Suspicious Silence

[posted by Callimachus]

This comes from a criticism, by one Lila Rajiva, of a post parting ways with Chomsky by Ali Eteraz. First, an excerpt from what Ali wrote:

Yet, the fact is that today, globalization, which Chomsky always said was the handmaiden of neo-liberalism, and a construction of powerful Western governments, has an equally sordid evil twin, and this is the globalized monstrosity of extremely extreme extremist Islam. By the way, when I talk about extremists, I am not referring to terrorists alone. Would it were that this globalized undercurrent of violence was merely political! There exists today a form of globalized lifestyle and cultural extremism galvanized and organized and idealized by millions. This extremism, where it is not suffocating art, scholarship, freedom and love, it is murdering, killing, and beating to death. It must be identified and spoken out against with the same gusto reserved for neo-imperialism and corporatism. Dissent against all three is not inconsistent as they each mutually feed one another and leave vast numbers of human beings without a voice, without life.

... Given that neither [Chomsky], nor those who invoke him, have added extremist Islam (specifically in its cultural and lifestyle manifestation) to the list of things to dissent against, I have to part ways with him and look around for a place to stand. I will not cease to speak out against the unilateralism of the superpower, the predation of the executive, or the murderous arms dealers. These things matter. However, I have seen too many people - my people - living lives of shame, fear, and cowardice in the face of an unchecked global predator, and I cannot stay silent because the established dissenters have not said anything about it. The current discourse of dissent is not enough. There must be more dissent. I hope that when Professor Chomsky looks across the world at the dissent he inspired, he will recognize some of himself in the rest of us.

Now, from Lila Rajiva's response:

It’s also important to remember the extent to which Islamic extremism was brought to the center of the political stage by systematic policy decisions and covert actions taken by the United States. In that sense, it is a reaction, which is probably one of the reasons Noam Chomsky does not engage it in the same way as he does American foreign policy. One should not forget that there are very influential human rights organizations funded by the United States to one degree or other which are already engaged in evaluating and criticizing the human rights abuses which Ali speaks about. Chomsky ’s silence is intended only to balance those vociferous voices, which sometimes use human rights to bolster imperial policies.

Well, even though she is only guessing what Chomsky thinks and why he is so very selective in his contrarianism, evidently she agrees with this model, as I suppose a great many of his disciples would. There's a great deal of insight into the game plan in that one graph.

You can unpack it to suit yourself, but here's some things I notice. First, it purports to agree with Ali about the "human rights abuses" of the non-American actors -- the long list of terrible things done in the name of religion and opposition to American hegemony that Ali lists in his post. But the answer is effectively "silent" about them (and defends silence about them), and admits them into the conversation only for as long as it takes to deflect the focus from them to America as the root of evil. They are regarded not as truths, but as mirrors. This frankly does them no justice, nor does it honor the people who have to grapple with this stuff in their daily lives (such as this woman).

Yet even her silence is not silence; there is an unspoken back-current delegitimatization of critics of Islamist extremism. The only critics mentioned are "very influential human rights organizations funded by the United States." But as we've been told, the writer regards the U.S. as the prime cause of the problem. Therefore, under the terms she has set, all these U.S.-funded critics are delegitimatized and their work cast into suspicion.

If she wants to suggest that, should she not come out and say it, and name names, and prove it? Or if she really thinks there is a problem with Islamist extremism, and all the existing critics are simply shills for imperialism, shouldn't that make it even more imperative for there to be an untainted critic speaking out loud, rather than sitting in silence?

Why spend more time on the supposed imperialism lurking behind criticism of Islamist extremism than on the thing itself? And if you choose to do so, why pretend to be agreeing with Ali that it is a real problem for real people whom he knows and cares about?

I'm not going to dwell on the obsession with modern America as the root of all the world's ills. It takes a germ of truth and grows it into a beanstalk vine to Chomskyite heaven. The pathetic short-sighted awareness of history reminds me of the letters to the editor I used to get from social conservatives. After reading the letter, I could tell within 5 years the date they were born. The gist of the letter was, "Ever since X happened, the liberals have been running this country to hell." But X always was a different event -- Eleanor Roosevelt, rock 'n' roll, the end of school prayer, the legalization of abortion. And it always was the event that happened about the time the author turned 13. The personal loss of innocence got narcissistically conflated with the history of civilization.

Chomsky may have studied modern times well (though his critics, even on the left, often have caught him twisting the facts rather badly out of shape and cherry-picking the record). But when his writing ventures into earlier periods of history, the fuzzy, cartoonish images that pop up are frankly embarrassing to him. His fan base does not typically include serious historians.

So in this alternate universe, it's as though Harry Truman waved a magic wand and conjured the modern world into being, whole and spinning. You'd never guess that America inherited, partly unwillingly, a world already deformed by European domination and then set afire by the rapid cut-and-run of the imperial powers, from an artificially united Iraq to a falsely divided India (with such important power centers as Punjab and Bengal carved up incoherently). Or that American policies since 1945 largely were reactionary to Soviet imperialism, rather than a Death Star assault on an innocent and unsuspecting world of global Ewoks.

"The evil we call X only exists as a reaction to American foreign policy. Vocal opponents of X are based in and funded by the Americans. Therefore, to balance them, we say nothing about X."

How does silence balance anything except silence? As though awareness were a zero-sum commodity, and if you talk too much about something, and I talk too little about it, my silence drains off that much of your noise. Silence on something essential only unbalances yourself. It makes people suspect you of bad faith with reality and your own moral yardsticks.

Blast from the Past

[posted by Callimachus]

The late Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.: Historian, patriotic liberal, Kennedy clan insider, and Chomsky debunker:

There are familiar forms of selfrighteousness in which people become so suffused with the virtue of their cause that they cease to care about intellectual honesty. Dr. Chomsky, I fear, has succumbed to this malady of moralism.

Read the whole thing, as they say. Historians' prose is like whiskey: It can be so harsh it makes you cringe, or it can be smooth and sweet. Schlesinger always was the latter. A Chomsky take-down requires detailed drudgery, but with Schlesinger's touch, this is likely to be one of the better ones you'll ever read, even though it's almost as old as I am.

[Hat tip: Ben Brumfield]

Choam Nomsky

[posted by Callimachus]

Yeah, I know that's not his name. I just like to write it like that. I used to post fictional sound-byte reactions to news stories in Chomsky's voice and I gave them that name. And ever since then I've gotten a few hits every month from people Googling that name. Evidently they think it's his name. So it amuses me.

Chomsky has been pegged so often and so well in his contradictions that I don't generally feel the need to add to the work of Oliver Kamm and others. I could neither expand nor ornament what they've already said.

Still, I do enjoy reading a fresh take on the old problem, and here's a gem.

To his supporters Noam Chomsky is a brave and outspoken champion of the oppressed against a corrupt and criminal political class. But to his opponents he is a self-important ranter whose one-sided vision of politics is chosen for its ability to shine a spotlight on himself. And it is surely undeniable that his habit of excusing or passing over the faults of America's enemies, in order to pin all crime on his native country, suggests that he has invested more in his posture of accusation than he has invested in the truth.
To describe this posture as "adolescent" is perhaps unfair: After all, there are plenty of quite grown-up people who believe that American foreign policy since World War II has been founded on a mistaken conception of America's role in the world. And it is true that we all make mistakes--so that Prof. Chomsky's erstwhile support for regimes that no one could endorse in retrospect, like that of Pol Pot, is no proof of wickedness. But then the mistakes of American foreign policy are no proof of wickedness either.

This is important. For it is his ability to excite not just contempt for American foreign policy but a lively sense that it is guided by some kind of criminal conspiracy that provides the motive for Prof. Chomsky's unceasing diatribes and the explanation of his influence. The world is full of people who wish to think ill of America. And most of them would like to be Americans. The Middle East seethes with such people, and Prof. Chomsky appeals directly to their envious emotions, as well as to the resentments of leaders like President Chavez who cannot abide the sight of a freedom that they haven't the faintest idea how to produce or the least real desire to emulate.

Success breeds resentment, and resentment that has no safety valve becomes a desire to destroy. The proof of that was offered on 9/11 and by just about every utterance that has emerged from the Islamists since. But Americans don't want to believe it. They trust others to take the kind of pleasure in American success that they, in turn, take in the success of others. But this pleasure in others' success, which is the great virtue of America, is not to be witnessed in those who denounce her. They hate America not for her faults, but for her virtues, which cast a humiliating light on those who cannot adapt to the modern world or take advantage of its achievements.

Prof. Chomsky is an intelligent man. Not everything he says by way of criticizing his country is wrong. However, he is not valued for his truths but for his rage, which stokes the rage of his admirers. He feeds the self-righteousness of America's enemies, who feed the self-righteousness of Prof. Chomsky. And in the ensuing blaze everything is sacrificed, including the constructive criticism that America so much needs, and that America--unlike its enemies, Prof. Chomsky included--is prepared to listen to.

Chomsky is so important now because he never was a Marxist. Every blame-it-on-America intellectual who was one went down with that ship in 1989. Which makes Chomsky's nasty barge the only boat still afloat in that navy.

I do, however, disagree with Chomsky critics who praise his linguistics work while wishing he'd stuck to it instead of dabbling in politics. The two halves of Chomsky are of one piece: They are consistent, and the importance and the flaws and the excesses exist in both halves. His feuds with biologists over Darwin are as legendary, in their way, as his political polemics. The view of the human mind and its working that informs his linguistics is at the root of both.

Chomsky Epiphany

For the average American (based on the outcome of the last few elections) the British "Guardian" newspaper is a brazen left-wing, U.S.-bashing, sack of socialist apologetics and moral equivalence. It's also lively and often thoughtful in a way few American papers can match.

So, considering how much the "Guardian" and Noam Chomsky have in common in their views of the world, it's surprising to me how poorly they get along. I suspect Chomsky, in his purity, regards the "Guardian" as part of what he calls "the so-called left."

Last year, the paper sent a reporter, Emma Brockes, to do an interview with The Great Man, and even amid her generally sympathetic presentation of his ideas, Chomsky claimed he'd been grossly misrepresented and demanded a retraction and an apology. He got it, but it was widely perceived that the paper had allowed itself to be bullied.

So I wonder what he'll make of this?

The "Guardian" didn't send some softball-pitch reporter out this time. It turned loose a heavy-hitter, in Peter Beaumont, on Chomsky's new book. If this was a belated push-back for the Brockes affair, it's probably too late to redeem anyone's honor. But it's a fun read nonetheless.

Beaumont hits on one of the essential things about Chomsky: the critique he makes of various media powerhouses is a rigorous and workable one that can be applied to any media force -- including Chomsky:

Reading Failed States, I had an epiphany: that by applying a Chomskian analysis to his own writing, you discover exactly the same subtle textual biases, evasions and elisions of meaning as used by those he calls 'the doctrinal managers' of the 'powerful elites'. The mighty Chomsky, the world's greatest public intellectual, is prone to playing fast and loose.

Mr. Beaumont, welcome to the club. After writing this, I see longtime Chomsky-watcher Oliver Kamm also picked this out as the key quote.

Speaking of speaking truth to power, Beaumont in his conclusion delivers the kind of dressing down The Great Man deserves. Even though I'm sure it won't stick (the pure don't have epiphanies), it's a pleasure to read:

Which leads to a question: is that really what you see, Mr Chomsky, from the window of your library at MIT? Is it the stench of the gulag wafting over the Charles River? Do you walk in fear of persecution and murder for expressing your dissident views? Or do you make a damn good living out of it? The faults of the Bush administration will not be changed by books such as Failed States. They will be swept away by ordinary, decent Americans in the world's greatest - if flawed and selfish - democracy going to the polls.

Chomsky Revisited

Oliver Kamm rejects the "self-loathing" tag that's often slapped on Chomsky and other anti-American Americans/anti-Israeli Jews. Kamm is a careful critic of Chomsky, and I agree with him that this label is a mere sneer.

To charge someone with holding a view out of self-hatred is a pernicious way of arguing, because - like the old antisemitic canard of "dual loyalty" - it is unfalsifiable.

When I did Jen Larson's interview, one of the questions dealt with Chomsky. I started to answer it in detail, but then realized I was taking much too much space, and I sort of left it hanging half-answered. My insight is not a great one. But I've noticed that Chomsky, in his purely adacemic work (without considering political writings) has an absolutist prejudice.

That is, he rules out a certain set of possible explanations for things, a priori, because the consequences of accepting any validity for those possible explanations seems to be intollerable to him. Goodness knows he's not the only person with that quality, or the only academic. But I question whether it's a good way to do science, or to think about international affairs.

In fact some of the people he smites down in academic wars were themselves absolutists of another strain -- the socio-biologists. Where he goes wrong, I think, is mistaking no attempt to distinguish any application of evolution to social situations, however innocent or logical, from the 666 Beast of Socio-biology. Hitler gave his speeches and wrote his orders in German; that's no reason to ban the German language.

Once again, it's not just Chomsky. You can find similar attitudes, for instance, among many creationists. Not that I consider them good scientists either, of course. But his form of it does seem to be peculiarly strong among academics with strong Old Left/social progressive political sensibilities. Stephen Jay Gould, who was a hero of mine for his rear-guard work in holding back creationism, suffered from it, too.

And of course, it's all over the academic discipline of history. Before you accuse me of unthinking right-wing stereotyping, read the autobiographical stories of a Eugene Genovese or an Eric Foner. Read their addresses to one another in the professional organizations. They write the past, but they live the present, and their academic work is done with a view to a future they would like to shape.

Listen to Genovese, answering the interviewer's question, "You grew up in a working-class family. Did this experience influence your scholarship? If so, how?"

"Undoubtedly it did in a big way. The specifics, however, are hard to come by. To take a direct example, my discussion of the driver in 'Roll, Jordan, Roll' drew upon the stories that my father, a wood caulker, told me of the contradictory roles of foremen on the docks in the port of New York. More broadly, growing up with workers and in a working-class neighborhood provided a strong antidote to the romanticism that characterizes a good deal of the 'new labor history.'

"I entered the communist movement in 1945 at age fifteen and spent summers working in shops as an organizer for Communist-led unions. It was a valuable experience, which reinforced my hard class attitudes but also my resistance to romanticism. ... In any case, I grew up in a class-conscious home -- class-conscious but by no means ideologically driven. I hated the bourgeoisie with the terrible passion that perhaps only a child can muster. When I came across some Communists at age fifteen and read the Communist Manifesto and some other pamphlets, I suddenly had a precise focus for my hatred. I would happily have sent the bastards to firing squads in large numbers, and their wives and children along with them.

"... My biggest problem as a historian has always been, I suppose, the conscious effort to rein in that hatred and not let it distort my reading of the historical record. I am sure that it has taken a toll, but I hope I have kept that toll to a minimum." ["Eugene D. Genovese and History: An Interview," in Slavery, Secession, and Southern History, ed. Robert Louis Paquette and Louis A Ferleger, University Press of Virginia, 2000, p.197]

Describing one written work of his, Genovese states his goal like this: "I was trying to help develop a left-wing orientation toward the re-emerging problem of black nationalism so that the white Left could prepare itself to contribute constructively to emerging struggles." And looking back on the entire body of work he and his contemporaries accomplished, he concludes, "Whatever our errors and inadequacies, I think we can claim to have accomplished what we set out to do: to reorient the study of southern slave society and to compel a confrontation with a new set of questions."

As he hints, his practical side later rebelled against doctrinaire Marxism (it ultimately led him to Catholicism), and cost him banishment from leftist academic historical circles. He emerged, recently, as one who has been able to write with some sympathy and understanding of the Southern "master class" and to separate slavery from racism and say the latter, not the former, is the real American tragedy.

Back to Kamm. He finds a drift in Chomsky's latest pronouncements that seems to tread thin ice over anti-Semitism.

But take a look at a more recent pronouncement by Chomsky. At the end of 2002, Chomsky spoke by video link to the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign and others on 'Antisemitism, Zionism and the Palestinians'. Chomsky is discussing the historical presence of antisemitism in US society, and concludes:

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.

What can one make of this? The best possible interpretation that could be spun is that Chomsky is talking about "privileged people" rather than Jews, and that just conceivably he did not mean to imply an identity between those groups. But it's a strained interpretation. The more direct interpretation is that the Jews control America, they want total domination, and they manufacture the chimera of antisemitism in order to divert attention from their nefarious foreign policy goals.

Because this is the first time I have seen this type of statement from Chomsky, and he was speaking rather than writing it, I would be inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt on the matter and resolve to watch him closely. I have not the slightest doubt that the antisemitic totalitarians of far-Right and far-Left, of secular ideologies and theocratic fundamentalisms, would be liable to understand Chomsky's demagoguery according to the more direct interpretation. As the phrase goes, go figure.

Chomp, Chomp

Watching people eat is considered impolite, but I can't help grinning with pleasure as I watch Oliver Kamm continue to chew up Chomsky.

Chomsky is pernicious not only for his allegiances but also for his practices: he is deceitful. Nothing that he says can be taken on trust. It is rare that he cites scholarly sources, as opposed to newspaper reports or references; and whatever source he does cite is proffered with a shocking disregard for accuracy. I gave a number of examples in my earlier posts, which necessarily had to be lengthy because Chomsky’s consistent practice is to strip his reference of context that would make sense of it.