Chomsky does not in any fashion offer up Cohen's viewpoint on Russia/Putin and when the OP
tries to lay blame on him, he reads like a moron.

Cohen is wrong, and his colleagues know this, I do not pretend to know his
motivations...he is not an expert on the region of which he speaks.

Terrible OP.

terrible reply

Chomsky does not and has not made any statements supporting Cohen on his views
of the annexation of land. He does put our foreign policy in historical context and
in doing so, does not absolve Putin...significant differences from Cohen.

*Russia's annexation of Crimea was an illegal act, in violation of international law and specific treaties. It's not easy to find anything comparable in recent years -- the Iraq invasion is a vastly greater crime.

http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20140501.htm

opinion about Crimea and Russia. As usual with him he can be a bit tongue in cheek ...but it helps to have the context:

-------------


The Politics of Red Lines: Putin's takeover of Crimea scares U.S. leaders because it challenges America's global dominance
Noam Chomsky
In These Times, May 1, 2014

Russia's annexation of Crimea was an illegal act, in violation of international law and specific treaties. It's not easy to find anything comparable in recent years -- the Iraq invasion is a vastly greater crime.

But one comparable example comes to mind: U.S. control of Guantanamo Bay in southeastern Cuba. Guantanamo was wrested from Cuba at gunpoint in 1903 and not relinquished despite Cuba's demands ever since it attained independence in 1959.

To be sure, Russia has a far stronger case. Even apart from strong internal support for the annexation, Crimea is historically Russian; it has Russia's only warm-water port, the home of Russia's fleet; and has enormous strategic significance. The United States has no claim at all to Guantanamo, other than its monopoly of force.

One reason why the United States refuses to return Guantanamo to Cuba, presumably, is that this is a major harbor and American control of the region severely hampers Cuban development. That has been a major U.S. policy goal for 50 years, including large-scale terror and economic warfare.

The United States claims that it is shocked by Cuban human rights violations, overlooking the fact that the worst such violations are in Guantanamo; that valid charges against Cuba do not begin to compare with regular practices among Washington's Latin American clients; and that Cuba has been under severe, unremitting U.S. attack since its independence.

But none of this crosses anyone's red lines or causes a crisis. It falls into the category of the U.S. invasions of Indochina and Iraq, the regular overthrow of parliamentary regimes and installation of vicious dictatorships, and our hideous record of other exercises of "upholding peace and stability."

http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20140501.htm

There is more than a handful of us on DU who are highly skeptical or instinctively averse to armed confrontation and covert action that replay the Cold War and generate further mass bloodshed. We don't agree that escalating new wars are the best way to make some obscure point that our depots are better than theirs.

Enough, already, with pushing the New Cold War crusade in the Middle East, Venezuela and the Ukraine - you're not making many converts through this propaganda offensive. We've all seen it before, and know where it leads - and that's just more suffering.

on "humanitarian" grounds or in the name of "freedom."

I haven't denigrated you by ad hominem attacks about "making shit up", and I don't do that sort of thing. Please show a little common courtesy.

and that wasn't a personal attack at all--you did indeed "just make shit up" when you presumed the piece is an argument for war or justifying Vietnam, which it is far from being.

Is it too much to ask that you skim an article before condemning it and characterizing it in grossly inaccurate terms? What set you off? The mention of Chomsky?

Weird.

Propaganda is all about persuasion or illusion. Neither has happened.

You failed.

that about it?

This is getting Orwellian

Last edited Fri Jan 30, 2015, 12:10 PM - Edit history (1)

Nonetheless, after mucking through this again, I amend my opinion. Kozloff's diatribe against Stephen Cohen and Noam Chomsky is not so much liberal interventionist, as pure unreconstructed 1960s-style neoconservatism. The original Trotskyist variety was practiced by Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz. Kozloff owes an unacknowledged debt to their Red-baiting from the Left. This would fit right into the pages of Encounter or Commentary, which argued that world revolution was served by supporting the Johnson Administration's Vietnam policies.

One read actually was enough. Kozloff's jab probably wouldn't be published back then - it is neither sufficiently radical nor well-written. Definitely, not up to standards of ideological polemic developed at the table occupied by the anti-Left "left" in the lunch room at City College of New York.

G-d help anybody in Russia or America who were ever stupid enough to accept the "help" and advice of these people.

The Neocons and neolibs are often thought of as pursuing similar ideological goals, but they have a different etymology. The original neocons were largely disaffected leftists in NYC who had split with CPUSA in the 1930s and 1940s. They eventually achieved respectability through aggressive Red-baiting, and an energetic devotion to war on communism second to none.

Neoliberals are products of Leo Strauss' Chicago School economics, which has more establishment origins. Chile under the Pinochet Junta was their laboratory, so neoliberalism also has connotations of militant regime change and anti-communism.

Then, there are the Liberal Internationalist which in the foreign policy realm go back to the Harding and Wilson Administrations. This is the ideological incubus of "humanitarian intervention" and Pax Americana -- Wilson's Secretary of State Lansing's nephews, the Dulles Brothers, essentially created the Cold War and the American Empire.

In effect, these three strains have merged into Hillary Clinton.

He certainly had his flaws, but he was not a mass-murderer or a dictator.

It's a brand of anti gay venom that his segment of the political world has been sharpening to a cutting edge.

out, we leave their countries much, much worse with the possible exception of Afghanistan, which was already a Mad Max mess when we went in.

Guatamala, Honduras, Haiti, and other neighboring countries.

The USA and Russia. Two bullies that need to cool it.

No quandary for this lefty.