Chomsky, Bloody Chomsky: A Profile in Complexity

As famed M.I.T. linguist and political dissident Avram Noam Chomsky, arguably the most important intellectual alive approaches his eighth decade on earth, and perhaps his fifth as the chief fly in the ointment of American political culture, he shows little indication of modifying any of his hardline and absolutist beliefs. He certainly did not seem phased by the terrorist slaughter of September 11, brushing it out of the way to get on with business as usual – indeed, rushing out yet another screed in his favored medium of late, a pamphlet of interviews titled 9-11 conducted by a kneeling acolyte asking predigested questions.

The contemporary hero of the campus left, known to grace the covers of punk zines and vinyl B-sides, Chomsky is prominent among a small cabal of leftists (he used to call himself an anarcho-syndicalist) who have become convenient punching bags for both irate neoconservatives and liberals out to prove their war mettle in the aftermath of 9/11. The distinguished list includes Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, Harold Pinter, Joan Didion, Barbara Kingsolver and Gore Vidal, eminences of a literary culture that had been in fair decline long before Osama Bin Laden first started to show up in the morning papers. I say distinguished without irony. All of the above listed, not least of all Chomsky, are great minds in every sense of that term, and one hopes they will be remembered for their intellectual and literary achievements rather than their intellectual abdication in the face of an outright attack on the civilization that facilitated those achievements in the first place.

I have faith, as Chomsky has often professed to, in the awesome infinity and wonder of human creative potential. He came to it as the greatest linguist of the 20th century. I arrive from a humbler vantage point, a mere appreciator of great literature and great thought. I can only pray Norman Mailer will enter history as the best American prose writer after Faulkner, the mythic pen behind Armies of the Night and Ancient Evenings, and not as the bitter old coot who said that the World Trade Center was ugly anyway, so what’s the big deal? Ditto Gore Vidal for his monumental series of America novels, and not his suggestion that the Bush administration facilitated the 9/11 attacks to line the pockets of their business friends. Jean-Paul Sartre, I’m sure, will go down as the mind behind the most important philosophy of his century, and not as an apologist for the Soviet abattoir.
But of all these figures, Chomsky seems the most bent on shadowing his original and very real achievements with a relentless assault on liberal democracy, to the point one must assume that in his case, old Noam himself would like the above criteria reversed.

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!

Chomsky stops short of that, but hedges his bets in a more personally emblematic fashion by paying lip service to terrible Serb atrocities while brushing them out of the way. While these can only plausibly be attributed to Milosevic, Timorese deaths are far easier to assign, with no complicating factors. Translated: the Balkans were tragic, but far too complex a region for something so trite as assignation of blame, while the blood of East Timor is squarely on our hands. Indeed, the Indonesian rape of East Timor was a gross atrocity, and culpability should be searched out wherever it may lie, including in our own government. But every war has complicating factors. That the Nazi holocaust had complicating factors (the Versailles treaty, massacres carried out by local Slavic clients) doesn’t make it too difficult to assign true blame. In fact, the slaughters in Bosnia/Kosovo and Indonesia are fairly similar in kind, with rampaging paramilitaries acting on the behalf of their despotic leaders in a vain, nationalist hope to avoid the secession of a region. In both cases, internecine civil war was used as a pretext to cover up genocide, a rhetorical device Chomsky knows well and has derided in the past.

Chomsky has often rightly pointed out the Orwellian doublespeak rampant in our political culture – it’s terrorism when they do it to us, but not when we do it to them, the Soviets invade Afghanistan while we defend South Vietnam, left-wing dictatorships are totalitarian while right-wing juntas are taking significant steps toward democracy, etc. While his demurral on the real threat of Al Qaeda is shameful, he is correct that terrorism has been used throughout this century by states to justify unjustifiable aggression. He has worthily argued that there is a substantive difference between terrorism backed by state apparatus and the terrorist violence of nationalist insurgents behind a justifiable cause. Yet here we are in thorny territory, and neither I nor Chomsky, I hope, would wish to excuse the murder of civilians, any more than state planners could morally rationalize the free-fire zones of General Westmoreland’s South Vietnam, or the Soviet carpet mining of Afghanistan.

However, look closely and Chomsky engages in doublespeak of his own, often to the detriment of his very worthy moral and social arguments. In After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina & the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology, he discusses refugee populations ignored in the West, as compared to publicized ones fleeing the Khmer Rouge or the conquering North Vietnamese:

A fuller account of refugees in Asia by mid-1978 would include the quarter of a million driven from their homes in West Asia by Israeli troops in March, 1978 after bombing of cities, villages and refugee camps with U.S. cluster bomb units and heavy artillery, among other devices, in attacks reminiscent of VietnamÖ By the latter part of 1978, we may add several hundred thousand Maronites driven from Lebanon by Syrian bombardment, added to the earlier Lebanese Muslim and Palestinian victims of Syrian force as Lebanon is further dismembered by civil strife and foreign invasion and intrigue too complex and remote from our focus here to receive a proper discussion (52-53).

Note the prevarication in the second example, similar to his previous juxtaposition of the Balkans and East Timor. Israel simply bombed the poor civilians out of their homes with no cause whatsoever, in attacks reminiscent of Vietnam; Syria apparently did something similar, but in its case we are dealing with intrigue too complex for the same forceful denunciation. Again, sometimes a corpse is not a corpse, nor a refugee a refugee. According to Chomsky, Israel did not even invade a country, it simply killed or expelled people from West Asia, while Syria got involved in Lebanon’s civil strife, a rhetorical device I spoke of earlier. that the author has elsewhere critiqued. Also, though Syria apparently caused more refugees, Chomsky’s language at first seems to frame Israel’s actions more dramatically – a quarter million versus several hundred thousand. To speak Chomskyan, I would say that he seems to bear out two forms of state oppression – Nefarious (as in Indonesia or Israel, U.S. clients) and Complex (Syria or Serbia, former Soviet allies).

Chomsky’s immediate comparison of the World Trade Center attacks to Clinton’s rocketing of Somalia’s Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in 1998 followed in this vein: The terrorist attacks were major atrocities. In scale they may not reach the level of many others, for example, Clinton’s bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext, destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and killing unknown numbers of people. So, they were both major atrocities. Good enough, get that out of the way and then explain the real atrocity, a bombing with no credible pretext (are we to assume that bin Laden had a credible pretext?) that killed unknown numbers of people – unlike the 9/11 attacks, whose death toll was apparently clear to Chomsky on 9/12.

Indeed, as much as Chomsky has made a living as a critic of American power, his most extreme and strange animus has always been reserved for Israel, which he glibly refers to as a U.S. military base (even though one can think of many comparable U.S. clients about which Chomsky has never written a 500-page book). Consider this passage from Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians:

Shortly after Israel announced its magnanimity in agreeing to a partial withdrawal from Lebanon under the conditions reviewed, the USSR announced that Kabul has expressed its readiness, in agreement with the USSR, for withdrawal of the total, limited Soviet contingent from [Afghan] territory and even expressed their willingness to give a timetable in this regard. The USSR is of course prepared to withdraw completely in conformity with the wishes of the legitimate government of Afghanistan, though there remains the problem of guaranteeing nonintervention in Afghanistan from the territories of other states, intervention which is taking place every day, which should be stopped, the Soviet spokesman asserted – referring to intervention by U.S.-backed guerillas based in Pakistan, who carry out violence and disruption. We are all supposed to be deeply impressed (427).

In such torturous prose, it is not clear Chomsky is even sure whether or not he is being sarcastic – a device he would typically employ with clarity and aplomb. At the very least, we are asked to compare Israel’s invasion of Lebanon with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, both of which sought to prop up (a la Vietnam) corrupt and illegitimate local clients and smash threatening peasant insurgencies. But Chomsky does not extend the comparison as he did with Kosovo and Timor, because to do so would be to admit that Israel did withdraw to a limited southern occupation that same year, after which most of the carnage, including massacres of Palestinians far worse than Sabra and Shatila, was caused by Syrian and Iranian-backed clients. Actually, if Chomsky were to compare numbers, as he liked to do while protesting the Kosovo war, he could point out that Israel would have had to invade Lebanon 75 times over to cause the carnage Brezhnev brought Afghanistan, where 1.3 million were killed and more antipersonnel mines sown than in any war in modern history. Also, ever the media critic, he could have questioned the glut of coverage given to the Israeli siege of Beirut, which rendered more media attention in months than Afghanistan did in ten years, and not quite all of it, as he would have us believe, sympathetic to the Israelis.

As one who has been slighted with that loaded sobriquet self-hating Jew, (by an exasperated Hebrew school teacher) I would be remiss in applying the same to Chomsky, as have many of his Jewish detractors. He has even been somewhat noble in braving the inevitable mortar fire that comes before any Jew who tries to air Israel’s dirty laundry in public, especially America’s public, and I believe morally genuine in his compassion for the Palestinians, whose suffering is real and who have repeatedly been sold out by their own leaders and the Arab states, as well as swept aside by the U.S.-Israel axis. Still, something in Chomsky’s critique of Israel rankles, suggesting that there may be psychology at work here apart from a ubiquitous penchant toward the side of the downtrodden (a position the Jews forfeited when they won their first war). The original closing chapter of Fateful Triangle, The Road to Armaggedeon, now reads rather embarrassingly, though Chomsky has done nothing to modify or even reinterpret his rhetoric: Sooner or later Israel will face a military defeat – it came close in 1973 – or the need to resort to a nuclear threat, with consequences that one hesitates to imagine (442). Never mind that Israel came nowhere close to defeat in 1973 but why, of any country, did Chomsky make Israel the world’s primary nuclear fall guy?

His final conclusion: there is a Samson complex (467) afoot in Israeli society, whereby, the Biblical tale as precedent, Israel will make sure they destroy everyone else along with themselves, when it comes down to brass tacks. Now, what would Chomsky’s reaction be if I suggested that apocalyptic bin Ladenism is simply a reflex of the Muslim character, a Saladin complex? If he were to call me a racist, as he surely and correctly would, then how are we to interpret his assessment of the Jews? Since 1983, as far as I am aware, Israel has not led us into nuclear holocaust. It is a truism, as Chomsky likes to say, that Pakistan and India came far closer to giving the world its second nuclear war (more than once) than Israel ever has – yet we get no 500-page tome on that irascible conflict. In Fateful Triangle, Chomsky gives dire, and not entirely baseless, warnings of a religious chauvinist element taking over Israeli democracy, with implications of regional war and perhaps ethnic cleansing to follow. However, when Western conservatives portended the same about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in places like Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia or North Africa, Chomsky brushed them off as irrational bigots fanning the flames of hatred.

In addition, while Israel has moved toward rapprochement with the Palestinians in the ’90s, two other regional powers have emerged spouting apocalyptic rhetoric and sporting nuclear weapons programs-Iraq and Iran. But, in the new preface to Fateful Triangle, Chomsky wrote, The propaganda campaign about ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ has its farcical elements – even putting aside the fact that U.S. culture compares with Iran in its religious fundamentalism (xi). Excuse me? Even if this were true, it is a pretty sorry gloss over the fact that the U.S. has an elected government with centuries of secular framework, whereas Iran is ruled by despot Mullahs who can legislate and imprison without restraint, according to their own interpretations of Islamic law. Former Iranian premier Rafsanjani has stated bluntly that if Iran goes nuclear, Israel will be a hole in the ground. Although he may not speak for anyone but a small minority, Chomsky could still have mentioned it, somewhere in his dissection of the farce that is Islamism, with 9/11 being its comedic final act.

Then there is Saddam Hussein, who Chomsky rightly calls a monster while, like his colleagues, opposing any initiative to get rid of him. He never wonders what would have happened, either in the Gulf War or more recently, if Israel had not aborted Iraq’s nuclear program in 1981. The same threats apply today, should Hussein acquire nuclear capability, though Chomsky does not seem nearly so distressed now. Once again, he never wrote a Fateful Triangle about Iraq when it was a U.S. client waging a brutal war on its neighbors and its own citizenry, atrocities far worse than anything of which Israel can be accused. Indeed, in his most recent musings on the Iraq situation, A Modest Proposal, he virtually repeats the bizarre scenarios at the end of Fateful Triangle. The article begins as a purported Swiftian satire on the absurdity of the coming war: Chomsky suggests we should have Iran invade Iraq instead of doing it ourselves. Chomsky concludes by asserting that: the radical nationalists in Washington have very close links with Israeli ultra-nationalists . . . [whose goals] include far-reaching plans for reconstructing the Middle East along lines resembling the former Ottoman Empire, but now with the U.S. and its offshore military base in Israel in charge, cooperating with Turkey. Wow.

Never mind the fact that if anyone in the region has expressed a wish to pick up the Ottoman mantle, it is an Osama bin Laden or a Saddam Hussein. Could the man who wrote Syntactic Structures, who gave us Universal Grammar and single-handedly began a great debunking of the B.F. Skinner- tabula rasa framework really be responsible for this paranoid delusion? I have no trouble calling the above a malign and evil shadow cast by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and in this light, it is hard to see Chomsky’s now-infamous defense of French holocaust revisionist Robert Faurisson as an unadorned amicus curae brief for free speech.

What is most galling is that Chomsky, a writer I respect and have always regarded highly, gives us an extremist version of far more sane questions put forth by paleoconservatives like Pat Buchanan and Robert Novak, both of whom I utterly despise. Novak was heard to remark, quite plausibly, If we are going to invade Iraq to make the region safer for Israel, then the president should tell people that. Fair enough. But when Chomsky outflanks Buchanan on that exhumed subject-the World Zionist conspiracy-we have truly entered the land of Jonathan Swift.

In 1991 Chomsky rightly reminded us that if Hussein is Satan, as the media and Bush I were suggesting, then he is a Satan with Made in America on the tag. Moreover in the absolute terms of what people insist on calling international law, (though no such thing has ever existed) Hussein’s annexation of Kuwait differed little from Bush I’s regime change in Panama City two years earlier. Yet when the human rights activist scoffed at our protection of the Kurds in northern Iraq, asking why the same standard did not apply to the Kurds of Turkey, the queasy sense of abstract logic ultimately gives way to a simple question – would he rather we had abandoned the Iraqi Kurds to their fate? It is hard to read Chomsky without sometimes thinking that if two wrongs don’t quite make a right, at least they are preferable to the invariable cognitive dissonance of international relations. Humanitarian consequences, he seems to argue, do not make humanitarian intervention – yet, elsewhere, he calls India’s invasion of East Pakistan (1971) and Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia (1979) true humanitarian interventions-even though it is plain to anyone remotely versed in the histories that both actions had considerably colder geopolitical factors framing them. But such complexity and intrigue, to borrow his terms, tarnish only the good name of NATO, not that of communist Hanoi or nonaligned Delhi.

Chomsky has often been asked how he would connect his linguistic and political work. He has never produced a satisfactory answer, sometimes going so far as to say that there is no connection, only a responsibility he felt to speak out against injustice. If his career simply showed protests against power’s potential for barbarism toward the weak or dissident – from Stalin, Mao and Mengistu to LBJ, Nixon and Begin – I could take his word for it. But there was always more.

Indeed, Chomsky’s politics are not disconnected from his linguistics – rather, the two stand in fundamental opposition. It can be said in distillation of his Universal Grammar that he brought Darwinism and evolutionary theory to bear on the field of cognitive science, with revolutionary results. If only he had followed the logical paths of his own thought. Like the dearly departed Stephen Jay Gould, Chomsky accepted the revolution that was evolution while espousing politics that radically contradict its every logical unfolding. Can one outline a hard-wired, innate structure to the brain without accepting that man is in some sense a hierarchical animal, a violent animal, an animal with chaotic will to power alongside drives toward socialization and love? Wasn’t this the Achilles Heel of Marxism? If so, it must bode just as poorly for anarcho-syndicalism, which as far as I can tell is simply an adornment of the primitive stage of Marx’s communism.

I speak with sorrow, not vindication. That Chomsky was a great moral and political tutor for many is obvious. At his best, he is compassionate and enlightening, disarmingly funny and fiercely intelligent. To watch him debate William Buckley in the adulatory documentary Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1993) it is impossible not to root for him – the genial, mousy, bespectacled academic in his workaday trousers, going up against that insufferable patrician with his ancien regime sneer and his cigarette holder. And despite the murky ideology that may lie beneath, his protests against U.S. and Israeli policy took real moral courage, and were no doubt framed by strong human compassion. But I would not be the first to point out that for all his comparisons of U.S. and Soviet propaganda during the Cold War, Chomsky the intellectual dissident never risked finding himself working a pickaxe in Siberia, or hooked up to electrodes in a Kazakh psychiatric hospital. That means something, and it is a distinction he has always sedulously avoided.

Chomsky was always good at pointing out the tests history gives one in his or her own intellectual climate – do you criticize the crimes of your own state alongside those of your enemies? Does one take Ronald Reagan’s word as gospel when he quips, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, referring not only to the Afghan mujahedin but to thugs like Jonas Savimbi and the Nicaraguan Contras? Does one then turn around and insist there is no room for ambivalence when the guns point in the other direction, as Reaganite neo-conservatives do now? The Cold War is over, but the tests are not. Indeed, we have just underwent a brand new one courtesy of the Bin Laden network, a test not of patriotism but of plain intellectual allegiance to classically liberal, enlightened, humanist values. Sadly, Chomsky failed that particular test. And if he goes down in history not as a brilliant linguist or humane activist, but as an apologist for Osama, Slobodan and Pol Pot, the blame may lay not so much with any system of state propaganda as with Chomsky himself.