ISLAMABAD, Nov 25: American intellectual, linguist, educator and political activist Prof Noam Chomsky will deliver a lecture at the Convention Centre on Monday. The lecture is on Our Endangered Species and is being jointly organized by the Dawn Group of Newspapers and the Eqbal Ahmad Foundation.
Seventy-three-year-old Prof Chomsky, who teaches linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, USA, is regarded as the founder of transformational-generative grammar, a system that revolutionized linguistics. He believes that language is the result of an innate human faculty. Equally at ease with cognitive sciences, philosophy, history, political science, contemporary international relations, social activism and politics, his lectures draw full houses across the world, at meetings often fixed years in advance.
Born in Philadelphia on Dec 7, 1928, Prof Chomsky received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. He joined MIT in 1955 and became a full professor there in 1961 at the age of 32.
Prof Chomsky gained publicity particularly from his long career of protest against US foreign policy, beginning from the Vietnam War in the 1960s to the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. His latest campaign is the US offensive in Afghanistan.
His political views have been expounded in many books and articles, including American Power and the New Mandarins (1969), The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians (1983), On Power and Ideology (1987) and World Orders, Old and New (1994).
A self-confessed anarchist, Prof Chomsky’s frank criticism of American foreign policy goes as far as to describe the US as the world’s biggest terrorist state which is carrying out the worse kind of terrorism in Afghanistan.
Such dissenting views on US policies go back to 1918 when American labour leader Eugene Debs was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison for daring to question US involvement in World War I.
Although those who subscribe to such dissenting views in the US today are not thrown in jail, at least not yet, they are, however, generally considered unpatriotic. Prof Chomsky’s radical stance has obviously embroiled him in controversies, with some uttering slanderous comments about him and censoring his words.
While on a recent lecture tour of India, he raised a furore when he said that India would gain “nothing” by supporting the US offensive in Afghanistan but get a “kick in the face” if it came in the way of America’s interests. When asked to comment on the reason for the violence in Kashmir, he said that the centre was not willing to accept “democratic participation” in the state, although he quickly added, “but this is one side of the story”.
Described by some as “the conscience of the American people,” Prof Chomsky is noted for his solidarity movements with the oppressed in many underdeveloped countries. He has criticized the enormous disparities created by globalization and chronicled the often bloody consequences of government and corporate control.
“The free market,” Prof Chomsky wrote in an article, “is socialism for the rich: the public pays the costs and the rich get the benefit-markets for the poor and plenty of state protection for the rich.
“What’s called trade isn’t trade in any serious sense of the term,” he continued. “Much of what’s called trade is just internal transactions, inside a big corporation....by now it’s estimated that about 40 per cent of what’s called world trade is internal to corporations.”
His major linguistic publications are Syntactic Structures (1957), Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), The Sound Pattern of English (1968), Language and Mind (1972), The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory and Reflections on Language (both 1975).
He was introduced to the study of linguistics by his father, a Hebrew scholar who worked within the framework of historical linguistics.
In 1988, Prof Chomsky was awarded the Kyoto Prize (described as the Japanese equivalent of the Nobel Prize) in recognition of having invented the “Chomskian Revolution” in mathematical linguistics.
Some say that in a saner world, his tireless efforts to promote justice and humanitarianism would long have won him the Nobel Peace Prize.