Noam Chomsky and the Manufacturing of American Dissent: 2 videos

[Jan Klimkowski]

On pages 184 and 185 of the link here, Chomsky himself talks openly of his funding by the Pentagon:

http://books.google.com/books?id=nTMEirK...q=&f=false

He displays a pragmatism which you either find credible or incredible.

Personally, I find it rather incredible that Chomsky would take military money in such a seemingly casual manner. However, he is correct that it is very hard to work for an institution such as MIT and not take Pentagon or corporate money because that is how research is funded in American educational establishments.

There is a distinction between receiving Pentagon money and, say, MK-ULTRA money. Money which is funding "science" which is part of an MK-ULTRA type programme, such as Ewan Cameron's shock therapy work, is usually hidden behind front companies or foundations.

The post-war decades were the era of the Human Ecology Fund, the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research and the Macy Foundation. America is the country of private foundations whose true agendas are often carefully hidden.

Here is an account of how science was funded by intelligence front companies and organizations in the post-WW2 decades:

For anyone interested in the current functioning of pharmaceutical funding the implications of this will be clear. MK-Ultra used CIA money to fund university academics through front bodies designed to look like legitimate funding institutions[19]. We now know much about the identity of these conduits for MK-ULTRA funds. The Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, the Macy Foundation and The Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology served as funding fronts for MKULTRA financing of academics[20][27].

Dr. Charles Geschickter, a Georgetown doctor served both as researcher and funding conduit. CIA documents indicate that Geschickter tested drugs on mentally disturbed patients at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington. For his own research he received $655,000 in CIA funds[3] (about $7 million at 2008 value). The CIA and MK-ULTRA provided secret funding for the construction of a wing of Georgetown University Hospital in the 1950s[20] to carry out clinical testing of LSD and other agents. Dr. Charles F. Geschickter acted as cover for CIA financing[20].

Professors Harold Wolff and Lawrence Hinkle of Cornell University fronted the "The Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology"[3], a C.I.A organization used to channel money for MK-ULTRA research. Harold Wolff was President of the New York Neurological Association and would become, in 1960, President of the American Neurological Association. He served for several years as editor-in-chief of the American Medical Association's Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry.[3]. In 1961 The Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology was reorganized as the Human Ecology Fund and operations of this front organization shifted to Cornell University’s Medical School[19]. James L. Monroe and later David Rhodes directed the fund[19]. Also on the Human Ecology board were Leonard Carmichael, head of the Smithsonian Institution, Barnaby Keeney president of Brown University, and George A. Kelly, at Ohio State University[3]. Despite signing documents which clearly indicated the funding source, Hinkle claimed that it was never his or Cornell's intention that the Society would be used as a CIA funding conduit.[3]

Many prominent names were funded through The Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, including:[19] B. F. Skinner, Carl Rogers, Carolyn and Musafer Sherif, Margaret Mead, Charles Osgood, Hans Eysenck and Martin Orne.

The CIA even conducted a study which found that the use of legitimate foundations was the most effective way of concealing the CIA’s hand. This study study suggested that this was ‘particularly effective for democratically-run membership organizations, which need to assure their own unwitting members and collaborators, as well as their hostile critics, that they have genuine, respectable, private sources of income.’ (US Senate 1976: 182-183)[19]

In some cases funding was passed through ostensible research foundation auspices to conceal the source of funding from the researcher's institution[10][28] even if the researchers themselves were aware.

It is undoubtedly the case that a few of these academics did not know the true source of funds. As pointed out in the Church Report these researchers were disabled from exercising choice to withdraw based on the nature of the sponsor[28]. Price discusses the way in which anthropologists such as Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson had "uncritical reliance on legitimate-seeming organizations that were secretly CIA funding fronts"[19]. Most researchers conducting the worst types of MK-ULTRA research could hardly have been unaware.

http://www.thejabberwock.org/wiki/index....ing_fronts

I see no proof in any of the links posted by Paul Rigby that the money received from the Pentagon by Chomsky originated with the CIA or NSA.

If it can be proved that the money originated with an intelligence agency, then it would be important to know when this was established and whether those taking the money knew. Or should have taken steps to find out.

Then there is the question of whether Chomsky's pure academic research was actually part of a malign NSA/CIA project. There is an attempt to make the case in the quote below:

But this project was actually funded NOT by the military, but by the CIA and NSA. From a prior post, "Manovich on Chomsky's CIA Ties," which observes that Chomsky, who worked on the program, took some of the ideas he helped develop for the CIA and NSA to his work on "mechanical translation," a full-fledged intelligence program directed against the Soviet Union:

"... The idea of computer vision became possible and the economic means to realize this idea became available only with the shift from industrial to post-industrial society after World War II. The attention turned from the automation of the body to the automation of the mind, from physical to mental labor. This new concern with the automation of mental functions such as vision, hearing, reasoning, problem solving is exemplified by the very names of the two new fields that emerged during the 1950s and 1960s -- artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology. The latter gradually replacing behaviorism, the dominant psychology of the "Fordism" era. The emergence of the field of computer vision is a part of this cognitive revolution, a revolution which was financed by the military escalation of the Cold War. This connection is solidified in the very term "artificial intelligence" which may refer simultaneously to two meanings of "intelligence": reason, the ability to learn or understand, and information concerning an enemy or a possible enemy or an area. Artificial intelligence: artificial reason to analyze collected information, collected intelligence. In the 1950s, faced with the enormous task of gathering and analyzing written, photographic, and radar information about the enemy, the CIA and the NSA (National Security Agency) began to fund the first artificial intelligence projects. One of the earliest projects was a Program for Mechanical Translation, initiated in the early 1950s in the attempt to automate the monitoring of Soviet communications and media. The work on mechanical translation was probably the major cause of many subsequent developments in modern linguistics, its move towards formalization; it can be discerned in Noam Chomsky's early theory which, by postulating the existence of language universals in the domain of grammar, implied that translation between arbitrary human languages could be automated."

 Alex Constantine

If I understand it correctly, the claim is that because Chomsky was working on universal or innate grammar, he was helping the NSA or CIA to create mechanical, non-human, translation systems for intelligence gathering purposes.

Chomsky published his Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory in 1955. Crude microprocessors were only introduced in the early 1970s.

If the claim is that Chomsky's linguistics research is somehow responsible for the intelligence gathering of global systems such as Echelon, then I find it implausible.

Pure and fundamental science, which is what Chomsky appears to have been undertaking in his linguistics work, can be used for good or evil purposes. Stem cell research is a classic example.

By the logic displayed above, any researcher working on Esperanto, attempting to create a universal human language, could be serving the interest of the NSA. I haven't researched Esperanto, but it may be that a detailed analysis would reveal that Esperanto research was primarily funded by intelligence agencies.

Would that make the Esperanto professors assets of intelligences agencies?

Surely it depends on whether they were witting or not.

So, I see no proof of either CIA or NSA funding, or that Chomsky's work was wittingly serving the beast.

By comparison, the research of Ewen Cameron, Martin Orne, Louis Jolyon West or Robert G Heath was always malign and destructive. That they were all ultimately revealed as MK-ULTRA participants was no real suprize.

There is no meaningful comparison that I can see between the witting destruction of memory and brain functionality in the attempt to create malleable human tabula rasae of the MK-ULTRA professors, and the witting attempt to discover a universal human grammar in the work of the MIT professor.

With the caveat that, inevitably, all science can potentially serve the beast, regardless of the intentions and wishes of the scientist.

----------------------

As for Paul Rigby's insults, his frequent MO is to accuse anyone who disagrees with him of being a "left gatekeeper" or an intelligence asset.

So, it was only a matter of time before he hurled such insults at me.

[Jack White]

Why does ANYONE give a fatratsass what Chomsky thinks.

To discuss him is to dignify him.

Jack

[Paul Rigby]

Why does ANYONE give a fatratsass what Chomsky thinks.

To discuss him is to dignify him.

Jack

In one sense, Jack, I'm only too sympathetic. His cowardice and dishonesty are so brazen and contemptible as to render him beyond the realm of civilized discourse. And yet, there is a serious side to this, and I can't think of any writer who has put it better than DiEugenio:

http://www.ctka.net/pr197-left.html

From the January-February, 1997 issue (Vol. 4 No. 2)

The Left and the Death of Kennedy

By Jim DiEugenio

In this issue we are glad to be able to excerpt parts of a new book by Dr. Martin Schotz. This new work, History Will Not Absolve Us, is an anthology of essays on varying aspects of the Kennedy case. In that regard it resembles previous anthologies like Government by Gunplay, and The Assassinations. This new collection compares favorably with those two. One of the glories of the book is that it includes Vincent Salandria’s early, epochal essays published in 1964 and 1965 on the medical and ballistics evidence. These essays were written in direct response to comments given by another Philadelphia lawyer, Arlen Specter, at the conclusion of the Warren Commission’s work. Working only from evidence available to the Commission and in the public record, Salandria shatters the case against Oswald almost as soon as it was issued. It is a shame that we have had to wait so long to see Salandria’s wonderful work collected in book form.

There is more. Schotz has included a speech made by Fidel Castro, in which, from just reading the press reports off the wire services, he 1) exposes the murder as a conspiracy, 2) shows Oswald for what he was, 3) points towards the elements in American society from where the plot emanated, and 4) indicates the reasons for the murder. All this within twenty hours of the assassination. Shotz’s opening essay furthers his ideas used in Gaeton Fonzi’s book, The Last Investigation, dealing with concepts of belief versus knowledge and what that means for the mass psychology of American society. This fascinating, intuitive essay gives the book both its tone and its title—a play on a phrase used more than once by Castro.

There is much more to recommend the book. We choose to excerpt here two particular selections: one in whole, the other in part. They both deal with the response of the left, or as Ray Marcus terms it the “liberal establishment”, to the Kennedy assassination. The first excerpt is an analysis by Schotz of the early editorial policy of The Nation to the assassination. The second section is from Ray Marcus’ monograph Addendum B, originally published in 1995. We chose to excerpt these for three reasons. It shows both Schotz and Marcus at their best. Both the people and institutions they discuss are still around. And finally, what they deal with here is an emblematic problem that is so large and painful—the response of liberals to high-level assassination as a political tool—that no one left of center wishes to confront it.

Concerning the second point, The Nation repeated its pitiful performance when the film JFK was released by giving much space to writers like Alexander Cockburn and Max Holland. Neither of these men could find any evidence of conspiracy in the Kennedy case, any value to Kennedy’s presidency, or any validity to the scholarship within the critical community. In other words, a leading “liberal” magazine was acting like Ben Bradlee and the Washington Post. As far as The Nation is concerned, their editorial policy has been quite consistent throughout a 33 year period. Their article policy, with very few exceptions, has also been uniform.

Ray Marcus extends this analysis. Marcus is one of the original, “first generation” group of researchers. In 1995 he privately published his Addendum B, which is a personal and moving chronicle of his attempts to get people in high places interested in advocating the Kennedy assassination as a cause. Ray has allowed Schotz to include sections of that important work in the book. Probe has excerpted the parts of Ray’s work which touch on the reaction of the left, both old and new, to the assassination. We feel that the section entitled “Five Professors” is especially relevant. For in this section, Ray reveals his personal encounters with some of the leading intellectuals of that ‘60’s and ‘70’s movement called the “New Left”, namely Howard Zinn, Gar Alperovitz, Martin Peretz, and Noam Chomsky. He shows how each of them rejected his plea. The instances of Peretz and Chomsky are both important and enlightening. For Peretz, in 1974, purchased The New Republic, another supposedly liberal publication. He owned it during the period of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Except for excerpting declassified executive session transcripts of the Warren Commission in the mid-seventies, I can remember no important article in that publication dealing with the JFK case during his tenure. In fact, at the end of that investigation, The New Republic let none other than Tom Bethell have the last word on that investigation. Ray shows why Peretz allowed this bizarre, irresponsible choice. Bethell’s 1979 article tried to bury Kennedy’s death. Five years later, his periodical tried to bury his life. It actually made a feature article out of a review of the tawdry Horowitz-Collier family biography The Kennedys. Who did that publication find suitable to review this National Enquirer version of the Kennedy clan? None other than Midge Decter, wife of neo-conservative godfather Norman Podhoretz, mother-in-law of Elliot Abrams. Decter, presumably with the Peretz blessing, canonized this Kitty Kelley antecedent.

Ray’s encounter with Chomsky is especially revealing and will be disturbing to adherents of the MIT professor. In his book, Looking For the Enemy, Michael Morrisey includes parts of a 1992 letter from Chomsky. In discussing a government conspiracy to murder and cover-up the assassination, the esteemed professor writes:

That would be an interesting question if there were any reason to believe that it happened. Since I see no credible evidence for that belief, I can’t accept that the issue is as you pose it. (p.6)

Apparently, Chomsky never thought that Marcus would include their three hour session over just three pieces of evidence. This exposes the above statement, and Chomsky’s public stance since Stone’s film, as a deception.

Chomsky and his good friend and soulmate on the JFK case, Alexander Cockburn went on an (orchestrated?) campaign at the time of Stone’s JFK to convince whatever passes for the left in this country that the murder of Kennedy was 1) not the result of a conspiracy, and 2) didn’t matter even if it was. They were given unlimited space in magazines like The Nation and Z Magazine. But, as Howard Zinn implied in a recent letter to Schotz defending Chomsky, these stances are not based on facts or evidence, but on a political choice. They choose not to fight this battle. They would rather spend their time and effort on other matters. When cornered themselves, Chomsky and Cockburn resort to rhetorical devices like exaggeration, sarcasm, and ridicule. In other words, they resort to propaganda and evasion.

CTKA believes that this is perhaps the most obvious and destructive example of Schotz’s “denial.” For if we take Chomsky and Cockburn as being genuine in their crusades—no matter how unattractive their tactics—their myopia about politics is breathtaking. For if the assassinations of the ‘60’s did not matter—and Morrisey notes that these are Chomsky’s sentiments—then why has the crowd the left plays to shrunk and why has the field of play tilted so far to the right? Anyone today who was around in the ‘60’s will tell you that the Kennedys, King, and Malcolm X electrified the political debate, not so much because of their (considerable) oratorical powers, but because they were winning. On the issues of economic justice, withdrawal from Southeast Asia, civil rights, a more reasonable approach to the Third World, and a tougher approach to the power elite within the U.S., they and the left were making considerable headway. The very grounds of the debate had shifted to the center and leftward on these and other issues. As one commentator has written, today the bright young Harvard lawyers go to work on Wall Street, in the sixties they went to work for Ralph Nader.

The promise of the Kennedys or King speaking on these issues could galvanize huge crowds in the streets. But even more importantly, these men had convinced a large part of both the white middle class, and the younger generation that their shared interests were not with the wealthy and powerful elites, but with the oppressed and minorities. Today, that tendency has been pretty much reversed. Most of the general public and the media have retreated into a reactionary pose. And some of the most reactionary people are now esteemed public figures e.g. Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Howard Stern, people who would have been mocked or ridiculed in the ‘60’s. And the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, under no pressure to disguise their real sympathies, can call Limbaugh a mainstream conservative (12/2/96).

What remains of the left in this country today can be roughly epitomized by the nexus of The Nation, the Pacifica Radio network (in six major cities), and the media group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting). We won’t include The New Republic in this equation since Peretz has now moved so far to the right he can’t be called a liberal anymore. The Nation has a circulation of about 98,000. Except for its New York outlet, WBAI, Pacifica is nowhere near the force it was in the sixties and seventies. The FAIR publication EXTRA has a circulation of about 17,000. To use just one comparison, the rightwing American Spectator reaches over 500,000. To use another point of comparison, the truly liberal Ramparts, which had no compunctions taking on the assassinations, reached over 300,000. As recently declassified CIA documents reveal, Ramparts became so dangerous that it was targeted by James Angleton.

One of this besieged enclave’s main support groups is the New York/Hollywood theater and film crowd, which was recently instrumental in bailing out The Nation. As more than one humorous commentator has pointed out, for them a big cause is something like animal rights. Speaking less satirically, they did recently pull in $680,000 in one night for the Dalai Lama and Tibet. Whatever the merits of that cause, and it has some, we don’t think it will galvanize youth or the middle class or provoke much of a revolution in political consciousness. On the other hand, knowing, that our last progressive president was killed in a blatant conspiracy; that a presidentially appointed inquest then consciously covered it up; that the mainstream media like the Post and the Times acquiesced in that effort; that this assassination led to the death of 58,000 Americans and two million Vietnamese; to us that’s quite a consciousness raiser. Chomsky, Cockburn and most of their acolytes don’t seem to think so.

In the ‘80’s, Bill Moyers questioned Chomsky on this point, that the political activism of the ‘60’s had receded and that Martin Luther King had been an integral part of that scene. Chomsky refused to acknowledge this obvious fact. He said it really wasn’t so. His evidence: he gets more speaking invitations today ( A World of Ideas, p. 48). The man who disingenuously avoids a conspiracy in the JFK case now tells us to ignore Reagan, Bush, Gingrich, Limbaugh, Stern and the rest. It doesn’t matter. He just spoke to 300 people at NYU. Schotz and Marcus have given us a textbook case of denial.

With the help of Marty and Ray, what Probe is trying to do here is not so much explain the reaction, or non-reaction, of the Left to the death of John Kennedy. What we are really saying is that, in the face of that non-reaction, the murder of Kennedy was the first step that led to the death of the Left. That’s the terrible truth that most of these men and organizations can’t bring themselves to state. If they did, they would have to admit their complicity in that result.

[Peter Presland]

Why does ANYONE give a fatratsass what Chomsky thinks.

To discuss him is to dignify him.

Jack

In one sense, Jack, I'm only too sympathetic. His cowardice and dishonesty are so brazen and contemptible as to render him beyond the realm of civilized discourse. And yet, there is a serious side to this, and I can't think of any writer who has put it better than DiEugenio:

http://www.ctka.net/pr197-left.html

From the January-February, 1997 issue (Vol. 4 No. 2)

The Left and the Death of Kennedy

By Jim DiEugenio


Chomsky "That would be an interesting question if there were any reason to believe that it happened. Since I see no credible evidence for that belief, I can’t accept that the issue is as you pose it." (p.6)

Apparently, Chomsky never thought that Marcus would include their three hour session over just three pieces of evidence. This exposes the above statement, and Chomsky’s public stance since Stone’s film, as a deception.

Chomsky and his good friend and soulmate on the JFK case, Alexander Cockburn went on an (orchestrated?) campaign at the time of Stone’s JFK to convince whatever passes for the left in this country that the murder of Kennedy was 1) not the result of a conspiracy, and 2) didn’t matter even if it was. They were given unlimited space in magazines like The Nation and Z Magazine. But, as Howard Zinn implied in a recent letter to Schotz defending Chomsky, these stances are not based on facts or evidence, but on a political choice. They choose not to fight this battle. They would rather spend their time and effort on other matters. When cornered themselves, Chomsky and Cockburn resort to rhetorical devices like exaggeration, sarcasm, and ridicule. In other words, they resort to propaganda and evasion.

CTKA believes that this is perhaps the most obvious and destructive example of Schotz’s “denial.” For if we take Chomsky and Cockburn as being genuine in their crusades—no matter how unattractive their tactics—their myopia about politics is breathtaking. For if the assassinations of the ‘60’s did not matter—and Morrisey notes that these are Chomsky’s sentiments—then why has the crowd the left plays to shrunk and why has the field of play tilted so far to the right? ...

I reckon a 'QED' is in order.

I sympathise with Jack too. Problem is that Chomsky has the status of a 'saint to a believer' in Left-leaning political circles in the UK.

The guy has clearly done immense damage and I for one won't be slow to say so when I hear him idolised from now on.

Sadly, I sense a battle with the Media Lens Luvvies approaching. Oh dear.

[Paul Rigby]

Sadly, I sense a battle with the Media Lens Luvvies approaching. Oh dear.

Then let me slip an arrow or two into the quiver, Brother Presland, afore we march off to, er, the bar perhaps?

Paired contradictions in Rethinking Camelot

Throughout Rethinking Camelot, Chomsky invites the reader to hold two mutually incompatible pairs of propositions in mind.

The first pair of propositions holds that “Falsification of the historical record, often reaching quite impressive levels, can persist for many centuries” (p.8) – but not, of course, in the case of JFK’s assassination, for “[T]here is not a phrase in the voluminous internal record hinting at any thought” of a conspiracy (p.37). This doctrine, of assassination exceptionalism, is the Chomskeian equivalent of the myth of American exceptionalism. It’s manifest absurdity – why is the CIA still fighting so bitterly to withhold records? – merits no further comment.

The second pair of contradictions simultaneously has it that “Policy flows from institutions, reflecting the needs of power and privilege within them, and can be understood only if these factors are recognized, including in the case under examination” (p.9), while throughout the book we are bombarded not with an institutional analysis of the CIA, which he is largely content to depict as naught but a collection of prescient and ignored analysts, but by the repeated insistence that the horrors of Vietnam were the personal responsibility of John F. Kennedy:

“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).

And:

”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).

Or:

”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).

It should be noted that this propaganda line is not sustained with complete discipline. At one point in Rethinking Camelot, we learn that “[T]he internal record reveals that Kennedy left decisions on Vietnam largely in the hands of his advisers” (p.116), an assertion that is both untrue and nowhere developed subsequently by old scrupulous from MIT.

Chomsky’s enduring failure to offer any kind of institutional analysis of the CIA is revealing, and unavoidable, for to embark on an honest appraisal of the Agency’s position under JFK would inevitably lead to a stark, unwelcome fact: The CIA was under severe institutional threat in the last year of Kennedy’s life and presidency. The most powerful bureaucratic challenge came from the Defense Intelligence Agency, the organisation McNamara conjured into being in August 1961, as a direct follow up to three National Security Action Memoranda (55-57) which issued from the RFK-headed (though Maxwell Taylor-fronted) enquiry into the CIA’s conduct of the Bay of Pigs operation.

NSAMs 55-57 effectively stripped the CIA of its responsibility for covert ops of any significance, transferring control of future paramilitary ops to the JCS. With the formation of the DIA, the Agency was faced with a rival intended to supplant it across the board. How do we know this? From a veteran CIA mouthpiece, Stewart Alsop, writing in the pages of another venerable Agency mouthpiece, the Saturday Evening Post, in late July 1963.

“CIA: The battle for secret power” is the Agency’s version of that struggle with the DIA. It, too, like Chomsky’s Rethinking Camelot, boasts contradiction at its heart. Alsop simultaneously sought to reassure that, post-Bay of Pigs, the CIA “was back at the top” of the intelligence “heap” (p.18), even as it detailed the very challenges posed to the Agency by the upstart, whose “empire,” an outraged Alsop noted, “is rapidly expanding” (p.21). Referring to the “13 issues” that had “arisen at last report between CIA and DIA” (Ibid.), he went on:

“Will the DIA’s intelligence bulletins circulate outside the Pentagon in competition with CIA’s? Who maintains liaison with friendly foreign intelligence, like M.I.6? Who ‘owns’ the CIA-created national photo interpretation centre? Who owns such technical devices as the U-2?...Above all, who runs covert operations and where? This is the most sensitive issue of all” (Ibid.)

The Kennedys were much better infighters than we are commonly lead to believe. They had the CIA under more severe pressure in 1963 than any Presidency before or since. Dallas was the CIA's response.

[Mark Stapleton]

I think Paul's done a pretty good hatchet job on Chomsky in this thread, and a fully justified one at that.

Chomsky might have been a groundbreaking linguist but his malicious misrepresentation of Kennedy's role in Vietnam (once and for all, the first aerial bombing of Vietnam was in February 1965 and the first combat troops were dispatched the following month) and his bizarre 'who cares' re 9/11 and JFK effectively negate a lifetime of railing against US imperialism.

Throw in the question of where the money came from and I think one can safely say that Chomsky was and is someone's asset. Not ours, though.

[Paul Rigby]

http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/55858

First 18 minutes or so see Chomsky rendered ridiculous; the rest is equally rewarding.

[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.

[Mark Stapleton]

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.

Jan, the problem is the only people wrong about the Kennedy assassination, and by wrong I mean those who insist there was no conspiracy, are people who are stupid or bent, and Chomsky's not stupid.

[Jan Klimkowski]

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.

Jan, the problem is the only people wrong about the Kennedy assassination, and by wrong I mean those who insist there was no conspiracy, are people who are stupid or bent, and Chomsky's not stupid.

I fundamentally disagree.

John Judge makes it entirely clear why Chomsky doesn't think there was a conspiracy. As far I'm aware, he doesn't then go to claim that this means Chomsky must be CIA or NSA or some other kind of asset.

I entirely agree with Judge's analysis.