Vile leaders such as Putin stay in power because even more vile intellectuals such as Chomsky underwrite them mentally with just the right emotion: don’t contradict the terror, it may visit you.
Artful lies from Mr. Chomsky to be swallowed by those who know too little, or hate too much. Ukraine’s NATO request had been blocked by France and Germany long ago. Chomsky pretends that the encroachment of NATO incited “Russia” to invade. That’s a lie. Putin is not Russia, just a lunatic tyrant terrorizing Russia and the world, and someone has to stop him. So far that someone is Ukraine, a democracy whose president was elected on a peace-with-Russia platform, contrasting with his more hard line predecessor, who he defeated (and has supported Zelinskyi ever since the full bore attack by Putin, even donning armor and weapons and defeating the invaders as they attacke Kyiv).
Ukraine then inscribed joining NATO in its Constitution, and also joining the EU. On the latter, progress has been made, infuriating Putin and his plutocratic circles.
Chomsky equates EU and NATO, a lie easily swallowed by his ignorant or biased audience.
Equating the EU and NATO is making implicit propaganda for the US empire. Whereas the US arguably controls NATO… It’s rather France which is more influential in the EU, where nothing of great importance is done without French approval. Chomsky by insisting all of the EU is a US puppet, with no mind of its own, insists that the US is greater than it really is, itself the propaganda masterpiece.
Chomsky, by insisting that EU expansion is NATO expansion, denies the existence of the EU, and in particular denies the existence of the EU as a potential counterweight to the US Deep State. At the limit Chomsky’s position is racist: EU, thus Europeans, don’t exist. The vocation of Eastern Europe, hence all of Europe, is to live under Kremling hegemony.
But who gave Kremlin hegemony onto Europe? Well the US Deep State made that formal at Yalta, in Crimea, in 1945.
How come the US Deep State gave massive help to the Kremlin, a genocidal tyranny who had killed 6 million Ukrainians in 1933? Less that one year before providing enormously military help to the genocidal tyrant in Moscow, the US Deep State had refused any helpt to France a democratic republic, which is, moreover, the parent of the USA.
So the question the US Deep State and Chomsky have to answer is why was the Kremlin preferred to France for so long? The question has to do with who controls the USA and for what purpose.
Chomsky, counterfactually, claims that because of the Ukrainian war “Europe is declining, suffering from deindustrialization”. It’s a lie: because of the war, precisely, France has already tripled its production of 155mm shells (each shell takes 2 years to produce, usually) and France is ramping up its Defense Industrial Base, directly from Ukrainian contracts. French defense giant Thales has relaunched into 24/7 production of missiles such as Starstreak, the fastest MANPAD around (the plant is in North Ireland and the UK is paying for the missiles).
True, Germany had to find European solutions to the end of its addiction to Putin, and is the only major economy in recession in 2023. But the Euro is overvalued relative to the dollar, although mortgage interest in the EU is only 4%, while 7% in the US..
Overall, the long held (since 500 CE) French thesis of Europe Puissance (Power Europe) is gaining ground. Europe with significant military means and the will to project them. Poland is arming to the teeth. France and UK are boosting their strategic nuke programs (nukes are expensive to keep functional).
The F16 and air supremacy program for Ukraine implicates countries who favored fascist aggression in 1914 and 1939, in the guise of their pseudo-neutrality, which was crucial to the German fascist aggressors’ war efforts. In 1914 and 1939, these small but venimous neutrals enabled fascist genocidal Germany to attack democracies, and prevented the two big democracies, France and Britain to defeat easily fascist genocidal racist tyrannic mad dog Kaiserreich and Dritte Reich.
But now these once greedy, nasty and viles pseudo-neutrals have joined France and Britain in allying themselves against the fascist terrorist genocidal monarch in the Kremlin.
Who said there were no positive to the Ukraine war? Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark, even Turkey have learned to exhibit a sense of where democracy lays. True democracy is explicitly a must of the European Constitution. Hey, we may even hope that Switzerland formally abandon the premise that democracies can be “neutral” to tyranny. The Suisses are nearly there: Parliement voted the authorization of re-exportation of Swiss made weapons… Retroactively.… To celebrate this, I saw two French Rafales, supersonic stealth fighter-bombers, fly along the border, just two hundred meters up…
Those countries will provide planes while discreetly others (UK, France, Romania) provide training. The very existence of this program implies that the EU thinks the war will last long. F16 and Swedish Saab Gripens are controlled by the US… which then is dragged reluctantly in providing Ukraine with an air force.
Chomsky repeats word for word Putin and his henchmen propaganda by saying that Russia can’t be defeated because it has nukes. Chomsky pudically calls them “ultimate weapons”. Russia has them, says Chomsky, Ukraine doesn’t. So Putin wins. Understanding that means for realistic Chomsky not living in a “dream world“.But Chomsky is ignorant of a crucial point about “ultimate weapons“: this situation happened before. No less than Hitler should teach Chomsky there.
Hitler had neurotoxic gas in huge quantities, and the means to send them afar. However Hitler didn’t use those huge quantities of gas: Hitler knew that his orders would not have been enacted. Why does Chomsky believe Putin to be somehow superior to Hitler in having his will obeyed? Is Putin superhuman, because everybody can see he is an assassin, whereas many pretended Hitler was not? Or has Chomsky fallen under the spell of Putin, as many Russians have, because they know too little? And because they are weak and thus admire the strong, and want to be like them?
Interestingly the “Peace plan” proposed by Chomsky is exactly the present “reasonable” diplomatic ceasefire presently proposed by Russia’s Lavrov. Chomsky supports Putin in Georgia, claiming that Georgia invaded… itself, and Putin, with great restraint, saved Georgia from genocidizing itself. And Chomsky naturally omits the fact that Putin recently withdrew recognition of Moldova as an independent country.
Systematically, just as he equates EU and NATO, Chomsky equates Putin and Russia. Chomsky calls that to be not dreaming. In truth Chomsky goes much further in his nightmare. Chomsky calls “Putin a mad dog” and Chomsky repeatedly argues, that’s his one and only argument, that, as a mad dog, Putin will destroy Ukraine with nukes if he loses. Ergo, Putin can’t lose, because he is a mad dog and mad dogs rule.
Like many “woke”, pacifist fanatics, pseudo-“left” intellectuals, Mr. Chomsky never studied the history of war in depth. And in particular the history of tyranny. Putin claims he is Russia. Chomsky approves, and claims Russia is strong. Does he dream of Putin as a lover at night? In truth tyrants cannot in general be identified with the tyrannies they lead. If Putin is assassinated, his henchmen will quickly follow. Most of the Russian military is not interested by dying in a nuclear holocaust. Putin’s orders have to go through that military, and that is why Putin is busy arresting military leaders (as so-called general Armageddon, who led the air force until two months ago when Putin jailed him… and was as decorated and rank as Gerasimov, head of the armed forces) or the top fanatic who led the Donbas rebellion in 2014, Girkin (jailed in August 2023)… And of course the three top leaders of the Wagner Group, assassinated, and general Popov, reassigned to Syria…
Chomsky is depicting as a hard core realist, but had core historiscim shows that, when in Russia a Czar loses a major war, he is disposed of by rebellion. So rebellion is the most likely outcome, and the signs are aplenty, Putin himself said it. Tellingly, Chomsky does not evoke that possibility at all, either from ignorance, or plain bad faith. Or both. Probably both. Chomsky is more Putin than Putin himself. Chomsky wants desperately the world to be under the rule of mad dog nuclear tyrant.
Chomsky is exactly the sort of pseudo-intellectuals who made the likes of Hitler leaders; mad dogs all, and those who fear them.
Patrice Ayme
Putin submitted Angeal Merkel with huge dogs. The weak minded German leader (probably herself a KGB plant, like the guy on the right) admitted she was terrified each time this happened. But she was so terrified, she couldn’t even talk about it. Chomsky is as simple.