Noam Chomsky And The Gatekeepers Of The Left

From indoctriNATION @ TheFilter.ca

I recently dug up an episode of one of my favoutrite Canadian alternative radio shows, Elephant Talk, which is broadcast from CHLY 101.7 in Nanaimo, British Columbia.

Progressive Canadian journalist Barrie Zwicker was the guest, discussing his new book Towers of Deception, The Media Cover-Up of 9/11.

One of the hosts of the show, James Booker, asked the award-winning journalist and university professor about something that had been on my mind for months, ever since I read Noam Chomsky’s uncharacteristicly emotional and logically stunted arguments against the hypothesis that 9/11 was a covert operation perpetrated by criminal elements of the US government.

Visit indoctriNATION to listen to Barrie Zwicker on Elephant Talk

The following is a transcription of part of their conversation (from 14:56 to 21:27):

James Booker: I was quite disappointed to hear [Noam Chomsky] say that this administration is already guilty of war crimes; we don’t need to look any farther. And he just shuts the debate down with that. What’s your response to this kind of thinking?

Barrie Zwicker: Well, chapter five in my book is 15,000 words and it’s titled “The Shame of Noam Chomsky and the Gatekeepers of the Left”. I was a huge fan of Chomsky for years, in the early 70s, I have sixteen of his books, I’ve interviewed him three times for TV, I used to praise him in my university classes. A friend of mine and I used to have a completion: which one could get more letters to the editor published defending Noam Chomsky against people who were unfairly attacking him. Really, I was pro-Chomsky. I helped in a small way to make the movie Manufacturing Consent. That’s how deep I was.

But there was always something I wondered. I always wondered how come Noam Chomsky maintained to begin with, and has maintained to this day, that John F. Kennedy was killed by the lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald. He absolutely said that, and as recently as 1993 he wrote a book called Rethinking Camelot that was a real hit-job on the Kennedys and said that it didn’t matter that President Kennedy was killed anyway, they’re all the same, so no individual president can make any difference. Then when Robert Kennedy was killed it was the same thing with Chomsky. He said yeah, Sirhan Sirhan; he bought the official story. Martin Luther King Jr, same story, James Earl Ray, sure, single gunman, and Malcom X.

The thing is that all sorts of people on the left, including myself, think that Noam Chomsky is saying these terrific things: we’ve got to wake up about East Timor, look at the death squads in Latin America, all of this terrific criticism of the depredations of the American Empire. But its curious that he’s got this stand on JFK. Just take JFK alone.[…]

And I just couldn’t figure it out, I really couldn’t. What I did was, when I couldn’t figure it out I put it aside, I cut him slack. You know what, I realize now I was in denial. Here’s what I say in my book, and here’s what I came reluctantly to believe because I did the research. Noam Chomsky, from his track record, is an agent of disinformation.

Now I’m not saying he’s a disinformation agent in the sense that he’s on the payroll of the CIA, I can’t prove that. But he might as well be. He constantly says, and so does David Barsamian, his chief acolyte and promoter, “well look, we’ve got them nailed for treason for these huge crimes, they shouldn’t have gone into Iraq, blah, blah, blah.” But the thing is, trying getting a giant empire because it’s generally criminal, is like trying to pin jelly against a wall.

I insist myself, I believe and preach this, that 9/11 is the supreme litmus test for every individual, every organization, and every discipline. Where do you stand on 9/11? The evidence now is abundant that it was an inside job, that it was a false flag operation, that it was Reichstag fire 2001, which is horrible, criminal, treasonous and its the Achilles heel of that whole neo-con gang. If that can become known by a sufficient number of people that it’s politically relevant, they could end up in court, in jail.

What do you do when you face a huge opponent that has humongous resources? You look for the weakest link. You look for the Achilles heel. That’s what 9/11 is. That’s why it’s the key, pivotal thing. It’s obviously changed history, everybody agrees to that. But it is the lynchpin to the war on terror and all the horrible stuff that is based on and justified by the so-called “War on Terror”.

Now, of all the people who should get that, Noam Chomsky is Numero Uno in the world, right? He is tremendously informed, he is tremendously intelligent. He digs out all sorts of information from obscure places and journals, he’s known as mister evidence practically. Also, he’s fearless. Because I’ve heard so many people who are in denial like I used to be, saying, “well, he could be mistaken,” “he could be afraid,” “maybe he just doesn’t know the facts” – all these things. None of them can apply to Noam Chomsky, I’m sorry. You just go down through those and none of them apply. So there has to be another explanation, and I think it’s very dark.

I think he is, as I say, an agent of disinformation. It’s called a bait-and-switch redirect operation. Where what you do is say stuff that people will admire, buy and value tremendously, and I wouldn’t take any of that away from him. All that stuff he’s done, a huge body of work, that has earned him tremendous influence on the left.

So how has he used that influence? When it comes to these toxic events, these assassinations and so on, an ongoing coup by the neo-cons, what does he do with those? He constantly redirects people away from them, and now it has become worse. Now he’s trashing people who just say the questions should be asked.[…]

I’ve identified twenty sly propaganda techniques that Chomsky uses all the time, and one of them is sardonic dismissiveness: “well it doesn’t matter who killed Kennedy”. He’s actually said about 9/11, “it doesn’t matter who did it”. He has said that, I’ve got the transcript. Not only that, he’s said it lots of times [see video].

Barry

Zwicker's chapter on Chomsky inTowers of Deception was a scathing and detailed examination of Chomsky's gatekeeping. It certainly persuaded me that he is a left gate keeper if not an outright neomockingbird.

Luckily, I had never cared about Chomsky one way or the other except a bit when I did research in psycholinguistics. So it was no great let-down to find out he is a schmuck.

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"There are none so hoplessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free." (Goethe)

Thanks Jeremiah

Nice post, neat site.