AHC: President Noam Chomsky
- Thread starter Lemonfish
- Start date
While I do realize that anarchism is not quite the shambolic free-for-all of popular caricature, I still think it's gonna be next to impossible for an anarchist, especially one with Chomsky's foreign-policy focus, to rise up through the American system.
I mean, even with your alt-1960s/70s, you'd REALLY need the conservatives to eff up badly to make Chomsky a plausible choice for most voters. Like, we're talking Mossad reacts to Zionism Is Racism by blowing up the UN building, tens of thousands of Americans die, Rabin goes on TV and says "Lots more where that came from, America!!", US politicians are too dumbstruck by this major bit of backstaberry to issue a clear condemnation, and so Chomsky can just waltz in and say "Hey, I'm the most anti-Israel guy in the room! Vote for me!"
Yeah, that might do it. But even then, I think it's more likely that some mainstream poltician(ie. not an MIT linguist) would adjust his rhetoric to be anti-Israel, and scoop up the votes.
I mean, even with your alt-1960s/70s, you'd REALLY need the conservatives to eff up badly to make Chomsky a plausible choice for most voters. Like, we're talking Mossad reacts to Zionism Is Racism by blowing up the UN building, tens of thousands of Americans die, Rabin goes on TV and says "Lots more where that came from, America!!", US politicians are too dumbstruck by this major bit of backstaberry to issue a clear condemnation, and so Chomsky can just waltz in and say "Hey, I'm the most anti-Israel guy in the room! Vote for me!"
Yeah, that might do it. But even then, I think it's more likely that some mainstream poltician(ie. not an MIT linguist) would adjust his rhetoric to be anti-Israel, and scoop up the votes.
Unless events in his childhood drastically change his political opinions, that is not happening. It's not libertarianism or social democracy that makes that implausible; it's that many of his rants are going to be seen as anti-American. Not simply unAmerican, anti-American. People are not going to vote for someone if they think he hates their country.
Probably a suggestion that Pol Pot's Cambodia was less like Nazi Germany than like "France after liberation, where many thousands of people were massacred within a few months under far less rigorous conditions than those left by the American war" would not go over well with the electorate... https://chomsky.info/19770625/
"Something I learned from [Todd] Gitlin and never forgot was that in 1968, when a majority of Americans had turned against the war in Vietnam, 'the antiwar movement was detested still more — the most hated political group in America, disliked even by most of the people who supported immediate withdrawal.'" https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/07/opinion/todd-gitlin-liberal.html
So like Al Gore win in 2000, made him secretary of education, than he and Lieberman and most of the cabinet was killed in alt 911, made Chomsky the next in line?
Darzin
Banned
Basically though I was thinking more Jimmy Carter or an Alt President coasting on post Vietnam backlash. But Al Gore works too.
Chomsky once said that he believed Bill Clinton and every other post WW2 President deserved to be hanged. He’s not getting appointed to anything ever.
Yeah. Chomsky isn’t getting appointed to diddly squat unless you fundamentally change everything about his public persona starring from the 1960s.
This scenario is ASB.
This selective quotation makes it look like grandfather was engaging in apologetics for one of the most evil regimes in history. Read it in context, and it looks (to me anyway) much more like a polemical intervention in the murky sphere of media representation of post-1975 Cambodia - representation that was less than honest in its actions or intentions. The demented evil of the KR regime is now well known, and unquestionable - but at the time the piece in that link was written it was genuinely hard to tell who was acting, or speaking in good faith on that one - and it was easier to tell who was working in bad faith. . .
One thing I'd like to know, on this point, is how did Chomsky's critics in this case react in the 1980s when it became clear that Washington and London were actively backing the KR mass murderers, allowing them to occupy the Cambodian UN seat, and (in UK's case) channeling support to the KR in the guise of SAS training for the so-called KPNLF (Khmer People's National Liberation Front), which was ostensibly a broad front of anti-Hun Sen forces but was really a KR sock puppet?
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Hmmm. Let's posit a point of departure that involves a much worse great depression, no FDR, and decades of a repressive regime in America, which finally emerges blinking into the sunlight in the mid-1960s and looking for a really radical departure in the form of MIT's greatest son?
Though by this time, he's probably building socialism on an Israeli kibbutz (I'm so old I can just about remember the last of the 'Israel is the world's only truly socialist country', by the way).
Chomsky mentions somewhere that when he spent time on a kibbutz in his youth, he encountered Jewish Stalinists who were defending the Doctor's Plot trials. (In case anyone was wondering if he had any understandable reasons for turning against Zionism.)
Hypothetically if he managed to become President while maintaining his leftist views I’m reminded of the song “If I Was President” by Wyclef Jean where he says he’d be assassinated within a week of election and business would go on as usual. I don’t buy into assassination conspiracies but I think if there ever were a time when the innumerable anti leftist groups in the government would use any means including murder to remove someone completely antithetical to the status quo it would be if Chomsky or anyone similar became President.
Honestly it always come out as someone that know perfectely to have said a thing that had revelead to be extremely wrong but it will never admit the mistake due to ego; but if he become president, well i expect something like the Trump presidency on level of efficiency only on the extreme left as Chomsky seem not the man that compromise and can create some level of consensus that's not ' geez i hate his holier than you attitude'
Also expect lot of problem with the american allies and i don't even mean the most controversial like Saudi Arabia but the historical like NATO
If Chomsky became president, and were able to put his agenda into action, then NATO as we know it would likely cease to exist.
Naa Chomsky don't have the political capacity to be an efficient president but like Trump can really put a screw on alliance and goverment working and may the universe help the USA if there is a real crisis
That article was one of the most ridiculous things I have ever read. When he goes down the list, gets to Carter, and comes up with a pretty flimsy explanation for why JIMMY CARTER of all people would be hanged if the Nuremberg standards were applied I had to stop.
Noam Chomsky getting elected President, or anything in the United States, is ASB.