Chomsky was in the Epstein files.
Just adding this link,so anyone who doesnt know has a starting point for researching this: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce9ykjlyv50o
“Epstein had claimed to Noam that he [Epstein] was being unfairly persecuted, and Noam spoke from his own experience in political controversies with the media. Epstein created a manipulative narrative about his case, which Noam, in good faith, believed in.”
I believe Valéria Chomsky, I think Epstein took advantage of Noam.
Like maybe he really did not check out anyone who wrote him, but even that by itself is problematic.
that by itself is problematic
I agree. I think he was a victim, but I don’t think Chomsky smells like roses from this. If problematic was a dis-qualifier for all political thought, the world would have no politics. I think anarchists (rightly) have higher standards for the people who speak for them. I’m speaking up because I worry this can go too far. This is a stain on Chomsky’s legacy, but I don’t think it invalidates his observations on the Palestinian genocide.
If anything, Epstein was a supporter of Netanyahu’s politics. Signal boosting his ‘friend’ in contradiction is an attack on Epstein’s legacy.
I’ve removed every book of his that I owned and tossed them in the trash. Someone else in this thread said it best, even if he isn’t a pedophile, he’s a capitalist collaborator for his own ends. But, honestly, from what I read, pretty sure he was an island boy through and through. I’ve always thought he was a reductionist anyway tbh.
Chomsky was in the Epstein files.
So were many other of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims.
If you’ve ever heard Chomsky talk about feminism or womens rights, you would find his inclusion in a list of pedophiles curious. He was explicitly against pornography, even while much of the anarchist scene held a more nuanced pro-sex worker stance. He’s lived a life indicative of a strong moral compass, and while his principles are counter-intuitive to some, they never included the abuse, degradation, or sexual exploitation of women.
Epstein brought several types of people to his island - people who served as attractions, and people who he used those attractions to leverage for money. Jeffrey was a major donor to MIT which employs Chomsky. Chomsky has rarely turned down a speaking opportunity, and his correspondence with Epstein consists of political discussion, on which they rarely agree.
Chomsky’s role as a Jewish voice against Palestinian genocide continues to be valuable, and permitting such a simple smear to dismiss his decades of work should be beneath us. No one has come forward to accuse Chomsky of sexual abuse. The reputational hit is much less serious than the suffering and trauma of the women who were trafficked. Still, Chomsky should be numbered among Epstein’s victims, not his clients and collaborators.
you must have missed the advice he gave to epstein abt ignoring the “hysteria” women were causing:
A reply from an account labelled in the documents as Noam Chomsky reads: “What the vultures dearly want is public response, which then provides a public opening for an onslaught of venomous attacks, many from just publicity seekers or cranks of all sorts.” “That’s particularly true now with the hysteria that has developed about abuse of women, which has reached the point that even questioning a charge is a crime worse than murder,” the email added.
nice moral compass. get fucked, noam chomsky.
you must have missed the advice he gave to epstein abt ignoring the “hysteria” women were causing
No, I haven’t. If you’re familiar with Noam Chomsky’s history of his free-speech activism, anti-violence stance, and criticism of Israel, you’ll also be familiar with how those positions have been characterized as support for holocaust denial, nazis, and antisemitism.
It’s pretty clear where Noam is coming from in his advice to Epstein, and is an understandable misstep for an ageing man who was not aware of the extent of Epstein’s depravity.
“Epstein had claimed to Noam that he [Epstein] was being unfairly persecuted, and Noam spoke from his own experience in political controversies with the media. Epstein created a manipulative narrative about his case, which Noam, in good faith, believed in.”
I appreciate the BBC for reproducing Valéria Chomsky’s assessment, which matches my own. I am disappointed by Noam’s relationship with Epstein, but not enough to throw away decades of lucid insight into media, politics, and society.
Yes, it is very understandable that an old white guy would side with a multi-millionaire old white guy against the lower class women that accuse him of rape while describing those women as hysterical vultures. When you join the old boys’ club, you agree to look out for each other and you leave your ideological differences at the door. And then maybe one of the old boys likes the cut of your jib and invites you to be a guest on their TV show, and hey, now you’re the most famous anarchist of your generation. You scratch their backs, they scratch yours.
It is genuinely very understandable. But to call someone doing that ‘a victim’ because people found out? That’s not a good lock.
chomsky was either too stupid to understand what was happening all around him and epstein, or he knew and chose to look the other way.
In either case his status as a public leftist intellectual is gone
Okay real talk: other than Manufacturing Consent, what original ideas did Chomsky actually bring to the table? Because my understanding of Chomsky is that intellectually, the most charitable interpretation of his work is that he simply restated watered-down but otherwise unoriginal anarchist analysis in a way which didn’t frighten shitlibs.
Like we’re not losing any information by purging this fool from our literature.
Less charitably, Chomsky is a shining beacon of everything wrong with modern Western anarchism, and that’s before the Epstein files! And now, his role as a collaborationist, as controlled opposition, is so painfully clear.
Manufacturing Consent is a pretty big original idea that soundly blunted liberal democracy’s primary attack on anarchist thought and allowed the current landscape of anarchist thinkers to find more fertile ground. It’s kind of comical to demand, “Okay, what else?” – some people only have one great idea in their life, and that’s enough. And that’s beside coming up with original ideas that fundamentally shaped the completely unrelated field of Linguistics. I don’t know how many of his other ideas are original to him, but it was important enough for people to hear them from him, because no one else with his platform was willing to share them. His willingness to speak publicly and his elevated profile gave anarchism room to breath while it was being suffocated under the combined pressure of western capitalism and soviet communism.
In many ways, Noam Chomsky was the Carl Sagan of anarchism communication. He’s not perfect, but he was the bridge that supported many people’s transition from liberal to anarchist. Many people who you dismiss as ‘shitlibs’ are somewhere on that path. We set a good example by holding Noam accountable for his words and deeds, but wishing him death and struggling to efface him from anarchism entirely despite his limited culpability for Epstein’s actions does not paint a picture of people driven by an ideology founded on fairness and justice.
It’s kind of comical to demand, “Okay, what else?” – some people only have one great idea in their life, and that’s enough.
I’m trying to say that other than Manufacturing Consent, we can basically toss his work without losing anything of value to anarchist philosophy. And to be a bit more precise: I’m not saying to literally forget Chomsky forever, but if there is anything he said that was said by someone else… probably better to go to that someone else instead.
And I’m only saying “what else” because I have not yet put in the work to find a replacement for Manufacturing Consent. People keep recommending Parenti’s Inventing Reality, but I have not had the time to read it and compare it with Manufacturing Consent, so I cannot and will not currently cite Inventing Reality. I am aware that Parenti hated anarchists, but I would rather read from someone who hates me than a man in the Epstein Files for his work laundering Epstein’s reputation.
In many ways, Noam Chomsky was the Carl Sagan of anarchism communication.
So we can toss him then? Because there’s a million Carl Sagans out there; Sagan was just the one lucky enough to get a platform.
He’s not perfect, but he was the bridge that supported many people’s transition from liberal to anarchist. Many people who you dismiss as ‘shitlibs’ are somewhere on that path.
Exactly, which is why we need to replace Chomsky with better anarchist <— liberal bridges, and make absolutely certain that the arrow consistently moves to the left and to not fail to pay attention next time the arrow points the other direction!
And that’s beside coming up with original ideas that fundamentally shaped the completely unrelated field of Linguistics.
Actually I had a conversation about this a couple months ago with another Lemmy user. I’m too lazy to find it now, but apparently, Chomsky’s main contribution to linguistics stifled the nascent field of artificial intelligence, from a computer science perspective. So I actually don’t even fuck with his linguistics work anymore 😆
We set a good example by holding Noam accountable for his words and deeds, but wishing him death and struggling to efface him from anarchism entirely despite his limited culpability for Epstein’s actions does not paint a picture of people driven by an ideology founded on fairness and justice.
So how exactly has Chomsky (or Valeria on his behalf) faced any justice for his complicity in the decades of abuse? Why did the Associated Press get a letter of apology before any of the victims? Like I’m not even talking punishments, like how have the Chomskys done any work to right the wrong they were (charitably) complicit in?
And even if abused no one, hell even if he was completely truly unaware of any abuse by Epstein himself, by Epstein’s class position, by Steve Bannon’s class position and fascist activism, Chomsky was, at best, a collaborationist with the capitalists. Which, by the way, is what Chomsky’s enemies on the Left have been screaming at Chomsky-supportive anarchists for decades and we plugged our ears and refused to fucking listen. Turns out, they were right!
Even if Chomsky did nothing illegal, the files revealed that he is still a capitalist collaborationist. And for that reason alone, we still can’t trust him even if he is completely exonerated of any possible complicity in Epstein’s sex crimes.
despite his limited culpability for Epstein’s actions
Big bro was literally laundering Epstein’s reputation AFTER he was convicted of sex crimes against minors. Limited my ass.
If your goal is to construct a tree of anarchist thought that is pruned of all problematic thinkers, I have terrible news for you about Prodhoun, Kropotkin, and Bakunin. A tenet of anarchism is that that are no people virtuous enough to rule over others. Most anarchists I know aren’t obsessed with purity of character the same way hierarchical ideologies deify and airbrush their founders. Anarchism acknowledges that all people are flawed, and is consistent when there is a focus on the strength of ideas rather than abusing history to generate virtuous founders to hang its ideology on.
While I think you have an exaggerated impression of Chomsky’s role in the scandal, it is possible for someone to roast and eat babies and still be able to say true and insightful things about politics. Moral failings do not make one politically impotent, and moral virtue is not a replacement for intellectual insight.
Nearly every theorist has been problematic in some regard. Chomsky ran cover for a pedophile. Hannah Arendt was a zionist. Karl Marx was kinda a sex pest. Virginia Held veers way off the rails codifying the ethics of care to say some stuff about authority and capital that no anarchist could possibly take seriously, especially in the context of that justice stems from caring for and loving others. bell hooks veered off the rails from giving real and fresh critiques of the ways feminism in the second wave and abandoned women of color to say some ignorant things about lower class Black men. Frederick Douglass didn’t listen good to the women in his life. Harriet Tubman never wrote anything down because she was busy engaged in some of the most hardcore praxis you can possibly imagine and didn’t think there was any real value to theory.
All your beloved favorites have some skeleton in their closet. You have to listen a person when they state their biases and come into it aware of the biases they’re going to bear. You have to recognize when the worst person you know has a great point. If you spend your whole life purity testing everyone and everything you will find yourself only able to engage in things that have been approved by some hegemony. Your thinking will become rigid and stale.
I have terrible news for you about Prodhoun, Kropotkin, and Bakunin.
Yeah I’m aware 😞. Hence why we should read these texts critically and skeptically (every text in every field of endeavor forever, actually) with a historical understanding of the author’s flaws and biases. In my view, these thinkers actually made original contributions to anarchist thought, unlike Chomsky with the exception of Manufacturing Consent. Frankly, I actually do think that, unless you are doing historical research into how anarchists used to think, we really need to recommend and consult contemporary works as much as possible. I.e., anarchism absolutely has a problem with the ghosts of problematic white men infecting our thoughts.
Most anarchists I know aren’t obsessed with purity of character the same way hierarchical ideologies deify and airbrush their founders.
Neither am I…but Chomsky is absolutely beyond the pale. Like okay you don’t have to be perfect or even that good, but come on… Chomsky’s cooked.
it is possible for someone to roast and eat babies and still be able to say true and insightful things about politics. Moral failings do not make one politically impotent, and moral virtue is not a replacement for intellectual insight.
Yeah, some moral failings absolutely do, at least without some attempt at rehabilitation and fixing what was broken, for the simple reason that it demonstrates that the intellectual doesn’t seriously believe in what they are arguing against. Again, we can absolutely disagree on the parameters of what moral failings makes someone politically impotent, but they certainly exist, e.g. roasting and eating babies… and I’m certain based on my perusals of the Epstein Files that Chomsky has provided one of the best practical examples in recent memory!
People keep recommending Parenti’s Inventing Reality
Just so you know if you read that at some point, Parenti does engage in historical revisionism, and is very much an apologist for authoritarian socialism (USSR, Castro, China, etc), as he feels that the gains for the working class like increased literacy, healthcare and housing are worth living under extremely authoritarian hierarchies and the negatives they bring (while also downplaying those negatives, such as minimizing the murders of political opponents in Soviet gulags).
Yeah I know, but thank you for pointing that out. Like I’m under no pretense that Parenti is anything but an authoritarian Marxist, but I’d rather read an authoritarian Marxist (with the utmost skepticism for his biases and revisionism) than a self-described anarcho-syndicalist who’s in the Epstein Files.
