It’s unfortunate that he’s lived to be 95 and still hasn’t managed to swallow his ego and admit the Bosnian or Cambodian genocides happened. I guess the ideological blindness is just too strong.
He’s also been a bafflingly strong proponent of Ukraine “just letting it happen” vis a vis the Russians invading. His geopolitical worldview is disappointingly Kissinger-esque.
His geopolitical worldview is disappointingly Kissinger-esque.
That’s a surprising take for some one on Nixon’s list of political opponents
He subscribes to the “great power” doctrine. His geopolitical calculus is unfortunately ossified with regards to military action potentially escalating to nuclear confrontation. It’s a mindset he shares with a TON of older politicians on both sides of the aisle, and it’s a key reason why Putin’s saber rattling is so effective at making the rest of the world mostly not get in their way in Ukraine, and why most western leaders are still shitting their britches over every single threat Putin makes. And in point of fact, that’s the reason Putin uses the strategy in the first place. He’s playing for an audience, and the audience is 70-80ish year old western politicians who have strong memories of the worst of the old Soviet saber rattling.
Nixon really was scum. Mother fucker wins an election in a landslide. He is freaken potus and gets credit for landing on the moon and opening up China. Still not enough for him. It is literally not enough to be liked, powerful, and rich. He has to have revenge. Couldn’t just be nice.
The last time someone brought this up, it seemed to be disinfo:
The top comment on this thread contains a conversation (argument) about Chomsky’s view on the term “genocide,” as well as his verbiage discussing Serbian-run concentration camps.
I listened to Understanding Power fairly recently and it definitely changed my outlook and broke me out of the lull of neoliberal self-satisfaction, and helped introduce me to other leftist writers. So I’m a fan of Chomsky’s, but it doesn’t sound like he had that good of a take on the Bosnian genocide. He seems to only reserve the word genocide for the Holocaust so as to keep its significance, and despite supporting a UN fact-finding commission that did find Serbia was running concentration camps, he refers to said camps as “refugee camps,” instead, and seems to infer people had the freedom to stay or leave as they please (even if this was technically true, I doubt it was practically true).
So, not a good look for him, even though he had other viewpoints that I’ve been strongly influenced by.
