If there's one thing I enjoy, it's a good Chomsky deconstruction. John-Paul Pagano has written a good one riffing on this Guardian interview with the good professor. This is Kamm-esque material. Pagano concentrates here on Chomsky's minimization of the Russian pogroms of the late nineteen/early twentieth centuries.
Chomsky says that the pogroms were really "not very bad, by contemporary standards. In the worst of the major massacres, I think about 49 people were killed."
Hmmmm. Only one black man would generally be killed during a lynching by the Ku Klux Klan. So, I guess by Chomsky's measure, by "contemporary standards," things were not so bad in the old South, not so bad at all!
He says that he thinks only (!) 49 people were killed during a "major" massacre. What massacre? How did he get that figure? If I were being interviewed, I wouldn't mention something unless I were very sure it was well-researched and well-founded.
OK, I read this from one of your links (guanubian):
"Chomsky is referring to the First Kishinev pogrom of 1903, which indeed killed between 47-49 Jews in what is modern-day Moldova."
And the blogger says: "It is true that by ancient or contemporary standards of slaughter, this is not a high body count."
But he comes up with a point that I didn't think of explicitely, the fact that, "taken all together, the pogroms were probably the most devastating phenomenon in Jewish history besides the Holocaust." Sure, I mean millions of Jews didn't emigrate from Eastern Europe between 1880 and 1920 because 50+ people got killed.
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Chomsky says that the pogroms were really "not very bad, by contemporary standards. In the worst of the major massacres, I think about 49 people were killed."
Hmmmm. Only one black man would generally be killed during a lynching by the Ku Klux Klan. So, I guess by Chomsky's measure, by "contemporary standards," things were not so bad in the old South, not so bad at all!
He says that he thinks only (!) 49 people were killed during a "major" massacre. What massacre? How did he get that figure? If I were being interviewed, I wouldn't mention something unless I were very sure it was well-researched and well-founded.
OK, I read this from one of your links (guanubian):
"Chomsky is referring to the First Kishinev pogrom of 1903, which indeed killed between 47-49 Jews in what is modern-day Moldova."
And the blogger says: "It is true that by ancient or contemporary standards of slaughter, this is not a high body count."
But he comes up with a point that I didn't think of explicitely, the fact that, "taken all together, the pogroms were probably the most devastating phenomenon in Jewish history besides the Holocaust." Sure, I mean millions of Jews didn't emigrate from Eastern Europe between 1880 and 1920 because 50+ people got killed.