Chomsky Promoting Bumper Sticker History
Chomsky’s response to Chris Knight’s chapter in the new ‘Responsibility of Intellectuals’ book
Chomsky’s relationship with war research at MIT has been a controversial topic ever since the publication of Chris Knight’s Decoding Chomsky.
Here is Chomsky’s latest response in the debate – followed by Knight’s rejoinder:
When Chomsky Worked on Weapons Systems for the Pentagon - by Chris Knight
Between 1963 and 1965, Noam Chomsky worked as a consultant on an Air Force project to establish English as an “operational language for command and control.”[1] According to one of his students, who also worked on this project, the military justification for funding this work was “that in the event of a nuclear war, the generals would be underground with some computers trying to manage things, and that it would probably be easier to teach computers to understand English than to teach the generals to program.”[2]
Chomsky and Gitta Sereny on the Holocaust denier, Robert Faurisson
Chomsky and Pol Pot's genocidal regime in Cambodia
Chomsky has repeatedly been criticised as an apologist for the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia in the 1970s. Understandably, a common reaction on the left is to dismiss such criticism as nothing more than a right-wing smear. But it is often forgotten that one of Chomsky's earliest critics on this issue was himself a leftist, the Marxist academic, Steven Lukes.
For anyone who wants to get a handle on this complex controversy, here's a pdf of the relevant chapter from Chomsky's 1979 book, 'After the Cataclysm', followed by the subsequent debate in the 'Times Higher Education Supplement':
6 reasons why Chomsky is wrong about antifa
Readings and photos from the student uprising at Chomsky’s university, MIT, 1967-1972
The protests that erupted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the late 1960s were an important part of the student unrest that shook the US in this period.
Noam Chomsky has talked sympathetically about these protests, which focused on MIT's development of both nuclear weapons and weapons used in the Vietnam war. However, Chomsky also has a strong loyalty to MIT – at one point describing the university as ‘the freest and the most honest and has the best relations between faculty and students than any other ... [with] a good record on civil liberties’ – and it seems this loyalty has prevented him from giving a full account of these events.
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