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Noam Chomsky - The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Redux: Using
Privilege to Challenge the State<br>
<br>
Since we often cannot see what is happening before our eyes, it is
perhaps not too surprising that what is at a slight distance removed
is utterly invisible. We have just witnessed an instructive example:
President Obama’s dispatch of 79 commandos into Pakistan on May 1 to
carry out what was evidently a planned assassination of the prime
suspect in the terrorist atrocities of 9/11, Osama bin Laden. Though
the target of the operation, unarmed and with no protection, could
easily have been apprehended, he was simply murdered, his body
dumped at sea without autopsy. The action was deemed “just and
necessary” in the liberal press. There will be no trial, as there
was in the case of Nazi criminals—a fact not overlooked by legal
authorities abroad who approve of the operation but object to the
procedure. As Elaine Scarry reminds us, the prohibition of
assassination in international law traces back to a forceful
denunciation of the practice by Abraham Lincoln, who condemned the
call for assassination as “international outlawry” in 1863, an
“outrage,” which “civilized nations” view with “horror” and merits
the “sternest retaliation.”<br>
<br>
In 1967, writing about the deceit and distortion surrounding the
American invasion of Vietnam, I discussed the responsibility of
intellectuals, borrowing the phrase from an important essay of
Dwight Macdonald’s after World War II. With the tenth anniversary of
9/11 arriving, and widespread approval in the United States of the
assassination of the chief suspect, it seems a fitting time to
revisit that issue. But before thinking about the responsibility of
intellectuals, it is worth clarifying to whom we are referring.<br>
<br>
The concept of intellectuals in the modern sense gained prominence
with the 1898 “Manifesto of the Intellectuals” produced by the
Dreyfusards who, inspired by Emile Zola’s open letter of protest to
France’s president, condemned both the framing of French artillery
officer Alfred Dreyfus on charges of treason and the subsequent
military cover-up. The Dreyfusards’ stance conveys the image of
intellectuals as defenders of justice, confronting power with
courage and integrity. But they were hardly seen that way at the
time. A minority of the educated classes, the Dreyfusards were
bitterly condemned in the mainstream of intellectual life, in
particular by prominent figures among “the immortals of the strongly
anti-Dreyfusard Académie Française,” Steven Lukes writes. To the
novelist, politician, and anti-Dreyfusard leader Maurice Barrès,
Dreyfusards were “anarchists of the lecture-platform.” To another of
these immortals, Ferdinand Brunetière, the very word “intellectual”
signified “one of the most ridiculous eccentricities of our time—I
mean the pretension of raising writers, scientists, professors and
philologists to the rank of supermen,” who dare to “treat our
generals as idiots, our social institutions as absurd and our
traditions as unhealthy.”<br>
<br>
Who then were the intellectuals? The minority inspired by Zola (who
was sentenced to jail for libel, and fled the country)? Or the
immortals of the academy? The question resonates through the ages,
in one or another form, and today offers a framework for determining
the “responsibility of intellectuals.” The phrase is ambiguous: does
it refer to intellectuals’ moral responsibility as decent human
beings in a position to use their privilege and status to advance
the causes of freedom, justice, mercy, peace, and other such
sentimental concerns? Or does it refer to the role they are expected
to play, serving, not derogating, leadership and established
institutions?<br>
<br>
• • •<br>
<br>
One answer came during World War I, when prominent intellectuals on
all sides lined up enthusiastically in support of their own states.<br>
In their “Manifesto of 93 German Intellectuals,” leading figures in
one of the world’s most enlightened states called on the West to
“have faith in us! Believe, that we shall carry on this war to the
end as a civilized nation, to whom the legacy of a Goethe, a
Beethoven, and a Kant, is just as sacred as its own hearths and
homes.” Their counterparts on the other side of the intellectual
trenches matched them in enthusiasm for the noble cause, but went
beyond in self-adulation. In The New Republic they proclaimed, “The
effective and decisive work on behalf of the war has been
accomplished by . . . a class which must be comprehensively but
loosely described as the ‘intellectuals.’” These progressives
believed they were ensuring that the United States entered the war
“under the influence of a moral verdict reached, after the utmost
deliberation by the more thoughtful members of the community.” They
were, in fact, the victims of concoctions of the British Ministry of
Information, which secretly sought “to direct the thought of most of
the world,” but particularly the thought of American progressive
intellectuals who might help to whip a pacifist country into war
fever.<br>
<br>
John Dewey was impressed by the great “psychological and educational
lesson” of the war, which proved that human beings—more precisely,
“the intelligent men of the community”—can “take hold of human
affairs and manage them . . . deliberately and intelligently” to
achieve the ends sought, admirable by definition.<br>
<br>
Not everyone toed the line so obediently, of course. Notable figures
such as Bertrand Russell, Eugene Debs, Rosa Luxemburg, and Karl
Liebknecht were, like Zola, sentenced to prison. Debs was punished
with particular severity—a ten-year prison term for raising
questions about President Wilson’s “war for democracy and human
rights.” Wilson refused him amnesty after the war ended, though
Harding finally relented. Some, such as Thorstein Veblen, were
chastised but treated less harshly; Veblen was fired from his
position in the Food Administration after preparing a report showing
that the shortage of farm labor could be overcome by ending Wilson’s
brutal persecution of labor, specifically the International Workers
of the World. Randolph Bourne was dropped by the progressive
journals after criticizing the “league of benevolently imperialistic
nations” and their exalted endeavors.<br>
<br>
The pattern of praise and punishment is a familiar one throughout
history: those who line up in the service of the state are typically
praised by the general intellectual community, and those who refuse
to line up in service of the state are punished. Thus in retrospect
Wilson and the progressive intellectuals who offered him their
services are greatly honored, but not Debs. Luxemburg and Liebknecht
were murdered and have hardly been heroes of the intellectual
mainstream. Russell continued to be bitterly condemned until after
his death—and in current biographies still is.<br>
<br>
In the 1970s prominent scholars distinguished the two categories of
intellectuals more explicitly. A 1975 study, The Crisis of
Democracy, labeled Brunetière’s ridiculous eccentrics
“value-oriented intellectuals” who pose a “challenge to democratic
government which is, potentially at least, as serious as those posed
in the past by aristocratic cliques, fascist movements, and
communist parties.” Among other misdeeds, these dangerous creatures
“devote themselves to the derogation of leadership, the challenging
of authority,” and they challenge the institutions responsible for
“the indoctrination of the young.” Some even sink to the depths of
questioning the nobility of war aims, as Bourne had. This
castigation of the miscreants who question authority and the
established order was delivered by the scholars of the liberal
internationalist Trilateral Commission; the Carter administration
was largely drawn from their ranks.<br>
<br>
Like The New Republic progressives during World War I, the authors
of The Crisis of Democracy extend the concept of the “intellectual”
beyond Brunetière’s ridiculous eccentrics to include the better sort
as well: the “technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals,”
responsible and serious thinkers who devote themselves to the
constructive work of shaping policy within established institutions
and to ensuring that indoctrination of the young proceeds on course.<br>
<br>
It took Dewey only a few years to shift from the responsible
technocratic and policy-oriented intellectual of World War I to an
anarchist of the lecture-platform, as he denounced the “un-free
press” and questioned “how far genuine intellectual freedom and
social responsibility are possible on any large scale under the
existing economic regime.”<br>
<br>
What particularly troubled the Trilateral scholars was the “excess
of democracy” during the time of troubles, the 1960s, when normally
passive and apathetic parts of the population entered the political
arena to advance their concerns: minorities, women, the young, the
old, working people . . . in short, the population, sometimes called
the “special interests.” They are to be distinguished from those
whom Adam Smith called the “masters of mankind,” who are “the
principal architects” of government policy and pursue their “vile
maxim”: “All for ourselves and nothing for other people.” The role
of the masters in the political arena is not deplored, or discussed,
in the Trilateral volume, presumably because the masters represent
“the national interest,” like those who applauded themselves for
leading the country to war “after the utmost deliberation by the
more thoughtful members of the community” had reached its “moral
verdict.”<br>
<br>
To overcome the excessive burden imposed on the state by the special
interests, the Trilateralists called for more “moderation in
democracy,” a return to passivity on the part of the less deserving,
perhaps even a return to the happy days when “Truman had been able
to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small
number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers,” and democracy therefore
flourished.<br>
<br>
The Trilateralists could well have claimed to be adhering to the
original intent of the Constitution, “intrinsically an aristocratic
document designed to check the democratic tendencies of the period”
by delivering power to a “better sort” of people and barring “those
who were not rich, well born, or prominent from exercising political
power,” in the accurate words of the historian Gordon Wood. In
Madison’s defense, however, we should recognize that his mentality
was pre-capitalist. In determining that power should be in the hands
of “the wealth of the nation,” “a the more capable set of men,” he
envisioned those men on the model of the “enlightened Statesmen” and
“benevolent philosopher” of the imagined Roman world. They would be
“pure and noble,” “men of intelligence, patriotism, property, and
independent circumstances” “whose wisdom may best discern the true
interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice
will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial
considerations.” So endowed, these men would “refine and enlarge the
public views,” guarding the public interest against the “mischiefs”
of democratic majorities. In a similar vein, the progressive
Wilsonian intellectuals might have taken comfort in the discoveries
of the behavioral sciences, explained in 1939 by the psychologist
and education theorist Edward Thorndike:<br>
<br>
It is the great good fortune of mankind that there is a substantial
correlation between intelligence and morality including good will
toward one’s fellows . . . . Consequently our superiors in ability
are on the average our benefactors, and it is often safer to trust
our interests to them than to ourselves.<br>
<br>
A comforting doctrine, though some might feel that Adam Smith had
the sharper eye.<br>
<br>
• • •<br>
<br>
Since power tends to prevail, intellectuals who serve their
governments are considered responsible, and value-oriented
intellectuals are dismissed or denigrated. At home that is.<br>
<br>
With regard to enemies, the distinction between the two categories
of intellectuals is retained, but with values reversed. In the old
Soviet Union, the value-oriented intellectuals were the honored
dissidents, while we had only contempt for the apparatchiks and
commissars, the technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals.
Similarly in Iran we honor the courageous dissidents and condemn
those who defend the clerical establishment. And elsewhere
generally.<br>
<br>
The honorable term “dissident” is used selectively. It does not, of
course, apply, with its favorable connotations, to value-oriented
intellectuals at home or to those who combat U.S.-supported tyranny
abroad. Take the interesting case of Nelson Mandela, who was removed
from the official terrorist list in 2008, and can now travel to the
United States without special authorization.<br>
<br>
Twenty years earlier, he was the criminal leader of one of the
world’s “more notorious terrorist groups,” according to a Pentagon
report. That is why President Reagan had to support the apartheid
regime, increasing trade with South Africa in violation of
congressional sanctions and supporting South Africa’s depredations
in neighboring countries, which led, according to a UN study, to 1.5
million deaths. That was only one episode in the war on terrorism
that Reagan declared to combat “the plague of the modern age,” or,
as Secretary of State George Shultz had it, “a return to barbarism
in the modern age.” We may add hundreds of thousands of corpses in
Central America and tens of thousands more in the Middle East, among
other achievements. Small wonder that the Great Communicator is
worshipped by Hoover Institution scholars as a colossus whose
“spirit seems to stride the country, watching us like a warm and
friendly ghost,” recently honored further by a statue that defaces
the American Embassy in London.<br>
<br>
The Latin American case is revealing. Those who called for freedom
and justice in Latin America are not admitted to the pantheon of
honored dissidents. For example, a week after the fall of the Berlin
Wall, six leading Latin American intellectuals, all Jesuit priests,
had their heads blown off on the direct orders of the Salvadoran
high command. The perpetrators were from an elite battalion armed
and trained by Washington that had already left a gruesome trail of
blood and terror, and had just returned from renewed training at the
John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg,
North Carolina. The murdered priests are not commemorated as honored
dissidents, nor are others like them throughout the hemisphere.
Honored dissidents are those who called for freedom in enemy domains
in Eastern Europe, who certainly suffered, but not remotely like
their counterparts in Latin America.<br>
<br>
The distinction is worth examination, and tells us a lot about the
two senses of the phrase “responsibility of intellectuals,” and
about ourselves. It is not seriously in question, as John Coatsworth
writes in the recently published Cambridge University History of the
Cold War, that from 1960 to “the Soviet collapse in 1990, the
numbers of political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of
nonviolent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded
those in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites.” Among
the executed were many religious martyrs, and there were mass
slaughters as well, consistently supported or initiated by
Washington.<br>
<br>
Why then the distinction? It might be argued that what happened in
Eastern Europe is far more momentous than the fate of the South at
our hands. It would be interesting to see the argument spelled out.
And also to see the argument explaining why we should disregard
elementary moral principles, among them that if we are serious about
suffering and atrocities, about justice and rights, we will focus
our efforts on where we can do the most good—typically, where we
share responsibility for what is being done. We have no difficulty
demanding that our enemies follow such principles.<br>
<br>
Few of us care, or should, what Andrei Sakharov or Shirin Ebadi say
about U.S. or Israeli crimes; we admire them for what they say and
do about those of their own states, and the conclusion holds far
more strongly for those who live in more free and democratic
societies, and therefore have far greater opportunities to act
effectively. It is of some interest that in the most respected
circles, practice is virtually the opposite of what elementary moral
values dictate.<br>
<br>
But let us conform and keep only to the matter of historical import.<br>
<br>
The U.S. wars in Latin America from 1960 to 1990, quite apart from
their horrors, have long-term historical significance. To consider
just one important aspect, in no small measure they were wars
against the Church, undertaken to crush a terrible heresy proclaimed
at Vatican II in 1962, which, under the leadership of Pope John
XXIII, “ushered in a new era in the history of the Catholic Church,”
in the words of the distinguished theologian Hans Küng, restoring
the teachings of the gospels that had been put to rest in the fourth
century when the Emperor Constantine established Christianity as the
religion of the Roman Empire, instituting “a revolution” that
converted “the persecuted church” to a “persecuting church.” The
heresy of Vatican II was taken up by Latin American bishops who
adopted the “preferential option for the poor.” Priests, nuns, and
laypersons then brought the radical pacifist message of the gospels
to the poor, helping them organize to ameliorate their bitter fate
in the domains of U.S. power.<br>
<br>
That same year, 1962, President Kennedy made several critical
decisions. One was to shift the mission of the militaries of Latin
America from “hemispheric defense”—an anachronism from World War
II—to “internal security,” in effect, war against the domestic
population, if they raise their heads. Charles Maechling, who led
U.S. counterinsurgency and internal defense planning from 1961 to
1966, describes the unsurprising consequences of the 1962 decision
as a shift from toleration “of the rapacity and cruelty of the Latin
American military” to “direct complicity” in their crimes to U.S.
support for “the methods of Heinrich Himmler’s extermination
squads.” One major initiative was a military coup in Brazil, planned
in Washington and implemented shortly after Kennedy’s assassination,
instituting a murderous and brutal national security state. The
plague of repression then spread through the hemisphere, including
the 1973 coup installing the Pinochet dictatorship, and later the
most vicious of all, the Argentine dictatorship, Reagan’s favorite.
Central America’s turn—not for the first time—came in the 1980s
under the leadership of the “warm and friendly ghost” who is now
revered for his achievements.<br>
<br>
The murder of the Jesuit intellectuals as the Berlin wall fell was a
final blow in defeating the heresy, culminating a decade of horror
in El Salvador that opened with the assassination, by much the same
hands, of Archbishop Óscar Romero, the “voice for the voiceless.”
The victors in the war against the Church declare their
responsibility with pride. The School of the Americas (since
renamed), famous for its training of Latin American killers,
announces as one of its “talking points” that the liberation
theology that was initiated at Vatican II was “defeated with the
assistance of the US army.”<br>
<br>
Actually, the November 1989 assassinations were almost a final blow.
More was needed.<br>
<br>
A year later Haiti had its first free election, and to the surprise
and shock of Washington, which like others had anticipated the easy
victory of its own candidate from the privileged elite, the
organized public in the slums and hills elected Jean-Bertrand
Aristide, a popular priest committed to liberation theology. The
United States at once moved to undermine the elected government, and
after the military coup that overthrew it a few months later, lent
substantial support to the vicious military junta and its elite
supporters. Trade was increased in violation of international
sanctions and increased further under Clinton, who also authorized
the Texaco oil company to supply the murderous rulers, in defiance
of his own directives.<br>
<br>
I will skip the disgraceful aftermath, amply reviewed elsewhere,
except to point out that in 2004, the two traditional torturers of
Haiti, France and the United States, joined by Canada, forcefully
intervened, kidnapped President Aristide (who had been elected
again), and shipped him off to central Africa. He and his party were
effectively barred from the farcical 2010–11 elections, the most
recent episode in a horrendous history that goes back hundreds of
years and is barely known among the perpetrators of the crimes, who
prefer tales of dedicated efforts to save the suffering people from
their grim fate.<br>
<br>
Another fateful Kennedy decision in 1962 was to send a special
forces mission to Colombia, led by General William Yarborough, who
advised the Colombian security forces to undertake “paramilitary,
sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known communist
proponents,” activities that “should be backed by the United
States.” The meaning of the phrase “communist proponents” was
spelled out by the respected president of the Colombian Permanent
Committee for Human Rights, former Minister of Foreign Affairs
Alfredo Vázquez Carrizosa, who wrote that the Kennedy administration
“took great pains to transform our regular armies into
counterinsurgency brigades, accepting the new strategy of the death
squads,” ushering in<br>
<br>
what is known in Latin America as the National Security Doctrine. .
. . [not] defense against an external enemy, but a way to make the
military establishment the masters of the game . . . [with] the
right to combat the internal enemy, as set forth in the Brazilian
doctrine, the Argentine doctrine, the Uruguayan doctrine, and the
Colombian doctrine: it is the right to fight and to exterminate
social workers, trade unionists, men and women who are not
supportive of the establishment, and who are assumed to be communist
extremists. And this could mean anyone, including human rights
activists such as myself.<br>
<br>
In a 1980 study, Lars Schoultz, the leading U.S. academic specialist
on human rights in Latin America, found that U.S. aid “has tended to
flow disproportionately to Latin American governments which torture
their citizens . . . to the hemisphere’s relatively egregious
violators of fundamental human rights.” That included military aid,
was independent of need, and continued through the Carter years.
Ever since the Reagan administration, it has been superfluous to
carry out such a study. In the 1980s one of the most notorious
violators was El Salvador, which accordingly became the leading
recipient of U.S. military aid, to be replaced by Colombia when it
took the lead as the worst violator of human rights in the
hemisphere. Vázquez Carrizosa himself was living under heavy guard
in his Bogotá residence when I visited him there in 2002 as part of
a mission of Amnesty International, which was opening its year-long
campaign to protect human rights defenders in Colombia because of
the country’s horrifying record of attacks against human rights and
labor activists, and mostly the usual victims of state terror: the
poor and defenseless. Terror and torture in Colombia were
supplemented by chemical warfare (“fumigation”), under the pretext
of the war on drugs, leading to huge flight to urban slums and
misery for the survivors. Colombia’s attorney general’s office now
estimates that more than 140,000 people have been killed by
paramilitaries, often acting in close collaboration with the
U.S.-funded military.<br>
<br>
Signs of the slaughter are everywhere. On a nearly impassible dirt
road to a remote village in southern Colombia a year ago, my
companions and I passed a small clearing with many simple crosses
marking the graves of victims of a paramilitary attack on a local
bus. Reports of the killings are graphic enough; spending a little
time with the survivors, who are among the kindest and most
compassionate people I have ever had the privilege of meeting, makes
the picture more vivid, and only more painful.<br>
<br>
This is the briefest sketch of terrible crimes for which Americans
bear substantial culpability, and that we could easily ameliorate,
at the very least.<br>
<br>
But it is more gratifying to bask in praise for courageously
protesting the abuses of official enemies, a fine activity, but not
the priority of a value-oriented intellectual who takes the
responsibilities of that stance seriously.<br>
<br>
The victims within our domains, unlike those in enemy states, are
not merely ignored and quickly forgotten, but are also cynically
insulted. One striking illustration came a few weeks after the
murder of the Latin American intellectuals in El Salvador. Vaclav
Havel visited Washington and addressed a joint session of Congress.
Before his enraptured audience, Havel lauded the “defenders of
freedom” in Washington who “understood the responsibility that
flowed from” being “the most powerful nation on earth”—crucially,
their responsibility for the brutal assassination of his Salvadoran
counterparts shortly before.<br>
<br>
The liberal intellectual class was enthralled by his presentation.
Havel reminds us that “we live in a romantic age,” Anthony Lewis
gushed. Other prominent liberal commentators reveled in Havel’s
“idealism, his irony, his humanity,” as he “preached a difficult
doctrine of individual responsibility” while Congress “obviously
ached with respect” for his genius and integrity; and asked why
America lacks intellectuals so profound, who “elevate morality over
self-interest” in this way, praising us for the tortured and
mutilated corpses that litter the countries that we have left in
misery. We need not tarry on what the reaction would have been had
Father Ellacuría, the most prominent of the murdered Jesuit
intellectuals, spoken such words at the Duma after elite forces
armed and trained by the Soviet Union assassinated Havel and half a
dozen of his associates—a performance that is inconceivable.<br>
<br>
The assassination of bin Laden, too, directs our attention to our
insulted victims. There is much more to say about the
operation—including Washington’s willingness to face a serious risk
of major war and even leakage of fissile materials to jihadis, as I
have discussed elsewhere—but let us keep to the choice of name:
Operation Geronimo. The name caused outrage in Mexico and was
protested by indigenous groups in the United States, but there seems
to have been no further notice of the fact that Obama was
identifying bin Laden with the Apache Indian chief. Geronimo led the
courageous resistance to invaders who sought to consign his people
to the fate of “that hapless race of native Americans, which we are
exterminating with such merciless and perfidious cruelty, among the
heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will one day
bring [it] to judgement,” in the words of the grand strategist John
Quincy Adams, the intellectual architect of manifest destiny,
uttered long after his own contributions to these sins. The casual
choice of the name is reminiscent of the ease with which we name our
murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Blackhawk,
Cheyenne . . . We might react differently if the Luftwaffe were to
call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”<br>
<br>
Denial of these “heinous sins” is sometimes explicit. To mention a
few recent cases, two years ago in one of the world’s leading
left-liberal intellectual journals, The New York Review of Books,
Russell Baker outlined what he learned from the work of the “heroic
historian” Edmund Morgan: namely, that when Columbus and the early
explorers arrived they “found a continental vastness sparsely
populated by farming and hunting people . . . . In the limitless and
unspoiled world stretching from tropical jungle to the frozen north,
there may have been scarcely more than a million inhabitants.” The
calculation is off by many tens of millions, and the “vastness”
included advanced civilizations throughout the continent. No
reactions appeared, though four months later the editors issued a
correction, noting that in North America there may have been as many
as 18 million people—and, unmentioned, tens of millions more “from
tropical jungle to the frozen north.” This was all well known
decades ago—including the advanced civilizations and the “merciless
and perfidious cruelty” of the “extermination”—but not important
enough even for a casual phrase. In London Review of Books a year
later, the noted historian Mark Mazower mentioned American
“mistreatment of the Native Americans,” again eliciting no comment.
Would we accept the word “mistreatment” for comparable crimes
committed by enemies?<br>
<br>
• • •<br>
<br>
If the responsibility of intellectuals refers to their moral
responsibility as decent human beings in a position to use their
privilege and status to advance the cause of freedom, justice,
mercy, and peace—and to speak out not simply about the abuses of our
enemies, but, far more significantly, about the crimes in which we
are implicated and can ameliorate or terminate if we choose—how
should we think of 9/11?<br>
<br>
The notion that 9/11 “changed the world” is widely held,
understandably. The events of that day certainly had major
consequences, domestic and international. One was to lead President
Bush to re-declare Ronald Reagan’s war on terrorism—the first one
has been effectively “disappeared,” to borrow the phrase of our
favorite Latin American killers and torturers, presumably because
the consequences do not fit well with preferred self images. Another
consequence was the invasion of Afghanistan, then Iraq, and more
recently military interventions in several other countries in the
region and regular threats of an attack on Iran (“all options are
open,” in the standard phrase). The costs, in every dimension, have
been enormous. That suggests a rather obvious question, not asked
for the first time: was there an alternative?<br>
<br>
A number of analysts have observed that bin Laden won major
successes in his war against the United States. “He repeatedly
asserted that the only way to drive the U.S. from the Muslim world
and defeat its satraps was by drawing Americans into a series of
small but expensive wars that would ultimately bankrupt them,” the
journalist Eric Margolis writes.<br>
<br>
The United States, first under George W. Bush and then Barack Obama,
rushed right into bin Laden’s trap. . . . Grotesquely overblown
military outlays and debt addiction . . . . may be the most
pernicious legacy of the man who thought he could defeat the United
States.<br>
<br>
A report from the Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson
Institute for International Studies estimates that the final bill
will be $3.2–4 trillion. Quite an impressive achievement by bin
Laden.<br>
That Washington was intent on rushing into bin Laden’s trap was
evident at once. Michael Scheuer, the senior CIA analyst responsible
for tracking bin Laden from 1996 to 1999, writes, “Bin Laden has
been precise in telling America the reasons he is waging war on us.”
The al Qaeda leader, Scheuer continues, “is out to drastically alter
U.S. and Western policies toward the Islamic world.”<br>
<br>
And, as Scheuer explains, bin Laden largely succeeded: “U.S. forces
and policies are completing the radicalization of the Islamic world,
something Osama bin Laden has been trying to do with substantial but
incomplete success since the early 1990s. As a result, I think it is
fair to conclude that the United States of America remains bin
Laden’s only indispensable ally.” And arguably remains so, even
after his death.<br>
<br>
There is good reason to believe that the jihadi movement could have
been split and undermined after the 9/11 attack, which was
criticized harshly within the movement. Furthermore, the “crime
against humanity,” as it was rightly called, could have been
approached as a crime, with an international operation to apprehend
the likely suspects. That was recognized in the immediate aftermath
of the attack, but no such idea was even considered by
decision-makers in government. It seems no thought was given to the
Taliban’s tentative offer—how serious an offer, we cannot know—to
present the al Qaeda leaders for a judicial proceeding.<br>
<br>
At the time, I quoted Robert Fisk’s conclusion that the horrendous
crime of 9/11 was committed with “wickedness and awesome cruelty”—an
accurate judgment. The crimes could have been even worse. Suppose
that Flight 93, downed by courageous passengers in Pennsylvania, had
bombed the White House, killing the president. Suppose that the
perpetrators of the crime planned to, and did, impose a military
dictatorship that killed thousands and tortured tens of thousands.
Suppose the new dictatorship established, with the support of the
criminals, an international terror center that helped impose similar
torture-and-terror states elsewhere, and, as icing on the cake,
brought in a team of economists—call them “the Kandahar boys”—who
quickly drove the economy into one of the worst depressions in its
history. That, plainly, would have been a lot worse than 9/11.<br>
<br>
As we all should know, this is not a thought experiment. It
happened. I am, of course, referring to what in Latin America is
often called “the first 9/11”: September 11, 1973, when the United
States succeeded in its intensive efforts to overthrow the
democratic government of Salvador Allende in Chile with a military
coup that placed General Pinochet’s ghastly regime in office. The
dictatorship then installed the Chicago Boys—economists trained at
the University of Chicago—to reshape Chile’s economy. Consider the
economic destruction, the torture and kidnappings, and multiply the
numbers killed by 25 to yield per capita equivalents, and you will
see just how much more devastating the first 9/11 was.<br>
<br>
The goal of the overthrow, in the words of the Nixon administration,
was to kill the “virus” that might encourage all those “foreigners
[who] are out to screw us”—screw us by trying to take over their own
resources and more generally to pursue a policy of independent
development along lines disliked by Washington. In the background
was the conclusion of Nixon’s National Security Council that if the
United States could not control Latin America, it could not expect
“to achieve a successful order elsewhere in the world.” Washington’s
“credibility” would be undermined, as Henry Kissinger put it.<br>
<br>
The first 9/11, unlike the second, did not change the world. It was
“nothing of very great consequence,” Kissinger assured his boss a
few days later. And judging by how it figures in conventional
history, his words can hardly be faulted, though the survivors may
see the matter differently.<br>
<br>
These events of little consequence were not limited to the military
coup that destroyed Chilean democracy and set in motion the horror
story that followed. As already discussed, the first 9/11 was just
one act in the drama that began in 1962 when Kennedy shifted the
mission of the Latin American militaries to “internal security.” The
shattering aftermath is also of little consequence, the familiar
pattern when history is guarded by responsible intellectuals.<br>
<br>
• • •<br>
<br>
It seems to be close to a historical universal that conformist
intellectuals, the ones who support official aims and ignore or
rationalize official crimes, are honored and privileged in their own
societies, and the value-oriented punished in one or another way.
The pattern goes back to the earliest records. It was the man
accused of corrupting the youth of Athens who drank the hemlock,
much as Dreyfusards were accused of “corrupting souls, and, in due
course, society as a whole” and the value-oriented intellectuals of
the 1960s were charged with interference with “indoctrination of the
young.”<br>
<br>
In the Hebrew scriptures there are figures who by contemporary
standards are dissident intellectuals, called “prophets” in the
English translation. They bitterly angered the establishment with
their critical geopolitical analysis, their condemnation of the
crimes of the powerful, their calls for justice and concern for the
poor and suffering. King Ahab, the most evil of the kings, denounced
the Prophet Elijah as a hater of Israel, the first “self-hating Jew”
or “anti-American” in the modern counterparts. The prophets were
treated harshly, unlike the flatterers at the court, who were later
condemned as false prophets. The pattern is understandable. It would
be surprising if it were otherwise.<br>
<br>
As for the responsibility of intellectuals, there does not seem to
me to be much to say beyond some simple truths. Intellectuals are
typically privileged—merely an observation about usage of the term.
Privilege yields opportunity, and opportunity confers
responsibilities. An individual then has choices.<br>
<br>
<i><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.bostonreview.net/BR36.5/noam_chomsky_responsibility_of_intellectuals_redux.php">http://www.bostonreview.net/BR36.5/noam_chomsky_responsibility_of_intellectuals_redux.php</a><br>
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