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Gorgo
SFN Die Hard
USA
5310 Posts |
 Posted - 02/23/2002 : 14:42:48
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I thought I'd try to make some time and look at an article by David Horowitz in depth. I haven't finished, but here is a start. The article can be found at:
http://www.frontpagemagazine.com/guestcolumnists/horrad12-19-01p.htm
To begin with, we can see that Horowitz, with no intent of slinging mud decides to reprint for us a sentence found in Article III Section 3 defining treason.
Probably simply as a history lesson.
Certainly not with the idea that posting this above an article criticizing Chomsky implies that Chomsky might be guilty of treason for expressing his opinion. Not in this land of "free speech" certainly.
Horowitz's article is one criticizing Chomsky's article entitled "The New War Against Afghanistan - from a speech at MIT on 10/18/2001.
Horowitz begins by telling us that Chomsky appeared in Islamabad to "share his views with the Muslim population of Pakistan, that nuclear and none-too-stable state." Horowitz probably mentions this as a public service to educate the public about U.S. allies in the "war against terrorism" I suppose, and not to tar Chomsky as being someone who supports things which are nuclear and none-too-stable.
Or, could I be wrong about some of my previous comments, as Horowitz sees commentary critical of some parts of the U.S. government as "a lifelong crusade against his country." Well, Horowitz certainly must have a great deal of evidence to support such a claim, I'm sure. Treason, talking to people in nuclear and none-too-stable countries, and a lifelong crusade against what surely is the most saintly of countries, Chomsky's own
country, the U.S. of A. Let's see what that evidence is.
Okay. The real meat of the article is starting. What is Chomsky saying?
Horowitz begins with the first of Chomsky's five questions. First we start with, what else but number one.
1. "What's Happening Right Now? Starvation of 3 to 4 million people"
Chomsky, quoting the NY Times says that seven or eight million people were barely surviving on international aid previous to, and after September 11, 2001. Also quoting the NY Times, Chomsky relates that the U.S. demanded from Pakistan the elimination of truck convoys that provide much of the food and other supplies to Afghanistan's civilian
population.
Horowitz repeats Chomsky's assertions with astonishment, stating that these are "misrepresented events."
According to Horowitz, "In order that nobody should fail to appreciate the gravity of the point, Chomsky spells it out again."
Horowitz is amazed again. Certainly Chomsky doesn't have his facts straight. Let's go back to Horowitz's evidence. ..."faux professorial tone... " "lurid..." "lunatic..." ..."at odds with everything we know about the way Americans and Europeans generally behave..."
Well, there you have it. Chomsky is wrong because everyone knows that Saintly old Uncle Sam wouldn't be that way. There you have it, Horowitz has proven that Chomsky's statements are "...cold and calculated lies"... "Turner Diaries..."Protocols of the Elders of Zion..."
But, Horowitz has a bigger heart than to end it there. Horowitz remembers those who "think Chomsky could not possibly have meant what he
wrote. Surely he does not mean to place American democracy on a par with Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot and other apostles of the mass annihilation of innocent populations. If so, however, they would be wrong, and Chomsky is the first to let them know it."
Horowitz's article continues quoting Chomsky, "...let's turn to the slightly more abstract question, forgetting for the moment that we are in the midst of apparently trying to murder 3 or 4 million people, not Taliban, of course, their victims."
Well, I'm sure ol' Diamond Dave is going to load on the evidence now:
Quoting Horowitz, "No wonder they want to bomb us! No wonder Al Quaeda resorts to 'terror' - a word, which as Chomsky will explain, is really a cynical verbal construction imposed on our language by the monsters themselves - since, in fact, 'terror' is more properly understood as the real victims' revenge." Of course, Chomsky never says these things, or even means these things, but since he's criticizing U.S. policy, he deserves being called a traitor, and we can make up accusations against traitors just like in the U.S.S.R., which Dave admired as a commie pinko youngster.
Well, but... uh... the evidence I'm sure will be mounting soon.
Dave continues with more about "fantasies... Mario the Magician...spellbound by his illusions... "Chomsky's hypnotic power..."reality he is inventing..."
Ahem. Well, certainly this is just
building up to something. A good writer needs a build up, right?
Here it is, here it is. No, wait. He's gone on so long, he's telling us to "recall how Chomsky sets up the scenario of a Washington plot... Okay Dave, yeah we remember. Wait, his refutation of what Chomsky said follows.
Remember now that Chomsky the liar has the audacity to say that the people who were in Afghanistan and knew what was going on in Afghanistan were all telling the U.S. that millions of people might die if they began to do what they were about to do. Wait, now. What has Chomsky lied about again?
Oh yeah. That was a lie because Dave says that in an October 16, 2001 NY Times article, it is reported that G.W. Bush, that old Santa Claus, "promoted his relief fund for Afghan children." You remember that one. The one where school children sent in their dollars? What a humanitarian!
Before we look up that article, let's look for a minute at Chomsky's lie. An internet NY TIMES archive search finds a 10/16/2002 New York Times article by John F. Burns which says, "Washington has also demanded a cutoff of fuel supplies, an end to the use of Pakistani banks as conduits for clandestine money movements by terrorists and the elimination of truck convoys that provide much of the food and other supplies to Afghanistan's civilian population."
Well, Chomsky is such a clever liar, that he's obviously in cahoots with this Burns character. Have to have Super Dave look this Burns up in the roster that McCarthy left for him.
Looking up the October 16 article, of course those Reds at the Ulra-Communist New York Times moved it to make Dave look sloppy. They show the article Dave is referring to as being published on 10/17/02. Now some pinko's going to say that Dave did that on purpose so people wouldn't check out his sources.
But, finally Dave brings some real fire to his Chomsky Roast. His article shows everything Chomsky has written to be a complete fantasy. The first half of the first sentence shows Dave to be absolutely right. "President Bush promoted his relief fund for Afghan children at the headquarters of the American Red Cross today," Fantastic! Chomsky, you old fraud you. You son of a self-hating Pol Pot apologizing Jewish red conspiracy you. Let's read on after the comma to really roast old Noam, "but international relief groups said the American bombing campaign was making it virtually impossible to deliver large amounts of food to starving Afghans."
What? That yellow rag changed ol' Dave's story a little, didn't they? Part of Chomsky's "hate the evil U.S." campaign I bet. Well, Dave can't be all wrong. Maybe the rest of the article shows old Noam to be the hateful liar that he is, "Aid officials were especially infuriated by the bombing of an International Committee of the Red Cross compound in Kabul by an American warplane earlier today."
"Relief groups said it was only the most dramatic development in their struggle to deal with what they described as a looming crisis of starvation as winter approaches in Afghanistan. The intensive bombing campaign, they said, was making their jobs irrelevant. Others said the food drops conducted by the Air Force were blurring the line between what were supposed to be parallel military and aid campaigns."
Of course, Chomsky ignores the one paragraph in the whole article which states that the Taliban are stealing from the "very convoys Chomsky refers to, in order to supply their own forces." Never mind that it's irrelevant to what Chomsky was talking about, and never mind that Horowitz ignores every other part of the article but that paragraph and the first half of the first sentence of the article. That was all just filler about some people who don't really matter.
Then in the best tactic of all, Horowitz completely ignores the first question, "What is happening now" and shows Chomsky to be a liar by explaining what actually happened AFTER Chomsky's speech. Brilliant!
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Too lazy to finish now. Maybe more later. Maybe not.
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October 17, 2001, Wednesday
FOREIGN DESK
A NATION CHALLENGED: CHARITIES; Bush Voices Pride in Aid, But Groups List Hurdles
By ELISABETH BUMILLER and ELIZABETH BECKER (NYT) 759 words
WASHINGTON, Oct. 16 -- President Bush promoted his relief fund for Afghan children at the headquarters of the American Red Cross today, but international relief groups said the American bombing campaign was making it virtually impossible to deliver large amounts of food to starving Afghans.
Aid officials were especially infuriated by the bombing of an International Committee of the Red Cross compound in Kabul by an American warplane earlier today.
Relief groups said it was only the most dramatic development in their struggle to deal with what they described as a looming
crisis of starvation as winter approaches in Afghanistan. The intensive bombing campaign, they said, was making their jobs irrelevant. Others said the food drops conducted by the Air Force were blurring the line between what were supposed to be parallel military and aid campaigns.
The situation prompted Raymond C. Offenheiser, president of Oxfam America, to call today for a halt in the airstrikes. ''The bombing has demonstrated that we cannot get food to hungry Afghan people in relative safety,'' he said. ''We've run out of food, the borders are closed, we can't reach our staffs and time is running out.''
Mr. Bush said proudly at the Red Cross that the White House had received 90,000 pieces of mail -- many containing money from American youth -- for food and supplies for Afghan children. He made no mention of the bombing. ''Thanks to the American children, fewer children in Afghanistan will suffer this winter,'' he said against a photogenic backdrop of American boys and girls.
This afternoon, before the Pentagon acknowledged that American bombs had hit the Red Cross compound, the International
Committee of the Red Cross issued a relatively cautious statement from its headquarters in Geneva.
''The I.C.R.C. strongly regrets this incident,'' the statement said. The committee reported that a Red Cross employee had been
wounded in the bombing and was in stable condition and that it had ''approached the United States authorities for information
on the exact circumstances.''
The organization also said that one of five buildings in the compound, containing blankets, tarpaulins and plastic, suffered a
direct hit and was completely destroyed. A second building that stored food caught fire and was partly destroyed.
The airstrike prompted a sharper reaction from Red Cross officials in the area, who said that it occurred in broad daylight and
that the top of the warehouse was painted with a large red cross on a white background.
Robert Moni, the director of the International Red Cross in Kabul, who has been evacuated to Pakistan, was quoted by Reuters as saying: ''It is definitely a civilian target. In addition to that, it is a clearly marked I.C.R.C. warehouse.
''People should take all necessary measures to avoid such things.''
The United Nations believes that 7.5 million Afghans will need food over the winter -- 2.5 million more than on Sept. 11.
Relief groups said today that the 275,000 packets of food dropped in the country so far are at best a minor public relations gesture and at worst a source of mistrust.
''With military planes dropping the food packages it compromises the neutrality of all aid delivery,'' said Nicholas de Torrente,
the executive director of Doctors Without Borders, which offers medical support and food for malnourished children in
Afghanistan. He called the food packages ''a drop in the bucket.''
Other officials said there was increasing difficulty in trucking in wheat, which is essential to avoiding starvation. Although the Pentagon and British Defense Ministry have agreed to coordinate the airstrikes so that they will not hit relief convoys, aid groups said they will have a hard time persuading local truck drivers to brave the wretched roads.
The Taliban have also begun levying a tax of $8 to $37 a ton on wheat coming into the country. ''One convey of 1,000 tons of wheat was held up for five days trying to negotiate the tax,'' Mark Bartolini of the International Rescue Committee said. Since airstrikes began, several warehouses have been looted and local staff members have been beaten.
At the Red Cross today, the president struck a more upbeat tone, praising children who contributed a dollar each to his Afghan fund.
''Winter arrives early in Afghanistan,'' he said. ''It's cold, really cold. And the children need warm clothing. And they need food.
And they need medicines.'' He added that the American Red Cross would make sure ''every single dollar that's been raised by
the boys and girls of America will be spent on the needs of the boys and girls in Afghanistan.''
"The United Nations believes that 7.5 million Afghans will need food over the winter -- 2.5 million more than on Sept. 11. Relief groups said today that the 275,000 packets of food dropped in the country so far are at best a minor public relations gesture and at worst a source of mistrust."
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"Not one human life should be expended in this reckless violence called a war against terrorism." - Howard Zinn
Edited by - gorgo on 02/23/2002 14:50:54
Edited by - gorgo on 02/23/2002 14:52:15
Edited by - gorgo on 02/23/2002 15:15:15
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Gorgo
SFN Die Hard
USA
5310 Posts |
Posted - 02/25/2002 : 20:32:19 [Permalink]
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I am going to try to finish this some day, but I wanted to let those who are interested know that I am looking into a mistake Chomsky made.
I did find that Chomsky made an error in the above article, and there was in fact an article on the seventeenth about Oxfam, when he said that there wasn't. Horowitz puts it on the sixteenth, but it was on the seventeenth. I asked Noam Chomsky about this.
I also asked him about something unrelated that I thought some might be interested in. He said once said that James Madison said that the purpose of government was to protect the minority of the opulent from the majority. When I tried to find that quote, what I found said that he said that the purpose of the SENATE was to protect the minority of the opulent form the majority. A considerably different concept.
His answer to both questions is below:
Reply from NC,
Exactly as you surmised, my (extemporaneous) talk at MIT on October 18 failed to mention that the New York Times indeed mentioned the Oxfam plea the day before, in an article headlined "A NATION CHALLENGED: CHARITIES;
Bush Voices Pride in Aid, But Groups List Hurdles," which I hadn't yet seen; given the intensity of my schedule, I'm often a day or two behind in careful reading of the national press. The reason I quoted the Globe and
not the Times is that I hadn't yet had a chance to read the Times carefully. Incidentally, the reference was so marginal that one can't even pick it up in the Times search system by searching for "Oxfam"; at least, that was true the last time I tried.
On Madison, I'm quoting directly from the standard source I cited: Yates's minutes of the debates. The context is the one I gave: Madison's discussion of how to "secure the permanent interests of the country" -- the
rights of property owners -- "against innovation" by vote of the majority. He pointed out that in England -- the model, of course -- "if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of landed
proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place," distributing property to the general population. The system he was framing had to prevent such injustice, and must be "so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority." It's in this context that he concludes that "The Senate, therefore, ought to be this body" that will protect the minority of the opulent. It will be the effective law-making body, and will be composed of "the wealth of the nation," people who "sympathize" with property owners and their rights (in the misleading terminology used, with "property and its rights," though of course property has no rights). That's exactly how I described it, pointing out the crucial role of the Senate in the Madisonian system and the other devices he advocated, and that were instituted, to assure that the "minority of the opulent" would be protected "against the majority." So you are right about the Senate, but you may be missing the essential Madisonian point, which is
what I reviewed.
If you are looking for a source, the most detailed one is an article of mine in the Cleveland State Law Review. Can send you the exact source, if you like. As you can determine, the meaning of the statement I quoted is just as I described it.
As I've written elsewhere, Aristotle raised the same problem in his _Politics_, the first great work of political analysis. He observed, as Madison did, that if the population could participate in a meaningful way in democratic decisions in an unequal society, then the majority would infringe on the property rights of the minority of the opulent. Exactly Madison's concern. Aristotle's proposal was to reduce inequality; Madison's, to prevent democracy -- and he recognized that over time there
was going to be a serious problem, because of the increase he anticipated in "the proportion of those who will labor under all the hardships of life, and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its benefits."
In Madison's defense, however, one should add (as I also pointed out in discussing this) that Madison was pre-capitalist in mentality, and believed that the "wealth of the nation" who would control policy-making in the Senate would be "enlightened Statesmen" and "benevolent philosophers," like the mythical Romans who were often cited by the Founding Fathers. He was quite outraged when he came to discover, shortly after, that they behaved
exactly as Adam Smith had observed a few years earlier, following the "vile maxim" of "the masters of mankind": "All for ourselves, and nothing for other people." Much of the subsequent history of the country, right to the present, has to do with the struggles over these doctrines.
"Not one human life should be expended in this reckless violence called a war against terrorism." - Howard Zinn |
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Gorgo
SFN Die Hard
USA
5310 Posts |
Posted - 02/26/2002 : 06:59:41 [Permalink]
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Horowitz responds:
I read this. There is nothing there worth anyone's time, but you can post this link for anyone who cares to waste their time reading it.
"Not one human life should be expended in this reckless violence called a war against terrorism." - Howard Zinn |
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Gorgo
SFN Die Hard
USA
5310 Posts |
Posted - 03/03/2002 : 11:43:27 [Permalink]
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Imagine thinking that superstition is a good thing.
Taking a break from Horowitz and looking for information about Matt Welch, I find a web site called leftwatch.com.
http://www.leftwatch.com/noam_chomsky/chomsky003.html
'One of the hallmarks of leftist intellectuals is that while they claim to represent and speak for "the working class" they have little respect for the choices and decisions that even working people make in their lives. Ideas and that the left intellectual finds disagreeable but which are shared by the mythical "working class" must be explained away as an irrational byproduct of the capitalist system.'
and:
'To the leftist intellectual, however, religious faith is both irrational and downright dangerous, bordering on proto-fascist. Consider |Noam Chomsky's| contempt for American's belief in God:
[Barsamian:] Huey Long [a populist governor and senator in the 1930s] once said that when fascism comes to this country, it's going to be wrapped in an American flag. You've commented on tendencies toward fascism in this country. You've even been quoting Hitler on the family and the role of women.
[Chomsky:] [Chomsky discusses the 1996 Republican
National Convention and notes that the pro-business wing of the Republican party gives the religious right its "god and country rally" but keeps the religious right from having a major role in decision making] ... But that can change.
When people grow more alienated and isolated, they begin to develop highly irrational and very self-destructive attitudes. They want something in their lives. They don't just want to be glued to the television set. If most of the constructive ways are cut off, they turn to other ways.
You can see that in the polls too. I was just looking at a study by an American sociologist (published in England)of comparative religious attitudes in various cultures. The figures are shocking. Three quarters of the American population literally believe in religious miracles. The numbers who believe in the devil, in resurrection, in God doing this and that -- it's astonishing.
These numbers aren't duplicated anywhere else in the industrial world. You'd have to maybe go to mosques in Iran or do a poll among old ladies in Sicily to get numbers like this. Yet this is the American population
Barsamian and Chomsky 1994, pp.77-78).'
"Not one human life should be expended in this reckless violence called a war against terrorism." - Howard Zinn
Edited by - gorgo on 03/03/2002 11:45:45 |
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Gorgo
SFN Die Hard
USA
5310 Posts |
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