Noam Chomsky and the Manufacturing of American Dissent: 2 videos

[Jan Klimkowski]

If John Judge's reading of Chomsky's answers is correct, and I have no reason to doubt otherwise, then yes, uncle Noam is trapped within his own analysis. And that analysis, in my opinion, is wrong.

I also think that Judge's explanation of why Chomsky's analysis is wrong is highly accurate.

I've transcribed the crucial part of Judge's analysis, from around 16mins in:

"The bottom line for Chomsky is 'do you like the guy [JFK] or not?' If you don't like him, it wasn't a conspiracy. That's really what it comes to. He doesn't think from his left critique of Kennedy, that Kennedy was worth killing. Kennedy was just a ruling class bastard like the rest. He had it coming, you know. He was doing all the dirt. So why bother studying it. And if you think killing a President can make any difference, you don't understand how class structure works. You don't understand how things happen. And you're just a starry-eyed liberal to think it makes any difference. And they wouldn't have killed Kennedy, because, after all, Chomsky didn't like Kennedy and he wasn't worth killing.

"But it's not the left critique of Kennedy that makes any difference. It's the right critique that makes the difference. Because it's not what Chomsky thought of him. It's what Curtis LeMay thought. Because Chomsky isn't going to shoot him and Curtis LeMay would.

"And that's the difference. You can go down the south today, and you can see in the homes of the poor, on the wall, pictures of Jesus, Martin Luther King and the Kennedy brothers. And you can stick your leftist nose in the air and say that that was 'false hope'. But it was hope. And it was a hope that they knew was moving people, and they knew that Kennedy was responding to popular movements, and it was that hope that they meant to kill in Memphis and Los Angeles and Dallas here in 1963

.....

"Because that was the last President who actually responded to the public will and with enough brains between his ears to make them worth blowing out. And this attitude turns around completely when you talk about King. And that's why I say ask these fellas from the left who say there's no such thing as a conspiracy about King and suddenly they become wilder conspiracy theorists than us. Because, after all, there was a reason to kill Martin Luther King."

This is, in my judgement, an entirely accurate dissection of the fundamental flaw in Chomsky's analysis. Chomsky doesn't believe in Camelot, or in JFK as a left-wing threat to the system. He believes JFK is just another, entirely replaceable, figurehead for enduring power structures. Therefore, in Chomsky's analysis, it makes no sense for the power structures to kill Kennedy because he (Chomsky) believes JFK is no threat to those power structures. Whereas Martin Luther King is a threat to the power structures, and so Chomsky does believe in a conspiracy of the power structures to kill him.

I agree with Judge that Chomsky's "left critique" of Kennedy is irrelevant to the question of how and by whom JFK was assassinated. Precisely because it was the "right critique", (Curtis LeMay in Judge's shorthand), which did perceive Kennedy as a threat and would be prepared to eliminate that threat. By blowing the President's brains out in broad daylight.

Chomsky is wrong about the assassination of Kennedy. But I see no proof that this is because he an asset of the CIA or the NSA or some other intelligence agency.

Chomsky is wrong because, in my judgement, his "left critique" of Kennedy is flawed, and fails to grasp the deep political reality of the power structures that did, correctly, perceive JFK to be a threat.