Voters in a British magazine poll named Noam Chomsky the world's top intellectual. This says something about the respondents to this poll. This says something about intellectuals. This says nothing about Noam Chomsky. In the late 1970s, Chomsky served as an apologist for Pol Pot's revolution in Cambodia. "The 'slaughter' by the Khmer Rouge," Chomsky and a coauthor wrote in the Nation magazine, "is a [Robert] Moss--New York Times creation." In the 1980s, he claimed that the standard of living in Cuba and the United States were roughly equal. In 2001, he warned of millions of civilian deaths if the U.S. invaded Afghanistan. The United States and its allies, he declared, "were in the midst of apparently trying to murder 3 or 4 million people." And all this to go after Osama bin Laden, whose links to the 9/11 attacks were "surprisingly thin." Beam me up, Scotty! If getting it wrong makes one an intellectual, then Noam Chomsky is tops.

Magazine readers are pretty darned unqualified to judge intellectuals as is evidenced by the Chomsky selection. I would love to hear those who chose Noam expound upon his linguistics work. Did they even know he was a linguist? Noam.

No one came close to Noam in name-recognition: in a field of about 100, he outscored his closest rival 2-to-1.

Dan,

In the frontpagemag symposium on Chomsky as an "outsider," Mr. Scialaba had the final word:

Scialaba: At one point in our symposium, Daniel Flynn referred to (without citing) an "infamous review" in which "Chomsky explicitly states that the mass-killings by the Khmer Rouge were Western media creations." In reply, I pointed out (with citation and quotes) that he was mistaken. He now repeats his claim, adding that I am a brazen liar for disputing it.

In "Distortions at Fourth Hand" (Nation, 6/25/77), Chomsky and Edward Herman tried to show that the mainstream Western media's portrayal of Indochina two years after the end of the war was biased, selecting unreliable but ideologically convenient sources while ignoring more plausible but less convenient ones and taking no account of the substantial US contribution to postwar traumas. About the actual level of Khmer Rouge atrocities, Chomsky and Herman were careful to profess agnosticism: "We do not pretend to know where the truth lies amidst these sharply conflicting assessments."

In rebuttal, Flynn now writes that Chomsky: (1) "condemned 'the extreme anti-Khmer Rouge distortions of the New York Review of Books'"; (2) "asserted that anonymous 'highly qualified specialists ... concluded that executions have numbered at most in the thousands ... "; and (3) "writes: 'The "slaughter" by the Khmer Rouge is a [Robert] Moss/New York Times creation.'"

About (1): Chomsky was clearly and specifically referring to statements by Jean Lacouture in the New York Review that were, in fact, extreme, harshly critical of the Khmer Rouge, and a distortion of the evidence in the book Lacouture was reviewing. In short, Chomsky's condemnation was correct; Flynn neither says nor (I suspect) knows anything to the contrary.

About (2): Not quite "anonymous": Chomsky names and quotes one of the specialists and names the journals in which the others wrote. He did not endorse their conclusions; on the contrary, when he and Herman insist that "We do not pretend to know where the truth lies amidst these sharply conflicting assessments," these specialist accounts and the more common mainstream media reports of 1-2 million Khmer Rouge murders were precisely the "assessments" they were referring to.

About (3): Robert Moss reported in the New York Times that the Cambodian head of state, Khieu Samphan, had "admitted" to the "slaughter of a million people." As Chomsky and Herman show, Moss's report is a journalistic travesty. It is Moss's unfounded allegation that Chomsky described -- correctly -- as a media creation. He did not deny -- has never denied -- that "mass killings by the Khmer Rouge" occurred.

To repeat: Chomsky and Herman's review is an accurate account of public opinion formation in the US about postwar Indochina. Flynn's accusations are based on his own crude and careless misreading.

I'd like to hear your response to this, Dan.

HERMAN!You have changed your tune an awful lot going from obsessive brown nose stalker to vengeful liar.As acting president of Daniel Flynn's fan club I hereby declare you banished for eternity.
Now that you have revealed your true identity you will surely be destroyed...you will be powerless against the scores of super mutant leprechauns which I have at my disposal.HA!HA!HEE!HEE!to be sure,to be sure.

Humor without logic is wanting.

In plain English, Chomsky did deny the Cambodian genocide. My words won't convince Chomsky sycophants. But maybe Noam's words will. Here's the link to Chomsky's infamous 1977 book review that repeatedly mocks the notion of Pol Pot exterminating his own people:

http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/chombookrev.htm

Steve sailer has good commentary on this subject

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/10/top-public-intellectuals-list-turns.html

"humor without logic is wanting"-herman

Who said that?Chris Farley,Conan O'Brien or maybe Ali G??!

Thanks for the link Dan.

I went ahead and read that Chomsky piece and I have to basically back your assessment of the article. The Scialaba position that Herman quotes above is either his being disingenuous or dim. Scialaba keeps referring to the one sentence near the end of the review where Chomsky and Herman say “We do not pretend to know where the truth lies amidst these sharply conflicting assessments." But read in the context of the entire review this is actually a dishonest claim of agnosticism, possibly thrown in to effect an air of objectivity or to stave off criticism through misdirection.

On the one hand Chomsky does keep rightly being skeptical of certain second-hand sources for evaluating the actions post-civil war of the khmer Rouge. But he continually refers to other sources of info which are equally anecdotal and often second-hand accounts. (For an illustration see his reference to the testimony of the economist W.J. Sampson, of whom a main source of info came from the very refugees that Chomsky elsewhere takes journalists to task for relying on for their information). The point he could reasonably draw from the criticism of possibly tainted sources is that it is not quite clear yet (at the time the review is written) exactly the extent of the killings of the Khmer regime, and so the confident conclusions of some of the journalists of his day are too hasty. Yet this is exactly the conclusion he does not draw. Rather he gives plausible reasons to be guardely skeptical of some media accounts of what was happening in Cambodia and then immediately gives accounts detailing exact opposite conclusions (such as that the killings by the Khmer hardly constituted a massacre, if there even were any) based on a similar use of sources one should be guardedly skeptical towards. Clearly Chomsky is not trying to play the two sides off each other in order to remain in a position of modest agnosticism.

Chomsky’s disingenuosness is most readily apparent in his consistent blaming of actual deaths in Cambodia, and the civil war their itself (!) on American bombings, and attacks. He keeps doing that throughout the review w/o himself citing any evidence for his claims, particularly when he makes claims like the following: “. . . [Khmer] executions have numbered at most in the thousands; that these were localized in areas of limited Khmer Rouge influence and unusual peasant discontent, where brutal revenge killings were aggravated by the threat of starvation resulting from the American destruction and killing. These reports also emphasize both the extraordinary brutality on both sides during the civil war (provoked by the American attack) and repeated discoveries that massacre reports were false.” This sort of claim on his part is very revealing of his bias against American and in favor of the Khmer regime, or any other communist revolutionary forces. Look at the funny legalese of this version of possible post-civil war killings by the Khmer; it sounds just like the old defense plea, “I didn’t do it, and even if I did do it I was justified in doing it!” Chomsky is saying 1) the executions happened WHERE the Khmer had little control or presence as in they didn’t do it!; 2) they resulted from UNUSUAL peasant “discontent” (discontented with what pray tell, maybe their new communist masters?), which is to say the killing of peasants was justified BY the unusual discontent, and finally, that all of this killing of peasants was a result of a threat of starvation that Americans had caused. He then immediately added that even the brutality of the two sides in the civil war was the result of American attack . . . as if there could be no other possible explanation for an extremity of violence in a CIVIL WAR. Chomsky goes on later to state that the “bulk” of Cambodian deaths are “attributable” to the American “war” on them.

Look, I agree that the U.S. bombing of Cambodia in “operation arclight” (which had happened 4 years prior to Chomsky's review) was reprehensible (in bello mostly), but I don’t know why Chomsky always has to undermine legitimate concerns of American interventionism by representing other players, like the Khmer in this case, as untainted as the freshly fallen snow? Well, I do know actually, you can read all about it in Flynn’s books. It is because of Chomsky’s ideological blinders and his hatred for the U.S. government specifically and American people generally.

I should have added that although Chomsky *could* have made the claim that a position of agnosticism over the Khmer Rouge atrocities was the proper one in 1977 it in fact would not have been. There were already enough accounts and evidences of the forced evacuations of the cities by the communists as well as other round-ups, forced labor camps, and executions for western journalists to get a clear view of the regime's brutality. In fact, Chomsky's taking the side of the Khmer Rouge was MORE typical of western journalism of the time than his reference to various mainstream American accounts which attack the communists for being corrupt murderers were typical.

Finally, doesn't the fact that the people Chomsky is criticizing were later definitively proven right effect our assessment of his criticisms of them? Just as the fact that Soviet documentation has proven just how correct McCarthy was should cause us to reevaluate his critics or that the critics of Bush's pre-Iraq war claims regarding Saddam's wmd capabilities have been proven correct should cause us to reexamine what The Prez and his handlers were up to?

First off, I's never said "humor without logic is wanting" ... that was Sasha Cohen ... or maybees Borak...

Second, Dan, why'd you have to bring this whole thing up again? Slow news day?

If I had a penny for every time this whole Chomsky Cambodia story is dragged out again, why, I would have at least a dollar by now...

Third, Brian, you are a bit too hard on Chomsky when you say he has "hatred for the U.S. gov't" and "hatred for the American people" (regardless of whether these hatreds are specific or general).

Let's give Chomsky the benefit of the doubt on two points:

(a) the man genuinely believes that the U.S. Gov't is a force for injustice and death in the world (and congenitally so), and that

(b) the American people are by and large (i) unintelligent and (ii) easily distracted from what is important.

In reply, I would only say that both b(i) and (ii) are true (although not always in the sense that Chomsky wants to understand them). If you don't believe me, see Dan's recent column on what hasn't killed him yet, or go back in the news archives and read newspapers from the mid-80s, or late 70s, and see what sort of issues were animating the body politic then, and how quickly they faded from view, without actually being resolved.

Secondly, (a) is false, but that the U.S. gov't in its foreign policy is _often_ a force for injustice in the world (or at least does not do what it could, or when it gets involved, does so in a sloppy fashion which does not bring about a better state of affairs than before-i.e., Iraq), seems to me to be true. It is not so congenitally, as Chomsky believes (when one looks at, by comparison, Spain between 1500 and 1900), but it is _often_ so.

If you want examples (which will arouse more controversy than it's worth), I will mention only the following uncontroversial cases:

a.) the Kurds in Turkey in general in the past 25 years...
b.) Civil war in Columbia since the beg. of our War on Drugs
c.) Chile in the 70s and Kissenger's involvement
d.) Iraq (Ja, Saddam is on trial, and you can argue that Iraq will eventually get better, but don't try to argue that the people living there here and now are better off than before the U.S. invaded. necessarily 't'aint so.)

I would add three more points:

1.) Chomsky's linguistic theories are still in play and one of two main competitors in the 'marketplace of ideas' ... in the field of linguistics.

This is no small achievement.

Moreover, viewed against the competitors, Chomsky's theory is really in a direct line with the Enlightenment heritage, as over and against post-modern and post-structuralist theories of language.

As evidence of this, and if you want to read a fascinating debate, wherein Chomsky argues for the existence of a determinate human nature, over and against Foucault, who argues the contrary, see this website:

http://www.chomsky.info/debates/1971xxxx.htm

or just google '"Chomsky" & "Foucault" & "Debate"'

2.) Chomsky's work on propaganda in the media is something - for all its problemmatic political slant - that no one else is doing at the level he is doing it (except for Pierre Bourdieu in his lectures at the College de France, published 2001 as "Bourdieu on TV" ... and anyway, he's dead now...).

Yes, you can point to all your media watchdogs, left and right, but Chomsky, though left-wing, has done significant work in drawing out the structures of this propaganda, and how it functions, apart from left or right, and this is important. Most Americans seem to think that "propaganda" was something the Nazis or the Soviets did (see b(i) above).

Lastly, Dan, if you were a public intellectual, and all of your statements for the past 35 years were on record, and I went through them with a fine-toothed comb, and pulled out the 4 or 5 stupidest things you had ever said ... how bad would that look?

So, my argument in sum is this: Chomsky has said at times questionable and even ridiculous things but, considering what he's done, you need to take him seriously.

If you don't well, then it's not political critique any more, it's just anti-intellectualism. Of which there is no small dose in the American bloodstream.

Peace-

PS:

Brian,

Just because we learn that McCarthy was not barking up the wrong tree, doesn't change the fact that he was (a) obnoxious (b) a drunk and (c) just plain unpleasant and therefore deserving no mercy when he was unable to prove what he had claimed.

Perhaps the reason so many people dislike Chomsky is because one could also attribute (a) and (c) to him as well. I don't know about (b) - I assume not.

but b counts in his favor for you considering your latest posts on Bush Ali-G.