Shame Was The Spur
“A man of stupendous brilliance.”
-----Norman
Finkelstein
“A gargantuan influence.”
-----Chris
Hedges
“ . . . brilliant . . . unswerving . . . relentless . . .
heroic.”
-----Arundhati
Roy
“Preposterously thorough.”
-----Edward
Said
“[A] fierce talent.”
-----Eduardo
Galeano
“An intellectual cannon.”
----Israel
Shamir
“A lighthouse over a sea of hogwash.”
-----Kathleen
Cleaver
by Michael K. Smith
www.legalienate.blogspot.com
He had a disarming frankness, a toothy grin, a dazzling mind
that never rested.
He always felt completely out of tune with the world. At ten,
he published his first article (in the school paper) – a lament on the fall of
Barcelona to Franco. At thirteen, he was haunting anarchist bookstores in New
York City and working a newsstand with his uncle, eagerly soaking up everything
a brilliant mix of immigrant minds had to offer, by far the richest
intellectual environment he was ever to encounter. At sixteen, he went off by
himself at the news of Hiroshima, unable to comprehend anyone else’s reaction
to the horror. At twenty-four, he abandoned a Harvard fellowship to live on a kibbutz, returning only by chance to
fulfill an academic career. At twenty-eight, he revolutionized the field of
linguistics with his book, Syntactic
Structures. At twenty-nine, he became associate professor at Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (and full professor three years later), though his
competence with technology was limited to the tape recorder. At thirty-five, he
threw himself into anti-war protest, giving talks, writing letters and
articles, promoting teach-ins, and helping to organize student demonstrations
and draft resistance against the Vietnam War. At thirty-eight, he risked a
five-year jail term protesting at the Pentagon, spending the night in jail alongside
Norman Mailer, who described him in Armies
of the Night as “a slim sharp-featured man with an ascetic expression, and
an air of gentle but absolute moral integrity.”At
forty, he was the only white face in the crowd at Fred Hampton’s funeral, after
the young Black Panther leader was gunned down by the FBI in a Gestapo-style
raid.
Such was the early life of America’s greatest dissident
intellectual, raised in a deeply anti-Semitic German-Irish neighborhood in
Quaker Philadelphia, later awarded an elite linguistics professorship at the
center of the Pentagon system at MIT.
Fulfilling a brilliant academic career at the pinnacle of
the Ivory Tower, Chomsky railed against his fellow intellectuals’ subservience
to power, dismissing pious declarations of Washington’s alleged commitment to
freedom, equality, and democracy with abundant demonstrations of its actual
values - greed, domination, and deceit. He forensically examined the claim that
the establishment media operate as an objective check on the excesses of the
powerful, marshalling overwhelming evidence showing that in fact they are a
propaganda service working on their behalf. Laboriously debunking the flood of
lies and distortions targeting mass audiences, he transformed dangerous
misperceptions of U.S. benevolence into insightful comprehension of imperial
reality.
Thus we learned that the Vietnam War was not a noble quest
to defend freedom, but a quasi-genocidal assault on a former French colony
designed to subjugate a defenseless peasantry; that Israel was not a glorious
example of uniquely decent democratic socialism, but a modern Sparta on a path
to self-destruction; that the Cold War was not a contest between freedom and
slavery, but a shared opposition to independent nationalism, in which a galaxy
of neo-Nazi U.S. client states masqueraded as the “Free World.”
Such insights were anathema in academia, and Chomsky quickly
earned a reputation as a political crank among his more subservient colleagues
(the vast majority), even as he gained considerable stature as a public
intellectual in American society at large and internationally. These
contrasting perceptions of his credibility made for a striking schizophrenia in
how he was evaluated: dismissed as a lunatic by pundits and professors, Chomsky’s
political lectures were sold out years in advance to overflow general audiences
throughout the world.
Elite commentators who wrote him off as a novice for his
lack of credentials in political science contradicted themselves by recognizing
him as a genius for his linguistics work, though he had no formal credentials
in that field either. Nevertheless, they were right about his genius. When
Chomsky first entered linguistics the prevailing model of language acquisition
was behaviorist, the assumption being that children acquire language by
imitation and “reinforcement” (gratifying responses from others for the correct
use of language), which Chomsky immediately realized couldn’t begin to account
for the richness of even the simplest language use - obvious from an early age
in all healthy children - who routinely manifest patterns of use they’ve never
heard before.
When Chomsky subjected the behaviorist paradigm to rational
scrutiny it promptly collapsed, replaced by recognition that language capacity
is actually innate and a product of maturation, emerging at an appropriate
stage of biological development in the same way that secondary sex
characteristics not evident in childhood emerge during puberty. Like so many
other Chomsky insights, the idea that language capacity is part of the
unfolding of a genetic program seems rather obvious in retrospect, but in the
1950s it was a revolutionary thought, vaulting the young MIT professor to
international academic stardom as the most penetrating thinker in a field his
un-credentialed insights utterly transformed.
At the time, Chomsky appeared to be living the perfect life
from a purely personal standpoint. He had fascinating work, professional
acclaim, lifetime economic security, and a loving marriage with young children
growing up in a beautiful suburb of Boston, an ideal balance of personal and
professional fulfillment. But just then a dark cloud called Vietnam appeared on
the horizon, and Chomsky – with supreme reluctance – launched himself into a
major activist career, sacrificing nearly all of his personal life along the
way.
In the Eisenhower years the U.S. had relied on mercenaries
and client groups to attack the Vietminh, a communist-led nationalist force
that had fought the French and was seeking South Vietnamese independence with
the ultimate goal of a re-unification of South and North Vietnam through
national elections. Though the U.S. was systematically murdering its leaders,
the Vietminh did not respond to the violence directed against them for many years.
Finally, in 1959, came an authorization allowing the Vietminh to use force in
self-defense, at which point the South Vietnamese government (U.S. client
state) collapsed, as its monopoly of force was all it had had to sustain itself
in power.
Plans for de-colonization proceeded. The National Liberation
Front was formed, and in its founding program it called for South Vietnamese
independence and the formation of a neutral bloc consisting of Laos, Cambodia,
and South Vietnam, with the ultimate goal of peacefully unifying all of
Vietnam. At that point there were no North Vietnamese forces in the South, and
no North-South military conflict.
That would emerge later, as a direct result of U.S. insistence on subjugating
the South.
To head off the political
threat of South Vietnamese independence, President Kennedy sent the U.S. Air
Force to bomb rural South Vietnam in October 1962 and drive the villagers into
“strategic hamlets” (concentration camps), in order to separate them from the
nationalist guerrilla movement Pentagon documents conceded they were willingly
supporting. This overt act of U.S. aggression was noted in the press, but
without a flicker of public protest, which would only come years later.
When Chomsky first began speaking out on Vietnam, venues
were scarce and public support for the effort virtually nil. He was actually
grateful for the customary police presence, which prevented him from getting
beaten up. “In those days, protests against the war meant speaking several
nights a week at a church to an audience of half a dozen people,” Chomsky
remembered years later, “mostly bored or hostile, or at someone’s home where a
few people might be gathered, or at a meeting at a college that included the
topics of Vietnam, Iran, Central America, and nuclear arms, in the hope that
maybe participants would outnumber the organizers.”
The quality of his analysis was extraordinary and Chomsky placed himself “in
the very first rank” of war critics (Christopher Hitchens) from the start,
helping to spark a mass anti-war movement over the next several years.
Unlike “pragmatic” opponents of the war, who justified U.S. imperialism in
principle but feared it would not bring military victory in Vietnam, Chomsky
called out U.S. aggression by name, sided with its victims, and urged the war
be terminated without pre-conditions.
Though a radical departure from establishment orthodoxy,
Chomsky’s positions on the war were always carefully thought out, never blindly
oppositional. For example, though he opposed the drafting of young men to fight
in a criminal war, he was not opposed to a draft per se. In fact, he emphasized
that a draft meant that soldiers could not be kept insulated from the civilian
society of which they were a part, leading to what he regarded as an admirable
collapse of soldier morale when the anti-war movement exposed U.S. intervention
in Vietnam as naked aggression. When the draft was terminated in 1973, the
Pentagon shifted to a “volunteer” army, that is, a mercenary army of the poor
and low-income, which Chomsky regarded as one much less likely to be affected
by popular anti-war agitation, even aside from the more serious issue of
unjustly assigning responsibility for “national defense” to the most
economically exploited sector of the population. For these reasons he felt that
a universal draft was to be preferred to a “volunteer” army brought into being
by strongly coercive economic forces.
Unlike his
establishment critics, Chomsky did not consider class analysis a conspiracy
theory, but rather, an indispensable tool in properly accounting for known
facts. For example, while there was no national
interest in attacking South Vietnam, there very much was an elite interest in suppressing the
contagious example of a successful national independence movement in Southeast
Asia, as the failure to do so might encourage other countries in the Pacific to
“go communist” (i.e., seek independence), which could ultimately have reversed
the outcome of WWII in the Pacific had Japan ended up accommodating the officially
socialist world instead of Washington.
Given the
unanswerable nature of this type of (anti-capitalist) analysis, Chomsky was
kept well away from mass audiences. On the rare occasions he did appear in the
corporate media, his overwhelming command of relevant fact meant that he
couldn’t be distracted or derailed. When interviewers attempted to get him off
track, they were quickly confronted by the soft query – “Do the facts matter?”
– followed by an informational tsunami leading inexorably to a heretical
conclusion.
Given his mastery of
evidence and logic, it was frankly suicidal for Chomsky’s establishment critics
to confront him directly, which probably accounts for why so few of them ever
did. The handful that tried were promptly obliterated by a massive bombardment
of inconvenient fact. Since “facts don’t care about your feelings,” all of the
latter group were obligated to examine which irrational emotions had encouraged
them to adopt the erroneous conclusions Chomsky showed them they held, but none
of them did.
William F. Buckley
had his error-riddled version of the post-WWII Greek civil war exposed on his
own show – Firing Line. “Your history
is quite confused there,” commented Chomsky to Buckley’s face, after the
celebrated reactionary referred to an imaginary Communist insurgency prior to the Nazis’ Greek intervention.
Neo-con Richard
Perle tried to divert his discussion with Chomsky from U.S. intervention and
denial of national independence around the world to an analysis of competing development
models, an entirely different topic. With no answer for fact and reason he was
reduced to rhetorically asking the audience if it really didn’t find
establishment mythology more plausible than what he called Chomsky’s “deeply
cynical” arguments revealing the shameful truth.
Boston University
president John Silber complained that Chomsky hadn’t provided proper context
when mentioning that the U.S. had assassinated Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar
Romero, blown up the church radio station, and cut the editor of the
independent newspaper to pieces with machetes. Silber neglected to disclose
what context could possibly redeem such atrocities.
Dutch Minister of
Defense Frederick Bolkestein dismissed Chomsky and Edward Herman’s thesis on
capitalist media as a conspiracy theory and Chomsky’s anarchist convictions as
a “boy’s dream.” In the course of their debate, however, Chomsky refuted every
one of Bolkestein’s charges, while pointing out their complete irrelevance to
evaluating the thesis advanced in Chomsky and Herman’s book, “Manufacturing
Consent,” which was the purpose of the debate.
The term
“Manufacturing Consent” derives from the public relations industry, the
practices of which more than amply confirm Chomsky and Herman’s thesis that
under capitalism the broad tendency of the mass media is to function as a
propaganda service for the national security state and the private interests
that dominate it. In any case, Bolkestein himself confirmed Chomsky and
Herman’s propaganda model in his very attempt to refute it, objecting to Chomsky’s
allegedly undercounting of killings attributable to Pol Pot (an official enemy
of the U.S.) while completely ignoring U.S. client Indonesia’s massacres in
East Timor, to which Chomsky had compared the killings in Cambodia. This is exactly
what the propaganda model predicts: crimes of state committed by one’s own side
will be ignored or downplayed while those of official enemies will be exaggerated
or invented, while occasioning great moral indignation, which is never in
evidence when one’s own crimes are under discussion.
These four
intellectual knockouts by Chomsky appear to have deterred the rest of the
establishment pack from even entertaining debating with him.
A story told by the late Alexander Cockburn suggests they were actually afraid
to do so. “One prominent member of the British intellectual elite,” related
Cockburn, warned him not to get into a dispute with Chomsky on the grounds that
he was “a terrible and relentless opponent” who confronted central issues
head-on and never ceded ground as part of a more complicated maneuver. That was
why, explained Cockburn, the guardians of official ideology so often targeted
Chomsky with gratuitous vilification and childish abuse: “They shirk the real argument they fear they will lose, and substitute
insult and distortion.”
(emphasis added)
So unprepared were
these establishment mouthpieces to engage in substantive discussion that they
actually refused Chomsky the customary right to defend himself even against
their repeated personal attacks. After demonstrating that elite assertions
about him were no more than vulgar smears, Chomsky found his letters to the
editor went unprinted or were mangled beyond recognition by hostile editing.
Rather than take
offense, Chomsky shrugged off such treatment as only to be expected. If he
hadn’t received it, he often said, he would have had to suspect that he was
doing something wrong.
As unperturbed as he
was by personal attacks, the same cannot be said of his reaction to propaganda
passed off as news. Christopher Hitchens and Alexander Cockburn both told the
story of how Chomsky once went to the dentist and was informed that he was
grinding his teeth in his sleep. Consultation with Mrs. Chomsky determined that
this was not the case. Further investigation found that Chomsky was indeed
grinding his teeth, but in the daytime – every morning when he read the New York Times.
The explanation for
these disparate reactions is straightforward. Chomsky could see that vilification
was infantile and inconsequential and therefore easily dismissed it. But the
deadly impact of mass brainwashing made him react with the whole of his being,
unconsciously gnashing his teeth at elite hypocrisy.
This fury fed his boundless reading appetite, equipping him
with the insurmountable advantage of a lifetime of determined preparation. An
avid reader from early childhood, he devoured hundreds, if not thousands, of
books growing up, checking out up to a dozen volumes at a time from the
Philadelphia public library, steadily working his way through the realist
classics – Austen, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Eliot, Hardy, Hugo, Tolstoy, Turgenev,
Twain, and Zola – as well as Hebrew literature, including the Bible, and
Marxist and anarchist texts.
This insatiable appetite for books continued throughout his
life, supplemented by countless other print sources. At home or at work he was
always surrounded by enormous stacks of books, more than anyone could read in
several lifetimes. The practical results of such a studious life could be
amusing. Chomsky himself told the story of how he and his first wife Carol once
heard a loud crash at 4:30 a.m., thinking it was an earthquake. In fact, it
turned out to be a mountain of books cascading to the floor in an adjoining
room.
Though Chomsky could only read a portion of all that he
would liked to have read, that portion was of staggering dimensions for any
ordinary reader. Aside from the mountain of books he read growing up, according
to his wife Carol he read six daily newspapers and eighty journals of opinion,
in addition to thousands of personal letters he received from the general
public, an important part of his reading load.
Before 911, Chomsky spent an average of twenty hours a week on personal
correspondence, a figure that probably increased after 911 when interest in
Chomsky’s work surged.
His longtime personal assistant Bev Stohl confirms that he answered e-mails
every night until 3:00 a.m.,
while Chomsky himself used to say he wrote 15,000 words a week responding to personal
letters, which he drily claimed was “a C.I.A. estimate.” Even subtracting out
the writing time for private correspondence, one can see that Chomsky’s reading
was beyond enormous, and not at all recreational, a preference that manifested
itself early in life when he read a draft of his father’s dissertation on David
Kimhi (1160-1236) a Hebrew grammarian,
which turned out to be the first step on a complicated path to intellectual
stardom sixteen years later with the publication of Syntactic Structures.
Chomsky’s boundless reading appetite appears to have been
matched by the public’s appetite to hear him speak. He probably spoke to more
Americans in person than anyone else in history, giving political lectures and
talks at a staggering rate for nearly sixty years. In the pre-zoom era that
meant considerable travel, the demands of which he embraced without complaint,
whether driving, flying, or taking the train. In addition to destinations all
over the U.S. he also went to Colombia, Palestine, Nicaragua, Ireland, New
Zealand, Australia, Canada, India, Mexico, Britain, Spain, France, Cuba, Laos,
Vietnam, Japan, Italy, Turkey, and South Africa, among other places activists
invited him to visit.
The talks were brilliant, and standing ovations routinely followed
them. But the question and answer periods were where Chomsky’s unparalleled
mastery stood out. Hour after hour questions were put to him on dozens of
different topics, from labor history to union organizing to guerrilla tactics
to drone warfare to economic theory to counter-insurgency and popular
resistance, and hour after hour he patiently answered with illuminating
precision and fascinating detail, at the same time providing an astonishing
array of book titles, article summaries, history lessons, revealing quotes, and
clarifying context about a seemingly limitless number of political conflicts
past and present. His prodigious power of recall was vastly superior to any
merely photographic memory, which overwhelms with irrelevant detail, whereas
Chomsky always selected from a vast trove of information just what was immediately
and historically relevant to a single person’s inquiry, before moving on to the
next, and the next, and the next, and the next, in city after city, decade
after decade after decade.
The size of his audiences mattered little to him, whether he
spoke on a tiny college radio station or in front of thousands at a prestigious
university. If anything, the larger audiences – though routine for Chomsky –
were less desirable, as they highlighted the discouraging fact that too few
intellectuals were willing to take up the challenge of political education and
popular organization, a conformist constriction of supply in relation to strong
public demand. In short, libertarian socialist Chomsky had no interest in being
a “hot commodity,” and the fact that he could be regarded as such represented a
failure of the intellectual class to politically engage with the public more
than it did any personal merit on his part. Furthermore, as far as merit to his
speaking ability goes, Chomsky deliberately refused to cultivate it, shunning
oratory and rhetorical flourish in preference for what he called his “proudly
boring” style of relying solely on logic and fact. Swaying audiences with
emotion, he thought, was better left to propagandists.
This preference for the analytical over the emotionally
gratifying was always in evidence with Chomsky. For example, in the early
eighties a massive build-up of first-strike nuclear weapons sparked the
emergence of the Nuclear Freeze movement, which mobilized enormous popular
support for a bilateral freeze (U.S.-U.S.S.R.) in the production of new nuclear
weapons by relentlessly focusing public attention on apocalyptic visions of
nuclear annihilation.
From the moment the incineration of Hiroshima was publicly
announced, of course, Chomsky, too, had recognized the danger of a world
wired-up to explode in atomic fury, but he dissented from the view that
paralyzing visions of utter destruction were an effective way of achieving
nuclear disarmament. On the contrary, Chomsky felt that public attention needed
to be focused on imperial policy, not military hardware, as it was policy that
produced outcomes. When the
Nuclear Freeze movement attracted more than a million people to New York City
in 1982 to protest the accelerating nuclear arms race, Chomsky withdrew from
the event when no mention was made of Israel’s ongoing invasion and devastation
of Lebanon, including the killing of Soviet advisers, a direct incitement to
potentially terminal superpower confrontation.
While the Freeze continued to focus laser-like on the
awesome destructiveness of nuclear bombs, Chomsky found the approach
insultingly simplistic, and expressed no surprise when its efforts were
ultimately absorbed into the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, then headed
by Kenneth Adelman, who was given the position after saying in his confirmation
hearings that he had never given any consideration to the idea of disarmament.
In spite of dissenting in such ways even from the views of
popular movements he sought to encourage, Chomsky’s public stature continued to
grow. While subject to an almost complete blackout in the corporate media (for
years after the end of the Vietnam War his writings could most reliably be
found in the pages of the right-wing magazine Inquiry and the worker-owned and managed South End Press), Chomsky nevertheless won widespread acclaim for
his analytical brilliance, tireless activism, and unflagging commitment to
exposing the truth. Though he himself downplayed personal accolades, he won
praise from a dazzling array of admirers, from learned professors and radical
journalists to students, activists, authors, spiritual leaders, political
hopefuls, movie directors, musicians, comedians, world champion boxers,
political prisoners, international leaders, and awestruck fans throughout the
world. With their constant compliments ringing in his ears, it’s doubly remarkable that he never
lost his humility.
Physicist Lawrence Krauss remembered being deeply impressed
by Chomsky’s consistent willingness to spend an hour of his time talking to him
whenever Krauss dropped by his office as a young student at MIT, though Chomsky
had no professional obligation to students outside of linguistics. “He showed me
a kind of respect I wasn’t anticipating,” said an appreciative Krauss years
later, while pronouncing Chomsky’s work “incisive, informative, provocative,
and brilliant.”
Activist and journalist Fred Branfman was impressed by
Chomsky’s apparent ability to X-Ray vast reams of print and extract the essence
for immediate practical use. When Chomsky visited Laos in 1970 to learn about
refugees of U.S. saturation bombing of the region, Branfman gave him a 500-page
book on the war in Laos at 10:00 one night, and was amazed to see him refute a
propaganda point in a talk with a U.S. Embassy official the next day by citing
a footnote buried hundreds of page into the text. Branfman was also struck by
the fact that, unlike many intellectuals, Chomsky retained access to his
deepest emotions. While witnessing Laotian peasants describing the horrific
effects of U.S. bombing, he openly wept.Overall,
Branfman found Chomsky to be intense, driven, and unrelenting in combating
injustice, but also warm, caring, wise, and gentle.
A documentary about Chomsky released in 2003 saluted his
amazing productivity, calling him “[a] rebel without a pause,” which was the
title of the film. After four decades of public intellectual work featuring eighteen-hour
workdays, the MIT professor was well-known for working through the night
drinking oceans of coffee, yet somehow still making himself available for
morning interviews.
Journalist and friend Alexander Cockburn emphasized Chomsky’s
provision of a coherent “big picture” about politics, “buttressed by the data
of a thousand smaller pictures and discrete theaters of conflict, struggle and
oppression,” all the product of his extraordinary responsiveness to injustice.
“Chomsky feels the abuses, cruelty and hypocrisies of power more than anyone,”
wrote Cockburn. “It’s a state of continual alertness.”
Famed American author and wilderness defender Edward Abbey
wrote that Chomsky deserved the Nobel Prize for Truth, if only one had existed.
British philosophy professor Nick Griffin declared Chomsky
“extraordinarily well-informed,” and found the experience of simply talking to
him “astonishing.” “He’s read everything and remembered what he’s read,” he
marveled.
Referring to the dissident classic, “American Power and the
New Mandarins,” historian and gay rights activist Martin Duberman hailed
Chomsky’s seemingly Olympian detachment, his tone so “free of exaggeration or
misrepresentation,” his avoidance of “self-righteousness,” and his rare ability
“to admit when a conclusion is uncertain or when the evidence allows for
several possible conclusions.” Perhaps most remarkably, Chomsky was able, said
Duberman, “to see inadequacies in the views or tactics of those who share his
position – and even some occasional merit in those who do not,” a rare talent
in the best of times and virtually non-existent in the frenzied tribalism so
prevalent today.
The brilliant Palestinian scholar Edward Said expressed
admiration for Chomsky’s tireless willingness to confront injustice and for the
awesome extent of his knowledge. “There is something deeply moving about a mind
of such noble ideals repeatedly stirred on behalf of human suffering and
injustice. One thinks here of Voltaire, of Benda, or Russell, although more
than any of them Chomsky commands what he calls ‘reality’” – facts – over a
breathtaking range.”
Pantheon editor James Peck noted a kind of intellectual
vertigo in reading Chomsky, finding his critiques “deeply unsettling” and
impossible to categorize, as “no intellectual tradition quite captures his
voice” and “no party claims him.” Always fresh and original, “his position
[was] not a liberalism become radical, or a conservatism in revolt against the
betrayal of claimed principles.” He was “a spokesman for no ideology.” His
uniqueness, said Peck, “fits nowhere,” which was in itself “an indication of
the radical nature of his dissent.”
People’s historian Howard Zinn resorted to leg-pulling irony
to describe the Chomsky phenomenon: “I found myself on a plane going south
sitting next to a guy who introduced himself as Noam Chomsky. . . . It occurred
to me, talking to him, that he was very smart.” Zinn, a popular speaker
himself, was sometimes asked for the latest count of the learned professor’s
staggering output of books. He would begin his reply with the qualification,
“As of this morning,” and then pause for dramatic effect, drolly suggesting that
any number he might offer stood a good chance of being abruptly rendered
obsolete by Chomsky’s latest salvo.
Daniel Ellsberg was of similar mind, once saying that keeping up with Chomsky’s
political work was a considerable challenge, as “he publishes faster than I can
read.”
Establishment liberal Bill Moyers was impressed by Chomsky’s
apparently greater admiration for the intelligence of ordinary people than for
the specialized talents of his elite colleagues. In an interview at the end of
the Reagan years he told Chomsky: “[It] seems a little incongruous to hear a
man from the Ivory Tower of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a scholar, a
distinguished linguistics scholar, talk about common people with such
appreciation.” Chomsky found no paradox at all in this, replying that his
appreciation flowed naturally from the evidence provided by language study
itself, which demonstrated overwhelmingly that ordinary people have deep-seated
creative intelligence that separates humans from every other known species.
Where paradox does
exist is in elite intellectuals’ apparently boundless capacity to pervert
natural human intelligence into specialized cleverness at serving the ends of
power. However, this makes them not the most intelligent part of the population,
as they believe themselves to be, but, on the contrary, the most gullible and
easily deceived, a point Chomsky made often.
In Chomsky’s final public years the fruit of using our
species intelligence to serve institutional stupidity manifested itself in
growing threats of climate collapse, nuclear war, and ideological fanaticism
displacing all prospect of democracy, calling into question the very survival
value of such intelligence.
Helpfully, Chomsky has left us with sage advice about which
direction our intelligence should take and also avoid, in order to escape
looming catastrophe. As to the first, he said, “You should stick with the
underdog.”
About the second, he said, “We should not succumb to irrational belief.”
In June 2023, Chomsky suffered a massive stroke, leaving him
paralyzed down the right side of his body, and with limited capacity to speak.
His appetite for news and sensitivity to injustice, however,
remain intact. When he sees the news from Palestine, his wife reports, he
raises his remaining good arm in a mute gesture of sorrow and anger.
Still compassionate and defiant at 96.
Incredibly well done, Professor Chomsky.
Happy Birthday.
On U.S. neo-Nazi client
states, see Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, “The Washington Connection And
Third World Fascism,” (South End, 1979), and many subsequent works. On Vietnam,
see Noam Chomsky, “American Power and the New Mandarins – Historical and
Political Essays; (Vintage, 1969); Noam Chomsky; “At War With Asia – Essays on
Indochina,” (Pantheon, 1970); and Noam Chomsky; “For Reasons of State,” (The
New Press, 2003). On the Middle East, see Noam Chomsky, “The Fateful Triangle –
The United States, Israel & The Palestinians,” (South End, 1983); Noam
Chomsky & Gilbert Achcar, “Perilous Power – The Middle East And U.S.
Foreign Policy,” (Paradigm, 2007); Noam Chomsky, “Middle East Illusions,”
(Rowman & Littlefield, 2007). On the Cold War, see Noam Chomsky, World
Orders Old and New, (Columbia, 1994).
Chomsky found political
activism distasteful, and hated giving up his rich personal life. See Mark
Achbar ed., “Manufacturing Consent – Noam Chomsky and the Media,” (Black Rose,
1994) pps. 65-6.
Noam Chomsky, “The Chomsky
Reader,” (Pantheon, 1987) pps. 224-5.
“Firing Line with William F.
Buckley: Vietnam and the Intellectuals,” Episode 143, April 3, 1969.
“The Perle-Chomsky Debate –
Noam Chomsky Debates with Richard Perle,” Ohio State University, 1988,
transcript available at www.chomsky.info.net.
Mark Achbar, “Manufacturing
Consent – Noam Chomsky and the Media,” (Black Rose, 1994) pps. 128-31
Alexander Cockburn in David
Barsamian, “Chronicles of Dissent – Interviews with Noam Chomsky,” (Common
Courage, 1992) p. xii
Robert Barsky, “Chomsky – A
Life of Dissent,” (MIT, 1997) pps. 13, 19; Mark Achbar ed., “Manufacturing
Consent – Noam Chomsky and the Media,” (Black Rose, 1994) p. 44
Noam Chomsky in David
Barsamian, “Class Warfare – Interviews With David Barsamian,” (Common Courage,
1996) p. 26
“Chomsky and Krauss: An
Origins Project Dialogue,” You Tube, March 31, 2013
Alexander Cockburn in David
Barsamian, “Chronicles of Dissent – Interviews with Noam Chomsky,” (Common
Courage, 1992) pps. x - xi
Edward Abbey, ed., “The Best
of Edward Abbey,” (Counterpoint, 2005), preface.
Quoted in the documentary
Rebel Without a Pause, 2003.
Martin Duberman quoted on
the back cover of “American Power and the New Mandarins,” 1969 (first Vintage
Books edition).
Edward Said, “The Politics
of Dispossession,” (Chatto and Windus, 1994) p. 263
James Peck, introduction to
The Chomsky Reader, (Pantheon, 1987) pps. vii - xix
Howard Zinn, “The Future of
History – Interviews With David Barsamian,” (Common Courage, 1999), pps. 39-40.
Though Chomsky’s total book count has ended up around 150 (with collaborations
with activist friends still coming out), it’s possible nobody knows the exact
figure with certainty. Lifelong activist and friend Michael Albert tells the
story of how Chomsky’s immense body of work once convinced a group of activists
in Eastern Europe that there were two different Chomskys, one a linguist, and
the other a political activist. Given Chomsky’s preposterous output and far
from unusual surname in that part of the world, it was perhaps an
understandable error. See Michael Albert, “Noam Chomsky at 95. No Strings on
Him,” Counterpunch, December 8, 2023.
Bill Moyers, “A World of
Ideas – Conversations With Thoughtful Men and Women,” (Doubleday, 1989). The
interview is also available online on You Tube. See “Noam Chomsky interview on
Dissent (1988),” <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEYJMCydFNI>
