A Superficial Analysis of Chomsky vs. Zizek

     I looked at the war of words the 2 were in a couple of years ago-what could be better than a Chomksy-Zizek smackdown?

     http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2015/06/noam-chomsky-contra-slavoj-zizek-on.html

     "The reason Chomsky is a more useful thinker when we are looking for the best plan for doing away with capitalism is because Chomsky’s syndicalism which he inherits from Rudolph Rocker. When it comes to the outline of a plan for doing away with our troubling economic system, it makes more sense to be a “Rocky Mountain Tough”(James 5). Rocker’s Syndicalism which Chomsky inherits seems to me to be the most appropriate response to the Soviet Union."

     "If we take Zizek’s communization theory seriously it seems all too easy that we could end up with another Napoleon or Stalin. The theory lacks the liberalism which Rocker thought so important, the idea that theSyndicalist solution will disperse power by having separate and spread out power centers. It seems Zizek hasn’t taken a far enough turn from Lenin who’s State and Revolution has influenced his thought. I am not adverse to one quoting Lenin who had some useful things to say. Lenin’s project, however, unquestionably (whether inevitable or not) resulted in Stalin. Syndicalism just as clearly guards against this totalitarianism. It seems evident from what I have just laid out that Chomsky’s plan is a better one. This doesn’t discount many of the interesting and useful things Zizek says about Ideology, though and this should not stop us from reading and enjoying both thinkers."

     https://libcom.org/library/zizekchomsky-debate-pragmatist-view

     It seems to me that this is a pretty superficial way to choose Chomksy-he's for Rudolph Rocker and Zizek is for Lenin and Stalin so we have to chose Chomsky and Rocker-and Bakunin as well you would have to say. 

    I think you have to look at it this way. Chomsky simply says:

    1. You are oppressed. Now that I've told you that come with me so we can overturn the empire

    2. Zizek says: 'You are oppressed but you already knew that. So why do you continue the same way?'

    Chomsky simply sees the task in much more simple terms than Zizek. Chomsky thinks we lack the facts and need him to inform us of them. Zizek assumes we mostly already have them but disregard them at least a lot of the time. 

    I think that if you look at their dueling open letters, some things stand out. 

    1. Chomsky's letter is in a blanket way dismissive of Zizek as a talent less, wholly dishonest quack. 

    2. Chomsky simply ignores the whole theoretical debate and his post simply deals with the question of Zizek's suggestion that he was biased and wrong in his characterization of the Khmer Rouge in the late 70s. 

    3. The overall point that Chomsky is driving home is that 'There are no errors to be found in my work and Zizek is a liar for claiming otherwise.'

    Basically Chomsky claims to be impeccable on all empirical matters-in all his years of prolific writing and speaking he's never made a single error. 

   Yet, I think that Zizek gets him here in his response:

   " For me, on the contrary, the problem is here a very rational one: everything hinges on how we define "ideology." If one defines and uses this term the way I do (and I am not alone here: my understanding echoes a long tradition of so-called Western Marxism), then one has to conclude that what Chomsky is doing in his political writings is very important, I have great admiration and respect for it, but it is emphatically not critique of ideology. Let me indicate what I mean by this. What I had in mind when I spoke about his stance towards Khmer Rouge was, among other passages, the following lines from Chomsky’s and Herman’s "Distortions at Fourth Hand" from the Nation (June 6, 1977): 

 

Space limitations preclude a comprehensive review, but such journals as the Far Eastern Economic Review, the London Economist, the Melbourne Journal of Politics, and others elsewhere, have provided analyses by highly qualified specialists who have studied the full range of evidence available, and who concluded that executions have numbered at most in the thousands; that these were localized in areas of limited Khmer Rouge influence and unusual peasant discontent, where brutal revenge killings were aggravated by the threat of starvation resulting from the American destruction and killing. These reports also emphasize both the extraordinary brutality on both sides during the civil war (provoked by the American attack) and repeated discoveries that massacre reports were false. ... To give an illustration of just one neglected source, the London Economist (March 26, 1977) carried a letter by W.J. Sampson, who worked as an economist and statistician for the Cambodian Government until March 1975, in close contact with the central statistics office. After leaving Cambodia, he writes, he 'visited refugee camps in Thailand and kept in touch with Khmers,' and he also relied on 'A European friend who cycled around Phnom Penh for many days after its fall [and] saw and heard of no ... executions' apart from 'the shooting of some prominent politicians and the lynching of hated bomber pilots in Phnom Penh.' He concludes 'that executions could be numbered in hundreds or thousands rather than in hundreds of thousands,' though there was 'a big death toll from sickness'—surely a direct consequence, in large measure, of the devastation caused by the American attack. ... If, indeed, postwar Cambodia is, as Lacouture believes, similar to Nazi Germany, then his comment is perhaps just, though we may add that he has produced no evidence to support this judgement. But if postwar Cambodia is more similar to France after liberation, where many thousands of people were massacred within a few months under far less rigorous conditions than those left by the American war, then perhaps a rather different judgement is in order. That the latter conclusion may be more nearly correct is suggested by the analyses mentioned earlier.

 

... We do not pretend to know where the truth lies amidst these sharply conflicting assessments; rather, we again want to emphasize some crucial points. What filters through to the American public is a seriously distorted version of the evidence available, emphasizing alleged Khmer Rouge atrocities and downplaying or ignoring the crucial U.S. role, direct and indirect, in the torment that Cambodia has suffered. Evidence that focuses on the American role ... is ignored, not on the basis of truthfulness or scholarship but because the message is unpalatable.

 

   "I think the quoted passage confirms that my improvised resume of Chomsky's position about Khmer Rouge atrocities ("No, this is Western propaganda. Khmer Rouge are not as horrible as that.") is a correct one. I do not agree in any way with those who accuse Chomsky of sympathizing with Khmer Rouge, although I find the parallel between Cambodia after the KR takeover and France liberated in 1944 very problematic. Did de Gaulle after the liberation of Paris order its complete evacuation? Did his government reorganize entire social life into collective communes run by military commanders? Did it close down schools? If anything, de Gaulle's first government was way too tolerant, (among other problematic measures) admitting legal continuity between the Vichy years and the new republic, so that all laws enforced by the Vichy regime (and they were numerous!) remained valid if they were not explicitly revoked."

    http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1365-some-bewildered-clarifications-a-response-to-noam-chomsky-by-slavoj-zizek

     Now, note that Chomsky's letter had not debunked Zizek by looking at 'Distortions at Fourth Hand' but instead a different text-ie he showed that Zizek was wrong about one text by looking at a different one.

     "Žižek cites nothing, but he is presumably referring to joint work of mine with Edward Herman in the ’70s (The Political Economy of Human Rights) and again a decade later in Manufacturing Consent, where we review and respond to the charges that Žižek apparently has in mind. In PEHR we discussed a great many illustrations of Herman’s distinction between worthy and unworthy victims. The worthy victims are those whose fate can be attributed to some official enemy, the unworthy ones are the victims of our own state and its crimes. The two prime examples on which we focused were Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in the same years. A long chapter is devoted to each."

      http://roarmag.org/2013/07/noam-chomsky-replies-to-zizeks-fantasies/

     It's very interesting the way  Chomsky frames this. He always frames things in this way where there is the implicit suggestion that if there are worthy victims and unworthy victims then if we are good leftist radicals it's right for us to be unmoved by those who are deemed worthy victims. 

    It's as if you necessarily have to be the mirror image of the US government. If it says white you have to say black. 

     With Cambodia, he argues that there is no way to know what the truth is as the relevant facts aren't in. This is very different from how he sized up East Timor. There there were no distortions which come from viewing things from fourth hand. 

    "These are very telling examples: comparable atrocities, in the same region, in the same years. Victims of the Khmer Rouge are “worthy victims,” whose fate can be blamed on an enemy. The Timorese are “unworthy victims,” because we are responsible for their fate: the Indonesian invasion was approved by Washington and fully supported right through the worst atrocities, labeled “genocidal” by a later UN investigation, but with ample evidence right at the time, as we documented. We showed that in both cases there was extraordinary lying, on a scale that would have impressed Stalin, but in opposite directions: in the case of the Khmer Rouge vast fabrication of alleged crimes, recycling of charges after they were conceded to be false, ignoring of the most credible evidence, etc. In the case of East Timor, in contrast, mostly silence, or else denial."

    Ok did you catch that? In the case of East Timor he said, 'with ample evidence at the time as we documented.'

   So there was ample evidence at the time to say what was going on in East Timor but not in Cambodia where trying to say what was going on was engaging in distortions at 4th hand. 

    So Zizek is right: 'Even Chomksy' can have his empirical judgments clouded by ideology. For him it's his feeling that every story has to have the same punchline: it's all the fault of evil Uncle Sam.