Eric Zuesse<\/p>\n
[NOTE: Wherever a reader disagrees with or doubts an allegation that is made in the following, the evidence behind that allegation can immediately be found by merely clicking onto the link where the given allegation is being stated.]<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n Noam Chomsky, who in a 2005 global poll was voted as the\u00a0“world\u2019s top public intellectual\u201d<\/span><\/a>, told Qatar\u2019s\u00a0Al Jazeera television, in a November 24th interview, that Hillary Clinton\u2019s \u201cpositions are much better than Trump\u2019s on every issue that I can think of\u201d<\/span><\/a>, so that Americans who didn\u2019t vote for her to become the next President were \u201cmaking a bad mistake.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n One of those issues (on which he preferred her \u201cposition\u201d) was whether to go to war against Russia \u2014 an issue on which her statements were remarkably consistent (unlike her positions on most other issues<\/span><\/a>) \u2014 namely, that\u00a0we should engage in a hot war against Russia, and that as the U.S. President she would do so<\/span><\/a>. Trump was opposed to her position that supported each one of the three ways in which she argued for hot war between Russia and the United States\u00a0(1: establishing a no-fly zone in Syria; 2: responding by physical warfare means \u2014 including bombs \u2014 against any Russian espionage that entails \u2018cyber\u2019 elements which harm U.S. interests or affect a U.S. federal election; and, 3: forcing Russia to restore Crimea to Ukraine)<\/span><\/a>. Trump opposed her on each of those three \u201cissues\u201d: he stood against her on each one of those three pathways toward a war against Russia; he opposed each one of the three paths. This was one of the clearest differences between him and her.<\/span><\/p>\n Huffington Post, as part of its continuing campaign for Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump, headlined the next day about this AJ interview,\u00a0“Noam Chomsky: People Who Didn\u2019t Vote For\u00a0Clinton To Block Trump Made A \u2018Bad Mistake\u2019,\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and linked there also to a 20 May 2016 interview of Chomsky by Britain\u2019s\u00a0Guardian<\/i>,\u00a0“Noam Chomsky on Donald Trump: ‘Almost a death knell for the\u00a0human species\u2019,\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0in which Chomsky alleged that Trump was unacceptable especially because of the effect he would have on climate-change:<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWhat effect would electing\u00a0Donald Trump\u00a0have?\u00a0It\u2019s hard to say because we don\u2019t really know what he thinks. And I\u2019m not sure he knows\u00a0what he thinks. He\u2019s perfectly capable of saying contradictory things at the same time. But there are some pretty stable elements of his ideology, if\u00a0you can even grant him that concept. One of them is: \u201cClimate change is not taking place.\u201d As he puts it: \u201cForget it.\u201d And that\u2019s almost a death\u00a0knell for the species \u2013 not tomorrow, but the decisions we take now are going to affect things in a couple of decades, and in a couple of generations\u00a0it could be catastrophic.”<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n On October 2nd, I provided evidence that whereas Hillary Clinton has never verbally denied the reality of global warming, her actual record as a public official (and also the sources of her political funding \u2014 both of those factors) point consistently to her being at least as much of a threat against the survivability of this planet\u2019s atmosphere and environment as Trump is. Chomsky pays attention only to words not deeds, and so ignored all of that evidence, which I provided under the sub-head:\u00a0“5:\u00a0\u00a0Sanders has been consistently opposed to fossil fuels. Hillary has aggressively supported them.\u201d<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n That issue, of global warming, seems to have been #1 for Chomsky, whereas for me it was #2, after the issue of whether or not the U.S. should engage in a hot war against Russia, either in Syria, or in Ukraine, or in Russia itself (which surely would mean a nuclear war). <\/span><\/p>\n However, my main disagreement with Chomsky regarding the U.S. Presidential contest is that whereas he implicitly trusted the honesty of \u2014 and based his views and made his selection of the candidate to prefer, upon \u2014 the merely verbal statements that were made by the candidates, I rely always as much as possible (which in Clinton\u2019s case was 100%) upon the given candidate\u2019s actions<\/i> not words. Whereas Chomsky invites liars to persuade him, I simply do not; only the choices that a candidate has actually made in his or her official capacity \u2014 actions not words \u2014 affect my electoral preferences.<\/span><\/p>\n One might therefore say that my basic disagreement with Chomsky is epistemological: He arrives at his opinions on the basis of people\u2019s words, whereas I arrive at my opinions on the basis of people\u2019s actions and decisions \u2014 not what they say, but what they actually do in the context of the circumstances in which they do it. I do not invite liars to persuade me, whereas he does \u2014 and that\u2019s the difference.<\/span><\/p>\n But, in any case, Hillary\u2019s consistent \u2014\u00a0in both her actions and<\/i> her words<\/span><\/a>\u00a0\u2014 support of the U.S. government imposing a no-fire zone in Syria (or any other country whose government is being actively protected by Russian military forces) was the overwhelming reason why I considered her to be presenting the greatest threat to the continuance of life on Earth of anyone in history, and why I was therefore greatly relieved to learn that she won\u2019t be the U.S. President. The difference between myself and Chomsky on this goes deeper than to political issues, and it reaches to epistemological issues, which is the bedrock of all beliefs.<\/span><\/p>\n \u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of\u00a0 They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a>,<\/i> and of<\/span> \u00a0<\/i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a><\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Eric Zuesse [NOTE: Wherever a reader disagrees with or doubts an allegation that is made in the following, the evidence behind that allegation can immediately be found by merely clicking onto the link where the given allegation is being stated.] Noam Chomsky, who in a 2005 global poll was voted as the\u00a0“world\u2019s top public intellectual\u201d, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":281272,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[461],"tags":[30,1036,25744,96,535,698,1037,907,59,1017,1023,804,524,754,92,6257,523,49,76,40,1024],"class_list":{"0":"post-281270","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-editorials","8":"tag-big-brother","9":"tag-breaking-news","10":"tag-chomsky","11":"tag-cover-up","12":"tag-global-news","13":"tag-hillary-clinton","14":"tag-interview","15":"tag-isis","16":"tag-military","17":"tag-news","18":"tag-nuclear","19":"tag-politics-2","20":"tag-russia","21":"tag-syria","22":"tag-terrorism","23":"tag-trump","24":"tag-ukraine","25":"tag-usa-news","26":"tag-warfare","27":"tag-white-house","28":"tag-ww3"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=281270"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281270\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/281272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=281270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=281270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}