All men are rapists

“All men are rapists, and that's all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws, their codes.” So says Val, a militant radical feminist character in The Women's Room (1977) by Marilyn French. I had to put up with this discourse in the 1980s while living in the Camdens and Islingtons of right-on johns and trendy wendys. It was, after all, the decade of the so-called New Man: where did he go?

Nathan Robinson on Jordan Peterson

Recommended reading by Chomsky: The Intellectual We Deserve in Current Affairs by Nathan J. Robinson.

On Anarchism by Noam Chomsky

Next book for the Book Group (meeting on Tuesday 18 June) is On Anarchism by Noam Chomsky: the Penguin Special edition of 2013 – not to be confused with Chomsky on Anarchism, a collection of essays selected and edited by Barry Pateman, AK Press, 2005.

On Anarchism by Noam Chomsky

Latest version of On Anarchism was published 2014 by Penguin, earlier versions available as PDF.

Charlie Hebdo and Serb Radio

On 23 April 1999 NATO bombed the Radio Television of Serbia headquarters in what was one of the largest incidents of civilian deaths, and certainly the largest in Belgrade, of the Kosovo war. Sixteen RTS civilian technicians and workers were killed and sixteen were wounded.

Noam Chomsky views the NATO bombing as an act of terrorism. Comparing it with the attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris on Wednesday 7 January 2015, he criticises the hypocrisy shown by media and politicians in the West, which in general viewed the 1999 bombing as legitimate, noting that, "There were no demonstrations or cries of outrage, no chants of 'We are RTS'”

See also Noam Chomsky (2015) "The Charlie Hebdo Attack and Hypocrisy" on YouTube

Israel's military assaults on Gaza

Facebook page Palestine-Loves-Israel writes “In July 2014, another war broke out between Israel and Palestine.” No, the passive hides the truth.

Vietnam: 50th anniversary of the US invasion

This year is the 50^th anniversary of the US invasion of South Vietnam: the worst atrocity in the post war period. It killed millions of people and destroyed four countries. There is hardly a word about it in the media. It's like it didn’t happen. To explain why this 50^th anniversary is so important, here is an extract from Afghanistan and South Vietnam, a 1984 essay by Noam Chomsky (quoted in The Chomsky Reader, p224). Chomsky contrasts the way that mainstream history recognises that the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1980, but does not recognise that the US ever invaded South Vietnam, in the one case rejecting, and in the other case allowing the excuse that the invaders were invited in by the government of their client regime.
In 1962, the US attacked South Vietnam. In that year, President Kennedy sent the US Air Force to attack rural South Vietnam, where more than 80 percent of the population lived, as part of a program intended to drive several million people to concentration camps (called “strategic hamlets”), where they would be surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards and “protected” from the guerrillas who, we conceded, they were willingly supporting. … In the following years, the US continued to resist every attempt at peaceful settlement and in 1964 began to plan the ground invasion of South Vietnam which took place in early 1965, accompanied by bombing of North Vietnam and an intensification of the bombing of the South, at triple the level of the more publicized bombing of the North. The US also extended the war to Laos, then Cambodia. ...

For the past twenty-two years, I have been searching to find some reference in mainstream journalism or scholarship to an American invasion of South Vietnam in 1962 (or ever), or an American attack against South Vietnam, or American aggression in Indochina – without success. There is no such event in history. Rather, there is an American defense of South Vietnam against terrorists supported from outside (namely, from Vietnam), a defense that was unwise, the doves maintain.

(extract from Afghanistan and South Vietnam, 1984, The Chomsky Reader, p224)

Chomsky and Trotsky

Trotsky was the one who laboured to destroy and undermine the popular organizations of workers in the Soviet Union, the factory councils and soviets, [and he was the one] who wanted to subordinate the working class to the will of the maximum leader and to institute a program of militarization of labor in the totalitarian society that he and Lenin were constructing. That was the real Trotsky – not only the Trotsky who sent his troops to Kronstadt and wiped out Makhno’s peasant forces once they were no longer needed to fend off the Whites, but the Trotsky who, from the very first moment of access to power, moved to undermine popular organizations and to institute highly coercive structures in which he and his associates would have absolute authority, with absolute submission of the working population to these leaders. That was the essential doctrine of Trotskyism in power, whatever he may have said before or after.
- from interview in The Chomsky Reader, p41, Pantheon Books 1987.

PS Most of my life I’ve seen Trotsky as the revolutionary hero of the 1917 revolution contrasted with the betrayer and villain, Stalin. No doubt this mainly derives from Animal Farm. Chomsky's pithy critique changes my view.