Zwicker Chapter on Chomsky Online

Somebody apparently scanned and OCR'd it so we could read this chapter. There are a few obvious mistakes in the final product, but overall it's pretty readable.

Barrie Zwicker is a Canadian documentarian and author who's been involved with the 9-11 Denial Movement for a long time. He appeared in one of the Loosers' films at the very beginning talking about infiltrators in the movement. This chapter explores Zwicker's disappointment at Noam Chomsky's refusal to join in the Conspiracy Theory camp.

In the sidebar we get some discourse on Zwicker's dedication to Chomsky mania:

I myself was one of his earliest supporters, from the days when most had not heard of him. My admiration knew almost no bounds. I have a stack of his books more than a foot high. I was honoured to interview him for four segments on Vision TV. A friend of mine and I at one time competed to see who could get the larger number of letters to the editor published defending Chomsky against the ill-wishers who twisted his words or called him names such as "anti-American". I assisted in a small way with the film Manufacturing Consent.

Okay, so Zwicker's identifying himself as a hard left-winger. Nothing wrong with that, but it's always useful to understand where the writer is coming from. But there was one thing troubling him:

But I became one of those in the Left puzzled, even mystified, as a result of Chomsky's insistence for more than 40 years that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman who killed JFK. This puzzling anomaly took on new significance after 9/11 with Chomsky's opposition to questioning the official 9/11 story - which questioning he says is a huge mistake for the Left.

Looking back, would anybody care to deny that regardless of what you think about who killed JFK, that the speculation about it has been an enormous waste of time? That it has resulted in nothing substantive, no proof, no convictions, nothing new? If you believe in the causes of the Left as Zwicker does, do you deny that all that effort might have produced some results if it had been focused elsewhere?

As we have seen often before, the conspiracy theory is often not about the actual event, but subsequent events that the fantasist wants to eliminate. As today's 9-11 Deniers appeal that 9-11 Denial will end the war in Iraq, so the JFK Deniers like Zwicker appeal in retrospect that without JFK's assassination the Vietnam War would not have happened.

But in Rethinking Camelot Chomsky, 30 years after JFK's assassination, takes great pains to study documents concerning Vietnam policy circa 1963, rather than rethinking the central event. His conclusions smack of mind made up and a certain meanness. "The belief that JFK might have responded differently ... is an act of faith, based on nothing but the belief that the President had some spiritual quality absent in everyone around him, leaving no detectable trace," he says. "The extensive record of newly-released documents ... undermine much further the already implausible contention that [JFK's assassination] caused dramatic changed in policy (or indeed, had any effects)."

A certain meanness? What Zwicker's saying is that Chomsky was being mean to those who continued to indulge themselves in the fantasy that Kennedy would have pursued a different course in Vietnam than LBJ did. I was actually active in the antiwar movement in the early 1970s and I can tell you that these claims were considered sentimentalism at best. Let's remember that JFK ran on the platform that Eisenhower wasn't being tough enough on the Soviets, and that there was a "missile gap" that he intended to close.

Ironically I couldn't help but agree with Zwicker in one of his criticisms against Chomsky:

A partial list of his propaganda techniques:

Absurdities Framing to exclude contrary outlooks
Ad hominem sallies Ignorance flaunted as admirable
Bald assertions that are mis-statements Inappropriate selectivity
Bandwagon psychology Insinuation
Bizarre non-sequiturs Internal contradiction
Bullying Major premises hidden in passing (taken as read)
Diminishment of the importance of the important Misdirection
Dismissiveness Misleading asides (useful for avoiding answering questions directly)
Diversions (e.g. not answering the questions) Mixing apples and oranges
Failure to provide minimal evidence Obfuscation
Fake humility Restriction of options (Limitation of possible questions)
Fake open-mindedness Scare tactics
False parallels Setting up straw men
False paradigm creation & perpetuation Sweeping generalisations
False syllogisms Word inflation

Absolutely true, which makes one wonder why Zwicker felt compelled to buy a foot of the man's books.

From what I can see, the rest of the chapter is an attack on Chomsky from the standpoint of the paranoid left; that Noam doesn't criticize the New World Order or the Bilderbergers or the CFR, so he must be covering up for them. Later, Zwicker incorporates almost all of the radical left into his new conspiracy theory:

Individuals and media outlets that have exhibited this stay-away-from 9/11 stance, entirely or in large part, for more than four years now include David Corn and The Nation; Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!; Chip Berlet, senior analyst at Political Research Associates in Somerville, Massachusetts; David Barsamian of Alternative Radio; Michael Albert of Z Magazine; Alexander Cockburn , Norman Solomon, The Progressive, Mother Jones, Alternet.org; Global Exchange; PBS; South End Press; Public Research Associates' FAIR / Extra; Counterspin; Columbia Journalism Review; Deep Dish TV working Assets; Molly Ivins; Ms Magazine; Inter Press Service; MoveOn.org; Greg Palast; David Zupan; Northwest Media Project ....

Another theory would be that some, perhaps a surprisingly large percentage, of these individuals are following instructions that benefit the national security state; that they are, in other words, agents. The nature and consistency of the anomalies they present prohibit a focus for potentially acrimonious debate. That is, indeed, a not unreasonably founded conspiracy theory. The situation beings to mind the line from the famous Sherlock Holmes mystery The Sign of Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: "Whenever you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

The chapter comes complete with one of those inevitable charts that paranoiacs use to "connect the dots":