Picture of the day

James Garner with Dihann Carroll at March on Washington

Thanks to The Dish.

Noam Chomsky: Obama is like a "Nazi general"

Noam Chomsky

To the radical left, the United States is the bad guy. On Alternet Noam Chomsky, after making some good points about Orwell and a free press, compares President Obama to a Nazi general:

There's actually an interesting essay by---Orwell, which is not very well known because it wasn't published. It's the introduction to Animal Farm. In the introduction, he addresses himself to the people of England and he says, you shouldn't feel too self-righteous reading this satire of the totalitarian enemy, because in free England ideas can be suppressed without the use of force. And he doesn't say much about it. He actually has two sentences. He says one reason is the press "is owned by wealthy men" who have every reason not to want certain ideas to be expressed.

But the second reason, and the more important one in my view, is a good education, so that if you've gone to all the good schools, you know, Oxford, Cambridge, and so on, you have instilled into you the understanding that there are certain things it wouldn't do to say---and I don't think he went far enough: wouldn't do to think. And that's very broad among the educated classes. That's why overwhelmingly they tend to support state power and state violence, and maybe with some qualifications, like, say, Obama is regarded as a critic of the invasion of Iraq. Why? Because he thought it was a strategic blunder. That puts him on the same moral level as some Nazi general who thought that the second front was a strategic blunder---you should knock off England first. That's called criticism [emphasis added].

Obama made his opposition to invading Iraq clear over the years. This speech from way back in 2002 is typical. Once he became president, he presided over our withdrawal from Iraq. How that makes him anything like a Nazi general is hard to figure.