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‘Those Are Alleged Threats’: Noam Chomsky on China, Iran and a Nuclear Middle East
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this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2026
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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.
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.
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!
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 😆
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.