Noam Chomsky and the Manufacturing of American Dissent: 2 videos

[Jan Klimkowski]

On pages 184 and 185 of the link here, Chomsky himself talks openly of his funding by the Pentagon:

http://books.google.com/books?id=nTMEirK...q=&f=false

He displays a pragmatism which you either find credible or incredible.

Personally, I find it rather incredible that Chomsky would take military money in such a seemingly casual manner. However, he is correct that it is very hard to work for an institution such as MIT and not take Pentagon or corporate money because that is how research is funded in American educational establishments.

There is a distinction between receiving Pentagon money and, say, MK-ULTRA money. Money which is funding "science" which is part of an MK-ULTRA type programme, such as Ewan Cameron's shock therapy work, is usually hidden behind front companies or foundations.

The post-war decades were the era of the Human Ecology Fund, the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research and the Macy Foundation. America is the country of private foundations whose true agendas are often carefully hidden.

Here is an account of how science was funded by intelligence front companies and organizations in the post-WW2 decades:

For anyone interested in the current functioning of pharmaceutical funding the implications of this will be clear. MK-Ultra used CIA money to fund university academics through front bodies designed to look like legitimate funding institutions[19]. We now know much about the identity of these conduits for MK-ULTRA funds. The Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, the Macy Foundation and The Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology served as funding fronts for MKULTRA financing of academics[20][27].

Dr. Charles Geschickter, a Georgetown doctor served both as researcher and funding conduit. CIA documents indicate that Geschickter tested drugs on mentally disturbed patients at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington. For his own research he received $655,000 in CIA funds[3] (about $7 million at 2008 value). The CIA and MK-ULTRA provided secret funding for the construction of a wing of Georgetown University Hospital in the 1950s[20] to carry out clinical testing of LSD and other agents. Dr. Charles F. Geschickter acted as cover for CIA financing[20].

Professors Harold Wolff and Lawrence Hinkle of Cornell University fronted the "The Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology"[3], a C.I.A organization used to channel money for MK-ULTRA research. Harold Wolff was President of the New York Neurological Association and would become, in 1960, President of the American Neurological Association. He served for several years as editor-in-chief of the American Medical Association's Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry.[3]. In 1961 The Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology was reorganized as the Human Ecology Fund and operations of this front organization shifted to Cornell University’s Medical School[19]. James L. Monroe and later David Rhodes directed the fund[19]. Also on the Human Ecology board were Leonard Carmichael, head of the Smithsonian Institution, Barnaby Keeney president of Brown University, and George A. Kelly, at Ohio State University[3]. Despite signing documents which clearly indicated the funding source, Hinkle claimed that it was never his or Cornell's intention that the Society would be used as a CIA funding conduit.[3]

Many prominent names were funded through The Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, including:[19] B. F. Skinner, Carl Rogers, Carolyn and Musafer Sherif, Margaret Mead, Charles Osgood, Hans Eysenck and Martin Orne.

The CIA even conducted a study which found that the use of legitimate foundations was the most effective way of concealing the CIA’s hand. This study study suggested that this was ‘particularly effective for democratically-run membership organizations, which need to assure their own unwitting members and collaborators, as well as their hostile critics, that they have genuine, respectable, private sources of income.’ (US Senate 1976: 182-183)[19]

In some cases funding was passed through ostensible research foundation auspices to conceal the source of funding from the researcher's institution[10][28] even if the researchers themselves were aware.

It is undoubtedly the case that a few of these academics did not know the true source of funds. As pointed out in the Church Report these researchers were disabled from exercising choice to withdraw based on the nature of the sponsor[28]. Price discusses the way in which anthropologists such as Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson had "uncritical reliance on legitimate-seeming organizations that were secretly CIA funding fronts"[19]. Most researchers conducting the worst types of MK-ULTRA research could hardly have been unaware.

http://www.thejabberwock.org/wiki/index....ing_fronts

I see no proof in any of the links posted by Paul Rigby that the money received from the Pentagon by Chomsky originated with the CIA or NSA.

If it can be proved that the money originated with an intelligence agency, then it would be important to know when this was established and whether those taking the money knew. Or should have taken steps to find out.

Then there is the question of whether Chomsky's pure academic research was actually part of a malign NSA/CIA project. There is an attempt to make the case in the quote below:

But this project was actually funded NOT by the military, but by the CIA and NSA. From a prior post, "Manovich on Chomsky's CIA Ties," which observes that Chomsky, who worked on the program, took some of the ideas he helped develop for the CIA and NSA to his work on "mechanical translation," a full-fledged intelligence program directed against the Soviet Union:

"... The idea of computer vision became possible and the economic means to realize this idea became available only with the shift from industrial to post-industrial society after World War II. The attention turned from the automation of the body to the automation of the mind, from physical to mental labor. This new concern with the automation of mental functions such as vision, hearing, reasoning, problem solving is exemplified by the very names of the two new fields that emerged during the 1950s and 1960s -- artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology. The latter gradually replacing behaviorism, the dominant psychology of the "Fordism" era. The emergence of the field of computer vision is a part of this cognitive revolution, a revolution which was financed by the military escalation of the Cold War. This connection is solidified in the very term "artificial intelligence" which may refer simultaneously to two meanings of "intelligence": reason, the ability to learn or understand, and information concerning an enemy or a possible enemy or an area. Artificial intelligence: artificial reason to analyze collected information, collected intelligence. In the 1950s, faced with the enormous task of gathering and analyzing written, photographic, and radar information about the enemy, the CIA and the NSA (National Security Agency) began to fund the first artificial intelligence projects. One of the earliest projects was a Program for Mechanical Translation, initiated in the early 1950s in the attempt to automate the monitoring of Soviet communications and media. The work on mechanical translation was probably the major cause of many subsequent developments in modern linguistics, its move towards formalization; it can be discerned in Noam Chomsky's early theory which, by postulating the existence of language universals in the domain of grammar, implied that translation between arbitrary human languages could be automated."

 Alex Constantine

If I understand it correctly, the claim is that because Chomsky was working on universal or innate grammar, he was helping the NSA or CIA to create mechanical, non-human, translation systems for intelligence gathering purposes.

Chomsky published his Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory in 1955. Crude microprocessors were only introduced in the early 1970s.

If the claim is that Chomsky's linguistics research is somehow responsible for the intelligence gathering of global systems such as Echelon, then I find it implausible.

Pure and fundamental science, which is what Chomsky appears to have been undertaking in his linguistics work, can be used for good or evil purposes. Stem cell research is a classic example.

By the logic displayed above, any researcher working on Esperanto, attempting to create a universal human language, could be serving the interest of the NSA. I haven't researched Esperanto, but it may be that a detailed analysis would reveal that Esperanto research was primarily funded by intelligence agencies.

Would that make the Esperanto professors assets of intelligences agencies?

Surely it depends on whether they were witting or not.

So, I see no proof of either CIA or NSA funding, or that Chomsky's work was wittingly serving the beast.

By comparison, the research of Ewen Cameron, Martin Orne, Louis Jolyon West or Robert G Heath was always malign and destructive. That they were all ultimately revealed as MK-ULTRA participants was no real suprize.

There is no meaningful comparison that I can see between the witting destruction of memory and brain functionality in the attempt to create malleable human tabula rasae of the MK-ULTRA professors, and the witting attempt to discover a universal human grammar in the work of the MIT professor.

With the caveat that, inevitably, all science can potentially serve the beast, regardless of the intentions and wishes of the scientist.

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As for Paul Rigby's insults, his frequent MO is to accuse anyone who disagrees with him of being a "left gatekeeper" or an intelligence asset.

So, it was only a matter of time before he hurled such insults at me.