> Chomsky replied: "Find one government in the world which does."
> Well, we can start with Venezuela and Serbia, Noam, you feisty devil.
Chomsky's been getting a lot of mileage out of this, as I've seen him repeat it in multiple places--he's repurposing the line in Zizekian proportions. But as I smartassly pointed out, it's not true. Even the next part of the story Dennis forwarded showed this:
> "The young man asked me whether I had ever been denied entry into other
> countries. I told him that once, to Czechoslovakia, after the Soviet
> invasion in 1968," he said, adding that he had gone to visit ousted
> Czechoslovak leader Alexander Dubcek, whose reforms the Soviets crushed.
Well, it turns out that Chomsky was trying to get into Palestine in order to...meet with a high government official:
"He was scheduled to deliver a lecture at Bir Zeit University near Ramallah and was scheduled to meet with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad."
Not only that, but Chomsky's has the highest of praise for Fayyad and the Third Way Palestinian government:
"I was going to meet with the Prime Minister. Unfortunately, I couldn’t. But his office called me here in Amman this morning, and we had a long discussion.
He is pursuing policies, which, in my view, are quite sensible, policies of essentially developing facts on the ground. It’s almost—I think it’s probably a conscious imitation of the early Zionist policies, establishing facts on the ground and hoping that the political forms that follow will be determined by them. And the policies sound to me like sensible and sound ones."
What a ridiculous figure Chomsky has become: No government likes what I have to say, he says as he's on the way to seek an audience with and give counsel to a government, one headed by a World Bank-trained neoliberal reformer. Why does the world's most famous anarchist seem to want to be consultant for states?