Where I've been, where I am

[Richard Ryan]

I'm going side with John on this one - I'm a Chomsky fan (used to get quotes from him on occasion when I was a working journalist in my 20s) - but his stance on the Balkans was "unenlightened."  Being uniformly against all American military activity or interventions is not the same thing as being a consistent anti-fascist or consistent anti-imperialist. 

--- On Wed, 3/18/09, Lawrence Bryan <lebryan at speakeasy.net> wrote:

> From: Lawrence Bryan <lebryan at speakeasy.net>
> Subject: Re: Where I've been, where I am
> To: "Carvill John" <johncarvill at hotmail.com>
> Cc: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Wednesday, March 18, 2009, 4:07 PM
> 
> Ahh, an antichomskyite... One finds them in the strangest
> places.
> 
> "Disastrously wrong" ... since no one in power pays the
> least attention to him, hard to see that any disaster could
> result.
> 
> "most shockingly" Were you really surprised? After all some
> antichomskyites are still claiming that Chomsky is a
> holocaust denier as well as denying the massacres in
> Cambodia.
> 
> "shrill"  Hard to see how his rather matter-of-fact
> soft spoken manner of speech could accurately be described
> as "shrill".
> 
> Typical ad hominem attack. Surprised you didn't add
> "discredited".
> 
> It would be interesting to see where you get your facts
> about what really happened there and compare them with
> Chomsky's opinion. By the way, where did you see a "recent
> pronouncement" of his on Bosnia/Serbia/Kosovo?
> 
> Lawrence
> 
> On Mar 18, 2009, at 8:15 AM, Carvill John wrote:
> 
> > 
> > 
> > << not to be a gadfly, but doesn't it seem like
> Chomsky is a heckuva good
> > critic of social ills, but might be doing the same
> about the
> > inevitable abuses of an anarcho-syndicalist regime
> if  one were in
> > place?>>
> > 
> > Hmmmm, yeah, probably. Plus, Chomsky has got some of
> his more recent pronouncements disastrously wrong - eg. his
> *completely* screwy attitude to Bosnia/Serbia/Kosovo, and,
> most shockingly, his shrill insistence that the Srebrenica
> massacre has been somehow 'overplayed' in the media.
> > 
> > If you took Chomsky's idiocy (yes, idiocy) over the
> Balkans, and rettrospectively applied it to all his previous
> political views, he wouldn't be left with much credibility.
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> >
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> 
>