4 ms·

Public indoctrination through control of the media is easily the most pressing problem of our days. Far more important than that of the global warming, for exam

• mc32 12y ago
  Chomsky, unfortunately, is not the most rigorous guy when it comes to empiricism. Look at how he interpreted the Khmer Rouge genocide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chomsky http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Choms... He defended them saying that what we said about the Kh R was Western propaganda, etc. Years later, when the truth became undeniable, he defended his actions saying, but well, I couldn't very well know they were so bad and since I didn't have the data, I was still right. Yet, at the time, there we all kinds of information coming out from Kampuchea, all pointing to it being a disaster --even the Vietnamese were utterly alarmed. So, you really have to be careful with him.
  • moo 12y ago
    I posted this before: Clearly the Cambodian and Indochina people went through an awful period. Pol Pot did extreme things as a leader but the alternative of leaving Lon Nol in power who had people starving was not good either. Whether communism or Islamic fundamentalism, anti-colonialism wars are not fun to live through. Here is a perspective I picked up from the Internet. "A Finnish inquiry commission concludes that 1 million or fewer people died in the Pol Pot period. The commission documented that at least several thousand of those were because of direct military battles with Vietnam. Part of the discrepancy in death figures comes from those who fail to account for the decrease in births that inevitably happens when a population is lacking adequate food and fighting a war. These missed births get counted as deaths in population projections that assume the birth rate did not change." "The United States war in Southeast Asia killed 600,000 people in Cambodia according to the Finnish Inquiry Commission. The total U.S.-caused deaths in Indochina run into the millions." "By 1975, an estimated 10 percent of the Kampuchean population -- 600,000 -- had already died as a result of the Vietnam War. Those 600,000 deaths were caused by U.S. efforts to track down Vietnamese communists. According to the Peter Jennings documentary "The Killing Fields", Cambodia specifically absorbed 500,000 tons of U.S. bombs in the early 1970s." "The U.S.-instigated war -- and the bombings in particular -- also caused the creation of 2 million refugees, who flooded the cities. The cities then came to depend on the U.S. food aid to live because of the war and the inefficiency of the right-wing Lon Nol regime." "Hence, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge seized power from Lon Nol in 1975 in the worst possible situation: The people were starving, Kampuchea was the poorest country in the world and one-third of its people were refugees." "Executions and other deaths" "The Boston Globe coverage of Pol Pot's death contained this characterization of the Khmer Rouge: "When the Khmer Rouge marched into the capital on April 17, 1975 to establish their agrarian society, they chased out city dwellers at gunpoint, killed anyone suspected of being an intellectual, forced millions into labor camps, and demanded that children inform on their parents. People were often arrested simply for wearing glasses or knowing a foreign language. Money and private property were abolished, schools and temples were shuttered, and medicine and food became scarce. During a nearly four-year reign, as many as 2 million people died of starvation, execution illness or overwork." "Pol Pot did execute between 75,000 and 150,000 people between 1975 and 1979. Most of those executions took place in the context of war between Vietnam and Cambodia.Vietnam invaded in 1978 and threw the Khmer Rouge out of power.The famous skull-pile pictures from Kampuchea come from a policy especially aimed at the Vietnamese.Serious famine followed again after the final Vietnamese invasion of December 1978, and by the time international aid started it was too late for many. A total of 2 million, or 30 percent of the population, died in the 1970s from the U.S. war, the Pol Pot period and Vietnamese invasions." "The United States aided the Khmer Rouge in the 1980s, because they were enemies of U.S. foes, the Vietnamese, who had invaded and ousted the Khmer Rouge in 1979."
• deepyearning 12y ago
  The problem with Chomsky is that he views everything from a left-wing perspective, in which he interprets the biases in the media as coming only from big money and the geopolitical power that big money relies on. He cannot explain, for example, the success of pro-immigration politics. He might argue that immigration is a tool used by the powerful to lower the cost of labor, but to do so is to completely ignore that it has been the left that has been the main driver of immigration and multiculturalism. Similarly, he can't explain the success of the pro-Israel lobby in the US. He views the US as propping up a right wing regime in Israel for its own benefit. But again, this ignores the complete cooperation of the mainstream left in the US in this process. The only way you can believe in Chomsky's worldview is if you think that literally everyone in mainstream US politics, and most of the left outside of the mainstream, have been co-opted into promoting an agenda which is absolutely unrelated (and often opposed to) to their stated agenda. It is a viewpoint that vastly exaggerates the importance of money and political power, and ignores the power of ideology.
  • DenisM 12y ago
    I too find Chomsky a bit too far to the left, and indeed he doesn't have all the answers in his worldview. The questions you pointed out seem important. Nevertheless, the list of techniques and examples of media manipulation that he has painstakingly documented in his book is valuable in its own right. You don't have to agree with all or even most of Chomsky to give due consideration to some of his work.
    • deepyearning 12y ago
      I totally agree that Chomsky is worth reading and I'm trying to get around to reading his books myself. In my view he is very consistent, and this consistency makes it easier to understand the inconsistency of mainstream American liberals.