Social Democracy Now

Noam Chomsky is undoubtedly an icon of the mainstream left. Since the Vietnam War era, he's acquired a reputation as the leading leftwing critic of U.S. foreign policy. During the 1980s, against the backdrop of Reaganism, his books became fixtures in most leftwing households, and by the 1990s he was unquestionably the world's most famous 'leftwing' intellectual. His star is clearly not on the wane, for a recent poll of so-called public intellectuals planted him firmly at the top. (SOURCE)

Typical of the quasi-veneration in which Chomsky is held is the reaction of a self-described 'leftie' of my acquaintance who, at the mere mention of the man's name, flew into raptures. 'Chomsky knows so much!' I was informed. 'And you know what? he reads everything. He reads the New York Times from cover to cover. And he cites amazingly obscure magazines and journals! Although my friend agreed with me that Chomsky probably had a team of researchers culling newspapers and magazines for him, this did not lessen the awe in which he held Chomsky. Chomsky was ... Superbrain.

The fact that my friend also ridicules 'conspiracy theories,' led me to question the role the Chomksy cult plays in shaping the worldview of the English-speaking left. I am finding myself more and more concurring with those who argue that Chomsky should be thought of as a leftwing gatekeeper, that is, someone whose real function is not to empower the left but to control and manipulate it.

My misgivings about Chomsky began with the realization that an America which no longer tolerates the slightest hint of open political dissent still seems to tolerate Chomsky remarkably well. He seems to be free to say whatever he apparently wants to say about U.S. foreign policy, while academics with far lower profiles who've said nowhere near as much have been censured or even driven out of academia altogether. These days even humble high school teachers are not exempt from the right's hypervigilance. Jay Bennish, for example, recently endured a massive amount of opprobrium and was suspended from his job merely for discussing the Middle East crisis from a pro-Palestinian perspective. (SOURCE) Another teacher, Deb Mayer, has effectively been sacked - her contract was not renewed - merely for answering a student's question as to whether she would attend a peace protest. (SOURCE)

Yet MIT - less an educational institution than a major bastion of the U.S. military-industrial complex - seems to have not the slightest problem hosting a professor who endlessly opines on the evils of U.S. foreign policy - activities that surely consume so much of his waking hours that it is hard to see how he possibly fulfills his professional obligations to MIT as a professor of linguistics. If the right, which professes to loathe Chomsky, had really wanted to knock him down from off his perch, they have had plenty of opportunities to do so by now. That they haven't even tried, speaks volumes for their real feelings towards the 'leftwing' phenomenon that is Noam Chomsky.

At least part of the answer to the mystery of Chomsky's inviolability is that he seems to possess some kind of connection with the Israel lobby. As James Petras pointed out recently, Chomsky's legendary brain seems to stop working altogether when it comes to the issue of Zionist influence in America. Writes Petras,

'Chomsky’s speeches and writing on the Lobby emphasizes several dubious propositions.

The pro-Israel Lobby is just like any other lobby; it has no special influence or place in US politics.

The power of the groups backing the Israel lobby are no more powerful than other influential pressure groups.

The Lobby’s agenda succeeds because it coincides with the interests of the dominant powers and interests of the US State.

The Lobby’s weakness is demonstrated by the fact that Israel is ‘merely a tool’ of US empire building to be used when needed and otherwise marginalized.

The major forces shaping US Middle East policy are “big oil” and the “military-industrial complex”, neither of which is connected to the pro-Israel lobby.

The interests of the US generally coincide with the interests of Israel.

The Iraq War, the threats to Syria and Iran are primarily a product of “oil interests” and the “military-industrial complex” and not the role of the pro-Israel lobby or its collaborators in the Pentagon and other government agencies.'

Petras responds with an extensive critique of Chomsky's positions - too long to reproduce here - showing that for all his reputed sagacity Chomsky is strangely blind when it comes to the power the Israel lobby exercises over the United States. Chomsky seems determined to depict Israel as America's insignificant little proxy in the Middle East, when the historical record proves over and over again that Israeli interests invariably trump American interests. As Petras remarks, 'To ignore the pro-Israel lobby is to allow it a free hand in pushing for the invasion of Iran and Syria. Worse, to distract from their responsibility by pointing to bogus enemies is to weaken our understanding not only of the war, but also of the enemies of freedom in this country. Most of all it allows a foreign government a privileged position in dictating our Middle East policy, while proposing police state methods and legislation to inhibit debate and dissent.'

It seems to me that Chomsky's obvious blindness with regard to the Israel lobby seriously undermines his reputation as the authoritative leftwing critic of our times. How can anyone acquire any kind of reputation at all as a political analyst who has not assimilated into his analysis the overwhelming fact of Jewish power? It is probably no co-incidence that Chomsky has strangely little to say about any of the central historical events of our time. The Israeli attack on the USS Liberty in 1967, for example, is utterly ignored in Chomsky's analysis, even though it proves that 1) Israel is not an ally of America, but has its own agenda and 2) an American president will not stand up to Israel, even in the face of extreme provocation.

When it comes to other central episodes in American history in which Zionist machinations can be suspected, Chomsky has shown a consistent pattern of downgrading the significance of the event. I won't dwell on Chomsky's attitude towards the assassination of President Kennedy, because his longstanding complicity in the coverup has been dealt with by Michael Worsham and DCDave (a favourite writer of mine). (Chomsky endorses the utterly unsustainable 'lone gunman' theory, even though he admits to not having studied the case in any detail.)

In another example of the pattern, Chomsky notoriously had nothing to say about the incident at Waco, when the FBI murdered 76 members of the Branch Davidian sect. This incident was, at the time it took place, 'easily the largest domestic U.S. government mass murder of this century, and possibly the largest of its kind in American history.' (SOURCE) In the same spirit, Chomsky utterly ignores the glaring facts that the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 were both stolen.

When Chomsky doesn't ignore an event altogether, he likes to make chalk-and-cheese comparisons that serve to minimize its significance. In regard to Watergate, for example, Chomsky argued that ''What CREEP was trying to do to the Democrats is insignificant in comparison with the bipartisan attack on the Communist Party in the post-war era' and that Ambassador Godley's testimony 'that 15,000-20,000 Thai mercenaries had been employed by the U.S. in Laos, in direct and explicit violation of Congressional legislation' ... is a far more serious matter than anything revealed at the Ervin hearings.' (SOURCE)

There can be no better example of this tendency than Chomsky's conscientious ignorance in relation to 9-11. Recently on Robert McChesney's radio programme Media Matters, Chomsky was asked by a caller to clarify his current position on 9-11. (Mp3 audio file here.) A most embarrassing moment followed when a bored-sounding Superbrain - who proved that he had never read anything on the subject at all, not even David Ray Griffin's well-documented, carefully-reasoned books and articles - reiterated the feeble commonplaces that accomplices of the military-industrial complex are always using to explain away obvious conspiracies. To my ears, it sounded like the kind of poorly thought out argumentation you'd get from a five-year-old who had been caught with his hand in the cookie jar (although a five-year-old would muster rather more passion).

Slowly rising to the challenge laid down by the caller, Chomsky insisted that even if it were true that 9-11 was an inside job, it wasn't very important anyway! 'Let's say it's true ... they blew up the World Trade Center ... OK, that's a crime ... but it doesn't weigh very heavily in the balance as compared with other crimes that they're carrying out, including crimes against the American population,' he muttered. In other words, the world's greatest 'leftwing' guru doesn't think it important for the American public to ponder the significance of the fact that their government organized the murder of 3,000 people. In the light of this astonishing remark, I find it very hard to imagine what kind of domestic political event Chomsky would actually consider important enough to justify political mobilization. It's like Chomsky wants to talk about every imaginable crime of U.S. foreign policy, except those that might get the bulk of the American population angry enough to demand root-and-branch reform of the political system.

Thus Chomsky consistently shows a pattern of either ignoring domestic acts of political violence altogether or minimizing their significance by comparing them to other events - invariably events about which the average politically active citizen in America can do even less - in a way that subtly indicates to the leftwing reader that there's nothing to see here and s/he should simply move along. The important stuff is always the crimes of American imperialism, but never the domestic events that, when studied carefully, would disclose the inner workings of the beast that actually commits the crimes. So while Chomsky's work seems to enhance political literacy insofar as it promotes an understanding of American imperialism, it actually exacerbates political illiteracy insofar as it obscures what is happening at the political centre, where imperial policy is actually made.

The problem with Chomsky, in the final analysis, is the same problem with most of the pre-eminent leftwing gatekeepers (in whose company I would include other alleged leftwing luminaries like John Pilger and George Galloway), the tendency to depict the U.S. as an international criminal but, apparently, never a criminal at home. Chomsky, for example, refers to the U.S. 'a leading terrorist state.' While this is undoubtedly so, five minutes later he will tell his audience that the very idea that the U.S. government could have perpetrated 9-11 is preposterous. So what makes him - or Pilger, or Galloway - think that the U.S. government wouldn't commit terrorism at home? Or that, to minimize the risk of being exposed, it wouldn't subcontract the operation out to an organization such as the Mossad? John Kaminski observed recently that, four years after the 9-11 attacks, 'the only people who believe George Bush’s story of what happened on 9/11/2001 are those who are brain damaged and those who are paid well to believe it.' Which category do you think Chomsky belongs to?

FURTHER READING: (1) Daniel L. Abrahamson, "Noam Chomsky: Controlled Asset of the New World Order" here. According to this article, John Coleman has identified Chomsky as a deep cover CIA agent in his book The Conspirator's Hierarchy. I suspect this is true - and if so it would do a lot to explain the ubiquitousness of Chomsky's works - at a time when the works of real leftwing intellectuals (e.g., Michael Parenti) can scarcely be found anywhere - and his relationship to MIT, a well-known organ of the American military-industrial complex.

(2) Bob Feldman, "MIT Professor Noam Chomsky's Ties to the Military" here.

(3) "Where Noam will not roam" here.

For a leftwing alternative to Chomsky, Amy Goodman and all the other leftwing gatekeepers, I recommend, as always, the invaluable radio programme Taking Aim, by Ralph Schoenman and Mya Shone.