sexta-feira, setembro 12, 2003
Unmasking Noam Chomsky
[...] Chomsky?s moral perspective is completely one-sided. No matter how great the crimes of the regimes he has favoured, such as China, Vietnam and Cambodia under the communists, Chomsky has never demanded their leaders be captured and tried for war crimes. Instead, he has defended these regimes for many years to the best of his ability through the use of evidence he must have realised was selective, deceptive and in some cases invented.
In fact, had Pol Pot ever been captured and tried in a Western court, Chomsky?s writings could have been cited as witness for the defence. Were the same to happen to Osama bin Laden, Chomsky?s moral rationalisations in his most recent book??almost any crime, a crime in the street, a war, whatever it may be, there?s usually something behind it that has elements of legitimacy??could be used to plead for a lighter sentence.
This kind of two-faced morality provided a model for the worldwide protests by left-wing opponents of the American-led coalition?s war against Iraq. The left was willing to tolerate the most hideous acts of state terrorism by the Saddam Hussein regime, but was implacable in its hostility to intervention by Western democratic governments in the interests of both their own security and the emancipation of the Iraqi people. This is hypocrisy writ large.
The long political history of this aging activist demonstrates that double standards of the same kind have characterised his entire career.
Chomsky has declared himself a libertarian and anarchist but has defended some of the most authoritarian and murderous regimes in human history. His political philosophy is purportedly based on empowering the oppressed and toiling masses but he has contempt for ordinary people who he regards as ignorant dupes of the privileged and the powerful. He has defined the responsibility of the intellectual as the pursuit of truth and the exposure of lies, but has supported the regimes he admires by suppressing the truth and perpetrating falsehoods. He has endorsed universal moral principles but has only applied them to Western liberal democracies, while continuing to rationalise the crimes of his own political favourites. He is a mandarin who denounces mandarins. When caught out making culpably irresponsible misjudgements, as he was over Cambodia and Sudan, he has never admitted he was wrong.
Today, Chomsky?s hypocrisy stands as the most revealing measure of the sorry depths to which the left-wing political activism he has done so much to propagate has now sunk.
posted by Miguel Noronha 5:42 da tarde
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