Jeremy Scahill on 9/11

[Paul Rigby]

... to describe them as "left gatekeepers" because you disagree with this or that and thereby throw out everything published there is plain crazy.

Nothing to do with opinion, it's a matter of evidence. Chomsky is a left-gatekeeper not because I want him to be so, or don't like the cut of his gib, but because he lies, chiefly, but by no means exclusively, by selectivity, hypocrisy, omission and inversion. The evidence for this is unarguable. You demonstrate this rather well by your steadfast refusal to engage with it. I don't blame you.

Chomsky on the Lone Nutter in the White House, 1961-63

Stone’s JFK, whatever its precise strengths and weaknesses, provoked a new generation to look at the assassination. This bubble of interest had to be swiftly deflated, and America’s centre-left preserved from contamination by conspiratorialist fever. Who better to inject the narcotic of conformity than the CIA’s favourite left-gatekeeper, the Gnome?

Rethinking Camelot, the preferred delivery mechanism, is one of the crudest pieces of CIA hackwork ever written. Much of it is laughably bad. Consider the question of responsibility for the US assault on Vietnam.

Early on in the book - all the quotations to follow are from the Verso paperback edition published in London in 1993 – Chomsky serves up one of those impressive-seeming, quasi-aphoristic criterion which so intoxicate his army of academic exegetes and hagiographers:

“Policy flows from institutions reflecting the needs of power and privilege within them, and can be understood only if these factors are recognized, including the case now under review” (p.9).

That eternal verity solemnly proclaimed, Chomsky proceeds to ignore it more or less entirely for the rest of the book.

How so? The text is littered with a mantra which makes nonsense of Chomsky’s assertion: It wasn’t an institution what done it, after all, it was that bloody awful man Kennedy. Single-handedly. Count the violations of Chomsky’s own tenet:

“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).

Just in case his less nimble readers missed the point, the Gnome served up a variation on the theme. Subtlety, as we shall see, was not his strongpoint:

”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).

Still not got it? Chomsky had a third variant on the same basic slogan:

”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).

Impressively sophisticated stuff: If you can’t convince ‘em with the quality of your argument or evidence, beat ‘em into submission by mindless repetition. Was Chomsky’s real research at MIT anything to do with mind control/MK Ultra, one wonders? Psychic driving, anyone?