Customer Reviews

Anti Chomsky Reader

5 star:		(60)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(60)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Ignore the absurdities and sophistries spouted by the Chomsky cultists who have come here to flood this book with one-star reviews. They are brilliant (pseudo-) "intellectuals" who know much more than common sense. Read their writings, and you will see that their talking points directly echo Chomsky's own words.

There are no straw men here. Chomsky DID support Pol Pot. He made no bones about it--during the genocide. Let's allow the man to speak for himself, shall we?

"...the evacuation of Phnom Penh, widely denounced at the time and since for its undoubted brutality, may actually have saved many lives. It is striking that the crucial facts rarely appear in the chorus of condemnations."
After the Cataclysm [South End Press, 1979]

"The victors in Cambodia undertook drastic and often brutal measures to accomplish this task, simply forcing the urban population into the countryside where they were compelled to live the lives of poor peasants, now organized in a decentralized system of communes. At heavy cost, these measures appear to have overcome the dire and destructive consequences of the U.S. war by 1978."
Ibid.

"...executions have numbered at most in the thousands; these were localized in areas of limited Khmer Rouge influence and unusual peasant discontent, where brutal revenge killings were aggravated by the threat of starvation resulting from the American destruction and killing."
Ibid.

"While all of the countries of Indochina have been subjected to endless denunciations in the West for their 'loathsome' qualities and unaccountable failure to find humane solutions to their problems, Cambodia was a particular target of abuse. In fact, it became virtually a matter of dogma in the West that the regime was the very incarnation of evil with no redeeming qualities, and that the handful of demonic creatures who had somehow taken over the country were systematically massacring and starving the population."
Ibid.

"There was a significant degree of peasant support for the Khmer Rouge and the measures that they had instituted in the countryside."
Ibid.

"A more appropriate comparison [for Pol Pot's Cambodia] would be France after liberation from the Nazis."
The Nation, June 25, 1977, "Distortions at Fourth Hand."

"The 'slaughter' by the Khmer Rouge is a Moss-New York Times invention."
Ibid.

"I think the use of terror would be justified."
Alexander Klein, ed., Dissent, Power and Confrontation [McGraw-Hill, 1971], p. 119

"[My aim is to] stem the flood of lies about Cambodia."
From a personal 1977 communication with Francois Ponchaud

Explaining how the Khmer Rouge had actually saved up to one million lives: "U.S. officials predicted at the war's end that a million people would starve in a year. It appears that the new regime was at least partially able to avoid this consequence of the war."
Christian Science Monitor, June 1, 1977. Chomsky's letter to the editor can be seen online on Paul Bogdanor's site.

The breathtaking dishonesty of these assertions expose Chomsky as a fraud and his "revelations" as hoaxes. Take the last claim, his most egregious and contemptible by far. The prediction to which he alludes referred not to the effects of war, but to the likely death toll from the Communist take-over. Imagine what he must think of his credulous audience! This prediction is easily accessible as a matter of public record (see, for example, The Washington Post, June 4, 23, 1975), it received a flurry of media coverage at the time (with liberals everywhere mocking it as an absurd propaganda fantasy), and he was writing in 1977 (when it would have been fresh in everyone's mind). Anyone who looked it up could see that the Ford administration was warning that the Khmer Rouge would murder at least one million people (the Nixon White House made similar claims). As we now know, the Khmer Rouge went on to murder twice that sum in a far shorter period of time than anyone would have believed and with much greater brutality than anyone could have imagined. Genocide investigators have determined that the Khmer Rouge perpetrated 1.4 million violent killings and murdered just under 2.2 million victims overall (see Etcheson's After the Killing Fields).

Chomsky, claiming that the Holocaust had been "inflated by a factor of a thousand," stated not only that the Khmer Rouge had refrained from murdering a million people, but that those they had allegedly refrained from murdering had actually been SAVED by the Khmer Rouge--even though the Khmer Rouge had, in fact, slaughtered well over a million individuals at the time he made this assertion.

Chomsky would later rewrite his record of genocide denial, arguing that the Cambodian Civil War had killed at least 600,000 people and that American bombing was ultimately responsible for all of their deaths--although this estimate is more than twice the real number of war-related deaths and American bombing accounted for less than a fifth of them (see Marek Sliwinski's excellent work on Cambodia). His ridiculous intent was to make it appear that "the responsibility of the United States and Pol Pot for atrocities in Cambodia seems to be roughly in the same range." He transformed himself into an eloquent voice against "both" genocides, a delusion his cult followers have been eager to embrace.

(The great irony of all this is that, as Amartya Sen has written, "famines are, in fact, so easy to prevent it is amazing that they are allowed to occur at all"--if such a prediction HAD been made, the Khmer Rouge could have easily averted it just by allowing foreign aid!)

As Bruce Sharp elaborates on (in his excellent study of Chomsky's Pol Pot apologies, "Averaging Wrong Answers"); our "courageous" dissident wrote that 250 people were dying every day in Phnom Penh alone due to "the conditions left by the US war" in order to "prove" this was true; in fact, the Red Cross had observers on the ground who calculated that less than 25 people were dying every day, assuming that the number of deaths they could record from all causes (15 per day) was only a fraction of the full toll (these "war-related" deaths were caused virtually exclusively by the Khmer Rouge shelling of the city--the deaths would have ended, in effect, in their entirety with the Communist victory, at least if the Khmer Rouge had allowed international aid). Although his original claim was that "the total for March [1975] alone comes to nearly 8000 people," his comrade Edward Herman would later inflate this number to 8,000 deaths PER DAY projected to continue for years "in Phnom Penh alone" (see his essay "Pol Pot's Death in the Propaganda System")--this statement was 30 times higher than his original exaggeration, which itself was at least 10 times higher than the truth, and from which he ridiculously extrapolated a death toll for years and years into the future. This averages out to an "expected" 11.7 million deaths, or six times that city's population (and 50% more than the entire population of Cambodia). Presumably, the implication is that Pol Pot, far from killing millions, actually saved millions of lives.

His other lies are equally grotesque and bizarrely unjust. On the evacuation of Phnom Penh, for example: As Sliwinski demonstrates, at least 30,000 very young children died as a direct result of the evacuation, and at least 870,000 citizens of Phnom Penh were killed by the Pol Pot regime altogether.

In closing, here are some more words of wit and wisdom from our hero:

"Sometimes violence does lead to good things. The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor led to many very good things. If you follow the trail, it led to kicking Europeans out of Asia - that saved tens of millions of lives in India alone. Do we celebrate that every year?"
Larissa MacFarquhar, "The Devil's Accountant," The New Yorker, March 31, 2003.

"You have to ask yourself whether the best way of getting rid of Hitler was to kill tens of millions of Russians....as Britain and the United States did."
Ibid.

"Britain and the US then began supporting armies established by Hitler to hold back the Russian advance. Tens of thousands of Russian troops were killed. Suppose you're sitting in Auschwitz. Do you want the Russian troops to be held back?"
Ibid. (Chomsky denied saying this, but his statement was recorded on tape.)

"Israel's `secret weapon' ... is that it may behave in the manner of what have sometimes been called `crazy states' in the international affairs literature... eventuating in a final solution from which few will escape."
Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians. Rev. ed., Pluto Press, 1999, pp469.

"The Jewish community here is deeply totalitarian. They do not want democracy, they do not want freedom."
Interview, Shmate: A Journal of Progressive Jewish Thought, Summer 1988

"I see no antisemitic implications in denial of the existence of gas chambers, or even denial of the holocaust."
Quadrant, Australia, October 1981

"East Europe under Russian rule was practically a paradise."
Letter, in Alexander Cockburn, The Golden Age Is In Us [Verso, 1995], pp. 149-151

"Western civilization is anticipating the slaughter of, well do the arithmetic, 3-4 million people or something like that in Afghanistan....Looks like what's happening is some sort of silent genocide....we are in the midst of apparently trying to murder 3 or 4 million people..."
Lecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, October 18, 2001

"But here's a way to liberate Iraq....No US casualties, no threat to Israel, good chance of bringing democracy....Help Iran invade Iraq....They have a fair chance of introducing democracy."
Interview, The New Yorker, March 31, 2003

"Jews in the US are the most privileged and influential part of the population....privileged people want to make sure they have total control, not just 98% control. That's why antisemitism is becoming an issue."
Variant, Scotland, Winter 2002

"If we ever get anything like a kind of just society, things like my standard of living may very well not exist. In that sense, there will be, I think, material deprivation in some manner for a large part of the population. And I think there ought to be."
Interview, Black Rose, No. 1, 1974

That Chomsky is actually taken seriously by millions of people all over the world and is our most-quoted living intellectual is demonstrative of the new wave of irrationality sweeping across the world. This book is a truly useful and insightful resource for those who still seek the truth in this day and age; Bogdanor's section, in particular, is the most devastating and incontrovertible take-down of any polemicist I have ever read. When you are finished with it, I doubt you'll have any faith in this wretched and pathetic man's intellectual integrity--any faith at all.

Aside from the fact that the publisher of this book, Encounter Books, is affiliated with the Project for a New American Century, the think tank that staffs the Bush White House and created its post-9/11 foreign policy of pre-emptive war, the axis of evil, and everything else Bush relies on to fight the war on terror, a full year BEFORE 9/11, the book is also full of complete misrepresentation. Chomsky never sided with that lunatic French author who denied the holocaust. He never denied Pol Pot's atrocities. He is not anti-American. He only asks Americans to apply the same standards to themselves as they apply to other nations. When we do that, we discover that, often times, our government deceives us into believing we are the moral crusaders of the planet, while we bomb civilians into ash and support death squads and dictatorships across the planet. Why not mention that little tidbit, Horowitz?

David Horowitz is obsessed with Noam. Mostly, his jealousy comes from the realization that he will never be on the same level as Chomsky as a scholar. Horowitz has some of the most dispicable views possible. He stated at Villanova Law School a few years ago that it was okay that three million Native Americans were killed because they would not have contributed anything of value to the world anyway. For a man like Horowitz to hate Chomsky, Noam should think of it as a badge of honor. Horowitz sends people to Chomsky's talks.
If you want to read Chomsky, it wouldn't be hard to go elsewhere, he unlike Horowitz is the most cited human being alive. Read Daniel Dennett's book on Chomsky where he considers Darwin and Chomsky two of the most improtant scientists of all time. Read Gilbert Harman's take on him, a professor from Princeton's philosophy department. Horowitz elevates his status by going after Chomsky. There will never be an anti-Horowitz book because he doesn't matter that much.

Chomsky is back in the press again, as Hugo Chavez holds up his books as proof of American duplicity in world affairs. Is Chomsky a great peacemaker hiding behind tenure? A great linguist whose activism goes beyond the normal boundries of academia?

This book succeeds in four well documented attacks on Chomsky:
1 - His worldview,
2 - His anti-Israel writings,
3 - His writing on the war on terror
4 - His professional contribution as a linguist.

The question is - if you take Chomsky with a grain of salt because of his political leanings, do you have to do the same with these guys? If so - should you take this book with the same? Perhaps, but still worth reading from both sides of the political spectrum. The ultra right get ammo for their crusades, and the ultra left should learn some reasons to question their uber-hero.

If it seems odd that a book should be devoted to debunking the propaganda of a single individual, one must bear in mind that Noam Chomsky has become a cult figure for anti-American zealots throughout the world, not just left-wing extremists attached to the cause of revolutionary socialism, but also right-wing nationalists resentful of American power and, in a disturbing new development, apologists for the actions of Jihadi terrorists. Professor Chomsky, let it be said, has been consistent in his views. In every single conflict involving the United States since the end of the Second World War, from the Korean War to the current struggle against militant Islam, he has vilified the actions of the US while rationalizing - and often supporting - the actions of America's foes.

This excellent book systematically exposes the propaganda techniques used in Chomsky's voluminous writings: his selective use of unreliable source material, often based on nothing more than the official propaganda of Communist regimes and their Western fellow travellers; his attacks on the credibility of those who uncover facts that threaten his political agenda, a prime example being Francois Ponchaud, the Catholic Priest who compiled eye-witness reports of Khmer Rouge atrocities; his distortion and falsification of the historical record to portray the US as an aggressive empire comparable to Nazi Germany.

No serious historian with the smallest degree of objectivity would consider Chomsky to be anything more than a shallow propagandist, who twists and invents facts to serve his anti-American agenda. Serious historians do not believe that there was a "US-Nazi alliance" after the Second World War; that the Cold War was an imaginary conflict created by US "ruling elites"; that Cambodian Communists slaughtered their own people because US bombing drove them mad; that the US responded to the 9-11 attacks by planning "a silent genocide" against the Afghan people. But most people are not historians and those with a pre-existing grudge against America are all too likely to take Chomsky seriously. This book will help you answer them.

Anyone who has read Chomsky knows he called 9-11 an atrocity; that he was extremely critical of the Soviet Union, Maoist China and that he called the holocaust, "the greatest madness in human history."
That these writers could so distort Chomsky as to deny the above is evidence that they are not interested in facts. Like another reviewer has said, Chomsky's main work is cataloging facts largely ignored by mass media. He actually shows a reluctance even to state his own opinion. Rather, he quotes, US government officials or documents -- rather than listening to spokespersons and their media stenographs -- to try to find out what the US government is really thinking.

I only gave this book 3 stars so I wouldn't be like everyone else, who seems to either love this book or hate it, the same way they go to extremes over chomsky. Do not read this book if you have not read Chomsky. This book argues in the same manner that politicians argue, by ignoring arguments and using slander to hurt their opponent.

They propose that Chomsky has relationships with the neo-nazis when he is a jew and his father was a Hebrew scholar. They propose he does not believe in the Holocaust when he cites the Holocaust innumerous times. They claim he hates America when he has devoted his life to making America a better place.

Their only attempt to actually argue with Chomsky is to debunk his facts, which they rarely do - if they do at times, then that is important to know. Chomsky, like all historians, may miss some facts. These writers could never compare to Chomsky - they simply have not reached his level of scholarship or intelligence. The fact that they clearly go into this book attempting to slander Chomsky should be sign enough, but taht they resort to name-calling and cliche insults - following in the steps of Bush by saying that if you criticize your country you are unpatriotic. Most of the people who have written positive reviews for this book clearly have not read Chomsky - some claim they have, and then they claim that his predictions have been wrong. Just look at his predictions about the Iraq war - he couldn't have been more right. If you want to read this book, go ahead. It is shameful and unfortunate that the writers had to resort to namecalling in what could have been an interesting work of scholarship attempting to clarify some mistakes of CHomsky (which they never prove did exist). Their criticisms of his linguistics theories are also trite and overly simplistic. If there is a place to criticize CHomsky, it is in his own simplification of world politics, but they fail to do this, being bogged down in a typical republican resort to "moral values" which they know nothing about. They claim Chomsky is a failed scholar, and then they spend half their book ignoring his text and attacking his person - the most embarassing form of arguing there could be.