[PEN-L:29451] Noam Chomsky and his critics

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

In the aftermath of September 11th, certain sectors of the US left buckled 
under ruling class pressure and turned against Noam Chomsky. His 
uncompromising anti-imperialism might have been acceptable during the 1980s 
when the Sandinistas were under Washington's gun, but in today's repressive 
atmosphere no quarter is given to the dissident intellectual. Of course, no 
quarter is asked from Chomsky, who remains fearless and principled as ever.

To the chagrin of ruling class pundits and weak-kneed leftists, a 
collection of interviews with Chomsky, which has been published under the 
title "9/11," has become a best seller. According to a May 5th Washington 
Post article, the book had already sold 160,000 copies and been translated 
into a dozen languages, from Korean to Japanese to two varieties of 
Portuguese.

In an attempt to warn people away from the book, the Post cites Brian 
Morton, supposedly "a novelist and essayist of the left," who regards 
Chomsky as an important intellectual whose arguments have suffered a 
sclerotic hardening. He says, "Chomsky sees the world in a very stark way 
and gets at certain truths in that way, but ultimately his view is so 
simplistic that it's not useful. He's become a phase that people on the 
left should go through when they are young."

It should come as no surprise that the Washington Post failed to identify 
the segment of the left Morton is associated with. As it turns out, he is 
an editor of Dissent Magazine, a publication that might be described as 
social democracy in a state of advanced rigor mortis. Irving Howe, the 
founder of the magazine, was a staunch supporter of the Vietnam War. The 
current editor, Michael Walzer, stumped for Bush's war against terrorism in 
the Fall 2001 issue, stating: "We have to defend our lives; we are also 
defending our way of life. Everyone says this, but it is true. The 
terrorists oppose and hate our way of life--and would still oppose and hate 
it even if we lived our lives far better than we do."

Eric Alterman and Christopher Hitchens, contributors to The Nation 
Magazine, a left liberal weekly that has published continuously since the 
Civil War, have jumped on the anti-Chomsky bandwagon with a vengeance. 
Although the magazine has had a reputation for principled anti-imperialism 
in the past, it has shifted noticeably to the right in recent years. Most 
would explain this as a function of tail-ending the Clinton administration.

Alterman, admits on his MSNBC.com 'blog' that Chomsky "did a lot of good 
work on East Timor." But when he accused the United States of "perpetrating 
a holocaust in Afghanistan" and compared the attack on the pharmaceutical 
factory in Somalia with that on the Twin Towers, he went out of bounds and 
became "the mirror image of the ignorant jingoism of Bennett, Krauthammer, 
Kelly, Will, etc."

Christopher Hitchens has been the author of the most visible and 
controversial attacks against Chomsky. In flag-waving attack on the peace 
movement in the September 24, 2001 Nation titled "Of Sin, the Left & 
Islamic Fascism." Hitchens describes Chomsky as "soft on crime and soft on 
fascism." With such people, he adds, "No political coalition is possible."
(http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=special&s=hitchens20010924)

For some on the postmodernist left, Chomsky has also become objectionable. 
Michael Berube, a commentator on the arts and society, feels that "the 
Chomskian left has consigned itself to the dustbin of history." In 
accounting for the split between the "Chomskian left" and "the Hitchens 
left," Berube surmises that "the simple fact that bombs were dropping" 
might have something to do with it. He writes:

>>For U.S. leftists schooled in the lessons of Cambodia, Libya, and the 
School of the Americas, all U.S. bombing actions are suspect: they are 
announced by cadaverous white guys with bad hair, they are covered by seven 
cable channels competing with one another for the catchiest "New War" 
slogan and Emmy awards for creative flag display, and they invariably kill 
civilians, the poor, the wretched, the disabled. Surely, there is much to 
hate about any bombing campaign.<<
(http://www.centerforbookculture.org/context/no10/berube.html)

Dispensing with the relativism and playful irony that characterizes the 
postmodernist left, Berube reminds his readers that war is a serious business:

>>Yet who would deny that a nation, once attacked, has the right to 
respond with military force, and who seriously believes that anyone could 
undertake any "nation-building" enterprise in Afghanistan without driving 
the Taliban from power first?<<

Bad Subjects, another postmodernist outlet, has joined the anti-Chomsky 
crusade as well. In the latest online edition 
(http://eserver.org/bs/reviews/2002-3-11-4.49PM.html), Joe Lockard complains:

>>The excursion begins with a simple postulate from which flows all manner 
of derivatives: the United States is the leading terrorist state. Mr. Smith 
isn't going to Washington; Mr. Smith is going to Terrorism Central. Why 
ever do Chomsky-quoters wonder why their hero isn't invited to address a 
special joint session of Congress?<<

My only wonder is how a member of the Bad Subjects collective would deem a 
trip to Congress worth the trouble. One supposes that despite all the 
transgressive gestures of our postmodernist friends that bourgeois 
respectability remains their underlying desire.

It is simple to understand why Chomsky has been targeted. As the most 
visible and respected figure in the radical movement, he is a tempting 
target. When one is involved in a street fight, it is good psychology to 
knock out your biggest and most powerful opponent and thus demoralize the 
ranks of the enemy. This article will consider how Chomsky became such a 
preeminent figure. In the course of this discussion, we will examine some 
of his limitations that, needless to say, are of a totally different sort 
than those alleged by his foes. We understand that it is exactly his 
ability to stand up to wartime pressures that distinguishes him from the 
run-of-the-mill intellectual.

From Robert Barsky's first-rate biography and intellectual portrait of 
Noam Chomsky (Noam Chomsky: a life of dissent, MIT Press 1998), we learn 
that he was born on December 7, 1928 to Dr. William (Zev) Chomsky and Elsie 
Simonofsky, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Chomsky's father was the principal of a Hebrew school and raised his son 
according to traditional Jewish beliefs. Although his parents identified 
with the New Deal, various cousins, aunts and uncles were further to the 
left. Within the extended Chomsky household, various opinions clashed with 
each other. Against this political backdrop, it was inevitable that he 
would come to identify with the left, especially since the radical opinions 
he heard all about him were reinforced by "seeing people coming to the door 
and trying to sell rags or apples" and " travelling in a trolley car past a 
textile factory where women were on strike, and watching riot police beat 
the strikers".

The bulk of the young people who became radicalized during the 1930s joined 
the Communist Party, while a smaller number became anti-Stalinists. And 
within this minority most joined the Trotskyist movement or the left wing 
of the Socialist Party, which tended to overlap. There were, however, a 
smaller number that identified with anarchism or the left communism 
(sometimes called council communism) that constituted a reaction to the 
compromises with world capitalism forced on the USSR. Noam Chomsky became 
part of this current.

Chomsky created an eclectic blend of council communism, anarchism and a 
left-Zionism that was natural to a Jewish household that retained many 
traditional beliefs side-by-side with progressive politics. All three 
influences reinforced each other and produce what appears to be a life-long 
affinity for small-scale cooperatives against "state socialism."

While most of his writings focus on US crimes, his ideas about locally 
based alternatives to capitalism and state socialism form a consistent 
thread throughout his career. For example, while his 1967 "American Power 
and the New Mandarins" is mostly devoted to a withering attack on the 
'trahison des clercs' that made the Vietnam War possible, there is also a 
chapter that includes a lengthy discussion of the Spanish Civil War. 
Although framed as a reply to liberal interpretations that justified 
repression of the anarchists, it is also a defense of anarchism itself, 
especially as expressed in the Aragon collectives. Chomsky puts the blame 
on "authoritarian centralization" rather than on a class-collaborationist 
Soviet foreign policy. The Marxist view, contrary to Chomsky's, is that 
centralization cannot be a meaningful term when detached from political 
economy and such key class criteria as ownership of the means of production.

Chomsky leaned at early date toward the Israel kibbutz as some kind of 
"socialist experiment", long after the colonization intentions of the 
settlers had become obvious. He did turn against the particular kibbutz he 
worked on, but not because of any economic shortcomings. Instead, the 
racism of the settlers was the key factor. To this day, Chomsky still 
speaks positively about the Zionist outposts without really addressing 
concerns about the class nature of the Israeli state. (Guardian, May 14, 2001)

Chomsky has never written systematically about how his brand of small-scale 
socialism will be achieved. This would require a discussion of matters such 
as human agency and economic policy that seem to matter little to him. For 
despite his affiliation with a movement that wrote a vast literature on 
such questions, Chomsky himself often seems content to proclaim its 
superiority to state socialism on face value.

Understandably, this attitude often veers off into a kind of moralizing 
that is symptomatic of the mood of the intelligentsia at the beginning of 
the Cold War, when both "camps" seemed equally evil--the very time indeed 
that Noam Chomsky was maturing politically and intellectually. Barsky comments:

>>Among those figures he was drawn to, George Orwell is especially 
fascinating, both because of the impact that he had on a broad spectrum of 
society and the numerous contacts and acquaintances he had in the 
libertarian left. Chomsky refers to Orwell frequently in his political 
writings, and when one reads Orwell's works, the reasons for his attraction 
to someone interested in the Spanish Civil War from an anarchist 
perspective become clear.<<

Armed with Orwell's sometimes troubling "pox on both your houses" outlook, 
Chomsky has often tended to evoke the beleaguered hero of "1984" who faced 
a world divided into equally evil totalitarian powers. This mindset shapes 
his discourse on the double-speak of an entire generation of US 
administrations. Unfortunately, this stance cannot do justice to the 
underlying dynamic of the clash between the superpowers, which is much more 
of a function of divergent class interests than blind worship of the State. 
In all fairness to Chomsky, as we shall see momentarily, this perspective 
has not led him to blur over the dominant and aggressive character of the 
Anglo-American imperialism, as it did Orwell who eventually collaborated 
with the British secret police against the "enemies" of freedom.

Indeed, much of the wrath directed against Chomsky seems tied up with his 
refusal to bend an inch toward the kind of free world triumphalism Francis 
Fukuyama upheld. If anything, Chomsky's antagonism toward American 
imperialism has only deepened since the end of the cold war.

For Chomsky, the cold war was essentially a confrontation along North-South 
lines rather than East-West. In this 500-year war of conquest against 
colonized peoples, anarchism or left communism rarely played a prominent 
role. But this does not prevent Chomsky from identifying with those in 
struggle, whatever their ideology.

Turning to "World Orders Old and New,"(based on lectures given at the 
American University in Cairo in 1993), we find a remarkable analysis of the 
cold war that, despite Chomsky's hostility to the Kremlin, elucidates the 
one-sided nature of the conflict. Citing Guatemalan journalist Julio Godoy, 
Chomsky concurs that Eastern Europeans were "luckier than Central 
Americans." While Prague was degrading and humiliating reformers, the US 
backed government in Guatemala was organizing a virtual genocide that 
ultimately cost the lives of 150,000 indigenous people. Indeed, the 
fearlessness of the Czech students' "Velvet Revolution" might just be 
explained by the refusal of the Czech army to shoot to kill.

Despite his animosity toward the USSR, he is even-handed about its place in 
history. In contrast to European and American imperialism, the Soviet Union 
appeared to operate on principles other than profit. During the period of 
Soviet "exploitation" of Eastern Europe, the satellite countries actually 
had a higher standard of living than the mother country. This was the 
result of a huge subsidy, amounting to $80 billion in the 1970s.

For Chomsky, the collapse of the Soviet Union did not usher in the 
emancipation of humanity. Instead, without the USSR as a counter-balance, 
imperialism has been able to step up the level of exploitation in the third 
world, including Nicaragua where the Sandinista revolution had been toppled:

>>It is only fair to add that the wonders of the free market have opened 
alternatives, not only for rich landowners, speculators, corporations and 
other privileged sectors, but even for the starving children who press 
their faces against car windows at street corners at night, pleading for a 
few cents to survive. Describing the miserable plight of Managua's street 
children David Werner, the author of "Where There is No Doctor" and other 
books on health and society, writes that "marketing shoe cement to children 
has become a lucrative business," and imports from multinational suppliers 
are rising nicely as "shopkeepers in depressed communities do a thriving 
business with weekly refills of the children's little bottles" for 
glue-sniffing said to "take away hunger." The miracle of the market is 
again at work, though Nicaraguans still have much to learn.<<

Although Chomsky has not written much in the way of a theoretical 
appreciation of the short-lived Sandinista revolution, there is little 
doubt that this country engaged his sympathies in a way that other 
countries with Marxist leaderships did not. Chomsky spoke out tirelessly to 
defend Nicaragua during the late 1980s. In a debate with John Silber, the 
Reaganite President of Boston University, Chomsky said:

>>Now, to return to Nicaragua and to return to the real world, I never 
described the Sandinistas as perfect democrats or whatever your phrase was. 
What I did was quote the World Bank, OXFAM, the Jesuit Order and others who 
recognize that what they were doing was to use the meager resources of that 
country for the benefit of the poor majority. That's why health standards 
shot up. That's why literacy shot up. That's why agrarian reform proceeded, 
the only place in the region. That's why subsistence agriculture improved 
and consumption of food increased and that's why we attacked them. It had 
nothing to do with democracy.<<
http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/interviews/86-silber.html

Chomsky did not allow his ideological predispositions to interfere with his 
perception of reality. Anybody who visited Nicaragua during this period, 
including Chomsky, came away with a deep appreciation for the dedication 
and honesty of the FSLN. (Chomsky's own daughter Avi was a volunteer with 
Tecnica, an organization that involved hundreds of others, included the 
author of this article.)

After the downfall of the Central American revolution, the enemies of US 
imperialism have been much easier to demonize. While tens of thousands of 
US citizens participated in Sister Cities projects for Nicaragua or raised 
money for the FMLN in El Salvador, solidarity on behalf of Iraq or 
Yugoslavia has been much more difficult to organize for obvious reasons.

Many intellectuals, who found it relatively easy to call for an end to the 
contra war, capitulated during the war against Iraq and Yugoslavia. 
Chomsky's stubborn refusal to go along with the "humanitarian intervention" 
mood in these circles led to his isolation from their ranks, but growing 
popularity among youthful radicals who questioned not only the motives of 
the USA but the effectiveness of replacing one dictator with another.

No matter how repugnant Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic appeared to 
rightward moving American progressives, September 11th constituted a 
profound challenge to the anti-interventionist left. There was and still is 
enormous pressure to conform to the ruling class consensus on the war, on 
the basis--to use Michael Berube's less than felicitous language--that "who 
would deny that a nation, once attacked, has the right to respond with 
military force." Surely, it is a different matter when Reagan supported the 
contras in Nicaragua. The Sandinistas never attacked a single American citizen.

But when three airplanes came crashing into the Pentagon and the Twin 
Towers, many journalists and intellectuals appeared ready to enlist in the 
Marines to wreak vengeance, if they hadn't been of such advanced years.

Mark Naison, a historian favorable to the CPUSA, told the New York Observer 
"if anyone said anything about America?s imperialist activities making it 
the moral equivalent of the Taliban and Al Qaeda ? I would beat them up. 
I?m six feet tall and 200 pounds."
http://www.nyobserver.com/pages/story.asp?ID=4975

Against this rising tide of bellicosity and xenophobia, Chomsky's voice has 
been a beacon of calmness and reason. In its rush to organize a "war 
against terrorism," the USA conveniently ignores the fact that it is one of 
most dangerous terrorist states in the world. "9-11" is a short anthology 
of interviews with Noam Chomsky that has become a best seller. It is one of 
the few places, outside of the Internet and the ghettoized socialist press, 
that ordinary citizens can get a counter-analysis.

Drawing from a wealth of previous research, Chomsky reminds his readers of 
US culpability without excusing the attack on the WTC and the Pentagon, 
which he characterizes as "horrifying atrocities."

The pamphlet contains Chomsky's comparison of Clinton's attack on a 
medicinal factory in Khartoum with the September 11th attacks, which 
enraged Christopher Hitchens to no end:

>>According to credible analyses readily available to us, then, 
proportional to population, the destruction of Al-Shifa is as if the bin 
Laden network, in a single attack on the U.S., caused "hundreds of 
thousands of people-many of them children-to suffer and die from easily 
treatable diseases," though the analogy, as noted, is unfair. Sudan is "one 
of the least developed areas in the world. Its harsh climate, scattered 
populations, health hazards and crumbling infrastructure combine to make 
life for many Sudanese a struggle for survival", a country with endemic 
malaria, tuberculosis, and many other diseases, where "periodic outbreaks 
of meningitis or cholera are not uncommon," so affordable medicines are a 
dire necessity (Jonathan Belke and Kamal ElFaki, technical reports from the 
field for the Near East Foundation). It is, furthermore, a country with 
limited arable land, a chronic shortage of potable water, a huge death 
rate, little industry, an unserviceable debt, wracked with AIDS, devastated 
by a vicious and destructive internal war, and under severe sanctions. What 
is happening within is largely speculation, including Belke's (quite 
plausible) estimate that within a year tens of thousands had already 
"suffered and died" as the result of the destruction of the major 
facilities for producing affordable drugs and veterinary medicines.<<

Concrete examinations of US criminality such as these are Chomsky's strong 
point, rather than socialist ideology. Over the decades, he has invested 
countless hours into removing the tarnished halo from the head of US 
foreign policy. As US politics becomes increasingly polarized, his books 
will continue to be an extremely valuable resource for the left, no matter 
his views on Kibbutzim or the Spanish Civil War.

This article will conclude with an examination of some controversies 
attached to Chomsky's political career that were used in a demagogic 
fashion against him during the struggle over support for the "war on 
terror." I speak of the Faurisson and Khmer Rouge affairs that have dogged 
Chomsky over the years no matter how often and how lucidly he has tried to 
defend his reputation against ideological lynch gangs.

For an example of how these issues were used against Chomsky, we turn to 
Alterman's MSNBC blog cited earlier. He writes:

>>As for Noam, well, it is unfair to compare him to Bill Bennett, because 
a) he does appear to be decent person with very good manners, and b) he has 
a day job as perhaps the most important linguistic philosopher since 
Wittgenstein. But politically, I'm sorry. I defended the guy for years, 
even through the Faurisson affair. And I think he did a lot of good work on 
East Timor. But look at the man's political judgment. He defended 
Faurisson. He championed the Khmer Rouge.<<

To put Chomsky's defense of Faurisson's right to teach in perspective, it 
is necessary to understand that he has been a free speech absolutist from 
early on.

In Chapter Four of Barsky's study, we learn that Chomsky views the 
university as some kind of refuge from politics and the class struggle. As 
Chomsky put it in 1996, "Nothing should be done to impede people from 
teaching and doing their research even if at that very moment it was being 
used to massacre and destroy."

During the time Chomsky was involved with protests against the war in 
Vietnam, he was always hostile--like Theodor Adorno--to on-campus protests 
that got in the way of pursuing the Truth. It was one thing to march 
against the war; it was another thing entirely to occupy a building that 
was dedicated to counter-insurgency research. According to Barsky, Chomsky 
admired "the challenge to the universities" but thought their rebellions 
were "largely misguided," and he "criticized [them] as they were in 
progress at Berkeley (1966) and Columbia (1968) particularly. This is 
corroborated by Norman Mailer, who spent time with Chomsky in a jail cell 
after being arrested at the Pentagon protest in 1969: "He had, in fact, 
great reservations about the form that the 1968 student uprisings 
ultimately took."

When Robert Faurisson, a holocaust denier, was relieved of his duties at 
the University of Lyon, Chomsky signed a petition on his behalf. Certainly, 
if scientists at MIT could conduct research even if it was used to 
"massacre and destroy", why would deny the right of a professor to earn a 
living even if he was guilty of nothing except of defending such practices 
in his spare time. While this act might have been understood on its own 
terms, Chomsky's 'obiter dictum' that "I have nothing to say here about the 
work of Robert Faurisson or his critics, of which I know very little, or 
about the topics they address, concerning which I have no special 
knowledge" raised hackles, as did his characterization of Faurisson as "a 
relatively apolitical liberal of some sort".

This led French Marxist antiquities scholar Pierre Vidal-Naquet to write a 
pointed reply to Chomsky. Even on free speech grounds, he found the 
petition dubious. It stated that Faurisson had been prevented from 
conducting research in public libraries and archives, an allegation that is 
certainly false according to Vidal-Naquet. Furthermore, Faurisson's books 
on the holocaust have been published without interference and he has given 
interviews on two occasions to Le Monde. Addressing Chomsky in sorrow just 
as much as anger, Vidal-Naquet writes in Assassins of Memory:

>>The simple truth, Noam Chomsky, is that you were unable to abide by the 
ethical maxim that you had imposed. You had the right to say: my worst 
enemy has the right to be free, on condition that he not ask for my death 
or that of my brothers. You did not have the right to say: my worst enemy 
is a comrade, or a "relatively apolitical sort of liberal." You did not 
have the right to take a falsifier of history and to recast him in the 
colors of truth.<<

When Chomsky and his writing partner Edward Herman were charged with 
apologetics on behalf of the Khmer Rouge, whose assault on the people of 
Cambodia attained near-genocidal proportions, the attack had as much merit 
as it did in the Faurisson case. While poor judgment may explain the error 
in the first instance, Chomsky and Herman's scholarship on the events in 
Cambodia were simply not acceptable to established wisdom in left-liberal 
circles. Their sin was to compare the relative indifference to the 
slaughter in East Timor to that in Cambodia, just as it was more recently 
in comparing the September 11th attacks to the Khartoum bombing. A 
statement such as this, contained in "The Political Economy of Human 
Rights," was unacceptable:

>>In the case of Cambodia reported atrocities have not only been eagerly 
seized upon by the Western media but also embellished by substantial 
fabrications--which, interestingly, persist even long after they are 
exposed. The case of Timor is radically different. The media have shown no 
interest in examining the atrocities of the Indonesian invaders, though 
even in absolute numbers these are on the same scale as those reported by 
sources of comparable credibility concerning Cambodia, and relative to 
population, are many times as great.<<

Furthermore, Chomsky and Herman had the temerity to question the casualty 
statistics in Francois Ponchaud's "Année Zéro," a book that had a major 
impact on the Western intelligentsia in the mid-1970s, particularly through 
a review of it by Jean Lacouture that appeared in the New York Review of 
Books, a journal that has been responsible for demonizing one enemy of US 
imperialism after another for over three decades. While not questioning the 
cruelty of the Khmer Rouge, Chomsky observed that Lacouture had inflated 
Ponchaud's estimates of civilian casualties to the tune of two million. In 
a correction published subsequently in the NY Review, Lacouture withdrew 
his claim and confessed that he "should have checked more accurately the 
figures on victims, figures deriving from sources that are, moreover, 
questionable." In "Chomsky's Politics," Milan Rai observes that the two 
million figure--despite the correction--became part of official history.

From the standpoint of Marxism, Chomsky's preeminent place in American 
politics represents something of a challenge. In contrast to the legions of 
Marxist scholars who jet set from conference to conference delivering 
obscure papers on how to re-interpret the Grundrisse or understand Marx 
from the perspective of French poststructuralism, Chomsky has always 
preferred speaking to community groups or activists:

What are called "conferences"gatherings of intellectualsI almost never 
attend. I do give endless talks and take part in many forums, but not the 
kind that would be called conferences. I almost always turn down 
invitations to these. Thus I almost never go to the Socialist Scholars 
Conference (though I have a lot of personal friends there), or to academic 
and professional conferences, etc. Virtually all of my talks are for 
popular and activist groups, though typically, they are combined with talks 
at universities, sometimes seminars, but more often for mass audiences 
interested in the general area.

If Chomsky can be infuriatingly superficial on the major questions of our 
epoch, including the nature of the USSR, he more than compensates through 
his passionate devotion to the underdog. His works have been geared to 
people new to radical politics, who are trying to make sense of the 
discrepancy between bourgeois democracy's lofty professed ideals and the 
actual record of blood, plunder and rape. The Marxist movement can learn 
much from Chomsky, most of all how to speak to the ordinary citizen. As 
late capitalism's contradictions continue to mount, there will be a 
tremendous imperative to speak with clarity and with authority. To do this 
successfully, we must pay careful attention to Chomsky's writings. Indeed, 
for all of Chomsky's frequent disparaging of Marxian socialism, his 
uniquely prophetic voice reminds us of none other than Karl Marx's own.



Louis Proyect
www.marxmail.org