Chomsky, Ecuador, and the Left

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/09/2012916101339622973.html

This article I found very interesting because it was sort of all over the place. The overall theme of the article was that the left is intellectually better than the right, but they are not doing anything to prove this fact. The clear bias is that this is written by a man who is very much on the political left, but is disappointed with the actions that certain leftists have taken. Firstly, he expresses his disappointment with the Ecuadorian government for making an alliance with Belarus, a particularly backwards country with an authoritarian, anti-semitic leader. Secondly, he comments briefly on Noam Chomsky's great influence over leftist politics and his lack of bringing certain things to the political agenda. Lastly, he comments on questionable connections between a newspaper in Britain, Belarus, and Julian Assange.

The thing that interested me most in the article was the distinction the author made between authoritarian leftist governments and leftist democracies. In the United States, the political right is in a poor position because they are so divided, yet here we see that on the global scale the political left is much more divided than the political right. They make alliances with one another such as Ecuador and Belarus did because they share a common enemy of the United States, yet these alliances are founded solely upon the principle of a common enemy, rather than because they have that much to acconmplish together. Another thing that I found cool was the enormous amount of power that the author attributes to Noam Chomsky. I had no idea that he had so much power on the political left.

Jon Kingzette