I, personally, think it's ridiculous for us to be expected to believe that Noam Chomsky was just a naive and trusting old man who didn't do his due diligence in looking into Epstein's background, and believed him when he said his teenaged "girlfriend" was of legal age. Nothing about Chomsky, his intellectual curiosity, or his prolific output of work, would ever lead me to think of him as gullible. I just think that stupid letter was an obvious whitewashing attempt, and the main reason I think that is BECAUSE I read so much Chomsky.
I got a notification around 11:45 p.m. on Saturday February 7 that Valéria's letter had just been published to Aaron Maté's Substack. I commented by 11:56, furious at the way I felt this was an attempt to manipulate the public and downplay the relationship Noam had with an already convicted sexual predator of children. A few people commented, agreeing with me, and by 12:30 a.m., Aaron Maté disabled comments on the piece. But I learned, from Noam Chomsky, that the best way to bury an important piece of information that has to be released to the public is to put it out at a time when people are busy, like White House press releases at 5 p.m. on a Friday. This letter was released close to midnight on a Saturday, knowing that on Monday morning Oversight would be viewing the unredacted files, and the Chomsky letter would be mostly lost in the sauce.
I don't care for Chris Hedges, he seems insufferable and smug, but by Monday he was saying the same thing I was, that Chomsky had to have known. And I believe the victims, who said that Jeffrey Epstein never went anywhere without at least one of the girls, that he never lied about it or tried to hide what he was doing, that he made everyone sign NDA's, and that everyone who knew Jeffrey Epstein knew he was a pedophile. I do not believe that a brilliant man who understood power dynamics so thoroughly he debated Michel Foucault on that topic more than fifty years ago was somehow fleeced by a sneaky pedo.
It all feels like a, frankly, pedestrian attempt to manufacture consent and preserve the reputation of a "Great Man." But history is filled with "Great Men" who were terrible people to women. Through his relationship with Epstein, Chomsky was introduced to Ehud Barak. And Barak is believed to be the unnamed world leader whom Virginia Guiffre said in her memoir raped her so violently, she believed he was killing her. I believe Virginia, and all of the victims, and I have had the unfortunate experience, personally, of being assaulted by a man I knew and trusted and never would have suspected was capable of such a thing. But this is how patriarchy operates. Men will protect other men at any cost. And the prestigious reputation of a man will always come before the actual lives and safety of girls and women in a patriarchal society. And Noam Chomsky, for all of his years of research and study and pontificating on power dynamics, failed to ever really address patriarchy and gender as the most widespread form of oppression ever. So, while it is disappointing, I find the whole thing very icky, and it absolutely does taint my esteem of not only Noam as a person, but his work. I refuse to separate the work from the person, I'm not fucking doing that. Patriarchy says that a man's contribution to culture and academia is so invaluable, we should overlook their extreme moral shortcomings. Patriarchy is why the world is falling apart at the seams. And I, for one, have been disillusioned of the belief that patriarchal men have any clue how to fix and reform a system that they uphold, were molded by, and benefit from. Kill your idols. Burn it all fucking down.
I Agree with all of you who say Christ Hedges comes across and "insufferable and smug". I watched one of his old videos today because I wanted to hear the guest not Mr. Hedges. Mr. Hedges was revealing how he "hated" the elite that he grew up with and how smug and insufferable they were. Well, that explains a lot!
Your overview resonates with me. Many of us believe the personal is the political, and I have always endorsed that. Many an alleged "Great Man" from Bill Clinton to Bill Cosby (so many others!) have risked their careers to satisfy contrary unethical personal behavior. We can attempt to think of this as their "different" side. Can we still read Chomsky and appreciate his vast intellectual contributions? I think the author says he can do the separation. I'm not so sure.
After Chris Hedges wrote that Noam knew about Epstein's crimes and didn't care, it was very difficult to understand my personal hero (Noam). But, as I reread "Deterring Democracy," I was reminded (just like you Justin) why Noam was so important to me. He took a principled stand against a mass media that once again serves the interests of power from Gaza, to Venezuela, to Haiti, to Iran, to Somalia, et al. I'm glad you placed it in the perspective of Chomsky-B and Chomsky-E. I will continue to learn from Chomsky-B, and refer back to him. While I turn my back on Chomsky-E that got on the Lolita Express.
Technically we have no evidence Chomsky ever set foot on the "Lolita Express".
Epstein instead collected Noam by providing him with access.
Chomsky the political historian he got with access to political decision makers some of whom were war criminals [clearly this is the moment where Chomsky the student of historical currents should have been a little more interested in individuals and know enough not to fraternize with them].
Chomsky the retired cognitive scientist he got with access to neuroscientists.
Chomsky the professor emiratus with a complex financial history and medical expenses who left managing money mostly to his first wife Carol... he got by his skills in moving money around (had some actual practice there).
Chomsky the much maligned dissident he got by playing to his humanity: as Noam was constantly unfairly maligned as literally Satan from the NYT to obscure message boards on usenet, someone else maligned like him must also be innocent (rather than actually moonlighting as Lucifer, hence the maligning).
Take heed - this is how they get you. They play on your weaknesses. Epstein does not come across as particularly smart but, man, was he an operator who played people like a fiddle...
I realize that you likely wrote "Lolita express" figuratively - but is literally true for so many other cognitive scientists who Epstein pegged differently.
Like Steven Pinker.
Steven Pinker, who hitched his wagon to Noam Chomsky to become big himself in linguistics. Professor of psychology in Harvard, record salary, serial liar.
Publishes best-selling books massaging "Evolutionary Psychology" to legitimize men wanting sex with young women as a cultural universal, an ultimate biological imperative for our species.
As Scientific American reported, "Pinker wrote a 2007 opinion on the semantics of the wording of a prostitution law as a favor for Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz" - to be used in the defense of Jeffrey Epstein (of which Pinker says he was unaware).
Steven Pinker who we have on video flying on Epstein's plane.
And Lo and behold, we have survivor accounts of underage girls who were groomed to, ahem, show him a good time on Epstein's private island [no mention on his wiki page of those I am shocked to tell you].
Thanks for the write-up Justin, it looks like it was a painful one to write. As for me, I only ever read Manufacturing Consent - which was a foundational text in learning western propaganda.
When it comes to public intellectuals, Edward Said’s small pamphlet ‘Representations of the Intellectual’ was and remains fundamental to me. It gave me armor for situations such as this. I am always very guarded and skeptical of highly celebrated people in the current neoliberal academy or intellectual life that are meant to be on our side. Said presents it very simply: if you are a genuine threat to the imperialists, your career will be stumped at best, at worst, they kill you. It happened to him later in life, it happened to Parenti from the start etc.
If the imperialists love what you write in their media, or have you repeatedly appear in their shows etc.., then you need to question yourself as an honest intellectual.
I was fortunate to read Black Shirts and Red Shirts soon after manufacturing consent, and I can honestly say it broke my brain (positively). I took up Parenti over every other Western leftist. He was superb and destroyed any internalized propaganda I had left on the USSR & Yugoslavia.
Losurdo, Frances Stonor Saunders, and now Gabe Rockhill have done excellent work in finally diagnosing the ‘compatible left’.
Chris Hedges was unusually emotional about his write up. There was a comment left at the very beginning by a social justice lawyer pointing out that Hedges made assumptions without actual knowledge and certainly no proof about a man who can no longer defend or explain himself and that is tantamount to character assault.
The unfortunate part of some "activists" these days is that they expect perfection and if anyone isn't perfect then they deserve to be cancelled in their entirety. To me that's throwing the baby out with the bathwater AND demanding from others what you yourself cannot possibly be capable of. Noam Chomsky was responsible for the political awakening of so many people that I have to wonder if these perfectionists have ever given any thought to what a world in which Noam Chomsky had never existed would actually be like.
I've dealt with several family members who didn't age the way I anticipated. They could be sharp as a tack, but made reductionist or reactionary judgements that were totally out of past character. I can anticipate the same could happen to me. Particularly his ruminations on the superiority of the Ashkenazi Jews sound like some of the things I heard from someone who had (edit: 50 years earlier) a cross burned in their front yard. So some of his actions are what I'd anticipate and I have empathy for his situation over the last decade.
The fact that he managed to reach the huge number of people that he did means that more people used him as their introduction to the path of non systemic education. Most didn't develop the "para social relationship you have no time for but Chomsky is an easy way to break into non empire thinking. He affected and got more people started on their journey than any other author and he harnessed philosophy, political science and decolonial thought with his brilliant linguistic skills.
I've already noted that he wasn't perfect and anyone worth their critical capacity will have ventured far and wide after their introduction to Chomsky so unless you have allowed yourself to put him on a pedestal (which would speak volumes to the person doing the elevation) then you've already tempered his writing with the views of his peers and don't need to re evaluate anything.
Thanks, Justin, for this personal and forward-looking appraisal of Noam's legacy.
Chomsky played a similar role for me when I came of age politically in Austria during the war on Kosovo. Chomsky cut through the media propaganda at its source in the original American - which the German-speaking political class duly absorbed as if still occupied by US troops. More than that, in his books, essays, and interviews, Chomsky laid out an alternative, morally grounded way of understanding one's place in the world at this time, including the media.
Like Silvana Briand, I am troubled by this apparent need to topple "authority figures": while it certainly has always been a favorite past-time of the left, the cynicism feels rather neo-liberal ("they are all corrupt").
It may also reflect the general shift from a book culture to a video (streaming) culture, as we lose the enormous contributions of writers to readers.
The essay correctly lists the many grievances people have stockpiled against Chomsky as "gatekeeper" etc. My own take is that the major dissonance that many people have with Noam is his focus on institutional forces and hence near-complete lack of interest in individual personalities (e.g. viewing JFK merely as an trustee of American elite interest).
At the very least people deeply resent a selected subset of Chomsky's opinions (on strategic voting, Syria, the 2-state-solution, the Faurisson affair for people with long memories) - but may not appreciate that Noam himself thought rather little of his opinions - but was instead invested in his methodology. (In that regard his approach is perhaps actually similar to Marxists).
In doing fully justice to this, Justin's is so far unique among the critical appraisals of Noam's legacy.
-- Chomsky's two full time+ professions (!) as a model (?) --
"I could actually imagine trying to do what he did [..] working in science and then trying to make a political contribution through writing"
This cuts close to home as I also looked to Chomsky's combination of politics and science as a "model" to emulate. Let's just say this is not exactly a realistic endeavor in the rat-race of academia, at the very least it is not anymore.
While there are any number of more or less active leftist intellectuals at universities - you'll find effectively all of them in PolSci, sociology, cultural studies..., areas directly related at least conceptually. There are a few high-profile activists who have a background in the sciences - and then switched to activism, journalism, ... (e.g. Vandana Shiva, George Monbiot...).
As far as I know, Chomsky is absolutely unique in pursuing political analysis *full-time* in parallel to conducting research *full time* (in computational linguistics). His work in both pursuits stood out for quality and quantity over decades. Perhaps a case could be made for Bertrand Russell, Chomsky's own model if he had one, but that was yet another generation removed.
It helped that Chomsky found himself in the very center of a scientific "revolution" (the cognitive revolution) as well as close to the center of the civil rights struggle, Anti-Apartheid, Anti-Vietnam War movements.
Crucially Chomsky pursued his politics the exact same way he practiced being a high-octane professor in linguistics and cognitive science: Reading, publishing, accepting invitations for talks and exchanges... only the primary material and the correspondents were different. It also helped that MIT paid the bills and so he never had to live off his politics.
Also that his wife Carol pretty much ran his life apparently.
-- Chomsky's focus on the power of "public opinion" - was he wrong? --
In 2003 millions took the the streets worldwide in mass protests against the US invasion of Iraq - record turnout, seemingly ineffectual. Chomsky placed us in historical context, insisting that elites in the West actually "fear public opinion", and that popular protest has had a "civilizing effect": "There were no B52 saturation bombings of, you know, settled areas, no chemical warfare – I mean, all the things they did in Vietnam, they couldn’t do [in Iraq], there was too much opposition".
I kept thinking back to this while listening to Greg Stoker, whom Justin also had on at the AEP: "Are they seriously dropping 1.000lb JDAMs [joint direct attack munitions] in one the most densely populated places on Earth? [Gaza City]".
So they could do the high-tech equivalent of B52 bombing runs in Gaza, after all. At least the "IDF" did it with American weapons, though the US military itself still has not, for all the wedding parties they blew to bits with drones. Perhaps this explains much of the high regard for the IDF.
Chomsky's particular focus on non-violent tactics - that "they" fear "them" the most when they don suits and march politely, as he used to put it - clearly needs to be, ahem, updated.
Chomsky's tactical focus on the "2 state solution" as the most (only?) realistic option for Palestineans has tagically failed.
Does that arc of history still bend towards justice? In 2026 it seems macabre to even ask... still, perhaps our dear elites have overextended themselves? Future generations, if any, may come to view their current backsliding towards more violent tactics as a desperate move made out of weakness. The jury is still out on this, or at least this is what I like to tell myself...
-- Chomsky the computational linguist: becoming a member of an elite --
"This is a fundamental thing I don’t think people understand about Chomsky: He’s a member of the elite who became a dissident"
I would rephrase this: Chomsky is a dissident who became a member of an elite.
While Chomsky had a privileged upbringing in some ways, notably attending a really cool alternative school, it is safe to say that initially he was quite far removed from the WASP elite.
Famously it was Harvard's antisemitic stance that forced scientists like Norbert Wiener to instead go to MIT and turn it from a backwater college into the premier intellectual and technological powerhouse of the second half of the 20th century. This is perhaps also the context in which to understand Noam's foregrounding of the shift in prestige of Jews in the US - and the state of Israel - which he dates to after 67.
Chomsky's pioneering work in computational linguistics was simply too useful and impossibly timely to the project to build what Yasha Levine calls "surveillance valley". This was the time when Marvin Minsky (also collected by Jeffrey Epstein) marketed "artificial intelligence" deliberately with the double meaning of "intelligence": in "I"Q as in C"I"A.
If anything, as a young professor, Chomsky did his best to commit career suicide by joining the student occupation who wanted MIT to cut off all Pentagon funding over the Vietnam war. This was back in the day when they had massive 30 year basic research grants. Noam planned on a long stint in prison over his involvement with Dan Ellsberg in the release of the Pentagon papers.
However, MIT needed Chomsky and Chomsky needed the professorship to have access to students, etc. But with the position did come prestige, a high salary, and indeed membership in an elite (not "the" elite: Chomsky could famously never get published in the NYT, the same paper that reported on him as "arguably the most important intellectual alive").
As Lucifer himself is all too keenly aware, the path to Hell is lined with invitations to fancy dinners: Tellingly, what first gave Jeffrey Epstein an "in" with Noam, was Chomsky's institutional obligation as a decorated MIT professor to regale high-value individuals - whose private funding has now replaced the defunct long-term funding grants...
It is telling that Michael Albert's most-quoted episode is from a factory take-over by workers in Argentina: A menial worker managed to teach herself accountancy from scratch within a few months - beautiful proof of the violence inherent in the class system. However, with the accountancy skills, yearnings for superior prestige and a higher salary also set in just as quickly, an example of the emergent power of the co-ordinator class: sandwiched between workers and owners and always tempted to side with the owners...
-- Chomsky as a unique voice, scholar, and anarcho-syndicalist --
I was going to write a rather convoluted essay on how Noam's voice was unique, notwithstanding the continuities with previous scholarship that Justin correctly lays out.
And to mention his idiosyncratic take on history and philosophy of ("Cartesian") science.
And to defend Noam's intellectual tradition seeing how few prominent voices write as "anarchists", let alone "anarcho-syndicalists". Really only the late David Graeber comes to mind. Unlike Graeber, Noam always stuck to his analysis of what is done in the center by the powerful rather than what is done in the periphery by the powerless - or indeed what we can do when we "behave as if we were already free".
But I expect that those still interested in such visions are much better off reading Chomsky (or Graeber) in the original ;-)
Thank you for your thoughtful engagement as always. The only disagreement we have is about the elite question. What I'm saying about that is that I no longer believe Chomskys interpretation that the Jewish community were marginalized until 1967. To the extent they were, they were a section of the elite that were marginalized from certain other sections of the elite as they marginalized others from theirs. The fact that they are more intertwined now through Epstein and rituals among other things doesn't mean they were not elites before. Chomsky was absolutely from a Jewish intellectual elite family and was predestined for success by that background, not by his talent, which I don't deny but which, as he would have agreed, is not concentrated in any community or group. Thanks for your other observations, and if you want to discuss further we can do it via email...
You are absolutely right to insist on the membership in the intellectual elite, thanks for that.
I remember reading Chomsky reflecting back on his time as a student: he concluded that the discipline of linguistics in the US had taken a completely wrong turn in the 20th century - and that the highly technical exercises with linguistic materials which he had drawn up as a side-project over the summer break were what the field should be about instead.
So while Chomsky was "self-made" to an astonishing degree, I may have made too much of this;
The other side of that same coin is how naturally it came to him *as a student* to weigh in on the proper goals and the very subject matter of a quite advanced scientific discipline. That sheer *chutzpah*, however earned - is deeply characteristic of elite thinking.
Indeed it is what Pierre Bourdieu has singled out as the most important characteristic for members of the elite to recognize one another.
Thank you for writing about your knowledge of Chomsky and his writings. I never read his books, although I have a few of them. (My love of books and the knowledge contained therein often overtakes my time to read them all.) Therefore, my knowledge of Chomsky is limited to anecdotes from Chris Hedges and Norman Finkelstein and now you. I felt sad when I heard about Chomsky and Epstein but mostly it was for those like Chris and Norman, who thought so highly of him. Yet, I know that all of us have facets in our character or personality that may not always link together smoothly. We are not of a piece but of many parts in our ideas, thoughts and conclusions, or perspectives. At least I’ve found that in myself and those I know. Your decision to look at Chomsky in his “parts” instead of as a “whole” is I think both kind and fair. Your article on Chomsky has, once again, firmed my respect for you and your ability to really see and understand situations. I have grown to appreciate your contributions to Palestine, its continuing genocide, and other historical topics through your writing and videos. Thank you for all you do to add to thoughtful and honest discussions on so many current and past events. You are a talented writer and teacher. Please keep writing and teaching - I still have much to learn.
Excellent meditation on Chomsky and his influence. I believe his best work was done in the 1970s and 80s. The collection of essays under the title “For Reasons of State” is a masterful exposition of the implicit racism contained in elite discourse during the Vietnam War. “The Fateful Triangle” is, along with the brave journalism of Robert Fisk, the best account in English I know of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. These works, along with “The Political Economy of Human Rights” and “Turning the Tide” will always be an important part of my political education. However by the 1990s I had lost interest in him and only listened to the odd interview. Looking back I agree he should have retired long ago and left the stage. It is sad to see that his legacy will be darkened by his association with Epstein.
V ery thoughtful essay. Thank you being objective and careful about what you learned from Chomsky. The last line Hedges wrote, that we are not supposed to party with THEM, we're supposed to destroy THEM
What an honest contribution to an hysterical debate. I never had any special interest in Chomsky, as I was into Marxism precociously. So no need to be disillusioned or enraged for me. However, I get why so many guys out there feel the need to commit ritual patricide online: many people have moved beyond anarchist, socdem and pacifist positions in view of unconcealed imperialist brutality, and if publicly renouncing your old hero helps in that process, that's a good thing. On the other hand, picking on a moribund person hardly brings out the best of humanity, it certainly doesn't foster intellectual development. There are too many freshly converted Leninists foaming at the mouth about Chomskism, French theory etc having always been CIA psyops who clearly have no clue about intellectual history. Marxists should understand that thinkers whose ideas are partly flawed or outright antisocialist can still give important progressive impulses, just as reformist political movements can be really progressive in certain contexts (as well as reactionary in others). Good examples, Justin, how this worked for you. Now it's time to learn from the mistakes of Chomskism (not just the man's himself) and move on. And learn about the predatory class from the distorted bits we're allowed to see from the pedo-files.
Thank you AEP for this well-written and argued article, which sheds a fair light on the complexity of the discourse on social structures of power as in part exemplified among Chomsky’s lifelong intellectual endeavors, and the necessity of considering the context and vicissitudes of the personal history and trajectory of Chomsky as a person. I think in today’s atmosphere, we are easily driven by and readily subscribe to simplistic polarizations that unfortunately create profound myopia, paralyzing our ability to distinguish the essential distinction between these levels of analysis.
The Palestinians have trained me to view the world as a battlefield against empire. Our side is the practical and ethical one. My new friends are more than angry with Chomsky-E. But, good people in the cause have exposed and detained him. I’m moving on to new targets. Scapegoating and hero-worshipping is not for a people’s movement.
Chomsky-B was a distant instructor via Youtube interviews for many years. Resistance was entirely suppressed in neo-medieval Missouri and its Zionist college of MSU. I was lucky to find Chomsky, Zinn, and Carlin. Carlin was not an elite. There’s no mention of him on Epstein Island. I’m grateful for not being an elite.
Vietnam: Chomsky was criticizing the Empire when my father was tortured in one camp and the Vietnamese were tortured in concentration camps, the Strategic Hamlets. My father wasn’t crazy, he was just anti-genocidal. He couldn’t be told what to do, so they labeled him a “paranoid schizophrenia.” James, Chomsky, and the Fighters all had the same enemy; Chomsky was in the Resistance. So was Ronald James; it’s a bit of an unorthodox approach, but Resistance takes all kinds. He didn’t set one foot in Vietnam.
Viet Minh: Chomsky didn’t mention the Resistance in any interview I heard. But nobody did over here. I can’t scapegoat Chomsky for that. Viet Minh were still heroes in the James family; Vietnam’s freedom was revenge for us against the U.S. military.
IDW: Islamic principles say to protect civilians, defeated enemies, and to take prisoners. So, I respect Islam, and that's that. If there was a revolution, I’d take Chomsky-E prisoner. But I would raise the Black Flag, however, with my more recent instructors. Someone would have to keep me away from Peterson, Harris, the Weinsteins, and fanatic Stefan Molyneux. They’re Zionists, Jewish Supremacists, and apologists for terrorism. Talk about the banality of Evil…if you think Chomsky is boring, then listen to Harris.
IDW and Epstein: Epstein was a prelude to the fall of the West. The IDW (too obvious, cf. IDF) was embarrassed by Epstein. If Chomsky was so wrong about Palestine, and the IDW frauds were so repelled by the pedophile, then why aren’t they taking the opportunity to trash Chomsky? They’re not only complicit, but future generations will view every single Jewish Supremacist as a Nazi. Havaraa Agreement, Zionists betrayed Jews to invade Palestine, so this isn’t new.
Peterson: Chomsky wore ordinary clothes. I always respected that. Subconsciously, Jordan Peterson came across as a distant person, literally and metaphorically, an aristocratic-like figure, whereas Chomsky didn’t. Same for all the IDW, except Rogan. Peterson wears suits that poor people can’t afford and then blames the poor person for everything. This is no different than Hitlerian triumph of the will BS. Maybe there was a non-Zionist Peterson once...don't care.
Parenti: Missouri’s education is backward. I think the problem is bigger than Missouri. My professors either didn’t know about Parenti or suppressed him. As a Roman historian, I should’ve read him. Didn’t even know who he was when Emersberger and Podur mentioned him once. He wrote "The Assassination of Julius Caesar."
Gatekeepers: The IDW are gatekeepers for knowledge that should be used by the Palestinians. Buddhism and psychedelics are examples. Podur’s argument for different Chomskys is just a fact.
Chomsky I, B, E: The Buddhists talk about no self all the time and how we change and literally aren’t the same people. James-7 is different from James-RF, and he’s even different from James-P, and then there’s James-P1, P2, and P3; 1) seven-year old watches Spartacus and cheers for slaves; 2) goes to college and starts cheering for the Romans, this is Romanophile Fascism; 3) Palestinian now returns to cheering for slaves and, also, spots the subtle American and Zionist propaganda in Kubrick's Spartacus and rejects the film and demands better.
There’s a lot more to say. I’m going to think more on it. Somebody came after me for defeating Western literature with Edward Said’s assistance. I already knew that he wasn’t radical. Doesn’t matter. It was a quasi-religious experience to purify and free myself from the West. This person didn’t get it…
Palestine-Lastly, I first really learned about Palestine from Chomsky’s debate with Dershowitz. One person was sincere, the other was paid to be there. One person was getting angry, and seemed to actually care about the topic. The other was a lawyer and a liar. Again, Black Flag with him. Dershowitz fits a stereotype of Jews where I’m from. We don’t like them. My father and I liked Chomsky. Ironically, we didn’t even know he was Jewish. When I found out it didn’t change anything. Didn’t matter with Zinn either.
He said he was Ukrainian. He later said his ancestors may have come from the Caucasus. Well, that evidently was my first lesson in Palestinian Studies: Israelis are invaders from Europe who are not native. I’m 100% for the Palestinians and I 100% hate the Anglo-American Empire that is invading them for 77 years straight with Judaeo-Nazi colonists. Thanks for sharing your history with Chomsky.
This is a really good piece. Thank you for writing it.
My 5-yr-old niece Avi is named after Noam (Avram) and my brother was torn up after the Ep revelations. Regardless, Avi (my little Che) is gonna change the world just wait...
Re: Parenti, contact me offline if you're interested and I'll tell you a story that 'canceled' him in my mind 20 years ago.
I, personally, think it's ridiculous for us to be expected to believe that Noam Chomsky was just a naive and trusting old man who didn't do his due diligence in looking into Epstein's background, and believed him when he said his teenaged "girlfriend" was of legal age. Nothing about Chomsky, his intellectual curiosity, or his prolific output of work, would ever lead me to think of him as gullible. I just think that stupid letter was an obvious whitewashing attempt, and the main reason I think that is BECAUSE I read so much Chomsky.
I got a notification around 11:45 p.m. on Saturday February 7 that Valéria's letter had just been published to Aaron Maté's Substack. I commented by 11:56, furious at the way I felt this was an attempt to manipulate the public and downplay the relationship Noam had with an already convicted sexual predator of children. A few people commented, agreeing with me, and by 12:30 a.m., Aaron Maté disabled comments on the piece. But I learned, from Noam Chomsky, that the best way to bury an important piece of information that has to be released to the public is to put it out at a time when people are busy, like White House press releases at 5 p.m. on a Friday. This letter was released close to midnight on a Saturday, knowing that on Monday morning Oversight would be viewing the unredacted files, and the Chomsky letter would be mostly lost in the sauce.
I don't care for Chris Hedges, he seems insufferable and smug, but by Monday he was saying the same thing I was, that Chomsky had to have known. And I believe the victims, who said that Jeffrey Epstein never went anywhere without at least one of the girls, that he never lied about it or tried to hide what he was doing, that he made everyone sign NDA's, and that everyone who knew Jeffrey Epstein knew he was a pedophile. I do not believe that a brilliant man who understood power dynamics so thoroughly he debated Michel Foucault on that topic more than fifty years ago was somehow fleeced by a sneaky pedo.
It all feels like a, frankly, pedestrian attempt to manufacture consent and preserve the reputation of a "Great Man." But history is filled with "Great Men" who were terrible people to women. Through his relationship with Epstein, Chomsky was introduced to Ehud Barak. And Barak is believed to be the unnamed world leader whom Virginia Guiffre said in her memoir raped her so violently, she believed he was killing her. I believe Virginia, and all of the victims, and I have had the unfortunate experience, personally, of being assaulted by a man I knew and trusted and never would have suspected was capable of such a thing. But this is how patriarchy operates. Men will protect other men at any cost. And the prestigious reputation of a man will always come before the actual lives and safety of girls and women in a patriarchal society. And Noam Chomsky, for all of his years of research and study and pontificating on power dynamics, failed to ever really address patriarchy and gender as the most widespread form of oppression ever. So, while it is disappointing, I find the whole thing very icky, and it absolutely does taint my esteem of not only Noam as a person, but his work. I refuse to separate the work from the person, I'm not fucking doing that. Patriarchy says that a man's contribution to culture and academia is so invaluable, we should overlook their extreme moral shortcomings. Patriarchy is why the world is falling apart at the seams. And I, for one, have been disillusioned of the belief that patriarchal men have any clue how to fix and reform a system that they uphold, were molded by, and benefit from. Kill your idols. Burn it all fucking down.
I Agree with all of you who say Christ Hedges comes across and "insufferable and smug". I watched one of his old videos today because I wanted to hear the guest not Mr. Hedges. Mr. Hedges was revealing how he "hated" the elite that he grew up with and how smug and insufferable they were. Well, that explains a lot!
Your overview resonates with me. Many of us believe the personal is the political, and I have always endorsed that. Many an alleged "Great Man" from Bill Clinton to Bill Cosby (so many others!) have risked their careers to satisfy contrary unethical personal behavior. We can attempt to think of this as their "different" side. Can we still read Chomsky and appreciate his vast intellectual contributions? I think the author says he can do the separation. I'm not so sure.
I couldn't have said it better myself.
It really points to the strength of class solidarity among the elites.
After Chris Hedges wrote that Noam knew about Epstein's crimes and didn't care, it was very difficult to understand my personal hero (Noam). But, as I reread "Deterring Democracy," I was reminded (just like you Justin) why Noam was so important to me. He took a principled stand against a mass media that once again serves the interests of power from Gaza, to Venezuela, to Haiti, to Iran, to Somalia, et al. I'm glad you placed it in the perspective of Chomsky-B and Chomsky-E. I will continue to learn from Chomsky-B, and refer back to him. While I turn my back on Chomsky-E that got on the Lolita Express.
Whereas I'll say honestly that Chris Hedges doesn't interest me in any format.
"We are all compromised"
- Noam Chomsky
Technically we have no evidence Chomsky ever set foot on the "Lolita Express".
Epstein instead collected Noam by providing him with access.
Chomsky the political historian he got with access to political decision makers some of whom were war criminals [clearly this is the moment where Chomsky the student of historical currents should have been a little more interested in individuals and know enough not to fraternize with them].
Chomsky the retired cognitive scientist he got with access to neuroscientists.
Chomsky the professor emiratus with a complex financial history and medical expenses who left managing money mostly to his first wife Carol... he got by his skills in moving money around (had some actual practice there).
Chomsky the much maligned dissident he got by playing to his humanity: as Noam was constantly unfairly maligned as literally Satan from the NYT to obscure message boards on usenet, someone else maligned like him must also be innocent (rather than actually moonlighting as Lucifer, hence the maligning).
Take heed - this is how they get you. They play on your weaknesses. Epstein does not come across as particularly smart but, man, was he an operator who played people like a fiddle...
I realize that you likely wrote "Lolita express" figuratively - but is literally true for so many other cognitive scientists who Epstein pegged differently.
Like Steven Pinker.
Steven Pinker, who hitched his wagon to Noam Chomsky to become big himself in linguistics. Professor of psychology in Harvard, record salary, serial liar.
Publishes best-selling books massaging "Evolutionary Psychology" to legitimize men wanting sex with young women as a cultural universal, an ultimate biological imperative for our species.
As Scientific American reported, "Pinker wrote a 2007 opinion on the semantics of the wording of a prostitution law as a favor for Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz" - to be used in the defense of Jeffrey Epstein (of which Pinker says he was unaware).
Steven Pinker who we have on video flying on Epstein's plane.
And Lo and behold, we have survivor accounts of underage girls who were groomed to, ahem, show him a good time on Epstein's private island [no mention on his wiki page of those I am shocked to tell you].
And he still has his position.
Not to speak for Anton but I think by "Lolita Express" he meant Epstein's plane, which the famous photo of the two of them talking is presumably on.
Thanks for the write-up Justin, it looks like it was a painful one to write. As for me, I only ever read Manufacturing Consent - which was a foundational text in learning western propaganda.
When it comes to public intellectuals, Edward Said’s small pamphlet ‘Representations of the Intellectual’ was and remains fundamental to me. It gave me armor for situations such as this. I am always very guarded and skeptical of highly celebrated people in the current neoliberal academy or intellectual life that are meant to be on our side. Said presents it very simply: if you are a genuine threat to the imperialists, your career will be stumped at best, at worst, they kill you. It happened to him later in life, it happened to Parenti from the start etc.
If the imperialists love what you write in their media, or have you repeatedly appear in their shows etc.., then you need to question yourself as an honest intellectual.
I was fortunate to read Black Shirts and Red Shirts soon after manufacturing consent, and I can honestly say it broke my brain (positively). I took up Parenti over every other Western leftist. He was superb and destroyed any internalized propaganda I had left on the USSR & Yugoslavia.
Losurdo, Frances Stonor Saunders, and now Gabe Rockhill have done excellent work in finally diagnosing the ‘compatible left’.
Chris Hedges was unusually emotional about his write up. There was a comment left at the very beginning by a social justice lawyer pointing out that Hedges made assumptions without actual knowledge and certainly no proof about a man who can no longer defend or explain himself and that is tantamount to character assault.
The unfortunate part of some "activists" these days is that they expect perfection and if anyone isn't perfect then they deserve to be cancelled in their entirety. To me that's throwing the baby out with the bathwater AND demanding from others what you yourself cannot possibly be capable of. Noam Chomsky was responsible for the political awakening of so many people that I have to wonder if these perfectionists have ever given any thought to what a world in which Noam Chomsky had never existed would actually be like.
Just a little food for thought.
I've dealt with several family members who didn't age the way I anticipated. They could be sharp as a tack, but made reductionist or reactionary judgements that were totally out of past character. I can anticipate the same could happen to me. Particularly his ruminations on the superiority of the Ashkenazi Jews sound like some of the things I heard from someone who had (edit: 50 years earlier) a cross burned in their front yard. So some of his actions are what I'd anticipate and I have empathy for his situation over the last decade.
Nobody in their 80s and 90s is the same as when they were younger. 100% of people have at least some dementia by that age.
who is “his” Chomsky has explicitely dismissed this idea of the superiority of Ashkenazi jews, and continued to in his emails with Epstein.
The fact that he managed to reach the huge number of people that he did means that more people used him as their introduction to the path of non systemic education. Most didn't develop the "para social relationship you have no time for but Chomsky is an easy way to break into non empire thinking. He affected and got more people started on their journey than any other author and he harnessed philosophy, political science and decolonial thought with his brilliant linguistic skills.
I've already noted that he wasn't perfect and anyone worth their critical capacity will have ventured far and wide after their introduction to Chomsky so unless you have allowed yourself to put him on a pedestal (which would speak volumes to the person doing the elevation) then you've already tempered his writing with the views of his peers and don't need to re evaluate anything.
What a good read. It totally resonates. I learned a lot from Chomsky but he’s never been “one of us”.
Thanks, Justin, for this personal and forward-looking appraisal of Noam's legacy.
Chomsky played a similar role for me when I came of age politically in Austria during the war on Kosovo. Chomsky cut through the media propaganda at its source in the original American - which the German-speaking political class duly absorbed as if still occupied by US troops. More than that, in his books, essays, and interviews, Chomsky laid out an alternative, morally grounded way of understanding one's place in the world at this time, including the media.
Like Silvana Briand, I am troubled by this apparent need to topple "authority figures": while it certainly has always been a favorite past-time of the left, the cynicism feels rather neo-liberal ("they are all corrupt").
It may also reflect the general shift from a book culture to a video (streaming) culture, as we lose the enormous contributions of writers to readers.
The essay correctly lists the many grievances people have stockpiled against Chomsky as "gatekeeper" etc. My own take is that the major dissonance that many people have with Noam is his focus on institutional forces and hence near-complete lack of interest in individual personalities (e.g. viewing JFK merely as an trustee of American elite interest).
At the very least people deeply resent a selected subset of Chomsky's opinions (on strategic voting, Syria, the 2-state-solution, the Faurisson affair for people with long memories) - but may not appreciate that Noam himself thought rather little of his opinions - but was instead invested in his methodology. (In that regard his approach is perhaps actually similar to Marxists).
In doing fully justice to this, Justin's is so far unique among the critical appraisals of Noam's legacy.
-- Chomsky's two full time+ professions (!) as a model (?) --
"I could actually imagine trying to do what he did [..] working in science and then trying to make a political contribution through writing"
This cuts close to home as I also looked to Chomsky's combination of politics and science as a "model" to emulate. Let's just say this is not exactly a realistic endeavor in the rat-race of academia, at the very least it is not anymore.
While there are any number of more or less active leftist intellectuals at universities - you'll find effectively all of them in PolSci, sociology, cultural studies..., areas directly related at least conceptually. There are a few high-profile activists who have a background in the sciences - and then switched to activism, journalism, ... (e.g. Vandana Shiva, George Monbiot...).
As far as I know, Chomsky is absolutely unique in pursuing political analysis *full-time* in parallel to conducting research *full time* (in computational linguistics). His work in both pursuits stood out for quality and quantity over decades. Perhaps a case could be made for Bertrand Russell, Chomsky's own model if he had one, but that was yet another generation removed.
It helped that Chomsky found himself in the very center of a scientific "revolution" (the cognitive revolution) as well as close to the center of the civil rights struggle, Anti-Apartheid, Anti-Vietnam War movements.
Crucially Chomsky pursued his politics the exact same way he practiced being a high-octane professor in linguistics and cognitive science: Reading, publishing, accepting invitations for talks and exchanges... only the primary material and the correspondents were different. It also helped that MIT paid the bills and so he never had to live off his politics.
Also that his wife Carol pretty much ran his life apparently.
-- Chomsky's focus on the power of "public opinion" - was he wrong? --
In 2003 millions took the the streets worldwide in mass protests against the US invasion of Iraq - record turnout, seemingly ineffectual. Chomsky placed us in historical context, insisting that elites in the West actually "fear public opinion", and that popular protest has had a "civilizing effect": "There were no B52 saturation bombings of, you know, settled areas, no chemical warfare – I mean, all the things they did in Vietnam, they couldn’t do [in Iraq], there was too much opposition".
I kept thinking back to this while listening to Greg Stoker, whom Justin also had on at the AEP: "Are they seriously dropping 1.000lb JDAMs [joint direct attack munitions] in one the most densely populated places on Earth? [Gaza City]".
So they could do the high-tech equivalent of B52 bombing runs in Gaza, after all. At least the "IDF" did it with American weapons, though the US military itself still has not, for all the wedding parties they blew to bits with drones. Perhaps this explains much of the high regard for the IDF.
Chomsky's particular focus on non-violent tactics - that "they" fear "them" the most when they don suits and march politely, as he used to put it - clearly needs to be, ahem, updated.
Chomsky's tactical focus on the "2 state solution" as the most (only?) realistic option for Palestineans has tagically failed.
Does that arc of history still bend towards justice? In 2026 it seems macabre to even ask... still, perhaps our dear elites have overextended themselves? Future generations, if any, may come to view their current backsliding towards more violent tactics as a desperate move made out of weakness. The jury is still out on this, or at least this is what I like to tell myself...
-- Chomsky the computational linguist: becoming a member of an elite --
"This is a fundamental thing I don’t think people understand about Chomsky: He’s a member of the elite who became a dissident"
I would rephrase this: Chomsky is a dissident who became a member of an elite.
While Chomsky had a privileged upbringing in some ways, notably attending a really cool alternative school, it is safe to say that initially he was quite far removed from the WASP elite.
Famously it was Harvard's antisemitic stance that forced scientists like Norbert Wiener to instead go to MIT and turn it from a backwater college into the premier intellectual and technological powerhouse of the second half of the 20th century. This is perhaps also the context in which to understand Noam's foregrounding of the shift in prestige of Jews in the US - and the state of Israel - which he dates to after 67.
Chomsky's pioneering work in computational linguistics was simply too useful and impossibly timely to the project to build what Yasha Levine calls "surveillance valley". This was the time when Marvin Minsky (also collected by Jeffrey Epstein) marketed "artificial intelligence" deliberately with the double meaning of "intelligence": in "I"Q as in C"I"A.
If anything, as a young professor, Chomsky did his best to commit career suicide by joining the student occupation who wanted MIT to cut off all Pentagon funding over the Vietnam war. This was back in the day when they had massive 30 year basic research grants. Noam planned on a long stint in prison over his involvement with Dan Ellsberg in the release of the Pentagon papers.
However, MIT needed Chomsky and Chomsky needed the professorship to have access to students, etc. But with the position did come prestige, a high salary, and indeed membership in an elite (not "the" elite: Chomsky could famously never get published in the NYT, the same paper that reported on him as "arguably the most important intellectual alive").
As Lucifer himself is all too keenly aware, the path to Hell is lined with invitations to fancy dinners: Tellingly, what first gave Jeffrey Epstein an "in" with Noam, was Chomsky's institutional obligation as a decorated MIT professor to regale high-value individuals - whose private funding has now replaced the defunct long-term funding grants...
It is telling that Michael Albert's most-quoted episode is from a factory take-over by workers in Argentina: A menial worker managed to teach herself accountancy from scratch within a few months - beautiful proof of the violence inherent in the class system. However, with the accountancy skills, yearnings for superior prestige and a higher salary also set in just as quickly, an example of the emergent power of the co-ordinator class: sandwiched between workers and owners and always tempted to side with the owners...
-- Chomsky as a unique voice, scholar, and anarcho-syndicalist --
I was going to write a rather convoluted essay on how Noam's voice was unique, notwithstanding the continuities with previous scholarship that Justin correctly lays out.
And to mention his idiosyncratic take on history and philosophy of ("Cartesian") science.
And to defend Noam's intellectual tradition seeing how few prominent voices write as "anarchists", let alone "anarcho-syndicalists". Really only the late David Graeber comes to mind. Unlike Graeber, Noam always stuck to his analysis of what is done in the center by the powerful rather than what is done in the periphery by the powerless - or indeed what we can do when we "behave as if we were already free".
But I expect that those still interested in such visions are much better off reading Chomsky (or Graeber) in the original ;-)
Thank you for your thoughtful engagement as always. The only disagreement we have is about the elite question. What I'm saying about that is that I no longer believe Chomskys interpretation that the Jewish community were marginalized until 1967. To the extent they were, they were a section of the elite that were marginalized from certain other sections of the elite as they marginalized others from theirs. The fact that they are more intertwined now through Epstein and rituals among other things doesn't mean they were not elites before. Chomsky was absolutely from a Jewish intellectual elite family and was predestined for success by that background, not by his talent, which I don't deny but which, as he would have agreed, is not concentrated in any community or group. Thanks for your other observations, and if you want to discuss further we can do it via email...
You are absolutely right to insist on the membership in the intellectual elite, thanks for that.
I remember reading Chomsky reflecting back on his time as a student: he concluded that the discipline of linguistics in the US had taken a completely wrong turn in the 20th century - and that the highly technical exercises with linguistic materials which he had drawn up as a side-project over the summer break were what the field should be about instead.
So while Chomsky was "self-made" to an astonishing degree, I may have made too much of this;
The other side of that same coin is how naturally it came to him *as a student* to weigh in on the proper goals and the very subject matter of a quite advanced scientific discipline. That sheer *chutzpah*, however earned - is deeply characteristic of elite thinking.
Indeed it is what Pierre Bourdieu has singled out as the most important characteristic for members of the elite to recognize one another.
I'm pretty sure his father was also a linguistics academic working on Hebrew linguistics.
Thank you for writing about your knowledge of Chomsky and his writings. I never read his books, although I have a few of them. (My love of books and the knowledge contained therein often overtakes my time to read them all.) Therefore, my knowledge of Chomsky is limited to anecdotes from Chris Hedges and Norman Finkelstein and now you. I felt sad when I heard about Chomsky and Epstein but mostly it was for those like Chris and Norman, who thought so highly of him. Yet, I know that all of us have facets in our character or personality that may not always link together smoothly. We are not of a piece but of many parts in our ideas, thoughts and conclusions, or perspectives. At least I’ve found that in myself and those I know. Your decision to look at Chomsky in his “parts” instead of as a “whole” is I think both kind and fair. Your article on Chomsky has, once again, firmed my respect for you and your ability to really see and understand situations. I have grown to appreciate your contributions to Palestine, its continuing genocide, and other historical topics through your writing and videos. Thank you for all you do to add to thoughtful and honest discussions on so many current and past events. You are a talented writer and teacher. Please keep writing and teaching - I still have much to learn.
Excellent meditation on Chomsky and his influence. I believe his best work was done in the 1970s and 80s. The collection of essays under the title “For Reasons of State” is a masterful exposition of the implicit racism contained in elite discourse during the Vietnam War. “The Fateful Triangle” is, along with the brave journalism of Robert Fisk, the best account in English I know of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. These works, along with “The Political Economy of Human Rights” and “Turning the Tide” will always be an important part of my political education. However by the 1990s I had lost interest in him and only listened to the odd interview. Looking back I agree he should have retired long ago and left the stage. It is sad to see that his legacy will be darkened by his association with Epstein.
V ery thoughtful essay. Thank you being objective and careful about what you learned from Chomsky. The last line Hedges wrote, that we are not supposed to party with THEM, we're supposed to destroy THEM
really struck home.
What an honest contribution to an hysterical debate. I never had any special interest in Chomsky, as I was into Marxism precociously. So no need to be disillusioned or enraged for me. However, I get why so many guys out there feel the need to commit ritual patricide online: many people have moved beyond anarchist, socdem and pacifist positions in view of unconcealed imperialist brutality, and if publicly renouncing your old hero helps in that process, that's a good thing. On the other hand, picking on a moribund person hardly brings out the best of humanity, it certainly doesn't foster intellectual development. There are too many freshly converted Leninists foaming at the mouth about Chomskism, French theory etc having always been CIA psyops who clearly have no clue about intellectual history. Marxists should understand that thinkers whose ideas are partly flawed or outright antisocialist can still give important progressive impulses, just as reformist political movements can be really progressive in certain contexts (as well as reactionary in others). Good examples, Justin, how this worked for you. Now it's time to learn from the mistakes of Chomskism (not just the man's himself) and move on. And learn about the predatory class from the distorted bits we're allowed to see from the pedo-files.
Thank you AEP for this well-written and argued article, which sheds a fair light on the complexity of the discourse on social structures of power as in part exemplified among Chomsky’s lifelong intellectual endeavors, and the necessity of considering the context and vicissitudes of the personal history and trajectory of Chomsky as a person. I think in today’s atmosphere, we are easily driven by and readily subscribe to simplistic polarizations that unfortunately create profound myopia, paralyzing our ability to distinguish the essential distinction between these levels of analysis.
Wow, thank you for this, enormously helpful and comforting to this longtime Chomsky fan.
The Palestinians have trained me to view the world as a battlefield against empire. Our side is the practical and ethical one. My new friends are more than angry with Chomsky-E. But, good people in the cause have exposed and detained him. I’m moving on to new targets. Scapegoating and hero-worshipping is not for a people’s movement.
Chomsky-B was a distant instructor via Youtube interviews for many years. Resistance was entirely suppressed in neo-medieval Missouri and its Zionist college of MSU. I was lucky to find Chomsky, Zinn, and Carlin. Carlin was not an elite. There’s no mention of him on Epstein Island. I’m grateful for not being an elite.
Vietnam: Chomsky was criticizing the Empire when my father was tortured in one camp and the Vietnamese were tortured in concentration camps, the Strategic Hamlets. My father wasn’t crazy, he was just anti-genocidal. He couldn’t be told what to do, so they labeled him a “paranoid schizophrenia.” James, Chomsky, and the Fighters all had the same enemy; Chomsky was in the Resistance. So was Ronald James; it’s a bit of an unorthodox approach, but Resistance takes all kinds. He didn’t set one foot in Vietnam.
Viet Minh: Chomsky didn’t mention the Resistance in any interview I heard. But nobody did over here. I can’t scapegoat Chomsky for that. Viet Minh were still heroes in the James family; Vietnam’s freedom was revenge for us against the U.S. military.
IDW: Islamic principles say to protect civilians, defeated enemies, and to take prisoners. So, I respect Islam, and that's that. If there was a revolution, I’d take Chomsky-E prisoner. But I would raise the Black Flag, however, with my more recent instructors. Someone would have to keep me away from Peterson, Harris, the Weinsteins, and fanatic Stefan Molyneux. They’re Zionists, Jewish Supremacists, and apologists for terrorism. Talk about the banality of Evil…if you think Chomsky is boring, then listen to Harris.
IDW and Epstein: Epstein was a prelude to the fall of the West. The IDW (too obvious, cf. IDF) was embarrassed by Epstein. If Chomsky was so wrong about Palestine, and the IDW frauds were so repelled by the pedophile, then why aren’t they taking the opportunity to trash Chomsky? They’re not only complicit, but future generations will view every single Jewish Supremacist as a Nazi. Havaraa Agreement, Zionists betrayed Jews to invade Palestine, so this isn’t new.
Peterson: Chomsky wore ordinary clothes. I always respected that. Subconsciously, Jordan Peterson came across as a distant person, literally and metaphorically, an aristocratic-like figure, whereas Chomsky didn’t. Same for all the IDW, except Rogan. Peterson wears suits that poor people can’t afford and then blames the poor person for everything. This is no different than Hitlerian triumph of the will BS. Maybe there was a non-Zionist Peterson once...don't care.
Parenti: Missouri’s education is backward. I think the problem is bigger than Missouri. My professors either didn’t know about Parenti or suppressed him. As a Roman historian, I should’ve read him. Didn’t even know who he was when Emersberger and Podur mentioned him once. He wrote "The Assassination of Julius Caesar."
Gatekeepers: The IDW are gatekeepers for knowledge that should be used by the Palestinians. Buddhism and psychedelics are examples. Podur’s argument for different Chomskys is just a fact.
Chomsky I, B, E: The Buddhists talk about no self all the time and how we change and literally aren’t the same people. James-7 is different from James-RF, and he’s even different from James-P, and then there’s James-P1, P2, and P3; 1) seven-year old watches Spartacus and cheers for slaves; 2) goes to college and starts cheering for the Romans, this is Romanophile Fascism; 3) Palestinian now returns to cheering for slaves and, also, spots the subtle American and Zionist propaganda in Kubrick's Spartacus and rejects the film and demands better.
There’s a lot more to say. I’m going to think more on it. Somebody came after me for defeating Western literature with Edward Said’s assistance. I already knew that he wasn’t radical. Doesn’t matter. It was a quasi-religious experience to purify and free myself from the West. This person didn’t get it…
Palestine-Lastly, I first really learned about Palestine from Chomsky’s debate with Dershowitz. One person was sincere, the other was paid to be there. One person was getting angry, and seemed to actually care about the topic. The other was a lawyer and a liar. Again, Black Flag with him. Dershowitz fits a stereotype of Jews where I’m from. We don’t like them. My father and I liked Chomsky. Ironically, we didn’t even know he was Jewish. When I found out it didn’t change anything. Didn’t matter with Zinn either.
He said he was Ukrainian. He later said his ancestors may have come from the Caucasus. Well, that evidently was my first lesson in Palestinian Studies: Israelis are invaders from Europe who are not native. I’m 100% for the Palestinians and I 100% hate the Anglo-American Empire that is invading them for 77 years straight with Judaeo-Nazi colonists. Thanks for sharing your history with Chomsky.
Sorry not so much intelligent to contribute here but I'll share this little clip of Michael Parenti calling C. Hedges a liberal, always makes me chuckle... https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxWiYg-oCEt9yAdMzq6JAWldmFIlggt9EE?si=PYqMzspLMtr01hn9
This is a really good piece. Thank you for writing it.
My 5-yr-old niece Avi is named after Noam (Avram) and my brother was torn up after the Ep revelations. Regardless, Avi (my little Che) is gonna change the world just wait...
Re: Parenti, contact me offline if you're interested and I'll tell you a story that 'canceled' him in my mind 20 years ago.