Chomsky in Edinburgh

Noam Chomsky speaks today at Edinburgh University in the Gifford Lecture series. The Gifford Lectures are intended to “contribute to the advancement of theological and philosophical thought”, but Chomsky is instead using the occasion to advance his political opinions under the title “Illegal but Legitimate: a Dubious Doctrine for the Times”. I assume it is not literally the same speech that he has previously given under that title, but all will be given the opportunity to check this as it is being broadcast live on the Internet at 17.15 GMT.

Some distinctly uncritical journalism has accompanied Chomsky’s visit. Indeed, while I don’t wish to expend superlatives without cause, this profile in Scotland’s Sunday Herald at the weekend, by associate editor Alan Taylor, strikes me as possibly the most ill-informed article for a general readership I have read on the contentious subject of Chomsky’s political advocacy. All the standard elements from Chomsky are there. He is instinctively suspicious and graceless even in a determinedly soft interview:

I remind Chomsky of his 1990 visit to Scotland, when he spoke on “self-determination and power” at the Pearce Institute in Govan, Glasgow. “You’ve got to remind me what this is about,” says Chomsky. This does not seem a promising start. I remind him that he is coming to Edinburgh to deliver a Gifford Lecture. “I know that,” he says, rather testily. “But who are you?”

Taylor identifies in this type of reception “a seam of laconic humour beneath the serious, restrained manner”, which is just as well in the circumstances. There is also the habitual invocation by Chomsky of the precedent of Nazi Germany when discussing Western liberal democracies, though on this occasion, mindful of the newspaper’s readership, he selects a British target. In “rubbishing” Tony Blair, he observes:

I suppose Hitler believed what he was saying too.

There is the hagiographer’s benediction:

“Unlike many leftists of his generation,” says [Robert] Barsky, “Chomsky never flirted with movements or organisations that were later revealed to be totalitarian, oppressive, exclusionary, anti-revolutionary, and elitist … He has very little to regret. His work, in fact, contains some of the most accurate analyses of this century.”

And there is this truly extraordinary unsubstantiated assertion by Taylor:

Nobody can deny Chomsky’s commitment to the cause of truth.

If I were the editor of the Sunday Herald, I should have expected my associate editor to consult at least some of the relevant history of Chomsky’s polemical exchanges before writing a sentence like that. I have in any event referred Taylor to the judgement of the political scientist Samuel Huntington as far back as 1970, in a letter to the New York Review of Books, concerning an early instance of the distorted quotations and false interpolations that characterise Chomsky’s political output:

The three paragraphs of Mr. Chomsky to which I have referred constitute less than five percent of his article. I do not know if the level of veracity which he achieves in them is typical of the entire piece. If these paragraphs are representative, however, the article as a whole should contain, by conservative extrapolation, approximately 94 other serious distortions and misstatements of fact.

Taylor has, in short, done his subject a signal service by failing to investigate the historical record.