Monday, December 18, 2006
Scrutinising Scruton
Who Is Noam Chomsky? asked The Wall Street Journal on behalf of perplexed financiers, after Chomsky’s latest book got a spot of publicity from a man called Chavez at the United Nations.
The person the Journal called upon to answer this question was Roger Scruton, described as “a British writer and philosopher”. Which in a sense is true, much as one would not be lying were one to describe Adolf Hitler as a painter of water colours and a German statesman. But neither definition quite tells the whole story.
Scruton enlightened his stockbroker readership: Chomsky is Someone who should have stuck to syntax.
And it is true that we all make mistakes--so that Prof. Chomsky's erstwhile support for regimes that no one could endorse in retrospect, like that of Pol Pot, is no proof of wickedness. But then the mistakes of American foreign policy are no proof of wickedness either.
(Read Scruton’s piece in full here.)
Yes, once again we are faced by the popular journalistic enterprise of representing Noam Chomsky as a deranged critic of America’s benign foreign policy and a nutty supporter of evil regimes the world over, from Pol Pot to Slobodan Milosevic.
As Chomsky once wearily remarked, attempting to keep up with the record of lies and deceit about my alleged views is a Herculean task (and for more on Chomsky and Cambodia you could do no worse than start here).
Roger Scruton, it should not be forgotten, is a covert PR hack for the tobacco industry at £4,500 per month who once boasted to his corporate paymasters that in the noble cause of furtively promoting the sale of cigarettes he would
aim to place an article every two months in one or other of the WSJ (Wall Street Journal), The Times, The Telegraph, The Spectator, the Financial Times, The Economist, The Independent or the New Statesman.
The full story of Roger Scruton, paid pimp of corporate interests, can be found here.
The person the Journal called upon to answer this question was Roger Scruton, described as “a British writer and philosopher”. Which in a sense is true, much as one would not be lying were one to describe Adolf Hitler as a painter of water colours and a German statesman. But neither definition quite tells the whole story.
Scruton enlightened his stockbroker readership: Chomsky is Someone who should have stuck to syntax.
And it is true that we all make mistakes--so that Prof. Chomsky's erstwhile support for regimes that no one could endorse in retrospect, like that of Pol Pot, is no proof of wickedness. But then the mistakes of American foreign policy are no proof of wickedness either.
(Read Scruton’s piece in full here.)
Yes, once again we are faced by the popular journalistic enterprise of representing Noam Chomsky as a deranged critic of America’s benign foreign policy and a nutty supporter of evil regimes the world over, from Pol Pot to Slobodan Milosevic.
As Chomsky once wearily remarked, attempting to keep up with the record of lies and deceit about my alleged views is a Herculean task (and for more on Chomsky and Cambodia you could do no worse than start here).
Roger Scruton, it should not be forgotten, is a covert PR hack for the tobacco industry at £4,500 per month who once boasted to his corporate paymasters that in the noble cause of furtively promoting the sale of cigarettes he would
aim to place an article every two months in one or other of the WSJ (Wall Street Journal), The Times, The Telegraph, The Spectator, the Financial Times, The Economist, The Independent or the New Statesman.
The full story of Roger Scruton, paid pimp of corporate interests, can be found here.
# posted by Ellis : 9:33 AM
