Philip Kobina Baidoo, Jr. Eats His Can Of Worms: Noam Chomsky 1

According to Mr. Baidoo, Noam Chomsky wrote the following in his book “America Power and the New Mandarins,” the 1969 edition:

“Suppose, that is, that American policy ceases to be dominated by the principles that were crudely outlined by President Truman almost twenty years ago, when he suggested in a famous and important speech that the basic freedom is freedom of enterprise and that the whole world should adopt the American system, which could survive in America only if it became a world system.”

Mr. Baidoo attributed this quote to Noam Chomsky. He also claimed that Chomsky “took” this statement from President Harry S. Truman’s speech, which he failed to mention for readers’ edification. It is our submission that Mr. Baidoo set a big trap for himself as he did not seem to have read the quote correctly. He went on to write: “THE FACT IS PRESIDENT HARRY S. TRUMAN NEVER MADE THAT STATEMENT.”

The substance of the above statement clearly points to Mr. Baidoo’s overt indication that Chomsky quoted Pres. Truman’s speech verbatim, much like saying he lifted the quote from Pres. Truman’s speech. THAT IS A BIG FAT LIE. In fact, Mr. Baidoo was so irredeemably ensnared in his self-concocted web of delusion that, there was no way he could conceivably have demonstrated a clear or precise understanding of what he said actually meant. And here is why:

If Mr. Baidoo correctly wanted to attribute a quote which Chomsky in turn directly attributed to President Truman, then there should have been another “quote” embedded within Mr. Baidoo’s parenthetic attribution to Chomsky. In other words, there should probably have been an “inner quote” for President Truman and an “outer quote” for Chomsky. Thus we are making a direct case for a discursive emphasis of parenthetic clarity where, for instance, the attributive delineation between Chomsky and Pres. Truman within a phrasal, sentential, or paragraphic superstructure is not a question of ambiguity. The subtext of this contention sounds like Chomsky’s linguistic theory of “recursion” as it relates to syntax category (and to mathematics, computer programming, and artificial intelligence).

Let us not deviate from the main topic, however. On the face of Mr. Baidoo’s larger attribution alone the quotational authorship is not clear in terms of attributive definition. We make this assertion in the context of his poorly formulated arguments, analytic errors, and questionable assumptions. Fortunately for us, though, there are ample landmarks in his misplaced attributive structure to show that Chomsky’s carefully-worded ascription to Pres. Truman’s unnamed speech was a summary, a reprise, or a paraphrase, not a statement or quote directly lifted from Pres. Truman’s unnamed speech, as would be shown shortly. Evidently Mr. Baidoo could not distinguish between a summary and a verbatim quote!

In the quote attributed to Chomsky we come across the phrases “crudely outlined,” “that is,” “a famous and important speech,” and “only if.” We also come across the words “could,” “suggested,” “outlined,” “almost,” “suppose,” and “should (NOT MUST).” What is more, the indefinite article, “a,” standing tall singularly before the phrasal construct “famous and important speech” unequivocally points to A SPEECH, possibly a particular speech text in the corpus of Pres. Truman’s speeches. Here, we clearly see the scholar Chomsky demonstrating analytic and authorial circumspection in re-interpreting a speech document, a public speech in that regard. Chomsky demonstrates that cautious formality in all his scholarly publications and public debates.

In fact the words “suppose,” “could,” and “suggested” and the phrases “only if” and “crudely outlined” certainly point to a reader of a text who makes adequate room for possible exegetical errors along the axis of analytic elasticity. We could neither overlook the counterfactual conditional of “only if” introduced into the discourse of speech exegesis nor shun its stochastic reflection on or ramifications for the mechanized self-criticism of Mr. Baidoo’s parenthetic attribution. In this regard the word “crudely” does not necessarily conceptually connote direct insightfulness or factual certainty on the basis of interpretation and/or re-interpretation of a given text. This is why we acknowledge a correlation between the adverb “crudely,” its implications for textural criticism, and the stochastic dimension of Chomsky’s attributive rendition of Pres. Truman’s speech.

We believe sentences, paragraphs, and phrases can be understood somewhat from the standpoint of morphemes, a process we may otherwise properly call morphology. Words in sentences, phrases, and paragraphs do not stand alone in terms of structural analysis. They stand in a relationship to a confraternity of other arranged words on whose behalf meanings and denotations enjoy a definition of collective personality. Thus, orthographic individuation should not be seen as antithetical to the collective framology of sentential and paragraphic personalities. We are here also dealing with localization, linguistics, semiotics, and philology.

Yet, the seeming problematic of Chomskyan rendition of Pres. Truman’s speech is arguably so insofar as Mr. Baidoo never bothered to read the speech for self-edification, let alone analyze it and then synthesize it for his readership, an exercise any writer who truly wanted to educate his readership would have undertaken to inform his writings. We see this superficial problematic all the time in sign language, translations/transcriptions and transliterations and the transmission challenges of oral literature (translation studies/translation criticism). We see this phenomenon in word-problems in Business Mathematics and Algebra (as well as in analytics, simulation, mathematical modeling, music theory, meteorology, genetics, physics (radio waves), and the interpretation of prehistoric cave paintings/rock art and fine art). We note, for instance, how the various translated versions of the Bible somehow correlate to Christendom (the different divisions in Christianity).

What do we mean exactly? The Feminist Bible (the New International Version), the Catholic Douay-Rheims Bible, the Kebra Nagast (and other canonical texts) of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, and the Jehowah’s Witnesses’ “The New World Holy Translation of the Holy Scriptures” constitute a few notable examples. The foregoing notwithstanding, we cannot gloss over the challenges of English-to-English translations or renditions.

What about translating a text from one language into another? Such a controversy would cloud the English translation of Camara Laye’s 1954 classic novel, “L’Enfant Noir.” English translations rendered Laye’s titular novel as “The Dark Child.” Others have also suggested “The Black Child” and “The African Child.”

Yet the words “dark,” “black,” and “African” are not necessarily the same perceptions or realities, for, after all, Africans come in all shades of color just like other races of men. There is also no doubt that the titular renderings of Laye’s work are informed by the racist dichotomy of “sub-Saharan Africa” versus “North Africa,” where the ancient history, paleoanthropology, and paleontology of a continuous continent are ignored in favor of the social Darwinist deconstruction of that continuous continent, a situation similar to Ali Mazrui’s description of Europe’s ideological rather than scientific cartographicization of the world where placing Africa topographically beneath Europe reinforced the latter’s superiority over the latter’s inferiority.

Interestingly, some of the reasons usually given for the translation controversy surrounding Laye’s novel would come to closely resemble the reasons some major American publishers and editors gave for deleting references to Othello’s Africanness (or “blackness”) and to all “Black” Biblical characters (For more information on the latter, see the first two volumes of Dr. Frederick Price’s “Race, Religion & Racism”).

However, unlike Laye’s case or the Othello example, Chomsky’s rendition of Pres. Truman’s speech was and still is a non-controversial matter, noting that the speech’s textural identity is not one of arcane or obscure verbiage of the narrative wavelength or rhetorical strength of Wole Soyinka, or even of William Faulkner. The language of the Truman speech is straightforward, namely uncomplexed, though the speech itself is erected on a fluid infrastructure of a set of complex topology of obscure yet well-coordinated assumptions. One only has to closely read the speech in question to appreciate our conclusions without the blinkers of ideology, the analytic adulteration of intellectual slant.

It is clear from Mr. Baidoo’s article that he did not read the speech itself, let alone decipher it for his readership, instead allowing other questionable writers to do that for him, in his behalf. It explains why Mr. Baidoo mistook a summary for a verbatim quote, an unpardonable commission of intellectual dishonesty (so far we have identified the right wing websites Mr. Baidoo liberally samples or lifts his ideas from without crediting the authors of those websites).

And given that Chomsky writes with palpable readable flair, clarity and grace, one wonders how Mr. Baidoo could have missed Chomsky’s unambiguous tone and rhetorical conciseness!

Perhaps more important is the fact that Mr. Baidoo should have subjected the so-called Pentagon Papers (1945-1967), granted that Pres. Truman made his speech in 1947, to scrutiny before pontificating about Pres. Truman, Chomsky, Pres. Lyndon Johnson, and others. This is what reporter R. W. Apple wrote (see “25 Years Later; Lessons from The Pentagon Papers,” June 23, 1996):

“They demonstrated, among other things, that the Johnson Administration had systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress, about a subject of transcendent national interest and significance.”

Then also Daniel Ellsberg, the man who released the Pentagon Papers to the public, wrote (see “Lying About Vietnam,” The New York Times, June 21, 2001; also see Ellsberg’s book “Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers”):

“The Pentagon Papers, published 30 years ago this month, proved that the government had long lied to the country. Indeed, the papers revealed a policy of concealment and quite deliberate deception from the Truman administration onward…But in 1969, when I read the entire Pentagon Papers, covering 1945 to 1968, I became aware that every president from Harry Truman on had heard this advice from more authoritative people than me. And for some reason the presidents had always chosen to stay in. Their determination not to suffer the political consequences of losing a war outweighed, for them, the human costs of continuing.”

Thus the Pentagon Papers would vindicate Chomsky and other activists, politicians, intellectuals, and ordinary citizens who had opposed the Truman presidency and its foreign policy. Likewise, the Pentagon Papers will also vindicate Chomsky’s view of Pres. Truman and his foreign policy prescriptions. Regrettably, these two facts are eloquently missing from Mr. Baidoo’s fraudulent attributions and poorly structured as well as logically flawed arguments, and if we could also add, wrongheaded pretensions at historicism, the latter being factually and intellectually anemic at best.

The question is: How will Pres. Truman translate the said speech today, a speech Mr. Baidoo was so afraid of to mention, let alone give himself the benefit of the doubt, in his article for obvious reasons? We can only respond to this question in hindsight. Put simply, we will dare pontificate that even if President Truman were alive here today he could probably not give us an exact or precise rendition of his speech. He may probably recall the substance of the speech but not its exact wording unless, of course, he demonstrates the rare gift of eidetic or photographic memory.

Even more interestingly is the fact that President Truman was never known to have possessed that capacity for extraordinary recall memory. More so, no human brain stays the same in terms of its behavior of synaptic mechanism and transmission chemistry. Age, diet, stress, and genetics all have to do with it. Chomsky thus merely gave a rendition of a speech, not a verbatim quote, as Mr. Baidoo fraudulently imposed on his unsuspecting readership.

Mr. Baidoo also made his dilemmatic delusion worse by making the following timid and uncritical statement, which cements his propensity for concocting egregious lies: “IF HE [CHOMSKY] DID MAKE IT ELSWEHER I AM NOT AWARE. AS FAR AS I CAN SEE NOAM CHOMSKY MADE IT UP. IT WAS A COMPLETE FABRICATION, YET HE GAVE REFERENCE TO THAT FALSEHOOD AND UNMITIGATED LIE, WHICH DOES NOT EVEN QUALIFY FOR A WHITE LIE.”

Mr. Baidoo did not look or see far enough. Having said that, did Mr. Baidoo want to be taken serious with his emotionally unreliable, needless circumlocution and defective logic? The word “ELSEHWERE” and the phrase “I AM NOT AWARE” betray Mr. Baidoo’s intellectual timidity, failure to carry out simple research activities, and scholastic cluelessness as far as digging for facts goes. In fact, he merely threw the second and third paragraphs at his unsuspecting readership without verifiable evidential support. A little research would have taught him that “SOMEWHERE” was also “EVERYWHERE” or “ALL OVER THE PLACE.” But Mr. Baidoo is an unconscionable writer who cares little for the sanctity of facts.

Mr. Baidoo is the type to shamelessly ignore the wisdom of Nollywood giant Pete Edochie, father of Yul Edochie, which says “Comments are free but facts are sacred.”

What did Mr. Baidoo expect of his readership as far as evaluating the intellectual and analytic merit of his arguments, without providing substantial collaborative evidence for his claims, is concerned?

It is therefore our submission that Mr. Baidoo avoided mentioning or reading the said speech for what he feared might be there for him, for he may have known or suspected that Chomsky was and still is as factually “scientific” as every other conscionable intellectual. Even so, why did Mr. Baidoo mention Alvin Toffler’s “Power Shift,” Chomsky’s “American Power and the New Mandarins,” as well as the quote he attributed to Chomsky but being “conveniently” silent on the Truman speech in question, though the Truman speech in question is all over the place (Did Mr. Baidoo ever find it meaningful to read Chomsky’s essay “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” at all? NOTE: MR. BAIDOO DID NOT TELL HIS READERSHIP THAT SERIOUS CRITICS OF ALVIN TOFFLER NOTE HIM FOR HIS WEAK ARGUMENTS, UNREALISTIC PROGNOSTICATIONS, FACTUAL EXAGGERATION, AND FACTUAL OVERGENERALIZATION).

Writers, historians, political scientists, and scholars generally refer to the speech in question as “ADDRESS ON FOREIGN ECONOMIC POLICY.”

Pres. Truman gave this speech on March 6, 1947 at Baylor University (Waco, Texas), during which the university awarded him a honorary doctorate.

The said speech reads in part:
“At this particular time, the whole world is concentrating much of its thought and energy on attaining the objectives of peace and freedom. These objectives are bound up completely with a third objective--reestablishment of world trade. In fact the three-peace, freedom, and world trade--are inseparable…”

“Now, as in the year 1920, we have reached a turning point in history. National economies have been disrupted by the war. The future is uncertain everywhere. Economic policies are in a state of flux. In this atmosphere of doubt and hesitation, the decisive factor will be the type of leadership that the United States gives the world.”

“WE ARE THE GIANT OF THE ECONOMIC WORLD. WHETHER WE LIKE IT OR NOT, THE FUTURE PATTERN OF ECONOMIC RELATIONS DEPENDS UPON US. THE WORLD IS WAITING AND WATCHING TO SEE WHAT WE SHALL DO. THE CHOICE IS OURS. WE CAN LEAD THE NATIONS TO ECONOMIC PEACE OR WE CAN PLUNGE THEM INTO ECONOMIC WAR.”

“THERE MUST BE NO QUESTION AS TO OUR COURSE…”

“THERE IS ONE THING THAT AMERICANS VALUE EVEN MORE THAN PEACE. IT IS FREEDOM. FREEDOM OF WORSHIP-FREEDOM OF SPEECH FREEDOM OF ENTERPRISE. IT MUST BE TRUE THAT THE FIRST TWO OF THESE FREEDOMS ARE RELATED TO THE THIRD…SO OUR DEVOTION TO FREEDOM OF ENTERPRISE, IN THE UNITED STATES, HAS DEEPER ROOTS THAN A DESIRE TO PROTECT PROFITS OF OWNERSHIP. IT IS PART AND PARCEL OF WHAT WE CALL AMERICAN…”

“The trade-agreement negotiations that will accompany consideration of the Charter, should enable countries that are now in difficulty to work their way out of it by affording them readier access to the markets of the world. This program is designed to restore and preserve a trading system that is consistent with continuing freedom of enterprise in every country that chooses freedom for its own economy. It is a program that will serve the interests of other nations as well as those of the United States…”

“OUR PEOPLE ARE UNITED. THEY HAVE COME TO A REALIZATION OF THEIR RESPONSIBILITIES. THEY ARE READY TO ASSUME THEIR ROLE OF LEADERSHIP…”

We shall return…