At one time, I admired Noam Chomsky. I had absorbed this attitude, unquestioningly, through my college education. I at first knew him only as a semantic pedant, one who deals with taxonomy of languages. Only later did I discover his political side, through left-leaning Salon magazine.

Over the years, I've come to the impression -- though there are certainly some conservative myths -- that leftism is in general constructed out of a tissue of lies. To mix metaphores: I felt as though I had confronted a huge insurmountable wall, and examined a single brick which crumbled under my slight probing. Then I examine another, which cracked easily as well. Then another and another and another, each crumbling when touched or examined.

Finally, I stood back and stared, realizing the whole edifice was undoubtedly built the same way: lie upon lie upon lie; myth upon misconception upon deception.

Oliver Kamm details such a case in Frontpage Magazine today. A political scientist named Samuel Huntington argued, during the Vietnam war, that the US could not beat the Viet Cong, so we instead should accomdate them. He summarized his argument in a article entitled, unsuprisingly, "The Bases of Accomodation."

A rather straightforward liberal position, one might think.

But Noam Chomsky had other designs, apparently. According to Kamm, Chomsky's desired narrative framework has been an equivalence between the US and Nazi Germany. As such, one is pressed to find parallels. When they don't exist in real life, unethical people create them.

Kamm demonstrates how Chomsky inverts Huntington's meaning by omitting key phrases, to misrepresent Huntingon as advocating genocide, not accomodation. Huntington wrote:

…the Viet Cong will remain a powerful force which cannot be dislodged from its constituency so long as the constituency continues to exist. Peace in the immediate future must hence be based on accommodation.

Yet here's what Chomsky did to Huntington's words (elision mine):

Professor Samuel Huntington, Chairman of the Government Department at Harvard and at the time (1968) .... explains that the Viet Cong is "a powerful force which cannot be dislodged from its constituency so long as the constituency continues to exist." The conclusion is obvious, and he does not shrink from it. We can ensure that the constituency ceases to exist by "direct application of mechanical and conventional power ... on such a massive scale as to produce a massive migration from countryside to city," where the Viet Cong constituency—the rural population—can, it is hoped, be controlled in refugee camps and suburban slums around Saigon.

Just by omitting the second sentence advocating peace and accomodation, and adding a quote which did not even originate from Huntington, Noam converts Huntington from an accomodationist to an advocate of genocide, in one deft deception.

Elsewhere, to lay it on even thicker, Noam attempts to parallel this false representation of Huntingon's position with that of Nazi Germany, comparing it to policies that a "Himmler or a Streicher would have advanced."

As he must have seen the second, omitted sentence which advocated peace and accodomation, there is no way to believe Chomsky's distortion was anything but deliberate. It was apparently so important to Chomsky to find some person involved with the Vietnam war advocating Nazi-like policies that it justified fabrication from the whole cloth, at the expense of one Professor Samuel Huntington, whose policies most leftists would have approved.

Kamm then traces the myth through those who unquestioningly turn to Chomsky as a reliable narrator of history, and details some of the consequences of Chomsky's deception: how Professor Huntington was then harrassed on his campus, subject of a campaign of intimidation, had speaking invitations withdrawn, and how this was all recounted approvingly by the founder of a group named, ironically, the "Council for Academic Freedom and Democracy."

He also gives evidence that Arundhati Roy repeats the myth.

The left is forever talking about "lies" -- by which they usually mean things they simply disagree with, or inaccuracies for which they can prove no malicious intent. They insist to us that they strongly disapprove of these "lies", and cannot for a moment further tolerate any such "liars."

Yet it is my experience this sort of deconstruction may be done to most of their prophets, and most their prophets' arguments, as John Ray is doing over at Marx Words. Yet when the left is confronted with such counter-evidence, it is my experience that they are suddenly not interested at all in the depravity of lies, nor will most equally repudiate actual, proven liars like Chomsky, who knowingly weave their destructive deceptions with eyes wide open.

Instead, we are to infer that the "ends justifies the means" -- the lie was okay, we now see, because it forwarded a cause they believed in. And so we learn why so many remain fellow travellers with Chomsky: They don't mind his methods -- quite to the contrary, they share them.