Alex Constantine - March 13, 2006
On Fascism and the Dissociative Academic Rhetoric of Noam Chomsky
By Alex Constantine
Noams vs Sprouts
Noam Chomsky's influence is pervasive - and somewhat divisive, a wedge that has split progressives into two adversarial camps. To see it clearly, pick up a copy of Z Magazine, a leftist house organ that routinely features the wisdom of Noam Chomsky and his fellow academic-intellectual commentators. We will hereafter refer to this gang as "the Noams." The work of the opposing camp is represented by Mae Brussell, the late anti-fascist researcher. This gang we will call "the Sprouts."
The Noams have been roughing up the Sprouts for years. With deep disdain in his voice, Dr. Chomsky has denounced The Sprouts as short-sighted, naive conspiracy mongers. He will not stoop to discussing the murder of John Fitzgerald Kennedy because, he told a trusting audience once, "Kennedy wasn't important."
"He's just another dead president."
This sort of reasoning is carried to every political issue addressed by The Noams. Some topics are not worth his time, and domestic political murders are chief among them.
And then there are the Nazis.
The Brussell Sprouts point to Otto von Bolschwing - the powerful SS officer who settled in central California after the war and connected up with the Reagan and Nixon cliques of right-wing industrialists - a mover and shaker in ODDESSA -- and ask "WHY?" The Noams find discussion of Nazis recruited d by the CIA and military a distasteful subject, and ask, "WHO CARES?"
Linking this fascist underworld to the murder of John Kennedy (and Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, et al) is positively forbidden by The Noams.
The Sprouts, who have been mugged by The Noams in the obscure, unlit back alleys of the progressive media, are convinced that political murders are not too trivial to discuss. Perhaps the assassination of John F. Kennedy in broad daylight, before a nation of spectators, was not so insignificant after all. The Sprouts have the temerity to disagree with the Noams.
John Kennedy may be "just another dead president" to Noam Chomsky, but his killers altered the course of history. They are still with us. They are in control of the "system" that Dr. Chomsky inveighs against.
Was Martin King "just another dead civil rights leader?" Did the capitalist "system" kill him? The government killed him - does justice cry out for more from the dissociative Left than "system" bashing and the belittlement of thoroughly documented "theories?"
The Noam gang sniffs at the naive work of the Sprouts, and has written them off as "conspiracy theorists." The Noams are concerned with loftier issues than the murders of Kennedy and King. So lofty, in fact, that the discussion is kept at the level of abstraction. What is bloodshed in Dallas when a Noam has his mind wrapped around media memes and assumptions, imperialism, hegemony in the Middle East, Israel, and the proles' mistaken abstract perceptions of world events.
The Sprouts flail at fascism, run down connections an nomenclature as if it matters. The Noam academics wrinkle their noses at the word "fascism," which is viewed as a prospective threat, not a serious domestic issue at present, and seldom is a name ever actually named.
One side is facing reality, the other is dissociating with abstractions, running away ... but making a good show of it by engaging in high-brow analysis bereft of particulars.
I once asked Chomsky to help me address organized child abuse. He told me to never write him again, and opined that I am "trouble." So I dealt for three years with organized child abuse. Along the way, I managed to expose a few pedophiles, informed the public of important cases, wrote a book, and even forced a pedophile police chief in North Carolina to step down.
Chomsky went on to make speeches about pro-Israel propaganda on the front page of the New York Times. He refused to talk about organized child abuse, as he did the murder of John Kennedy. Some topics are inherently respectable. Traumatized children and just another dead president are not.
If agitating to stop child rape and abuse makes me "trouble," then what is Noam Chomsky, who seems to me of even less importance than a dead president, and speaks in an effete twang that reveals him to be stuffy.
What then is an "intellectual?" A peer-flogged academic who places his reputation above the truth? Sprouts have the courage to face and resist fascism. It might occur to an intellectual that exposing the assassins of democracy by name is a matter of civic responsibility,
The Noams will, believe it or not, eventually slide into the sink hole of history. They were creepy types who engaged in empty, high-toned whining when there were serious issues to address with precision, among them the killing of John Kennedy and Martin King.
Chomsky describes himself as an "activist." But true activists do not censor, cringe, or joust with hegemonic windmills.