Noam Chomsky

Foreign Policy and Prospect magazine have announced their top 100 intellectuals. Number one is Noam Chomsky -- a guy dubbed by this 2002 City Journal article as America's Dumbest Intellectual. A sampling:

For Chomsky, turn over any monster anywhere and look at the underside. Each is clearly marked: MADE IN AMERICA. The cold war? All America’s fault: “The United States was picking up where the Nazis had left off.” Castro’s executions and prisons filled with dissenters? Irrelevant, for “Cuba has probably been the target of more international terrorism [from the U.S., of course] than any other country.” The Khmer Rouge? Back in 1977, Chomsky dismissed accounts of the Cambodian genocide as “tales of Communist atrocities” based on “unreliable” accounts. At most,the executions “numbered in the thousands” and were “aggravated by the threat of starvation resulting from American distraction and killing.” In fact, some 2 million perished on the killing fields of Cambodia because of genocidal war against the urban bourgeoisie and the educated, in which wearing a pair of glasses could mean a death sentence.

In quick fashion this award is about as big of a joke as the Nobel peace prize. In fairness, given that the top 5 positions were decided by readers of the magazines, perhaps this says more about their readership than anything else.