In response to: ‘The Chomsky Paradox’
 by Vasko Kohlmayer, The American Thinker, 17/3/2006

In turn in response to:
‘Latin America and Asia are at last breaking free of Washington’s grip’
by Avram Noam Chomsky, The Guardian, 15/3/2006

Kohlmayer opens by claiming that Chomsky’s article turn on a ‘mind-boggling premise’. This premise is that Latin America and Asia are becoming less influenced by the United States. You might be forgiven for failing to see what is mind-boggling about this. Indeed, one has to be an highly indoctrinated individual to see anything mind-boggling in this. To understand Kohlmayer, one has to realise that Chomsky sees freedom from foreign influence a generally good thing; whereas to Kohlmayer, U.S. influence is by definition good. To him, therefore, a country free of U.S. influence sounds less like a dog free of fleas and more like a dog free of fur — that is to say, the thing is so positive and necessary that to speak of being free of it is nonsensical.

No modern person’s mind would be boggled by talk of Britannia becoming freer of Roman influence after AD410, whether or not they judged the Romans to have been on the whole positive or negative in their effects. On the other hand, I imagine that Emperor Valentinian back in Rome would have been scandalised by the idea of being ‘free’ of the glorious influence of the sole source of civilisation in the world. It is apparently in the nature of rulers and their lapdogs to be incapable even of comprehending language which is not in line with their twisted view of the world — let us call it the Roman or imperial view.

This sheds light on what the ‘mind-boggling premise’ really is. The facts of the shifting geo-political sands are not the true premise; they are just events reported. The premise behind Chomsky’s approach is that the Roman view of the world is false. Chomsky believes America’s influence is not automatically good and is instead something that can be discussed. We must conclude that this unspoken premise is what so boggles Kohlmayer’s mind, thus indicating him to be an intelligent but highly indoctrinated individual. We reject the conclusion that Kohlmayer is merely stupid and is mind-boggled simply by the idea that Latin America and Asia are becoming less influenced by the U.S.

Let us focus on Kohlmayer’s second paragraph. He sets up a straw man by simplifying Chomsky’s statement that the countries in question are ‘breaking free of Washington’s grip’ and pretending instead that Chomsky said that the countries are ‘becoming free’ in a general sense. This may seem like a very minor falsification of what Chomsky said, but it is important for the argument Kohlmayer will make in the next paragraph. Before moving on, Kohlmayer does not miss the opportunity to tarnish the honour of Venezuela by putting this relatively democratic country in the same list as the Chinese and Cuban dictatorships. He then attributes fanciful ‘congratulatory accents’ to Chomsky in order to imply that he is in favour of these two régimes which in reality he has constantly criticised.

In Kohlmayer’s third paragraph, he invents a ‘problem’ in Chomsky’s reportage. Apparently ‘[m]any of those whose freedom Mr. Chomsky celebrates live under the tyranny of leftist dictators.’ In even plainer English, this means ‘Chomsky says these countries are free, but they are really unfree’. This argument relies entirely on the straw man set up in the previous paragraph. Chomsky said these countries were becoming free of U.S. influence; their freedom from other things was off-topic and unmentioned. It is rather as though Chomsky had said ‘this Alsatian is free of fleas’, and Kohlmayer replied ‘But here is the problem: Many of those dogs whose freedom Mr. Chomsky celebrates live under the tyranny of owners who beat them’.

Here, we perhaps uncover another cause of Kohlmayer’s boggled mind. Chomsky has no difficulty in comprehending the notion of a dog free of fleas but unfree of domestic oppression at the hands of a cruel master. The same goes for a country free of U.S. influence but unfree of domestic oppression at the hands of a cruel master. Kohlmayer would understand the dog as well as Chomsky; but when it comes to a country, it appears to be inconceivable to him that the régime might be neither inherently good nor evil. To him, there is ‘communist tyranny’ on one hand and there are countries where ‘true liberty and goodness live’ on the other.

In his fourth paragraph, Kohlmayer proceeds to paint America as a paradise, his main factual basis for this being the existence of immigration to America. We shall leave it to the reader to ponder this feeble argument.

He goes on to describe Chomsky’s observation of growing independence from the U.S. as ‘a monstrous claim’ that will confuse oppressed people if they try to reconcile it with ‘the harrowing fact of their subjugation’.

Irony then sets in. Having demonstrated a psychological defect that switches off the logical parts of his brain when the free and good nature of the U.S. is challenged in any way, he then has the audacity to try to coin a new phrase specifically to libel Chomsky. He declares that from now on the ‘Chomsky Paradox’ shall mean ‘ a singular phenomenon which takes place in the brain of a western leftist when he looks at an oppressed people and thinks they are free’. In reality, this means ‘the phenomenon whereby a Western leftist looks at a régime commonly vilified in the West and breaks taboo by seeing some positive thing about it’. The irony is that the only pathology demonstrated here is what we might call the ‘Kohlmayer Paradox’: ‘the phenomenon whereby a Western rightist cannot accept even slightly positive things said about a régime commonly vilified in the West’.

Now that Kohlmayer believes he has made his point successfully, he stops making arguments and launches several sentences consisting of absurd attacks such as: ‘Mr. Chomsky has not only betrayed reason and truth, but also those countless browbeaten who look toward America as their hope for ending the outrage in which they live. With a straight face he lied about their situation and thus belittled the untold pain and injustice they have endured and are enduring still.’

Remember that all this is based on the same logic that would see a contradiction between a dog being free of fleas and not being free of a bad owner. That is to say, no logic.