Hari Kumar writes:
> 1) JD thinks the choice is between Hitchens & Chomsky. I doubt that.
> What to say of Hitchens - though his Kissinger is pretty good
> isn't it?
Just because I would choose Chomsky over Hitchens in a nanosecond (if forced to do so) doesn't mean that I reject everything H says root and branch. As I've said with regard to Milton Friedman, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. H is better than that.
> ... "Indeed, for all of Chomsky's frequent disparaging of Marxian socialism,
> his uniquely prophetic voice reminds us of none other than Karl Marx's
> own."
I find that in many ways Chomsky _is_ a Marxian socialist (rather than an anarchist). For whatever reason, he wants to distance himself from Marxism.
> ... 3) Another comparison is sort-of offered to us. Chomsky as an Orwell.
> But, Chomsky is surely far, far superior to Orwell - Incomparable to
> that turd really. For whatever 'errors' Chomsky makes/has made - his is
> surely not the turncoat viciousness of a spying ideological thug as the
> paid agent Orwell was? Gosh, I hope the archives of some future "Encounter"
> magazine - or British Whitehall Files, do not prove me wrong!
My impression is that when Orwell finked, he was sick, depressed, and ideologically confused (by the lack of the predicted revolution at the end of WW2, by the widening "moral plague" of McCarthyism and Stalinism). His best stuff was done earlier.
("Moral plague" is a phrase from Wilhelm Reich, another who flipped about around that time.)
JD
