Two events from my bleak rural Pennsylvania childhood have scarred my soul more than any others, fundamentally defining my entire outlook both psychologically and philosophically. The first event was very personal but became very political and the second was very political but became very personal. Over the decades the two have overlapped and intertwined in more ways than I can possibly count.
The first event was being violently sexually abused at the age of five by a pair of Catholic priests. These men weren't strangers with candy in a white panel van. They were divinely chosen representatives of the small-town diocese where I would spend the remainder of my childhood. I blacked out a lot of the trauma for most of my life just to survive it, but I spent the next decade after the abuse at a school and in a church that facilitated and covered up my abuse. I also spent what was left of my youth listening to literally every adult I knew from my teachers to my parents' making excuses for the kind of men who violated me.
While I suppressed and denied my trauma for decades, the same people who openly shamed me for being Queer and neurodivergent greeted the child sex abuse scandal that rocked their precious church to its foundation in the early 2000s with an endless campaign of excuses and obfuscation. According to these pillars of my community, it was just a few bad priests and what are a few measly broken childhoods in the context of centuries of charity and high moral piety. After all, the Church was the real victim here, singled out by an unjust world that only they could hold accountable.
As nauseating as all this high-handed moral hypocrisy was, especially coming from a legion of brazenly bigoted bullies who trafficked fervently in the biblical binary chicanery of 'good' and 'evil', it wasn't enough to break through the wall of dissociation I had built between myself and the outside world in the wake of my abuse. It would take a war to do that.
Ten years after I was molested by holy sadists in white collars, the United States made the unilateral decision to invade Iraq a second time based on lies that seemed almost absurdly obvious to an emotionally numb 8th grade closet case but no one else. Every adult I knew at that church was totally on board with this imperial crusade for oil and they all seemed to despise me for finding myself disgusted by their willful hubris. I didn't know much about politics at the time. All I knew was that every time I turned on the news, I found myself making eye contact with another emotionally numb child being dragged from the rubble with a look of horror on their face that felt jarringly familiar. A look that screamed 'why' without a voice to scream it with.
I went looking for answers that I knew my textbooks wouldn't provide me with and I stumbled over the truth in the writings of a plain-spoken old MIT professor named Noam Chomsky. I read a number of his books at a very impressionable age, but none had a bigger impact on me than 'What Uncle Sam Really Wants.' With an excruciatingly detailed and exhaustingly well researched exploration into the vile sex crimes committed by American armed, funded, trained, and led death squads in Central America, I finally found an adult willing to cut the bullshit and tell me 'why.'
America, just like the Catholic Church, decimated and abused the innocent quite simply because they could. Every reason they supplied to the public was nothing more than another empty excuse for the perversion of naked power.
The government, my government, didn't give a flying fuck about fighting communism. In fact, they supported it when it suited them in Cambodia just to destabilize Vietnam. And they didn't give a flying fuck about democracy either. Every state they propped up went a mile out of its way to evaporate basic civil liberties in a vat of CIA supplied acid. Uncle Sam, much like the Pope, only cared about power and cruelty was quite simply the most effective way to achieve this.
In other words, there was no excuse.
It was a harsh lesson to teach a pissed-off teenager, but it was also the only lesson that passed the smell test with her because I was already intimately familiar with the savagery that pious adults were capable of when they could convince themselves that they were armed with moral superiority. Lying and cheating and raping and killing could all be justified by the fact that they knew without a shadow of a doubt that they were on the right side, whether it be on the right side of 'democracy' or the right side of 'God.'
In many ways, Noam Chomsky taught me what I already knew by simply helping me to unlearn the excuses that power used to get away with it.
Needless to say, with all this considered, I was more than a little disgusted to discover Noam Chomsky in the Epstein Files. It wasn't exactly a secret that he had interactions with that billionaire sex fiend, but the depth and nature of those interactions were exposed by the House Oversight Committee to be far more intimate and disturbing than anything I had imagined. Years of what Chomsky himself is quoted as describing as a valued friendship, all occurring well after Epstein's crimes and his shocking ability to get away with them had become public knowledge.
The thing that sickened me the most about these revelations though were the excuses made by Chomsky's diehard supporters on the intellectual left because they largely mirrored the excuses that I have been hearing for my entire life in defense of the predator class.
"After all, what are a few pictures and a single friendship with a known rapist compared to Professor Chomsky's long career as an otherwise spotless crusader against unchecked power? Are you really going to throw that all away over a single scandal?"
And the answer is no. Noam Chomsky's writings on the dangers of state power remain indispensable, as does his service to the crusade to give voice to the voiceless, but none of this, not the professor's brilliance or his past, supplies him with an excuse for doing far more than just canoodling with a very powerful man who acquired his power through trafficking the voiceless to the powerful.
In 2018, Jeffrey Epstein's sweetheart deal with the Southern District of Florida that allowed him to evade a federal investigation into child sexual slavery in exchange for pleading guilty to state prostitution charges was finally given mainstream exposure by the Miami Herald.
Jeffrey Epstein's response to this rapidly tightening noose, as revealed through his emails and text messages at the time, was to try to produce a documentary on himself that would present him in a more favorable light. One of those text messages stated simply, "Spoke to Chomsky. He's all in." Another message from Epstein claimed that he was flying to meet with Chomsky on May,12, 2019, less than two months before the new charges dropped.
2018 was also the year that Noam Chomsky received a transfer of $270,000 from Epstein linked accounts. According to Chomsky this was all very innocent. Jeffrey Epstein was simply helping the professor "rearrange" funds related to his late ex-wife's estate and none of this directly involved Epstein's money. The only problem here is the problem that faces every rich and powerful figure who has chosen to engage Jeffrey Epstein for supposedly innocent economic services.
Jeffrey Epstein is a convicted sex offender who isn't even licensed as a stockbroker or a financial advisor which makes him a pretty absurd choice for assistance with such supposedly routine but largescale financial transactions, especially for someone as brilliant and well-connected as Noam Chomsky.
I can't tell you why Noam Chomsky chose to engage with a creature like Jeffrey Epstein or how he could allow his good name to be used by such an obvious fiend in a desperate attempt to rehabilitate his public image and apparently Chomsky can't either. A stroke in 2023 has allegedly rendered him beyond reproach. What I can tell you is that a great deal of Chomsky's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein appeared to have to do with the access Epstein could provide to powerful people (and clients) like former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who could further the professor's research or possibly even some of his loftier political goals.
I can also tell you that Professor Chomsky has a long history of publicly justifying the lesser evilism of endorsing monsters like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton in the name of defending us all from supposedly more dangerous monsters like Donald Trump which I strongly believe is precisely the kind of short-sighted moral relativism that actually allowed an open fascist like Trump to access the White House in the first place, now that his "left wing" opponents are to the right of Richard Nixon.
One more history lesson.
In 1971, a young Noam Chomsky engaged in a now infamous debate with iconoclastic French post-modern philosopher Michel Foucault over the existence of moral relativism. Chomsky argued against the concept, claiming that fundamental moral principles rooted in human nature defined what conduct society perceives as good or evil. Foucault argued that it was in fact 'regimes of power' that defined a society's morality.
While I have found my own personal ideology drifting towards increasingly Foucaultian post-left waters in recent years, I would still argue that both were right. Human beings are indeed imbued with a natural sense of right and wrong, but structures of power erected since the Agricultural Revolution by misguided men in search of 'progress' have grown massive enough to distort this natural moral compass and even manufacture the consent of the masses against it.
These are the kind of power structures that allow good parents to defend pedophile priests over their own children in the name of God. The kind of power structures that allow good citizens to defend despotism in the name of democracy. And, tragically, these appear to be the kind of power structures that can convince even brilliant men that colluding with evil can serve some higher good in the name of lesser evils.
These power structures like power itself exist for the simple reason that they can, that it is easier for good people to forfeit critical thinking to such schemes because it is easier to accept the inevitability of progress than it is to accept that evil is something that even good people can do without trying. But we must try. We must all do the hard work of confronting evil every single day, everywhere that it exists, including in our own mirrors, because all it takes for evil to prevail is for good people to accept that a lesser version can save them from it.
Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post
* See No Evil by Television
* Cornflake Girl by Tori Amos
* Down by the Water by PJ Harvey
* Wardance by Killing Joke
* Triptych by Samia
* Melissa by Merciful Fate
* Human Cannonball by Butthole Surfers
* 100% by Sonic Youth
* Requiem by Killing Joke
* Atmosphere by Joy Division
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