Date: Thu, 16 May 2002 19:39:36 -0500
Subject: chomsky still kicking...



--------------------
Noam Chomsky: Still contrary after all these years
--------------------
By Michael Powell
The Washington Post
May 16, 2002
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- The talk is of terrorism and the terrible delusions of 
the powerful, and of the real bottom line of Sept. 11.
Which the famous professor explains this way:  "The atrocities of Sept. 11 
are quite new in world affairs, not in scale and character, but in target. 
The United States exterminated its indigenous population, conquered half of 
Mexico, and carried out depredations all over. Now, for the first time 
since the British burned the White House in (the War of) 1812, the guns 
have been directed the other way."
Our professor is being a touch provocative here, no? He glances sideways at 
you, through silver-rimmed glasses, and smiles. If you listen closely, he 
seems sure he can penetrate the fog.
"This is not complicated," he says in that softly insistent voice. "You can 
be a pure hypocrite or you can look at events honestly."
Noam Chomsky's new book -- a pamphletlike collection of interviews with the 
professor -- is titled "9-11." The book, which argues that the war in 
Afghanistan is morally and legally appalling, not to mention an act of 
state terrorism, has sold 160,000 copies and three weeks ago ranked ninth 
on The Washington Post best-seller list. It's been translated into a dozen 
languages, from Korean to Japanese to two varieties of Portuguese.
Chomsky, 73, a white-hot contrarian, is a distinguished linguist at the 
Massachusetts Institute of Technology who "tends to be quite conservative" 
and is devoted to "simple moral truisms." His lectures are 
standing-room-only affairs. Afterward his fans dutifully transcribe and 
circulate his words.
And he is ubiquitous on foreign airwaves, from CBC to BBC to Radio B92 in 
downtown Belgrade. Chomsky travels to Turkey to lend comfort to defenseless 
Kurds and to Brazil to rally those fighting the worst excesses of global 
capitalism.
The London Independent newspaper declares him among our greatest living 
philosophers. The Arts and Humanities Citation Index reports Chomsky is the 
most quoted living intellectual. Certainly he's the only silver-haired MIT 
professor to appear on stage and on disc with bands Chumbawamba and Rage 
Against the Machine.
It took two months to arrange a one-hour interview, which is timed to the 
minute by Chomsky's assistant. "How do I relax?" Chomsky smiles, faintly, 
at the suggestion of personal needs -- he sees lifelong friends twice a 
year, at most. "That's my wife's worry when I get home each night."
And yet ...
To pick up the most powerful newspapers and intellectual magazines in the 
United States, to tune in the 463 television political babble-athons, is to 
conclude that Chomsky is invisible. His book has garnered just a single 
review in a major newspaper.
Critics are many
The publisher of the New Republic describes Chomsky's views, particularly 
on Israel, where he champions an eventual confederation with Palestine, as 
outside the pale of intellectual responsibility. Television commentator 
Jeff Greenfield suggests that Chomsky's opinions "come from Neptune."
Brian Morton, a novelist and essayist of the left, sees Noam Chomsky as an 
important intellectual whose arguments have suffered a sclerotic hardening.
"Chomsky sees the world in a very stark way and gets at certain truths in 
that way," Morton says. "But ultimately his view is so simplistic that it's 
not useful. He's become a phase that people on the left should go through 
when they are young."
"He's been consigned to a kind of oblivion by the higher circles of 
America's intellectual class," says Steve Wasserman, editor of the Los 
Angeles Times book review. "He's ignored by the mafia that controls 
America's op-ed pages, and that's unfortunate."
Chomsky professes no mystification. He's tracked American intellectuals 
since they fell into serried rows of support for the Vietnam War 40 years 
ago. They are, he says, a lap dog class, scampering forth to bark on 
command for their masters.
"It's a remarkably narrow culture. There are disagreements but they are at 
the level of statistical error, literally," Chomsky says.
That said, Chomsky might be seen as complicit in his own marginalization. 
His sentences are diamond-hard and brook no disagreement. "No one with even 
a shred of honesty would disagree" -- is a characteristic bit of Chomskyan 
throat-clearing.
And the master linguist's analysis can skirt the arid reaches of moral 
certitude. His pursuit of the logical can lead to moral cul-de-sacs, as 
when Chomsky and co-author Edward Herman, in "After the Cataclysm," 
detailed and ridiculed inconsistencies in journalistic exposes of Khmer 
Rouge atrocities in the late 1970s -- even as Cambodia descended into a 
horror of communist purges, executions and famine that left as many as 1 
million dead.
Taking America to task
Today Chomsky is fond of analogies between American and Nazi attempts to 
rationalize state violence in pursuit of international aims.
"Of course the U.S. claims it has reasons," Chomsky says. "And the Nazis 
had reasons for gassing the Jews. Everyone has reasons. The question is 
whether they're justified."
How the war fevers raged in those days after Sept. 11. The nation's 
syndicated belligerati were beside themselves. Columnist Michael Kelly 
flayed the unconscionable pacifists as pro-terrorist and evil. Charles 
Krauthammer argued for bombing an enemy city, anywhere.
And Christopher Hitchens, the Nation columnist, turned on his old moral 
tutor in a splenetic display, averring that Chomsky's opposition to a war 
in Afghanistan did "not rise above the level of half truth" and that the 
professor's "remorseless logic has degraded into irrationality."
Chomsky barely paused to take the rhetorical bait, dismissing Hitchens' 
sustained critique of his views as a "fanciful diatribe." Chomsky passed 
most of this time giving the near nonstop speeches and interviews that 
Seven Stories Press collected in his book "9-11."
He raised a number of provocative points during this period. He noted that 
the United States had armed and trained many of the fundamentalists, and 
that theirs was less a blind desire to smash globalization than a campaign 
to force the United States out of Saudi Arabia and establish an Islamic 
state. And he predicted, correctly, that many nations, including Israel, 
would use the rubric of Bush's war on terror to prosecute their own battles.
If Bush were interested in leading a fight for civilization, Chomsky said, 
he might start by laying out his evidence against al Qaeda and asking 
Congress for a declaration of war, as outlined in the Constitution.
But Chomsky's crystal ball was as often cracked.
Last October, he stated as a matter of fact that American military 
strategists "anticipated the slaughter and silent genocide" of 3 million to 
4 million Afghans, as the bombing would disrupt food relief efforts. He 
offered no evidence for his charge and his prediction of such a terrible 
death toll has not come to pass.
Culture of terrorism
He takes pride in noting that he's always described the attacks on the 
World Trade Center as an atrocity, though he always adds that such attacks 
pale next to the West's "deep-seated culture of terrorism."
"We should recognize that in much of the world the United States is 
regarded as a leading terrorist state, with good reason," Chomsky says. 
"These were horrific acts on September 11, but anyone who is honest will 
recognize ..."
This might be called the attenuated sympathetic style.
A knock on the door. It's 4:45 p.m. on a Friday. The professor's aide has 
been timing the hour allotted for the interview. A young documentarian 
waits outside, video camera in hand, ready for the professor's next hour.
Chomsky smiles and extends his hand. The hope is that the fog has cleared 
just a touch.
 >From linguistics to world of politics
Noam Chomsky grew up in working-class Philadelphia in the dark interregnum 
between the start of the Great Depression and the onset of World War II. 
His father was a renowned Hebrew scholar. By the age of 10, Noam was 
reading proofs of books on 13th Century Hebrew and penning passionate 
editorials for the school newspaper decrying the rise of fascism.
Noam wept when he heard that Barcelona had fallen to Franco's fascist 
legions on Jan. 26, 1939.
On weekends, as a teenager, he took the train to New York to visit a 
favorite uncle who owned a newsstand. The uncle was a Trotskyite, then an 
anti-Trotskyite, and finally a Freudian. The last choice was a keeper, as 
the uncle became a successful lay psychoanalyst with a penthouse apartment.
Chomsky enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania in 1945, where he 
studied linguistics. (He married Carol Doris Schatz in 1949, and they had 
three children.)
The behavioralism of B.F. Skinner ruled the field, with his view that human 
responses are learned through conditioning, and thus can be predicted and 
controlled.
Chomsky recoiled from this.
How can it be, he asked, that language is but a learned habit if man and 
his words are so creative, nuanced and morally complex? From this question 
of philosophy no less than science, Chomsky developed his theory of 
transformational grammar, eventually published in his book "Syntactic 
Structures." He posited that the ability to speak and think complexly is 
encoded in our species through evolution. All humans have an innate 
capacity to understand grammar.
It was a breakthrough likened to unraveling the genetic code. Modern 
linguists regard Chomsky as their Einstein, their Freud, their Picasso.
By the early 1960s, Chomsky had a new passion: Vietnam. American soldiers 
had landed, American planes began dropping napalm, and the professor turned 
his every faculty to opposing that war.
These were lonely years, filled with threats of arrest and possible loss of 
his job at MIT. Chomsky recalls walking into church basements and finding 
his fellow loyal oppositionists: a polite Presbyterian minister, a 
blue-haired organist and a couple of guys who'd wandered in off the street, 
"usually including a drunk who wanted to punch me out."
Chomsky extended his critique in ensuing years to United States policy in 
East Timor (where successive American governments supported brutal 
Indonesian repression of the island) and to Central America, where the 
United States supported autocracies and consistently ignored World Court 
rulings.
He developed a view of the West as a uniquely vicious and savage culture, 
where the nature of global domination remains half-hidden from people by a 
corporate-dominated press and mendacious leaders. To focus on the terror of 
others is beside the point.
"The terrorism of them against us?" He shakes his head. "It exists, but 
it's the minor part."
-- Michael Powell

Copyright (c) 2002, Chicago Tribune

--------------------
Improved archives!
Searching Chicagotribune.com archives back to 1985 is cheaper and easier 
than ever. New prices for multiple articles can bring your cost down to as 
low as 30 cents an article: http://chicagotribune.com/archives

HTML VERSION: