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161 of 215 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Short on facts and logic, January 23, 2006
It is important to read some Chomsky before judging whether this book is any good. There are a lot of criticisms of Chomsky (much more praise though) and unless you know the facts you could assume that it is justified. Two examples that I know a little about:
Chomsky denies the Holocost: False. He allowed an essay of his about freedom of speech to appear in the introduction of a book denying the holocaust. In short: Freedom of speech must include freedom for ideas we don't like.
Chomsky is a Pol Pot apologist: False. He criticized the US for fabrication information about Pol Pot for US political ends. He always recognized that Pol Pot was a monster.
In general the logic goes that if Chomsky criticizes America then he must support the other side be it Russia, Kemer Rouge, Saddam, Osama etc. Most thinking people know that this is not the case but it can take time to get this crucial point.
He criticizes the American government a lot for two reasons: 1. America is the most powerful and therefore the most aggressive nation on Earth and 2. He is American and feels it is his moral responsibility to do something about this aggression. He can't do much about Russia or China but in his own country where he has so much freedom he is duty bound.
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330 of 446 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A must read, March 19, 2006
I'm sure that most of you will simply look at the rating above and immediately pass a dismissive judgment on my political beliefs and choose to not read the review. However, it is true that all political reviews are born of a political predisposition, and I am honest to enough to admit that this review is from a leftist. It is important for leftists and followers of Chomsky to not dismiss this book out of hand, to go through the evidence and judge only after you evaluate the criticisms and the factual record. On the other hand, for those of you on the right who are comfortable with the findings in this book, I urge you to consider the following:
Chapter 1 by Stephen Morris of Johns Hopkins University, called "Whitewashing Dictatorship in Communist Vietnam and Cambodia" of course attempts to make the case that Chomsky (and the far left in general), has apologized for the crimes of Communism during the United State's military involvement in Indochina during the 60's and 70's. However, I'm afraid Morris' scholarship is less than exemplary and makes incorrect assumptions about the nature of American involvement in Vietnam. Morris writes on the Communists, "the regime that controlled North Vietnam after 1954 was the political creation of the Vietnamese Communist Party [...] Its agenda was to seize total power, first by negotiation with the French, and from late 1946 on, by expelling the French from the region through armed force" (pg. 4). But what Morris presupposes here is that the Communists had no right to free themselves from French colonialism. He becomes confused on the next page while defining the ideology of the Vietnamese Communists, writing that, "North Vietnam was anything but democratic. It was a nation run by a Marxist-Leninist vanguard party," but then he also says, "the North Vietnamese, like their North Korean comrades, continued to revere Stalin publicly" (pg. 5). Unfortunately, both of these statements cannot be correct because Marxist-Leninism is inherently different than Stalinism, nor does he cite the relevant historical material to substantiate his claim. On Chomsky's apologetics for Maoist influence in North Vietnam, Morris writes that "Chomsky ignored the published eyewitness accounts of Vietnamese defectors and the well-documented scholarship of a Chinese-American academic historian" (pg. 6), yet Morris fails to name the historian. Morris makes the case that Chomsky was "not too perturbed by the Marxist-Leninist regime that controlled the population" (pg. 7), yet the quote from Chomsky that he himself provides expresses serious doubts about the social movement, "degree of centralization of control that, in the long run, will pose serious problems [...]" (pg. 8). Morris later provides an extract from Father Gelinas, a Jesuit priest who had taught in South Vietnam and argues that Chomsky distorts the meaning of Gelinas' testimony (pgs. 11-12), but no where does he indicate where Chomsky committed the misrepresentation. Similarly, Morris makes the case that Chomsky and Hermann disregarded the testimony of Nguyen Cong Hoan, quoting Chomsky, "How credible is his testimony in general?" Again, he fails to provide a citation for the quote. The rest of the essay, including his contemptuous section on Cambodia, proceeds with the same form of willful deception and miserly scholarship.
Chapter 2, Chomsky and the Cold War, Thomas M. Nichols (U.S. Naval War College)
Near the beginning of the essay, Nichols claims that Chomsky "will criticize the outcome of a revolution led by European Bolsheviks, but not those led by the likes of Castro" (pg. 38), which is simply not the case. Chomsky described Castro's regime as "tyrannical" (see Understanding Power, pg. 149). The majority of the first half the essay is an amateurish attempt to write of Chomsky as a Communist apologist without any serious referencing, nor does the author once mention the U.S.'s support for the Soviet Union during WWII, nor does he mention the U.S.'s support (rather incredibly) for the Khmer Rouge after the Cambodian genocide during the 1980's. Nichols moves on to a section titled Chomsky's "scholarship" in which he systematically distorts Chomsky's methodology. He makes the case on page 48 that Chomsky has misrepresented a study that appeared in Harvard professor William Yandell Elliot's book `The Political Economy of American Foreign Policy', which reveals that the U.S. was concerned about the Soviet Union to the extent that it would interfere with U.S. business interests. Nichols claims that Chomsky makes the case that the document was well known among U.S. planners, he writes: "This phrasing-especially the use of the word `document'-seems to indicate a widely read report", but unfortunately the word `document' in fact reveals absolutely nothing about how widely read it is. Furthermore, Chomsky himself (as quoted by Nichols), states that the document is "generally ignored." Nichols has contradicted himself in the course of a single paragraph. Additionally, Nichols makes the case that Chomsky will often make a claim in which he merely cites another of his books, which in turn, cites another of his books in such a way as to disguise the fact that Chomsky isn't referring to any actual evidence. Nichols writes: "in World Orders Old and New, his first note in his chapter on the Middle East reads: `For sources where not given here, see Deterring Democracy, chap. 1; Year 501, chap.2. An intrepid reader seeking to follow Chomsky's trail in his footnotes will find that very little of the first chapter in Chomsky's own Deterring Democracy is actually about the Middle East." While it is true that the Middle East occupies only a small portion of Chomsky's introductory chapter of the Cold War, the relevant factor is the evidence he cites. Turing to the footnotes of Deterring Democracy (pg. 68, n. 82), Chomsky cites Towards a New Cold War, but also Search for Security (Aaron David Miller), Aramco, the United States and Saudi Arabia (Irvine Anderson, Princeton U Press), Oil, War and American Security (Michael Stoff, Yale U), Oil and the American Century (David Painter, Johns Hopkins), and Eisenhower as cited in Steven Spiegel, The Other Arab-Israeli Conflict (University of Chicago). This is not exactly a slim sample of historical evidence. Furthermore, Nichols neglects to address the evidence presented by Chomsky in the footnotes to chapter 2 of Year 501 (pgs. 293-296), cited as the other reference for the relevant material in World Orders, wherein he cites a plethora of historical and scholarly material from obscure publications like the New York Times and American Foreign Policy (citing Kissinger directly). Even a superficial reading of his essay reveals that Nichols has not risen to the level of outright fabrication on the question of Chomsky's scholarly integrity.
The Anti-Chomsky reader is nothing more than a collection of misrepresentations, factual inaccuracies, and consciously willed lies. The rest of the essays that follow are of the same intellectual-scholarly caliber as the ones previously discussed. I urge you to read through them and confront the evidence they present, I'm sure you will find that it collapses upon quick inspection.
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113 of 157 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Labelling and Straw Men, December 29, 2004
As a Scot I am struck by the use of the terms 'left' and 'anti-American' here. It's as if these words carry mechanistic weight, that is, they help one understand the mechanisms by which Chomsky reached his conclusions.
But they don't. In fact, they inform one of the perspective of the person using these terms. Use of these terms denotes a simplistic and rigid belief system. How strange that anyone who doesn't believe in the free market without a bit of control can be filed in the same box as Stalin! In Western Europe the welfare state is stronger than in the US (ie. poor pregnant mothers are generally given the same level of care as middle-class pregnant mothers), yet the system is basically capitalist. Does that make Europeans generally of the 'left', or even Stalinists?
This labelling business is like some kind of weird sport: ah! I've got you categorized now, ya lefty!
I think it's helpful to look at things in more depth, allowing for more complexity and more accuracy. Think of it like this: Chomsky has certain views about how the behavior of some humans beings harms the welfare of others. The absurd invasion of Grenada (Reagan-worshippers, please try to justify that!) is one example; the US and UK support of undemocratic and murderous regimes such as Pinochet's is another. Chomsky pointed out forcefully that for various reasons, our governments supported regimes which harmed and killed many thousands of ordinary people who were just trying to work and live. And he also pointed out that this wasn't widely reported in our mass media. What's wrong with that? Why not face up to these facts? Why squirm out of it by calling him a lefty or a neo-communist? You may disagree with Chomsky's explanation, his media theory, but it is surely true that (a) our governments did bad, bad things to civilians in other countries, and (b) the media were remarkably bad at reporting this.
So as a principle, why not just deal with (a) the facts - are they correct or not?, and then, if they are, (b) Chomsky's conclusions.
This book doesn't really do this. It picks on some mistakes that Chomksy made, and then implies that this means that the reader should regard all that Chomsky states as false (a logical fallacy); it (depressingly) raises the false accusation that Chomsky is a holocaust-denier; it has an irrelevant chapter in which Chomsky's linguistics theories are challenged: so what? That's science, it's allowed, that's how science works, people disagree and then do experiments to resolve these disagreements, Watson and Crick made some mistakes in their DNA model, they were challenged and then fixed, blah blah blah, what the heck does this have to do with political debate?); his footnotes are challenged - um, so he self-references, like all other scholars, and sometimes uses hard to find sources, again, so what?; etc.
Looking at Horowitz's stuff in general, it does seem as if he is a bit of an irrational nationalistic, anti-'left' ideologue. He has found a faith and is sticking by its dogmas. He carries some core beliefs through which the outside world is interpreted. Thus, he argues from a set of unexamined (at least by him) and flimsy premises. So do many of the reviewers here. For example, if someone questions US foreign policy, they are on the 'left', and are there to be attacked. Same with Chomsky's criticism of the behaviour of the State of Israel (ie. = anti-Semitic).
Some reviewers here also seem to use this bizarre method of argument. The 'left' lives in a daydream, the 'left' lies to maintain its ideological position, etc.
Now I don't understand the value of this way of doing things. It's a distraction from getting at the truth. As a citizen I am interested in knowing about how government policies affect people domestically and abroad. Chomsky has conducted some informative analyses on these topics. Trying to bat them away by using labelling and straw men just doesn't do it for me.
The authors are ignorant or dishonest, and they get one star.
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