Noam Chomsky’s Efforts

His historic significance, approachability, Epstein, oil and the Middle East, and his critics

Noam’s historical stature

Noam Chomsky is the only living human who can credibly be compared to Albert Einstein. Einstein is the iconic scientist who also used his towering scientific stature to promote peace. Noam is no scientific slouch and is sometimes called the “Einstein of linguistics” who influenced several scientific fields, including psychology and computer science. But Noam will be best remembered for his political work, especially by the world’s public. In Cold War Poland, many thought that there were two Noam Chomskys: the linguist and the political activist. Noam is perhaps the most-cited living author. There may never be another like him, and his passing will mark the end of an era. He will be remembered as the USA’s greatest dissident intellectual, and the debate will be how close to the top he ranks in world history.

Noam’s anarchist ideals, formed as a child, were wedded with his critiques of his nation’s foreign policy, which he described as only performing his duty as an American. Much of Noam’s political work is disarmingly simple, as he points out the obvious double standards of treatment of world events, depending on who the victims and beneficiaries were. In my summary of Noam’s likely final book, I hope that the simplicity of what I consider Noam’s best political work is clear. His primary thesis is that the USA, which is history’s richest and most powerful nation, is really an empire that acts as all empires have as it exploits the conquered on behalf of the conquerors, which the imperial class profits from.

Noam’s political work cuts through the propaganda with a childlike simplicity founded on the simple philosophical proposition that we are all the most responsible for the predictable consequences of our actions. I have watched all manner of imperial hack assail Noam since the 1990s, and they often could not seem to string two rational thoughts together as they defended the Empire. Ed Herman’s libelous Wikipedia bio clearly presents the dynamics. The movie Manufacturing Consent was the most popular documentary in Canadian history to its time, and it has never aired on American network television to my knowledge (which Noam predicted). That kind of says it all about the American propaganda system.

When Noam has been asked about Isaac Newton and his forays into alchemy, for instance, Noam replied that we are all products of our times and nobody sees everything clearly, although the scientific process seems to help us get closer to that ideal. The best scientists were modest about their work, as they freely admitted how little they knew. Even though Big Bang cosmology and E=MC² portray the entire universe as nothing but energy, the best scientists admit that they don’t know what energy is or where it came from. It is even suspected in orthodox circles that dark matter, dark energy, and the cosmological constant are fudges to preserve Einstein’s relativity equations. Newtonian physics was superseded by relativity, but that did not make Newton any less of a major figure in science, even arguably more significant than Einstein. We all stand on the shoulders of giants.

Einstein expected that his theories would be superseded by new theories but that the best parts of his would survive in the new theories. Noam stated something similar about the ephemeral nature of his scientific work.

Noam’s approachability and the Epstein affair

I am one of many thousands of people who were astounded at Noam’s replies to us. That alone was saintly behavior. On Friday, with the latest release of the Epstein files, a picture was published of Noam with Jeffrey Epstein on the latter’s airplane. The Nation has weighed in on the issue, and Matt Taibbi criticized the Nation for its lack of dealing with the Epstein evidence. I lived only a few miles from Epstein’s first lair when it was in operation, and I heard about some of the sexual escapades at the time. I don’t know what Taibbi is trying to do with the series of articles that he is in the midst of, but Epstein was certainly involved in the spook world, and we do not have to connect very many dots to suspect that he was part of Israeli intelligence operations, quite possibly for blackmail purposes.

But Noam was so approachable that virtually anybody (1, 2) could get his time. Cultivating a relationship with Noam surely had its benefits for Epstein. It reminds me of how the Rockefeller Empire courted Mark Twain (1). I largely discovered Twain’s marginalized anti-imperial efforts through Noam’s work. As far as American critics of the Empire go, Noam and Twain sit in the first row, maybe by themselves. There are hundreds of clips and interviews of Noam on YouTube and maybe even more. I have watched many of them over the years.

Noam on energy and the Middle East

Bucky Fuller said if oil was priced at the benefit that humanity got from it, it would cost $1 million a barrel. I made a rough calculation to support his claim. Noam has long called Middle East oil “history’s greatest material prize,” similar to how the State Department called it during World War II. That explains everything about the West’s involvement in the Middle East, and everything else is a sideshow. But a decade after the invasion of Iraq, the American media never seemed to mention oil as a motive. This is nothing new. I recently witnessed the same punditry explain away oil as having anything to do with Trump’s bellicose stance toward Venezuela, which “coincidentally” has the world’s largest oil reserves. As Noam would have said, that pundit probably believed what he wrote.

Noam’s critics

From the very beginning of my media studies in 1990, even though I had witnessed the media’s lying for years by that time (1, 2, 3, 4), what Noam and Ed Herman wrote about flew in the face of mainstream “understanding,” and I sought critical perspectives of their work. Noam’s critics lined up to take a swing at him, and the lies and irrationality were striking. Ed Herman’s libelous Wikipedia bio is another example of this phenomenon at work. Noam and I do not see eye to eye on many topics, which I will discuss in coming posts, but it will be about Noam’s limitations, human as he is, and about the Left’s limitations in general. It will be done in a spirit of love, however. The Left’s members could have been the most formidable allies of free-energy efforts, but they have been trapped by their ideological positions, which has been a source of sadness over the years. I have not given up on them, however, at least not all of them.