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Unfair to Chomsky

Outside on such a beautiful fall day, and I reflected with angst that I’d been unfair to Noam Chomsky in this post of last week, where I characterized his dismissal of Walt and Mearsheimer as “ethnocentric.” A friend corrected me a day later, and I failed to amend. If Chomsky is wrong about W&M (and I think he is), his error doesn’t spring from ethnocentrism, but a scientific-materialist reading of policy-making (which regards an individual’s ethnic identification and sentiment as so much noise). The fact that Chomsky was raised in an ethnocentric household is not evidence that he’s ethnocentric today. Jesus– a lot of us grew up and out of that kind of rearing. Tony Judt did, for instance. My apologies to Chomsky for a cheap shot.

 

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