The voice of reaction

The Independent columnist Johann Hari asks rhetorically, concerning one of his longstanding antagonists:

Doesn't it worry [Noam] Chomsky that as he was trying desperately to prevent the invasion, he was acting against the clear wishes of most Iraqi people? Is it really reasonable to denounce as "Stalinist" (the tag he applied to me a year ago) anybody who tries sincerely to support the Iraqi people? I believe in siding with the Iraqi people on both counts: for overthrowing Saddam, and against a protracted occupation. Chomsky, it seems, does not. Why?

I don't know definitively the answers to these questions (other than the second), but I can draw an inference from Chomsky's writings on earlier conflicts. Chomsky, lauded as the voice of dissent by his admirers, is more properly regarded as a representative of the forces of reaction and conservative pessimism in foreign affairs. In his 1994 collection of interviews, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many, he was asked by his indefatigable Boswell, a radio producer called David Barsamian, quite a pertinent, if non-threatening, question about the greatest moral failure of European policymakers since the war:

Would you comment on the events in the former Yugoslavia, which constitute the greatest outburst of violence in Europe in fifty years -- tens of thousands killed, hundreds of thousands of refugees. This isn't some remote place like East Timor we're talking about -- this is Europe -- and it's on the news every night.

Chomsky's answer began, irrelevantly enough, with the preposterous accusation that western conservatives (for him, a blanket term) "defend much of what's happening". To that end he cited a letter to The Economist from an obscure former Observer journalist and pro-Serb crank called Nora Beloff, and ignored historically somewhat more significant figures such as Margaret Thatcher and Jeane Kirkpatrick, both advocates of western intervention on behalf of Bosnian Muslims. But, perhaps unintentionally, Barsamian asked not a bad follow-up question:

Some say that, just as the Allies should have bombed the rail lines to Auschwitz to prevent the deaths of many people in concentration camps, so we should now bomb the Serbian gun positions surrounding Sarajevo that have kept that city under siege. Would you advocate the use of force?

Here is Chomsky's answer in full:

First of all, there's a good deal of debate about how much effect bombing the rail lines to Auschwitz would have had. Putting that aside, it seems to me that a judicious threat and use of force, not by the Western powers but by some international or multinational group, might, at an earlier stage, have suppressed a good deal of the violence and maybe blocked it. I don't know if it would help now.

If it were possible to stop the bombardment of Sarajevo by threatening to bomb some emplacements (and perhaps even carrying the threat out), I think you could give an argument for it. But that's a very big if. It's not only a moral issue -- you have to ask about the consequences, and they could be quite complex.

What if a Balkan war were set off? One consequence is that conservative military forces within Russia could move in. They're already there, in fact, to support their Slavic brothers in Serbia. They might move in en masse. (That's traditional, incidentally. Go back to Tolstoy's novels and read about how Russians were going to the south to save their Slavic brothers from attacks. It's now being reenacted.)

At that point you're getting fingers on nuclear weapons involved. It's also entirely possible that an attack on the Serbs, who feel that they're the aggrieved party, could inspire them to move more aggressively in Kosovo, the Albanian area. That could set off a large-scale war, with Greece and Turkey involved. So it's not so simple.

Or what if the Bosnian Serbs, with the backing of both the Serbian and maybe even other Slavic regions, started a guerrilla war? Western military "experts" have suggested it could take a hundred thousand troops just to more or less hold the area. Maybe so.

So one has to ask a lot of questions about consequences. Bombing Serbian gun emplacements sounds simple, but you have to ask how many people are going to end up being killed. That's not so simple.

And here is my translation of Chomsky's answer into plain English:

No.

What I find extraordinary in retrospect, as I did at the time, about Chomsky's sentiments on the subject of aggression and genocide is not just the policy proposal he expounded but the terms in which he couched it. His is a statement not of internationalist solidarity with the victims of aggression, but of traditional 'realism' in the discredited sense of urging on the West an abdication of moral responsibility: the issue, after all, was "not so simple".

Yet the issue did turn out to be pretty simple in one crucial respect a year after the book was published. In August 1995 the Croats began a ground offensive against the Serbs, while Nato launched air attacks against Serb positions after the shelling of the Sarajevo marketplace. The resulting rapid and decisive shift in territorial advantage against the Serbs enabled the negotiation of the Dayton Accords. Chomsky's warnings proved groundless. Had Nato followed the advice of this paragon of radical conscience and dissent, much needless suffering would have ensued.

Comments

[Gilles]

Erm, as you've already admitted to being 'separated from my books' are we to infer that you have a copy of Chomsky with you as holiday reading?

[e.a.]

It's good that J.Hari has managed to prise himself away from the worthless piece of TV voyeurism known as Big Brother, about which he wrote excitedly:

'If you hate Big Brother, you hate Britain and everything we have become. I love Big Brother because I love living in a country where a ballsy Portuguese transsexual is odds-on favourite to win the nation's biggest popularity contest. And I love Big Brother for revealing our nation's dysfunctions in all their fetid, furious glory. The current series of the reality TV show - which reaches a climax tonight - reveals more about this country's strengths and problems in the early 21st century than all the Booker Prize winners and Royal Court plays of the noughties combined.'

The above gives the impression of a journo-rabbit trapped in the headlights of a stage-managed piece of media ephemera. Let's hope his political judgement is alittle more reliable.

[Michael]

The above gives the impression of a journo-rabbit trapped in the headlights of a stage-managed piece of media ephemera.

Or, alternatively, of someone who recognises that an 'out' transsexual winning a large-scale nationwide popularity contest (whose voters are presumably heavily comprised of the kind of tabloid readers traditionally regarded as viscerally hostile to that particular minority group) indicates a sea-change in British attitudes that is very much worth taking seriously, regardless of the inanity of the circumstances.

[e.a.]

There is a world of difference between 'loving' something and finding it culturally significant, as I'm sure you know. Surveys also suggest you're wrong about the viewing constituency of the programme. And for what its worth, I think the 'sea-change' happened years ago, Big brother is just a piece of flotsam.

[Rich]

"Erm, as you've already admitted to being 'separated from my books' are we to infer that you have a copy of Chomsky with you as holiday reading?"

Judging from the links given in Oliver's post, I would infer that he has access to Zmag's online Chomsky archive and an ability to clip and paste.

[Red Deathy]

ignored historically somewhat more significant figures such as Margaret Thatcher and Jeane Kirkpatrick, both advocates of western intervention on behalf of Bosnian Muslims.

But didn't the Conservative government impose an arms embargo, which benefitted the Serbs? Didn't the Tory foriegn secretary, Dougie 'The boy' Hurd then go on to join the board of NatWest, in helping privatise the Serbian telephone system? Didn't FRY rank as number four in the list of recipients of bilateral aid from britain, right up until Labour came in?

[maor]

It was actually reasonable of Chomsky to point out that using force might have negative consequences.
But someone who acknowledges that he has no clear answer shouldn't be so sure that what the rest of the world does is so awful. How can he know if he isn't sure what is good?

[Simon Kinahan]

Deathy,

The three issues you raise in no way imply that "Western Conservatives" (a remarkably large group to generalise about anyway), even the ones specifically mentioned, approved of "much of what was happening", Chomksy's statement that you are presumably trying to defend. I realise the kind of scattershot deployment of vaguely-bad-sounding facts you're trying is a tactic of Chomksy's, but in the rest of the world it doesn't constitute any kind of an argument.

[alex]

I thought the latter half of Hari's post to be the more significant - finding common cause for the left over developments in Iraq. It often seems as if many on the left would rather see Iraq fail on the basis of "anti-imperialist" point-scoring than exert seious pressure on the US/UK governments to make sure they live up to their promices of "freedom" and "democracy" for Iraqi people. Conversely, many of the pro-warriors seem to have lost any critical faculties they ever (perhaps) posessed.

That contracts for virtually every aspect of Iraqi life have been contracted out to US firms with no chance of them being rebuked by a soverign government or that the balance of private/public ownership in Iraq has already been decided by the occupying forces should be cause for alarm for anyone describing themselves as a beliver in democracy.

I would hope that those on the left, whom seem to have so enthusiastically signed up to the Bush/Blair worldvision, would at least pause to think about the undemocratic and destructive implications of the doctrine of "market as panacea" - to which both Bush and Blair are ideologically attached.