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Comment by maeln | Hacker News Reader

> But whenever I hear him speak outside his niche his points are stupid (like this one) or harmful (like his Ukrainian takes).

Chomsky was always like this. He is an unapologetic hypocrite, constantly criticizing the U.S and "the west" while defending "socialist" country for the exact thing, and often even worse, than he was criticizing the U.S for. Even going as far as denying the existence of genocide during the Yugoslavia civil-war.

Manufacturing Consent was a very good book, but for me it won't change the fact that Chomsky is a genocide-denier tankie.

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Chomsky is a provocateur. The currency he measures is attention. There’s some interesting things that he has to say, but ultimately, not worth getting your blood pressure up over.

It’s good to critique the US or the west - you cannot improve without dissent. Fortunately, Chomsky is in the US and enjoys unimpeded speech and academic freedom.

> It’s good to critique the US or the west - you cannot improve without dissent. Fortunately, Chomsky is in the US and enjoys unimpeded speech and academic freedom.

That I can fully agree with. My issue is that he often criticizing the U.S while downplaying the other side violence.

Saying something like "France should not have had a military intervention in Lybia" is fine. But saying this and then adding "and Gaddafi repression of the Arab Spring was exaggerated by the media" is when I know what you really wanted to say.

I think this is hardly the genocide-denial you think it is. In the Gaddafi case, I doubt he really sides with a military dictator.

His critique has always been how the West intervenes, but mainly for economic security and superiority. We don't give much of a rat's-ass about installing a fair democracy, if that's even what these countries want, so much as installing someone who agrees with us (see: Reagan in South America)

Yeah. Not like Snowden or all those other provocateurs forced into exile.

Can you cite him exactly on any of your points or are you paraphrasing what you have heard second hand?

You could just go to his wikipedia article.

Anyway, he tried to downplay the genocide and the violence committed by the Khmer Rouge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chom...

He, in the same fashion, downplayed the bosnian genocide: https://www.dw.com/en/dissident-intellectual-noam-chomsky-at... https://books.google.fr/books?id=7Bl9KT9NME0C&pg=PA142&redir...

And said that the Russian was acting "with restrain and moderation" in Ukraine: https://archive.is/EJp7e

That is how he operate. Whenever there is a conflict involving the U.S, even remotely, he is systematically downplaying the opponent violence and insisting that everyone focus on the U.S and ally violence. This way he can always look like the reasonable man, while basically defending massacre and dictator. How can he do this when criticizing (rightfully so), the U.S for the Vietnam War or the Contra, and not see the hypocrisy, is beside me.

He tried to make sense of numbers, as a point that it serves the US geopolitical goals at the time to have a distraction from their own atrocities.

"We do not pretend to know where the truth lies amidst these sharply conflicting assessments; rather, we again want to emphasize some crucial points. What filters through to the American public is a seriously distorted version of the evidence available, emphasizing alleged Khmer Rouge atrocities and downplaying or ignoring the crucial U.S. role, direct and indirect, in the torment that Cambodia has suffered."

Calling it downplaying genocide is a nice strawman. In any developing situation the media wants to jump yo a conclusion, that's his point overall.

He wasn't denying or downplaying just stating, if its happening how can we know to what degree when we have unreliable sources?

> he tried to downplay the genocide and the violence committed by the Khmer Rouge

The US carpet bombed Cambodia just like it did Vietnam, and Chomsky condemned this.

This nebulous "Khmer Rouge" you refer to was armed by the US starting in 1979 and even more so in subsequent years. The US worked to put them back in power and put economic, military and diplomatic support behind it. As reported in the New York Times, ABC News at the time. Chomsky was against this.

The US establishment was anti-Khmer Touge until 1979, then began arming and supporting them in 1979. By the late 1990s they began going out of favor in the US establishment. Chomsky's opinion hasn't changed, he was against the US bombing Cambodia during the Vietnam War.

You seem to mix things up?

He has been very critical of "socialist" countries, especially towards their underlying political ideology.

Happy to learn otherwise, but everything I've seen follows the pattern of briefly paying lip service to the fact that some enemy of the US is not perfectly innocent, but well we're all human, and here's five pages on how the US is the worst.

“My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence. But also for a much more important reason than that: namely, I can do something about it. So even if the US was responsible for 2% of the violence in the world instead of the majority of it, it would be that 2% I would be primarily responsible for. And that is a simple ethical judgment. That is, the ethical value of one’s actions depends on their anticipated and predictable consequences. It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century.”

https://www.antiwar.com/blog/2014/04/01/why-criticize-your-o...

Calling for introspection is all well and good, but there's nothing ethical about actively denying the reality of what is happening abroad.

In the end, it is just an attempt to shore up weak arguments with weaker falsehoods.

That's interesting, I'm a millenial aged leftist so I don't have the political baggage from the 70s-90s that older people have on Chomsky.

And so I find in a globalized, hegemonic world, Chomsky's first reason is just as important if not more so than the second: Seeing what the larger component is is crucial, as a prerequisite to doing something about it.

Yes, fair enough, it is more that he systematically downplayed the violence of the "red" side whenever there was a conflict with the U.S. Like how he basically tried to deny the Cambodian and Bosnian genocide.

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