[lbo-talk] Is this the new left?

ravi gadfly at exitleft.org
Fri Jul 21 14:47:42 PDT 2006


At around 21/7/06 4:44 pm, info at pulpculture.org wrote:
> At 03:32 PM 7/21/2006, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>>> This if bloody fucking depressing. Half-wit punks with a web site
>>> can actually suggest Chomsky, of all people, is an "idiot"?!!
>

Hey, where's my attribution?


> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrios
>
> He's not a half-wit punk, any more than Chomsky is an idiot. (I am
> not saying I care for his site or his politics. Just explaining who
> he is and why he probably doesn't think he's a halfwit punk.

Oh I am sure he doesn't think he is. IMO, anyone who thinks Chomsky is an "idiot" qualifies eminently as a half-wit. Someone not quite in posession of his critical faculties. You can say a lot about Chomsky, (including his theoretical work ranging from linguistics to the ever-ongoing "instinct" debate) but he is no idiot. Punk because he thinks he can get away with just shooting off his mouth.


> "Black obtained a PhD in economics from Brown University[citation...

Chomsky obtained ... wait! I won't even take the trouble of educating Black on that. Even he should know Chomsky's academic credentials. The man is freaking colossus of 20th century academia and you don't have to be a fan to accept that!


> As for Berube, even after reading Dennis, I didn't get the outrage.

Berube writes that Chomsky's words on the attack on Yugoslavia are "a a pack of lies". Nowhere in his piece does he offer any significant data or reasoning to explain why. Instead he gets into guilt by association by moving on to Herman and Johnstone and then quoting various others' opinions on those matters.

Now the word "lies" in his post is a link to someone else's page about the link between Milosevic and Srebrenica. Other words link to similar reports on the exodus of Albanians from their region, and on the atrocities against them.

However, here is what he quotes of Chomsky:


> "Remember, the Milosevic Tribunal began with Kosovo, right in the
> middle of the US-British bombing in late '99 . . . Now if you take a
> look at that indictment, with a single exception, every charge was
> for crimes after the bombing.
>
> There's a reason for that. The bombing was undertaken with the
> anticipation explicit [that] it was going to lead to large-scale
> atrocities in response. As it did. Now there were terrible
> atrocities, but they were after the bombings. In fact, if you look at
> the British parliamentary inquiry, they actually reached the
> astonishing conclusion that, until January 1999, most of the crimes
> committed in Kosovo were attributed to the KLA guerrillas.
>
> So later they added charges [against Milosevic] about the Balkans,
> but it wasn't going to be an easy case to make. The worst crime was
> Srebrenica but, unfortunately for the International Tribunal, there
> was an intensive investigation by the Dutch government, which was
> primarily responsible their troops were there and what they concluded
> was that not only did Milosevic not order it, but he had no
> knowledge of it. And he was horrified when he heard about it. So it
> was going to be pretty hard to make that charge stick."

Berube does not state anywhere in his article as to where the sites he links to, show that the below claims by Chomsky are incorrect:

a) indictment charges were for crimes after the bombing

b) British parliamentary inquiry attributed most crimes comitted in

Kosovo to the KLA.

c) Dutch government found that Milosevic did not order, nor had any

knowledge of Srebrenica.

To show any of these incorrect, Berube (and his links) will have to show:

a) majority of indictment charges included crimes before bombing

b) British parliamentary inquiry did not reach stated conclusion

c) Dutch government did not reach stated conclusion

But let us go even further and do Berube's work for him i.e., weed through his hints (links) and find relevant sections. The link for the text "lies" points to a report by one organization (Institute for War and Peace Reporting) and their finding + *analysis* (not any determination of fact. Here, interestingly is what the report says:


> Under the Serbian constitution, the president of Serbia, a post that
> Milosevic held at the time, is directly responsible for the actions
> taken by his republic's police force.

That this is the form in which the guilt of Milosevic can be established comes further below (note that I do not disagree that this makes him guilty, but most important to our discussion, it does not in any way disprove Chomsky's point, and aids it by suggesting that lack of direct knowledge or involvement by Milosevic is not enough to save him from prosecution). More:


> Whether Milosevic knew that his police were sent to participate in
> the attack on the town is unclear. If he did, then the document will
> play a key role in proving genocide charges. If he didn't, it will
> still provide important evidence of crimes against humanity. For the
> former, intent has to be established; for the latter responsibility
> is enough.

The first sentence shows that this page in no way at all refutes Chomsky's statement.

More:


> A six-year, 6 million US dollar investigation by the Dutch
> government's Institute for War Documentation concluded in a
> 7,000-page report last April found no evidence linking the Belgrade
> government to the Srebrenica massacre.

Wait a second. This is the page that Berube links to under the melodramatic word "lies"?


> However, the document IWPR
> obtained clearly shows that members of Serbia's MUP were operating
> out of the key Bosnian Serb military stronghold of Trnovo, just
> outside of Sarajevo, and that they were transferred to Srebrenica and
> placed under the command of Bosnian Serb police colonel Ljubomir
> Borovcanin.

So IWPR has a document that leads them to think differently than the Dutch. This makes Chomsky a liar?

Let us in fact give Berube all the rope we have. Let us say he reads Chomsky to be explicitly saying that: there were no large-scale atrocities before the US-led attack and that Milosevic was not involved in and was unaware of Srebrenica.

This does not make Chomsky a Milosevic defender of course. As the cliche goes, context is everything, and the context of Chomsky's general critique of this matter is the motivation, legality and justification of the US-led attack on Yugoslavia. In that context, Chomsky is not examining if Milosevic is pure as milk but whether the US reasoning against him holds.

Now, back to Berube interpretation of Chomsky we have constructed just above: how does Chomsky make such a claim? He provides two pieces of information: the findings of a British parliamentary inquiry (atrocities), and the findings of the Dutch government (Srebrenica). Both fairly official sources which if anything would have a bias towards substantiating the US-NATO story. What is the hole that Berube finds in this? Presenting an alternate view to the British inquiry or the Danish findings does not necessarily negate them, far less make Chomsky a liar.

The thing is: one could have stopped at saying Chomsky is incorrect. The word "lies" is intentional grandstanding, and in this case, quite unsubstantiated, especially since there is one other burden: intentionality (on the part of Chomsky). To jump from inaccuracy to lying.


> PLEASE NOTE: I am not a chomsky fan, but I don't hate chomsky either.
> I agree with him on just about anything i've ever read. I just find
> it boring to read.

Its not about being a "fan" or not being a "fan". I am not a Chomsky "fan" either. But, I find Chomsky interesting and someone else boring. Tastes differ, I guess.


> I am also not wedded to my interpretation above, I just want someone
> to help me understand what is awful about what Berube said. As much
> as I love DP, I don't think Berube is engaged on Chomsky bashing and
> I don't think he is using logical fallacy, smearing by association.

Indeed he is doing exactly those two (the fallacies and lack of reasoning I outline above, the association is clear with the quick jump to Herman et al -- and it is noteworthy that even in tackling Herman he resorts to quoting the *opinions* of others, such as Ian Willaims), plus a bit more. And what is awful about it is that he is doing it while claiming to be a (or speaking on behalf of) true progressive(s).

If he considers himself part of the left there are better ways to bring out such disagreements.


> So... After all that, if this is going otturn into an idiot-fest
> telling me how wrong I am to be a Chomsky hater, I will ignore your
> asses. HA

Be a Chomsky-hater, fan, ambivalent, whatever your reasoning leads you to. But read through Berube's rant and the links he provides. And even if it is boring, consider again the bulk of Chomsky's writings and the meticulous attention to detail and the general absence of histrionics. And I write this as someone who has my own problems with Chomsky's style.


> I'm asking a legit quetions: I honestly don't understand the outrage
> with Berube. I know nothing about Black, don't care about him. But
> Berube I admire and respect a great deal.

Well, I have provided, I think, the first stab at showing the shallowness or entire absence of reasoning of Berube's rant.

--ravi

-- Support something better than yourself: ;-) PeTA: http://www.peta.org/ GreenPeace: http://www.greenpeace.org/ If you have nothing better to do: http://platosbeard.org/



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