Noam Chomsky

by **proldic** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 11:47 am

Deep politics from a marxist discussion board From: What Next? Marxist discussion journal 26 (2003) 17-29 For PDF see <a href="http://mysite.freeserve.com/whatnext">mysite.freeserve.com/whatnext</a> NOAM CHOMSKY: POLITICS OR SCIENCE? Chris Knight Noam Chomsky ranks among the leading intellectual figures of modern times. He has changed the way we think about what it means to be human, gaining a position in the history of ideas— at least according to his supporters — comparable with that of Darwin or Descartes. Since launching his intellectual assault against the academic orthodoxies of the 1950s, he has succeeded — almost single-handedly — in revolutionizing linguistics and establishing it as a modern science. Such victories, however, have come at a cost. The ‘Linguistics Wars’ (Harris 1993) began when, as a young anarchist, Chomsky published his first book. He might as well have thrown a bomb. ‘The extraordinary and traumatic impact of the publication of Syntactic Structures by Noam Chomsky in 1957’, recalls one witness (Maclay 1971: 163), ‘can hardly be appreciated by one who did not live through this upheaval’. From that moment, the battles have continued to rage. 1.01 ‘Command and control’ How could a technical book on syntax have produced such dramatic effects? By his own admission, the author knew little about the world’s different languages. Indeed, he outraged traditionalists by claiming he didn’t need to know. Chomsky was not interested in documenting linguistic diversity. Neither did he care about the relationship between language and human thought or social life. As far as his opponents could see, he was not really interested in linguistics at all. He seemed to be more interested in computers. By 1957, Chomsky’s ‘Research Laboratory of Electronics’ at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had begun attracting the attention of the US military. It was not that they were disturbed about Chomsky’s anarchist politics. Aware of his other activities, they were anxious to benefit from his ideas. Moreover, they were in a position to pay. The preface to Syntactic Structures (1957: 1) concludes: ‘This work was supported in part by the U.S.A. Army (Signal Corps), the Air Force (Office of Scientific Research, Air Research and Development Command), and the Navy (Office of Naval Research); and in part by the National Science Foundation and the Eastman Kodak Corporation’. Two large defence grants subsequently went directly to generativist — that is, Chomskyan — research in university linguistics departments – one to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the mid-1960s and the other, a few years later, to the University of California Los Angeles. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Chomsky 1965) contains this acknowledgment: ‘The research reported in this document was made possible in part by support extended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Research Laboratory of Electronics, by the Joint Services Electronics Programs (U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, and U.S. Air Force) under Contract No. DA36-039-AMC-03200(E); additional support was received from the U.S. Air Force (Electronic Systems Division under Contract AF19(62<img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/glasses.gif ALT="8)"> -2487), the National Science Foundation (Grant GP-2495), the National Institutes of Health (Grant MH-04737-04), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Grant NsG-496).’ Several questions arise. Why did Chomsky – an outspoken anarchist and antimilitarist – take the money? Secondly, what did the military think they were buying? Both questions are sharpened by the fact that MIT at this time had no tradition in linguistics. This confronts us with a third puzzle: why didn’t the investment of military funds go to an institution with a proven record in linguistic research? Explaining his decision to choose MIT, Chomsky recalls that he felt in no mood to serve an established department of linguistics. He needed somewhere where original thinking could be freely explored: ‘I had no prospects in a university that had a tradition in any field related to linguistics, whether it was anthropology, or whatever, because the work that I was doing was simply not recognized as related to that field – maybe rightly. Furthermore, I didn’t have real professional credentials in the field. I’m the first to admit that. And therefore I ended up in an electronics laboratory. I don’t know how to handle anything more complicated than a tape recorder, and not even that, but I’ve been in an electronics laboratory for the last thirty years, largely because there were no vested interests there and the director, Jerome Wiesner, was willing to take a chance on some odd ideas that looked as if they might be intriguing. It was several years, in fact, before there was any public, any professional community with which I could have an interchange of ideas in what I thought of as my own field, apart from a few friends. The talks that I gave in the 1950s were usually at computer centers, psychology seminars, and other groups outside of what was supposed to be my field’ (Chomsky 1988a: 15-16). As for the military, they saw a practical value in Chomsky’s theoretical agenda. In a 1971 interview (Newmeyer 1986: 85-6), Colonel Edmund P. Gaines explained: ‘The Air Force has an increasingly large investment in so called ‘command and control’ computer systems. Such systems contain information about the status of our forces and are used in planning and executing military operations. For example, defense of the continental United States against air and missile attack is possible in part because of the use of such computer systems. And of course, such systems support our forces in Vietnam. The data in such systems is processed in response to questions and requests by commanders. Since the computer cannot ‘understand’ English, the commanders’ queries must be translated into a language that the computer can deal with; such languages resemble English very little, either in their form or in the ease with which they are learned and used. Command and control systems would be easier to use, and it would be easier to train people to use them, if this translation were not necessary. We sponsored linguistic research in order to learn how to build command and control systems that could understand English queries directly.’ Chomsky’s followers were by then engaged in just such a project at the University of California Los Angeles, prompting Colonel Gaines to comment: ‘Of course, studies like the UCLA study are but the first step toward achieving this goal. It does seem clear, however, that the successful operation of such systems will depend on insights gained from linguistic research…..’ The colonel went on to express the Air Force’s ‘satisfaction’ with UCLA’s work. 1.02 Versions of the machine On the eve of the computer age, Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures (1957) excited and inspired a new generation of linguists because it chimed in with the spirit of the times. Younger scholars were becoming impatient with linguistics conceived as the accumulation of empirical facts about locally variable linguistic forms and traditions. Chomsky promised simplification by reducing language to a mechanical ‘device’ whose design could be precisely specified. Linguistics was no longer to be tarnished by association with ‘unscientific’ disciplines such as anthropology or sociology. Avoiding the obscurities of sociocultural or psychosocial studies, linguistics would be redefined as the study of a ‘natural object’ – the specialised module of the brain which (according to Chomsky) was responsible for speech. Excluding social factors and thereby transcending mere politics and ideology, the reconstructed discipline would at last qualify as a natural science akin to mathematics and physics. If a theory is sufficiently powerful and simple, said Chomsky, it should radically reduce the amount of knowledge needed to understand the relevant data. As he explains (Chomsky 1988a: 17): ‘In fact, the amount that you have to know in a field is not at all correlated with the success of the field. Maybe it’s even inversely related because the more success there is, in a sense, the less you have to know. You just have to understand; you have to understand more, but maybe know less’. Syntactic Structures infuriated established linguists – and delighted as many iconoclasts – because its message was that much of the profession’s work had been a waste of time. Why laboriously collect concrete, detailed observations as to how the world’s variegated languages are spoken, if a simplifying short-cut is available? In an ice-cool, starkly logical argument that magisterially brushed aside most current linguistic theory, Syntactic Structures evaluated some conceivable ways of constructing the ultimate ‘language machine’: ‘Suppose we have a machine that can be in any one of a finite number of different internal states.... the machine begins in the initial state, runs through a sequence of states (producing a word with each transition), and ends in the final state. Then we call the sequence of words that has been produced a “sentence”. Each such machine thus defines a certain language; namely the set of sentences that can be produced in this way’ (Chomsky 1957: 1<img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/glasses.gif ALT="8)"> . As his argument unfolds, Chomsky rules out this first, crude design for his envisaged machine – it clearly wouldn’t work. By a process of elimination, he then progressively narrows the range of designs which – on purely theoretical grounds – ought to work. Thrillingly, Chomsky opens up the prospect of discovering in effect ‘the philosopher’s stone’: the design specifications of a ‘device’ capable of generating grammatical sentences (and only grammatical ones) not only in English but in any language spoken (or capable of being spoken) on earth. Syntactic Structures itself, as it happened, proved unequal to the extraordinary task. Aware of this, Chomsky in his next book (1965) proposed a completely different design for his machine – variously known as the Aspects model or as the Standard Theory. This in turn, however, had to be abandoned when mathematical linguists Stanley Peters and Robert Ritchie (1969, 1971, 1973a, 1973b) demonstrated that the class of grammars described by the new model was so all-encompassing as to be vacuous. A device built in such a way, they showed, would be quite extraordinarily stupid. In fact, it would be unable to distinguish between (a) any conceivable list of strings of symbols (say, all the decimal places of ð, divided into arbitrary sequences and enumerated by value of the products of their digits) and (b) a list of actual strings used by humans for expressing themselves in, say, English (Harris 1993: 179-80). As one critic put it (Bach 1974: 15<img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/glasses.gif ALT="8)"> , attempting to use Chomsky’s new model would be like having ‘a biological theory which failed to characterize the difference between raccoons and lightbulbs’. Responding to all this in the early 1970s, Chomsky introduced a number of changes, offering what became known as the Extended Standard Theory, or EST. By the late 1970s, further changes seemed required, leading to the Revised Extended Standard Theory, or REST. Realising that this was still unsatisfactory, in 1981 Chomsky published his Lectures on Government and Binding (1981a), which swept away much of the apparatus of earlier transformational theories in favour of a much more complex approach. In its ‘Principles and Parameters’ incarnation, the language machine becomes a box of switches linked to connecting wires: ‘We can think of the initial state of the faculty of language as a fixed network connected to a switch box; the network is constituted of the principles of language, while the switches are the options to be determined by experience. When the switches are set one way, we have Swahili; when they are set another way, we have Japanese. Each possible human language is identified as a particular setting of the switches – a setting of parameters, in technical terminology. If the research program succeeds, we should be able literally to deduce Swahili from one choice of settings, Japanese from another, and so on through the languages that humans can acquire’ (Chomsky 2000: <img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/glasses.gif ALT="8)"> . Without abandoning this extraordinary dream, Chomsky has recently jettisoned most of the specifics in favour of yet another attempted solution – known as the ‘Minimalist Programme’. It is hard not to suspect that should this in turn be discarded, the patience of even Chomsky’s most ardent supporters may run out. 1.03 Linguistics as physics To his academic colleagues in the humanities and social sciences, Chomsky’s programme has caused predictable astonishment, exasperation and even outrage. How could Chomsky imagine it possible – even in principle — to construct a ‘device’ enabling scientists to ‘deduce’ the languages currently or historically spoken across the world? In replying to such critics, Chomsky accuses them of misunderstanding science. To do science, Chomsky explains (1979: 57), ‘you must abstract some object of study, you must eliminate those factors which are not pertinent....’ The linguist – according to Chomsky – cannot study humans articulating their thoughts under concrete social or historical conditions. Instead, you must replace reality with an abstract model. ‘Linguistic theory’, Chomsky (1965: 3) declares, ‘is primarily concerned with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogenous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance’. In this deliberately simplified model, children acquire language in an instant (Chomsky 1976: 15). The evolution of language is also instantaneous (1998: 17). Semantic representations are not socially constructed but innate and preexistent (2000: 64-66). Humans speak not for social reasons, but in expressing their genetic nature (1976: 57-69). Speech is the natural, autonomous output of a specialised computational mechanism – the ‘language organ’ – installed inside the brain of every human on earth. In his capacity as a natural scientist, Chomsky (1976: 186) correspondingly sees people as ‘natural objects’, their language a ‘part of nature’. Linguistics ‘falls naturally within human biology’ (1976: 123). However, this is not biology as normally understood. Discussing the evolution of speech, Chomsky suggests: ‘The answers may well lie not so much in the theory of natural selection as in molecular biology, in the study of what kinds of physical systems can develop under the conditions of life on earth....’ (1988: 167). Language’s features may be ‘simply emergent physical properties of a brain that reaches a certain level of complexity under the specific conditions of human evolution’ (1991: 50). More recently, Chomsky (1998: 17) has speculated that ‘.....a mutation took place in the genetic instructions for the brain, which was then reorganized in accord with the laws of physics and chemistry to install a faculty of language’. Such appeals to fundamentally physical laws are a recurrent theme. For Chomsky, linguistics can aspire to the precision of physics for a simple reason – language itself is a ‘natural object’ (2000: 106-33). As such, it approximates to a ‘perfect system’ – an optimal solution to the problem of relating sound and meaning. Biologists, according to Chomsky, do not expect such perfection, which is a distinctive hallmark of physics. He explains: ‘In the study of the inorganic world, for mysterious reasons, it has been a valuable heuristic to assume that things are very elegant and beautiful’. Chomsky (1996:30) continues: ‘Recent work suggests that language is surprisingly “perfect” in this sense.... Insofar as that is true, language seems unlike other objects of the biological world, which are typically a rather messy solution to some class of problems, given the physical constraints and the materials that history and accident have made available’. Language, according to Chomsky, lacks the messiness we would expect of an accumulation of accidents made good by evolutionary ‘tinkering’. Characterised by beauty bordering on perfection, it cannot have evolved in the normal biological way. It is easy to understand why computer programmers and engineers might find it useful to treat language as a mechanical ‘device’. If, say, the aim were to construct an electronic command-and-control system for military use, then traditional linguistics would clearly be inadequate. Such engineers would need a version of language stripped free of ‘meanings’ in any human emotional or cultural sense, cleansed of politics – and stripped also of poetry, humour or anything else not accessible to a machine. But military figures such as Colonel Gaines were not the only people hoping to benefit from the new approach. What of Chomsky’s other institutional sources of support? And what about his own fiercely anti-militarist, anarchosyndicalist politics? How did anticapitalist revolution connect with the ‘revolution’ Chomsky inaugurated in linguistics? Indeed, can the two sides of Chomsky’s output be reconciled at all? Was the young anarchist tailoring his theories to meet the requirements of his military sponsors – forcing us, perhaps, to question the sincerity of his anarchosyndicalist commitments? Or did he believe he was taking the money – refusing to let this influence his scientific results – in order to secure the best possible position from which to promote the anarchist cause? 1.04 Chomsky’s politics Born in 1928 in Philadelphia, Chomsky (1988a: 13) describes himself as ‘a child of the Depression’. ‘Some of my earliest memories’, he reminisces, ‘which are very vivid, are of people selling rags at our door, of violent police strikebreaking, and other Depression scenes’. He recalls looking out from a trolley car window as it passed a textile factory whose workforce had set up a picket line: ‘It was mostly women, and they were getting pretty brutally beaten up by the cops. I could see that much. Some of them were tearing off their clothes. I didn’t understand that. The idea was to try to cut back the violence. It made quite an impression. I can’t claim that I understood what was happening, but I sort of got the general idea. What I didn’t understand was explained to me.... My family had plenty of unemployed workers and union activists and political activists and so on. So you knew what a picket line was and what it meant for the forces of the employers to come in there swinging clubs and breaking it up’ (quoted in Rai 1995: 7). Chomsky’s politics, then, didn’t have to be learned from books. Between the ages of two and twelve, Chomsky attended the Oak Lane County Day School in Philadelphia. This was an experimental progressive school which sought to foster non-competitive creativity. Chomsky remembers that the teaching here produced ‘a lively atmosphere’ in which ‘the sense was that everybody was doing something important’. Each child ‘was regarded as somehow being a very successful student’: ‘It wasn’t that they were a highly select group of students. In fact, it was the usual mixture in such a school, with some gifted students and some problem children who had dropped out of the public schools. But nevertheless, at least as a child, that was the sense that one had – that, if competing at all, you were competing with yourself. What can I do? But no sense of strain about it and certainly no sense of relative ranking’ (Chomsky 1988a: 5). On later entering a city high school, Chomsky was shocked to discover that none of this was considered normal. In other schools, apparently, competitive dynamics were encouraged and personal creativity suppressed. Chomsky (1988a: 6) comments: ‘That’s what schooling generally is, I suppose. It’s a period of regimentation and control, part of which involves direct indoctrination, providing a system of false beliefs. But more importantly, I think, is the manner and style of preventing and blocking independent and creative thinking and imposing hierarchies and competitiveness and the need to excel, not in the sense of doing as well as you can, but doing better than the next person’. Chomsky here identifies the educational philosophy he would resist throughout his life. Chomsky’s real education, however, came less from school than from a lively intellectual culture dominated by the radical Jewish intelligentsia of New York. It was, he recalls, a ‘working-class culture with working-class values, solidarity, socialist values, etc. Within that it varied from communist party to radical semi-anarchist critique of Bolshevism.... But that was only a part of it. People were having intensive debates about Stekel’s version of Freudian theory, a lot of discussions about literature and music, what did you think of the latest Budapest String Quartet concert, or Schnabel’s version of a Beethoven sonata vs. somebody else’s version’ (quoted in Rai 1995: <img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/glasses.gif ALT="8)"> . At an early age, Chomsky was affected by the outcome of the Spanish civil war. ‘The first article I wrote was an editorial in the school newspaper on the fall of Barcelona, a few weeks after my tenth birthday’ (1988a: 13). He describes the defeat as ‘a big issue in my life at the time’ (Barsky 1997: 16). Referring to events in Germany and Italy after World War I and in Spain in 1936, Chomsky comments: ‘The anarchosyndicalists, at least, took very seriously Bakunin’s remark that the workers’organizations must create “not only the ideas but also the acts of the future itself” in the prerevolutionary period. The accomplishments of the popular revolution in Spain, in particular, were based on the patient work of many years of organization and education, one component of a long tradition of commitment and militancy And workers’ organizations existed with the structure, the experience, and the understanding to undertake the task of social reconstruction when, with Franco’s coup, the turmoil of early 1936 exploded into social revolution’ (quoted in Otero 1981: 3<img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/glasses.gif ALT="8)"> . By his twelfth birthday, Chomsky had already rejected the politics of the Communist Party. Inspired by Barcelona ’s anarchists, he adopted their defeated cause and in subsequent years has never abandoned it. Chomsky rejected not only Stalinism but also Leninism, which he associated with elitist attempts at indoctrination of the people. The Spanish anarchists, he felt, didn’t try to educate the masses by imposing a rigid ideology from above. They believed in self-organization and everyone’s capacity — once personally and politically liberated – to contribute to the revolutionary cause. ‘I do not doubt’, Chomsky writes (1981b: 224), ‘that it is a fundamental human need to take an active part in the democratic control of social institutions.’ The ‘fundamental human capacity’, in his view, ‘is the capacity and the need for creative self-expression, for free control of all aspects of one’s life and thought’ (1988b: 144). Contemporary capitalist society ensures rewards for the more selfish tendencies in human nature. ‘A different society’ however, ‘might be organized in such a way that human feelings and emotions of other sorts, say solidarity, support, sympathy become dominant’ (1988b: 773). Chomsky observes: ‘We may only hope that human nature is so constituted that these elements of our essential nature may flourish and enrich our lives, once the social conditions that suppress them are overcome. Socialists are committed to the belief that we are not condemned to live in a society based on greed, envy, and hate. I know of no way to prove that they are right, but there are also no grounds for the common belief that they must be wrong’ (1988 [1976]: 192). 1.05 Chomsky and academia In 1945, Chomsky entered the University of Pennsylvania: ‘I entered with a good deal of enthusiasm and expectations that all sorts of fascinating prospects would open up, but these did not survive long, except in a few cases..... At the end of two years, I was planning to drop out to pursue my own interests, which were then largely political’ (1988a: 6-7). While actively opposing the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, Chomsky met Zellig Harris, who was at that time campaigning for Arab-Jewish co-operation. According to Chomsky, Harris possessed ‘a kind of semianarchist strain to his thought’. It so happened that he was also a charismatic professor of modern linguistics. Chomsky, in his own words, was at this time ‘a kind of college dropout, having no interest in college at all because my interest in a particular subject was generally killed as soon as I took a course in it’. Just ‘to have something to do’, however, he decided to study linguistics under his new friend Harris. Gradually, ‘I got interested in the field and sort of put it at the center of my concerns’ (1988b: 119). Although he ‘got interested’, however, Chomsky felt by no means qualified. His father had been a noted Hebrew scholar, imparting to Noam a childhood interest in historical linguistics and mediaeval Hebrew grammar. But on attending college, Chomsky felt no enthusiasm for structural linguistics. Neither was he attracted by anthropology or current versions of psychology. Under Harris’ influence, Chomsky instead took courses in philosophy and mathematics, ‘fields in which I had no background at all, but which I found interesting, in part, no doubt, thanks to unusually stimulating teachers’ (1988a: <img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/glasses.gif ALT="8)"> . As an anarchist, Chomsky naturally distrusted the state, large institutions in general, the university and all its functionaries. Disaffected intellectuals of this kind, according to one historian (Jacoby 1987: 96-7; quoted in Barsky 1997: 85-6) ‘are less vulnerable to the corruption of title and salary because their resistance is moral, almost instinctual’. Chomsky respected science, especially mathematics and physics. By the same token, he was deeply suspicious of the so-called ‘social sciences’, regarding them as patently ideological. Chomsky dreamed of ridding linguistics of such contamination. He would do this by detaching the discipline from its current institutional affiliations and rendering it purely formal — if possible, purely mathematical. Was it no more than a happy coincidence that this was exactly what the nascent computer industry – and its military sponsors – required? 1.06 The behaviourist background Up until this time, speech had been allocated to ‘culture’, in turn thought of as ‘learned behaviour’. During the 1940s and 1950s, the standard paradigm in psychology had been behaviourism – championed in the United States most prominently by B. F. Skinner. Skinner’s new book, Verbal Behaviour (1957), claimed to explain language as a set of habits built up over time. Rats, Skinner showed, can be trained to perform extraordinarily complex tasks provided two basic principles are followed. First, the tasks must be broken down into graduated steps. Second, the animal under instruction must be appropriately rewarded or punished at each step. This type of learning was termed by Skinner operant conditioning. Building on his work with rats, Skinner (1957: 3) argued: ‘The basic processes and relations which give verbal behaviour its special characteristics are now fairly well understood. Much of the experimental work responsible for this advance has been carried out on other species, but the results have proved to be surprisingly free of species restrictions. Recent work has shown that the methods can be extended to human behaviour without serious modification.’ Skinner accordingly treated human language in stimulus-response terms, identifying ‘meaning’ with the habituated response of the listener to the speech-sounds he or she repeatedly heard. Language was conceptualised as structured like a chain, learned by associating one link ¯ via appropriate approval or ‘reinforcement’ ¯ to the next. This stress on ‘learning’ was, of course, part of a much wider intellectual movement. It was closely linked to the notion of ‘culture’ that had been central to anthropology since the beginning of the twentieth century. As I have described elsewhere (Knight 1991), Franz Boas and his students founded cultural anthropology in the United States by repudiating Darwinian and social-evolutionary traditions and by forcing a breach with physical anthropology. Their justification for ignoring ‘nature’ was that humans can apparently learn virtually any conceivable cultural pattern given appropriate contact, needing external input because they lack the precise instincts of other animals. In Britain, anthropologists such as Bronislaw Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown later echoed these themes, arguing that man’s evolutionary origins were unknowable and in any case irrelevant, breaking with evolutionary theory and instead recommending ‘functionalism’ ¯ a body of knowledge designed specifically to appeal to educators, employers and administrators. Radcliffe-Brown in particular helped redefine the discipline as an instrument of political coercion. ‘To exercise control over any group of phenomena’, as he (1960 [1929]) explained, ‘we must know the laws relating to them. It is only when we understand a culture as a functioning system that we can foresee what will be the results of any influence, intentional or unintentional, that we may exert upon it.’ What the colonial and other authorities needed was an applied science, a rule-book for dealing with indigenous peoples, enabling them to be governed in much the same way that a chemist or physicist can control and manipulate nature. Planners and social engineers ¯ among them Stalin in the Soviet Union ¯ welcomed behaviourism for similar reasons. Like the new anthropology, behaviourism in psychology seemed to offer enhanced techniques for mass education, pacification and control. Stimulus-response psychology, as one historian observes (Harris 1993: 55), encouraged industrialists in the belief that securing co-operative behaviour meant finding in the workforce which buttons to push ¯ and pushing them. Or as Noam Chomsky (1988 [1984]: 131) puts it: ‘Those who rule by violence tend to be “behaviorist” in their outlook. What people may think is not terribly important; what counts is what they do. They must obey, and this obedience is secured by force’. 1.07 The language instinct Two years after publishing Syntactic Structures, Chomsky published a devastating review of Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour. He had been wise enough not to take issue with, say, the school of child psychology pioneered in the Soviet Union by Lev Vygotsky (1987) or the subtle and fruitful approach adopted by the Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget (1929). Despite major differences with psychoanalysis, these psychologists had echoed Freud in taking as read that humans, like other animals, must have deep-rooted instincts of some relevance to a study of the mind. Chomsky, however, refrained from acknowledging the existence of such scientists. By singling out behaviourism for attack and ignoring everything else, he succeeded in arranging the battleground to suit his own needs. According to Chomsky, we must choose between one of two mutually exclusive theoretical possibilities. One is that language is ‘external’ to the individual. If that were the case, the child acquiring language would need repetitive training and motivation through external punishments and rewards. Rejecting this, Chomsky’s alternative is that language is ‘internal’. The child’s pre-installed, genetically determined knowledge of language can simply to be allowed to ‘grow’. Chomsky’s review of Verbal Behaviour succeeded, it would seem, beyond its author’s wildest dreams. Published in the journal Language and subsequently splashed across the front cover of The New York Review of Books, the ‘case against B. F. Skinner’ set in motion a tidal wave of revolt against a school of thought increasingly perceived as Orwellian in its project to shape and manipulate human life. It was not difficult for Chomsky to associate traditional linguistics with Orwellian aims. Leonard Bloomfield was the major figure in American linguistics between the wars. In 1929, he told the Linguistics Society of America (Bloomfield 1970: 227): ‘I believe that in the near future ¯ in the next few generations, let us say ¯ linguistics will be one of the main sectors of scientific advance, and that in this sector science will win through to the understanding and control of human conduct’. Following the Second World War, reviewing the undesirable conduct of large numbers of military personnel and insurgents worldwide, many of Bloomfield’s professional colleagues in the United States saw themselves living ‘at a time when our national existence ¯ and possibly the existence of the human race ¯ may depend on the development of linguistics and its application to human problems’ (McDavid 1954: 27-32).The wave of McCarthyite witch-hunting which swept North America during the 1950s was in part premised on the belief that critics of ‘the American way of life’ must clearly have been brain-washed by ‘communists’. In this bitter cold-war context, linguistics was seen as a crucial weapon in the world-wide struggle for ideological control. Against this backdrop, Chomsky found it easy to present his antithesis as politically attractive and even liberating. Chomsky is withering in his response to the notion – still prevalent in left-liberal circles to this day – that a child must be taught its natal tongue through social pressure, training and example: ‘Attention to the facts quickly demonstrates that these ideas are not simply in error but entirely beyond any hope of repair. They must be abandoned, as essentially worthless. One has to turn to the domain of ideology to find comparable instances of a collection of ideas, accepted so widely and with so little question, and so utterly divorced from the real world. And, in fact, that is the direction in which we should turn if we are interested in finding out how and why these myths achieved the respectability accorded to them, how they came to dominate such a large part of intellectual life and discourse. That is an interesting topic, one well worth pursuing....’ (Chomsky 1988: 137-<img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/glasses.gif ALT="8)"> . How can language be an ordinary acquired skill? What kind of ‘skill’ is it when humans everywhere in the world ‘learn’ it in basically the same way and in equal measure? Languages – Chomsky points out – are not like other cultural patterns. They are not more or less complex, more or less sophisticated, according to the level of technological or other development. While differing from one another grammatically and in other ways, every human language is an equally intricate, complex intellectual system; none can be described as more or less sophisticated or ‘advanced’. In all cultures, moeoever, people speak fluently regardless of social status, training or education. There is an innate biological schedule for language acquisition, specifying at what age a new language can easily be mastered and at what age the task becomes virtually impossible. While young children take quickly and easily to learning a new language, adults encounter immense difficulties, often making recurrent basic errors and revealing a permanent tell-tale accent even despite years of trying. Young children not only learn easily: in linguistically impoverished environments, they may creatively invent improvements, developing a language more systematic than any they have heard. It is as if they knew by instinct how a proper language should be structured, anticipating regularities and establishing them inventively where necessary (Goldin-Meadow and Mylander 1984; Gleitman and Newport 1995). The human vocal tract is a complex arrangement – a combination of disparate structures whose original functions certainly had no connection with speech (MacNeilage 1999). But with its independently controllable parts, the tract as it now exists appears well designed to transmit strings of digitally encoded information accurately and at very high speeds. This, too – as Chomsky’s colleague Lenneberg (1967) was among the first to stress – illustrates that there is such a thing as ‘human nature’. No child needs to be taught to babble, any more than it needs instruction in suckling at the breast. The rhythmic lip and mouth movements are instinctive and enjoyable for their own sake. Given even a minimally loving and stimulating environment, the next transition – from babbling to mature speaking – occurs equally naturally. Like the transition from crawling to walking, it is just part of growing up. The syntactical skills of children mastering a language, Chomsky points out, are acquired with extraordinary rapidity and in unmistakably creative ways. The child is not just assimilating knowledge or learning by rote: on the contrary, what comes out seems to exceed what goes in. Children hear relatively few examples of most sentence types, are rarely corrected, and encounter a bewildering array of half-formed sentences, lapses and errors in the language input to which they are exposed. Yet despite all this, they are soon fluent, creatively producing sentences never heard before, knowing intuitively which sequences are grammatical and which are not. In Chomsky’s (1959: 57) words: ‘The fact that all normal children acquire essentially comparable grammars of great complexity with remarkable rapidity suggests that human beings are somehow specially designed to do this, with data-handling or ‘hypothesis-formulating’ ability of unknown character and complexity.’ It is as if humans have an instinct for language. 1. 08 Chomsky: politics or science? In accepting military funding for his early language research, Chomsky risked accusations of political corruption. How could an anarchist do such a thing? As if fending off such attacks, Chomsky went out of his way to clarify his political stance. Showing unusual courage, he made speeches advocating civil disobedience in opposition to the United States’ war effort in Vietnam. As the political system is currently constituted, Chomsky (1985: 252) argues, policies are determined by representatives of private economic power. In their institutional roles, these individuals ‘will not be swayed by moral appeals’ but can only be affected by the ‘costs consequent upon the decisions they make’. Chomsky and his allies seemed vindicated when, after the Tet offensive of 1968, the joint Chiefs of Staff pointed out that the deployment of additional troops to Vietnam was being hampered by the need to ensure that ‘sufficient forces would still be available for civil disorder control’ at home (Rai 1995: 115). During these and subsequent years, no American public figure did more to put the record straight on ‘the United States’ invasion of Vietnam’ than Noam Chomsky. Other left-wing intellectuals may not have felt quite the same need to deny personal culpability for their country’s actions around the world. Chomsky experienced this need as intimate and morally inescapable. But simply to explain his political stance was not enough. Chomsky’s overall programme had to appear consistent. He could hardly afford to let his critics suggest that although his politics were progressive, his linguistic theories were clearly reactionary. His anarchosyndicalism and antimilitarism had to be constructed as consistent with his linguistics. Somehow, the corporately backed and financed ‘cognitive revolution’ in psychology and related sciences had to be presented as intrinsically liberating and consistent with Chomsky’s political beliefs. He did not have to look far for a solution. Chomsky projected the ‘language device’ of his electronics laboratory into the brain of the human child. In real life, the human brain is not composed of wires or switch-boxes of the kind a 1950s computer engineer might devise. But if Chomsky’s electronic ‘device’ could henceforth be conceptualised as a feature of the maturing human brain, it would nonetheless solve a number of pressing problems. Central to anarchism is the celebration of spontaneity and self-organization. It must have occurred to Chomsky that a machine defined as autonomous – as freely controlling its own ‘creative’ output – would fit into the anarchist scheme of things. Chomsky could now claim that his commitment to what looked like a box of electronic tricks had a deeper political significance. The commitment in reality was to a resistant and creative human nature. Children don’t need to be taught language by external pressure or example because – thanks to the special ‘device’ in their brains – they know the basics already. We ‘can know so much’, as Chomsky (1976: 7) explains, ‘because in a sense we already knew it, though the data of sense were necessary to evoke and elicit this knowledge. Or to put it less paradoxically, our systems of belief are those that the mind, as a biological structure, is designed to construct’. If human mental nature is intricately structured and resistant, it must set limits to authoritarian control: ‘If, indeed, human nature is governed by Bakunin’s ‘instinct for revolt’ or the ‘species character’ on which Marx based his critique of alienated labor, then there must be continual struggle against authoritarian social forms that impose restrictions beyond those set by ‘the laws of our own nature’, as has long been advocated by authentic revolutionary thinkers and activists’ (Chomsky 1976: 133). Moving onto the offensive against his left-liberal critics, he explains (Barsky 1997: 20<img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/glasses.gif ALT="8)"> : ‘For intellectuals ¯ that is, social, cultural, economic and political managers ¯ it is very convenient to believe that people have ‘no nature’, that they are completely malleable. That eliminates any moral barrier to manipulation and control, an attractive idea for those who expect to conduct such manipulation, and to gain power, prestige and wealth thereby.’ In fact, according to Chomsky, revolution remains possible because of the deep-rooted human instinct to resist. As we learn a language, according to Chomsky, we are anarchists – not social conformists. The child acquires linguistic fluency in order to express its individual creativity: ‘If some individual were to restrict himself largely to a definite set of linguistic patterns, to a set of habitual responses to stimulus configurations.... we would regard him as mentally defective, as being less human than animal. He would immediately be set apart from normal humans by his inability to understand normal discourse, or to take part in it in the normal way ¯ the normal way being innovative, free from control by external stimuli, and appropriate to a new and ever-changing situation’ (1972: 100). Celebrating a rebellious human ‘nature’, Chomsky repudiates the pessimistic view that humanity’s ‘passions and instincts’ will forever prevent enjoyment of the ‘scientific civilisation’ that reason might create. He concludes instead that ‘human needs and capacities will find their fullest expression in a society of free and creative producers, working in a system of free association....’ ‘Success in this endeavour’, he continues, ‘might reveal that these passions and instincts may yet succeed in bringing to a close what Marx called the ‘prehistory of human society’. No longer repressed and distorted by competitive and authoritarian social structures, these passions and instincts may set the stage for a new scientific civilization in which ‘animal nature’ is transcended and human nature can truly flourish’ (1976: 134). 1.09 In defence of science For Chomsky, so-called social science — premised on the idea that human nature doesn’t exist — is irretrievably, hopelessly ideological and reactionary. Intellectuals embrace it not because it is true but, on the contrary, because it is a patent fiction required to keep people ignorant and confused. Writing of school education of the kind typical in the United States, Chomsky terms it ‘a period of regimentation and control, part of which involves direct indoctrination, providing a system of false beliefs’ (Chomsky 1988b: 6). Other components of the system have the same basic function (Chomsky 1988c [1984]: 136): ‘Over sixty years ago, Walter Lippmann discussed the concept of “the manufacture of consent,” an art that is “capable of great refinements” and that may lead to a “revolution” in “the practice of democracy.” The idea was taken up with much enthusiasm in business circles — it is a main preoccupation of the public relations industry, whose leading figure, Edward Bernays, described “the engineering of consent” as the very essence of democracy. In fact, as Gabriel Kolko notes, “from the turn of the century until this day, [the public mind] was the object of a cultural and ideological industry that was as unrelenting as it was diverse: ranging from the school to the press to mass culture in its multitudinous dimensions.” The reason, as an AT&T vice president put it in 1909, is that “the public mind…..is in my judgment the only serious danger confronting the company.” The idea was also taken up with vigor in the social sciences. The leading political scientist Harold Lasswell wrote in 1933 that we must avoid “democratic dogmatisms,” such as the belief that people are “the best judges of their own interests.” Democracy permits the voice of the people to be heard, and it is the task of the intellectual to ensure that this voice endorses what far-sighted leaders know to be the right course. Propaganda is to democracy what violence is to totalitarianism. The techniques have been honed to a high art, far beyond anything that Orwell dreamt of. The device of feigned dissent, incorporating the doctrines of the state religion and eliminating rational critical discussion, is one of the more subtle means, though more crude techniques are also widely used and are highly effective in protecting us from seeing what we observe, from knowledge and understanding of the world in which we live.’ For Chomsky, the only kind of knowledge which is free from such ideological contamination is genuine natural science. Chomsky disagrees passionately with those social theorists — including historians of science — for whom science itself is just another form of oppressive ideology. He admits that such suspicions have long found favour among his fellow-anarchists: ‘Within the anarchist tradition, there’s been a certain feeling that there’s something regimented or oppressive about science itself, that we should break free of the oppressive structures of scientific thinking, and so on. I’m totally out of sympathy with that attitude. There are no arguments that I know of for irrationality. I don’t think the methods of science amount to anything more than being reasonable, and I don’t see why anarchists shouldn’t be reasonable’ (1988a: 22). With the rise of postmodernism, Chomsky complains, science has become viewed as just another form of manipulative ideology. Whereas in the 1930s, he notes, progressive intellectuals were still running education classes for ‘the workers’ and writing books with titles such as ‘Mathematics for the Millions’, everything has now gone into reverse: ‘Today’s counterparts of these ’30s left intellectuals are telling people, You don’t have to know anything. It’s all junk, a power play, a white male conspiracy. Forget about rationality and science. In other words, put those tools in the hands of your enemies. Let them monopolize everything that works and makes sense’ (Chomsky 1998b: 12<img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/glasses.gif ALT="8)"> . Chomsky passionately opposes the idea that ordinary people needn’t learn anything but can think what they like. Instead of urging us to ‘break free of the oppressive structures of scientific thinking’, he recommends respecting and upholding precisely those ‘structures’. The compatibility between anarchist politics and science, according to Chomsky, is proven by numerous precedents including the work of Pyotr Kropotkin, whose great book, Mutual Aid — a celebration of co-operative self-organization in nature — was ‘perhaps the first major contribution to “sociobiology”’ (1988: 21). According to Chomsky, the nub of the matter is that while everyone acquires linguistic competence, not everyone is in a position to conduct scientific research. The difference between the humanities and the sciences, for Chomsky, is that scientists must co-operate with one another across space and time and therefore be honest. In the humanities, by contrast – as in ordinary life – people are free to ignore one another and can claim whatever they please. In the humanities, scholars tend to feel threatened by science precisely because of its unrestrictedly co-operative nature. Equally, they feel threatened by ideas which are genuinely new. Such defects may also afflict disciplines within natural science. But at least ‘the sciences do instil habits of honesty, creativity and co-operation’, features considered ‘dangerous from the point of view of society’ (quoted in Rai 1995: 13<img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/glasses.gif ALT="8)"> . A student in a university physics department will hardly survive without being questioning; in the ‘ideological disciplines’, by contrast, originality is discouraged. Chomsky (1975: 219) complains that in the ‘domain of social criticism the normal attitudes of the scientist are feared and deplored as a form of subversion or as dangerous radicalism’. For Chomsky, the culture of science is the real ‘counter-culture’ to the reigning ideology (Rai 1995: 13<img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/glasses.gif ALT="8)"> . In recent decades, historians of science have clarified the social and political processes through which research agendas are set and ‘facts’ correspondingly selected and constructed (Kuhn 1970; Latour and Woolgar 1979; Haraway 1989). For many social anthropologists, the concept of a monolithic, unitary knowledge-form known as ‘science’ has yielded to a more pluralistic vision of multiple ‘sciences’ fashioned for diverse social purposes. Western versions, it is widely argued, prevail over indigenous alternatives because their supporters can lay claim to disproportionate levels of economic and military power (Haraway 1989; Nader 1996). Chomsky does not hold this view. Since Copernicus and Galileo, we have known that the earth is round and that it encircles the sun – facts which remain true regardless of anyone’s tribal or religious beliefs to the contrary. For Chomsky, political pluralism doesn’t license unqualified persons to intrude as they please into scientific debates. Those who have not mastered the relevant literature — internalising its concepts and terms — have nothing of interest to contribute and should therefore expect to be excluded: ‘Look, in the physical sciences there’s by now a history of success, there’s an accumulated record of achievement which simply is an intrinsic part of the field. You don’t even have any right to enter the discussion unless you’ve mastered that. You could challenge it, it’s not given by God, but nevertheless you have to at least understand it and understand why the theories have developed the way they have and what they’re based on and so on. Otherwise, you’re just not part of the discussion, and that’s quite right’ (1988a: 16). 1.10 Not part of the discussion According to Chomsky, the so-called ‘social sciences’ amount only to political ideology, a defect extending naturally to sociologically conceived versions of linguistics. Consequently, it is right to exclude such perspectives from discussions within science. Those who fail to understand this clearly haven’t mastered certain foundational concepts intrinsic to the field. For Chomsky, ‘society’ is not a valid scientific concept. No natural language should be conceptualised as belonging to a social group. Neither should we imagine that in acquiring linguistic competence, children need social relationships ¯ science cannot say anything about such phenomena. ‘Mind’ has no necessary connection with ‘society’. To study mental phenomena is to examine aspects of brain structure and function. Ignoring the so-called ‘social sciences’, Chomsky’s dream is to unify the sciences by integrating linguistics into an expanded version of physics: ‘The world has many aspects: mechanical, chemical, optical, electrical and so on. Among these are its mental aspects. The thesis is that all should be studied in the same way, whether we are considering the motion of the planets, fields of force, structural formulas for complex molecules, or computational properties of the language faculty’ (Chomsky 1996: 31). Consistently with this project, Chomsky defines language as ‘an individual phenomenon, a system represented in the mind/brain of a particular individual’ (1988: 36), contrasting this with the earlier view of language as ‘a social phenomenon, a shared property of a community’. De Saussure (1974 [1915]: 14) wrote of langue: ‘It is the social side of speech, outside the individual who can never create nor modify it by himself; it exists only by virtue of a sort of contract signed by the members of a community’. The problem with such usage, Chomsky (1988: 36-7) complains, is that it ‘involves obscure sociopolitical and normative factors’ – about which science can have nothing to say. Chomsky denies the relevance of social factors even when considering language acquisition by the human child. The infant’s linguistic capacities, he explains, cannot be taught. Instead, they must be ‘allowed to function in the way in which they are designed to develop’ (1988: 173). After briefly discussing this topic, he concludes: ‘I emphasized biological facts, and I didn’t say anything about historical and social facts. And I am going to say nothing about these elements in language acquisition. The reason is that I think they are relatively unimportant’ (1988: 173). Superficial irrelevancies aside, Chomsky views language acquisition as independent of experience: ‘No one would take seriously a proposal that the human organism learns through experience to have arms rather than wings, or that the basic structure of particular organs results from accidental experience. Rather, it is taken for granted that the physical structure of the organism is genetically determined....’ (1976: 9-10). Human mental structures develop in the same way. ‘Acquisition of language’, concludes Chomsky (1988: 174), ‘is something that happens to you; it’s not something that you do. Learning language is something like undergoing puberty. You don’t learn to do it; you don’t do it because you see other people doing it; you are just designed to do it at a certain time’. 1.11 Chomsky in political perspective Let us retrace our steps. Consider Chomsky the young anarchist, faced with the problem of breaking into academia. Given his outspoken views, how was he to overcome the many obstacles that would naturally be placed in his way? It would appear that Chomsky found a way of turning his apparent political handicap into an advantage. Financially and institutionally, the requirement – he knew – was for an agenda the precise reverse of anarchosyndicalism. The 1950s represented the dawn of the new computer age. Key intellectual and technical developments were being funded by the American military. These and other corporate forces required a new version of cognitive and linguistic science, having little in common with what they saw as Marxist-inspired versions of sociology or anthropology. What was needed was a psychology and a linguistics completely stripped of social content or political awareness – a version of these disciplines rigorously re-engineered and fine-tuned to serve the computer age in the name of ‘cognitive revolution’. But how could the left’s ‘natural’ ascendancy in these disciplines be overturned? Corporate America needed someone of intellectual integrity and – preferably – of unimpeachable political integrity to act as its standard-bearer in organizing the necessary coup. Ideally, this person should not only be ‘left-wing’ in an ordinary, run-of-the-mill sense. The perfect candidate would be sufficiently left-wing to outflank everyone else in the race. Chomsky in 1957 was the right person arriving in the right position at exactly the right time. In the event, Chomsky forged an anti-behaviourist coalition linking much of the academic left with those corporate forces – including the military – who were underwriting the development of the nascent computer industry. It was an unholy alliance, and as such was destined to fall apart once the behaviourist enemy had been overthrown. Jerome Bruner (1990: 2-3) recalls: ‘Now let me tell you first what I and my friends thought the revolution was about back there in the late 1950s. It was, we thought, an all-out effort to establish meaning as the central concept in psychology — not stimuli and responses, not overtly observable behaviour, not biological drives and their transformation, but meaning. ....we were not out to “reform” behaviourism, but to replace it’. ‘The cognitive revolution as originally conceived’, Bruner (1990: 3) continues, ‘virtually required that psychology join forces with anthropology and linguistics, philosophy and history, even with the discipline of law’. Once behaviourism had been toppled, however, Chomsky clarified that this was not his vision at all. As Bruner (1990: 40) explains: ‘Very early on.....emphasis began shifting from ‘meaning’ to ‘information’, from the construction of meaning to the processing of information. These are profoundly different matters. The key factor in the shift was the introduction of computation as the ruling metaphor and of computability as a necessary criterion of a good theoretical model’. Information, as Bruner(1990: 4) points out, is a term designed to be indifferent with respect to meaning. In computational terms, information comprises an already precoded message in the system. Meaning is preassigned to messages. It is not an outcome of computation nor is it relevant to computation save in the arbitrary sense of assignment: ‘According to classic information theory, a message is informative if it reduces alternative choices. This implies a code of established possible choices. The categories of possibility and the instances they comprise are processed according to the “syntax” of the system, its possible moves. Insofar as information in this dispensation can deal with meaning it is in the dictionary sense only: accessing stored lexical information according to a coded address.’ In integrating his new version of linguistics with computer science, Chomsky dispensed with concepts such as ‘intention’, ‘context’ and ‘meaning’ in favour of an insistent and relentless focus on ‘syntax’. It was Alan Turing’s great discovery that machines can be designed to evaluate any inference that is ‘formally valid’ – that is, valid by virtue of the internal syntax of the pre-installed code. No machine can genuinely talk, because speaking entails understanding what other speakers may have in mind as they draw on their memories and experiences of themselves and others on the biological, social, cultural, religious and other levels inhabited by human minds. Machines are and always will be hopeless at passing themselves off as humans. But, as Fodor (2000: 13) points out, ‘you can build them so that they are quite good at detecting and responding to syntactic properties and relations. That, in turn, is because the syntax of a sentence reduces to the identity and arrangement of its elementary parts, and, at least in the artificial languages that machines compute in, these elementary parts and arrangements can be exhaustively itemized, and the machine specifically designed to detect them’. Such a system, however, cannot cope with vagueness, with polysemy or with metaphoric or connotative connections – in other words, with the stuff of human language. Consequently, Chomsky and his followers simply stopped talking of meaning – replacing the idea with “computability” instead. Linguists now spoke not of intention, belief or agency but of mechanical ‘inputs’ and ‘outputs’ – notions not too different, as Bruner (1990: 7) points out, from the ‘stimuli’ and ‘responses’ of the behaviourists who were supposed to have been overthrown. Writing of Chomsky’s overall scientific contribution, Geoffrey Leech (1983: 3) comments: ‘It has the advantage of maintaining the integrity of linguistics, as within a walled city, away from the contaminating influences of use and context. But many have grave doubts about the narrowness of this paradigm’s definition of language, and about the high degree of abstraction and idealization of data which it requires’. Child-language specialist Elizabeth Bates (1984) complains of the ‘scorched earth’ policy deployed by Chomsky and his allies to keep the opposition at bay. While the overthrow of behavourism was widely celebrated, the ‘revolution’ intended by Chomsky’s corporate sponsors had nothing to do with the establishment of a science of human meaning. As these forces championed Chomsky in steering the ‘cognitive revolution’ along channels narrowly defined by their specific commercial and political goals, the intellectuals who had supported generativism ‘from the left’ felt betrayed. Had they been able to unite, they might have comprised a formidable intellectual and political force. In the event, however, Chomsky’s politics served him and his sponsors well. Left-wing resistance to Chomsky’s science was always tempered by respect for his moral and political integrity. How do you attack an ‘enemy’ who is on your own side? The ambivalence ended up simply paralysing the opposition, whose splits and disagreements left Chomsky with a free hand — which he used quite mercilessly. It is fair to say that most of those linguists and other creative thinkers whose contributions were excluded by Chomsky had political sympathies not vastly different from his own. Together, they could have mounted an impressive intellectual defence of the unity and autonomy of science. In the event, it was Chomsky’s defection that sealed their fate. Alienated from the academic mainstream, this talented individual was in effect selected by corporate America to do an extraordinary double-act, playing the role of chief enforcer for the new corporate science at home – while using this very status to gain a hearing as the most eloquent academic critic of U.S. policies elsewhere across the globe. References cited Bach, E. 1974. Explanatory inadequacy. In D. Cohen (ed), Explaining Linguistic

by **DrDebugDU** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 12:17 pm

Very interesting read. I missed one point though (or I overlooked it - TMI I have to reread it a slower pace): The key behind the learning language skills that there is a sudden explosion of words and gramatical structure which is so huge that it can be never be explained from the limited input. Usually this appears the strongest with young children 3-6 years old, but it also happens when you acquire a second language and since that happens in an adult stage it can be better explored. When learning a new language, the start is very slow with little or no progress and that stage often takes years (and some people will stay on that stage), but especially if there is active interaction there is a sudden stage of mass expansion of knowledge. It has been documented time and time again that for one weird reason the sudden 'understanding of a language' always happens when the subject starts to think and dream in the other language. Even though some have said that there is suddenly translation of the native language to the second language, the observed result is totally the opposite: there is no translation anymore and the language is suddenly implemented on a level which far exceeds the initial input. After the sudden implementation of a language on a mind scale for one reason the human being returns to the initial state. Any addition as far as vocubulary and grammar goes is once again very very slow and once again the input is far greater than the output. In conclusion language skills start very slow with the input being far less than the output and there is a sudden implementation of the whole framework on a mental level which far exceeds any initial input and afterwards we are back on the slow track. The computer analogy is very good as well, because I've observed the same process in acquiring programming languages. It starts very slow and suddenly you understand it and any development from there is slow again.

by **proldic** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 1:44 pm

My Beef with Chomsky by Michael Morrissey, Ph.D -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Following are Dr. Morrissey's summary comments on his correspondence with linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky, between 1989 and 1995. This summary was written in September 2000. * * * Chomsky and AIDS In my first letter to Chomsky, in April 1989, I included my review of the Turner film, The Men Who Killed Kennedy, which I had seen a few months earlier and had so turned my head around. He replied (5/15/89) that the review was "interesting" and that he "didn't know about the events" I described. In retrospect, this is a puzzling remark. Three years later (3/3/92) he told me he had "read a good bit of the critical literature" (meaning critical of the Warren Report), so I suppose he did this reading in the meantime, the Gulf War notwithstanding. I learned in 1995, however, after reading Ray Marcus's Addendum B (1995, self-published), that Chomsky had been well informed about the evidence of high-level conspiracy in the assassination twenty years before I wrote to him. Marcus tells the story of trying to enlist the support of a number of progressive intellectuals in reopening the JFK case in 1969: I first met with Noam Chomsky. Soon after our discussions began, he asked his secretary to cancel his remaining appointments for the day. The scheduled one-hour meeting stretched to 3-4 hours. Chomsky showed great interest in the material. We mutually agreed to a follow-up session later in the week. Then I met with Gar Alperovitz [a professor at Harvard]. At the end of our one-hour meeting, he said he would take an active part in the effort if Chomsky would lead it... [The second meeting] again lasted much of an afternoon. The discussion ranged beyond evidentiary items to other aspects of the case. I told Chomsky of Alperovitz' offer to assist him if he decided to lead an effort to reopen. After the meeting, as they drove me back to my apartment, Bromberger [another MIT professor who had attended the meeting] expressed the view that, "If they are strong enough to kill the president, and strong enough to cover it up, then they are too strong to confront directly...if they feel sufficiently threatened., they may move to open totalitarian" ("they" was not further defined). As we have seen from previous reactions by I.F. Stone, A.L. Wirin, and Carey McWilliams, this was similar to the fears expressed or implied by many leftist intellectuals among those who nevertheless professed faith in the Warren Report. From Bromberger, I was hearing it for the first time from someone who believed the report to be false. I phoned Vince Salandria, of whom I had spoken to Chomsky, and asked him to send Chomsky his research and thinking. Salandria told me he was skeptical that Chomsky would actually get involved, based on his previous experiences with such left-oriented people. He reasoned that had they entertained any such intentions, they would have acted on them long before this. Nevertheless, he agreed to send the material. Upon returning to Los Angeles, I wrote a lengthy letter to Chomsky summing up my overview of the case to that time, and stating as cogently as I could the arguments for his active involvement. He responded on April 18, 1969: Just a quick note. I got your long letter, and some material from Salandria. I'll read both carefully. But I won't be able to decide anything until I return from England, in mid-June. Right now things are simply too rushed, and I'm too harassed to give serious thought to anything. I'll be in touch with you then. I don't know what the odds are. I'm still open-minded (and I hope will remain so). From the context of our previous meetings it was clear that what Chomsky "...won't be able to decide" until he returned from England was not the question of whether or not there was a conspiracy --- that he had given every indication of having already decided in the affirmative --- but whether or not he wished to participate actively, even to assume a leading role, in the movement to reopen the case. I never heard from him again, and Chomsky did not join such a movement. On the contrary, in recent years he has on a number of occasions gone on record attacking the critics' position and supporting the Warren Report (pp. 67-6<img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/glasses.gif ALT="8)"> . What "events" had I described in my little review that Chomsky "didn't know about," after being informed by Marcus and Salandria twenty years earlier? There is a telling parallel to this behavior in Chomsky's reaction to the AIDS origin issue. In late summer 1989, I sent Chomsky an early (1986) paper by Jakob Segal in English and a copy of his first book, Aids: Erreger aus dem Genlabor (AIDS: Germ from the Pentagon, Berlin: Simon und Leutner, 1987), which, though in German, I thought he would be able to read. (After all, I had to pass a German reading exam to qualify for my Ph.D. in linguistics, and he is the most famous linguist in the world!) He thanked me (8/26/89) for "the surprising and very interesting material," without further comment. I had "surprised" him with the "very interesting" argument that the Pentagon had created AIDS, and this was all he had to say? It was my turn to be surprised. On Sept. 14, 1989 I sent him a copy of an article I had written summarizing Segal's theory ("Is AIDS Man-Made?"). He thanked me (9/22/89) for the "information," which he said was "most intriguing," but again had no further comment. On Nov. 29, 1989, I sent Chomsky a photocopy of the MacArthur testimony from the Congressional Record (see "Informing the Press" in "Was There an AIDS Contract?"). He replied (12/28/89): Thanks also for the material from the Hearings. Sends a chill up the spine. This is very far from my field, and I have no scientific judgment. But it is hard for me to believe that one can't obtain a scientific judgment from some knowledgeable and unprejudiced source. I don't know people directly involved in AIDS research, but there are plenty of them around. A year later, on Nov. 30, 1990, I sent him another article about Segal, focussing on the MacArthur testimony ("Burying the Public Record"). Chomsky's reply (12/17/90) was: "Quite a story." These were his last words on the subject to me. A "chill up the spine," but the man who calls Washington the "terrorist capital of the world" has no more to say on the subject. The parallel is clear. In 1969, he learns from Marcus and Salandria about the evidence for conspiracy in the assassination, but has not a word more to say about the subject until twenty years later, when I write to him, at which time he professes "surprise" to hear about it. In 1989, he also expresses surprise and horror at the idea that the "terrorist" US government may have created AIDS, but has nothing further to say on this subject either. This behavior strikes me as very much out of character --- at least out of the character that I thought, from reading his books, that Chomsky possessed. There is another significant parallel. Chomsky's trust in the integrity and objectivity of the "scientific community" (in quotes because I think it is more like the Mafia than a community) is astonishing, and again totally out of character for a man who is considered by many to be the "leading intellectual dissident" in the country. In 1989 he assures me that "knowledgeable and unprejudiced" sources can answer the question of the origin of AIDS (although he obviously does not wish to pursue the question, despite a "chill up the spine"). A couple of years later, Chomsky reveals his absolute faith in the National Academy of Sciences. In dismissing the notion of conspiracy in the JFK assassination, he gives this example of conspiracy logic (July 1, 1992): Thus when the National Academy of Sciences refutes by careful experiment the one reason offered by the House Committee to question the Warren Report, we can simply conclude that the scientists are in on the conspiracy. Anyone who knows them personally knows that this is laughable... It is hard to remember, reading this, that the author is Noam Chomsky, author of many books and articles excoriating other academics and journalists, not to mention politicians and government officials, for their conformist, propagandized mentality (e.g., Manufacturing Consent). But in these lines we learn not only that it is "laughable" to doubt the judgment of a member of the National Academy of Scientists, but also, implicitly, that the House Select Committee on Assassinations 1979 report is trustworthy. No one who has read "a good bit of the literature" could maintain such faith in either of these institutions --- even before Gaeton Fonzi's definitive exposé of the HSCA's thoroughly compromised "investigation" (The Last Investigation, NY: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1993). No one, at least, who is not either incredibly naive, or the worst example of the kind of propagandized intellectual that Chomsky has so often (and effectively and correctly) warned us about. Chomsky and CAIB/CAQ Chomsky suggested that I send my review of the Turner film (The Men Who Killed Kennedy) to Covert Action Information Bulletin (now Quarterly). This was the first I had heard of it. One of CAIB's editors, Bill Vornberger, answered on 10/25/89 that they could not print my review because they were planning to run a review of Jim Garrison's On the Trail of the Assassins, which had just come out, in their next issue. This review never appeared, and as far as I know CAIB/CAB has never published anything about the Kennedy assassination. Thus the first obvious question: Why has a journal devoted to exposing the misdeeds of the CIA so conspicuously avoided the subject of the JFK assassination, when a large portion of the general public believes the CIA was involved, and especially since the journal's longtime editors, Bill Schaap and Ellen Ray, were also the editors at Sheridan Square Press, which published Garrison's book, and the editors of Lies Of Our Times, a political monthly (now defunct) that published favorable (and reasonable) reviews of the Stone film? Chomsky has always been a supporter of CAIB/CAQ; his photo adorns the magazine's subscription inserts. "Quite a good rag," he told me (May 15, 1989). "I write for it a lot." Here again is a statement which in retrospect I find very puzzling. If I had bothered to check, I would have found that Chomsky had published only two articles in CAIB --- actually only one, since the second one (No. 32, summer 1989) was simply a shortened version of the first (No. 26, summer 1986), and they were identically titled ("Libya in US Demonology"). Why did Schaap and Ray publish virtually the same article twice within three years? They had never done such a thing before, and they haven't since. Why would Chomsky refer to this one article, published twice, as "a lot"? How could he write for it "a lot," if it was only one article? On May 21, 1992, referring to Alexander Cockburn's review of the Stone film in The Nation, Chomsky wrote to me: But so far, his account is the only one in print that does justice to the factual record. Perhaps I should abstain from comment on this, since I did a lot of the background research for it (though what he wrote is his way of using it). I would like to know how many professors, especially famous professors, do "background research" for journalists. Chomsky is the only one I have ever heard of. Maybe this is the way to understand his remark about having written "a lot" for CAIB, although only one article had appeared under his name. If he does "background research" for Alexander Cockburn, why shouldn't he do it for others? Although CAIB/CAQ has strictly avoided the assassination in print, Vornberger told me in the same letter that "we are very much aware of the fact that Kennedy was killed by members of a conspiracy." "In fact," Vornberger continued, "it is our opinion that these men were current or former employees of the CIA." Vornberger also said "we highly recommend" Jim Garrison's On the Trail of the Assassins. The question screaming at us here is: If that's what they think, why haven't they written about it? CAIB/CAQ and AIDS I also sent "Burying the Public Record," which Chomsky found to be "quite a story," to Lies Of Our Times. Bill Schaap replied (12/27/90) that they had "real problems with the Segal material," that "the most credible critic in this country of the standard medical establishment line is Dr. Peter Duesberg," and that although "incredibly significant," the AIDS origin issue was not, as I had called it, "'the biggest cover-up since JFK.'" He said LOOT or CAIB would be interested in a "general piece on the failure of the media (U.S. and Western Europe) to cover alternative theories in general, which would not have to accept any particular theory, but would show how conferences which take the establishment line get considerable coverage whereas those which do not are barely, if at all, covered." CAQ did not come out with an AIDS article until six years later, in their Fall 1996 (No. 5<img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/glasses.gif ALT="8)"> issue. This article, "Tracking the Real Genocide," by David Gilbert, a prison inmate, hardly fulfilled Schaap's call for fair coverage of "alternative theories." Gilbert offers a two-sentence summary of Segal's theory, failing to mention that Segal claims the virus escaped by accident, thus making it appear that Segal blamed the Pentagon for spreading it on purpose, which he did not. This gross misrepresentation of Segal is especially surprising considering what Schaap had written to me six years earlier (12/27/90): We have real problems with the Segal material, even though we did, at CAIB, publish Dr. Lehrman's article which relied to some extent on it. (We do have his English monograph.) There was a logical fallacy in Lehrman's reliance, too, because he used Segal's theories to bolster his notion that the release of AIDS was deliberate, even though Segal believes that it was accidentally released. But in 1996, Schaap allows Gilbert to get away with this blatant misrepresentation. What "problems," one must ask, did the CAIB editors have with the Segal material? Why did they have no problems with the Gilbert article, which they must have known was a travesty? Gilbert not only misrepresents Segal but fails completely to mention other dissident AIDS researchers, notably Robert Strecker and Alan Cantwell. He dismisses the science of the matter by asking his microbiologist friend Janet Stavnezer, who assured him that "the Segals' splice theory is scientifically impossible." In the issue of CAQ following the Gilbert article (No. 59, Winter 1996), Nathaniel Lehrman writes in a letter to the editor that his 1987 article "Is AIDS Non-Infectious" (CAIB No. 2<img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/glasses.gif ALT="8)"> "examined and demolished the Segal hypothesis of a synthetically created AIDS virus." This is truly astonishing. It will be clear to anyone who reads the earlier article that exactly the opposite is true. In that article, Lehrman suggests that HIV, although it is only "closely associated " with AIDS [following Duesberg], might be "a laboratory-created, minimally infective agent intended to be blamed for the chemical poisoning it actually accompanies." Far from "demolishing" Segal, Lehrman affirms and goes considerably beyond it, suggesting that AIDS was not only man-made, but made on purpose: The information described here, and the history of CBW research, suggest that AIDS may indeed be another example of a deliberately created disease (p. 62). How is one to understand such self-contradictions? Schaap tells me in 1990 that his magazine wants to give decent coverage to "alternative" theories like Segal's, and six years later he publishes an article that does just the opposite. Gilbert gives us "official AIDS doctrine," as Lehrman puts it, grossly misrepresenting Segal, and Lehrman responds with an even grosser misrepresentation of what he himself had written in the same magazine nine years earlier! One thing is clear: the message, flawed as it is, from CAQ/CAQ is that theories of the artificial origin of AIDS are not to be taken seriously. Chomsky and Vietnam Chomsky's argument is that Vietnam policy did not change after the assassination (until 1968, of course) Only tactics changed, quite coincidentally, at the same time as the assassination, in response to the changed military situation. The change in tactics was first made by JFK, not LBJ. #1 is justified by Chomsky's definition of the word policy to mean "withdrawal if and only if victory is assured." This is his interpretation, from which he refuses to budge an inch, of one sentence in the McNamara-Taylor recommendations approved by NSAM 263: This action [troop withdrawals] should be explained in low key as an initial step in a long-term program to replace U.S. personnel with trained Vietnamese without impairment of the war effort. Chomsky insists that the last six words constitute an "explicit condition" of victory before any withdrawal would take place, and that this was the policy of both JFK and LBJ. This is pure linguistics. Now, Chomsky is the greatest linguist in the world, but look at the linguistic facts he ignores in his interpretation: First, the sentence can easily be understood to mean "This is the way we should explain it, but not necessarily the whole truth." Obviously, McNamara and Taylor (and JFK) would not have wanted it to look like they were simply abandoning the South Vietnamese. More importantly, the phrase "without impairment of the war effort" is not an explicit condition, even if the most famous linguist in the world says it is. Consider: My plan is to wash the windows without hurting the plants. Does this mean (Chomsky's interpretation) My plan is to wash the windows if and only if I can do so without hurting the plants. or does it mean, as I am quite certain it does, My plan is to wash the windows and not hurt the plants (and I think I can do so). This is what the sentence means, and it is what McNamara and Taylor meant: "The plan --- at least the way we should explain the plan --- is to withdraw and do so without impairment of the war effort (which as we have said should be taken over completely by the Vietnamese by the end of 1965)." But Chomsky wants us to understand it as: "The plan is to withdraw if and only if victory is assured." Who is right? You be the judge. The second argument is meant to back up the first. If the policy never changed, it does not matter when the tactics changed, whether under JFK or LBJ, but we would still be left with the troublesome coincidence that the change in tactics (in fact a reversal, from withdrawal to escalation, from not fighting the war to fighting the war) took place immediately after the assassination. But lo and behold, on Jan. 31, 1991, right out of the blue, apparently, a draft of NSAM 273 appears from the black box that houses "national security" secrets, with no explanation as to why it was being released 13 years after the final document was released (NSAM 273 was declassified in 197<img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/glasses.gif ALT="8)"> , or who or what was causing it to be released (an interesting question in itself, as is the question of its authenticity). This is all Chomsky needs for his third argument: If anyone should insist that even a reversal of tactics, if not of policy, so close on the heels of the murder of the head of state in charge of both the policy and the tactics, could be suspicious, thanks to the Bundy draft we now know that the person behind the change in tactics was not Johnson, but Kennedy. Why? Because Bundy wrote the draft on Nov. 21, one day before the assassination! Therefore, Chomsky concludes, JFK would have signed it (although he never saw it or discussed it with Bundy or anyone else). Therefore, Chomsky further concludes, the people who say NSAM 273 shows a change in policy (Peter Dale Scott, John Newman, Arthur Schlesinger) are right, but wrong about who was responsible for it. Chomsky's third argument actually contradicts the first. It's like saying, "I don't care what flavor it is, but make sure it's vanilla." If "tactical" changes don't matter, they don't matter. If they don't matter, there is no reason to make the further point --- dubious in itself --- that JFK made the change. By adding this third argument, Chomsky allows for the possibility that the "tactical" change was indeed significant, which destroys the premise expressed in the first argument. What does all this mean? What is the message we are hearing from Chomsky and CAIB/CAQ? It is clear: No AIDS conspiracy No assassination conspiracy No connection between Vietnam and the assassination Surely it cannot escape our attention that this is precisely the same message we have been hearing from the government, from the mainstream press, and the so-called "scientific community." Nor should it escape our attention, as I think even this brief summary shows, that the argumentation presented to support these conclusions is patently false in each case. Of course it is not necessarily wrong to agree with the government. But when "radical dissidents" agree so completely with the government, on such important questions, and the reasoning employed is so clearly wrong, the warning bells should sound. Ding dong. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Return to Main Page -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- * * *

by **heath7** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 2:51 pm

Wow. It seems today I'm meant to remove any remaining faith I have in Chomsky. Earlier today I read an article in the American Prospect that attacked so-called liberals for supporting conscription, and one of those singled out was Chomsky. They linked an interview with Chomsky from Democracy Now: <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/15/1448219#transcript" target="top">Noam Chomsky on Yasser Arafat, Iraq and the Draft</a> AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, speaking on Sunday in Princeton, New Jersey. Afterwards, he was asked a series of question, one of them was, would the draft be reinstated. NOAM CHOMSKY: I think it's extremely unlikely. I should tell you this as a word of personal background. I was very much involved in the resistance movement in the 1960's. In fact, I was just barely -- the only reason I missed a long jail sentence is because the Tet Offensive came along and the trials were called off. So I was very much involved in the resistance, but I was never against the draft. I disagreed with a lot of my friends and associates on that, for a very good reason, I think at least as nobody seems to agree. In my view, if there's going to be an army, I think it ought to be a citizen's army. Now, here I do agree with some people, the top brass, they don't want a citizen's army. They want a mercenary army, what we call a volunteer army. A mercenary army of the disadvantaged. And in fact, in the Vietnam war, the U.S. military realized, they had made a very bad mistake. I mean, for the first time I think ever in the history of European imperialism, including us, they had used a citizen's army to fight a vicious, brutal, colonial war, and civilians just cannot do that kind of a thing. For that, you need the French foreign legion, the Gurkhas or something like that. Every predecessor has used mercenaries, often drawn from the country that they're attacking like England ran India with Indian mercenaries. You take them from one place and send them to kill people in the other place. That's the standard way to run imperial wars. They're just too brutal and violent and murderous. Civilians are not going to be able to do it for very long. What happened was, the army started falling apart. One of the reasons that the army was withdrawn was because the top military wanted it out of there. They were afraid they were not going to have an army anymore. Soldiers were fragging officer. The whole thing was falling apart. They were on drugs. And that’s why I think that they're not going to have a draft. That's why I’m in favor of it. If there's going to be an army that will fight brutal, colonial wars, and that's the only likely kind of war, I’m not talking about the militarization of space and that kind of thing, I mean ground wars, it ought to be a citizen's army so that the attitudes of the society are reflected in the military. Chomsky was never against the draft, despite being an anarchist? Does not compute. I understand his argument that the unintended consequences of a citizens' army are a means to an end, but he completely glosses over the loss of life were a draft to happen, and he ignores that it would still serve the interests of the war pigs. Thanks to the interview on Democracy Now, and this thread, it will be hard for me to view Chomsky as anything other than an intelligence asset.

by **thrulookingglass** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 3:12 pm

"They were afraid they were not going to have an army anymore. Soldiers were fragging officer (sic). The whole thing was falling apart. They were on drugs. And that’s why I think that they're not going to have a draft. That's why I’m in favor of it. If there's going to be an army that will fight brutal, colonial wars, and that's the only likely kind of war, I’m not talking about the militarization of space and that kind of thing, I mean ground wars, it ought to be a citizen's army so that the attitudes of the society are reflected in the military." Ok, so Chomsky is saying in this quote that its good to have decent "salt of the earth" people in the military because it grounds these military actions in reality. Professional soldiers (as implied in Chomsky's quote) are great killers (if there ever could be such a being) and conscripts f-off, do drugs, and kill officers. Anyhow, if I have a point to this rant, on the list of assholes who deserve to be brought in shackles before the masses Chomsky is like number 8020! I mean, if we can find room to critize Chomsky (heralded as one of the great philosophers of our time)...ya think we can get a few threads in here about what a colossal asshole W/Cheney is?! Like Chomsky is a threat to our way of life.

by **proldic** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 3:41 pm

THE JFK ASSASSINATION II: CONSPIRACY PHOBIA ON THE LEFT Almost as an article of faith, some individuals believe that conspiracies are either kooky fantasies or unimportant aberrations. To be sure, wacko conspiracy theories do exist. There are people who believe that the United States has been invaded by a secret United Nations army equipped with black helicopters, or that the country is secretly controlled by Jews or gays or feminists or black nationalists or communists or extraterrestrial aliens. But it does not logically follow that all conspiracies are imaginary. Conspiracy is a legitimate concept in law: the collusion of two or more people pursuing illegal means to effect some illegal or immoral end. People go to jail for committing conspiratorial acts. Conspiracies are a matter of public record, and some are of real political significance. The Watergate break-in was a conspiracy, as was the Watergate cover-up, which led to Nixon's downfall. Iran-contra was a conspiracy of immense scope, much of it still uncovered. The savings and loan scandal was described by the Justice Department as "a thousand conspiracies of fraud, theft, and bribery," the greatest financial crime in history. Conspiracy or Coincidence? Often the term "conspiracy" is applied dismissively whenever one suggests that people who occupy positions of political and economic power are consciously dedicated to advancing their elite interests. Even when they openly profess their designs, there are those who deny that intent is involved. In 1994, the officers of the Federal Reserve announced they would pursue monetary policies designed to maintain a high level of unemployment in order to safeguard against "overheating" the economy. Like any creditor class, they preferred a deflationary course. When an acquaintance of mine mentioned this to friends, he was greeted skeptically, "Do you think the Fed bankers are deliberately trying to keep people unemployed?" In fact, not only did he think it, it was announced on the financial pages of the press. Still, his friends assumed he was imagining a conspiracy because he ascribed self-interested collusion to powerful people. At a World Affairs Council meeting in San Francisco, I remarked to a participant that U.S. leaders were pushing hard for the reinstatement of capitalism in the former communist countries. He said, "Do you really think they carry it to that level of conscious intent?" I pointed out it was not a conjecture on my part. They have repeatedly announced their commitment to seeing that "free-market reforms" are introduced in Eastern Europe. Their economic aid is channeled almost exclusively into the private sector. The same policy holds for the monies intended for other countries. Thus, as of the end of 1995, "more than $4.5 million U.S. aid to Haiti has been put on hold because the Aristide government has failed to make progress on a program to privatize state-owned companies" (New York Times 11/25/95). Those who suffer from conspiracy phobia are fond of saying: "Do you actually think there's a group of people sitting around in a room plotting things?" For some reason that image is assumed to be so patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers. But where else would people of power get together - on park benches or carousels? Indeed, they meet in rooms: corporate boardrooms, Pentagon command rooms, at the Bohemian Grove, in the choice dining rooms at the best restaurants, resorts, hotels, and estates, in the many conference rooms at the White House, the NSA, the CIA, or wherever. And, yes, they consciously plot - though they call it "planning" and "strategizing" - and they do so in great secrecy, often resisting all efforts at public disclosure. No one confabulates and plans more than political and corporate elites and their hired specialists. To make the world safe for those who own it, politically active elements of the owning class have created a national security state that expends billions of dollars and enlists the efforts of vast numbers of people. Yet there are individuals who ask with patronizing, incredulous smiles, do you really think that the people at the top have secret agendas, are aware of their larger interests, and talk to each other about them? To which I respond, why would they not? This is not to say that every corporate and political elite is actively dedicated to working for the higher circles of power and property. Nor are they infallible or always correct in their assessments and tactics or always immediately aware of how their interests are being affected by new situations. But they are more attuned and more capable of advancing their vast interests than most other social groups. The alternative is to believe that the powerful and the privileged are somnambulists, who move about oblivious to questions of power and privilege; that they always tell us the truth and have nothing to hide even when they hide so much; that although most of us ordinary people might consciously try to pursue our own interests, wealthy elites do not; that when those at the top employ force and violence around the world it is only for the laudable reasons they profess; that when they arm, train, and finance covert actions in numerous countries, and then fail to acknowledge their role in such deeds, it is because of oversight or forgetfulness or perhaps modesty; and that it is merely a coincidence how the policies of the national security state so consistently serve the interests of the transnational corporations and the capital-accumulation system throughout the world. Kennedy and the Left Critics In the winter of 1991-92 Oliver Stone's film JFK revived popular interest in the question of President John Kennedy's assassination. As noted in part I of this article, the mainstream media launched a protracted barrage of invective against the movie. Conservatives and liberals closed ranks to tell the public there was no conspiracy to murder the president for such things do not happen in the United States. Unfortunately, some writers normally identified as on the Left have rejected any suggestion that conspiracy occurred. While the rightists and centrists were concerned about preserving the legitimacy of existing institutions and keeping people from seeing the gangster nature of the state, the leftists had different concerns, though it was not always clear what these were. Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, and others challenge the notion that Kennedy was assassinated for intending to withdraw from Vietnam or for threatening to undo the CIA or end the cold war. Such things could not have led to his downfall, they argue, because Kennedy was a cold warrior, pro-CIA, and wanted a military withdrawal from Vietnam only with victory. Chomsky claims that the change of administration that came with JFK's assassination had no appreciable effect on policy. In fact, the massive ground war ordered by Johnson and the saturation bombings of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos ordered by Nixon represented a dramatic departure from Kennedy's policy. On some occasions, Chomsky says he refuses to speculate: "As for what JFK might have done [had he lived], I have nothing to say." Other times he goes on to speculate that Kennedy would not have "reacted differently to changing situations than his close advisers" and "would have persisted in his commitment to strengthen and enhance the status of the CIA" (Z Magazine, 10/92 and 1/93). The evidence we have indicates that Kennedy observed Cambodian neutrality and negotiated a cease-fire and a coalition government in Laos, which the CIA refused to honor. We also know that the surviving Kennedy, Robert, broke with the Johnson administration over Vietnam and publicly stated that his brother's administration had committed serious mistakes. Robert moved with the tide of opinion, evolving into a Senate dove and then a peace candidate for the presidency, before he too was murdered. The two brothers worked closely together and were usually of like mind. While this does not provide reason enough to conclude that John Kennedy would have undergone a transition comparable to Robert's, it still might give us pause before asserting that JFK was destined to follow in the direction taken by the Johnson and Nixon administrations. In the midst of this controversy, Chomsky wrote a whole book arguing that JFK had no intention of withdrawing from Vietnam without victory. Actually, Kennedy said different things at different times, sometimes maintaining that we could not simply abandon Vietnam, other times that it ultimately would be up to the Vietnamese to fight their own war.1 One of Kennedy's closest aides, Kenneth O'Donnell, wrote that the president planned to withdraw from Vietnam after the 1964 elections. According to Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, who headed military support for the clandestine operations of the CIA, Kennedy dictated "the rich parts" of NSAM 263, calling for the withdrawal not only of all U.S. troops but all Americans, meaning CIA officers and agents too. Prouty reflects that the president thereby signed "his own death warrant." The Army newspaper Stars and Stripes ran a headline: "President Says - All Americans Out by 1965." According to Prouty: "The Pentagon was outraged. JFK was a curse word in the corridors." Concentrating on the question of withdrawal, Chomsky says nothing about the president's unwillingness to escalate into a ground war. On that crucial point all Chomsky offers is a speculation ascribed to Roger Hilsman that Kennedy might well have introduced U.S. ground troops in South Vietnam. In fact, the same Hilsman, who served as Kennedy's Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, the officer responsible for Vietnam, noted in a long letter to the New York Times (1/20/92) that in 1963 "President Kennedy was determined not to let Vietnam become an American war - that is, he was determined not to send U.S. combat troops (as opposed to advisers) to fight in Vietnam nor to bomb North Vietnam." Other Kennedy aides such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and General Maxwell Taylor made the same point. Taylor said, "The last thing he [Kennedy] wanted was to put in our ground forces . . . I don't recall anyone who was strongly against [the recommendation], except one man and that was the President." Kennedy opposed the kind of escalation embarked upon soon after his death by Lyndon Johnson, who increased U.S. troops in Vietnam from 17,000 to approximately 250,000 and committed them to an all-out ground war. Kennedy and the CIA Chomsky argues that the CIA would have had no grounds for wanting to kill JFK, because he was a dedicated counterinsurgent cold warrior. Chomsky arrives at this conclusion by assuming that the CIA had the same reading of events in 1963 that he has today. But entrenched power elites are notorious for not seeing the world the way left analysts do. To accept Chomsky's assumptions we would need a different body of data from that which he and others offer, data that focuses not on the Kennedy administration's interventionist pronouncements and policies but on the more private sentiments that festered in intelligence circles and related places in 1963. To offer a parallel: We might be of the opinion that the New Deal did relatively little for working people and that Franklin Roosevelt actually was a tool of the very interests he publicly denounced as "economic royalists." From this we might conclude that the plutocrats had much reason to support FDR's attempts to save big business from itself. But most plutocrats dammed "that man in the White House" as a class traitor. To determine why, you would have to look at how they perceived the New Deal in those days, not at how we think it should be evaluated today. In fact, President Kennedy was not someone the CIA could tolerate, and the feeling was mutual. JFK told one of his top officials that he wanted "to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds" (New York Times, 4/25/66). He closed the armed CIA camps that were readying for a second Bay of Pigs invasion and took a number of other steps designed to bring the Agency under control. He fired its most powerful and insubordinate leaders, Director Allen Dulles, Deputy Director Charles Cabell, and Deputy Director for Plans Richard Bissell. He tried to reduce its powers and jurisdiction and set strict limits as to its future actions, and he appointed a high-level committee to investigate the CIA's past misdeeds. In 1963, CIA officials, Pentagon brass, anti-Castro Cuban émigrés, and assorted other right-wingers, including FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, hated JFK and did not believe he could be trusted with the nation's future. They referred to him as "that delinquent in the White House." Roger Craig records the comments of numerous Dallas police officers who wanted to see Kennedy done away with. Several years ago, on a San Francisco talk show on station KGO, I heard a listener call in as follows: "this is the first time I'm saying this. I worked for Army intelligence. In 1963 I was in Japan, and the accepted word around then was that Kennedy would be killed because he was messing with the intelligence community. When word came of his death, all I could hear was delighted comments like 'We got the bastard'." In his book First Hand Knowledge, CIA operative Robert Morrow noted the hatred felt by CIA officers regarding Kennedy's "betrayal" in not sending the U.S. military into the Bay of Pigs fiasco. One high-level CIA Cuban émigré, Eladio del Valle, told Morrow less than two weeks before the assassination: "I found out about it last night. Kennedy's going to get it in Dallas."2 Morrow also notes that CIA director Richard Helms, "knew that someone in the Agency was involved" in the Kennedy assassination, "either directly or indirectly, in the act itself - someone who would be in a high and sensitive position . . . Helms did cover up any CIA involvement in the presidential assassination." Several years after JFK's murder, President Johnson told White House aide Marvin Watson that he "was convinced that there was a plot in connection with the assassination" and that the CIA had something to do with it (Washington Post, 12/13/77). And Robert Kennedy repeatedly made known his suspicions that the CIA had a hand in the murder of his brother. JFK's enemies in the CIA, the Pentagon, and elsewhere fixed on his refusal to provide air coverage for the Bay of Pigs, his unwillingness to go into Indochina with massive ground forces, his no-invasion guarantee to Krushchev on Cuba, his overtures for a rapprochement with Castro and professed willingness to tolerate countries with different economic systems in the Western hemisphere, his atmospheric-test-ban treaty with Moscow, his American University speech calling for reexamination of U.S. cold war attitudes toward the Soviet Union, his antitrust suit against General Electric, his curtailing of the oil-depletion allowance, his fight with U.S. Steel over price increases, his challenge to the Federal Reserve Board's multibillion-dollar monopoly control of the nation's currency,3 his warm reception at labor conventions, and his call for racial equality. These things may not have been enough for some on the Left but they were far too much for many on the Right. Left Confusions and the Warren Commission Erwin Knoll, erstwhile editor of the Progressive, was anther left critic who expressed hostility toward the conspiracy thesis and Oliver Stone's movie in particular. Knoll admitted he had no idea who killed Kennedy, but this did not keep him from asserting that Stone's JFK was "manipulative" and provided false answers. If Knoll had no idea who killed Kennedy, how could he conclude that the film was false? Knoll said Stone's movie was "a melange of fact and fiction" (Progressive, 3/92). To be sure, some of the dramatization was fictionalized - but regarding the core events relating to Clay Shaw's perjury, eyewitness reports at Dealey Plaza, the behavior of U.S. law officers, and other suspicious happenings, the movie remained faithful to the facts unearthed by serious investigators. In a show of flexibility, Knoll allows that "the Warren Commission did a hasty, slipshod job" of investigation. Here too he only reveals his ignorance. In fact, the Commission sat for fifty-one long sessions over a period of several months, much longer than most major investigations. It compiled twenty-six volumes of testimony and evidence. It had the investigative resources of the FBI and CIA at its disposal, along with its own professional team. Far from being hasty and slipshod, it painstakingly crafted theories that moved toward a foreordained conclusion. From the beginning, it asked only a limited set of questions that seemed to assume Oswald's guilt as the lone assassin. The Warren Commission set up six investigative panels to look into such things as Oswald's background, his activities in past years and on the day of the assassination, Jack Ruby's background, and his activities on the day he killed Oswald. As Mark Lane notes, there was a crying need for a seventh panel, one that would try to discover who killed President Kennedy. The commission never saw the need for that undertaking, having already made up its mind. While supposedly dedicated to bringing the truth to light, the Warren Commission operated in secrecy. The minutes of its meetings were classified top secret, and hundred of thousands of documents and other evidence were sealed for seventy-five years. The Commission failed to call witnesses who heard and saw people shooting from behind the fence on the grassy knoll. It falsely recorded the testimony of certain witnesses, as they were to complain later on, and reinterpreted the testimony of others. All this took careful effort. A "hasty and slipshod" investigation would show some randomness in its errors. But the Commission's distortions consistently moved in the same direction in pursuit of a prefigured hypothesis. Erwin Knoll talks disparagingly of the gullible U.S. public and says he "despises" Oliver Stone for playing on that gullibility. In fact, the U.S. public has been anything but gullible. It has not swallowed the official explanation the way some of the left critics have. Surveys show that 78 percent of the public say they believe there was a conspiracy. Both Cockburn in the Nation and Chomsky in Z Magazine dismiss this finding by noting that over 70 percent of the people also believe in miracles. But the fact that people might be wrong about one thing does not mean they are wrong about everything. Chomsky and Cockburn are themselves evidence of that. In any case, the comparison is between two opposite things. Chomsky and Cockburn are comparing the public's gullibility about miracles with its unwillingness to be gullible about the official line that has been fed to them for thirty years. If anyone is gullible it is Alexander Cockburn who devoted extra column space in the Nation to support the Warren Commission's tattered theory about a magic bullet that could hit both Kennedy and Connolley while changing direction in mid-air and remaining in pristine condition. Chomsky says that it is a "curious fact that no trace of the wide-ranging conspiracy appears in the internal record, and nothing has leaked" and "credible direct evidence is lacking" (Z Magazine, 1/93, and letter to me, 12/15/92). But why would participants in a conspiracy of this magnitude risk everything by maintaining an "internal record" (whatever that is) about the actual murder? Why would they risk their lives by going public? Many of the participants would know only a small part of the picture. But all of them would have a keen sense of the immensely powerful and sinister forces they would be up against were they to become too talkative. In fact, a good number of those who agreed to cooperate with investigators met untimely deaths. Finally, what credible direct evidence was ever offered to prove that Oswald was the assassin? Chomsky is able to maintain his criticism that no credible evidence has come to light only by remaining determinedly unacquainted with the mountain of evidence that has been uncovered. There has even been a decision in a U.S. court of law, Hunt vs. Liberty Lobby, in which a jury found that President Kennedy had indeed been murdered by a conspiracy involving, in part, CIA operatives E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis, and FBI informant Jack Ruby.4 Nixon advisor H.R. Haldeman admits in his memoir: "After Kennedy was killed, the CIA launched a fantastic coverup." And "In a chilling parallel to their coverup at Watergate, the CIA literally erased any connection between Kennedy's assassination and the CIA." Indeed, if there was no conspiracy, why so much secrecy and so much cover-up? If Oswald did it, what is there to hide and why do the CIA and FBI still resist a full undoctored disclosure of the hundreds of thousands of pertinent documents? Would they not be eager to reveal everything and thereby put to rest doubts about Oswald's guilt and suspicions about their own culpability? The remarkable thing about Erwin Knoll, Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, and others on the Left who attack the Kennedy conspiracy findings is they remain invincibly ignorant of the critical investigations that have been carried out. I have repeatedly pointed this out in exchanges with them and they never deny it. They have not read any of the many studies by independent researchers who implicate the CIA in a conspiracy to kill the president and in the even more protracted and extensive conspiracy to cover up the murder. But this does not prevent them from dismissing the conspiracy charge in the most general and unsubstantiated terms. Let's Hear It for Structuralism When pressed on the matter, left critics like Cockburn and Chomsky allow that some conspiracies do exist but they usually are of minor importance, a distraction from the real problems of institutional and structural power. A structural analysis, as I understand it, maintains that events are determined by the larger configurations of power and interest and not by the whims of happenstance or the connivance of a few incidental political actors. There is no denying that larger structural trends impose limits on policy and exert strong pressures on leaders. But this does not mean that all important policy is predetermined. Short of betraying fundamental class interests, different leaders can pursue different courses, the effects of which are not inconsequential to the lives of millions of people. Thus, it was not foreordained that the B-52 carpet bombing of Cambodia and Laos conducted by Nixon would have happened if Kennedy, or even Johnson or Humphrey, had been president. If left critics think these things make no difference in the long run, they better not tell that to the millions of Indochinese who grieve for their lost ones and for their own shattered lives. It is an either-or world for those on the Left who harbor an aversion for any kind of conspiracy investigation: either you are a structuralist in your approach to politics or a "conspiracist" who reduces historical developments to the machinations of secret cabals, thereby causing us to lose sight of the larger systemic forces. As Chomsky notes: "However unpleasant and difficult it may be, there is no escape from the need to confront the reality of institutions and the policies and actions they largely shape." (Z Magazine, 10/92). I trust that one of the institutions he has in mind is the CIA. In most of its operations, the CIA is by definition a conspiracy, using covert actions and secret plans, many of which are of the most unsavory kind. What are covert operations if not conspiracies? At the same time, the CIA is an institution, a structural part of the national security state. In sum, the agency is an institutionalized conspiracy. As I pointed out in published exchanges with Cockburn and Chomsky (neither of whom responded to the argument), conspiracy and structure are not mutually exclusive dynamics. A structural analysis that a priori rules out conspiracy runs the risk of not looking at the whole picture. Conspiracies are a component of the national security political system, not deviations from it. Ruling elites use both conspiratorial covert actions and overtly legitimating procedures at home and abroad. They finance everything from electoral campaigns and publishing houses to mobsters and death squads. They utilize every conceivable stratagem, including killing one of their own if they perceive him to be a barrier to their larger agenda of making the world safe for those who own it. The conspiracy findings in regard to the JFK assassination, which the movie JFK brought before a mass audience, made many people realize what kind of a gangster state we have in this country and what it does around the world. In investigating the JFK conspiracy, researchers are not looking for an "escape" from something "unpleasant and difficult," as Chomsky would have it, rather they are raising grave questions about the nature of state power in what is supposed to be a democracy. A structuralist position should not discount the role of human agency in history. Institutions are not self-generating reified forces. The "great continuities of corporate and class interest" (Cockburn's phrase) are not disembodied things that just happen of their own accord. Neither empires nor national security institutions come into existence in a fit of absent-mindedness. They are actualized not only by broad conditional causes but by the conscious efforts of live people. Evidence for this can be found in the very existence of a national security state whose conscious function is to recreate the conditions of politico-economic hegemony. Having spent much of my life writing books that utilize a structuralist approach, I find it ironic to hear about the importance of structuralism from those who themselves do little or no structural analysis of the U.S. political system and show little theoretical grasp of the structural approach. Aside from a few Marxist journals, one finds little systemic or structural analysis in left periodicals including ones that carry Chomsky and Cockburn. Most of these publications focus on particular issues and events - most of which usually are of far lesser magnitude than the Kennedy assassination. Left publications have given much attention to conspiracies such as Watergate, the FBI Cointelpro, Iran-Contra, Iraq-gate, CIA drugs-for-guns trade, BCCI, and savings-and-loans scandals. It is never explained why these conspiracies are important while the FJK assassination is not. Chip Berlet repeatedly denounces conspiracy investigations while himself spending a good deal of time investigating Lyndon LaRouche's fraudulent financial dealings, conspiracies for which LaRouche went to prison. Berlet never explains why the LaRouche conspiracy is a subject worthy of investigation but not the JFK conspiracy. G. William Domhoff points out: "If 'conspiracy' means that these [ruling class] men are aware of their interests, know each other personally, meet together privately and off the record, and try to hammer out a consensus on how to anticipate and react to events and issues, then there is some conspiring that goes on in CFR [the Council for Foreign Relations], not to mention the Committee for Economic Development, the Business Council, the National Security Council, and the Central Intelligence Agency." After providing this useful description of institutional conspiracy, Domhoff then conjures up a caricature that often clouds the issue: "We all have a tremendous tendency to want to get caught up in believing that there's some secret evil cause for all of the obvious ills of the world." Conspiracy theories "encourage a belief that if we get rid of a few bad people, everything will be well in the world." To this simplistic notion Peter Dale Scott responds: "I believe that a true understanding of the Kennedy assassination will lead not to a few bad people but to the institutional and parapolitical arrangements which constitute the way we are systematically governed." In sum, national security state conspiracies are components of our political structure, not deviations from it. Why Care About JFK? The left critics argue that people who are concerned about the JFK assassination are romanticizing Kennedy and squandering valuable energy. Chomsky claims that the Nazi-like appeals of rightist propagandists have a counterpart on the Left: "It's the conspiracy business. Hang around California, for example, and the left has just been torn to shreds because they see CIA conspiracies . . . secret governments [behind] the Kennedy assassination. This kind of stuff has just wiped out a large part of the left" (Against the Current 56, 1993). Chomsky offers no evidence to support this bizarre statement. The left critics fear that people will be distracted or misled into thinking well of Kennedy. Cockburn argues that Kennedy was nothing more than a servant of the corporate class, so who cares how he was killed (Nation 3/9/92 and 5/18/92). The left critics' hatred of Kennedy clouds their judgment about the politcal significance of his murder. They mistake the low political value of the victim with the high political importance of the assassination, its implications for democracy, and the way it exposes the gangster nature of the state. In 1894 Captain Alfred Dreyfus was a conservative militarist. Clemenceau once conjectured that if the man's name had not been Dreyfus, he would have been an anti-Dreyfusard. Does that mean that the political struggle waged around l'affaire Dreyfus was a waste of time? The issue quickly became larger than Dreyfus, drawn between Right and Left, between those who stood with the army and the anti-Semites and those who stood with the republic and justice. Likewise Benigno Aquino, a member of the privileged class in the Philippines, promised no great structural changes, being even more conservative than Kennedy. Does this mean the Filipino people should have dismissed the conspiracy that led to his assassination as an event of no great moment, an internal ruling-class affair? Instead, they used it as ammunition to expose the hated Marcos regime. Archbishop Romero of El Salvador was a member of the Salvadoran aristocracy. He could not have risen to the top of the church hierarchy otherwise. But after he began voicing critical remarks about the war and concerned comments about the poor, he was assassinated. If he had not been murdered, I doubt that Salvadoran history would have been much different. Does this mean that solidarity groups in this country and El Salvador should not have tried to make his murder an issue that revealed the homicidal gangster nature of the Salvadoran state? (I posed these questions to Chomsky in an exchange in Z Magazine, but in his response, he did not address them.) Instead of seizing the opportunity, some left writers condescendingly ascribe a host of emotional needs to those who are concerned about the assassination cover-up. According to Max Holland, a scribe who seems to be on special assignment to repudiate the JFK conspiracy: "The nation is gripped by a myth . . . divorced from reality," and "Americans refuse to accept their own history." In Z Magazine (10/92) Chomsky argued that "at times of general malaise and social breakdown, it is not uncommon for millenarian movements to arise." He saw two such movements in 1992: the response to Ross Perot and what he called the "Kennedy revival" or "Camelot revival." Though recognizing that the audiences differ, he lumps them together as "the JFK-Perot enthusiasms." Public interest in the JFK assassination, he says, stems from a "Camelot yearning" and the "yearning for a lost Messiah." I, for one, witnessed evidence of a Perot movement involving millions of people but I saw no evidence of a Kennedy revival, certainly no millenarian longing for Camelot or a "lost Messiah." However, there has been a revived interest in the Kennedy assassination, which is something else. Throughout the debate, Chomsky repeatedly assumes that those who have been troubled about the assassination must be admirers of Kennedy. In fact, some are, but many are not. Kennedy was killed in 1963; people who today are in their teens, twenties, thirties, and forties - most Americans - were not old enough to have developed a political attachment to him. The left critics psychologize about our illusions, our false dreams, our longings for Messiahs and father figures, or inability to face unpleasant realities the way they can. They deliver patronizing admonitions about our "conspiracy captivation" and "Camelot yearnings." They urge us not to escape into fantasy. They are the cognoscenti who guide us and out-left us on the JFK assassination, a subject about which they know next to nothing and whose significance they have been unable to grasp. Having never read the investigative literature, they dismiss the investigators as irrelevant or irrational. To cloak their own position with intellectual respectability, they fall back on an unpracticed structuralism. It is neither "Kennedy worship" nor "Camelot yearnings" that motivates our inquiry, but a desire to fight back against manipulative and malignant institutions so that we might begin to develop a system of accountable rule worthy of the name democracy. 1 Kennedy's intent to withdraw is documented in the Gravel edition of the Pentagon Papers ("Phased Withdrawal of U.S. Forces, 1962-1964," vol. 2, pp. 160-200). It refers to "the Accelerated Model Plan . . .. for a rapid phase out of the bulk of U.S. military personnel" and notes that the administration was "serious about limiting the U.S. commitment and throwing the burden onto the South Vietnamese themselves." But "all the planning for phase-out . . . was either ignored or caught up in the new thinking of January to March 1964" (p. 163) - the new thinking that came after JFK was killed and Johnson became president. 2 Del Valle's name came up the day after JFK's assassination when Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade announced at a press conference that Oswald was a member of del Valle's anti-communist "Free Cuba Committee." Wade was quickly contradicted from the audience by Jack Ruby, who claimed that Oswald was a member of the leftish Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Del Valle, who was one of several people that New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison sought out in connection with the JFK assassination, was killed the same day that Dave Ferrie, another suspect met a suspicious death. When found in Miami, del Valle's body showed evidence of having been tortured, bludgeoned, and shot. 3 The bankers of the Federal Reserve System print paper money, then lend it to the government at an interest. Kennedy signed an executive order issuing over $4 billion in currency notes through the U.S. Treasury, thus bypassing the Fed's bankers and the hundreds of millions of dollars in interest that would normally be paid out to them. These "United States Notes" were quickly withdrawn after JFK's assassination. 4 See Mark Lane, Plausible Denial; Was the CIA Involved in the Assassination of JFK? (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1991). For testimony of another participant see Robert Morrow: First Hand Knowledge: How I Participated in the CIA-Mafia Murder of President Kennedy (New York: S.P.I. Books, 1992). From Dirty Truths by Michael Parenti (1996, City Lights Books) (Pages 172 - 191) Also google JFK Conspiracy: The Intellectual Dishonesty and Cowardice of Alexander Cockburn and Noam Chomsky, by Michael Worsham

by **proldic** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 4:01 pm

Apologies to the writer for my having used this quote as a general "example" of other's thinking, but - to me - this says it all (at least in terms of my largely self-caused fate on this board): "Anyhow, if I have a point to this rant, on the list of assholes who deserve to be brought in shackles before the masses Chomsky is like number 8020! I mean, if we can find room to critize Chomsky (heralded as one of the great philosophers of our time)...ya think we can get a few threads in here about what a colossal asshole W/Cheney is?! Like Chomsky is a threat to our way of life." "..one of the great philosophers of our time" -- the New York Times

by **heath7** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 7:43 pm

I'd say a Chomsky forum is reasonable because people in here read Chomsky, and may not know what a duplicitous sumbitch he might be. A Cheney forum could be fun as well, but I'm sure we all know what direction that's going (it'll be about his donkey member)<img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/wink.gif ALT=";)">

by **robertdreed** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 8:12 pm

A mind like Noam Chomsky's isn't to be comprehended by viewing it through a single ideological gloss. My disagreements with him are abundant. His remarks about the draft show him at his worst, I think- revealing it to be an abstraction for him. And I thought his take on 9-11, as the Third World Revenge of champion Osama, was miserable. But I've found a lot of his insights on the workings of the American system to be invaluable. I don't fault Chomsky for distancing himself from JFK conspiracism. Plainly, it just isn't his thing. He doesn't find the evidence convincing enough to make it a cornerstone of his political presentations. Neither do I. I don't find the JFK assassination to be nearly the open-and-shut case that a lot of other folks do, and I'm hesitant to get lost in a wilderness of mirrors. So what? I think Chomsky's insights on linguistics- deep structure, human developmental psych- are groundbreaking and valid. If the U.S. Air Force made profitable use of his research on cybernetic principles- well, that's science and technology for you. ( As for Chomsky's work on principles of human language being overly abstract- jeez, ever try to tackle Alfred Koryzybski's work on semantic information principles? But General Semantics isn't invalidated by the comparative impenetrability of it's formal logic precepts and mathematical engineering formulas. ) I don't think it's sound reasoning policy to consider everyone with whom one has areas of ideological disagreement to be working for the Enemy. Sometimes people are just wrong, that's all ;^) Furthermore, Chomsky gets "props" from me for being skeptical of the whole "meme" thing. Chomsky isn't impressed by that at all. I think we're both looking for someone to provide a clear explanation for us...

by **proldic** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 8:39 pm

"I don't fault Chomsky for distancing himself from JFK conspiracism. Plainly, it just isn't his thing. He doesn't find the evidence convincing enough to make it a cornerstone of his political presentations. Neither do I. I don't find the JFK assassination to be nearly the open-and-shut case that a lot of other folks do, and I'm hesitant to get lost in a wilderness of mirrors." So, not only are you a closet racist, you are a very sophisticated ignoramus. Lord Help Us!

by **heath7** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 8:43 pm

In the case of his views on the draft, abstraction would seem to be a very apt word; I'll bet it didn't even dawn on him that he was fighting age during Korea (supports the draft my ass!). It was more than his views on the draft that I pointed out, that made me suspicious of him. Proldic covered some nice information in his novella posts.

by **heath7** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 8:49 pm

Sorry, proldic could be a cootie-infested girl for all I know<img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/happy.gif ALT=":D">

by **proldic** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 9:04 pm

The Left and the Death of Kennedy By Jim DiEugenio Probe, January-February 1997 (Volume 4, No. 2) In this issue we are glad to be able to excerpt parts of a new book by Dr. Martin Schotz. This new work, History Will Not Absolve Us, is an anthology of essays on varying aspects of the Kennedy case. In that regard it resembles previous anthologies like Government by Gunplay, and The Assassinations. This new collection compares favorably with those two. One of the glories of the book is that it includes Vincent Salandria’s early, epochal essays published in 1964 and 1965 on the medical and ballistics evidence. These essays were written in direct response to comments given by another Philadelphia lawyer, Arlen Specter, at the conclusion of the Warren Commission’s work. Working only from evidence available to the Commission and in the public record, Salandria shatters the case against Oswald almost as soon as it was issued. It is a shame that we have had to wait so long to see Salandria’s wonderful work collected in book form. There is more. Schotz has included a speech made by Fidel Castro, in which, from just reading the press reports off the wire services, he 1) exposes the murder as a conspiracy, 2) shows Oswald for what he was, 3) points towards the elements in American society from where the plot emanated, and 4) indicates the reasons for the murder. All this within twenty hours of the assassination. Shotz’s opening essay furthers his ideas used in Gaeton Fonzi’s book, The Last Investigation, dealing with concepts of belief versus knowledge and what that means for the mass psychology of American society. This fascinating, intuitive essay gives the book both its tone and its title—a play on a phrase used more than once by Castro. There is much more to recommend the book. We choose to excerpt here two particular selections: one in whole, the other in part. They both deal with the response of the left, or as Ray Marcus terms it the “liberal establishment”, to the Kennedy assassination. The first excerpt is an analysis by Schotz of the early editorial policy of The Nation to the assassination. The second section is from Ray Marcus’ monograph Addendum B, originally published in 1995. We chose to excerpt these for three reasons. It shows both Schotz and Marcus at their best. Both the people and institutions they discuss are still around. And finally, what they deal with here is an emblematic problem that is so large and painful—the response of liberals to high-level assassination as a political tool—that no one left of center wishes to confront it. Concerning the second point, The Nation repeated its pitiful performance when the film JFK was released by giving much space to writers like Alexander Cockburn and Max Holland. Neither of these men could find any evidence of conspiracy in the Kennedy case, any value to Kennedy’s presidency, or any validity to the scholarship within the critical community. In other words, a leading “liberal” magazine was acting like Ben Bradlee and the Washington Post. As far as The Nation is concerned, their editorial policy has been quite consistent throughout a 33 year period. Their article policy, with very few exceptions, has also been uniform. Ray Marcus extends this analysis. Marcus is one of the original, “first generation” group of researchers. In 1995 he privately published his Addendum B, which is a personal and moving chronicle of his attempts to get people in high places interested in advocating the Kennedy assassination as a cause. Ray has allowed Schotz to include sections of that important work in the book. Probe has excerpted the parts of Ray’s work which touch on the reaction of the left, both old and new, to the assassination. We feel that the section entitled “Five Professors” is especially relevant. For in this section, Ray reveals his personal encounters with some of the leading intellectuals of that ‘60’s and ‘70’s movement called the “New Left”, namely Howard Zinn, Gar Alperovitz, Martin Peretz, and Noam Chomsky. He shows how each of them rejected his plea. The instances of Peretz and Chomsky are both important and enlightening. For Peretz, in 1974, purchased The New Republic, another supposedly liberal publication. He owned it during the period of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Except for excerpting declassified executive session transcripts of the Warren Commission in the mid-seventies, I can remember no important article in that publication dealing with the JFK case during his tenure. In fact, at the end of that investigation, The New Republic let none other than Tom Bethell have the last word on that investigation. Ray shows why Peretz allowed this bizarre, irresponsible choice. Bethell’s 1979 article tried to bury Kennedy’s death. Five years later, his periodical tried to bury his life. It actually made a feature article out of a review of the tawdry Horowitz-Collier family biography The Kennedys. Who did that publication find suitable to review this National Enquirer version of the Kennedy clan? None other than Midge Decter, wife of neo-conservative godfather Norman Podhoretz, mother-in-law of Elliot Abrams. Decter, presumably with the Peretz blessing, canonized this Kitty Kelley antecedent. Ray’s encounter with Chomsky is especially revealing and will be disturbing to adherents of the MIT professor. In his book, Looking For the Enemy, Michael Morrisey includes parts of a 1992 letter from Chomsky. In discussing a government conspiracy to murder and cover-up the assassination, the esteemed professor writes: That would be an interesting question if there were any reason to believe that it happened. Since I see no credible evidence for that belief, I can’t accept that the issue is as you pose it. (p.6) Apparently, Chomsky never thought that Marcus would include their three hour session over just three pieces of evidence. This exposes the above statement, and Chomsky’s public stance since Stone’s film, as a deception. Chomsky and his good friend and soulmate on the JFK case, Alexander Cockburn went on an (orchestrated?) campaign at the time of Stone’s JFK to convince whatever passes for the left in this country that the murder of Kennedy was 1) not the result of a conspiracy, and 2) didn’t matter even if it was. They were given unlimited space in magazines like The Nation and Z Magazine. But, as Howard Zinn implied in a recent letter to Schotz defending Chomsky, these stances are not based on facts or evidence, but on a political choice. They choose not to fight this battle. They would rather spend their time and effort on other matters. When cornered themselves, Chomsky and Cockburn resort to rhetorical devices like exaggeration, sarcasm, and ridicule. In other words, they resort to propaganda and evasion. CTKA believes that this is perhaps the most obvious and destructive example of Schotz’s “denial.” For if we take Chomsky and Cockburn as being genuine in their crusades—no matter how unattractive their tactics—their myopia about politics is breathtaking. For if the assassinations of the ‘60’s did not matter—and Morrisey notes that these are Chomsky’s sentiments—then why has the crowd the left plays to shrunk and why has the field of play tilted so far to the right? Anyone today who was around in the ‘60’s will tell you that the Kennedys, King, and Malcolm X electrified the political debate, not so much because of their (considerable) oratorical powers, but because they were winning. On the issues of economic justice, withdrawal from Southeast Asia, civil rights, a more reasonable approach to the Third World, and a tougher approach to the power elite within the U.S., they and the left were making considerable headway. The very grounds of the debate had shifted to the center and leftward on these and other issues. As one commentator has written, today the bright young Harvard lawyers go to work on Wall Street, in the sixties they went to work for Ralph Nader. The promise of the Kennedys or King speaking on these issues could galvanize huge crowds in the streets. But even more importantly, these men had convinced a large part of both the white middle class, and the younger generation that their shared interests were not with the wealthy and powerful elites, but with the oppressed and minorities. Today, that tendency has been pretty much reversed. Most of the general public and the media have retreated into a reactionary pose. And some of the most reactionary people are now esteemed public figures e.g. Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Howard Stern, people who would have been mocked or ridiculed in the ‘60’s. And the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, under no pressure to disguise their real sympathies, can call Limbaugh a mainstream conservative (12/2/96). What remains of the left in this country today can be roughly epitomized by the nexus of The Nation, the Pacifica Radio network (in six major cities), and the media group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting). We won’t include The New Republic in this equation since Peretz has now moved so far to the right he can’t be called a liberal anymore. The Nation has a circulation of about 98,000. Except for its New York outlet, WBAI, Pacifica is nowhere near the force it was in the sixties and seventies. The FAIR publication EXTRA has a circulation of about 17,000. To use just one comparison, the rightwing American Spectator reaches over 500,000. To use another point of comparison, the truly liberal Ramparts, which had no compunctions taking on the assassinations, reached over 300,000. As recently declassified CIA documents reveal, Ramparts became so dangerous that it was targeted by James Angleton. One of this besieged enclave’s main support groups is the New York/Hollywood theater and film crowd, which was recently instrumental in bailing out The Nation. As more than one humorous commentator has pointed out, for them a big cause is something like animal rights. Speaking less satirically, they did recently pull in $680,000 in one night for the Dalai Lama and Tibet. Whatever the merits of that cause, and it has some, we don’t think it will galvanize youth or the middle class or provoke much of a revolution in political consciousness. On the other hand, knowing, that our last progressive president was killed in a blatant conspiracy; that a presidentially appointed inquest then consciously covered it up; that the mainstream media like the Post and the Times acquiesced in that effort; that this assassination led to the death of 58,000 Americans and two million Vietnamese; to us that’s quite a consciousness raiser. Chomsky, Cockburn and most of their acolytes don’t seem to think so. In the ‘80’s, Bill Moyers questioned Chomsky on this point, that the political activism of the ‘60’s had receded and that Martin Luther King had been an integral part of that scene. Chomsky refused to acknowledge this obvious fact. He said it really wasn’t so. His evidence: he gets more speaking invitations today ( A World of Ideas, p. 4<img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/glasses.gif ALT="8)"> . The man who disingenuously avoids a conspiracy in the JFK case now tells us to ignore Reagan, Bush, Gingrich, Limbaugh, Stern and the rest. It doesn’t matter. He just spoke to 300 people at NYU. Schotz and Marcus have given us a textbook case of denial. With the help of Marty and Ray, what Probe is trying to do here is not so much explain the reaction, or non-reaction, of the Left to the death of John Kennedy. What we are really saying is that, in the face of that non-reaction, the murder of Kennedy was the first step that led to the death of the Left. That’s the terrible truth that most of these men and organizations can’t bring themselves to state. If they did, they would have to admit their complicity in that result.

by **robertdreed** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 9:46 pm

I'm on proldic's Enemies List. Convicted of Thoughtcrime. With an augmentation on the conviction, for Racism. The sum total of the evidence against me is drawn solely from my comments on this board. It appears that my views don't share 100 per cent conformity with those of proldic. Just in case the rest of you ever wondered what passed for Due Process, for a confirmed Marxist-Leninist. (When my views are sympathetic to his own, presumably my enthusiasm is insufficient. ) Edited by: <A HREF=http://p097.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=robertdreed>robertdreed</A> at: 7/28/05 7:56 pm

by **proldic** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 10:06 pm

Keep spluttering Uncle Joe Ah yes, garden-variety racism, in the form of thinly-veiled contemptuousness to inner-city schoolchildren and their parents, best exemplified by your statement: "[you say] 'impossible'? -then so long suckers". I call that racist. Of course you'll get away unchallenged (even defended) on the internet. Come talk that bullshit in the city, then try telling people you're no racist. As far as your comments r.e. Chomsky, I'm sure they speak for themselves to most sane people.

Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky

Re: Noam Chomsky

more on Chomsky

Re: more on Chomsky

Re: more on Chomsky

But conspiracy phobia from folks who "like Icke"?

that's why it's called "deep" politics.

Re: that's why it's called "deep" politics.

Chomsky

Robert the Great

Re: Chomsky

Re: Chomsky

"The 5 Professors"

oh dear...

If it walks like a duck...

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