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:
E14: The Vietnam war with Noam Chomsky
Podcast episode about the Vietnam war with Noam Chomsky, and Mrs Van, a member of the Vietnamese Women’s Union. We look at the geopolitics of the conflict and its human cost.
When Chomsky Worked on Weapons Systems for the Pentagon - by Chris Knight
Submitted by hedgehog on Mar 4 2018 14:00
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
Submitted by hedgehog on Oct 29 2017 18:11
Chomsky is sometimes accused of being a Holocaust denier. This is little more than a right-wing smear. However, Chomsky's views on the Holocaust denier, Robert Faurisson, are difficult to understand.
Chomsky and Pol Pot's genocidal regime in Cambodia
Submitted by hedgehog on Oct 22 2017 19:49
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
Submitted by libcom on Aug 18 2017 16:15
Noam Chomsky recently made some comments about antifa, and militant anti-fascism in general, which were as ill-timed as they were ill-informed. Here's what we think he's got wrong about the subject.
The Chomsky effect or anarchism of the State - Oiseau-tempête (Claude Gillon)
A French ''Oiseau-tempête" journal's (post-Situationist; Marxist autonomist/insurrectionary anarchist) critique of Chomsky translated into English. This comes from the ninth issue of Oiseau-tempête as its twelfth article and is authored Claude Guillon.
Readings and photos from the student uprising at Chomsky’s university, MIT, 1967-1972
Submitted by hedgehog on May 13 2017 17:14
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.
Chomsky at MIT: Between the war scientists and the anti-war students, by Chris Knight
Submitted by hedgehog on Apr 17 2017 16:15
It is now fifty years since Noam Chomsky published his celebrated article, 'The Responsibility of Intellectuals'.* Few other writings had a greater impact on the turbulent political atmosphere on US campuses in the 1960s. The essay launched Chomsky's political career as the world's most intransigent and cogent critic of US foreign policy - a position he has held to this day.
Chomsky on War Research at MIT
Submitted by hedgehog on Mar 18 2017 21:49
On 25 February 2017, a conference was held at University College London to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Noam Chomsky's landmark article, 'The Responsibility of Intellectuals'.[1]
During the conference, Noam made the following statement about the military research that was going on at his university, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, around the time when the article was published:
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