[Peace-discuss] Chomsky article (fwd)

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Gentles: I wrote the appended for the weekly paper in Bloomington, which
is running a series of articles about Chomsky's talk there on 10/7, so I
thought I'd burden you with it.  Regards, CGE]


CHOMSKY AND ANARCHISM

The remarkable Norman Finkelstein, who's written as well as anyone about
Mideast politics, recently considered the role of "apostates" --
particularly those who go from criticizing political power and authority
to cozying up to it. "A rite of passage for apostates peculiar to U.S.
political culture is bashing Noam Chomsky. It's the political equivalent
of a bar mitzvah, a ritual signaling that one has 'grown up' -- i.e.,
grown out of one's 'childish' past. It's hard to pick up an article or
book by ex-radicals -- Gitlin's 'Letters to a Young Activist,' Paul
Berman's 'Terror and Liberalism' -- that doesn't include a hysterical
attack on him" <http://counterpunch.org/finkelstein09102003.html>.

The hysteria of ex-leftists' attacks on Chomsky (and it is amazing) has an
obvious psychological cause, says Finkelstein. For these political
turn-coats, "Chomsky mirrors their idealistic past as well as sordid
present, an obstinate reminder that they once had principles but no longer
do, that they sold out but he didn't."

Indeed he didn't.  Noam (two syllables -- not like the Alaskan city)
Chomsky, who will be 75 this December, remains what he has been for forty
years -- the most mordant and indefatigable critic of the crimes of the
greatest political power that ever existed, the contemporary United
States.  He sends forth a torrent of books, articles, lectures and talks,
the sheer energy of which would be the envy of person half his age.  More
importantly, the quality of what he says is unique in political discourse
-- clear, concise, remarkably detailed but eminently readable, and not
bound by what Chomsky himself calls "the limits of allowable debate."  As
a result he attracts immense audiences and outrages liberals and
conservatives, Marxists and capitalists, pundits and politicians -- by
telling the truth.

Chomsky has been a member of the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology since the mid-1950s.  Usually people with his social and
political views are shunted aside in the American academy and do not
become university professors.  The same thing might have happened to
Chomsky, were he in one of what he would call "the ideological
disciplines" -- history, political science, even literature.  But Chomsky
as a young man created his own field.  He transformed the study of
linguistics as profoundly as Albert Einstein transformed the study of
physics -- perhaps more so, because Chomsky changed what had been a
largely descriptive, "humanistic" field into a science.

Chomsky pointed out -- over against the Behaviorist ideas dominant in the
mid-20th century and associated with the name of B. F. Skinner -- that
children couldn't possibly learn language simply by imitating what they
heard from parents and others.  Human language use was too creative.  An
unlimited number of new and unheard sentences were possible even to the
young child who has just begun to speak -- her situation is worlds removed
from that of the smart dog or chimpanzee who learns to respond to certain
situations.  That language use is unique to humans -- a natural ability of
human beings, as flying is a natural ability of birds -- is central to
Chomsky's view.

And just as the ability to fly appears at a certain point in the
development of a bird, so the ability to speak grammatical sentences
develops at a particular point in the life-cycle of humans, when they
learn the particular forms that the innate human language-ability takes in
their particular society. There is Chomsky argues a universal structure to
language. He has said that an anthropologist arriving from Mars would
obviously regard all humans as speaking one language, with regional
variations.

Chomsky's "cognitive revolution" created a new science, some of its
techniques being drawn from mathematics.  Chomsky has pointed out the
difference in the disciplines in American intellectual life by noting that
he was educated in no established field and therefore had to pick up
aspects of a number of fields: when he wrote about mathematics, he said,
mathematicians wanted to know whether he got the right answer; when he
wrote about history, historians wanted to know where he got his degree...

Chomsky has frequently denied that there is any connection between his
writings on history and politics and his technical work in linguistics --
except perhaps, he says, in a negative sense, in that the time devoted to
the one takes away from the time available for the other.  But it's surely
fair to see come relation between his insistence on the free, creative
ability of every human being in regard to language use and his vision of a
free cooperative society, opposed to the authoritarian structures in which
we live, structures that rob us of our control over our own creative
activity.

Chomsky was born and reared in Philadelphia, where he attended a school
run on the non-authoritarian principles of John Dewey.  Education there
was not meant to be competitive or directive -- it rather should encourage
the development of natural capacities.  His father had left Russia in 1913
to avoid being conscripted into the army, worked his way through school in
the US, graduated from Johns Hopkins university, and become a leading
scholar of Hebrew.  His mother, also a Hebrew teacher, came from a
working-class Jewish community that was quite politically aware and
active.  Political discussion among these people influenced young Noam, as
did what he saw around him, growing up during the Depression.
 
Chomsky attended the University of Pennsylvania and became a Junior Fellow
at Harvard -- a prestigious appointment that took the place of a doctorate
for some members of his academic generation, such as Arthur Schlesinger,
the Kennedy historian -- but Chomsky found it primarily an education in
social graces.  During the time however Chomsky produced a thousand-page
manuscript that rethought the study of language. This vast work was not
finally published until twenty years later but circulated in manuscript
and had a profound effect on the study of language.  In 1955 Chomsky
submitted one chapter of his thesis to the University of Pennsylvania and
received a doctorate for that alone.  His first published work ("Syntactic
Structures" 1957) was in fact the notes for an undergraduate course that
he taught at MIT.

Chomsky's technical work in linguistics and philosophy was paralleled with
an immense output of writing on politics. From early in the 1960s he was
an intense critic of the American attack on South Vietnam. His article,
"The Responsibility of Intellectuals," which appeared in the New York
Review of Books in 1967, called on those who were given the leisure in our
society to read and write, think and talk, to "speak the truth and expose
lies." That would seem (as Chomsky himself said) "a truism" for
intellectuals "and anyone else" -- clearly as necessary now as it was more
than 35 years ago. But at the time, the article -- called by even a critic
a "morally impassioned and powerfully argued denunciation of American
aggression in Vietnam" -- was seen as almost unique in the American
academy.

Chomsky is contemptuous of "theory" in the social sciences, in part
because he takes a strict, scientific position on what theory might be.
"...if by "theory" we mean something with principles which are not obvious
when you look at them from which you can deduce surprising consequences,
check out the consequences, and then confirm the principles -- you're not
going to find anything like that."  But he certainly has a political
vision, one that can be stated with some specificity.  Chomsky has
described himself as an old-fashioned Liberal, but not really in any of
the multiple (and contradictory) ways in which that word is used in
contemporary political parlance.  By Liberalism, Chomsky means the ideals
of the Enlightenment, particularly the conviction that human reason leads
to the conclusion that freedom is an essential requirement of human
nature.

The implicitly but inescapably political ideas of the Enlightenment were
ranged against the state feudalism of pre-modern Europe.  When those ideas
are extended into the age of industrial capitalism, they become
"libertarian socialism" in Chomsky's view, and that's how he describes his
position.  Again, though, socialism is not what comes to be described that
way in the 20th century. In fact Chomsky has said that one of the greatest
lies of that blood-stained century was the one that the US and USSR
colluded in -- that the Soviet Union was "socialist."  According to the
notions of the original socialists, it never was, because socialism means
at a minimum the democratic control of economic production -- which has
almost never existed.  (Chomsky from a very young age was interested in
one of the few places in which it has appeared, however faintly -- Spain,
during the Spanish Civil War.)

The other name for the libertarian socialist position is anarchism, which
as Chomsky has written, quoting a 19th-century anarchist, "has a broad
back, like paper it endures anything" (as we have seen from the activities
of a number of contemporary self-described anarchists).  But it is
interesting to hear Chomsky condemned as a "Communist," which still
happens: Chomsky has always been a critic of Communism (in the sense of
Marxism-Leninism) *from the Left.* Communism of the USSR variety was not
only not socialist, it was crushingly authoritarian, and as the
German-American anarchist (and Haymarket martyr) Adolph Fischer put it,
"every anarchist is a socialist but not every socialist is necessarily an
anarchist." The Enlightenment, Liberal principle of freedom is inseparable
from any authentic socialism, in Chomsky's view.

Chomsky proposes that, if we want a consistent usage for the fraught
Left/Right distinction, we might think of political parties ranged along a
line according to how authoritarian or democratic they are. The further
Right one goes, the more authoritarian the parties, and the further Left,
the more democratic. (At the far Left end are the true socialists, who
want not just a democratic polity but a democratic economy as well --
investment decisions made not by corporations but by elections, for a
start.) The Bolsheviks, then, must be seen as a *right-wing* Marxist
party, as must all 20th-century Communist parties, owing to their
authoritarianism. And they were indeed so described by left-wing Marxists
like Rosa Luxemburg and Anton Pannekoek, whom Chomsky sees as being close
to the anarchist tradition that he accepts.

Chomsky's devotion to Liberal principles led him into an incident with
which his right-wing critics always tax him, "the Faurisson affair." His
defense of the free-speech rights of a French writer later condemned as a
"Holocaust-denier," against a legal charge of "falsifying history," became
a cause-celebre when Chomsky's article was used as a preface to a book by
Faurisson.  But Chomsky replied disparagingly that he thought "all these
things had been settled in the Enlightenment" -- referring to Voltaire's
supposed remark that he disagreed with what was said but would defend to
the death the right to say it.  Chomsky has frequently observed that if
you don't believe in free speech for ideas that you despise, you don't
believe in it at all.

Another charge disingenuously hurled against Chomsky is that he wasn't
sufficiently critical of the "auto-genocide" under the Khmer Rouge in
Cambodia that followed America's "secret bombing" of that country. What
Chomsky actually did was to criticize the cynical use by American
apologists of the Cambodian murders, and the acceptance of the most
extreme stories about them, to combat America's ideological enemies in the
1970s.  At the same time, he pointed out, an example of "benign and
constructive bloodbaths" was underway in the Indonesian invasion of East
Timor, where a larger fraction of the population died than in Cambodia,
but under American patronage. The situation in East Timor was ignored in
the US, while the premier example of "nefarious bloodbaths ... perpetrated
by official enemies," in Cambodia, was condemned.  "The reaction follows
the same pattern as the treatment of terrorism," writes Chomsky. "The
former are ignored, denied, or sometimes even welcomed; the latter elicit
great outrage and often large-scale deceit and fabrication, if the
available evidence is felt to be inadequate for doctrinal requirements."

Chomsky's severest critics are soi-disant "friends of Israel," who are
willing to see Israel exist as a nuclear-armed Sparta, a racist state
corrupted by American money and arms to defend US control of Middle East
oil resources. Chomsky, who contemplated emigrating to Israel when he was
at Harvard, has consistently and in detail condemned the lies and
misrepresentations that have allowed Israel to continue the brutal and
illegal military occupations of the West Bank and Gaza. In a series of
articles and books -- notably the recently republished "The Fateful
Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians" (1983) --
Chomsky has devastated the arguments in favor of the malign US/Israel
policy in the Middle East.

Years ago, I assigned Chomsky's 1979 book "The Washington Connection and
Third-World Fascism" to an undergraduate class at a Midwest university.
Their reaction was summed up by the student who said, "Why hasn't anyone
ever told us about this?"  Exactly. Chomsky's detailed account of just
what the American empire means in terms of human misery around the world,
is simply excised form the popular consciousness in this country. Chomsky
himself often says that if the American people knew what was being done in
their name, they would be appalled.

Why don't they know?  The answer is the American media.  Chomsky and his
co-author Edward Herman turned their attention to that subject in
"Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media" (1988 --
also recently republished).  They described the techniques whereby the
for-profit media in the US -- themselves often large corporations and
parts of even larger ones -- systematically mislead the US populace.
"Propaganda is for the democracies what violence is for the
dictatorships," he says -- the way of accomplishing the necessary task of
keeping the people in line. He sets out to explain the seeming paradox
that in a dictatorship the controlled press is not believed, but in the
freest country in the world, all the newspapers say the same thing, and
are believed.

Chomsky's common sense and his astonishing industry -- he simply reads
everything -- are the reason that his book "9-11" (a series of interviews,
mostly with foreign journalists) became a best seller.  People wanted a
sensible account of how and why the attacks of September 11, 2001, had
occurred -- as opposed to the propagandized excuses that the media gave
for launching the Bush wars, wars that now have killed tens of thousands
of people in southwest Asia.  As Chomsky had been doing for almost forty
years, he simply explained what was going on.  Robert Barski concludes his
"Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent" (1997) with the description,
"...Institute Professor, linguist, philosopher, grandfather, champion of
ordinary people."

	-30-