10-06-2010, 08:49 PM
Jan Klimkowski Wrote:Paul - do you seriously believe that Noam Chomsky and Peter Schweizer speak for, in your phrase, the "same people"?
Absolutely.
The overt right has been taking constrained pot-shots at this intellectual secret policeman since the mid-1960s. Chomsky didn't smell right to the Encounter set from the outset. The problem was, and what a frustration it must have been, they couldn't exceed certain limits in their criticism of him. I mean, Irving Kristol, the CIA hack, couldn't very well denounce Noam Chomsky as one, could he?
This frustrated impotence continued through such pieces as Leopold Labedz's "Under Western Eyes: Chomsky Revisited" (Encounter, July 1980, p.34), down to the present.
So Schweizer's attack - a carefully delimited one - has a pedigree on the overt right.
"There are three sorts of conspiracy: by the people who complain, by the people who write, by the people who take action. There is nothing to fear from the first group, the two others are more dangerous; but the police have to be part of all three,"
Joseph Fouche
Joseph Fouche