Arvind Rajagopalan went to the US to do a Masters in Electrical Engineering. Evil Yankee bastids tricked him into becoming a Professor of 'Media Studies' at NYU.
He asks, in Scroll.in, how
Chomsky’s ideas (should) be judged?
Truth. If they correspond with reality, they pass muster. If they don't, they are shit.
Both those who believe his intellectual legacy is unshaken,
have shit for brains. He was wrong about everything.
as well as those who now question it would benefit from clarifying just what he stood for.
If you hold a informed belief regarding his intellectual legacy, you are already clear in your mind about this. Some thought Chomsky was a saintly fellow who wouldn't associate with a rapist- let alone take his help. They were wrong. Others thought he was a shithead who would, absolutely, associate with any scoundrel if he personally benefitted by it.
It came as a shock to many to discover that the prominent US philosopher and political activist Noam Chomsky was also within convicted child-sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s slowly surfacing circle of confidantes.
Epstein was the expert on tax avoidance & estate planning. Chomsky took his help and offered his support at a difficult time in Epstein's worthless life.
Since he shot into the public eye with his trenchant opposition to the Vietnam war in the 1960s, Chomsky has been one of the most trenchant critics of US neo-imperialism
There was no imperialism. There was anti-Communism. The 'domino' theory was that South Vietnam must be saved otherwise Cambodia & Laos would also turn Red. Sadly, Irma Adelman's advise- viz. buy out the landlords & hand it over to the tenants- wasn't taken even though it was the cheaper option. American Blood & Treasure was squandered in vain.
and its unaccountable elite.
They were accountable to the voter/taxpayer, who kicked them in the fucking balls.
As a consequence, many of his admirers struggled to understand how Chomsky had also been friends for over a decade with Epstein
He met him in 2015. Epstein topped himself in 2019.
– a relationship whose contours became clear with the recent release by US authorities of an enormous stash of emails, videos and other material detailing the sex offender’s activities and the extent of his social networks.
Epstein helped Chomsky. The old man was grateful. That's all there is to it. In any case, for Chomsky's generation, statutory rape or 'grooming' or whatever simply wasn't a crime. In 2017, Gov. Cuomo raised the age of consent for marriage from 14 to 18 years old, 'while providing guidance for judges who are asked to determine whether someone as young as 17-years-old can marry According to Governor Cuomo’s office, more than 3,800 children ages 14-17 were married in the state between 2000 and 2010. And according to the state Department of Health, a majority of those involved minor girls marrying adult men.'
The so-called Epstein Files show that Chomsky had sought Epstein’s advice on financial matters.
Nothing wrong in that unless you can prove tax evasion or intent to defraud. Epstein was an expert on such matters. I suppose Chomsky would have let a surgeon with Nazi sympathies operate on his wife or child if he thought this was the best option for them.
The activist, on his part, had offered Epstein counsel on handling the “putrid” allegations against him.
'Counsel' is what your Lawyer or PR agent gives you. Chomsky merely said 'ignore the allegations'. Maybe he sensed the dude was a suicide risk and wanted to cheer him up.
In light of this, some are asking how Chomsky’s ideas are to be judged.
They are stupid shit. To be fair, we now know a lot more than blokes did back in the Sixties.
Chomsky suffered a stroke in 2023 and has been unable to address these revelations himself.
There is nothing to address. An old man got some help with his finances from a recognized expert in the field.
Epstein was found dead in his jail cell in 2019.
Which suggests he was a suicide risk. Maybe Nowak & Chomsky & so forth were just being supportive to a fellow Jew. Suicide is a ghastly sin in Judaism. Nothing wrong in that at all.
However, both those who believe Chomsky’s intellectual legacy is unshaken, as well as those who now question it would benefit from clarifying just what he stood for.
But this ignorant shithead can't clarify shit.
Within US academia, which during the Cold War was part of the “military-industrial complex”
Some parts were. Most weren't. At one time Chomsky's work might have looked promising to the Pentagon. But Government funds for Machine Translation dried up after November 1966 following the publication of the ALPAC report. Chomsky's 'responsibility of the intellectual' was published the next year.
formed by the US military and defence companies, few successful scholars got away with criticising US foreign policy.
Nonsense! They could say what they liked more particularly if no Government money was funding their research.
Chomsky was a rare exception.
Not that rare. B.F. Skinner- Chomsky's bete noire- opposed nuclear testing, Vietnam War etc.
Chomsky also argued that domestic politics was superseded by a “permanent government”
which Eisenhower termed the Military-Industrial Complex as represented by McNamara.
pursuing its own interests–
like Galbraith's 'New Industrial State'. This wasn't that different from what Ronald Reagan or Barry Goldwater was saying.
an idea that has become popular as the “deep state”.
Trump keeps saying his mission is to destroy the 'deep state'. The plain fact is, lots of Americans didn't want to waste money on yet more nukes & forever wars in faraway shitholes.
Whether a Democratic or a Republican government was in power, pure force, for maximum profit, was the plain and obvious rule.
Private enterprise is very evil. Did you know that McDonalds charges you money for burgers because it it wants to make a profit? What's more, its minions incessantly sodomize & decapitate working class people thus causing them to develop a taste for Happy Meals
Whether at home or abroad, common people faced the same problem, of an unaccountable elite.
Which uses the Post Office as a front for a paedophile ring.
Despite his popularity, Chomsky was never interviewed on any of the major American television networks.
His interview with 'Chairman' Bill Buckley on Firing Line in 1969 was syndicated. Sadly, even 'middle-brow' fare of a sort common in UK failed to gain advertising revenue. Firing Line was wholly relegated to the PBS in 1971. Chomsky did receive sympathetic on non-profit stations like PBS & C-SPAN. But, once the US ran away from Vietnam, he lost relevance. People understood he was some sort of sciencey nerd. They preferred the patrician Gore Vidal who could be quite witty.
Perhaps this is because he had analysed the key role that mass media played in “manufacturing consent” for the status quo.
No. 'Manufacturing consent' got him a documentary, in 1992, which was so boring that it was a big hit in Canada. To be fair, Chomsky wasn't trying to compete with Left Wing Hollywood stars. Indeed, he refused to appear in my aerobics videos which is how come Jane Fonda cornered that market.
Ironically, most consumers of US mass media viewer
Scroll doesn't bother to read, let alone edit, the shite they publish
may know nothing about Chomsky other than that he was a leftist who befriended Epstein.
There is nothing to know. He was a silly man who taught useless shite. He made a bit of money publishing stupid books. So did David Icke. Big whoop.
But how and why Epstein?
Chomsky had a crazy theory of evolution & may have hoped Nowak could use fancy math to provide him with a fig-leaf or plausibility. Epstein funded Nowak's research. That's how Chomsky met him when he needed help with his finances. I should mention, Epstein had a private office in Nowak's Harvard Lab.
Chomsky grew up in Zionist socialist circles in Philadelphia that created lasting and complex attachments to ideas of anarchist and socialist cooperation as well as to the idea of Israel.
It was Zelig Harris whose influence was strongest on Noam.
Chomsky had difficulty in acknowledging the evidence unearthed by the historian Ilan Pappé, that ethnic cleansing was inseparable from the idea of Israel from its very start.
There would be an exchange of population- as with India/Pakistan- but nobody knew how it would unfold or, indeed, whether the Jews might not be exterminated by united Arab armies.
This suggested that he shared with Epstein an attachment to Israel that he could not explain.
He was Jewish. He had relatives in Israel. Zelig Harris had actually gone to work on a kibbutz at age 13.
The attachment to a version of Zionism was not the only formative bond that Chomsky’s intellectual framework left unexamined.
It was examined. Zelig Harris believed the transformation of Capitalist Society could occur thanks to social experiments in Palestine/Israel. Sadly, Reagan's 'tough love' forced Israel to put its finances in order & turn into an affluent knowledge economy. Sad.
There was another, perhaps deeper, one – not to a political community but to a way of knowing and doing research.
Fuck off! He did research in the manner of Harris except that he tended to be more abstract & rely on mathematical logic to move from 'distributional' to 'generative' models. In other words, Harris had an 'e-language' approach (which is what actually works) & Chomsky had an 'i-language' approach (sadly nobody knows what 'extensions' can be given to the relevant 'intensions'- i.e. his shite is empty). Chomsky is fully formed, intellectually speaking, when he left the Uni of Philadelphia with an MA. Apart from Harris, his major influence was Nelson Goodman.
He acquired this at Harvard
He was a Fellow there. Quine & Austin may be mentioned as influences. However, his PhD was from Philadelphia though he hadn't been a student there for four years.
and MIT, universities, at the heart of “the military industrial complex”
Nonsense! He wasn't a Physicist or a Cryptographer. His Doctorate exempted him from Army Service. The plain fact is, had he been involved in anything to do with National Security he would have a security clearance and would have signed various Official Secrets acts.
There was plenty of Pentagon funded work being done at MIT & Chomsky's own mechanical translation work did attract some Defence funding.
that US President Dwight Eisenhower in 1961 had warned the American people against.
He was a Republican. Republicans want small government- i.e. lower taxes, no costly foreign wars & fucking all dusky immigrants to death.
Research universities were a key part of this compact during the Cold War.
The RAND Corp. maybe. Not Harvard & MIT's Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics.
Scholars in the so-called free world were groomed to believe they were the intellectual leaders and saviors of democracy.
Every American was groomed to believe they should defend their country. If this meant supporting Franco in Spain & the French in Indochina- so be it.
Even those such as Chomsky who opposed the triumphalist politics of the US could succumb to such intellectual elitism.
Leftist Zionists were unhappy with American policy towards Israel- whose main ally was France. It was possible to believe that aristocratic Arab landowners were the real enemy of the Israeli Jew. Socialism would get rid of private ownership of land. The Arab & the Jewish agricultural or factory worker would embrace each other. Would they also have butt sex? No. Socialists are above that sort of thing.
With World War II, the US changed from a provincial power, confined largely to the western hemisphere, to the most powerful nation and model for the world to imitate.
The same was true of the Soviet Union albeit somewhat more slowly.
Its experts were sent all over the world to help other countries achieve this aim.
The Soviets, too, had plenty of agents.
Chomsky rejected Cold War politics,
He didn't raise a peep about the Korean War. Vietnam was a different kettle of fish. This was a case of 'the ugly American' doing stupid shit while the tax-payer wasn't even allowed to own gold as a hedge against inflation.
What scared Jews like Chomsky was that Barry Goldwater was talking about nuking Vietnam & maybe Congo while cutting Social Security. Goldwater, though an Episcopalian, was of Jewish descent. What a shanda fur de goyim!
but subscribed to the most subtle and influential aspects of the intellectual training of his time, of expertise as a privilege, an identity and a way of knowing.
Not in America. A man is judged by the size of his car & the size of his wife's breasts & the size of his bank balance. Professors have received a training appropriate for guys who can only afford to drive compacts & whose wives have tiny breasts & strong opinions.
His own position remained unexamined: it was a one-way lens that could expose power everywhere except in the conditions of its own production.
Fuck would he know about power? Joe Kennedy knew about it. He had half a billion dollars & his son got into the White House. Howard Hughes knew even more about it which is why we don't know, even now, how many Senators he owned rather than merely rented.
America is about money. Professors aren't respected at all. There's an old joke about a Southern Senator visiting the UK. He is introduced to the Liberian Ambassador. He can't bring himself to call the coloured man 'Excellency' or even 'Sir'. So he gets round the problem by calling him 'Professor'.
Over the decades, Chomsky stood out as a solitary anti-imperialist figure over the decades.
No. He was on the winning side re. Vietnam. Ford, Carter & Reagan avoided 'foreign entanglements' (unless Grenada counts). Bush decided to leave Saddam in place. Clinton was cautious about Bosnia. It wasn't till 9/11 that the US lost its distaste for 'boots on the ground' in shithole countries.
But his solitude was chosen.
He was more active than most of hi ilk in the Sixties and did receive acknowledgment for this. The problem was that his side won too comprehensively. Give up on fighting Communism in shithole countries and suddenly people can own good & get a good return on equities. The hippies had made yuppies possible.
He refused to acknowledge that there were crucial thinkers on these issues elsewhere in the world,
Thinkers have never been crucial anywhere in the world.
who often had other perceptive ways to explain the changing character of US influence worldwide.
anyone can spout paranoid shite.
From Althusser
Nutter. He killed his wife.
to Castoriadis
A cultured Greek Communist exile in France. Maybe, if he had stayed in Athens, he'd have amounted to something.
to Zizek (from A to Z, we might say),
a gadfly
he rejected them all as irrational or unscientific.
Like himself. Castoriadis did actually know some Econ. But if you are good at that sort of thing you soon get lots of wealth & power or have influence over those who do.
Moreover, the world Chomsky described
He couldn't describe a world he knew little about.
was changing, in part due to the very forces that he had analysed.
He didn't analyse shit. One could say there was some moral force to his opposition to the Vietnam war but he had no 'Structural Causal Model'.
Dissent was absorbed into the media landscape.
This cretin thinks he himself represents 'dissent' rather than dysentery.
Practices of cherry-picking information for self-help and wellness, were reinforced by algorithmic feeds that cocooned users from their environments.
Did you know that, if you stopped watching Netflix, you would become a Jihadi terrorist blowing up Wall Street? This is the price you pay for being digitally 'cocooned'.
Emotion and reason blended together to induce attachments that could defy reason,
What reason could you possibly have for not killing your own Mummy? She is a pensioner- i.e. a Capitalist pitilessly exploiting trillions of disabled Muslim Lesbians.
and, if the culture industry had its way, they did.
Culture industry prevented you killing and eating your own Mummy. Why is Culture industry being so mean?
This is what the Epstein dinner table finally made visible.
Chomsky was brainwashed by elite institutions & then the culture industry. That is why he didn't kill and eat his own Mummy. Neither did Epstein- but he was a fucking Capitalist and thus beyond the reach of Reason.
The anarchist from the Philadelphia Zionist youth groups,
who, sadly, had failed to kill & eat his Mummy due to Military-Industrial complex
seated at dinner beside former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak
a soldier with degrees in Math & Physics & Mathematical Economics. He was born on a kibbutz and was a leader of the Labour party- in other words, he was similar to Chomsky.
at the invitation of a convicted sex trafficker
who was pretending to be real mathsy & an expert on global finance. People thought he had been done for statutory rape- i.e. a fucked a 17 year old who looked 22.
– the scene is not merely scandalous but symptomatic.
It was inconsequential. All three were past their prime.
Dissent became décor –
What dissent? Epstein was a rich dude. He wasn't Che fucking Guevara. Barak had failed as a politician & Epstein gave him money to invest in a start-up. Netanyahu is laughing his head off at his wannabe rival.
proof that the powerful are so confident, they can afford to seat their critics at the table.
Epstein was rich. He was financially helping two men whose careers were in terminal decline. Where was the fucking 'dissent'?
In a moment when the United States has shed the pretense of liberal internationalism,
The year was 2015. President Obama had just announced that he was quitting as the Chairman of the Trotskyite International. He resiled on his commitment to physically eliminate the kulak class.
when the very vocabulary of media criticism has been captured by the nationalist right
In the US, the nationalist right captured power in 1776.
and when the tradition of American anti-imperialism that Chomsky represented
he was against the Vietnam war. But Vietnam wasn't a colony.
faces its severest test, the task is not to discard his legacy but to ask how to further it.
Get invited to dinner by a billionaire. Take money from him. Pretend to be mathsy. Then say 'boo to Israel'. Surely Soros will give you some cash if you do so?
What shape would an anti-imperialist movement take,
in a world without any fucking Empires?
when mass immigration has complicated almost every nation’s demographics and when surveillance is all-encompassing?
Just say 'boo to Israel'. You are too stupid and useless to do anything more.
The analytical gaze that Chomsky so powerfully directed outward at the world
was shit. He didn't know econ or military strategy or how international diplomacy works.
could be directed inward,
Instead of shaking your fist at Israel, direct your fisting inward up your own arse.
to help build collective movements
the Proud Boys?
and institutional forms that no solitary intellectual – no matter how brilliant some believe him to be – can substitute for.
Zohran has become Mayor. He studied 'African Studies' which is actually even more useless than it sounds. Arvind is older & better educated. He hasn't achieved shit. Muslims simply do anti-Zionism better than Hindus. Sad.
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