Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'

> Yes it was an example of one of Chomsky's half-truths.

Except he himself explicitly says that there were killings multiple times.

> Neither Cazaux nor Shanberg were cited as evidence for the passage quoted.

I don't understand what you are trying to say. Chomsky claims Cazaux wrote that '“not a single corpse was seen along our evacuation route,” and that early reports of massacres proved fallacious', that seems to provide a conflicting account of the "passage quoted" (i.e. "virtually everybody saw...").

> This was an example of Chomsky dishonest borrowing of authority

As I said maybe you could argue that if he didn't explicitly describe the evidence and the source at length in the very next paragraph.

> an article that stated (correctly) that there were a million civilian deaths.

What we are arguing about is whether there was a basis for those figures. I can't find the Economist article online at the moment but as far as I know the only source of those high figures at the time was Lacouture which Chomsky showed to be fabricated. I assume if you knew of another source you would have cited it already.

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I will re-iterate that the key issue is not any of the above but that the most important piece of evidence, the Lacouture number, was fabricated and would have failed the most basic fact-checking, yet was loudly promoted. In contrast the US government's own numbers, which conflicted with La Couture, were ignored. These hard figures were the most important pieces of evidence and the fact they were treated as they were is what proves Chomsky's point about distortion of information, the Cambodia case being only one example.

Why not? He's supposedly anti-imperislist yet had no problem living in their society.

Polio got reclassifed and the vaccines claimed a success. But keep the faith.

Cuba was more of a sovereignty/sphere-of-influence problem than a nuclear-warfare problem. That ship has long since sailed with regard to Russia's borders. Moscow is half-surrounded on the west, as well it should be given its history of combining expansionist behavior with atrocities like communism and the Holodomor.

The Russians have had more than ample opportunity to join the civilized world and stop acting like dicks, but that's apparently not what they want to do. So, containment it is.

And if they feared NATO encroachment on their borders, trying to take over Ukraine was a really stupid way to discourage that. Nukes are scary enough, but nukes in the hands of stupid people are downright terrifying. Personally I doubt any of theirs still work, but that's all too easy to say.

No, that's not an accurate characterisation. You're confusing the cause and the response. That the support to Ukraine has been predominantly US-led, in no small part because it had stockpiles that Europe does not, does not tell us anything about Russia's motivations for invading a sovereign neighbour. It's also possible for countries to support what they consider an ally without it being a 'proxy' war. For it to be a proxy war would require that NATO caused the war, but all the historical evidence shows that NATO countries like the US, France, the UK, Germany, and others spent months in advance of Russia's invasion trying to convince Putin not to invade. There's even a video of one of Macron's phone calls to Putin where he begs him to agree to a diplomatic summit that could find an alternative to war.

Chomsky's view, and I'm guessing yours too, is that NATO should never have expanded, that NATO's expansion was a move intended only to provoke Russia, that Russia had the right to not have NATO on its borders, and therefore that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is justified and understandable.

Yet none of those are accurate, as I've shown, but I'll address them again in brief below:

1) NATO was expanded only with initial great reluctance and the constant lobbying of Eastern European and Baltic nations in particular, who had good reason to want to be part of a defensive security alliance. However, and most importantly, Ukraine was nowhere near joining NATO and certainly was not moving closer to it in January/February 2022. There was, in fact, no activity being undertaken by Ukraine that could possibly be considered a clear and imminent threat to Russia in any form.

2) The expansion was conducted cautiously, with strict limits placed on what forces could be forward-deployed near Russia, adding Russia as a Partnership for Peace member, creating the NATO-Russia Founding Act and with it the permanent NATO-Russia Council, and creating additional official liaison offices to provide the Russians with visibility into and reassurance about NATO's operations and intentions.

3) Sovereign countries are free to join whatever security alliance they want to, it is a fundamental concept of sovereignty that countries should have their own foreign policies. Therefore Russia has no right to prevent its neighbours from joining either the EU or NATO. To grant Russia a veto over that would be to accept an undemocratic imperial hegemony of the type that existed decades ago. Of course, Russia is free to use its own foreign policy instruments in response, by isolating, sanctioning, demarching, etc a neighbour that does something it doesn't like, but that's as far as it can go.

4) Obviously, given all the above it's ludicrous to claim that Russia had any kind of justification in invading Ukraine, or that its decision to do so can be viewed as an understandable or reasonable one.

But sure, if you still want to argue that it was 'because of NATO', then you have to accept that Russia chose to invade Ukraine not because it was about to imminently join the alliance in the next few months (because it was years and years away under the absolute best case scenario) but to avoid the mere possibility of it joining NATO some point in the future. That's no less unacceptable and illegal, and it doesn't make it more understandable.

Would you accept the US invading Venezuela because it was concerned about that country's close alliance with Russia and substantial re-armament using Russian weapons?