Noam Chomsky: GOP Is "Literally A Serious Danger To Human Survival"

He only supported austerity after pressure from the rest of the EU and the liberals in his party, and because his economic mismanagement made the public more inclined to listen to the austerity lobby.

 

As of November 2014:
"During Hollande's presidency, the country's tax burden has increased by 40 billion euros, unemployment has risen to 3.3 million, and government spending has reached 57 percent of GDP."
Any rich politician responsible for numbers like these is not a very good socialist.

https://www.rt.com/news/205911-paris-austerity-rally-hollande/

 

Bernie Sanders is doing very well. He's a nut. Both sides have the same issue! Wake up

 

OK, lets call it 'statistically insignificant'.

Several of the posts up thread quite correctly point out that Chomsky's credibility suffers as a result of his need to regularly comment outside his area of academic expertise. Sowell suffers from the same problem to a lesser extent. He needs to stick to economics. If he thinks the book 'Liberal Fascism' is 'great' then he really doesn't know what Fascism is, he just knows what he wants it to be. As for some CEO, spare me. I'm betting you don't go to Soros for analysis of political phenomena. A position that is based on a poor understanding of the topic substantively rebuts itself.

The study of Fascism is a small expert field largely populated by historians. The reason for this is that Fascism is basically an historical phenomenon. It has barely existed since 1945 in any form, and certainly not as a government anywhere. The guys whose opinions you need to be seeking are Stanley Payne, Robert Paxton, Roger Griffin, Ian Kershaw, Michael Mann and a few others. They are the guys whose books you read. They are the guys who the people cite. They are the guys who have studied the area intensely. Sowell isn't. He's an academic who likes to stray into political commentary - like Chomsky.

Here is an article some of them contributed to during the 'Trump is a Fascist' idiocy. It is a good read because it moves beyond Trump to discuss Fascism in a broader context.

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2015/12/10/9886152/donald-trump-fascism

They mention 'Liberal Fascism':

Here are some more detailed takedowns of Goldberg:

http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/122231

http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/122473

What Goldberg, Sowell & CEO boy were all doing is picking out a few dot points and claiming they make something 'like' Fascism. They don't. Not even close. Ronald Reagan was a nationalist who used the military to help break union influence, boosted defence spending, ran an aggressive foreign policy & supported friendly dictators. That makes him more 'Fascist' than Obama according to my carefully selected out of context ahistorical & politically motivated reasoning. Right? I 'proved' that didn't I ? I mean, Ronnie wasn't a 'classical Fascist', but near enough is good enough, right?

The 'classical definition' is actually the only definition worth using. Anything else is some version of 'internet checklist Fascism' and is to be avoided.

When I was a much, much younger man I was a Chomskyite. I read the books, I watched the fawning documentaries & I even went to see him speak several times. Not even the doubts of friends had an impact initially. What woke me up was an intense & lengthy study of history. The more I studied, the clearer it became what an absolute fraud he was. He either didn't know what he was talking about or bent the facts to suit his purposes. My eyes were then opened to just how foul & corrosive his opinions & methods are.

That love of history is the reason I am equally harsh on people who misuse the term 'Fascism'. I accept that your intent in likening Obama to a fascist is genuine, but it is incorrect. You have been misled. I suspect that you have been exposed to authors who have appealed to an existing set of political prejudices with an argument that sounds persuasive but is ultimately wrong. You may not have meant to use the term as abuse or name calling, but that is the practical effect here.

Fascism isn't a term that should be associated with any major political parties currently operating in the Western world. There are a few fringe parties in Europe, but many fewer than people on the left would have us believe (for instance, Golden Dawn is close, but the National Front in France isn't).

If you have an interest in the subject track down the authors I've mentioned. They are among the handful of people in academia whose opinions on the subject should be sought.

 

Exactly: he's not a socialist. Nor is Sanders. They both claim to be, they both use all the rhetoric, but when it came down to action, Hollande failed to do anything positive and if anything turned public discourse in France against socialism. A similar thing will most likely happen with Sanders. Social democrats do not change public discourse in any way which should be welcomed by the left.

 

In the US, Barack Obama passes for a socialist for millions of his constituents:
"The US is first and foremost an empire built on the fragile illusion of a republic. Billions of human beings around the globe have every reason to be scared witless of a vicious imperialist presidency of Hillary Clinton..."

"Sanders, to be sure, is not going to be the Salvador Allende, Hugo Chavez, or even Jeremy Corbyn or Alexis Tsipras of the US.

"This fact has nothing to do with him, but with the empire in which he wants to become president.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2016/01/vote-bernie-sanders-elections-hillary-clinton-160131095804384.html

"There are structural limitations that would make such a possibility entirely improbable. This fact extends not just to his chance of winning this presidential election, but even more seriously to what he can do as the president of a belligerent, warmongering empire."

Hopefully, Bernie will put the US military to work rebuilding US infrastructure instead of bombing children in Syria, Iraq, and Libya, but he will need new economic incentives to make that happen.

 

If you think Buckley beat him on the Nam issue then you are incapable of rational thought. In fact, the man is a polymath, there is no other way to explain his incredible intellect. Buckley himself knew he was beat just as Vidal beat the daylights out of him in 68. I liked Buckley, he was not a mean man, he was simply a man with an ideology and a 50 dollar vocabulary. Watch him debate James Baldwin in the UK, total annihilation.