Criticizing Chomsky (Written in the Week After Osama Bin Laden's Death, and Chomsky's comments about it)

I plug Chomsky a lot on this blog. That doesn’t mean I’m completely uncritical of him. And I happen to agree with him most of the time. That doesn’t mean I’m completely uncritical of him. Or that I think he needs to be regarded as infallible. Chomsky is a polemical writer, and he occasionally will commit some of the sins common to the genre. 

He cherry picks his quotes. And he will sometimes present facts that are technically true, but in a context that is misleading. (To give but one example: Chomsky criticized Winston Churchill’s desire to use chemical weapons against the Arab tribes. Chomsky neglected to mention that Churchill was advocating non-lethal gas as a more human alternative to the conventional British practice of just bombing the Arabs.)

In short, Chomsky needs to be read with the same critical eye that applies to everything else you read.

In that respect, it’s a pity that there’s not intelligent criticism of Chomsky out there: writers who would take the time to carefully go through his essays and thoughtfully engage his arguments, and, go through his footnotes, and independently fact check his claims.

Unfortunately, in the mainstream media there’s only two criticism of Chomsky ever allowed into press.

1) To criticize Chomsky by criticizing the type of people who read Chomsky. To complain about the crazy leftist kids at Universities these days, or to claim that the bourgeois bohemians just read Chomsky as an icon of fashionable dissent.

2). To just roll your eyes and say “Can you believe this guy?” (without ever engaging any of his actual arguments.)

To the extent that Chomsky’s name ever makes it into the mainstream press at all, it is invariable in one of the two above contexts.
Often this is combined with distorting Chomsky’s arguments, and then hinting that his ability to freely talk and write on these matters should be limited (usually this is done in vague terms without any concrete suggestions, but it’s hinted at nonetheless.) And then to finally say that only in America could we have the courage to tolerate dissent like this.

All of this we’ve seen the past week with the media’s reaction to Chomsky’s comments on Osama Bin Laden’s death. Chomsky’s original article in Guernica can be read here.

Then there’s the reaction. A google search of News articles from the past week related to Chomsky, link here, shows that every single mainstream publication responding to the Chomsky followed this pattern. Typical is this Wall Street Journal article, link here.

All of this goes to demonstrate what Chomsky has been saying all along—that there is a particular worldview that is allowed, and any deviation is not permitted.