@nirile
I've been wondering when someone would get around to writing out some context for Chomsky being "in the Epstein Files".. And Greg Grandin did, and Walden Bello provides an intro to Grandin's long Nation article.

Walden Bello:^1

Grandin is right, Noam responded to every email and started from the basic assumption one was approaching him in good faith until proven otherwise. When I approached him cold back in 1981, via snailmail, asking him to read and, if he felt it met his standards, endorse "Development Debacle: The World Bank in the Philippines," I was astounded when I received back a detailed commentary on the manuscript along with his endorsement, which contributed mightily to discrediting the Marcos-World Bank relationship that was the subject of the book. Speaking for myself, from my personal experience with the man, he is both an intellectual giant and a person of great integrity. ^1

Greg Grandin:^2

Chomsky earned a reputation early in his career as someone whose door was always open—who talked to anyone who knocked and answered any letter delivered. Then came e-mail.

I wrote Chomsky cold in the early 1990s, and within a week, I was in his Cambridge office. We spent an hour discussing Iran-contra and death squads, and before I left, he gave me his “secret” e-mail address, [email protected], which, as it turned out, wasn’t so secret. He gave that address to everyone anyway.

Chomsky, to be clear, has not been implicated in any of Epstein’s crimes. Rather, he seems to have been one of the many marquee names Epstein cultivated over the years.

Tunnel focused on geopolitics and on crimes of state, Chomsky apparently didn’t see what others saw clearly: that Epstein was a pimp servicing a privatized global aristocracy, and that his victims were children.

And who knows, if more e-mails come out on the Chomsky-Epstein relationship, this whole essay may read as wrong as that tweet.

Still, Chomsky’s e-mails display none of the fawning chatter found in, say, Summers’s mash notes to Jefferey and Ghislaine, and none of the affective investment in Epstein that Anand Giridharadas dissects so sharply in a recent New York Times opinion piece, “How the Elite Behave When No One is Watching.”^3 And he does not appear to have been co-opted by whatever access Epstein provided.

^1 facebook.com/walden.bello/post…

^2 thenation.com/article/society/…

^3 archive.is/TbYs7

#GregGrandin #WaldenBello #NoamChomsky #EpsteinFiles #EpsteinAndChomsky #GrandinOnChomsky #GrandinOnEpstein

@nirile

The Grandin article:^3

Today, almost all of Chomsky’s old political comrades—Zinn, Lynd, Eqbal Ahmad, Grace Paley, Daniel Ellsberg, Marilyn Young, Edward Said, Daniel Berrigan, and Barbara Ehrenreich, among others—are gone. These were friends who could speak to his decency and to his uniqueness in a way that could help us understand what some think, for understandable reasons, was either an unforgivable or an incomprehensible relationship.^3

got me wonderingg what Norman Finkelstein might have said. Searches didn't turn up anything, I had to find Finkelstein's website the scroll and guess to find his statement: ^1

I have been asked to comment on allegations of a “relationship” between Professor Chomsky and Jeffrey Epstein. It is an incontrovertible fact that Professor Chomsky met and corresponded with everyone. He didn’t discriminate; that was his modus operandi. That disposes of the bulk of the accusations leveled against Professor Chomsky. However, a portion of the allegations do puzzle: for example, a mysterious undated, unsigned, and unaddressed letter that Professor Chomsky supposedly wrote in support of Epstein. Most of the letter does not sound at all like him. How this letter came to be is, at this point, anyone’s guess. ^1

Norman Finkelstein was interviewed somewhere about Chomsky taking him and how nice it was to have help in desparate times... Finkelstein also said "but he has weaknesses" and the interviewer asked what they were: "You know what, I'll never tell you, he's a good friend.. " I imagie the weaknesses were thinks like not knowing what Saturday Night Live is or, to notice he was dealing with Borat... Later Chomsky commented what a waste of time it was to talk with the actor playing the role of moron...

Noam Chomsky on Finkelstein: ^2

... [Joan Peters book about Palestinians] everybody was talking about it as the greatest thing since chocolate cake.Well, one graduate student at Princeton, a guy named Norman Finkelstein, started reading through the book. He was interested in the history of Zionism, and as he read the book he was kind of surprised by some of the things it said. He’s a very careful student, and he started checking the references—and it turned out that the whole thing was a hoax, it was completely faked: probably it had been put together by some intelligence agency or something like that. Well, Finkelstein wrote up a short paper of just preliminary findings, it was about twenty-five pages or so, and he sent it around to I think thirty people who were interested in the topic, scholars in the field and so on, saying: “Here’s what I’ve found in this book, do you think it’s worth pursuing?”

Well, he got back one answer, from me. I told him, yeah, I think it’s an interesting topic, but I warned him, if you follow this, you’re going to get in trouble—because you’re going to expose the American intellectual community as a gang of frauds, and they are not going to like it, and they’re going to destroy you.So I said: if you want to do it, go ahead, but be aware of what you’re getting into. It’s an important issue, it makes a big difference whether you eliminate the moral basis for driving out a population—it’s preparing the basis for some real horrors—so a lot of people’s lives could be at stake. But your life is at stake too, I told him, because if you pursue this, your career is going to be ruined.

Well, he didn’t believe me. We became very close friends after this, I didn’t know him before. He went ahead and wrote up an article, and he started submitting it to journals. Nothing: they didn’t even bother responding. I finally managed to place a piece of it in In These Times, a tiny left-wing journal published in Illinois, where some of you may have seen it. Otherwise nothing, no response. Meanwhile his professors—this is Princeton University, supposed to be a serious place—stopped talking to him: they wouldn’t make appointments with him, they wouldn’t read his papers, he basically had to quit the program.

By this time, he was getting kind of desperate...^2

^1 normanfinkelstein.com/professo…
^2 chomsky.info/power01/
^3 thenation.com/article/society/…

#EpsteinRecommendation #FinkelsteinAndChomsky