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    Re: A Dissection: How not to be a Propagandist (video) Archived Message

    Posted by brooks on November 12, 2019, 12:08 am, in reply to "A Dissection: How not to be a Propagandist (video)"

    McAdams call it the Lew Rockwell rule but I think it was articulated by Chomsky many years earlier. I remember reading a version of it in one of his earliest collection of political essays from the 1960s, where he (if I am remembering correctly) warns of the moral hazard of Americans criticizing a government under US attack (North Vietnam, at the time) - whether it was accurate criticism or not - since it could be used by the propaganda system to justify US imperial crimes and lend them ideological support. I don't have the book with me at the moment, but here's a quote from a Q and A he gave in more recent years that expresses basically the same thing:

    Honest people are just going to have to face the fact that that whenever possible, people with power are going to exploit any actions which serve their violent ends. So when American dissidents criticize the atrocities of some enemy state like Cuba or Vietnam or something, it's no secret what the effects of that criticism are going to be: it's not going to have any effect whatsoever on the Cuban regime, for example, but it certainly will help the torturers in Washington and Miami to keep inflicting their campaign of suffering on the Cuban population (i.e. through the US-led embargo). Well, that is something I do not think a moral person would want to contribute to.

    Chomsky unfortunately violated his own rule wrt Syria - and so did not act like a moral person when he repeatedly condemned Assad while the US was engaged in a horrific, proxy regime-change war against Syria - but the rule itself, basically the same one as Lew Rockwell's, seems compelling to me on elementary moral and tactical grounds.

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