[Peace-discuss] The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Redux

[E. Wayne Johnson]

It's a great piece.

There seem to be 4 kinds of "intellectuals".

1) There are those who really understand what is going on and are 
willing to speak truth to power.

2) There are those who know the truth and have "sold their birthright 
for a mess of red pottage"
and have become pawns for the itching ear crowd.

There are those who ain't quite woke up yet and 3) may or 4) may not be 
willing.




On 9/9/2011 8:41 AM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> Noam Chomsky - The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Redux: Using 
> Privilege to Challenge the State
>
> 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.”
>
> 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.
>
> 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.”
>
> 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?
>
> • • •
>
> One answer came during World War I, when prominent intellectuals on 
> all sides lined up enthusiastically in support of their own states.
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.”
>
> 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.”
>
> 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.
>
> 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:
>
> 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.
>
> A comforting doctrine, though some might feel that Adam Smith had the 
> sharper eye.
>
> • • •
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> But let us conform and keep only to the matter of historical import.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.”
>
> Actually, the November 1989 assassinations were almost a final blow. 
> More was needed.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> This is the briefest sketch of terrible crimes for which Americans 
> bear substantial culpability, and that we could easily ameliorate, at 
> the very least.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.”
>
> 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?
>
> • • •
>
> 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?
>
> 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?
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
> 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.”
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> • • •
>
> 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.”
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> /http://www.bostonreview.net/BR36.5/noam_chomsky_responsibility_of_intellectuals_redux.php
> /
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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