|
The
Daily Whopper
Noam Chomsky - America's #1 Traitor
October 11, 2001
by
J B
Friends, there is treason among us... at least if you believe
the right wing.
Noam Chomsky is the inspiration of all the evil that is arising
on American campuses, the inspiration of the misguided, the
comforter of the wicked, the ally of the cruel. He gives aid
and comfort to the enemy, which everyone knows is the definition
of treason.
Who is making these charges? David Horowitz.
So there you have it. The intellectual leader of worldwide
forces against America, the man who provides the academic
framework for terrorism, the man who provides the foundation
for hatred for America, is not Osama Bin Laden. It is not
Saddam Hussein.
It is Noam Chomsky.
It would take Hercules to clean this stable. These are the
words of the great Horowitz:
"For forty years, Noam Chomsky has turned out book after
book, pamphlet after pamphlet and speech after speech with
one message, and one message alone: America is the Great Satan;
it is the fount of evil in the world."
To the lions!
"In Chomsky's demented universe, America is responsible not
only for its own bad deeds, but for the bad deeds of others,
including those of the terrorists who struck the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon."
He dares question our majesty! To the guillotine! Off with
his head!
"In this attitude he is the medium for all those who now
search the ruins of Manhattan not for the victims and the
American dead, but for the "root causes" of the catastrophe
that befell them."
Madman! Fiend! How can this man still walk among us!
"His venomous message is spread on tapes and CDs, and the
campus lecture circuit; he is promoted at rock concerts by
superstar bands such as Pearl Jam, Rage Against the Machine,
and U-2 (whose lead singer Bono called Chomsky a "rebel without
a pause")."
Wow, Noam Chomsky is a purveyor of enemy propaganda. He is
a legitimate military target. As no man of such low character
can be called with a straight face an American citizen, he
is subject to a waiving on the prohibition against assassination
by the CIA. Since he is not a head of state, the act of "taking
him out" is legally defensible; the Justice Department has
likely already written a secret legal opinion defending this
position. At any rate, since he is an enemy of the state,
he qualifies for a national security waiver.
"He is the icon of Hollywood stars like Matt Damon whose
genius character in the Academy Award-winning film Good Will
Hunting is made to invoke Chomsky as the go-to authority for
political insight."
Isn't the corruption of youth a capital offense? Oh, sorry,
wrong millennium.
All right, enough quoting. You can read the article for yourself.
I've made my point.
David Horowitz, like myself, is someone who fled the ideology
of his youth to go to the other side. Unlike myself, he seems
to believe that it is moral to use the worst of the enemy's
propaganda to espouse one's own side. In essence, he's come
to believe in the inherent morality of using bad rhetorical
tools for good ends; he's just changed what ends he wants
to achieve. He believes that the ends justify the means.
Consequently, he believes that the best way to achieve his
ends is to a) teach Republicans that they must propagandize,
demonize, dehumanize, and demagogue shamelessly, mercilessly,
and dishonestly, because that is what their enemies do; b)
to himself demonstrate how this is to be done by propagandizing,
demonizing, dehumanizing, and demagoguing with his own pen.
In essence, he wants to tell his friends, "This is how you
do it," and then to actually go through with it by assaulting
the symbols of the Left and by making right-wing radicalism
into effective propaganda.
I am fully capable of attempting what he is doing, but I
simply have too much honor and morality left from my experience
in close contact with the American right-wing to soil it like
he is doing. It's like being trained to use a gun, especially
if that person is a soldier or a police officer. That training
is a tool; it exists and cannot easily be taken away. It can
be used for good, or for evil.
Horowitz's bargain with the devil is that he has accepted
using his weapons training (using his pen as a weapon) in
the pursuit of "good" as he sees it to be. I ask, is using
a weapon even necessary, or effective? A good cop solves a
lot more problems with his mouth and his head than with his
gun. Is resorting to a weapon of war needed, or desired? More
importantly, I dispute that the weapon is aimed in the right
direction. To use a weapon in a reckless manner not only demeans
the weapon, it demeans the person using it. This is the level
to which Horowitz has sunk, and to which I refuse to sink.
Just because I study propaganda as a science doesn't imply
that it should be used carelessly, or even at all, if it can
be avoided. There are many reasons for that. For one thing,
it just plain doesn't work well if overused. For another thing,
I don't see the means being justified by my ends, or even
useful to those ends, for MY ends are to expose truth and
stupidity, and to cut through the "bodyguard of lies" and
the propagandist excuses that shield truth and stupidity from
democratic review.
There is no need to propagandize, particularly since the
act of creating my own, rather than simply deconstructing
that of others, would demean me as a writer. I also view a
public column not being written specifically for the purpose
of propaganda to imply a basic contract with the reader that
I will not lie, I will not defraud, I will not make a fool
of myself by attacking others needlessly and violating civility.
I believe that you, the reader, should expect more of me than
that; I think that more should be expected of the likes of
Ann Coulter and David Horowitz.
Therefore, by the principles of intellectual honesty I hold,
not even having gotten to other issues of charging fellow
Americans with being intellectual supporters of hatred of
America, I find what David Horowitz attempts to do as being
deceptive, disgusting, and a diminution of the duty of responsible
writers to not descend to that level. That he understands
how low he is sinking through the careful use of words as
weapons compounds the shame he inflicts upon responsible writers
who know better, and do better.
Quick confession: At this point through my article, I've
only read a total of four paragraphs of Horowitz's long article.
That's how long I've borne his theories of "turning the tables";
that's how disgusted I am with his focused attack on Noam
Chomsky, the least hypocritical and most intellectually honest
(and honest to himself) man that I can think of in intellectual
circles who has made a lifelong mission out of exposing the
abuse of language. Merely identifying the subject of Horowitz's
article allows me to understand the depth that he intends
to stoop, purely political action that is born out of rational
strategic propagandist thought.
I bet it won't even accomplish anything.
What's the point in selling your soul if you can't buy
anything with it?
Guess free market principles have their limits.
Who will stand up for Noam? That's the question I'm wondering,
now that I've sufficiently used Horowitz's article as my chew
toy. Who's going to say, even if he's anti-American, which
quite frankly a rather dramatic stretch of the truth, that's
okay? He has the freedom to be American and be anti-American.
Dissent is okay. Freedom of conscience is okay. Freedom of
religion is okay. Freedom to think is okay!
Who is going to shout this to the world, and add that it
is tolerance of such dissent that America is built on? Furthermore,
that this tolerance is what enables America to be a great
nation?
Let's not kid around here. Countries that stifle dissent
stagnate. This is a virtually universal principle. Lack of
self-diagnosis, lack of self-critique, lack of tolerance of
political opinions that disagree with the status quo, and
lack of a proper placing in perspective of a self-selected
elite, is poison, toxic to nations, the black ichor which
flows through the veins of decadent states. Without intellectual
variation, without dissent, without being told to our faces
by someone that we may, just may, be wrong about something,
we, collectively, are weaker and poorer for it.
Even if Noam Chomsky is worse than Khomeini, even if he's
more despicable than Osama Bin Laden, even if he's more fascist
than Hitler himself, it is still legal, and just, that this
man is able to speak his mind without restriction within the
borders of the United States of America.
That he is none of those things merely highlights the weakness
of this wave of attacks upon freedom of conscience and the
freedom to share that sense of conscience with others. These
are basic American rights that are under assault, and thanks
to the shining example of American freedom, they have been
accepted worldwide as universal human rights, rights
that many peoples around the world envy Americans for.
How can taking this right away from others on American campuses
and in American media be worth it? Terrorism is a quality
of life crime? Yeah, well so is taking away the freedom of
the living in the name of the dead. What is the point of being
an American, if fear of terror forces us to give up what so
many desire for themselves, without having it taken from our
cold, dead hands?
Though a paradox, it is an entirely predictable one: Horowitz's
crusade against his former allies has made him lose sight
of the freedoms that he thinks that his former allies want
to take away, thus making it acceptable for him to try to
take those same freedoms away from his current enemies. He
has become the enemy he fears most, a propagandist without
remorse and without concern for American principles, wrapping
himself in the flag to oppress the freedoms of others.
I almost feel sorry for him.
Almost, however, only counts in horseshoes and Pentagon briefings.
Previous
Editions of The Whopper
|
