Adam Roberts reviews Chomsky

BBC Radio 3's Nightwaves programme earlier this week discussed Noam Chomsky. If you follow the link and click on Monday's programme you'll be able to hear it. The Chomsky item starts around 35 minutes into the programme. The interviewee is Adam Roberts, Professor of International Relations at Oxford; he is discussing Chomsky's latest book, Failed States. (The book will be published in the UK next month; I shall review it here in due course.)

It's well worth listening to. I've commented before on the dismissal that academic historians accord Chomsky's political writings (a point that is acknowledged, incidentally, by Chomsky's supporters, though their explanation is highly unconvincing). Roberts, however, does have long experience of Chomsky's political arguments, and he makes some thoughtful comments about them. It is astute to point out that the very immutability of Chomsky's premise about the iniquities of US foreign policy may explain his lack of clinical accuracy in identifying America's actual mistakes. The presenter, Susan Hitch, does her best to talk up Chomsky by referring to the Prospect poll for greatest living public intellectual, but I modestly suggest that she would have found the answers to some of her questions in my own article for that magazine about the poll. A sufficient explanation for the popularity of Chomsky's political writings is given by Richard Posner, in the judgement that begins my article, that "a successful academic may be able to use his success to reach the general public on matters about which he is an idiot".

While venturing some interesting observations on why Chomsky writes about politics in the way that he does (i.e. by ignoring complexity and moral dilemmas), Roberts makes one point that I do not agree with. He suggests that the experience of the Vietnam War, for which Chomsky was right to reject the more abstruse and ingenious justifications, may have made Chomsky enduringly resistant to intellectual subtlety. It is quite a common view that the early Chomsky had a valid cause but has lost his political bearings in his later writings; some date the degeneration from his Cambodia polemics of the 1970s, some from the quietism over Bosnia in the early 1990s, and some from his post-9/11 writings. But this is a mistaken critique. The elements that disfigure Chomsky's political writings now - heedlessness in historical accuracy, unscrupulous handling of source material, abuse of his critics, and above all sophistry in rendering the US as analogous to Nazi Germany - have all been there from the outset.

I assessed Chomsky's earliest writings on Vietnam in this (very long) post. In it, I point out that he argued a very different case from left-wingers such as Michael Walzer who saw the war as "unjustified intervention ... carried on in so brutal a manner that even had it initially been defensible, it would have to be condemned, not in this or that aspect but generally". For Chomsky, the issue went far beyond this critique, to the need to purge America of Nazi-like characteristics: "To me it seems that what is needed [in the US] is a kind of denazification." (When I recalled this judgement in my Prospect article, Chomsky had the gall to complain that I had misquoted him. Needless to say - but I will say it, and have said it, anyway - Chomsky was fibbing, and doing so in a peculiarly inept manner given how easy it was to demonstrate the falsehood. The quotation was accurate, and may be found on page 17 of American Power and the New Mandarins, 1969.)

One other aspect of the interview is worth noting. Roberts is critical, but he remains dispassionate and fair-minded. This is in nice contrast to Chomsky's own approach. One example comes from the debates over the first Gulf War, when Chomsky, in one of those innumerable soft interviews, had this to say of Roberts, an expert on UN decision-making:

The worst deceit in this comes from the academic profession -- people like Professor Adam Roberts at Oxford who is the great British expert on the United Nations. Read his articles in The Independent (of London) on this. He is the main British specialist on this topic, so when he does it, it is not just ignorance, it is conscious deceit.

Again, I've commented on this type of thing in Chomsky many times. Faced with weighty commentators of different views from his, Chomsky cannot help himself from impugning their honesty and even their humanity. Commentators, scholars or statesmen such as Roberts, Walzer, Abba Eban and Vaclav Havel are liars, racists, apologists for state violence and the like. Never mind the gracelessness of Chomsky's bile; just compare and contrast with his perplexing failure to use such language about a man who genuinely does deserve all of those epithets, the Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson (see this post for my account of Chomsky's intervention in the Faurisson case). Chomsky is certainly no Holocaust denier, which makes the discrepancy peculiarly perverse.

Finally on this subject, I note with complacence the indignant reaction to Adam Roberts's comments from some predictable sources. These include the imaginative Medialens site, whose supporters can detect flagrant media bias in a description of President Chavez of Venezuela as "left-wing" (seriously). These people are so ignorant. They make sweeping inferences about the supposed establishment prejudices and background of Professor Roberts, apparently without being aware that he has a small but decidedly non-trivial role in the history of radical anti-war campaigning in Britain. In the 1960s, Roberts was an influential writer for Peace News and a leading light in the Committee of 100, which conducted a campaign of civil disobedience in protest at nuclear weapons. I have on my desk a copy of a volume Roberts edited in 1967, The Strategy of Civilian Defence, in which he suggests (p. 9) that "non-violent action might provide the basis for a defence policy and prove capable of resisting internal and external threats to a society's freedom and independence". Both Roberts and Chomsky came to public prominence in the anti-war campaigns of those times; it is a shame that only one of them has a record of scholarship and intellectual distinction in international relations.