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included Chomsky's imaginary genocides and genocide denials
[[Image:Chomsky3.gif|right|130px]]
[[Image:Chomsky3.gif|right|130px]]
'''Noam Chomsky''' (born December 7, 1928) is a far-left, political writer. He advocates holding America to an absolute standard of ethics in foreign relations, but has not held such a standard elsewhere. He tends to ignore such violations by other countries, even when they have been far worse. Fellow liberal academic, [[Arthur Schlesinger]], once referred to Chomsky as "an intellectual crook." <ref>"He begins as a preacher to the world and ends as an intellectual crook." -- [[Arthur Schlesinger]] - ''Commentary'' magazine, December 1969</ref>
'''Noam Chomsky''' (born December 7, 1928) is an extreme left-wing propagandist and genocide denier<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomsky/cambodiacomments.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.jim.com/chomsdis.htm</ref><ref>http://www.jim.com/chomsdis.htm</ref><ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomsky/labedz.pdf</ref>. He advocates holding America to an absolute standard of ethics in foreign relations, but has not held such a standard elsewhere. He tends to ignore such violations by other countries, even when they have been far worse. Fellow liberal academic, [[Arthur Schlesinger]], once referred to Chomsky as "an intellectual crook." <ref>"He begins as a preacher to the world and ends as an intellectual crook." -- [[Arthur Schlesinger]] - ''Commentary'' magazine, December 1969</ref>
He is an institute professor & professor of [[linguistics]] (Emeritus) at the [[MIT|Massachusetts Institute of Technology]] (MIT) <ref>http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/people/faculty/chomsky/index.html</ref>.
He is an institute professor & professor of [[linguistics]] (Emeritus) at the [[MIT|Massachusetts Institute of Technology]] (MIT) <ref>http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/people/faculty/chomsky/index.html</ref>.
It should be noted that both Finkelstein and Chomsky are from Jewish-American backgrounds <ref>[http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=150]</ref><ref>http://www.tikkun.org/rabbi_lerner/noamchomsky2005</ref>, and that both Chomsky's parents were devout and involved in Jewish scholarship. It is unclear whether Chomsky still practices Judaism.
It should be noted that both Finkelstein and Chomsky are from Jewish-American backgrounds <ref>[http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=150]</ref><ref>http://www.tikkun.org/rabbi_lerner/noamchomsky2005</ref>, and that both Chomsky's parents were devout and involved in Jewish scholarship. It is unclear whether Chomsky still practices Judaism.
===Controversies===
#Chomsky denied the Cambodian Genocide, claiming that the killing had been inflated "by a factor of 100."<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomsky/encounter.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomsky/labedz.pdf</ref> He further asserted that the (in reality) 2 to 3 million Cambodians slaughtered by the [[Khmer Rouge]] from 1975 to 1978 were morally comparable to Nazi collaborators during WW2, and that [[Pol Pot]]'s Cambodia was "comparable to France after liberation [from the Nazis]."<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/chomsky.htm</ref>
#Chomsky recently (1995) claimed, in the wake of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that the death toll in Cambodia may have been inflated "by a factor of a ''thousand''."<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/chomsky.htm#fn61</ref> Since he was responding to an estimate of two million dead, his words would imply that the real toll was on the order of two thousand. (Note: Investigators have uncovered and examined the remains of 1.1 million Cambodians--later raised to 1.39 million--found in mass graves near Khmer Rouge execution centers whose cause of death has been determined by the investigators to have been execution by the former Khmer Rouge regime.<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm</ref><ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/toll.htm</ref><ref>http://welcome.to/dccam</ref> Because no ''more'' than roughly ''half'' of those killed by the Khmer Rouge were executed (the rest having died from other causes like state-created famine, the deliberate withholding of basic necessities by the state, the refusal by the state to allow foreign aid, the abolishing of medicine and hospitals by the state, systematic overwork and slave labor by the state, and brutal mistreatment by the state), the Documentation Center of Cambodia estimates that the former regime killed or otherwise caused the unnecessary deaths of, between 2 and 3 million Cambodians.<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm</ref> A UN investigation reported 2-3 million dead, while UNICEF estimated 3 million dead.<ref>William Shawcross, The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust, and Modern Conscience (Touchstone, 1985), p115-6</ref> Demographic estimates went as high as 4 million killed by the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1978.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomsky/labedz.pdf</ref> Even the Khmer Rouge acknowledged that 2 million had been killed—though they attributed those deaths to a subsequent Vietnamese invasion.<ref>Khieu Samphan, Interview, Time, March 10, 1980</ref>)
#Chomsky has claimed that [[Pearl Harbor]] saved millions of lives and that America and Britain used Nazi armies to attack the [[Soviet Union]] and prolong the [[Holocaust]].<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomsky/newyorker1.html</ref>
#Chomsky has stated: “Of course, no one supposed that Mao literally murdered tens of millions of people, or that he ‘intended’ that any die at all.”<ref>“Second Reply to Casey,” ZNet, September 2001: http://www.zmag.org/chomreply2.htm</ref> In fact, a comprehensive analysis by Professor R.J. Rummel concluded that Mao was responsible for the deaths of 76 million Chinese.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE1.HTM</ref>
#Chomsky regularly compares the "alleged" genocide in Cambodia to the 21-year occupation of [[East Timor]] by [[Indonesia]]. He wrote: “The harshest critics claim that perhaps 100,000 people have been slaughtered [in Cambodia]… Comparing East Timor with Cambodia, we see that the time frame of alleged atrocities is the same, the numbers allegedly slaughtered are roughly comparable in absolute terms, and five to ten times as high in East Timor relative to population… my own conclusion is that the sources in the [case of] East Timor are more credible…”<ref>Radical Priorities (rev. ed., AK Press, 2003), p80.</ref> Based on the findings of genocide investigators, as mentioned above; at least 2.8 million people were killed in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. A Truth Commission found that the Indonesian war in East Timor caused 18,600 violent killings and 75,000-183,000 deaths from hunger and illness.<ref>Final Report of the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor (CAVR), January 30, 2006, part 6, paras. 47, 56-7: http://www.ictj.org/en/news/features/846.html</ref> [[Suharto]] killed far less people in absolute terms over decades in one of the world's most populous countries than Pol Pot killed in three years in a country with under 7 million people, and exponentially less relative to the size of the population.
#Chomsky denied any genocide or mass reprisals in [[Laos]] after the Communist victory, stating that the Pathet Lao "have made some efforts to achieve a reconciliation with the mountain tribesmen who had been organized in the CIA clandestine army."<ref>After the Cataclysm (South End Press, 1979), p122.</ref> Some 100,000 tribespeople had been exterminated in a campaign of genocide at the time.<ref>Forced Back and Forgotten (Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights, 1989), p8 (estimate); Jane Hamilton-Merritt, Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos, 1942-1992 (Indiana Uniersity Press, 1999), pp337-460 (atrocities).</ref>
#Chomsky once wrote: “At the end of 1978 Cambodia [under the Khmer Rouge] was the only country in Indochina that had succeeded at all in overcoming the agricultural crisis that was left by the American destruction.”<ref>Language and Politics (AK Press, 2004), pp245-6. Cf.: “it was a condition of survival to turn (or return) the populations to productive work. The victors in Cambodia undertook drastic and often brutal measures to accomplish this task… At a heavy cost, these measures appear to have overcome the dire and destructive consequences of the US war by 1978,” After the Cataclysm (South End Press, 1979), pviii.</ref> By late 1979, UN and Red Cross officials were warning that another 2.25 million Cambodians faced death by starvation due to “the near destruction of Cambodian society under the regime of ousted Prime Minister Pol Pot,”<ref>New York Times, August 8, 1979.</ref><ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,912511,00.html</ref> who were saved by American and international aid. The Cambodian communists' economic plans were, at times, utterly surreal. Scholar David Chandler notes that, in a Democratic Kampuchea report on General Political Tasks of 1976, there are three lines devoted to education, and six devoted to urine. The document states that, regarding human urine, "We collect thirty per cent. That leaves a surplus of 70%." These were indicative of the types of policies that Chomsky and his co-writer, Edward Herman, claimed had lifted Cambodia out of the ashes of war.
#Chomsky openly claimed in 1977 that Pol Pot had saved more than one million lives.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomsky/cambodiacomments.pdf</ref> He did so by citing a Nixon administration statement that US aid to Cambodia should continue because the Khmer Rouge would likely kill more than one million people if they took over, and then falsely restating it to imply that more than one million Cambodians would starve to death if aid was cut off. At the time of this essay, the Khmer Rouge had probably already killed more than one million people, but Chomsky was still claiming that "executions numbered at most in the thousands," that Khmer Rouge atrocities had been "inflated by a factor of 100" and that those the Khmer Rouge had allegedly refrained from killing were actually saved by the Khmer Rouge. One million people had not died since aid was terminated, he said, therefore one million lives had been saved from starvation by the Khmer Rouge's ingenious economic policies. (Chomsky is also implying that the US cut off aid to Cambodia, when it actually had an unconditional offer to supply aid to it. Aid was terminated ''by the Khmer Rouge'').
#Chomsky has praised [[Imperial Japan]] for allegedly "saving maybe tens of millions of lives."<ref>Interview, International Socialist Review, September-October 2002.</ref>
#Chomsky has expressed support for the former Communist dictatorship of [[Angola]]: “The defense of Angola was one of Cuba’s most significant contributions to the liberation of Africa.”<ref>Hegemony or Survival (Penguin, 2004), p94.</ref> Cuban military intervention in support of the communist MPLA dictatorship in Angola led to decades of civil war that cost 1 million lives. Other Cuban “contributions to the liberation of Africa” include fighting for the communist dictatorship in Ethiopia, which killed 1.25 million people by massacre and forced starvation.<ref>Médecins Sans Frontières, “Angola: An Alarming Nutritional Situation,” August 1999 (Angola death toll); Washington Post, March 18, 1978 (Ethiopia intervention); New York Times, December 14, 1994(Ethiopia death toll).</ref>
#Chomsky has repeatedly denied that the former Sandinista regime in [[Nicaragua]] committed any human rights violations at all.<ref>The Culture of Terrorism (South End Press, 1988), p137.</ref> According to the Nicaraguan Commission of Jurists, the regime carried out some 8,000 political murders within its first three years in power.
#Chomsky also strongly approved of the Sandinista's economic policies, writing that “the crime of the Sandinistas was to carry out successful development… they immediately began to divert resources to the poor part of the population.”<ref>Latin America: From Colonization to Globalization (Ocean Press, 1999), p57.</ref> Within a few years of Sandinista rule, wages had been fixed below poverty level and there was mass unemployment. There were shortages of nearly all basic goods, with inflation at 30,000%. Government studies found that three-quarters of schoolchildren suffered from malnutrition, while living standards were lower than Haiti. The World Bank found that Nicaragua was on the economic level of Somalia.<ref>Roger Miranda and William Ratliff, The Civil War in Nicaragua (Transaction, 1993), pp183-4.</ref>
#Chomsky referred to 22 Israeli schoolchildren murdered by Palestinian terrorists as "members of a paramilitary youth group."<ref>Pirates and Emperors, Old and New (rev. ed., Pluto Press, 2002), p65.</ref> He falsely claimed there had been "an exchange of fire" between the schoolchildren and the terrorists.
#Chomsky claimed after the [[9/11]] attacks that “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…”<ref>“The New War Against Terror,” Lecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, October 18, 2001.</ref> Far from killing millions, the American intervention saved lives. UNICEF figures indicate that the deaths of 112,000 children and 7,500 pregnant women have been prevented every year since as a result.<ref>New York Times, February 1, 2002.</ref> The US invasion ''saved'' millions of Afghans from starvation.<ref>http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42858-2001Dec30?language=printer</ref><ref>http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=24019</ref> Chomsky responded by claiming in 2002 that it was still possible that millions might starve to death, but that the Americans and the media could cover it up: "What the effects will be, we will never know. Starvation is not something that kills people instantly. People eat roots and leaves and they drag on for a while. And the effects of starvation may be the death of children born from malnourished mothers a year or two from now, and all sorts of consequences. Furthermore, nobody’s going to look because the West is not interested in such things and others don’t have the resources."<ref>http://www.leftwatch.com/articles/2004/chomsky-backpedals-on-silent-genocide-in-afghanistan/</ref>
#Chomsky believes that there are “no anti-Semitic implications in denial of the existence of gas chambers, or even denial of the Holocaust.”<ref>Quoted in W.D. Rubinstein, “Chomsky and the Neo-Nazis,” Quadrant, October 1981.</ref>
#Chomsky has repeatedly claimed that there has never been so much as a misplaced comma in any of his writings and that no valid criticism of any of his statements or ideas has ever been published by anyone.<ref>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKPtwYzehYM</ref>
===Chomsky's Criticisms of the West===
===Chomsky's Criticisms of the West===