Noam Chomsky and the Manufacturing of American Dissent: 2 videos

[Paul Rigby]

Sadly, I sense a battle with the Media Lens Luvvies approaching. Oh dear.

Then let me slip an arrow or two into the quiver, Brother Presland, afore we march off to, er, the bar perhaps?

Paired contradictions in Rethinking Camelot

Throughout Rethinking Camelot, Chomsky invites the reader to hold two mutually incompatible pairs of propositions in mind.

The first pair of propositions holds that “Falsification of the historical record, often reaching quite impressive levels, can persist for many centuries” (p.8) – but not, of course, in the case of JFK’s assassination, for “[T]here is not a phrase in the voluminous internal record hinting at any thought” of a conspiracy (p.37). This doctrine, of assassination exceptionalism, is the Chomskeian equivalent of the myth of American exceptionalism. It’s manifest absurdity – why is the CIA still fighting so bitterly to withhold records? – merits no further comment.

The second pair of contradictions simultaneously has it that “Policy flows from institutions, reflecting the needs of power and privilege within them, and can be understood only if these factors are recognized, including in the case under examination” (p.9), while throughout the book we are bombarded not with an institutional analysis of the CIA, which he is largely content to depict as naught but a collection of prescient and ignored analysts, but by the repeated insistence that the horrors of Vietnam were the personal responsibility of John F. Kennedy:

“Kennedy escalated” (p.2); “John F. Kennedy’s escalation” (p.23); “Kennedy’s escalation” (p.27); “Kennedy…escalated the war” (p.37); “JFK raised the level of US attack” (p.43); “As he prepared to escalate the war…in late 1961” (p.46); “Kennedy’s 1961-62 escalation” (p.51); “his 1961-1962 escalation” (p.67).

And:

”Kennedy’s war” (p.2); “Kennedy’s war” (p.36); “Kennedy’s war” (p.39); “Kennedy’s war” (p.52); “Kennedy’s war” (p.53); “Kennedy’s war” (p.69); “Kennedy’s war” (p.73); “Kennedy’s war” (p.81); “Kennedy’s war” (p.86); “Kennedy’s war” (p.105).

Or:

”Kennedy…his aggression” (p.15); “Kennedy moved on to armed attack” (p.25); “JFK’s aggression” (p.32); “JFK’s aggression” (p.35); “Kennedy’s aggression” (p.52); “Kennedy’s aggression” (p.63); “JFK’s 1961-1962 aggression” (p.66); “JFK’s aggression” (p.115).

It should be noted that this propaganda line is not sustained with complete discipline. At one point in Rethinking Camelot, we learn that “[T]he internal record reveals that Kennedy left decisions on Vietnam largely in the hands of his advisers” (p.116), an assertion that is both untrue and nowhere developed subsequently by old scrupulous from MIT.

Chomsky’s enduring failure to offer any kind of institutional analysis of the CIA is revealing, and unavoidable, for to embark on an honest appraisal of the Agency’s position under JFK would inevitably lead to a stark, unwelcome fact: The CIA was under severe institutional threat in the last year of Kennedy’s life and presidency. The most powerful bureaucratic challenge came from the Defense Intelligence Agency, the organisation McNamara conjured into being in August 1961, as a direct follow up to three National Security Action Memoranda (55-57) which issued from the RFK-headed (though Maxwell Taylor-fronted) enquiry into the CIA’s conduct of the Bay of Pigs operation.

NSAMs 55-57 effectively stripped the CIA of its responsibility for covert ops of any significance, transferring control of future paramilitary ops to the JCS. With the formation of the DIA, the Agency was faced with a rival intended to supplant it across the board. How do we know this? From a veteran CIA mouthpiece, Stewart Alsop, writing in the pages of another venerable Agency mouthpiece, the Saturday Evening Post, in late July 1963.

“CIA: The battle for secret power” is the Agency’s version of that struggle with the DIA. It, too, like Chomsky’s Rethinking Camelot, boasts contradiction at its heart. Alsop simultaneously sought to reassure that, post-Bay of Pigs, the CIA “was back at the top” of the intelligence “heap” (p.18), even as it detailed the very challenges posed to the Agency by the upstart, whose “empire,” an outraged Alsop noted, “is rapidly expanding” (p.21). Referring to the “13 issues” that had “arisen at last report between CIA and DIA” (Ibid.), he went on:

“Will the DIA’s intelligence bulletins circulate outside the Pentagon in competition with CIA’s? Who maintains liaison with friendly foreign intelligence, like M.I.6? Who ‘owns’ the CIA-created national photo interpretation centre? Who owns such technical devices as the U-2?...Above all, who runs covert operations and where? This is the most sensitive issue of all” (Ibid.)

The Kennedys were much better infighters than we are commonly lead to believe. They had the CIA under more severe pressure in 1963 than any Presidency before or since. Dallas was the CIA's response.