort <jablankfort@earthlink.net>
http://educate-yourself.org/cn/chomsky911interviewremark26dec06.shtml
December 26, 2006http://www.rense.com/general74/cchom.htmI don't usually send videos to my list but this short clip of Noam Chomsky being interviewed re 9-11 is very revealing in which he says, referring to what critics of the official narrative allege, "what does it matter even if it was true, it wouldn't be significant?"He then refers back to the assassination of JFK in which he still insists that the assassin was Oswald, with the nonsensical comment that "people get killed all the time."
Add to this his routine dismissal of the role of the Jewish lobby in shaping US Middle East policy and it is easy to understand why he is known as the "Chief Gatekeeper."Will he debate anyone on these issues? Of course not.He prefers opponents like Alan Dershowitz who is guaranteed not to raise any important issues that Chomsky cannot counter. In this 4 minute clip, he speaks about coincidences that can't be explained but it would be nice if he would explain how it was that the 8000 page Patriot Act was already written, printed, and ready to be sent to Congress immediately after 9-11 when, before the event, there would have been no chance of its passage. Another coincidence?
http://youtube.com/watch?v=LoDqDvbgeXM
=====================================
Michael MorrisseyBy Michael Morrissey
http://educate-yourself.org/cn/morrisseychomskyonjfkandvietnam1993.shtmlThis was published in The Third Decade 1993, 9.6, 8-10.Noam Chomsky has been described, justifiably, as the leading American (leftist) dissident, and his argument against what he calls the "withdrawal thesis" (see "Vain Hopes, False Dreams," Z, Oct. 1992) is a serious challenge to those who believe Kennedy was killed because he was planning to withdraw from Vietnam.Although I have the greatest admiration for Chomsky and agree with him on most other issues, I think he is dead wrong here, and his argument is flawed. First of all, although it may be true that some biographers and assassination researchers are JFK "hagiographers," as Chomsky puts, one need not deny that Kennedy was as ruthless a cold warrior as any other president to acknowledge that he had decided to withdraw from Vietnam. Reagan's decision to withdraw from Lebanon doesn't make him a secret dove, either.Secondly, the withdrawal "thesis" is not a thesis but a fact, amply documented in the Gravel edition of the Pentagon Papers ("Phased Withdrawal of U.S. Forces, 1962-1964," Vol. 2, pp. 160-200). Since Chomsky himself co-edited Vol. 5, I am surprised that avoids mentioning that this PP account states clearly that "the policy of phase out and withdrawal and all the plans and programs oriented to it" ended "de jure" in March 1964 (p. 198; my emphasis). It is also clear from the PP that the change in the withdrawal policy occurred after the assassination:The only hint that something might be different from on-going plans came in a Secretary of Defense memo for the President three days prior to this NSC meeting [on Nov. 26]....In early December, the President [Johnson] began to have, if not second thoughts, at least a sense of uneasiness about Vietnam. In discussions with his advisors, he set in motion what he hoped would be a major policy review... (p. 191).There can be no question, then, if we stick to the record, as Chomsky rightly insists we do, that Kennedy had decided and planned to pull out, had begun to implement those plans, and that Johnson subsequently reversed them.The thesis which Chomsky is actually arguing against is his own formulation: that JFK wanted "withdrawal without victory." This is wordplay, but important wordplay. It is true that the withdrawal plan was predicated on the assumption of military success, but Chomsky, who is also the world's most famous linguist, should not have to be reminded that an assumption is not a condition. There is a difference between saying "The military campaign is progressing well, and we should be able to withdraw by the end of 1965," which is how I read the McNamara-Taylor report and Kennedy's confirmation of it in NSAM 263, and "If we win the war, we will withdraw," which is how Chomsky reads the same documents.We do not know what Kennedy may have secretly wanted or what he would have done if he had lived. Whether he really believed the war was going well, as the record indicates, or privately knew it was not, as John Newman contends (in JFK and Vietnam, NY: Warner Books, 1992), is also unknowable. What we do know, from the record, Chomsky notwithstanding, is that Johnson reversed the withdrawal policy sometime between December 1963 and March 1964.The point is crucial. If one manages to say, as Chomsky and others (Michael Albert in Z, Alexander Cockburn in The Nation) do, that in truth there was no change in policy, that in fact there never was a withdrawal policy but only a withdrawal policy conditional on victory (until after Tet), and that therefore Johnson and Nixon simply continued what Kennedy started, then the question of the relation of the policy change (since there wasn't one) to the assassination does not arise.If, however, one states the facts correctly, the question is unavoidable. Exactly when Johnson reversed the policy, and whether he did so because conditions changed, or because perceptions of conditions changed, or for whatever reason, is beside the point. Why do Chomsky et al. avoid the straightforward formulation which is nothing but a summary of the PP account? PP: JFK thought we were winning, so he planned to withdraw; Johnson decided that we weren't, so he killed the plan.The reason is clear. Once you admit that there was a radical policy change in the months following the assassination, whether that change was a reaction to a (presumed) change in conditions or not, you must ask if the change was related to the assassination, unless you are a fool. Then, like it or not, you are into conspiracy theory--which is anathema to the leftist intellectual tradition that Chomsky represents.Thus Chomsky, uncharacteristically, is telling us the same thing the government, the mass media, and Establishment historians have been telling us for almost thirty years--that the assassination had no political significance. The withdrawal plan was never a secret, but the overwhelming majority of historians have simply ignored those forty pages in the Gravel PP (also carefully circumscribed in the New York Times edition of the PP), treating the Kennedy-Johnson Vietnam policy as a seamless continuum, exactly as Chomsky does.Conspiracy does not explain this degree of unanimity of opinion in the face of facts clearly to the contrary, but Chomsky's own propaganda model does (see Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent, NY: Panteon, 1988). One variation of this model, as Michael Albert has made clear in recent articles in Z, this magazine, is that conspiracy theory is incompatible with "institutional" or "structural" theory. That this distinction is spurious, and counterproductive for progressive goals, becomes clear with one example. The CIA (Operations, at least) is by definition a conspiracy, and at the same time a structural part of the US government, i.e. an institutionalized conspiracy. When Garrison, Stone et al. say the President was removed by the military-industrial-intelligence complex because he was getting in the way of their war plans (or was perceived to be getting in the way), what could be more "structural"?If the withdrawal policy reversal is now entering the realm of permissible knowledge (e.g. Arthur Schlesinger, Roger Hilsman), some version of the propangada model, which includes truths and half-truths as well as lies, will explain this too, just as it will explain why CIA (Colby) endorses a book by an Army intelligence officer (Newman) that apparently supports the coup d'état theory, and why a film such as JFK was produced by the world's biggest propaganda machine (Time Warner). As always, the realm of permissible knowledge is infused with smoke and mirrors.Which brings me to the document Chomsky attaches so much importance to, the Bundy draft of NSAM 273, supposedly showing that Johnson's Vietnam policy was virtually identical to Kennedy's. Bundy, as National Security Adviser, was the highest common denominator in the intelligence community in the Kennedy-Johnson transition--above even CIA, and far above Johnson. Whatever the nation's darkest secrets were on November 22, 1963, it was Bundy who filled Johnson in on them, not vice versa. Now, after a quarter of a century, just as Garrison, Stone et al. are bringing the question of the relation between the assassination and Vietnam to a head, a Bundy document appears that ostensibly proves (for Chomsky) that there was no change in policy. How convenient.In fact the Bundy draft can be seen as supporting any one of several contradictory analyses, which I'm sure is exactly the way the smoke and mirrors artists at Langley like to have things. If you take NSAM 273 and the Bundy draft at face value, as Chomsky does, they prove there was no change in the withdrawal policy, as explicitly stated in paragraph 2. If you take that as a lie, and the other paragraphs (6-8) as an implicit reversal of the withdrawal policy, as Peter Scott and Arthur Schlesinger do, they prove that either Kennedy reversed his own policy, or Johnson reversed it, depending on whether you believe Bundy wrote the draft for Kennedy or for Johnson (meaning, in the latter case, that Bundy was part of the coup). To this must be added the question of the authenticity of the Bundy draft (worth asking, considering the circumstances), and the question (unanswerable) of whether Kennedy would have approved it, since he never saw it or discussed it with Bundy.Here again, Chomsky is beating a straw man. One need not prove that Johnson reversed the policy with NSAM 273 to prove that he reversed it. All we need for the latter is the PP and all the documents, including Bundy's draft, taken at face value, which prove that withdrawal was official U.S. policy in November 1963, and that Johnson began abandoning that policy the following month. Chomsky's Camelot debunking, on target as it may be in some respects, cannot obscure this fact, and should not distract us from the enormously important question that Garrison, Stone and many others are asking.
By Michael Morrissey
http://educate-yourself.org/cn/morrisseyrethinkingchomsky1993.shtmlThe following is a review of Noam Chomsky, Rethinking Camelot (1993) published in The Fourth Decade 1.4, 22-23 (1994).http://www.geocities.com/mdmorrissey/rechom1.htmRethinking Camelot (Boston: South End Press, 1993) is Noam Chomsky's worst book. I don't think it merits a detailed review, but we should be clear about the stand that "America's leading intellectual dissident," as he is often called, has taken on the assassination. It is not significantly different from that of the Warren Commission or the majority of Establishment journalists and government apologists, and diametrically opposed to the view "widely held in the grassroots movements and among left intellectuals" (p. 37) and in fact to the view of the majority of the population.For Chomsky, the only theories of the assassination "of any general interest are those that assume a massive cover-up, and a high-level conspiracy that required that operation." These he rejects out of hand because "There is not a phrase in the voluminous internal record hinting at any thought of such a notion," and because the cover-up "would have to involve not only much of the government and the media, but a good part of the historical, scientific, and medical professions. An achievement so immense would be utterly without precedent or even remote analogue."These arguments can be as glibly dismissed as Chomsky presents them. It is simply foolish to expect the conspirators to have left a paper trail, much less in the "internal record," or that part of it that has become public. It is equally foolish to confuse the notion of conspiracy and cover-up with the much more broadly applicable phenomenon of "manufacturing consent," to use Chomsky's own expression. You don't have to be a liar to believe or accept or perpetuate lies. This is exactly what Chomsky himself and Edward Herman say about the media, and it applies to the "historical, scientific, and medical professions" as well:Most biased choices in the media arise from the preselection of right-thinking people, internalized preconceptions, and the adaptation of personnel to the constraints of ownership, organization, market, and political power. Censorship is largely self-censorship, by reporters and commentators who adjust to the realities of source and media organizational requirements and by people at higher levels within media organizations who are chosen to implement, and have usually internalized, the constraints imposed by proprietary and other market and governmental centers of power (Manufacturing Consent, NY: Pantheon, 1988, p. xii).Nevertheless, Chomsky admits that a "high-level conspiracy" theory makes sense if "coupled with the thesis that JFK was undertaking radical policy changes, or perceived to be by policy insiders." Rethinking Camelot is devoted to refuting this thesis.I've addressed this subject before ("Chomsky on JFK and Vietnam," The Third Decade, Vol. 9, No. 6, pp. 8-10), so I won't repeat myself. But two things should be clear. First, Chomsky has loaded the deck. The theory that Kennedy was secretly planning to withdraw from Vietnam regardless of how the military situation developed is not the only one that supports a conspiracy view of the assassination. This is John Newman's highly speculative argument in JFK and Vietnam (NY: Warner Books, 1992), which is so easy to refute that one wonders if it was not created for this purpose. Why else would the CIA, in the form of ex-Director Colby, praise the work of Newman, an Army intelligence officer, as "brilliant" and "meticulously researched" (jacket blurb)? In any case, accepting the fact that we cannot know what JFK's secret intentions were or what he would have done, the fact that he was planning to withdraw by the end of 1965 is irrefutable.Secondly, it should be clear that Chomsky's view of the relation, that is, non-relation, of the assassination to subsequent policy changes is essentially the same as Arthur Schlesinger's. They are both coincidence theorists. Schlesinger says Johnson reversed the withdrawal plan on Nov. 26 with NSAM 273, but the idea that this had anything to do with the assassination "is reckless, paranoid, really despicable fantasy, reminiscent of the wilder accusations of Joe McCarthy" (Wall Street Journal, 1/10/92). The assassination and the policy reversal, in other words, were coincidences.I suspect Chomsky knows he would appear foolishly naive if he presented his position this way, so he has constructed a tortured and sophistic argument that "there was no policy reversal" in the first place, which, if true, would obviate the question of its relation to the assassination. A neat trick if you can pull it off, and Chomsky gives it a good try, but in the end he fails. In fact, he undermines his own position by making it even clearer than it has been that the reversal of the assessment of the military situation in Vietnam, which caused the reversal of the withdrawal policy, occurred very shortly after the assassination, and that the source of this new appraisal was the intelligence agencies:The first report prepared for LBJ (November 23) opened with this "Summary Assessment": "The outlook is hopeful. There is better assurance than under Diem that the war can be won. We are pulling out 1,000 American troops by the end of 1963." ... The next day, however, CIA director John McCone informed the President that the CIA now regarded the situation as "somewhat more serious" than had been thought, with "a continuing increase in Viet Cong activity since the first of November" (the coup). Subsequent reports only deepened the gloom (p. 91).By late December, McNamara was reporting a "sharply changed assessment" to the President (p. 92).The only difference between this and Schlesinger's view is that Chomsky says the assessment of the military situation changed first, and then the policy changed. So what? The point is that both things changed after the assassination. The President is murdered, and immediately afterward the military assessment changes radically and the withdrawal policy changes accordingly. It matters not a whit if the policy reversal occurred with NSAM 273, as Schlesinger says, or began in early December and ended de jure in March 1964, as the Gravel Pentagon Papers clearly say (Vol. 2, pp. 191, 196).Nor does it matter what JFK's secret intentions may have been. It is more important to note that according to Chomsky's own account, whose accuracy I do not doubt, the source of the radically changed assessment that began two days after the assassination was the CIA and the other intelligence agencies. Furthermore, this change in assessment was retrospective, dating the deterioration of the military situation from Nov. 1 or earlier. Why did it take the intelligence agencies a month or more to suddenly realize, two days after the assassination, that they had been losing the war instead of winning it?This question may be insignificant to coincidence theorists like Schlesinger and Chomsky, but not to me. Rethinking Camelot has shown me -- sadly, because I have been an admirer -- that Chomsky needs to do some serious rethinking of his position, and that I need to do some rethinking of Mr. Chomsky.Michael Morrissey
==========================
CHOMSKY & JEWRY HYPOCRISY
ON ARIZONA IMMIGRATION LAW
Interview With Kevin MacDonald PhD
By Brother Nathanael Kapner, Copyright 2009-2010http://www.realzionistnews.com/?p=502
DR KEVIN MACDONALD, PSYCHOLOGIST AND HISTORIAN, is a Professor of Psychology at the California State University. As the author of several books, Dr MacDonald outlines Jewry’s quest to destroy White Christian culture through intellectual movements and politics.
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Brother Nathanael Kapner: What is the Jewish community’s response to the Arizona Immigration law?
Kevin MacDonald PhD: Not surprisingly, the organized Jewish community has unanimously come out against the Arizona law. We’re talking about all the major Jewish organizations which are legion.
Finding examples of Jewish double standards and hypocrisy vis-a-vis their attitudes about the US and Israel is like shooting fish in a barrel. But their posturing on the Arizona immigration law is particularly flagrant.
Br Nathanael: Which Jewish organizations are opposing the law?
Kevin MacDonald: The Jewish groups up in arms over the legislation include the Anti-Defamation League, AIPAC, Simon Wiesenthal Center, American Jewish Committee, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, National Council of Jewish Women, and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, an umbrella group comprised of the synagogue movements and scores of Jewish communities throughout America.
These groups, nearly 90 of them altogether, are demanding that Congress and the Justice Department take action against the law.
Br Nathanael: What kind of statements are the Jewish groups making?
Kevin MacDonald: As usual, Gideon Aronoff, head of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, leads the moral posturing by stating: “Are most of the Latinos who suffer from this law Jewish? The answer is no. We are all Americans and we must welcome the stranger.”
Br Nathanael: What is your take on this kind of rhetoric?
Kevin MacDonald: If American Jewry really wants to “welcome the stranger” then they should invite all the illegals to move into their neighborhoods. And that will never happen.
The reality is that Jewish support for legal and illegal immigration is hardball ethnic politics where Jews see themselves as part of the emerging non-White coalition. It is motivated by their fear and loathing of the traditional people and culture of America.
Just look at the photo accompanying their article, “New Arizona Law Brings Attention To Immigration Reform,” which likens the Arizona law to (what else?) Nazi Germany. The horrors!
By the way, Noam Chomsky, that great ‘defender’ of human rights, whose underlying interests are always Jewish at bottom, has suggested the same thing.
ENTER NOAM CHOMSKY
Br Nathanael: What has Chomsky said about the illegal immigrants?
Kevin MacDonald: Chomsky has likened the backlash against illegals to the crisis of the Weimar Republic in post World War I Germany which gave rise to Hitler.
In a recent interview, Chomsky said, “In Germany an enemy was created which was the Jew. Here the enemy are the illegal immigrants. We will be told that white men are a persecuted minority. This could be converted into a force which will be more dangerous than Nazi Germany.”
Using the catch phrase, “Nazi Germany,” to characterize white Americans’ valid opposition to illegal immigrants, is both Chomsky’s and Jewry’s method to silence all public discussion on the issue.
Br Nathanael: Looking at that interview, it appears that Chomsky warns that if somebody comes along who is “charismatic and honest,” the US will be in “real trouble” because of the “justified anger White Americans are feeling.” What are your thoughts on this?
Kevin MacDonald: Chomsky is right that there is justified anger among Whites and that if indeed an honest figure could rally the sentiments of White people, especially White males, it would change history.
Of course Chomsky doesn’t want to blame any of the darlings of the left for the problems of Whites, but it is entirely reasonable on our part to blame immigration and the Jewish role in changing the country, not only on immigration but for the triumph of the left as well.
There could be an explosion like he worries about—and I would love it. But, political anger is well-channeled now, and I don’t see that changing unless things get much worse for Whites. Republican elites, who have taken ownership of the Tea Party Movement, and the entire media are not going to want to go that route.
Br Nathanael: But isn’t Chomsky a foremost critic of Israel and its apartheid policies?
Kevin MacDonald: In my review of Mearsheimer and Walt’s best seller, The Israel Lobby, I describe Chomsky’s criticism of Israel as “duplicitous.”
Br Nathanael: Why “duplicitous?”
Kevin MacDonald: Chomsky has attacked Mearsheimer and Walt for focusing on the Israel Lobby rather than on the Oil Lobby as being the prime influence on US Mid East policy.
By blaming the oil companies, Chomsky engages in a subtle form of subterfuge to deflect serious criticism of Israel and to immobilize any persistent effort to halt Israeli crimes against the Palestinians.
It seems a bit suspicious to me that Chomsky would temper his criticisms by asserting that Israel is simply doing the bidding of the United States and that the real masters are the oil companies. All the money the Jewish lobby spends to influence US policy is only a smokescreen for the real story: Poor, hapless Israel is Uncle Sam’s errand boy. View Entire Story Here & Here.
HYPOCRISY HITS THE FAN
Br Nathanael: You mentioned that Jewish organizations are applying a double standard vis-a-vis their attitudes about the US and Israel. How does their position on the Arizona law reflect this hypocrisy?
Kevin MacDonald: Israel has been ‘Arizona’ all along. Laws like the Arizona one – and worse – have been in effect in Israel ever since their independence in 1948. These are laws that allow police to ask people for their papers. I’m not talking about the Occupation but inside Israel proper.
One of these laws, The Identity Card Carrying and Displaying Act, requires any Israel resident sixteen or older to carry an Identity card and present it upon demand to a policeman or member of the Armed forces.
And guess against which ethnic group this requirement is enforced most often? The answer is: Anyone looking like an Arab. The vast majority of their effort is spent profiling, questioning and strip-searching Palestinians.
Br Nathanael: How can American Jewry be confronted regarding their obvious double standard?
Kevin MacDonald: Perhaps now that the word is out that their favorite country also requires everyone to carry papers, Jewish organizations will decide to back the Arizona law.
And maybe people like Gideon Aronoff and Abe Foxman will start putting pressure on Israel to change its laws.
If you believe that, you are living in an alternate universe — one in which the mantra “Is it good for the Jews” — has ceased to be the key to understanding Jewish ethics and their deceptive methods of realpolitik.
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