Noam Chomsky is a fool

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

There is some truth to this.

Cockburn got picked up by the LA times as a columnist after JFK.

Bugliosi--who is not a conservative, but who's book is wacky--used Chomsky's Vietnam stuff to critique Stone. And there is little doubt that their followers, at places like Counter Punch and Zee magazine--a community that is much smaller today thank GOd--do not consider JFK pure enough.

But what I tried to do in the article was to show just how agenda driven and wrong on the facts Chomsky is. In other words to discredit him as a scholar and show how he is just so twisted on the topic of JFK that he is useless. BTW, in AFter the Cataclysm, I don't recall him taking back what he said about Pol Pot.

Again, I invite Nathaniel to write an appendix to the piece and submit it to ctka.

I think I will try this Jim. Of course it will involve a radical new departure for me, personally.

Coherence.

I actually think that there is a possibility that what Chomsky is doing is deliberate disinformation. I base this on the sheer number of times Chomsky makes a completely wrong reference to JFK. Think the number of Stan Musial's lifetime doubles. But what really stands out is when he driv-by's JFK right in the middle of a completely different subject. Magda is certainly correct when she points out he makes some great points on lots of other topics. That is just the point: he would not have credibility with the targeted audience if he did not. So the question then becomes is this [jfk related bs} the quo for the quid of his other writings.

However my holding out the possibility that JFK is deliberately gate-keeping is not limited to his own writing. We need to look at the overall Twentieth Centruy history of propaganda, in particular that which developed during WWII. Even earlier Walter Lippmann critiqued the Creel, primarily for his crudeness. The Morgan- Lamont subsidies to the "leftish" New Republic soon followed, with Lippmann playing a key role in that gatekeeping publication.

During WWII press control was even more systematic but had the advantage of 20 years of communications research. People shoudl be sure and read Nervous Liberals by Brett Gary on how that poet whose name I can't remember, from his job as top dog at Library of Congress, helped refine censorship so that it would be more specifically tailiored toward left-liberals. Judging from the Cary McWilliams -Fred Cook disputes of 1964-66, it seems that some of this was used on McWilliams or perhaps he had already internalized this censorship.

I will try to type something up when I get some time.