OK, But in All Fairness, Chomsky Pyschosis Is a Diagnosis, Too
John Feffer could be more accurately described as a hack apologist for its regime than an authority on North Korea. Feffer recently won himself a Bruce Cumings Prize for the year’s most spectacularly ill-timed defense of the indefensible. What the Soviet archives did for Cumings’s academic reputation, the Havel-Wiesel-Bondevik report ought to have done for Feffer’s denial of Kim Jong Il’s culpability for the great famine that sacrificed millions of lives for nukes and missiles, had anyone actually read what Feffer wrote. Here are two men whose tongues have never known a lamppost that was too cold for affectionate contact. So in a sense, you could say that drawing a comparison between George W. Bush and Kim Jong Il is a move toward moderation for Feffer. Heresy, even.
The answer, or a stab at one, comes in a piece called “Bush and Kim: Brothers under the skin?” by John Feffer, the director of global affairs at the U.S. think tank International Relations Center (IRC). It was published in Foreign Policy in Focus, whose co-director Feffer is.
First of all, Feffer says, both “grew up in privileged families, though they have both taken pains to present themselves as men of the people. Not surprisingly, then, they have tried to obscure their origins. Kim Jong-il claims his birthplace in the symbolic Mt. Baekdu rather than the Soviet Russia where he really saw the light of this world, while George W. Bush pretends to be from Texas but is actually a Connecticut-born WASP.
Right! And one keeps 250,000 men, women, and children in concentration camps, while the other is fattening up 395 terrorists in Gitmo. Which makes them exactly the same! Other than one being a tall, skinny white guy who’s won two elections over the opposition of a hostile news media … and the other being a dumpy Korean mass murderer who inherited a despotic regime of shriveling subjects from his father, there are absolutely no differences except for, you know, their entire psyches.
Feffer may also have some qualifications as a mental health professional, but they were not apparent in this Chosun Ilbo piece.
Venturing into psychology, Feffer speculates that this “oedipal insecurity” led to the Iraq War and North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.
Here’s my venture into psychology: projection. We have here a person who works for something with “International Relations” in its name, and who expects to be taken seriously as a scholar, and who seriously suggests that at the, erm, root of two the world’s great crises is … a sexual deviancy. I’d love to know the basis of Feffer’s major premise for this novel theory, but it makes more sense that Feffer is talking about something he really knows, or possibly through an aperature of similar latitude. Anyone who would hire this man as a scholar would hire Ted Kennedy as a lifeguard.
Natural Missile Reduction!
Maybe the Chosun Ilbo wasn’t taking Feffer too seriously, either, and I detected a hint of sarcasm in its report. That may presume too much sophistication for Chosun readers, however. If the Chosun Ilbo insists on publishing rants that have this little news value or logical merit, it might as well educate its readers about just where Feffer is coming from ideologically. The endorsement from Noam Chomsky would be a start.
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10 Responses
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Brilliant, Joshua. Sad, Corpy.
Terrific fisking, but this knucklehead needs a fisting.
Where did you come up with this:
“Here are two men whose tongues have never known a lamppost that was too cold for affectionate contact.”
I was ROTFL laughing, remembering the time 50 years ago when on the way back from playing hockey on a pond, walking on frozen skates, somoone hooked me as a joke and I landed with my tongue frozen to the post of a cyclone fence. Then, of course, I remembered what happened when someone yanked me by the hair and pulled me off, leaving most of the surface of my tongue behind. Come to think of it, maybye someone should give Feffer, Cummins et al the same experience.
Yeah … John Feffer … I am still kicking myself in the butt for having bought his book … didn’t catch the ‘Chumpsky’ endorsement until it was too late.
Obviously Bush and Kim aren’t the same, but the reality is that President Bush’s decision to invade and occupy Iraq has resulted in the deaths of (at a minimum) tens of thousands of civilians. I’m hoping this blog doesn’t think military action against North Korea will produce good results, judging from historical experience in the region (aka the UXO and bombies left behind in Indochina…)
Rather than getting into an off-topic argument on Iraq, I’ll just refer you to this.
Thanks, MAWL, for proving how ignorance can be bliss.
Reading Corpy reminded me of how glad I gave up seeking a Phd – but in my courses at another well-known Korean Studies institute in the US, I had to listen to a Korean grad student tell me the week after 9/11, “We’re afraid the US will use this as an excuse to keep Korean students who protest against the US from getting visas to study….”
Or the Chinese student who would throw his papers in the air and blurt out, “Stupid American scholars” every time someone in class brought up a work by somebody who was remotely critical of Korea or mentioned democratic reforms in China….
It was listening to the head of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation on CNN after 9/11 and before significant operations by the US in Afghanistan (Afghanistan – not Iraq) that led me into temporary corenary arrest and firmly down the road to leaving higher education…
He said he wished the US would do something with Bin Laden and the Taliban like we did at Nuremburg —- work with the international community, and not against it, to bring them to a recognized tribunal of international law – rather than “indescriminately bombing people…”
In the heady days of post-9/11 trauma —- I almost had my head pop like that guy on The Dave Chappelle Show….
I was so angry —- for a week or two ——
And that is what I can’t stand the most ——–
the utter, complete, absolute, clear, manifest, plain-as-day —- ignorance that comes out of these people’s mouths….
….and they make a fair living saying them……
It should be obvious to anybody who has not been beheaded by a Jihadist ——- that the trials at Nuremburg —- a bombed out shell of a city ——— happened because of that little thing we like to call “World War II”……
When God decided to start over with the human race, rather than just flooding the place like one gigantic enema —- he should have toyed around with the Noah crew’s DNA —- so that the human head would pop when it became too full of poo….
Then we wouldn’t have to live with the fact that the Bruce Cumingss and Feffers and Chompsky’s of the world would not only make as much money as they do, you would never hear about them, because the parts of their anatomy that don’t work so well would have been turned into purple mush early on……