Huey Long--Why does he get so little attention?

[Paul Rigby]

Uh, well, I've long wondered if he was a CIA limited hangout kinda guy since he seems to be a JFK conspiracy denier. He's also at MIT, a place long associated with the CIA, where he has access to many young minds he can mold.

I just found out he's a 911 conspiracy denier too. Much more at this link:
http://www.oilempire.us/chomsky.html

For a man so keen on the analysis of institutions, he's curiously reluctant to offer any kind of in-depth look at the Agency. Don't blame him, though - might lead into "difficult" territory.

One of the big problems with criticism of him is the unwillingness and/or inability of said critics to pay proper attention to his arguments. Many of them are too absurd for words. Here's a classic example of what I'm getting at:

Readers of The Chomsky Reader, edited by the sycophantic James Peck, learn that the great one visited Israel in 1953 “at the time of the Slansky trails in Czechoslovakia”(1).

We are first informed that the kibbutzim on which he stayed was “a functioning and very successful libertarian commune,” that he “liked…very much in many ways”(2), so much so that he “came close to returning there to live”(3). So far so clear.

Yet in the very next paragraph, we learn that this same “functioning and very successful libertarian commune” was nothing of the sort. It was, instead, a sectarian hellhole: “…the ideological conformity was appalling. I don’t know if I could have survived long in that environment because I was very strongly opposed to the Leninist ideology, as well as the general conformism…”(4).

This is ridiculously contradictory as straight autobiographical reminiscence, but then to read these paragraphs in that conventional way is to miss the point. For these “recollections” have nothing to do with an accurate history of Chomsky’s life and intellectual development. Instead, the great, shameless, absurd volte-face is “legend” creation. If his opinions were to carry weight with the CIA’s particular target audiences, and thus help set the limits of 1960s dissent, Chomksy had to be armoured against two principle likely objections: that he was a self-hating Jewish intellectual, and/or a Stalinoid fellow-traveller. Now we have the key to unlocking the contradictory farrago that is Chomsky’s characterisation of the kibbutzim he visited in 1953.

(1) James Peck (Ed.) The Chomsky Reader (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1992 reprint), p.10.

(2) Ibid., p.8.

(3) Ibid., pp.8-9.

(4) Ibid., p.9.