Rightwing Americans seem to get their history from the vile Stephen E. Ambrose, who devotes much space in his 'history' of D-Day to the thesis that the British troops that day lacked the 'guts' of the Americans- but oddly, Ambrose manages to omit those pieces of data, eg casualty figures or the opinions of German officers, which would enable his readers to form their own opinions.(posted 8757 days ago)Chomsky would no doubt object to being bracketed with a Nixon apologist like Ambrose, but actually his historical technique is much the same.As far as I can see, this is DeLong's key objection to Chomsky. It is not that he holds views on the Cold War, which as DeLong himself says, many intelligent and admirable people also hold. It is rather that he outlines these views in works which purport to be historical but which carefully omit the strongest contrary evidence, the hardest counter-arguments, to the views Chomsky himself holds.So....minimal discussion of the Stalinist purges; no mention of the military imbalance between the Red Army of the 1940s and the purely European armed forces of the period;no discussion of whether the 'Peoples' Republics' of Eastern Europe might somehow have been rather more oppressive than, say, modern day Italy......and so on.
There is a key passage in George Orwell, in his finest essay, 'Looking back on the Spanish War', in which he comments that a British and German historian in the twenties, discussign WW1, would have had some profound differences but would have been prepared to each cite some of the same material, however much they would have disagreed with it. He contrasted this with the collapse in intellectual honesty in the Thirties and Forties, when many intellectuals would refuse to admit the existence of any facts which were inconvenient to their chosen ideological standpoint. The same with Chomsky. You can read the works of a Marxist historian like Edward Thompson and derive a rightwing argument from the evidence he has uncovered: Corelli Barnett did so in his Thatcherite polemic 'The Audit of War'. You can be a leftist, as I am, and find plenty of scholarly merit in the works of right wing historians:if you want to criticise the hysteria of right-wing European politicians before 1914, read Norman Stone's 'Europe Transformed', written by a thoroughly conservative author.
But what Chomsky is doing is not writing history: he is merely a schoolboy debating star citing any fact which may be grist to his mill and hiding all the difficult evidence well away from his impressionable audience.
And one last point: one of DeLong's most virulent critics informs us Stalin was a 'stick figure...a boogy-man (sic)'.Is that what you call a genocidal dictator responsible for the most extensive system of concentration camps in history, in command of the twentieth century's most successful army?