The Hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky

Keith Windschuttle critiques the moral hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky's role as a leading apologist for the Pol Pot regime during the Cambodian genocide, and his condescending stance towards American casualties in 9/11:

Chomsky has declared himself a libertarian and anarchist but has defended some of the most authoritarian and murderous regimes in human history. His political philosophy is purportedly based on empowering the oppressed and toiling masses but he has contempt for ordinary people who he regards as ignorant dupes of the privileged and the powerful. He has defined the responsibility of the intellectual as the pursuit of truth and the exposure of lies, but has supported the regimes he admires by suppressing the truth and perpetrating falsehoods. He has endorsed universal moral principles but has only applied them to Western liberal democracies, while continuing to rationalize the crimes of his own political favorites. He is a mandarin who denounces mandarins. When caught out making culpably irresponsible misjudgments, as he was over Cambodia and Sudan, he has never admitted he was wrong.

Today, Chomsky’s hypocrisy stands as the most revealing measure of the sorry depths to which the left-wing political activism he has done so much to propagate has now sunk."

The Hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky, by Keith Windschuttle The New Criterion Vol. 21, No. 9, May 2003