Oliver Kamm

"LM was probably correct" - Chomsky

Against my expectations, there is a perceptive interview in The Guardian today, by Emma Brockes, not a writer I'd previously credited with much independence of thought, with Noam Chomsky. The stated reason for the interview is the Prospect/FP poll in which Chomsky was voted the world's top public intellectual. I have given my views on this result here and in Prospect magazine. In her interview, Ms Brockes never states explicitly the reasons for scepticism, but does give some encouraging hints:

[Chomsky's] conclusions remain controversial: that practically [sic - the 'practically' is not necessary - OK] every US president since the second world war has been guilty of war crimes; that in the overall context of Cambodian history, the Khmer Rouge weren't as bad as everyone makes out; that during the Bosnian war the "massacre" at Srebrenica was probably overstated. (Chomsky uses quotations marks to undermine things he disagrees with and, in print at least, it can come across less as academic than as witheringly teenage; like, Srebrenica was so not a massacre.)

She also notes that Chomsky is accused of 'miring a debate in intellectual spam, what the writer Paul Berman calls his "customary blizzard of obscure sources"' - which is a rather polite way of characterising Chomsky's handling of source material. But most revealing is an extraordinary passage that, despite the carefully hedged terms that Ms Brockes couches it in, merits reproducing at length and ought to be widely publicised:

As some see it, one ill-judged choice of cause was the accusation made by Living Marxism magazine that during the Bosnian war, shots used by ITN of a Serb-run detention camp were faked. The magazine folded after ITN sued, but the controversy flared up again in 2003 when a journalist called Diane Johnstone made similar allegations in a Swedish magazine, Ordfront, taking issue with the official number of victims of the Srebrenica massacre. (She said they were exaggerated.) In the ensuing outcry, Chomsky lent his name to a letter praising Johnstone's "outstanding work". Does he regret signing it?

"No," he says indignantly. "It is outstanding. My only regret is that I didn't do it strongly enough. It may be wrong; but it is very careful and outstanding work."

How, I wonder, can journalism be wrong and still outstanding?

"Look," says Chomsky, "there was a hysterical fanaticism about Bosnia in western culture which was very much like a passionate religious conviction. It was like old-fashioned Stalinism: if you depart a couple of millimetres from the party line, you're a traitor, you're destroyed. It's totally irrational. And Diane Johnstone, whether you like it or not, has done serious, honest work. And in the case of Living Marxism, for a big corporation to put a small newspaper out of business because they think something they reported was false, is outrageous."

They didn't "think" it was false; it was proven to be so in a court of law.

But Chomsky insists that "LM was probably correct" and that, in any case, it is irrelevant. "It had nothing to do with whether LM or Diane Johnstone were right or wrong." It is a question, he says, of freedom of speech. "And if they were wrong, sure; but don't just scream well, if you say you're in favour of that you're in favour of putting Jews in gas chambers."

Eh? Not everyone who disagrees with him is a "fanatic", I say. These are serious, trustworthy people.

"Like who?"

"Like my colleague, Ed Vulliamy."

Vulliamy's reporting for the Guardian from the war in Bosnia won him the international reporter of the year award in 1993 and 1994. He was present when the ITN footage of the Bosnian Serb concentration camp was filmed and supported their case against LM magazine.

"Ed Vulliamy is a very good journalist, but he happened to be caught up in a story which is probably not true."

But Karadic's number two herself [Biljana Plavsic] pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity.

"Well, she certainly did. But if you want critical work on the party line, General Lewis MacKenzie who was the Canadian general in charge [of Unprofor, and later, as discovered by Roy Gutman of Newsday, undertook a speaking tour financed by a pro-Serb lobby group, whose support he did not disclose - OK] has written that most of the stories were complete nonsense."

And so it goes on, Chomsky fairly vibrating with anger at Vulliamy and co's "tantrums" over his questioning of their account of the war. I suggest that if they are having tantrums it's because they have contact with the survivors of Srebrenica and witness the impact of the downplaying of their experiences. He fairly explodes. "That's such a western European position. We are used to having our jackboot on people's necks, so we don't see our victims. I've seen them: go to Laos, go to Haiti, go to El Salvador. You'll see people who are really suffering brutally. This does not give us the right to lie about that suffering." Which is, I imagine, why ITN went to court in the first place.

I'm not usually lost for words on the subject of Chomsky's political opinions, but I have no idea where to begin in commenting on this denigration of the work of honest reporters, whose accounts have been verified even by the war criminals they helped bring to book. I spoke to Ed Vulliamy at some length while the libel case against LM magazine was going on; he was most anxious to convince me (and he did) that the scurrilous accusations and harassment conducted by the magazine fully justified ITN's legal action. This was about the time, incidentally, that LM magazine endorsed the discredited former minister Neil Hamilton in his Tatton constituency in the 1997 general election, and I recall thinking it was a shame that Mr Hamilton had allowed his name and reputation to be exploited in this way.

I don't usually link to essays without comment, but on the general subject of the 'Left revisionists' and their attitude to Serb aggression, this article by Cambridge historian Marko Atiila Hoare is definitive and damning.

Tough Liberalism; Anti-Totalitarianism

Peter Beinart, editor of The New Republic, has a fine article entitled Tough Liberalism in the magazine of the Democratic Leadership Council – in effect, the beleaguered Blairite wing of the US Democrats. Beinart’s theme is that “you have to go back pre-Vietnam to find a precedent for how the Democratic Party can respond in a way that will win the country's trust” on the issue of national security. He refers specifically to the immediate post-war period and the debates then taking place within American liberalism:

Between 1946 and 1949, the Democratic Party engaged in a huge internal fight. It was not a fight against Republicans, but first and foremost a fight within the Democratic Party. In state after state, the state parties ripped themselves apart over the issue of anti-communism. The issue was fundamentally about whether liberal Democrats would define liberalism only in opposition to the right wing or whether anti-communism would be placed at the heart of what it meant to be a liberal.

Beinart lucidly recounts the history of this argument and draws an important historical parallel:

What can we learn from that today? It seems to me there has been a kind of silent, hidden divide on the left in the Democratic Party since 9/11. It is akin to the divide that existed in the late 1940s. The fundamental question is again whether the proper prism through which to view this new world is anti-totalitarianism based on the idea that we face another totalitarian foe.

This is indeed Beinart’s view, and he concludes:

In 1960, the first debate between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy was about domestic policy. Kennedy got the first question and he said, I know this is a debate about domestic policy, but I want to start by saying that Nikita Khrushchev is in New York tonight and everything I'm going to say bears on our ability to win the struggle against totalitarianism in the world. He went on to talk about education, health care, and the economy -- and the fact that an African American child had only one-half the chance of graduating from high school that a white child had. The theme was America's ability to become a better society that would ultimately lead us to prevail in the world.

That's the tradition that the Democratic Party and liberals need to recapture in this new era in which we face a great new threat.

I completely agree with Beinart, and this provides me with the opportunity for a shameless piece of self-publicity. I have recently written a similar argument and conclusion to Beinart’s, but with regard to British politics. It will be published next month by the Social Affairs Unit under the title Anti-Totalitarianism: the Left-Wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy. (Amazon lists it as already published, but it will be a little while yet.)

Throughout the past century the Left has fractured over the issue of national security. My book tries to plot a course for progressive politics by drawing on four pivotal historical debates on the British Left. These episodes comprise: collective security in the 1930s; opposition to Communist expansionism after World War II; the Labour Party’s rejection in the 1980s of its earlier anti-Communism; and President Bush’s ‘war on terror’. Running through these debates is an authentic left-wing tradition of militant anti-totalitarianism. Against it, though, there has been a recurring temptation for progressives, critical of their own societies’ failings, to excuse or even romanticise the ideological opponents of Western liberal democracies.

Left-wingers who instinctively oppose the use of force by the Western democracies are not just wrong but also heterodox. Rather than advancing libertarian ends, they have a startling affinity with the conservative ‘realism’ that characterised the foreign policy of the unlamented government of John Major, and that fails even in its own terms as a strategy of preserving vital interests. (Britain’s betrayal of Bosnia in the early 90s caused the most serious breach in transatlantic relations since Suez.) My book maintains that these issues are not new to British political debate, and that the Left is reprising familiar errors. The sole distinctive feature of left-wing opposition to the Blair-Bush strategy since 9/11 is that an alliance has emerged between different and previously hostile forms of totalitarianism: theocratic reaction and the Trotskyite Left. But even so, there is a precedent for the adoption by the far Left of fascist and antisemitic doctrines. Respect/SWP/Stop the War (one organisation, not three) has its counterpart in the pre-war British People’s Party, a pro-Nazi group styled on the Parti Populaire Français established by the French Communist leader and Nazi sympathiser Jacques Doriot in the 1930s.

Against self-styled realists, my book defends regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq as part of an anti-totalitarian struggle with recognisable antecedents in twentieth-century Europe. It argues that the promotion of global democracy accords with the Left’s internationalist ideals of opposition to fascism and clerical reaction. Indeed, the much-maligned term neoconservatism should be seen as a modern variant of traditional liberal internationalism.

Invoking the term ‘neoconservative’ is intended to be provocative, because it is treated in the UK mainly as a synonym for ‘sinister’, and I am not myself a neoconservative. But just as the term was originally coined as an insult (by the American Socialist leader Michael Harrington in the 1970s) and was adopted ironically by those on the receiving end of it, so there are reasons now for acquiescing in its use against us on the ‘regime-change’ Left. The main one is that the founding fathers of neoconservatism in the US these days place little store by the term. Irving Kristol is sceptical of the notion of exporting democracy: his support for an assertive foreign policy is couched in the language of realism rather than traditional liberal-democratic internationalism. Norman Podhoretz maintains there is no longer any need to distinguish his position from traditional conservatism. If neoconservatives such as Podhoretz are abandoning the term, this is as good a time as any to adopt it, in foreign affairs at least. No longer would neoconservatism then denote rage at the cultural changes of the 1960s. It would encompass those of us who believe the cultural changes of the 1960s have had a civilising effect and ought to go further.

My book argues finally that, while interventionism has proved a political liability for Tony Blair, it ought to be a bipartisan cause supported by the Left – in the same way that post-war liberalism led the opposition to Communism in the 1940s. The Left has a historic responsibility in this task, to be true to its legacy whatever the position of parties of the Right. Otherwise it will betray the cause of internationalism and anti-totalitarianism, and will risk the resurgence of a conservative realpolitik in informal alliance with an isolationist and reactionary Left.

UPDATE: Provisional publication date for my book will be 11 November.

Isolate Syria's tyranny

This article appears in The Times tomorrow.

“SYRIA IS LUCKY to have Bashar Assad as its President,” declared George Galloway, the indefatigable MP, on a trip to Damascus this summer. Now a UN report has found strong evidence of Syrian complicity in the assassination of the former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in February. None but a dedicated apologist for tyranny should demur at a strategy of confrontation.

Tony Blair has declined to rule out sanctions against Syria, but they would be a minimal step. Against Baathist Iraq, sanctions were porous, ineffectual, corruptly administered and a public relations disaster. Against Syria, they need to be more than symbols of disapproval. Political, diplomatic and economic pressure should be exerted with the declared aim of regime change. Forcing that outcome now is right and timely, and may obviate the need to pursue it militarily later.

After 9/11, President Bush declared that Syria had to “decide which side of the war against terror it is on”. There is little doubt of the answer. Under its dynastic despotism, Syria supports terrorists and grants them sanctuary. Islamic Jihad has its headquarters in Damascus, and Syria is known to have channelled arms from Iran to Hezbollah in Lebanon. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, Syria also has “an active chemical weapons programme, including significant reserves of the deadly nerve agent sarin”.

Whereas Western leaders have invested faith in Syria to support a Middle East peace settlement, those hopes have never been repaid. Successive Israeli leaders have been ready to return the entire Golan Heights to Syria, but Syria has stymied agreement by insisting also on a small parcel of land that safeguards Israel’s access to the Sea of Galilee. No Israeli Government would risk its principal water supply by ceding land on its own side of the international border. Syria’s fiercely anti-Semitic leadership is clearly determined to sabotage territorial compromise.

Protests in Lebanon after Hariri’s assassination led to the withdrawal of Syrian troops, and Lebanese elections in May decisively rejected Syrian influence. Assad felt the diplomatic pressure so keenly that he fruitlessly sought support from Saudi Arabia. Beyond Iran, his international support is scant. Enforcing the isolation of this callow and callous ruler is the least that a humane and pacific foreign policy must aim for.

Chomsky - the last word

If you want an apt comment on the vote on the Iraqi constitution, go to Rosemary Righter in The Times:

The robustness of the Iraqi commitment to the political process is beyond remarkable. So listen, you defeatists and cynics who said that this couldn’t be done, shouldn’t even be attempted: however confused the outcome may be, the democracy that you patronisingly declared that Iraqis could never handle is taking shape. By all means sneer when Bush and Blair talk about progress, but lay off the Iraqi people. They are not the benighted fools you took them for; and their courage puts us all to shame.

If you want apt coverage of George Galloway, then I cede the territory to this site and this columnist.

But if it's Chomsky-bashing you're after, you’ve come to the right place.

In my article in Prospect I recalled a breathtaking thought experiment dreamed up by the master of tendentious syllogism:

In A New Generation Draws the Line: Kosovo, East Timor and the Standards of the West (2000), Chomsky wryly challenged advocates of Nato intervention in Kosovo to urge also the bombing of Jakarta, Washington and London in protest at Indonesia's subjugation of East Timor. If necessary, citizens should be encouraged to do the bombing themselves, "perhaps joining the Bin Laden network." Shortly after 9/11, the political theorist Jeffrey Isaac wrote of this thought experiment that, while it was intended metaphorically, "One wonders if Chomsky ever considered the possibility that someone lacking in his own logical rigour might read his book and carelessly draw the conclusion that the bombing of Washington is required."

The relevant passage from Chomsky appears on pp. 38-9 of the book cited, and Isaac’s comment appears in a brief article he contributed to the left-wing American Prospect magazine in October 2001. I have not commented on this piece before, which is remiss of me, because it is the best thing that has ever been written about the political thinking of Noam Chomsky. While I have written from time to time about Chomsky’s central conceit (that the US is analogous to Nazi Germany) and characteristic method (playing fast and loose with source material), Professor Isaac has managed in little more than 1000 words to isolate and describe everything you need to know about Chomsky’s political stance. It is a gem of an article.

The usual way of arguments over Chomsky’s political views is that proponents comment on his searing honesty in describing the flaws of Western foreign policy and critics charge him with support for totalitarianism. It will be obvious that I disregard the first view, but Isaac deftly demonstrates that the second does not accurately summarise Chomsky either:

The true dialectic, for Chomsky, is not between the evils of American imperialism and some good that might (in his mind) stand against it. The true dialectic is between "American imperialism" and the terrorists and tyrants who hate it. Chomsky does not need to descend from the clouds and take sides in this struggle. He can simply observe that "the chickens have come home to roost," and say "I told you so" while the body count rises. It is for the rest of us, or at least those who care, to worry about the plight of the Kosovars, or the realistic policies that might actually bring peace to the Middle East, or how to respond to a terrorism that rightly shocks, angers, and frightens us, and rightly calls forth a decisive response.

There is a word for Chomsky's stance, and it is not courageous dissent or intellectual responsibility. It is cynicism.

This seems to me exactly right. I have spent a lot of time, for example, considering Chomsky’s remarks on Holocaust denial. I have never described him as a Holocaust denier himself, and I’ve been irritated when my judgement to that effect has been quoted out of context by naïfs who wish to depict his lobbying for the antisemite Robert Faurisson as an unexceptionable defence of free speech. Chomsky’s position is in fact a scarcely more reputable one of defending the political legitimacy of Faurisson’s position without endorsing the factual accuracy of Faurisson’s claims (i.e. the baseless and fraudulent lie that the Holocaust is a myth). It is a cynical stance.

Chomsky’s politics are, as one writer (I think, Roger Scruton) has put it, furious sophistry. But they are not merely an intellectual game played by a dilettante. They have consequences, as Isaac hints at in his piece, and a distinctive malevolence as well. In that context, do have a look at Chomsky’s response to Isaac:

The remainder [of Isaac’s argument] is just a series of childish fabrications, random shots without even a hint of evidence or argument. No person of even minimal moral or intellectual integrity would engage in such practices.

One can appreciate Isaac's distress over the revelation of his inability to construct a justification for his support for state violence in one of the cases discussed, and more strikingly, of his culpability for the massive atrocities in the analogue. Even his efforts to defame without evidence pale into insignificance in comparison with the cold savagery with which he views his own passive acquiescence in what he knows -- or can easily discover -- to be perhaps the worst slaughter relative to population since the Holocaust, peaking in the late 1970s, continuing since, escalating again from early 1999, and continuing today in ways that we would condemn with justified fury if Serbia were the guilty party.

I scarcely speak metaphorically when I describe this tirade of spiteful abuse as deranged, pitiful and weird. Professor Isaac has never, so far as I know, held a post in public policy. He is an academic political philosopher who specialises in the thought of Hannah Arendt. It is one thing to say (rightly) that the citizens of a constitutional democracy have a civic responsibility to protest against injustices of commission or omission perpetrated by their governments. Indeed, one of my principal criticisms of Chomsky is that he argues vehemently against Western action to confront regimes guilty of terrible abuses of human rights (in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Baathist Iraq, but not only there). But the accusation that Isaac ‘bears culpability for massive atrocities’ and that he practises ‘cold savagery’ in considering the matter demonstrates a sensibility on Chomsky’s part that is the living refutation of his claim to perceive, in the title of his most celebrated political essay, the responsibility of the intellectuals. Chomsky is not the world's pre-eminent public intellectual. He is a crank.

Chomsky and source material

In my article in Prospect about Noam Chomsky, I refer to his use of source material:

Chomsky buttresses his argument, incidentally, with a peculiarly dishonest handling of source material. He manipulates a self-mocking reference in the memoirs of the then US ambassador to the UN, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, by running separate passages together as if they are sequential and attributing to Moynihan comments he did not make, to yield the conclusion that Moynihan took pride in Nazi-like policies. The victims of cold war realpolitik are real enough without such rhetorical expedients.

For reasons of space, I was not able to do more than refer to this example, which I have detailed before on this site. In case there are readers new to the site who have come here from the Prospect article, and who may wish to have substantiation of my point about Chomsky's dishonesty, I'm reproducing part of that earlier post about Chomsky's misuse of source material. It refers to the US response, or lack of it, to Indonesia's invasion of East Timor in 1975.

I would not go as far as Christopher Hitchens's assessment that the Ford Administration gave a 'green light' to the invasion, but I certainly agree that the episode reflects great discredit on US policy at the time. The problem, as I read the historical evidence, is that the fate of small countries menaced by external aggressors simply did not register in the world view of Cold War realpolitik, with disastrous consequences for East Timor. It was a similar failure of vision to the notorious remarks of Ambassador April Glaspie to Saddam Hussein in July 1990 that "we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait". As you would expect, John Pilger and others have inferred from Glaspie's remarks a conspiracy to lure Saddam into invading Kuwait, but the real explanation is more prosaic: a realist view of the relations between states that proved quite unrealistic and attenuated in its unwillingness to consider ideological and ethical considerations.

Following is my assessment of one of Chomsky's favourite arguments.

I have read the argument in question in countless of Chomsky’s books and articles, and I am aware (though I have never heard him speak) that he cites it in interviews and speeches too. Of very many instances of it, this comes from Chomsky’s book A New Generation Draws the Line: Kosovo, East Timor and the Standards of the West (2000, pp 79-80):

The guiding principles were well understood from the outset by those responsible for guaranteeing the success of Indonesia’s 1975 invasion [of East Timor]. They were articulated lucidly by [the United States’] UN Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in words that should be committed to memory by anyone with a serious interest in international affairs, human rights, and the rule of law. The Security Council condemned the invasion and ordered Indonesia to withdraw, but to no avail. In his 1978 memoirs, Moynihan explains why:

"The United States wished things to turn out as they did, and worked to bring this about. The Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success."

Success was indeed considerable. Moynihan cites reports that within two months some 60,000 people had been killed, “10 per cent of the population, almost the proportion of casualties experienced by the Soviet Union during the Second World War.” A sign of the success, he adds, is that within a year “the subject disappeared from the press.”

It’s a fair bet that few of Chomsky’s readers who are impressed with the moral clarity of the master’s denunciation will have read the memoirs of Daniel Patrick Moynihan (A Dangerous Place, 1978). Take, for example, Neil Smith, Professor of Linguistics at University College London, the second edition of whose book Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals has just been published. Smith's book contains a useful bibliography of Chomsky’s writings, and I assume – for I’m not competent to judge – that the four chapters that discuss Chomsky’s work in linguistics are a reliable account. The chapter on Chomsky’s political writings is, on the other hand, stupid and disgusting. (On page 208, Smith describes the Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson - a charlatan who purports to reveal “the real meaning” of texts - as “a professor of history [wrong – he once was a lecturer in twentieth-century French literature] whose research led him to question the existence of gas chambers in Nazi Germany and to doubt the Holocaust”.) Unsurprisingly for a man who’ll believe anything, Smith (p. 194) merely appends to his quotation of Chomsky’s quotation of Moynihan the judgement, “Comment is superfluous.”

Comment is in fact required. Washington’s stance on Indonesian aggression in the 1970s was shameless, but Chomsky’s account of it is shameless misrepresentation using exactly the technique – quoting out of context, and fitting unrelated passages together – that he used against Samuel Huntington in 1970. In context, the quotation from Moynihan ought to read (it appears on page 247– in all the citations he gives of this book, Chomsky never, ever gives page numbers, for a reason that will shortly become obvious):

[S]uch was the power of the anticolonial idea that great powers from outside a region had relatively little influence unless they were prepared to use force. China altogether backed Fretilin [a Marxist group that had seized power] in Timor, and lost. In Spanish Sahara, Russia just as completely backed Algeria, and its front, known as Polisario, and lost. In both instances the United States wished things to turn out as they did, and worked to bring this about. The Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success.

Moynihan is describing a period in the Cold War when the Soviet Union was making advances in the Third World both directly and by proxy, and US policy aimed single-mindedly at thwarting those ambitions. The policy was right in principle; the means to effect it often weren’t, morally and strategically. (One of the reasons I, as a left-winger, favour President Bush’s re-election is that he has overturned the tradition of being prepared to ally with autocratic regimes in the interests of western security, maintaining instead that autocracies foment the totalitarian forces that wish us harm.) But Chomsky’s claim that those means included wishing Indonesia to launch a bloody invasion of East Timor bears no resemblance to what Moynihan wrote. In context, the phrase “the United States wished things to turn out as they did” clearly refers to the failure of Soviet and Chinese clients in, respectively, Spanish Sahara and Timor. Chomsky has taken it out of context in order to insinuate, utterly falsely, that Moynihan is boasting about the successful accomplishment of mass murder by proxy.

In fact, I don’t know why I use the word “insinuate”. Chomsky states his thesis openly. It’s not entirely explicit in the version of his argument that I’ve quoted, so consider instead the version Chomsky gives in Chronicles of Dissent, pp 252-3:

Referring to the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, [Moynihan] says that the United States wanted things to turn out as they did and that he had the assignment of making sure that the United Nations could not act in any constructive way to terminate or reverse the Indonesian aggression. He carried out that task with remarkable success. He then in the next sentence goes on to say that he’s aware of the nature of that success. He says that two months later, reports surfaced that the Indonesian invasion had killed off about 10 per cent of the population in East Timor over a period of two months. A proportion of the population which, he then goes on to say, is about the same as the proportion of people in Eastern Europe killed by Hitler. So he’s taking pride in having stopped the United Nations from interfering with an aggression that he himself compares with Hitler’s invasion of Eastern Europe, and he then drops it at that.

Well, I have Moynihan’s book open in front of me. The sentence after the words “carried it forward with no inconsiderable success” reads in full:

It is difficult to say precisely when Luanda fell.

Luanda is not in East Timor: it is the capital of Angola. Moynihan has left the subject of East Timor and has embarked on a new section of the book. The reference to the killing of 10 per cent of the population of East Timor does appear in the book, but not in the context that Chomsky asserts. Chomsky’s claim that Moynihan “in the next sentence goes on to say that he’s aware of the nature of that success” is outright fabrication: no such remark appears anywhere in the book. Nor does Moynihan say that a “sign of success” was that the subject disappeared from the press. He merely reports that fact, along with the estimate of the deputy chairman of the provisional government that 60,000 people had been killed since the outbreak of the civil war. This is on pages 245-6. Incidentally, Moynihan was misquoting the estimate; according to Robert Conquest in the Daily Telegraph, 8 March 1980 (cited in Leopold Labedz, The Uses and Abuses of Sovietology, 1989, p. 119) the figure given by the administrator was that 60,000 people had lost their lives or homes, and that this included 40,000 who had fled from the Communists.

Chomsky misrepresents Moynihan by omission and fabrication; he also doesn’t appear to have read the book he claims to be quoting from. Moynihan himself was appalled by the US stance on the annexation of East Timor and the partition of Western Sahara, but represented the views of the administration. My description of the US position as “shameless” is in fact his description. As he put it in his book Pandaemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics, 1993, p. 153:

It happens I was United States representative at the UN when these events occurred. I defended a shameless American policy – Morocco and Indonesia were cold-war allies - with sufficient shamelessness.

He points to the context in which the major powers considered such issues, which were “too often assessed in terms of cold-war advantage/disadvantage”. What is relevant to this discussion of Chomsky is that this was not merely a view that Moynihan came to once the Cold War had ended. In the same book Chomsky so egregiously misquotes, Moynihan bemoans the degeneration of the UN because, so he claims, it has become complicit in the annexation of Timor (pp. 244-5):

A theme of our speeches throughout November [1975] had been that to corrupt the language of human rights – the language, that is, of Leo Strauss’s “Modern Project,” the language of “a society consisting of equal nations, each consisting of free and equal men and women” – would soon enough imperil the language of national rights also, and soon enough it did. In December, two fledgling nations were conquered or partitioned by their neighbours, while a third [Angola] was invaded by Communist forces from half a world away. It would be gratifying to report that there were those who made some connection between what we said would happen and what now did happen, but there were none. This perhaps only confirmed our charge that the Charter was being drained of meaning.

This was the example I was referring to in Prospect. It's a personal view, but I do not consider that somone who uses source material in the manner that Chomsky does can be considered a public intellectual at all, let alone the pre-eminent one.

For and against Chomsky

The November issue of Prospect magazine is now out, with Noam Chomsky ("The world's top public intellectual?") as its cover story. This link will take you to the articles on Chomsky by Robin Blackburn ("celebrates a courageous truth-teller to power") and me ("deplores his crude and dishonest arguments").

I append to the article my thanks to Bob Borsley and Paul Postal, professors of linguistics at, respectively, Essex University and New York University, for their invaluable and illuminating advice on this aspect of Chomsky's work. If I had not had their help, I might have emulated Blackburn's confusion between the linguist Zellig Harris and the foreign policy analyst Selig Harrison.

UPDATE: Prospect has now corrected in its web edition Blackburn's mistaking Selig Harrison for Zellig Harris.

Chomsky as public intellectual

The Guardian has a report today on the Prospect/FP poll on public intellectuals:

Since the poll was for the world's leading intellectuals, it should come as no surprise that websites manned by supporters of Chomsky, Hitchens and Abdolkarim Soroush were used to draw attention to the poll. Chomsky's supporters are clearly the most energetic: he took 4,800 votes to Eco's 2,500. Voters came mainly from Britain and the US. "I don't pay a lot of attention to them," said Chomsky of the poll last night. "It was probably padded by some friends of mine."

This is a minor point, and it has nothing to do with Chomsky himself, but the site ‘manned by supporters of Chomsky’ did rather more than merely draw attention to the poll. Whereas the Hitchens web (again, a site organised not by Hitchens but by one of his supporters) merely linked to the poll using Prospect’s own headline, the ‘Chomsky info’ site specifically urged its supporters to vote, and repeated it “If you'd rather want [sic] your vote to have practical impact.”

Fair enough. The task of a lobby is to promote its cause, and no rules were broken. I merely draw attention to what happened and to the ease with which an Internet poll can be influenced by people who may never have heard, let alone be regular readers, of the magazines conducting it.

The Guardian refers to the November edition of Prospect, which will discuss Chomsky’s work, and says that in my article for the magazine I “dismiss him as a kneejerk anti-American who is cavalier about his sources”. This is not quite the central point, even though I do regard Chomsky as reflexively anti-American, and unscholarly and manipulative in his use of source material. Chomsky’s politics are distinctive in comparing the United States to Nazi Germany – a premise that is more than standard anti-Americanism. It is quite a common view among left-wingers with whom I generally sympathise to distinguish between the younger Chomsky, who opposed the Vietnam War and Indonesia’s annexation of East Timor, and the Chomsky who since the early 90s has (in the phrase of Christopher Hitchens) gone from supporting the underdog to supporting mad dogs. For example, Nick Cohen, in a fair review of Chomsky’s book Hegemony or Survival, noted Chomsky’s indifference to the Iraqi opposition to Saddam Hussein in these terms:

He wasn't always so coy. In his younger and better days he condemned the dishonesty of intellectuals who went along with America's crimes in Indochina and South America. It would be heartening if he could apply the same standards to himself.

This seems to me excessively generous to Chomsky. Nick is alluding to the essay 'The Responsibility of Intellectuals' in Chomsky’s first political book, American Power and the New Mandarins (1969). I discussed this book and Chomsky’s polemics on Indochina here. The main point is that, from his earliest political writings, Chomsky maintained that the task for progressives was not merely opposition to an immoral war, or even opposition to US imperialism, but the ‘denazification’ of America. The notion that US foreign policy is analogous to Nazi Germany’s has remained a theme of Chomsky’s work ever since. In his latest book of ‘interviews’, Imperial Ambitions (2005), Chomsky maintains the theme with his observation that “the pretenses for the invasion [of Iraq] are no more convincing than Hitler’s”.

If you overlook this notion, you miss the essential part of Chomsky’s political advocacy. Calls by left-wingers such as Hitchens and Nick Cohen for Chomsky to acknowledge the progressive character, at long last, of US foreign policy when it overthrows tyranny in Afghanistan or Iraq are thus beside the point. If you believe the US is comparable to Nazi Germany in its foreign conduct, then you cannot regard US intervention even as a lesser evil, let alone as serving humanitarian ends. Chomsky’s politics are wrongheaded at root, and not merely in application, and he is being entirely consistent in regarding the humanitarian actions in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq as aggressive imperialism. His reflexive, and not merely conditional, opposition to US foreign policy is a reactionary stance that properly merits the term anti-Americanism, but it goes a lot deeper than even many of his critics realise.

Once you grasp this axiom of Chomsky’s political analysis, some of his more startling judgements begin to have a certain rationality. One of his more notorious judgements of recent years was recorded in a New Yorker profile by Larissa MacFarquhar in 2003. The article is not online, but it quotes Chomsky declaring to a class at MIT:

Well, we’ve learned from the Russian archives that Britain and the US then [in WWII] began supporting armies established by Hitler to hold back the Russian advance. Tens of thousands were killed. Suppose you’re sitting in Auschwitz. Do you want the Russian troops to be held back?

This preposterous claim has not the slightest evidence in its favour, but it does illustrate two facets of Chomsky’s political advocacy. First, his belief in the Nazi-like character of the foreign policy of western democracies is deep-rooted and independent of evidence. Secondly, his treatment of source material makes him a fundamentally unserious and unreliable commentator. When he is called on these characteristics, he either tries to bully his way out or claims to have been misquoted.

Noam Chomsky is the world's top public intellectual.

Hitchens on Pinter

Christopher Hitchens, in today's Wall Street Journal (link requires subscription), terms the award of a Nobel to Harold Pinter "a straight and philistine preference for the grotesque":

The Nobel judges have again given their approval to a writer of doggerel; a very poor man's Beckett, a man most celebrated for the long silences that punctuated his stage "dialogue," who would have no reputation of any kind if it were not for the slightly unbelievable character of his public statements. Let us hope, then, that the day when the Nobel Prize is a local and provincial event has been brought closer. Especially in their opinions about peace and literature -- two matters that ought to concern all serious people -- the judges have brought absurdity upon themselves. Let us withdraw our assent from their fool's-gold standard, and see what happens. Let us also hope for a long silence to descend upon the thuggish bigmouth who has strutted and fretted his hour upon the stage for far too long.

Hitchens believes Pinter has produced nothing worth noticing since the 1960s, which is a little harsh. The poetry is dismal and the politics vile, but the screenplays up until the execrable film version of Margaret Atwood's fine novel The Handmaid's Tale are spare and consistently good (especially The French Lieutenant's Woman and the little-noticed Turtle Diary, based on Russell Hoban's novel). Hitchens also castigates last year's winner, Elfriede Jelinek, as a mediocre Austrian Stalinist, which is not harsh at all.

Public Intellectuals

The result of the Prospect/Foreign Policy poll for the top public intellectuals is announced today. The winner is Noam Chomsky, followed by Umberto Eco, Richard Dawkins, Vaclav Havel and Christopher Hitchens. A jocular comment from The Sunday Times is here. The November issue of Prospect will be published later this week; it includes an article by Robin Blackburn of New Left Review on why Chomsky is a splendid choice, and one from me on why he isn't.

More on Chomsky through this week.

Chomsky for the 21st century

The Aljazeera web site has lately published an extract from Noam Chomsky’s 1992 book of ‘interviews’ (they are not hard-hitting) Chronicles of Dissent. The reason is suggested by the web site’s caption to a photograph of a Hasidic Jew praying at the Western Wall: ‘Is Holocaust manipulated by the Israeli state to promote its own interests?’ The question is rhetorical. It is asked by Chomsky’s faithful interlocutor, David Barsamian; Chomsky replies: 'It's very consciously manipulated. I mean, it's quite certainly real, there's no question about that, but it is also undoubted that they manipulate it.'

Two observations about this. First, it might appear odd that Chomsky offers the redundant observation that the Holocaust is 'certainly real', but it should be read in the context of a contrived discussion that the Aljazaeera extract has edited out, which runs like this:

QUESTION: I ask you this question because I know that you have been plagued and hounded around the United States specifically on this issue of the Holocaust. It's been said that Noam Chomsky is somehow agnostic on the issue of whether the Holocaust occurred or not.

CHOMSKY: My "agnosticism" is in print. I described the Holocaust years ago as the most fantastic outburst of insanity in human history, so much so that if we even agree to discuss the matter we demean ourselves. Those statements and numerous others like them are in print, but they're basically irrelevant because you have to understand that this is part of a Stalinist-style technique to silence critics of the holy state and therefore the truth is entirely irrelevant, you just tell as many lies as you can and hope that some of the mud will stick. It's a standard technique used by the Stalinist parties, by the Nazis and by these guys.

I’ve written before about this particularly shameless evasion. No serious critic of Chomsky has ever claimed that he is Holocaust denier. The criticism is not that he claims for Holocaust denial factual accuracy, but that he invests it with political legitimacy, denying its inherent antisemitism. (I found from a recent trawl through these unsavoury web sites that one online publication – I won’t give a link, but it’s an electronic magazine tendentiously called the Revisionist Clarion – has reproduced my post on Chomsky's relations to Holocaust denial, and another on the antisemitic polemicist “Israel Shamir”, while making its own antisemitic annotations. Be aware that it has done so of course without my knowledge or consent, but there’s not much I can do about it. The headline given to me was, at least, ‘A PARTICULARLY VICIOUS BASTARD’, as indeed I am.)

Secondly, it’s interesting to note the direction of Chomsky’s rhetoric over the years, and the Aljazeera extract reminds me of this. In Chronicles of Dissent, Chomsky at least recognises antisemitism as a real phenomenon, and not only historically, while maintaining it is no more prevalent or destructive than other forms of prejudice:

Anti-Semitism undoubtedly exists, but it's now on a par, in my view, with other kinds of prejudice of all sorts. I don't think it's more than anti-Italianism or anti-Irishism, and that's been a very significant change in the last generation, one that I've experienced myself in my own life, and it's very visible throughout the society.

I think this is a mistaken interpretation on many grounds, but it’s not an illegitimate claim. Contrast it, though, with what Chomsky has said much more recently on the same question, in remarks to a Scottish pro-Palestinian group at the end of 2002 (emphasis added):

By now Jews in the US are the most privileged and influential part of the population. You find occasional instances of anti-Semitism but they are marginal. There’s plenty of racism, but it’s directed against Blacks, Latinos, Arabs are targets of enormous racism, and those problems are real. Anti-Semitism is no longer a problem, fortunately. It’s raised, but it’s raised because privileged people want to make sure they have total control, not just 98% control. That’s why anti-Semitism is becoming an issue. Not because of the threat of anti-Semitism; they want to make sure there’s no critical look at the policies the US (and they themselves) support in the Middle East.

Again, I have written of this passage before, but wish to put it on record again, for reasons I shall explain next week. Noam Chomsky is by some margin the most prominent public figure in the Western world to maintain publicly that Jews are “the most privileged and influential part of the population”, and that they cry antisemitism because they want to increase their control of American life from domination to “total control”, thereby preventing public debate on their sinister foreign-policy goals. Think about it.