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April 23, 2006
A Herd of Independent Minds
Anarcho-socialist philosopher and linguistics professor Noam Chomsky has written a tepid review for Z of an article in the London Review of Books about the Israel lobby’s influence on the US. Ho-hum, you say? Yeah, me too. However what struck me was the way that Chomsky skewered the herd mentality of the intellectual classes and the mainstream media talking heads and scribblers.
"Take any topic", says Chomsky, "that has risen to the level of Holy Writ among ‘the herd of independent minds’ (to borrow Harold Rosenberg's famous description of intellectuals): for example, anything having to do with the Balkan wars, which played a huge role in the extraordinary campaigns of self-adulation that disfigured intellectual discourse towards the end of the millennium, going well beyond even historical precedents, which are ugly enough. Naturally, it is of extraordinary importance to the herd to protect that self-image; much of it based on deceit and fabrication. Therefore, any attempt even to bring up plain (undisputed, surely relevant) facts is either ignored (M-W can't be ignored), or sets off most impressive tantrums, slanders, fabrications and deceit, and the other standard reactions."
Ouch! That is all quite true however. The media herd that continually bitchs about the screw-ups by the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld War Machine is pretty hypocritical and transparently so too, IMHO. If the war were going great, as it was following the initial invasion in 2003, how much criticism in the mainstream media would there be now? Not fookin’ much methinks other than the usual suspects who oppose war and the warfare state as matter of principle in all cases.
Most of the critical response goes along the lines of: "This war was a mistake, and besides we [fill in the blank here] would have done it much better!" Paraphrasing Kerry, Clinton, Lieberman, and the rest here.
Whatever criticisms of Chomsky are to be made, and I have made a few lately myself, he gets this story right.
Posted by Ali Massoud at April 23, 2006 10:48 AM
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