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CAMBRIDGE: 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 US 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 believes in the redemptive power of logical thinking and coming to Chomskyan conclusions about the world. He is a white-hot contrarian, a distinguished linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who “tends to be quite conservative” and is devoted to “simple moral truisms.”
The US, he says, is the world’s leading purveyor of state terrorism while Osama bin Laden is the foremost private practitioner. The Saudi’s fundamentalist politics are benighted, but he gives form to a deep discontent with the nature of American power.
The 73-year-old Chomsky doesn’t just tack into the prevailing wind. He sails into Category 5 hurricanes. And his course is not so unpopular as one might imagine right now.
Chomsky’s new book — a pamphlet-like collection of interviews — 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.
Chomsky’s 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 defenceless 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.
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 US, 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. It’s as though the professor inhabits Dimension Left, the alternative celebrity universe.
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.”
“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.”
US INTELLECTUALS: 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.
Today Chomsky is fond of analogies between American and Nazi attempts to rationalize state violence in pursuit of international aims.
“Of course the US 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 flat-out 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 US 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 US 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.
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 US is regarded as a leading terrorist state, with good reason,” Chomsky says.
It is also Chomsky’s style to express surprise that his analogies are considered provocative. His favourite, of late, is to compare the terror attacks to the American bombing of a Sudanese chemical factory in 1998. President Clinton claimed, erroneously, that this factory produced chemical weapons.
A security guard died in that attack. The factory was Sudan’s chief source of pharmaceuticals and pesticides. And Chomsky argues-with the use of some elastic math-that tens of thousands of Sudanese perished as a result.
Still, you ask, isn’t there a moral difference between an act of terror that directly claims 3,000 lives and a mistake that directly claims one life?
The Sudan bombing, Chomsky replies, was worse.
“The Americans didn’t even think about the outcome of the bombing,” he says, “because the Sudanese were so far below contempt as to be not worth thinking about.”
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 pleasantly and extends his hand. The hope is that the fog has cleared just a touch.—Dawn/LAT- WP News Service (c) The Washington Post
