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America’s Dumbest Intellectual
David Horowitz, professional teeth-gnasher, is at it again.
when david horowitz attacks! are reparations racist?
by Nick Mamatas (laddertrick [at] gvny.com) - March 15, 2001
David Horowitz, professional teeth-gnasher, is at it again.
Horowitz first entered the public consciousness in the 1960s, when, as a member of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and writer for Ramparts, his explosive rhetoric against the Vietnam War did little to end the conflict. Decades later, Horowitz has repudiated the cartoony left of his youth and has become an ideologue for the parodic right. A thoughtful conservative, the man is not.
There is no right-wing ideal or position too wacky for Horowitz. Was the movie The Patriot historically inaccurate? No, screams Horowitz, because it made the British look bad and the Americans look good. Yes, mention the historians of earth idly, as they tick off error after error, and indeed, historical fabrication after historical fabrication. Is there a vast left-wing conspiracy against the right? Of course there is! Hororwitz insists. His proof: some readers gave his books negative reviews on Amazon.com. I cashed my check from Moscow (uhm . . . Communism is dead, better make that Berkeley) today, and I never even wrote my commissioned review of Horowitz’s work, but I'll make up for that now.
Horowitz recently scribbled a poison pen letter to blacks, seekers of social justice and history itself. This little number, called Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks is a Bad Idea for Blacks - and Racist Too (gee, thanks for caring David!) has caused quite a stir in California. Opponents of Horowitz have been smeared as being "politically correct" as usual, and the many members of the myopic news media have squinted at the text of Horowitz's piece and have declared it "not racist." (So much for the vast left-wing conspiracy against Horowitz).
Of course, since the media could look at a sentence reading "All niggers are motherfuckers," and, under the guise of objectivity, declare that sentence non-racist -- after all, a pity op-ed writer might opine, some white people have been described as niggers as recently as a week ago by Governor Byrd -- I've decided to take a look at Horowitz's ten claims myself. Here they are, from FrontPageMagazine.com:
1. There Is No Single Group Clearly Responsible For The Crime Of Slavery.
Horowitz punts here. He mentions that black Africans were involved in the slave trade, and that some free blacks owned black slaves. Of course, he stops short of explaining why this is a reason why reparations would be bad for blacks. The implicit argument he is making is that reparations are conceived as a payment by whites that benefited from slavery, and that such a conception is racist, since whites are not exclusively responsible. His claim would be accurate if black Americans had filed a class action suit against the descendents of slaveholders, but they have not. The US government is clearly responsible for slavery, since it allowed slavery to exist legally.
It is also worth noting that, even if Horowitz is right, this doesn’t mean that reparations would be bad for blacks. A check in the mail is nearly always a good thing.
2. There Is No One Group That Benefited Exclusively From Its Fruits.
Here, Horowitz gets explicit and says that reparations are based on the notions that only whites benefited from slavery. Such a claim would be a surprise from many of those supporting reparations. Building a rhetorical strawmen and shoving it in the mouth of hundreds of thousands of blacks is certainly the action of a racist.
Horowitz further claims that black Americans benefited from slavery, since slave-built wealth exists in the US and since blacks in Africa are worse off then blacks in the US. If their ancestors hadn't been kidnapped, current claimants would be stuck in Somalia, suffering from absolute poverty.
Of course, Horowitz doesn't demonstrate that slavery was the mechanism for building up the US economy as a whole – in fact most historical economists who study its impact would suggest that slavery was a drag on the economy throughout much of the 19th century. Further, blacks in the "black belt" of former slave states and territories are the dead last poorest group in this country, even though they are the closest to the "wealth" built by slavery. Horowitz ignores this inconvenient fact and adds, willy-nilly, the income of the descendents of free blacks in the North to those of slaves in the South, and claims that all blacks benefited from the existence of slavery.
He also ignores the probability that blacks are better of in the US in spite of slavery. Since most of the black middle class emerged in the 20th century and in the North where neither slavery nor Jim Crow has as significant an impact on the economy, Horowitz's supposition that blacks benefited from slavery is incorrect.
He's also wrong on Africa. While Africa is clearly an economic basket case, that is also partially the fault of slavery. The need for cheap labor, cheap raw materials and new markets fueled what is frequently called "New Imperialism." Africa went from terra incognita to fully colonized by European merchant powers in a matter of decades. The extractive economy of imperialism kept local capital and civil society from developing, and the US, as one of the largest market for slaves, and later for raw materials and finished goods, fueled this.
Even today, nations with immense natural wealth, such as the Congo, are impoverished because of the political and economic manipulations by the US during the colonial era, and also in the post-colonial era. Far from being an argument against reparations, the state of Africa suggests that African nations should sue for reparations based on the terrible impact slavery had on their economies as well.
3. Only A Tiny Minority Of White Americans Ever Owned Slaves, And Others Gave Their Lives To Free Them.
Horowitz plays the race card. He asks, rhetorically, what moral principle exists that would allow for millions of whites who had nothing to do with slavery to pay reparations through taxes? There need be none, of course, since Horowitz is asking the wrong question. The moral principle at work is that the US government is an institution, and one responsible for its actions. Since the US government had allowed for and encouraged slavery, and since slavery would not have existed in the US had it been illegal and fought against, the US is responsible.
It is clear that non-whites also pay taxes, and they would pay for reparations as well. In other news, millions of people who have no use for nuclear weapons and who never get to ride in Air Force One have to pay for these things, because the government claims a responsibility to supply these things.
It is also worth noting that this point contradicts point 2. If the US benefited economically from slavery, and if black Americans even benefited from slavery, then clearly non-slaveholding whites did as well. Horowitz is so muttonheaded that he can’t even retain consistency across sentences. In either case, both points are incorrect, and in no case can both points be correct.
4. America Today Is A Multi-Ethnic Nation and Most Americans Have No Connection (Direct Or Indirect) To Slavery.
Another non-sequitur. Most Americans today have no direct connection to any practice of the US government in the 19th century. But most people on earth live with the historical fallout of the US in the 19th century. The reservation system for Native Americans? Check. The enormous amount of money poured into the Panama Canal, including Operation: Just Cause? Check. The very existence of any states other than the original thirteen colonies? Check. And once again, this point contradicts point 2. If the US economy was built on slavery, it is clearly part of what made the US such an attractive destination for immigrants.
5. The Historical Precedents Used To Justify The Reparations Claim Do Not Apply, And The Claim Itself Is Based On Race Not Injury.
Now, Horowitz suggests that blacks in America were not harmed by slavery, even though Jim Crow laws, most of the stereotypes of the American black, and much of the ideology of blacks as inferior and distinct from whites on a social level can be directly traced to slavery. Slavery and Jim Crow necessarily impacted the growth of unions in the US, to the point where the average black worker in the North makes more money than the average white worker in the South – the black southern worker is even further behind -- according to studies by Syzmanski and others. Blacks have had immense systematic difficulty exercising the voting franchise in the South as recently as November 2000 ("Hi Jeb!"). The socio-economic impact of slavery is felt by all blacks, not just the direct descendents of slaves. Indeed, Horowitz admits this himself in point 2. How is it that everyone in the US benefits from slavery, but nobody is harmed by it?
Horowitz also asks, "Randall Robinson's book on reparations, The Debt, which is the manifesto of the reparations movement is pointedly sub-titled 'What America Owes To Blacks.' If this is not racism, what is?" Well, Robinson's subtitle isn't racism. Claiming that American blacks, regardless of their socioeconomic status, benefited from slavery while claiming that they could not possibly be impacted negatively by slavery, is. Glad to have cleared that up for you, David.
6. The Reparations Argument Is Based On The Unfounded Claim That All African-American Descendants of Slaves Suffer From The Economic Consequences Of Slavery And Discrimination.
This is not a sixth reason, really, but simply an explicit repetition of an implicit claim in other points. Again, this point runs headlong into point 2 and could thus be tossed our right away. However, just because Horowitz makes such a great punching bag, I'll point out that the reparations argument isn't based on an unfounded claim. Horowitz contends that the rise of the black middle class demonstrates that slavery didn't have a negative impact on black America. This is false.
What the rise of the black middle class demonstrates is that people can surmount difficulties, that Affirmative Action works and that the impact of slavery and the direct fallout of Reconstruction and Jim Crow impacted the South more heavily than it impacted the North. Horowitz has confused the word "unfounded" with the term "disliked by Davd Horowitz."
Further, studies by the Urban Institute show that racism (and modern racist ideologies were born of the slave trade) still impacts the black middle class. Blacks and whites seeded in job interviews, given the same exact suits, resumes, and scripts show that whites are still more likely to get jobs.
7. The Reparations Claim Is One More Attempt To Turn African-Americans Into Victims. It Sends A Damaging Message To The African-American Community.
Horowitz finds common cause with the most reactionary black leaders, like those of the Nation Of Islam, who claim that black capitalism, black separatism and up-by-the-bootstraps hard work, spiced up with anti-Semitism, cultism and the occasional political assassination of one of their own, is all the black community needs.
Horowitz is being disingenuous here as well. He claims to be concerned about the social psychology of the black community, but then explains that reparations would be "extravagant new handout that is only necessary because some blacks can't seem to locate the ladder of opportunity within reach of others." Hardly the rhetoric of a concerned citizen.
Horowitz offers no proof that reparations are an attempt to turn blacks into victims. He offers not a single quote from a black leader to that effect, and offers no common pro-reparation argument that demonstrates this claim. Rather, he just desperately makes it and hopes that off-handedly mentioning the "extravagance" of reparations will scare Whitey into reactionary action.
8. Reparations To African Americans Have Already Been Paid.
Horowitz gets desperate. He claims that welfare benefits have been paid to lacks "under the rationale of redressing historic racial grievances." Of course welfare payments, which he incorrectly dates to the time of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, have been paid to people of all races for most of the 20th century, in one form or another. If Horowitz means the now defunct AFDC, home of the loathed "welfare mother," (a program Horowitz is against), then it is worth pointing out that AFDC was also open to people of all races, including relatively recent immigrants to the US. In no way was it designed to redress historical racial grievances. Horowitz suggests that welfare was a transfer payment (from whom?) to blacks on the level of trillions of dollars. This figure is both vague and would not be accurate even if every dollar from every Johnson-era federal welfare program -- excluding old age benefits from Social Security -- went only to blacks.
Horowitz also claims that Affirmative Action programs are a form of reparation. Here too, he is wrong. AA/EEOC was designed to redress current racial preferences for whites, regardless of black qualifications, not as a "make good" for slavery. Horowitz also fumes over the wholesale rewriting of federal law for the benefit of blacks. One is led to wonder how he feels about the Constitutional amendments giving blacks citizenship and the laws allowing them to vote.
9. What About The Debt Blacks Owe To America?
Boy howdy! Horowitz claims that slavery existed for thousands of years, and that there was never an anti-slavery movement until "white Christians – Englishmen and Americans – created one." We will forgive Horowitz, who as a Jew, is a descendent of slaves himself, for ignoring Moses, or for mistakenly thinking that Moses was a British Christian. I'm sure Horowitz burned his copy of the Torah back when he joined SDS. We will also ignore Spartacus and any number of slave revolts in the antebellum South. We will also forgive him for conflating slavery under antiquity, which did not have a racist component, with slavery under capitalism, which did.
We will also ignore the unfortunate fact that, for most of the last thousand years, slavery was an economic footnote, as serfdom was the most popular and efficient way of organizing labor for the feudal middle class. Slavery re-emerged under capitalism in a form very different than the way it existing in Egypt, Greece, Rome and Africa.
We will ignore all of these things, because it would distract us from pointing and laughing at Horowitz for the following: "If not for the sacrifices of white soldiers and a white American president who gave his life to sign the Emancipation Proclamation, blacks in America would still be slaves." All together now, my friends in fourth grade:
Abraham Lincoln did not give his life to sign the Emancipation Proclamation!
Does Horowitz have some vision of Lincoln from the movies, where old Abe is dodging poison darts, hopping over deadfalls, rolling under ceiling-spike traps, swinging over cliffs with nothing but the help of a whip, and finally, outrunning a giant boulder, to sign the Emancipation Proclamation? Oh wait, that was Indiana Jones, not Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln signed the Proclamation years before he was assassinated. In no way could it be said that he gave his life to do something he had already done years before he died. Further, here is a complete list of slaves freed by the Proclamation:
That's right. None. Moving on.
Horowitz makes the hysterical claim that blacks in America would still be slaves if not for the Civil War. Most historians, even the most credulous members of the Great Man school of thought, would spill tea on their laps if they read such a claim in a historical journal. Slavery was clearly on the way out throughout the world, as labor could be more efficiently organized by freeing people from land (serfs) chattel status (slaves) and freeing them from the burdens of owning their own property (small scale artisans). Mass industrial production eliminated the economic power of slavery.
But even if Horowitz is right and everyone else is wrong about history, and Lincoln was essential, he would still be wrong. The Confederate states seceded from the United States. "America" wouldn't have slaves because the Confederacy was another country. If there was no Civil War and no Lincoln, and nothing else changed in history (Horowitz doesn't specify) the US would be a free country, and the Confederacy – a foreign power – would be a slave country. Horowitz goes beyond racism and beyond right-wing bombast to semiliterate stupidity with this "point."
10. The Reparations Claim Is A Separatist Idea That Sets African-Americans Against The Nation That Gave Them Freedom.
Horowitz claims that the black community is being suckered by black nationalists, black separatists and the political left. Apparently, Horowitz forgot his lessons from SDS: black nationalism is a right-wing movement, not a left-wing movement. Most black nationalists are against Affirmative Action and reparations, they want a black nation or see blacks and blacks alone (not the white government) as the agent of political and economic change.
Horowitz also asks, "Who is more American than the descendents of African slaves?" to which one can only answer, "Indians." The question is a rhetorical one; Horowitz sees the reparations claim as one that would alienate blacks from the US. The opposite is true, few people are alienated from institutions who give them money to make up for egregious treatment. Horowitz also claims, in the point itself, that the US gave blacks freedom. Sure, it did. After enslaving them in the first place. And the freedom the average black person in the US has is qualitatively different than the freedom everyone else in the US has, even other people of color and recent immigrants. Racism isn't just a historical artifact, it is an institution today, one informed by the institutions of the past.
Since Horowitz sees slavery as something that blacks benefited from (see point 2), and racism as the passe whine of the overprivileged minority that stops stuffing itself with government surplus cheese only long enough to have bastard children and cash their welfare checks, it isn't surprising that he would be equally confused on the facts of history, the actual claims of the reparation movement and his own arguments.
Racism has always been a muddle, and Horowitz is the clearest demonstration of that since . . well, since last week.
by Nick Mamatas (laddertrick [at] gvny.com) - March 15, 2001
David Horowitz, professional teeth-gnasher, is at it again.
Horowitz first entered the public consciousness in the 1960s, when, as a member of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and writer for Ramparts, his explosive rhetoric against the Vietnam War did little to end the conflict. Decades later, Horowitz has repudiated the cartoony left of his youth and has become an ideologue for the parodic right. A thoughtful conservative, the man is not.
There is no right-wing ideal or position too wacky for Horowitz. Was the movie The Patriot historically inaccurate? No, screams Horowitz, because it made the British look bad and the Americans look good. Yes, mention the historians of earth idly, as they tick off error after error, and indeed, historical fabrication after historical fabrication. Is there a vast left-wing conspiracy against the right? Of course there is! Hororwitz insists. His proof: some readers gave his books negative reviews on Amazon.com. I cashed my check from Moscow (uhm . . . Communism is dead, better make that Berkeley) today, and I never even wrote my commissioned review of Horowitz’s work, but I'll make up for that now.
Horowitz recently scribbled a poison pen letter to blacks, seekers of social justice and history itself. This little number, called Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks is a Bad Idea for Blacks - and Racist Too (gee, thanks for caring David!) has caused quite a stir in California. Opponents of Horowitz have been smeared as being "politically correct" as usual, and the many members of the myopic news media have squinted at the text of Horowitz's piece and have declared it "not racist." (So much for the vast left-wing conspiracy against Horowitz).
Of course, since the media could look at a sentence reading "All niggers are motherfuckers," and, under the guise of objectivity, declare that sentence non-racist -- after all, a pity op-ed writer might opine, some white people have been described as niggers as recently as a week ago by Governor Byrd -- I've decided to take a look at Horowitz's ten claims myself. Here they are, from FrontPageMagazine.com:
1. There Is No Single Group Clearly Responsible For The Crime Of Slavery.
Horowitz punts here. He mentions that black Africans were involved in the slave trade, and that some free blacks owned black slaves. Of course, he stops short of explaining why this is a reason why reparations would be bad for blacks. The implicit argument he is making is that reparations are conceived as a payment by whites that benefited from slavery, and that such a conception is racist, since whites are not exclusively responsible. His claim would be accurate if black Americans had filed a class action suit against the descendents of slaveholders, but they have not. The US government is clearly responsible for slavery, since it allowed slavery to exist legally.
It is also worth noting that, even if Horowitz is right, this doesn’t mean that reparations would be bad for blacks. A check in the mail is nearly always a good thing.
2. There Is No One Group That Benefited Exclusively From Its Fruits.
Here, Horowitz gets explicit and says that reparations are based on the notions that only whites benefited from slavery. Such a claim would be a surprise from many of those supporting reparations. Building a rhetorical strawmen and shoving it in the mouth of hundreds of thousands of blacks is certainly the action of a racist.
Horowitz further claims that black Americans benefited from slavery, since slave-built wealth exists in the US and since blacks in Africa are worse off then blacks in the US. If their ancestors hadn't been kidnapped, current claimants would be stuck in Somalia, suffering from absolute poverty.
Of course, Horowitz doesn't demonstrate that slavery was the mechanism for building up the US economy as a whole – in fact most historical economists who study its impact would suggest that slavery was a drag on the economy throughout much of the 19th century. Further, blacks in the "black belt" of former slave states and territories are the dead last poorest group in this country, even though they are the closest to the "wealth" built by slavery. Horowitz ignores this inconvenient fact and adds, willy-nilly, the income of the descendents of free blacks in the North to those of slaves in the South, and claims that all blacks benefited from the existence of slavery.
He also ignores the probability that blacks are better of in the US in spite of slavery. Since most of the black middle class emerged in the 20th century and in the North where neither slavery nor Jim Crow has as significant an impact on the economy, Horowitz's supposition that blacks benefited from slavery is incorrect.
He's also wrong on Africa. While Africa is clearly an economic basket case, that is also partially the fault of slavery. The need for cheap labor, cheap raw materials and new markets fueled what is frequently called "New Imperialism." Africa went from terra incognita to fully colonized by European merchant powers in a matter of decades. The extractive economy of imperialism kept local capital and civil society from developing, and the US, as one of the largest market for slaves, and later for raw materials and finished goods, fueled this.
Even today, nations with immense natural wealth, such as the Congo, are impoverished because of the political and economic manipulations by the US during the colonial era, and also in the post-colonial era. Far from being an argument against reparations, the state of Africa suggests that African nations should sue for reparations based on the terrible impact slavery had on their economies as well.
3. Only A Tiny Minority Of White Americans Ever Owned Slaves, And Others Gave Their Lives To Free Them.
Horowitz plays the race card. He asks, rhetorically, what moral principle exists that would allow for millions of whites who had nothing to do with slavery to pay reparations through taxes? There need be none, of course, since Horowitz is asking the wrong question. The moral principle at work is that the US government is an institution, and one responsible for its actions. Since the US government had allowed for and encouraged slavery, and since slavery would not have existed in the US had it been illegal and fought against, the US is responsible.
It is clear that non-whites also pay taxes, and they would pay for reparations as well. In other news, millions of people who have no use for nuclear weapons and who never get to ride in Air Force One have to pay for these things, because the government claims a responsibility to supply these things.
It is also worth noting that this point contradicts point 2. If the US benefited economically from slavery, and if black Americans even benefited from slavery, then clearly non-slaveholding whites did as well. Horowitz is so muttonheaded that he can’t even retain consistency across sentences. In either case, both points are incorrect, and in no case can both points be correct.
4. America Today Is A Multi-Ethnic Nation and Most Americans Have No Connection (Direct Or Indirect) To Slavery.
Another non-sequitur. Most Americans today have no direct connection to any practice of the US government in the 19th century. But most people on earth live with the historical fallout of the US in the 19th century. The reservation system for Native Americans? Check. The enormous amount of money poured into the Panama Canal, including Operation: Just Cause? Check. The very existence of any states other than the original thirteen colonies? Check. And once again, this point contradicts point 2. If the US economy was built on slavery, it is clearly part of what made the US such an attractive destination for immigrants.
5. The Historical Precedents Used To Justify The Reparations Claim Do Not Apply, And The Claim Itself Is Based On Race Not Injury.
Now, Horowitz suggests that blacks in America were not harmed by slavery, even though Jim Crow laws, most of the stereotypes of the American black, and much of the ideology of blacks as inferior and distinct from whites on a social level can be directly traced to slavery. Slavery and Jim Crow necessarily impacted the growth of unions in the US, to the point where the average black worker in the North makes more money than the average white worker in the South – the black southern worker is even further behind -- according to studies by Syzmanski and others. Blacks have had immense systematic difficulty exercising the voting franchise in the South as recently as November 2000 ("Hi Jeb!"). The socio-economic impact of slavery is felt by all blacks, not just the direct descendents of slaves. Indeed, Horowitz admits this himself in point 2. How is it that everyone in the US benefits from slavery, but nobody is harmed by it?
Horowitz also asks, "Randall Robinson's book on reparations, The Debt, which is the manifesto of the reparations movement is pointedly sub-titled 'What America Owes To Blacks.' If this is not racism, what is?" Well, Robinson's subtitle isn't racism. Claiming that American blacks, regardless of their socioeconomic status, benefited from slavery while claiming that they could not possibly be impacted negatively by slavery, is. Glad to have cleared that up for you, David.
6. The Reparations Argument Is Based On The Unfounded Claim That All African-American Descendants of Slaves Suffer From The Economic Consequences Of Slavery And Discrimination.
This is not a sixth reason, really, but simply an explicit repetition of an implicit claim in other points. Again, this point runs headlong into point 2 and could thus be tossed our right away. However, just because Horowitz makes such a great punching bag, I'll point out that the reparations argument isn't based on an unfounded claim. Horowitz contends that the rise of the black middle class demonstrates that slavery didn't have a negative impact on black America. This is false.
What the rise of the black middle class demonstrates is that people can surmount difficulties, that Affirmative Action works and that the impact of slavery and the direct fallout of Reconstruction and Jim Crow impacted the South more heavily than it impacted the North. Horowitz has confused the word "unfounded" with the term "disliked by Davd Horowitz."
Further, studies by the Urban Institute show that racism (and modern racist ideologies were born of the slave trade) still impacts the black middle class. Blacks and whites seeded in job interviews, given the same exact suits, resumes, and scripts show that whites are still more likely to get jobs.
7. The Reparations Claim Is One More Attempt To Turn African-Americans Into Victims. It Sends A Damaging Message To The African-American Community.
Horowitz finds common cause with the most reactionary black leaders, like those of the Nation Of Islam, who claim that black capitalism, black separatism and up-by-the-bootstraps hard work, spiced up with anti-Semitism, cultism and the occasional political assassination of one of their own, is all the black community needs.
Horowitz is being disingenuous here as well. He claims to be concerned about the social psychology of the black community, but then explains that reparations would be "extravagant new handout that is only necessary because some blacks can't seem to locate the ladder of opportunity within reach of others." Hardly the rhetoric of a concerned citizen.
Horowitz offers no proof that reparations are an attempt to turn blacks into victims. He offers not a single quote from a black leader to that effect, and offers no common pro-reparation argument that demonstrates this claim. Rather, he just desperately makes it and hopes that off-handedly mentioning the "extravagance" of reparations will scare Whitey into reactionary action.
8. Reparations To African Americans Have Already Been Paid.
Horowitz gets desperate. He claims that welfare benefits have been paid to lacks "under the rationale of redressing historic racial grievances." Of course welfare payments, which he incorrectly dates to the time of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, have been paid to people of all races for most of the 20th century, in one form or another. If Horowitz means the now defunct AFDC, home of the loathed "welfare mother," (a program Horowitz is against), then it is worth pointing out that AFDC was also open to people of all races, including relatively recent immigrants to the US. In no way was it designed to redress historical racial grievances. Horowitz suggests that welfare was a transfer payment (from whom?) to blacks on the level of trillions of dollars. This figure is both vague and would not be accurate even if every dollar from every Johnson-era federal welfare program -- excluding old age benefits from Social Security -- went only to blacks.
Horowitz also claims that Affirmative Action programs are a form of reparation. Here too, he is wrong. AA/EEOC was designed to redress current racial preferences for whites, regardless of black qualifications, not as a "make good" for slavery. Horowitz also fumes over the wholesale rewriting of federal law for the benefit of blacks. One is led to wonder how he feels about the Constitutional amendments giving blacks citizenship and the laws allowing them to vote.
9. What About The Debt Blacks Owe To America?
Boy howdy! Horowitz claims that slavery existed for thousands of years, and that there was never an anti-slavery movement until "white Christians – Englishmen and Americans – created one." We will forgive Horowitz, who as a Jew, is a descendent of slaves himself, for ignoring Moses, or for mistakenly thinking that Moses was a British Christian. I'm sure Horowitz burned his copy of the Torah back when he joined SDS. We will also ignore Spartacus and any number of slave revolts in the antebellum South. We will also forgive him for conflating slavery under antiquity, which did not have a racist component, with slavery under capitalism, which did.
We will also ignore the unfortunate fact that, for most of the last thousand years, slavery was an economic footnote, as serfdom was the most popular and efficient way of organizing labor for the feudal middle class. Slavery re-emerged under capitalism in a form very different than the way it existing in Egypt, Greece, Rome and Africa.
We will ignore all of these things, because it would distract us from pointing and laughing at Horowitz for the following: "If not for the sacrifices of white soldiers and a white American president who gave his life to sign the Emancipation Proclamation, blacks in America would still be slaves." All together now, my friends in fourth grade:
Abraham Lincoln did not give his life to sign the Emancipation Proclamation!
Does Horowitz have some vision of Lincoln from the movies, where old Abe is dodging poison darts, hopping over deadfalls, rolling under ceiling-spike traps, swinging over cliffs with nothing but the help of a whip, and finally, outrunning a giant boulder, to sign the Emancipation Proclamation? Oh wait, that was Indiana Jones, not Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln signed the Proclamation years before he was assassinated. In no way could it be said that he gave his life to do something he had already done years before he died. Further, here is a complete list of slaves freed by the Proclamation:
That's right. None. Moving on.
Horowitz makes the hysterical claim that blacks in America would still be slaves if not for the Civil War. Most historians, even the most credulous members of the Great Man school of thought, would spill tea on their laps if they read such a claim in a historical journal. Slavery was clearly on the way out throughout the world, as labor could be more efficiently organized by freeing people from land (serfs) chattel status (slaves) and freeing them from the burdens of owning their own property (small scale artisans). Mass industrial production eliminated the economic power of slavery.
But even if Horowitz is right and everyone else is wrong about history, and Lincoln was essential, he would still be wrong. The Confederate states seceded from the United States. "America" wouldn't have slaves because the Confederacy was another country. If there was no Civil War and no Lincoln, and nothing else changed in history (Horowitz doesn't specify) the US would be a free country, and the Confederacy – a foreign power – would be a slave country. Horowitz goes beyond racism and beyond right-wing bombast to semiliterate stupidity with this "point."
10. The Reparations Claim Is A Separatist Idea That Sets African-Americans Against The Nation That Gave Them Freedom.
Horowitz claims that the black community is being suckered by black nationalists, black separatists and the political left. Apparently, Horowitz forgot his lessons from SDS: black nationalism is a right-wing movement, not a left-wing movement. Most black nationalists are against Affirmative Action and reparations, they want a black nation or see blacks and blacks alone (not the white government) as the agent of political and economic change.
Horowitz also asks, "Who is more American than the descendents of African slaves?" to which one can only answer, "Indians." The question is a rhetorical one; Horowitz sees the reparations claim as one that would alienate blacks from the US. The opposite is true, few people are alienated from institutions who give them money to make up for egregious treatment. Horowitz also claims, in the point itself, that the US gave blacks freedom. Sure, it did. After enslaving them in the first place. And the freedom the average black person in the US has is qualitatively different than the freedom everyone else in the US has, even other people of color and recent immigrants. Racism isn't just a historical artifact, it is an institution today, one informed by the institutions of the past.
Since Horowitz sees slavery as something that blacks benefited from (see point 2), and racism as the passe whine of the overprivileged minority that stops stuffing itself with government surplus cheese only long enough to have bastard children and cash their welfare checks, it isn't surprising that he would be equally confused on the facts of history, the actual claims of the reparation movement and his own arguments.
Racism has always been a muddle, and Horowitz is the clearest demonstration of that since . . well, since last week.
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master of reality.
Roll him off a ciff.
Free Speech. Now and Forever.
Censorship SUCKS!
Free Speech. Now and Forever.
Censorship SUCKS!
what's clear is that smashtheleft is here reposting the same bullshit over and over and over again. fortunately this article was updated to balance out the *dozens* of copies of the original that stl posted. if you're interested in seeing the "censorship" head on over to the hidden articles section...http://www.indybay.org/news/?hidden=hidden
I agree with most of what the author had to say, but I do have to disagree with the idea that slavery would have ended without the Civil War.
When an economic system becomes obsolete, it doesn't just go away. Slavery was the basis of the social system of the South -- the basis of the power of the slaveholding class. The war began following elections which revealed that the slaveholders had lost their control of the central government -- which was a sign that their social system was in crisis -- and that they would have to secede to maintain their power.
No ruling class ever willingly renounces power. They must be forced out.
Without the Civil War, slavery would have continued. In fact, for the first several years of the war, the Union armies were commanded by generals who sympathized with the Southern ruling class and were unwilling to fight aggressively enough to defeat the Confederacy.
Although the Emancipation Proclamation was, as the author hinted, designed to free only those slaves in territories not in Union control, abolitionists were able to make use of it to argue that the war was now a war of liberation.
To win the Civil War required breaking the power of the Southern ruling class -- which meant ending slavery.
It's too rarely mentioned that the slaves did, in the end, free themselves -- in the sense that they simply abandoned the plantations in massive numbers. This was possible, though, because those that formerly stood guard over them were busy fighting off the Union army.
The real tragedy of the Civil War was the failure of Reconstruction. To permanently break the old Southern ruling class's power would have required breaking up and redistributing land, particularly to the newly freed slaves. Had this been achieved, the basis of racism would have been broken. But doing this would have brought the concept of private property into question -- and was therefore too radical for the Northern capitalists to accept.
My understanding is that it is that failure that reparations are meant to redress.
When an economic system becomes obsolete, it doesn't just go away. Slavery was the basis of the social system of the South -- the basis of the power of the slaveholding class. The war began following elections which revealed that the slaveholders had lost their control of the central government -- which was a sign that their social system was in crisis -- and that they would have to secede to maintain their power.
No ruling class ever willingly renounces power. They must be forced out.
Without the Civil War, slavery would have continued. In fact, for the first several years of the war, the Union armies were commanded by generals who sympathized with the Southern ruling class and were unwilling to fight aggressively enough to defeat the Confederacy.
Although the Emancipation Proclamation was, as the author hinted, designed to free only those slaves in territories not in Union control, abolitionists were able to make use of it to argue that the war was now a war of liberation.
To win the Civil War required breaking the power of the Southern ruling class -- which meant ending slavery.
It's too rarely mentioned that the slaves did, in the end, free themselves -- in the sense that they simply abandoned the plantations in massive numbers. This was possible, though, because those that formerly stood guard over them were busy fighting off the Union army.
The real tragedy of the Civil War was the failure of Reconstruction. To permanently break the old Southern ruling class's power would have required breaking up and redistributing land, particularly to the newly freed slaves. Had this been achieved, the basis of racism would have been broken. But doing this would have brought the concept of private property into question -- and was therefore too radical for the Northern capitalists to accept.
My understanding is that it is that failure that reparations are meant to redress.
Instead of "reparations" per se, we should have land reform?
The article was never posted more than once at a time. Every time it was posted it was hidden and they attempted to censor me from ever posting again.
America’s Dumbest Intellectual
by S. Kanfer • Sunday July 14, 2002 at 09:01 PM
...is MIT's America-hating professor, Noam Chomsky.
Walk onto the popular-music floor of Virgin Records in midtown Manhattan, and you encounter, as you’d expect, kids with shoulder tattoos and pierced body parts, wandering through rows of the latest hip-hop, altrock, and heavy-metal CDs as heavily amplified beats thunder. At the checkout counter, though, is a surprise. A single book is on display: perennial radical Noam Chomsky’s latest anti-American screed, 9/11—an impulse item for the in-your-face slackers of the Third Millennium. Strictly speaking, 9/11 is a non-book, a hastily assembled collection of fawning interviews with Chomsky conducted after the terrorist attack on New York City and the country, in which the author pins the blame for the atrocities on—you guessed it—the U.S. But you’d be wrong to dismiss 9/11 as an inconsequential paperback quickie. More than 115,000 copies of the book are now in print. It has shown up on the Boston Globe and the Washington Post best-seller lists, and in Canada, it has rocketed to seventh on the best-seller list. And as its prominent display at Virgin Records attests, 9/11 is particularly popular with younger readers; the book is a hot item at campus bookstores nationwide. The striking success of 9/11 makes Chomsky’s America-bashing notable, or at least notably deplorable—especially here in New York, which lost so many of its bravest on that horrible day.
Chomsky’s title for his new book may have a little to do with its best-seller status: some people may have picked it up assuming it to be a newsworthy account of September 11. But undoubtedly, the main reason 9/11 is selling so briskly is because of its author’s fame. According to the Chicago Tribune, Noam Chomsky is cited more than any other living author—and he shows up eighth on the all-time most-cited list, the paper says, right after Sigmund Freud. Do a search for “Noam Chomsky” on Amazon.com and up pops an astonishing 224 books. The New York Times calls him “arguably the most important intellectual alive.” He’s even been the subject of an adoring 1993 movie-length documentary film. Chomsky has achieved rock-star status among the young and hip. Rock groups like Bad Religion and Pearl Jam proudly quote his writings in interviews and in their music. To the self-styled bohemian coffee-house crowd, observes Wired magazine, “Chomsky is somewhere between Kerouac and Nietzsche—carrying around one of his books is automatic countercultural cachet.”
Chomsky, now a 73-year-old grandfather living in suburban Massachusetts, has worked for decades to win that cachet. Avram Noam was born in Philadelphia in 1928. His parents, William and Elsie Chomsky, had fled from czarist oppression in Russia to the City of Brotherly Love, where William established himself as a Hebrew scholar and grammarian. Radical politics aroused the young Noam—at ten, he wrote a school newspaper editorial on the Spanish Civil War, lamenting the rise of fascism, and two years later he embraced the anarchism that he still adheres to today. By the age of 16, the bright, ambitious youth had enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, where he eventually earned a Ph.D. in linguistics. Passed over for a teaching position at Harvard, he landed in 1955 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has remained ever since.
Most linguistics professors would have toiled in obscurity in a science-and-industry school like MIT. Not Chomsky. In the 1950s, he brashly challenged psychologist B. F. Skinner’s theory of language as a learned skill, acquired by children in a process of reward and punishment. Chomsky claimed instead that when we learn a language as children, we can articulate and understand all sorts of sentences that we’ve never actually come across before. “What we ‘know,’ therefore,” Chomsky held, “must be something deeper—a grammar—that makes an infinite variety of sentences possible.” In Chomsky’s view, the capacity to master the structures of grammar is genetically determined, a product of our evolutionary development. This idea—that grammar is hardwired in the labyrinth of DNA—shook the walls of linguistics departments across the globe. Chomsky promoted his theory tirelessly, defending it in countless symposia and scholarly reviews. By the mid-sixties, he was an academic superstar; in the seventies, researchers at Columbia University even named a chimpanzee trained to learn 125 words “Nim Chimpsky” in his honor.
With this fame as a base, the professor proceeded to wander far from his area of expertise. Such uses of fame, ironically, are common in the country Chomsky attacks so relentlessly. In America, you come across two kinds of fame: vertical and horizontal. The vertical celebrity owes his renown to one thing—Luciano Pavarotti, for example, is famous for his singing, period. The horizontal celebrity, conversely, merchandises his fame by convincing the public that his mastery of one field is transferable to another. Thus singers Barbra Streisand and Bono give speeches on public policy; thus linguistics professor Chomsky poses as an expert on geopolitics.
Chomsky first employed his horizontal celebrity during the 1960s, when he spoke out forcefully against the Vietnam War. His 1969 collection of agitated writings, American Power and the New Mandarins, indicted the nation’s brainwashed “elites”—read: government bureaucrats and intellectuals who disagreed with him on the morality of the war. But Vietnam was only the beginning: over the next three decades, Chomsky published a steady stream of political books and pamphlets boasting titles like What Uncle Sam Really Wants and Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies—all of them filled with heated attacks on American policies, domestic and foreign.
Those attacks would be laughable if some people didn’t take them seriously. Here’s a small but representative sample. The goal of America, Chomsky charges, “is a society in which the basic unit is you and your television set. If the kid next door is hungry, it’s not your problem. If the retired couple next door invested their assets badly and are now starving, that’s not your problem either.” Prisons and inner-city schools, Chomsky maintains, “target a kind of superfluous population that there’s no point in educating because there’s nothing for them to do. Because we’re a civilized people, we put them in prison, rather than sending death squads out to murder them.” Another example: “When you come back from the Third World to the West—the U.S. in particular—you are struck by the narrowing of thought and understanding, the limited nature of legitimate discussion, the separation of people from each other.”
Goodness. But if America is all about ignoring hungry children, why does the country spend billions in public and private funds every year on the poor? Does America deliberately seek to mis-educate and send to prison a “superfluous” population? Wouldn’t today’s knowledge-based economy benefit from as many decently educated people as it could find? What Third World countries does Chomsky have in mind where the discussion is more freewheeling and open than in the U.S.? Algeria? Cuba? Such puerile leftism is scarcely worthy of a college sophomore.
If possible, however, Chomsky’s assessment of U.S. foreign policy is even more absurd. The nightmare of American evil began in 1812, he thinks, when the U.S. instigated a process that “annihilated the indigenous [American] population (millions of people), conquered half of Mexico, intervened violently in the surrounding region, conquered Hawaii and the Philippines (killing hundreds of thousands of Filipinos), and in the past half century particularly, extended its resort to force throughout much of the world.” That the U.S. saved the Philippines during World War II, that Hawaiians voted to become the fiftieth state, that every day Mexicans pour across the border to take part in the economy of the hated United States—all of that is irrelevant to Chomsky. He believes in the Beaumarchais mode of political debate: “Vilify, vilify, some of it will always stick.”
For Chomsky, turn over any monster anywhere and look at the underside. Each is clearly marked: MADE IN AMERICA. The cold war? All America’s fault: “The United States was picking up where the Nazis had left off.” Castro’s executions and prisons filled with dissenters? Irrelevant, for “Cuba has probably been the target of more international terrorism [from the U.S., of course] than any other country.” The Khmer Rouge? Back in 1977, Chomsky dismissed accounts of the Cambodian genocide as “tales of Communist atrocities” based on “unreliable” accounts. At most, the executions “numbered in the thousands” and were “aggravated by the threat of starvation resulting from American distraction and killing.” In fact, some 2 million perished on the killing fields of Cambodia because of genocidal war against the urban bourgeoisie and the educated, in which wearing a pair of glasses could mean a death sentence.
The Chomskian rage hasn’t confined itself to his native land. He has long nourished a special contempt for Israel, lone outpost of Western ideals in the Middle East. The hatred has been so intense that Zionists have called him a self-hating Jew. This is an unfair label. Clearly, Chomsky has no deficit in the self-love department, and his ability to stir up antagonism makes him even more pleased with himself. No doubt that was why he wrote the introduction to a book by French Holocaust-denier Robert Faurisson. Memoire en Defense maintains that Hitler’s death camps and gas chambers, even Anne Frank’s diary, are fictions, created to serve the cause of American Zionists. That was too much for Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who challenged fellow leftist Chomsky to a debate. In the debate, Dershowitz keyed in on the fact that Chomsky had described Faurisson’s conclusions as “findings,” and claimed that they grew out of “extensive historical research.” But as numerous scholars had shown, Faurisson was not a serious scholar at all, but rather a sophist who simply ignored the mountain of documents, speeches, testimony, and other historical evidence that conflicted with his “argument.” Dershowitz noted that Chomsky also wrote the following: “I see no anti-Semitic implication in the denial of the existence of gas chambers or even in the denial of the Holocaust.”
Just recently, Chomsky spearheaded a group pressuring universities to divest themselves of any stock connected with the Jewish state: Israel equals South Africa in the Chomskian universe of moral equivalence. Here, happily, Chomsky got nowhere. He obtained 400 signatures for his movement; opposing him, Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard, gathered 4,000 signatures in support of Israel. The controversy set Dershowitz off again. This time, he said, he wanted the MIT prof to debate him “on the morality of this selective attack against an American ally that is defending itself—and the world—against terrorism that targets civilians.” He pointed out that universities have always invested in companies head-quartered in foreign nations with unsavory reputations—countries whose citizens don’t have the freedom the Israelis enjoy or suffer the terror they endure. “Yet this petition focused only on the Jewish State, to the exclusion of all others, including those which, by any reasonable standard, are among the worst violators of human rights. This is bigotry pure and simple.” Chomsky declined the challenge.
That brings us to 9/11, an egregious insult to decency in general and to the citizens of New York in particular. True to form, in one of the interviews, Chomsky calls the United States “a leading terrorist state” and equates President Clinton’s 1998 bombing of the Al-Shifa plant in Sudan with the horrors of September 11. In every way, Chomsky’s comparison is obscene. The bombing was in response to attacks on two U.S. embassies that had resulted in the deaths and injuries of thousands. The U.S. made sure it took place at night, when the target was empty of civilians. U.S. intelligence, mistaken though it may have been, indicated that the pharmaceutical factory was producing weapons of mass destruction. The unprovoked attack on the World Trade Center, needless to say to anyone except Chomsky and his disciples, occurred in broad daylight, with the intention of inflicting maximum damage and death on innocents.
Chomsky concedes that the WTC attack was unfortunate—not so much because of the deaths of Americans, but because “the atrocities of September 11 were a devastating blow to the Palestinians, as they instantly recognized.” (Some other group, disguised as Palestinians, must have been dancing in the streets that day.) Israel, he adds, “is openly exulting in the ‘window of opportunity’ it now has to crush Palestinians with impunity.”
On the rare occasions in 9/11 when Chomsky expresses condolences for the victims of the terrorist attack, he immediately goes on to excoriate the U.S. “The atrocities were passionately deplored, even in places where people have been ground underfoot by Washington’s boots for a long, long time,” he typically says. Chomsky rolls on in this manner. The West is the Great Satan, the Third World its eternal victim. The World Trade Towers were a symbol of America’s gluttony and power. In effect, we were asking for it and are now unjustly using it as a casus belli. More U.S. oppression is about to take place all over the globe. If you didn’t know better, you could be reading one of bin Ladin’s diatribes. Chomsky’s response to September 11 outraged even leftist Christopher Hitchens, a former admirer of the MIT professor who now attacked him for abandoning “every standard that makes moral and intellectual discrimination possible.”
Does anyone believe these inanities? It would be tempting to say that the author only preaches to the choir. But there’s more to Chomsky’s success than that. True, Chomsky is like the Bog Man of Grauballe, Denmark, preserved unchanged for centuries. Since the early 1960s, no new ideas have made it into his oeuvre. He is as he was, and his rage against democracy as practiced in the U.S. is of a piece with the raised fists of the Chicago Seven and the ancient bumper stickers condemning “Amerika.” But his message still seems to resonate with a sizable faction of the Boomers, trained to respond to emotion rather than reason. These are the people who sympathized with Susan Sontag’s notorious post–September 11 observation: “Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘humanity’ or ‘the free world’ but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?” These are the folks who applauded Bill Clinton’s fatuous mea culpa appraisal of the WTC attack: “This country once looked the other way when a significant number of native Americans were dispossessed and killed to get their land or their mineral rights or because they were thought of as less than fully human. . . . [W]e are still paying a price today.”
And now a younger crowd is following the Pied Piper of anti-Americanism. 9/11 makes it easy for them. They needn’t read it; they just have to make sure the thing is sticking out of their backpacks or sitting on their milk-crate coffee tables, a symbol of mass-market rebellion pushed at the record stores for $10.95—less than the new Eminem CD! Call it Anti-Americanism for Dummies. It would be more than a pity if the lies of 9/11 seduced more innocents; it would be a clear and present danger. We are at war now, and two generations of Chimpskies are enough.
America’s Dumbest Intellectual
by S. Kanfer • Sunday July 14, 2002 at 09:01 PM
...is MIT's America-hating professor, Noam Chomsky.
Walk onto the popular-music floor of Virgin Records in midtown Manhattan, and you encounter, as you’d expect, kids with shoulder tattoos and pierced body parts, wandering through rows of the latest hip-hop, altrock, and heavy-metal CDs as heavily amplified beats thunder. At the checkout counter, though, is a surprise. A single book is on display: perennial radical Noam Chomsky’s latest anti-American screed, 9/11—an impulse item for the in-your-face slackers of the Third Millennium. Strictly speaking, 9/11 is a non-book, a hastily assembled collection of fawning interviews with Chomsky conducted after the terrorist attack on New York City and the country, in which the author pins the blame for the atrocities on—you guessed it—the U.S. But you’d be wrong to dismiss 9/11 as an inconsequential paperback quickie. More than 115,000 copies of the book are now in print. It has shown up on the Boston Globe and the Washington Post best-seller lists, and in Canada, it has rocketed to seventh on the best-seller list. And as its prominent display at Virgin Records attests, 9/11 is particularly popular with younger readers; the book is a hot item at campus bookstores nationwide. The striking success of 9/11 makes Chomsky’s America-bashing notable, or at least notably deplorable—especially here in New York, which lost so many of its bravest on that horrible day.
Chomsky’s title for his new book may have a little to do with its best-seller status: some people may have picked it up assuming it to be a newsworthy account of September 11. But undoubtedly, the main reason 9/11 is selling so briskly is because of its author’s fame. According to the Chicago Tribune, Noam Chomsky is cited more than any other living author—and he shows up eighth on the all-time most-cited list, the paper says, right after Sigmund Freud. Do a search for “Noam Chomsky” on Amazon.com and up pops an astonishing 224 books. The New York Times calls him “arguably the most important intellectual alive.” He’s even been the subject of an adoring 1993 movie-length documentary film. Chomsky has achieved rock-star status among the young and hip. Rock groups like Bad Religion and Pearl Jam proudly quote his writings in interviews and in their music. To the self-styled bohemian coffee-house crowd, observes Wired magazine, “Chomsky is somewhere between Kerouac and Nietzsche—carrying around one of his books is automatic countercultural cachet.”
Chomsky, now a 73-year-old grandfather living in suburban Massachusetts, has worked for decades to win that cachet. Avram Noam was born in Philadelphia in 1928. His parents, William and Elsie Chomsky, had fled from czarist oppression in Russia to the City of Brotherly Love, where William established himself as a Hebrew scholar and grammarian. Radical politics aroused the young Noam—at ten, he wrote a school newspaper editorial on the Spanish Civil War, lamenting the rise of fascism, and two years later he embraced the anarchism that he still adheres to today. By the age of 16, the bright, ambitious youth had enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, where he eventually earned a Ph.D. in linguistics. Passed over for a teaching position at Harvard, he landed in 1955 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has remained ever since.
Most linguistics professors would have toiled in obscurity in a science-and-industry school like MIT. Not Chomsky. In the 1950s, he brashly challenged psychologist B. F. Skinner’s theory of language as a learned skill, acquired by children in a process of reward and punishment. Chomsky claimed instead that when we learn a language as children, we can articulate and understand all sorts of sentences that we’ve never actually come across before. “What we ‘know,’ therefore,” Chomsky held, “must be something deeper—a grammar—that makes an infinite variety of sentences possible.” In Chomsky’s view, the capacity to master the structures of grammar is genetically determined, a product of our evolutionary development. This idea—that grammar is hardwired in the labyrinth of DNA—shook the walls of linguistics departments across the globe. Chomsky promoted his theory tirelessly, defending it in countless symposia and scholarly reviews. By the mid-sixties, he was an academic superstar; in the seventies, researchers at Columbia University even named a chimpanzee trained to learn 125 words “Nim Chimpsky” in his honor.
With this fame as a base, the professor proceeded to wander far from his area of expertise. Such uses of fame, ironically, are common in the country Chomsky attacks so relentlessly. In America, you come across two kinds of fame: vertical and horizontal. The vertical celebrity owes his renown to one thing—Luciano Pavarotti, for example, is famous for his singing, period. The horizontal celebrity, conversely, merchandises his fame by convincing the public that his mastery of one field is transferable to another. Thus singers Barbra Streisand and Bono give speeches on public policy; thus linguistics professor Chomsky poses as an expert on geopolitics.
Chomsky first employed his horizontal celebrity during the 1960s, when he spoke out forcefully against the Vietnam War. His 1969 collection of agitated writings, American Power and the New Mandarins, indicted the nation’s brainwashed “elites”—read: government bureaucrats and intellectuals who disagreed with him on the morality of the war. But Vietnam was only the beginning: over the next three decades, Chomsky published a steady stream of political books and pamphlets boasting titles like What Uncle Sam Really Wants and Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies—all of them filled with heated attacks on American policies, domestic and foreign.
Those attacks would be laughable if some people didn’t take them seriously. Here’s a small but representative sample. The goal of America, Chomsky charges, “is a society in which the basic unit is you and your television set. If the kid next door is hungry, it’s not your problem. If the retired couple next door invested their assets badly and are now starving, that’s not your problem either.” Prisons and inner-city schools, Chomsky maintains, “target a kind of superfluous population that there’s no point in educating because there’s nothing for them to do. Because we’re a civilized people, we put them in prison, rather than sending death squads out to murder them.” Another example: “When you come back from the Third World to the West—the U.S. in particular—you are struck by the narrowing of thought and understanding, the limited nature of legitimate discussion, the separation of people from each other.”
Goodness. But if America is all about ignoring hungry children, why does the country spend billions in public and private funds every year on the poor? Does America deliberately seek to mis-educate and send to prison a “superfluous” population? Wouldn’t today’s knowledge-based economy benefit from as many decently educated people as it could find? What Third World countries does Chomsky have in mind where the discussion is more freewheeling and open than in the U.S.? Algeria? Cuba? Such puerile leftism is scarcely worthy of a college sophomore.
If possible, however, Chomsky’s assessment of U.S. foreign policy is even more absurd. The nightmare of American evil began in 1812, he thinks, when the U.S. instigated a process that “annihilated the indigenous [American] population (millions of people), conquered half of Mexico, intervened violently in the surrounding region, conquered Hawaii and the Philippines (killing hundreds of thousands of Filipinos), and in the past half century particularly, extended its resort to force throughout much of the world.” That the U.S. saved the Philippines during World War II, that Hawaiians voted to become the fiftieth state, that every day Mexicans pour across the border to take part in the economy of the hated United States—all of that is irrelevant to Chomsky. He believes in the Beaumarchais mode of political debate: “Vilify, vilify, some of it will always stick.”
For Chomsky, turn over any monster anywhere and look at the underside. Each is clearly marked: MADE IN AMERICA. The cold war? All America’s fault: “The United States was picking up where the Nazis had left off.” Castro’s executions and prisons filled with dissenters? Irrelevant, for “Cuba has probably been the target of more international terrorism [from the U.S., of course] than any other country.” The Khmer Rouge? Back in 1977, Chomsky dismissed accounts of the Cambodian genocide as “tales of Communist atrocities” based on “unreliable” accounts. At most, the executions “numbered in the thousands” and were “aggravated by the threat of starvation resulting from American distraction and killing.” In fact, some 2 million perished on the killing fields of Cambodia because of genocidal war against the urban bourgeoisie and the educated, in which wearing a pair of glasses could mean a death sentence.
The Chomskian rage hasn’t confined itself to his native land. He has long nourished a special contempt for Israel, lone outpost of Western ideals in the Middle East. The hatred has been so intense that Zionists have called him a self-hating Jew. This is an unfair label. Clearly, Chomsky has no deficit in the self-love department, and his ability to stir up antagonism makes him even more pleased with himself. No doubt that was why he wrote the introduction to a book by French Holocaust-denier Robert Faurisson. Memoire en Defense maintains that Hitler’s death camps and gas chambers, even Anne Frank’s diary, are fictions, created to serve the cause of American Zionists. That was too much for Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who challenged fellow leftist Chomsky to a debate. In the debate, Dershowitz keyed in on the fact that Chomsky had described Faurisson’s conclusions as “findings,” and claimed that they grew out of “extensive historical research.” But as numerous scholars had shown, Faurisson was not a serious scholar at all, but rather a sophist who simply ignored the mountain of documents, speeches, testimony, and other historical evidence that conflicted with his “argument.” Dershowitz noted that Chomsky also wrote the following: “I see no anti-Semitic implication in the denial of the existence of gas chambers or even in the denial of the Holocaust.”
Just recently, Chomsky spearheaded a group pressuring universities to divest themselves of any stock connected with the Jewish state: Israel equals South Africa in the Chomskian universe of moral equivalence. Here, happily, Chomsky got nowhere. He obtained 400 signatures for his movement; opposing him, Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard, gathered 4,000 signatures in support of Israel. The controversy set Dershowitz off again. This time, he said, he wanted the MIT prof to debate him “on the morality of this selective attack against an American ally that is defending itself—and the world—against terrorism that targets civilians.” He pointed out that universities have always invested in companies head-quartered in foreign nations with unsavory reputations—countries whose citizens don’t have the freedom the Israelis enjoy or suffer the terror they endure. “Yet this petition focused only on the Jewish State, to the exclusion of all others, including those which, by any reasonable standard, are among the worst violators of human rights. This is bigotry pure and simple.” Chomsky declined the challenge.
That brings us to 9/11, an egregious insult to decency in general and to the citizens of New York in particular. True to form, in one of the interviews, Chomsky calls the United States “a leading terrorist state” and equates President Clinton’s 1998 bombing of the Al-Shifa plant in Sudan with the horrors of September 11. In every way, Chomsky’s comparison is obscene. The bombing was in response to attacks on two U.S. embassies that had resulted in the deaths and injuries of thousands. The U.S. made sure it took place at night, when the target was empty of civilians. U.S. intelligence, mistaken though it may have been, indicated that the pharmaceutical factory was producing weapons of mass destruction. The unprovoked attack on the World Trade Center, needless to say to anyone except Chomsky and his disciples, occurred in broad daylight, with the intention of inflicting maximum damage and death on innocents.
Chomsky concedes that the WTC attack was unfortunate—not so much because of the deaths of Americans, but because “the atrocities of September 11 were a devastating blow to the Palestinians, as they instantly recognized.” (Some other group, disguised as Palestinians, must have been dancing in the streets that day.) Israel, he adds, “is openly exulting in the ‘window of opportunity’ it now has to crush Palestinians with impunity.”
On the rare occasions in 9/11 when Chomsky expresses condolences for the victims of the terrorist attack, he immediately goes on to excoriate the U.S. “The atrocities were passionately deplored, even in places where people have been ground underfoot by Washington’s boots for a long, long time,” he typically says. Chomsky rolls on in this manner. The West is the Great Satan, the Third World its eternal victim. The World Trade Towers were a symbol of America’s gluttony and power. In effect, we were asking for it and are now unjustly using it as a casus belli. More U.S. oppression is about to take place all over the globe. If you didn’t know better, you could be reading one of bin Ladin’s diatribes. Chomsky’s response to September 11 outraged even leftist Christopher Hitchens, a former admirer of the MIT professor who now attacked him for abandoning “every standard that makes moral and intellectual discrimination possible.”
Does anyone believe these inanities? It would be tempting to say that the author only preaches to the choir. But there’s more to Chomsky’s success than that. True, Chomsky is like the Bog Man of Grauballe, Denmark, preserved unchanged for centuries. Since the early 1960s, no new ideas have made it into his oeuvre. He is as he was, and his rage against democracy as practiced in the U.S. is of a piece with the raised fists of the Chicago Seven and the ancient bumper stickers condemning “Amerika.” But his message still seems to resonate with a sizable faction of the Boomers, trained to respond to emotion rather than reason. These are the people who sympathized with Susan Sontag’s notorious post–September 11 observation: “Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘humanity’ or ‘the free world’ but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?” These are the folks who applauded Bill Clinton’s fatuous mea culpa appraisal of the WTC attack: “This country once looked the other way when a significant number of native Americans were dispossessed and killed to get their land or their mineral rights or because they were thought of as less than fully human. . . . [W]e are still paying a price today.”
And now a younger crowd is following the Pied Piper of anti-Americanism. 9/11 makes it easy for them. They needn’t read it; they just have to make sure the thing is sticking out of their backpacks or sitting on their milk-crate coffee tables, a symbol of mass-market rebellion pushed at the record stores for $10.95—less than the new Eminem CD! Call it Anti-Americanism for Dummies. It would be more than a pity if the lies of 9/11 seduced more innocents; it would be a clear and present danger. We are at war now, and two generations of Chimpskies are enough.
I guess there's no room for debate in a fascist state. Maybe this is why our little toadie of the empire (the writer above) fails to address any of the claims that Professor Chomsky brings up.
He seems to think our little bombings in many foreign lands now (not just Sudan or Afghanistan) are nice and clean and done for the noblest of reasons. I guess he didn't hear the about the one in the former Yugoslavia, wherein bombs struck a populated hospital and then, (this is the really good part for all you "bomb-the-shit-out-them" zealots) they waited and bombed it again after the rescue workers went inside. Our guess our military brass and our "leaders" in general are really concerned about rescure workers. This is all lost on suburban diaper boy.
What about the rescure workers in New York? The only reason they have a good life here is because they fight for it - THROUGH A UNION. No, gasp ... say it isn't so ... you mean the heros of New York were actually union pinkos? .... argh ... foiled again. Isn't it funny that the people going up the stairs (into the WTC disaster) were union workers and all those coming down were anti-union. Oh well, maybe it was planned after all.
Love, Val
He seems to think our little bombings in many foreign lands now (not just Sudan or Afghanistan) are nice and clean and done for the noblest of reasons. I guess he didn't hear the about the one in the former Yugoslavia, wherein bombs struck a populated hospital and then, (this is the really good part for all you "bomb-the-shit-out-them" zealots) they waited and bombed it again after the rescue workers went inside. Our guess our military brass and our "leaders" in general are really concerned about rescure workers. This is all lost on suburban diaper boy.
What about the rescure workers in New York? The only reason they have a good life here is because they fight for it - THROUGH A UNION. No, gasp ... say it isn't so ... you mean the heros of New York were actually union pinkos? .... argh ... foiled again. Isn't it funny that the people going up the stairs (into the WTC disaster) were union workers and all those coming down were anti-union. Oh well, maybe it was planned after all.
Love, Val
The arguements that Mr. Chomsky makes are almost always so subjective that it is difficult to argue pure facts with him. Everyone is entitled to their opinion and Mr.Chomsky is his. This is why he can only be refuted in the manner which this author chose. The statements have to be put into context and then distilled into a concentrated form to be compared with reality.
What the author has shown is that Chomsky is from another world.
I won't argue with someone who uses such exagerations as Nice Clean, and Noblest of reasons, when discussing military attacks.
It would be futile.
Your observation about Union rescue workers is of little merit.
You are putting a political spin on something which wasn't political. Those people don't do rescue work because they like being in a Union, they do it for the "noblest of reasons".
What the author has shown is that Chomsky is from another world.
I won't argue with someone who uses such exagerations as Nice Clean, and Noblest of reasons, when discussing military attacks.
It would be futile.
Your observation about Union rescue workers is of little merit.
You are putting a political spin on something which wasn't political. Those people don't do rescue work because they like being in a Union, they do it for the "noblest of reasons".
Wow, The Collective is still out to censor the newswire, I thought the heavy-handed Censorship would end when they put the unCensored articles in a little box (Other/Breaking News) in the bottom corner of the newswire that quickly rolled off screen.... while the prefiltered, screened and approved articles were displayed at the top. I guess the insecure must resort to censorship to inflate their weak ideas.
"Wow, The Collective is still out to censor the newswire, I thought the heavy-handed Censorship would end when they put the unCensored articles in a little box (Other/Breaking News) in the bottom corner of the newswire that quickly rolled off screen.... while the prefiltered, screened and approved articles were displayed at the top. I guess the insecure must resort to censorship to inflate their weak ideas. "
Well hmm, I thought the idea behind the local/global stuff was to prevent certain people from spamming the site with 500 of the same article so nobody could read anything. One would assume this would also reduce the rightwing people posting the same stuff over and over again also since it would be a waste of time.
But they have continued for some weird reason.
Hiding probably occurs more now than before since the reposts can be hidden during the process of classifying things as local or global.
Well hmm, I thought the idea behind the local/global stuff was to prevent certain people from spamming the site with 500 of the same article so nobody could read anything. One would assume this would also reduce the rightwing people posting the same stuff over and over again also since it would be a waste of time.
But they have continued for some weird reason.
Hiding probably occurs more now than before since the reposts can be hidden during the process of classifying things as local or global.
I'm disPleased by people who hide my Words or Misrepresent my words or DisRespect me. Hiding my posts is Cowardly, I never repost anything that is currently posted. Liars lie. Don't accuse someone of reposting when you hide posts because you are too weak to address them. Don't accuse someone of reposting an article when you continually delete it out of fear...
FREE SPEECH
Typically American. Ignorant, controlled and brainwashed by your government, your media and your greed. Open a book, stop watching CNN (America's Propaganda channel) and get your head out of your ass. Your Government has been a terrorist for generations there is so much evidence I'm surprised even someone as smart as yourself can't find it. I AM CANADIAN and your government is invading MY country as I write this. You may not think so but I'll leave it for you to figure out.
Typically American. Ignorant, controlled and brainwashed by your government, your media and your greed. Open a book, stop watching CNN (America's Propaganda channel) and get your head out of your ass. Your Government has been a terrorist for generations there is so much evidence I'm surprised even someone as smart as yourself can't find it. I AM CANADIAN and your government is invading MY country as I write this. You may not think so but I'll leave it for you to figure out.
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