First off I want to thank everyone who responded to my article at the
conterpunch website, 'Eight Ways to Smear Noam Chomsky' (read original
here: http://www.counterpunch.org/mcguire1009.html )
I'm sending this reply to everyone who emailed me, using the blind
carbon copy function.
As of today I have received 35 responses.
3 have been negative, 32 positive.
I'm going to share some of the responses, minus the names of the people
of course, and add some comments
Of the positive responses some have raised some good questions, which I
will try and answer below.
However first the negative responses:
"You live in France. How convenient. Why can't you just admit it: You
and Chomsky hate America, not just it's foreign policy. All that
suffering we cause, like saving the world from a dark-age tyranny ( WW2)
the likes of which the world had never seen, until now. The
Islamo-fascists are the new nazis. Your views are psychotic. Stay in
France with the rest of the America-haters. When the Islamists take
over Europe, you can help them put the Jews on the trains, but I don't
want to get you too excited. Yi mach schmo ve zichiro."
I don't understand the last sentence, which is just as well I guess.
Since the writer provides no evidence for his accusations, and no
definitions for his terms (for example, what is 'America', which I'm
supposed to hate?), it's not much use responding. It's interesting,
though, that the writer says 'we' in reference to 'America'. Which
means I am defined as 'they' and he defines himself as 'we'.
This is one of the roots, I think, of humanity's current crisis.
Because from this beginning of a division in consciousness we proceed to
a division in reality, and the division in reality also creates and
nourishes the division in consciousness, a cycle of cause and effect.
My experience and my daily perceptions however provide evidence that
human beings are very, very similar all around the world, and one
similarity is that we are all conditioned by our culture, and this
conditioning encourages all of us to divide ourselves into 'us' and
'them'. Because I see myself dividing people into 'us' and 'them' I am
similar to the man who wrote the above letter. Because of our
similarities I think it is most accurate to say 'we are all human
beings', though we all tend to divide ourselves, in our consciousness,
from each other.
I think that Chomsky himself does this sometimes. His basic division is
'the elite' and 'we, the non-elite'. No doubt an 'elite', that is some
people who have a lot more power than other people, does exist. But who
creates this elite? Can we honestly say that 'the elite is them'? I
would say that it's more accurate to say 'the elite is part of us'. We
help create the elite with our day to day lives.
The writer also seems to have little understanding of democracy in the
U.S. The first amendment, which guarantees the right to dissent
publicly, was added to the Constitution because the citizens at that
time recognized that democracy without dissent is not democracy
Full: http://www.marxmail.org/mcguire.htm
--
Louis Proyect
www.marxmail.org
