Chomsky says US should stay in Syria

The Hypocrisy Of Chomsky And The Imperialist Left On Syria, Rojava And Yemen

Russ Fort,

25 December, 2018

SYDNEY, Australia – “‘Scared to Death’: Syria’s Kurds Feel Trapped Between Threats From Assad and Erdogan” – Ha’aretz

Many pro-Rojava [named region of a separatist Kurdish entity on Syrian territory] leftists including Noam Chomsky agree that an illegal US military occupation of a sovereign country is needed to protect “the Kurds”, possibly because they have no idea how pragmatically Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has addressed Kurdish demands and grievances.

The Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) wanted citizenship for 300,000 stateless Kurds and Assad granted it back in April 2011. Then they wanted autonomy, which Assad effectively gave them back in July 2012. Most do not know that from 1980-98 the Turkey-based Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), in which the YPG is the Syrian branch, and its leader Abdullah Ocalan were based in Damascus from where they waged their secessionist campaign against Turkey.

More broadly, why in the minds of pro-Rojava leftists are Kurds literally the only victims of Islamic extremism whose lives seem to matter? Because it serves a pro-partition agenda.

Ten million Yemenis are starving right now because of this campaign of Saudi aggression, which pays 100,000 foreign mercenaries, armed by the Anglo-American military industrial complex, to fight alongside Al-Qaeda, against the Ansarullah-backed government in Sana’a, all in order to restore the pro-Saudi status quo. The left doesn’t care because nothing about Yemen was ever marketed to them as fashionable, with no dancing feminists to exoticise.

If the pro-Rojava left really cared about Turkish-backed Islamists murdering socialist Kurds, why from 2012 to 2014 did they say nothing about the arming and funding of those Islamists by the NATO-Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) alliance? I remember that period, the only people who said anything in defence of Syrian Kurds (aside from Kurdish leftists) were those who supported the defence of the Syrian government.

The fashionability of “Rojava” among the western left was manufactured to coincide with the US intervention in September 2014, before which, it was the Syrian military that protected YPG held areas from Islamic State attacks, and how were they repaid? After receiving US patronage, the YPG tried to violently expel the Syrian military from Hasakah province.

The US intervention in September 2014 was not purely motivated by a desire to defeat Islamic State, rather it was to protect Kurdish held territories in Syria and Iraq, which in turn encouraged Islamic State to direct their aggression at the Syrian government (which is obviously easier than fighting militias that have US protection), which prompted the Russian intervention a year later.

The Syrian government’s frustration with the Kurdish YPG is therefore entirely understandable. The YPG will not tolerate Turkish-backed Islamists on territory they control, but had no problem allowing the US to bomb Syrian government forces from their territory, even if it meant raising the possibility of the rest of Syria being overrun by the same forces that they want the entire world to save them from.

Jay Tharappel is a PhD Candidate at Sydney University.

Noam Chomsky is right about Antifa

Chomsky: Antifa Is A 'Major Gift 

To The Right'

By Steven Nelson



August 22, 2017 "Information Clearing House" - The left-wing "Antifa" movement is rising in prominence after clashing with white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., but one progressive scholar says the anti-fascists feed the fire they seek to extinguish.

"As for Antifa, it's a minuscule fringe of the Left, just as its predecessors were," Noam Chomsky told the Washington Examiner. "It's a major gift to the Right, including the militant Right, who are exuberant."

Many activists affiliated with the loosely organized Antifa movement consider themselves anarchists or socialists. They often wear black and take measures to conceal their identity.

Chomsky said, "what they do is often wrong in principle – like blocking talks – and [the movement] is generally self-destructive."

"When confrontation shifts to the arena of violence, it's the toughest and most brutal who win – and we know who that is," said Chomsky, a professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "That's quite apart from the opportunity costs – the loss of the opportunity for education, organizing, and serious and constructive activism."

The violence in Charlottesville ended Saturday when an alleged white supremacist drove a car into a crowd of anti-racism activists, not all of whom were Antifa activists, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring more than a dozen others. The driver has been charged with murder.

On Tuesday, Trump shocked viewers of a press conference, including prominent members of his own party, by saying "both sides" deserved blame for the violence. Critics said the president should single out white supremacists for scorn.

"There was a group on this side, you can call them the Left, you've just called them the Left, that came violently attacking the other group," Trump said on Tuesday. "So, you can say what you want, but that's the way it is."

Where Antifa fits in a historical context of progressive activism is not yet clear, but some observers see the increasingly prominent movement — members of which were mass-arrested at Trump's inauguration after a march that featured window-smashing — as becoming an important, accepted part of the mainstream Left.

Mark Lance, professor of justice and peace at Georgetown University, said the Antifa movement's rise is a clear response to more open fascist organizing.

"I'm seeing more concrete productive discussion between anti-fascists and others on the Left these days than ever before in my life," Lance said.


"There is reason to think that it will become integrated into an emerging coalition that includes Sanders supporters, democratic socialists, dreamers, the Movement for Black Lives, environmentalists, [and] Native American organizers," he said.

Lance said Antifa actions "need not be violent confrontation, but most Antifa, in practice, are willing to physically resist fascist marches and defend themselves against fascist attack."

Reaching for American historical parallels for Antifa is difficult.

Lance said he doesn't see a close historical reference in leftist groups that formed in the 1960s like the Black Panthers or the Weather Underground, which conducted a bombing campaign aimed largely at damaging property. Both were primarily focused on government institutions, he said.

"There's some limited similarity to the Weather Underground," Chomsky said about the group that grew out of the anti-Vietnam War movement. He added, however, that "Weathermen differed not only in radically different context, but also in tactics, almost always against property, in intent at least."

By contrast, "Antifa purports to be defensive," he said.

Anti-fascism during the rise of Nazism in Germany is perhaps a better analogy for today's Antifa, said Chomsky, who expressed alarm at Trump's remarks. He clarified that in Germany, "left violence was hardly the problem."

This article was first published by Washington Examiner -

Noam Chomsky: Antifa is a 'major gift to the right'

World-renowned academic prompts criticism for his attack on the anti-fascist movement in the wake of Charlottesville

TheIndependent,

20 August, 2017

Noam Chomsky has launched into an attack on the anti-fascist movement and argued its actions are wrong in principle and it is a “major gift to the right”.

The eminent intellectual, who is described as the father of modern linguistics, argued the movement was self-destructive and constituted a tiny faction on the periphery of the left.

Antifa, shorthand for anti-fascist organisations, refers to a loose coalition of militant, decentralised, grassroots groups which are opposed to the far-right. 

The movement, which was founded in Europe in the 1920s, has dominated headlines in the wake of a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville earlier this month. Neo-Nazis, KKK members and “alt-right” supporters clashed with anti-fascists and a woman was left dead after a car ploughed into a crowd of anti-fascist protesters. 

In the wake of the deadly violence, President Donald Trump has prompted anger for drawing a moral parity between white supremacists and anti-fascists, saying counter-protesters were as violent as the far-right and the "alt-right" groups included some "very fine" people.

Chomsky, a leading voice on the left who is famed for his critique of US foreign policy, neoliberalism and the mainstream media, has now criticised Antifa. 

"As for Antifa, it's a minuscule fringe of the Left, just as its predecessors were," the linguist and political philosopher told the Washington Examiner. "It's a major gift to the right, including the militant right, who are exuberant."

"What they do is often wrong in principle – like blocking talks – and [the movement] is generally self-destructive,” the 88-year-old told the conservative paper.

He added: "When confrontation shifts to the arena of violence, it's the toughest and most brutal who win – and we know who that is. That's quite apart from the opportunity costs – the loss of the opportunity for education, organising, and serious and constructive activism."

While many only associate the anti-fascist movement with militant direct action, it is worth noting it adopts a wide variety of tactics. This includes union organisation, migrant solidarity, public education programmes, ousting white supremacists and neo-Nazis to their neighbours and employers, and urging venues to cancel far-right events.

Chomsky, who recently left his post as Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to become a laureate professor at the University of Arizona, has prompted criticism for his assessment of Antifa.

Eleanor Penny, who has written extensively on fascism and the far-right, told The Independent: "Chomsky treats the battle against fascism as a battle for moral purity than can be won when the left remain respectful, polite, and deferent."

She added: "But fascists have no interest in winning that battle. They don't care about respecting free speech or the right to a fair trial; they've openly declared their murderous intent towards people of colour (and other undesirables) and they'll pursue that goal by any means necessary. In this context, physical resistance is a duty, an act of self-defence, not an unsightly outpost of leftist moral decline."

"What's more - it works. From the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 to similar confrontations in Lewisham and Wood Green in London in 1977, physical resistance has time and again protected local populations from racist violence, and prevented a gathering caucus of fascists from making further inroads into mainstream politics."

Critics on social media argued Chomsky, who is one of the most cited scholars in history, had become less left wing in his old age and the remarks meant he had become irrelevant.

Asa Winstanley, a US journalist, said: “Sad: Chomsky comes close to Trump blaming 'both sides'; says Antifa is 'a major gift to the Right'".

“Can u believe we live in a world where Mitt Romney is left of Noam Chomsky on Antifa,” said another user.

There’s no such thing as the ‘alt-left’ and white supremacists know it

The anti-fascist movement, which is in favour of popular grassroots opposition to fascism rather than reliance on the police or the state, is not a homogenous centralised organisation. It has a long and varied history which dates back to fighting Benito Mussolini’s Blackshirts in the 1920s and then Adolf Hitler’s Brownshirts in the taverns of Munich.

In the UK, anti-fascists mobilised against Blackshirts led by Oswald Moseley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, in Cable Street in East London in the 1930s and in many other instances.

Chris Hedges interviews Noam Chomsky on American collapse

Chomsky to RT: ‘US is racing toward the precipice, while the world is trying to save itself’

RT,

1 July, 2017

The minimum wage should be $20 an hour, “neoliberalism is tyranny” and the Republican Party is “dedicated to destroying human life,” renowned academic and activist Noam Chomsky told RT in an extended interview.

“We are headed toward a cliff and the worst cliff we are headed toward is due to market systems,” the linguist and philosopher said to the “On Contact”host Chris Hedges during a sit-down talk at MIT, where Chomsky, 88, continues to serve as Emeritus Professor.

Hedges, himself a professor, and Chomsky traced back the history of applied neoliberalism from its late 1970s origins on both, the left and the right, to the era of Donald Trump.

“The neoliberal shift moved decisions from the public arena to the market,” said Chomsky, whose book on the topic, “Requiem for the American Dream,” came out earlier this year. “The ideology claims it’s increasing freedom, it’s in fact increasing tyranny.”

Putting the interest of capital – and specifically transnational corporations and financial institutions – above that of the people, has created a “democratic reduction” and a “stagnation or decline of wages, for the majority,” said Chomsky, who advocates better wage distribution, and has called himself a socialist.

“Neoliberalism has been putting the working people of the world in competition with each other, but allowing freedom of capital, and in fact a high degree of protection for capital. So, for example, intellectual property rights are a huge tax on the population,” said Chomsky, who noted Microsoft’s stranglehold on tech patents, and Apple’s tax avoidance schemes as means of depriving ordinary people.

Chomsky, who co-authored the prominent 1992 media study Manufacturing Consent, said that these changes have been pinned by “indoctrination” with opponents marginalized and even dismissed as “anti-American.”

“Aside from the US, I don’t know any other non-totalitarian, non-authoritarian country where the concept even exists. That’s a very striking concept. If you’re critical of policy – you’re anti-American,” said Chomsky.

Chomsky, who achieved academic fame for his universal grammar theory, is now predominantly concerned about climate change, and particularly the recent US withdrawal from the Paris agreement, signed by then-President Barack Obama in 2015.

“The position of the savage wing of American capitalism, the Republican Party, is really striking, they are really racing toward a precipice. Has there really been an organization in history that has dedicated itself to the destruction of human life?” said Chomsky, who has been a constant critic of Trump. “The US is racing toward the precipice, while the world is trying to do something.”

Noam Chomsky on climate change and environmental collapse

Noam Chomsky, 'The Human Species Has Never Faced A Question Like This’ (2016)

In an exclusive new interview Noam Chomsky reflects on the incredible period in human history we currently find ourselves in where climate change, and looming environmental collapse, threaten the very future of our species. 

Noam Chomsky reflects on how the economic and political system we've set up puts considerations of short-term profits ahead of the life-systems of our planet. In our interview, Noam Chomsky also shares his thoughts on the 2016 U.S. presidential election, where Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton stand on climate change, and why advertising has a distorting effect on our society.

Recorded May 17 2016 for The Elephant Podcast
Interviewer: Kevin Caners

Noam Chomsky interviewed on Radio NZ

Noam Chomsky was interviewed on Radio NZ

Noam Chomsky on the death of the American Dream

RNZ,

6 May, 2016

Famed scholar, activist and political theorist Noam Chomsky talks frankly to Nine to Noon's Kathryn Ryan about politics, society and his new film Requiem for the American Dream.

Listen to Noam Chomsky's interview with Kathryn Ryan

Read an edited snapshot of the interview below:

You argue that the problem with inequality at the scale it is developing in the United States, is that it is corrosive to democracy and that the history of democracy in the United States from the time of the founding fathers, has been a cyclical battle between the elite, trying to protect its position in power, and sporadic uprisings of working people and the marginalised in protest. Is this just such another era unfolding in the United States?

So it appears. If you look at the Trump victory yesterday, [which] solidifies his position of Republican candidate. But if you look at the attitudes towards him, the public opposition to him is enormous, it’s running well over 50 percent, just as a candidate. Clinton is not much more popular.

The hatred and anger [towards] virtually all institutions is just overwhelming. Support for Congress has pretty much been in single digits for many years. There is tremendous anger, disillusionment, fear … if it does not take a constructive, organised form, as it did in the 1930’s and to an extent in the 1960’s, it could be a very threatening development.

You have someone who is the Secretary of State, who has been a senator, spent decades in the public eye in the form of Hillary Clinton, who never would have predicted such a sustained challenge from Bernie Sanders, who has been around as an activist for decades, but now is also seriously still in this race for the Democratic nomination. Is that the same kind of feature of disillusionment with establishment politics?

It’s the same kind and in fact if you take a close look at attitudes of Sanders and Trump supporters, they’re not very different. They’re taking different forms, but the actual attitudes are rather similar.

In fact, basically social democratic support for greater government involvement in health, education, higher taxes for the rich and the terrible debt burden on students, opposition to the export of production and the enrichment of largely predatory financial institutions … these attitudes are quite wide spread, both among Trump supporters and Sanders supporters.

There is the clear frustration with the dysfunction of Washington politics and the fact that it’s almost in gridlock, trying to get any decisions made in the capital, in the Congress. Very interestingly, when you look at the Senate’s and Congress’ opposition to what a president is trying to do, that in-built check was there right at the beginning.

You make the point in the documentary that when the political system was being drawn up by the founding fathers, there was an appointment system built into the Senate. It was a check system right from the beginning.

The original framework, established by James Madison and others, held that (I’m quoting Madison) power should be in the hands of the wealth of the nation, the more responsible group of men, those who have a concern for property and its rights and that a primary goal of government should be to protect the minority of the opulent from the majority. And by structuring the system that way, the primary power was actually given to the Senate, which was not - as you say - not elected. 


The president at that time was more of an administrator. There have been many changes over the years. There’s been substantial struggles that have gained far more democratic participation, there have been regressive periods … we happen to be in one now.

The dysfunction you mention in the government presented in a little bit of a misleading way. It’s one-sided. When Obama was elected, the Republican leadership, Mitch McConnell, and others said straight out, that prime policy will be "No". Make sure that the country is un-governable. That is the primary source of the so-called gridlock and dysfunction.

Of course, from the point of view of the public, this looks like the system has collapsed - and to an extent it has - but its primary responsibility is the fact that the Republican Party shifted so far to the right, that they’re barely a political party anymore.

This is actually recognised by some of their leading intellectuals, the leading political analysts of the American Enterprise Institute, the Conservative institute. Norman Ornstein described the current Republican Party as a “radical insurgency”, which is abandoned parliamentary politics, and that’s not far from truth, that’s the primary source of the gridlock.

But the fact of the matter is that the policies, the Democrats have also moved to the right, but today’s Democrats are pretty much what used to be called moderate Republicans. Richard Nixon is actually the last liberal president if you look at policies.

Bernie Sanders is described as radical and extremist, but if you take a look at his policies, they wouldn’t have surprised President Eisenhower. Eisenhower famously said that anyone who doesn’t accept basic New Deal policies doesn’t belong in the American political system. Sanders is basically a New Dealer. If you look at his policies, they would have been considered relatively moderate in the 1950’s.

All of this is a reflection of the general shift of the mainstream spectrum to the right during the neoliberal period which began in the mid-‘70s and really began to escalate under Reagan. And it has led to somewhat similar outcomes in many different places.

In Europe, for example, the attack on democracy has been harsher than in the United States and it is leading to the significant decline of the mainstream political parties and organisations and sharp rise of opposition at both right and left. That’s not entirely dissimilar from the Sanders phenomenon and due to much the same kind of policies, the neoliberal policies have had that kind of consequence almost everywhere and in the Third World, they have been really destructive. But they have led to, for a majority of the population, near stagnation or decline in benefits and opportunities.

There’s a sense of hopelessness for the future. There is a strong antagonism to established institutions.

You talked about the Republicans - are Ted Cruz and others now reaping the prize of that policy, of blocking everything that the Democratic president tried to do? Is this effectively now coming back to bite the party, which does seem to be – certainly its establishment wing – in absolute meltdown?

That’s quite accurate. If you look at the last few primary elections, you can see this building up. In the last several elections in the Republican primaries, if a candidate came out of the popular base of the party they were regarded as so extreme and disastrous that they had to be eliminated and held back. Herman Cain, Rick Santorum, one after the other… And in the preceding primaries the establishment, which controls the basic funding, the institution’s personnel and so on, they were able to suppress, in one way or another, the candidates who arose from the base and finally get their own man… like Romney in the last election, unpopular as he was among the base.

This time, to everyone’s surprise, they were unable to do it. Trump was the candidate of the popular base and he simply overwhelmed the establishment candidates and they’re now in utter disarray, not even able to decide whether to support him, to hold their noses (as some say), as they vote for him or abandon the party.

The Democratic Party is in not much better shape, if you want to know the truth. And we may see in November, the Sanders supporters, many of them young, energised, mobilised, bitter about establishment politics, they may just not depart from the party. It’s the kind of situation that we’re also seeing in Europe – the decline of the centrist parties.

Do you have a sense of what this outcome is going to be?

I think we’re going to see, in the coming months up to the election, a very ugly scene of bitterly harsh, negative advertising, denunciations, condemnations, hatred, fury… you can hope that out of these forces, especially the Sanders forces, there might come an organised movement that might sustain not the specifically electoral extravaganza, but would be a continuing force. It could happen and it could even happen that they would be joined by the largely white, working class supporters of Trump. That is conceivable.

In fact, it’s kind of striking to compare the present situation with that of the 1930s, which I am old enough to remember personally. The 1930s, the Depression, the circumstances were much more grim. It was a much poorer country, the conditions were far harsher, but subjectively, it was a much more optimistic period.

People felt that, we would get out of this somehow. The labour unions, which had been virtually destroyed in the 1920s, were reconstituting. There was militant labour action, the CIO organising sit-down strikes. Activism of race issues, and so on. A lot of pressure. There were political organisations of many kinds. There were political debates, discussion on many front.

It was a fairly sympathetic administration and the effect of it was to yield the New Deal legislations, which didn’t end the Depression, the War ended the Depression, but they did soften the edges and give people a sense of hopefulness and expectation that the future would be better. That’s strikingly lacking now. But it might consolidate.

It’s not impossible that existing forces will organise themselves in a way that will yield a subjective experience and direct activism that could lead to policies that will overcome the harsh effect of the neoliberal programmes. They’re not in stone, they can be changed.

*In Requiem for the American Dream, Noam Chomsky unpacks the US policies of the past half-century which have lead to an unprecedented concentration of power in the hands of the select few.

The documentary gets its New Zealand premiere at this years Documentary Edge International Film Festival It screens in Wellington today and on Sunday and in Auckland on Tuesday May 24 and Saturday May 28.