They had at their disposal the most powerful technologies of their day, some of which could have posed an immediate existential threat to humanity or a likely one if the regimes had survived. For example, Stalin had nuclear weapons in his arsenal and was a lot less stable and a lot less kept in check than the modern GOP is.
He’s just a louder and more prominent member of the jury. He’s often right about things that aren’t discussed by the MSM but he’s often wrong, so I don’t accord him a special position as arbiter of the Truth™.
Often? About what? Relatively trivial details, or his main points?
He amasses and dispenses huge amounts of detail, so gotchas can be gained here and there over certain phrases, names, or titles that he uses. But to say that “he’s often wrong” is to risk mischaracterizing someone whose incisive main points have long been widely ignored by nearly all levels of U.S. society, because of the discomfiting truths he regularly dispenses about how power works.
In fact (ha), you know what? I’d like to stop this typical derailing line of discussion over whether he’s right about the exact level of the danger posed by the current GOP. For once a relatively popular media outlet (BB) has paid attention to, and asked for sustained viewers’ attention, to Chomsky and the main points of what he has to say. Oh how I wish more people would actually pay attention to him.
Fair enough. It happens. I do pay attention to Chomsky, but don’t take his word as gospel.
I initially gave his larger truth the benefit of the doubt despite his being a linguist and despite the fact that he in particular doesn’t need to resort to constant hyperbole. Someone else said “no, he said what he means”, so I replied “in that case he’s wrong.”
AND a sociopolitical analyst, who’s written scores of books outside of linguistics.
What “constant” hyperbole?
I’ve read, watched and listened to him a lot, and I haven’t encountered constant exaggeration.
Your ad hominem character assassination here is getting a bit bizarre. Maybe just spell out what your more substantive criticism(s) of his sociopolitical thought are?
and voter suppression, don’t forget about how effectively they have made use of voter i.d. laws and voter purges to reduce the number of voters who predominately vote for democrats.
i think the most important thing to remember about chomsky is that he is perhaps the most tireless exponent for going beyond the surface outlines of american politics to look at the whole package of the way capitalist structures effect and influence the politics of the united states . this is one reason he can sometimes come across as taking a “plague on both your houses” position.
his study of the propaganda cycle, with edward herman, “manufacturing consent” is a book i have found useful in helping me decode the way messaging effects our politics. remarkably, i was able to convince one of my most republican uncles to read that book and while he is still a republican he no longer takes fox news as seriously as he once did. it didn’t move him to agree with my left-liberal opinions but it gave us more of a basis for discussion.
chomsky doesn’t always get it right, to that extent he is sometimes trapped within his own framework, but i take his views and ideas very seriously. he is definitely a source of a perspective which is sharply different from mainstream views and as such is almost irreplaceable as a resource. he is not afraid to be wrong and i have seen him admit mistakes on some occasions.
That’s a good encapsulation. Someone similar to Chomsky in terms of perspective who did have the ability to escape his own framework, and thus escape the temptation of hyperbole to which Chomsky frequently succumbs, was Howard Zinn. Once you read Zinn you get a little spoiled, I’ll admit.
@anon75430791 provides a good example above. He exaggerates far more than he has to in order to make his points. It isn’t ad hominem character assassination to note that someone I generally respect and whose broader conclusions I agree with is capable of doing better on details and presentation and phraseology.
If he’d said that the GOP poses an existential threat to humanity I’d agree. If he’d said “today’s Republican Party is the most dangerous organization in the world today” I could see a case being made for that, too. Both are powerful and provocative statements that need no enhancement.
Instead, though, he kicks it up a needless notch further by saying “today’s Republican Party is the most dangerous organization in human history,” giving trollies an opening to distract from his main (and valid) message. Chomsky does this sort of thing a lot, and it’s not only my opinion. Here’s an example from 2006:
He’s been accused of engaging in hyperbole and exaggeration by liberals and some progressives since the Bush Jr. years when he made the jump from respected and well-known academic to a truly public intellectual.*
[* some would date his emergence during the Clinton years but it was still “inside baseball” stuff inside what passes for the American left rather than his being a household name and right-wing bogeyman]
We’ve already discussed that and, I thought, agreed to disagree (given what’s at stake and their current power, I do think it’s the most dangerous organization in human history). IMHO, if trollies use that claim of his to distract from his main message, they’re starting off with a false claim (so screw them).
Regarding his tendency to exaggerate, thanks for the more detailed explanation, and for the link. Having read the latter, it does remind me of the general tenor of you comments in this thread, generally: What’s important about Chomsky is how much he exaggerates, not what he says.
I see that this critic also spends nearly all of his time on Chomsky’s exaggerations and minor inaccuracies, rather than on the substance of what he says. It’s hard to take seriously a review of Chomsky’s book from someone who jingoistically declares the U.S. is “the world’s greatest - if flawed and selfish - democracy” (I don’t think he means greatest in terms of power and influence). Nor one who thinks it’s significant that “Between pages 60 and 62, [Chomsky] cannot decide whether an alleged bribe paid to UN official is $150,000 or $160,000.” Wow, much inconsistent, so discrediting!
Anyway, dang it, here we are again, discussing his exaggerations and technical inaccuracies, rather than what he actually has to say. Le sigh.
On the conclusion itself, yes. I’m framing it in the context of being a needless exaggeration.
How so? I started out in this thread by reframing the exaggerated statement in a way that illustrates its underlying truth. Someone insisted I take it literally instead of as the hyperbole it was, giving me no choice but to state that it was (from a historical and historiograhical POV) wrong.
In my last comment I provided two other very forceful ways he could have phrased it so that no-one would be talking about his exaggerations and inaccuracies.
The writer for the Grauniad is a critic, so that’s his job. He also points out several times that he’s in agreement with Chomsky on the broader issues. Like me he’d prefer that Chomsky do better on the details and the precision of his statements so he can make his case more effectively and give his actual opponents fewer opportunities to discredit what are some very important points.
The title of the article I linked is very much a stretch. It’s a good think piece, but no, not every post-war President has committed war crimes based on the Nuremberg principles. Some? Sure. Not all; that’s not defensible, and he does not even argue it strongly in the piece (he likes to say, “One could argue X position”).
The central thesis of the piece is that the Nuremberg trials were a farce which played to the desires of the winning side(s) instead of justice, which is not at all what the title was about. It’s kind of click-baity.
Exactly. He sets up a category error at the beginning with this sentence:
By violation of the Nuremberg laws I mean the same kind of crimes for which people were hanged in Nuremberg.
Those crimes against humanity specified direct involvement by the accused or the accused ordering underlings directly under his authority to commit the crimes. No-one was hanged in Nuremberg for war crimes committed by proxy troops not under direct orders, nor were officials or military officers of Nazi client states hanged there – those non-German war criminals had their own trials.
Then Chomsky goes on to discuss that some presidents should be hanged in the same way that Germans were at Nuremberg due to CIA-backed foreign armies and insurgent groups and support of client states. This may be a technical distinction but if he’s going to cite legal precedent as the basis of his argument then technical distinctions matter.
Now he could have said something like:
If the international regime of laws established in the wake of the post-war Nuremberg trials were applied fairly, then some post-war American presidents could have been executed. By violation of such laws I mean the same kind of crimes for which people have been sentenced by international tribunals since Nuremberg.
That statement would allow him to support his central thesis and have the added benefit of being more accurate. But of course it doesn’t have the same “oomph” that the original has.
I mean, he could have just gone with his thesis, which is provocative enough by itself.
“The Nuremberg Principles were Total Crap.”
No need to involve Presidents at all, except a short section calling out that the principles uncomfortably place current and past world leaders within their scope.
It seems though that it’s much more important here to discuss Chomsky himself, as a person who is sometimes (supposedly) hyperbolic and technically inaccurate, than to discuss what he actually has to say in the BB post’s linked interview.
As for that interview, I didn’t hear anything I especially disagreed with, but I do wonder about his interpretation near the end of U.S. leaders’ motives for invading Afghanistan. He surmises it was just motivated by revenge and by the desire to show the world that the U.S., having just been attacked on 9/11, has big military muscles that other countries should keep in mind. He contrasts those motives with those driving the invasion of Iraq, which he surmises was mostly driven by a desire to gain control of its oil. He doesn’t state any of that definitively, allowing instead that those are his best (obviously well-educated) guesses.
But I wonder, doesn’t Afghanistan also have a wealth of natural resources? If so, surely the thought of gaining control of them was on the minds of some leaders of the U.S. invasion (and of the ongoing U.S. determination to stay there and keep fighting). As for Iraq, I also remember reading and hearing that as with Qaddafi, Western powers also objected to Hussein’s efforts towards national self-determination, including going off the U.S. dollar.
I’m no expert on these invasions, and as Chomsky allows, who knows what those leading the destruction of those two countries were thinking, but it does seem that he’s being uncharacteristically simplistic here in interpreting what drove them.
systematically dismantling every aspect of government that works for the benefit of the population
This is the clearest statement of their actions and intent. Grover Norquist’s wet dream of drowning government in the bathtub. They’ve been working away at that for decades, but now Trump is giving them enough cover to get away with it at an unprecedented rate.
