[Marxism] Chomsky interview

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Question time

He's 'The Elvis Of Academia' and 'The Devil's Accountant'. A relentless
thorn in America's side, Noam Chomsky has spent 50 years bringing his
country's elite to account. Here, he talks to Tim Adams about genocide and
genitalia

Sunday November 30, 2003
The Observer

On the railings outside my local train station at Harringay, in north
London, someone has carefully placed a series of small white stickers. The
stickers, all at eye level, are designed, I suppose, to be the first thing
you see on the way to work and the last thing you see on your way home.
They are all neatly typed with two words: READ CHOMSKY. Most mornings I
find myself wondering for an instant whether the words are an imperative
('If you do nothing else today...'), or a swaggering boast (along the lines
of some of the station's other typical graffiti: 'Shagged Karen', say).
Anyone who has read Noam Chomsky will know that both interpretations are
justified. His writings, in linguistics (a discipline which he effectively
invented) and on the hypocrisy and warmongering of America (and its
principal ally) are among the few essential documents of our times. They
are also not designed for the intellectually faint-hearted. As the most
unforgiving critic of the Washington-run world order, Chomsky is often
caricatured as supplying more reality, and more guilt, than many of us care
to handle. His books have the manner and certainty of gospels, and they
work by accretion, stockpiling the remorseless fact of distant atrocity
done in each of our names. They seem to demand not so much readers as
disciples, (prominent among whom you would count John Pilger and Harold
Pinter, Michael Moore and Naomi Klein). To judge by sales figures (his
little pamphlet on 11 September has sold upwards of half a million copies)
the faithful are an ever-growing number.

Chomsky's latest book, Hegemony or Survival - a devastating history of
American foreign policy since 1945 ('No president in that time, judged on
the principles of Nuremberg, would have escaped hanging') as well as a
sustained dissection of the motivation and disastrous consequence of the
current 'war on terror' - is the newest chapter of this lifetime of
compulsive dissent. The transgressive thrill of Chomsky's world view, in
which an American elite routinely bombs and terrorises in the name of
'freedom' and in defence of market share, has led fans such as Bono of U2
to describe the 73-year-old professor as the 'Elvis of academia'. In a
recent profile in the New Yorker, Chomsky was identified, perhaps more
accurately, as the 'Devil's accountant', totting up the foreign corpses
sacrificed in America's 'quest for global dominance'.

Chomsky works from within the empire, in one of its more rigorous outposts,
at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology. MIT has none of the
marginal, down-at-heel feel of a British university. Its pristine campus,
all smoked glass and soaring marble, across the Charles river from Boston,
has the sheen of a hi-tech business park. MIT advertises itself as
'America's ideas factory', and nowhere does the production line work as
efficiently as in the offices of Professor Chomsky.

His little suite of rooms, above a wholefood cafe full of ardent acolytes
flirting with semantics, is piled variously with books and papers from the
world's subjugated corners and on the terra incognita of the human brain.
On the walls are posters advertising the talks and lectures he has given
over the years on East Timor and Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. Above a
door there is a large photo of Bertrand Russell, a fellow libertarian
pin-up, and beside it a blue aerogram addressed to 'Palestine' and
officially stamped by the US Postal Service 'Return to Sender, No Such
Address'. In a side office Chomsky sits with his assistant signing off
proofs, going through letters and deliberating over demands on his precious
time; a one-man cultural revolution. I am greeted with the stern
information that today Professor Chomsky's hours (one of which is allotted
for our interview) are lasting only 50 minutes - take it or leave it.

The interviewer of Chomsky is faced with a series of anxieties. To anyone
who has even dipped into his books, the idea of pinning him down or
catching him out, or even directing his attention in the course of a
truncated hour seems vaguely absurd. In reviewing a volume in which Chomsky
debated some of his ideas with America's leading philosophers, one critic
noted how the book was like 'watching a grandmaster play, blindfolded, 36
chess matches against the local worthies'.

full: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,11913,1094708,00.html


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