freke said:
Chomsky opens the door to conspiratorial thinking, by arguing powerfully that 1) there is a small cabal of people in charge of government and business; 2) they only ever act in their own self interest. If you accept these two points then you are half-way towards accepting conspiracy theories. (This is not to say that you *will* accept conspiracy theories, but as you have already accepted a set of conspiratorial ideas, it must be more likely.)
This is a weak argument to rest your claim that Chomsky is a polemicist. But let's just say that his work does open the door to conspiratorial thinking, he can hardly be blamed for that. For example, if a doctor prescribes medicine for an ailment, it is not his fault if the patient refuses to take it as prescribed.
In answer to points 1 & 2: In any govt or any corporation, it is a fact that there will be "a small cabal of people in charge". The decisions they make are hardly open or democratic. A corporation is hardly likely to allow rivals free access to its board meetings. Directors will meet in secret to discuss strategies that will give them an advantage over their rivals. They will naturally act in their own interest. For instance, Eli Lilly develops Prozac to corner the market in anti-depressants. Despite the fact that the company had conducted human testing trials that lasted a mere six weeks, the FDA gave the drug its approval. In the footnotes of "Toxic Psychiatry" (p.185) written by Jeffrey Mason we find this little gem:
If it turns out that Prozac received especially favourable treatment from the FDA, or that it had an extraordinary boost from the FDA, political influence may be at work. Eli Lilly, based in Indianopolis, was a large contributor to the senatorial campaigns of Dan Quayle. In addition, according to the October 2, 1988 Washington Post, 'Quayle's uncle, William C. Murphy, opened Lilly's government relations office in Washington in 1964 and his 1980 campaign manager, Mark D. Miles, went to work for the company in 1982 as director of communications'. Quayle was instrumental in passing legislation described by a Lilly spokesman as the most important drug measure before Congress at the time.
Is this coincidental?
It also no secret that the CIA has meddled in the internal affairs of other countries and that it has also fomented coups. Chavez claims such meddling is going on in Venezuela, as I type, and this has been common place since WWII.
Let's look closer to home at today's press: Blair on Lord Goldsmith's advice and the Iraq war:
"The advice was clear that the war was lawful, for the reasons the attorney general then set out in a parliamentary answer. The attorney general came to cabinet. He was there. We had a discussion at cabinet about it. You can go on forever trying to prove there's some conspiracy, some plot. There wasn't. There was a judgment - a judgment that might be right, it might be wrong, but I had to take it."
Blair made the decision to take the country to war following a meeting with Bush in March 2002. The decision made in that meeting was kept secret from the British public. However, now the beans are being spilt re: Lord Goldsmith's advice, we see that his decision was not based on sound legal reasons at all but on his personal view that "it was the right thing to do", even though a majority of the British public were opposed to the war.
It seems that even when the intent to conspire can be shown, there are still some that deny the possibility. Is there a name for this particular form of denial apart from cognitive dissonance?
