Brian Small

.> I don’t mean to equate a Vietnamese villager to Vaclav Havel. For one thing, I doubt that the former would have had the supreme hypocrisy and audacity to clothe his praise for the defenders of freedom with gushing about responsibility for the human race. It’s also unnecessary to point out to the half a dozen or so sane people who remain that in comparison to the conditions imposed by US tyranny and violence, East Europe under Russian rule was practically a paradise. Furthermore, one can easily understand why an oppressed Third World victim would have little access to any information (or would care little about anything) beyond the narrow struggle for survival against a terrorist superpower and its clients. And the Pravda hack, unlike his US clones, would have faced a harsh response if he told the obvious truths. So by every conceivable standard, the performance of Havel, Congress, the media, and (we may safely predict, without what will soon appear) the Western intellectual community at large are on a moral and intellectual level that is vastly below that of Third World peasants and Stalinist hacks — not an unusual discovery. - https://chomsky.info/19900301/

#NoamChomsky in a letter to #AlexanderCockburn writes about #VaclavHavel and #ElSalvador, how #TheColdWar #TheInvasionOfVietnam and #JesuitPriests like #IgnacioEllacuria expose the level of #WesternIntellectuals to be that of #StalinistHacks...

On Vaclav Havel Speech

The Noam Chomsky Website.

Jun 27, 2023 at 11:10pmWeb
Show threadBrian SmallJun 27, 2023

.> ... it is more gratifying to bask in praise for courageously protesting the abuses of official enemies, a fine activity, but not the priority of a value-oriented intellectual who takes the responsibilities of that stance seriously.
.> The victims within our domains, unlike those in enemy states, are not merely ignored and quickly forgotten, but are also cynically insulted. One striking illustration came a few weeks after the murder of the Latin American intellectuals in El Salvador. Vaclav Havel visited Washington and addressed a joint session of Congress. Before his enraptured audience, Havel lauded the “defenders of freedom” in Washington who “understood the responsibility that flowed from” being “the most powerful nation on earth”—crucially, their responsibility for the brutal assassination of his Salvadoran counterparts shortly before.
.> The liberal intellectual class was enthralled by his presentation. Havel reminds us that “we live in a romantic age,” Anthony Lewis gushed. Other prominent liberal commentators reveled in Havel’s “idealism, his irony, his humanity,” as he “preached a difficult doctrine of individual responsibility” while Congress “obviously ached with respect” for his genius and integrity; and asked why America lacks intellectuals so profound, who “elevate morality over self-interest” in this way, praising us for the tortured and mutilated corpses that litter the countries that we have left in misery. We need not tarry on what the reaction would have been had Father Ellacuría, the most prominent of the murdered Jesuit intellectuals, spoken such words at the Duma after elite forces armed and trained by the Soviet Union assassinated Havel and half a dozen of his associates—a performance that is inconceivable. - https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/noam-chomsky-responsibility-of-intellectuals-redux/

#NoamChomsky comparing #VaclavHavel with #Ellacuría, #IgnacioEllacuria, #FatherEllacuría to place the #LiberalIntellectualClass in context... #ElSalvador #LatinAmericanIntellectuals #JesuitIntellectuals #USACongress #TheDuma

The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Redux

Using privilege to challenge the state.

Boston Review