Chomsky, Bloody Chomsky: A Profile in Complexity

I do not speak as a lapsed disciple of Chomsky’s, as did erstwhile Nation journalist Christopher Hitchens, claiming that Chomsky is losing the qualities that made him a great moral and political tutor in the years of the Indochina war (Nation, 10/4/01). Nor do I wish to unilaterally demean the man, for his ideas are important, and his books, academic and popular alike, are well worth reading. It is then sorrowful, but also instructive, that the genial old professor behind such monumental political works as Deterring Democracy, Manufacturing Consent and American Policy and the New Mandarins should stoop to the following:

The primary victims [of the 9/11 attacks], as usual, were working people: janitors, secretaries, firemen, etc. It is likely to be a crushing blow to Palestinians and other poor and oppressed people.

In any context the above would be appalling, but coming from one who has made a career of pointing out the often grotesque differences between worthy and unworthy victims (see Manufacturing Consent or The Washington Connection for his instructive comparison of Cambodia and East Timor), the statement indicates a deeply troubled mind, one divided against itself. The words yearn for proper compassion, but can only express such for worthy peoples (i.e. those without advanced degrees and those not pulling down six-figure incomes as brokers and financiers). It seems a sick sort of affirmative action coming from the man who railed against our collective ignorance of the half million ethnic Chinese and quarter million Timorese killed by a U.S. client (Indonesia’s Suharto) with U.S. support. So some victims are more equal than others, even for this erstwhile firm believer in Cartesian common sense. One would also think that the Palestinian cause could stand on its own. At the very least, Chomsky would do well not to mourn the effects the 9/11 slaughter would have on these poor and oppressed people halfway across the globe, particularly when many of said people were inconveniently seen cheering in the aftermath.

Or take the following passage from of Chomsky’s latest proper book, The New Military Humanism: Kosovo, East Timor and the Standards of the West, bandied about much by his critics in the aftermath of 9/11, though usually for the wrong reasons:

The huge slaughter in East Timor is (at least) comparable to the terrible atrocities that can plausibly be attributed to Milosevic in the earlier wars in Yugoslavia, and responsibility is far easier to assign, with no complicating factors. If proponents of the “repetition of Bosnia” thesis intend it seriously, they should certainly have been calling for the bombing of Jakarta–indeed Washington and London–in early 1998 so as not to allow in East Timor a repetition of the crimes that Indonesia, the US, and the UK had perpetrated there for a quarter-century. And when the new generation of leaders refused to pursue this honorable course, they should have been leading citizens to do so themselves, perhaps joining the Bin Laden network. These conclusions follow straightforwardly, if we assume that the thesis is intended as something more than apologetics for state violence (39).

Although Chomsky was not endorsing the bin Laden network, as some have suggested, it is telling that he chose bin Laden as the voice one could plausibly choose to answer for the injustice in Timor. In other words, a bomb is a bomb is a bomb, regardless of intent or philosophy. Two other key motifs stand out: one a stultifying equivalence and the other a strange lack thereof. First: the implication is that since we did nothing to help the Timorese, we should do nothing to help Muslims put to the sword by Milosevic. Whatever its ideological underpinning, this is a recipe for more rather than less suffering. Indeed, he may be willing to offer human sacrifice in the name of this odd form of tough love; though some leftists (frequent Chomsky collaborator and University of Pennsylvania professor Edward Herman, for example) went further during the Balkan wars, assailing not double standards but rather NATO’s aggression against the real victim - the Serbs!