One of the darlings of the left in the United States is Noam Chomsky, appealing to both hard-wired radicals and intellectual leftists ensconced in their sanctuaries of supportive thought, safe in the womb of that which they despise. Chomsky, like most of the left, ridicules all religious belief. He regards believers as his intellectual inferior. The salvation of humanity for him rests with man alone.
However, Chomsky usually talks with a form of doublespeak, just harsh enough to support his radical base, but with enough obfuscation not to alarm his more sedate allies. Attempts on my part to read his works often result in a headache as I try to make sense of his arguments as they flit between almost clarity and obvious befogging, at times almost approaching a contrived word salad. He reminds me of Dr. Weston, a physicist who has built his own atheistic scientific religion, in the C. S. Lewis’ book Perelandra for the way he couches his arguments. Perelandra was one the most challenging but rewarding works of fiction I have ever read.
One of the hardest things about engaging those who resist God, especially in the intellectual arena, is getting them to speak plainly about where they stand and what they believe, just ask any traditional Anglican. In Lewis’ book, the hero, who goes by the name of Ransom, fights a long battle clarifying for the Green Lady of the new Eden (located on Venus) what Weston is really saying in his attempts to seduce her to his way thinking. For much of the story my mind screamed at Weston, “Just say what you really mean and get on with it.”
Many have felt the same way about Noam Chomsky. Well it appears that he has finally done just that. In an article in FrontPage Magazine, Benjamin Kerstein critiques the new Chomsky compendium, What Uncle Sam Really Wants, arguing that for the first time, what Noam Chomsky really wants is abundantly clear. According to Kerstein, Chomsky’s underlying premise is that the United States did not defeat Nazism in World War II, but instead absorbed it into its national character, whereby Nazism as a philosophical and political premise really won the war. As a result, all thinking people should work for the demise and/or overthrow of the United States as it now exists. In closing Kerstein sums up Chomsky’s end game.
…the Chomsky we meet in this final passage is a man at war with the entirety of the modern world, who seeks to return us all to that sacred innocent [sic] embodied in Rousseaus multitudes of entirely naked savages, to remake us in the model of that racist fantasy of the Third World as a collection of noble barbarians.
Kerstein’s critique is long and detailed and should be saved for a time when the mind is clear and there are no distractions. However, for me it was well worth the effort to read Kerstein’s Ransom fisk Chomsky’s Weston.
