Chomsky is Right

[rollhead]

June 25, 2006
'Failed States,' by Noam Chomsky
Homeland Insecurity
Review by JONATHAN FREEDLAND (New York Times)
THIS latest philippic from Noam Chomsky sets out to overturn every belief about their country Americans hold dear. The self-image of the United States as a beacon of freedom and democracy, lighting the way for the rest of the world, is a lie, Chomsky says, and it always has been. "Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy" aims to expose the rot of the shining city on a hill, from its foundations to its steeples.

At the book's center is the avowed American mission to spread democracy throughout the world. Chomsky concedes that, rhetorically at least, this has been the nation's goal since Woodrow Wilson, but he insists the words are utterly at odds with American deeds. In its many foreign interventions, Washington has acted to frustrate the will of the people, often by supporting those engaged in the most chilling violence. The United States has overthrown democratic governments in Iran, Chile, Guatemala "and a long list of others." Elsewhere it has paid lip service to procedural democracy while doing all it could to rig the outcome. There is, Chomsky says, a "rational consistency" to this inconsistency between words and actions. The record shows that the United States does indeed back democracy abroad — "if and only if it is consistent with strategic and economic interests."

These are not, Chomsky insists, the interests of the American people, but of the corporate elite that dominates the country and its policy making. For, he says, the United States is not a democracy, if that word is reserved for a society where the people's will is done.

Take health care. Chomsky has the data to show that the American system is economically inefficient, much costlier than more socialized models abroad and deeply unpopular with a majority of Americans, who are ready to pay for increased government intervention even if that means higher taxes. That democratic majority remains unheard, however, because "the pharmaceutical and financial industries and other private powers are strongly opposed." That is why the mainstream news media, a perennial Chomsky target, say publicly funded health care lacks political support: the majority might back it, but not the people who count.

Chomsky employs the same linguistic deconstruction for media definitions of prosperity. The experts may say the economy is healthy, as it is for the top 1 percent, whose wealth rose by 42 percent from 1983 to 1998. But it is not healthy for the majority, whose wages have stagnated or declined in real terms, nor for those going hungry in America because they cannot afford to buy food.

Much of this will be familiar to veteran Chomsky readers, but in this book he supplies a new twist. What, he asks, is a failed state? It is one that fails "to provide security for the population, to guarantee rights at home or abroad, or to maintain functioning (not merely formal) democratic institutions." On that definition, Chomsky argues, the United States is the world's biggest failed state. This sounds like a hyperbolic charge, ludicrously overblown — but he goes far toward substantiating it. He is especially strong on pointing up Washington's woeful efforts to protect Americans from terror attacks, in one instance lavishing more resources on the imaginary threat from Cuba than on the all-too-real menace of Al Qaeda.

And if a rogue state is defined by its defiance of international law, then the United States, Chomsky says, has long been the rogues' rogue. It has ignored the Geneva Conventions by its treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo and of Iraqi civilians in Falluja; violated the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty by its development of new weapons when it should be making good-faith efforts to get rid of the old ones; flouted the United Nations Charter, which allows the use of force only when the "necessity of self-defense" is "instant" and "overwhelming," standards hardly met by the 2003 invasion of Iraq; and defied the World Court, which in the 1980's held Washington guilty of "unlawful use of force" against Nicaragua, a ruling the United States simply rejected. Scholars like to speak of American exceptionalism, but with Chomsky the phrase takes on new meaning: America exempts itself from the rules it demands for everyone else. This is not a double standard, but flows from what Chomsky, quoting Adam Smith, calls the single standard: the "vile maxim of the masters of mankind: . . . All for ourselves, and nothing for other people."

Throughout "Failed States" Chomsky writes in this vein of fierce excoriation. No one is exempt, according to him. The whole system is rotten, including traditional liberal heroes. Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John Kennedy are all faulted for their pursuit of international dominance, from Roosevelt's plans to firebomb Japanese cities more than a year before Pearl Harbor to Kennedy's war in Vietnam. Even the framers of the Constitution are condemned. Chomsky disapprovingly quotes James Madison's insistence that the new Republic should "protect the minority of the opulent against the majority." He doesn't much like The New York Times either.

If there is a crumb of comfort for his readers, it is this: Americans are not a uniquely evil people. On the contrary, imperialists throughout history have behaved in the same way, from the Greeks to the British, always telling themselves they were driven by noble purpose — even as their elites wreaked havoc for their own material gain.

There are flaws in this book. It is dense, with almost every paragraph broken up by extensive quotations. And it is unrelenting, the invective interrupted only by the occasional flash of bitter wit. Like any polemicist, Chomsky is selective in his material: for example, he cites rulings by the Israeli Supreme Court that have injured Palestinians rights, but ignores those that have respected them.

Too often Chomsky fails to cast those outside the United States as active moral agents in their own right. He argues, with justification, that the American invasion of Iraq has unleashed a wave of terrorism in that country — but he has little interest in the bombers and beheaders themselves. Their actions are merely the inevitable products of decisions taken in Washington. He is also too airily dismissive of liberal interventionists, those who would like to see American power deployed to thwart genocide; in Chomsky's eyes, they are mere patsies for imperialism.

Similarly, his view of politics can be too mechanistic; sometimes he writes as if whole national debates are mere staged distractions, planned by the powers that be. And while he spends 260-odd pages presenting his critique, he offers only two paragraphs of solutions (an imbalance, it should be said, he is aware of).

Still, maybe it's sufficient for a prophet to tell the people they are in a wilderness; he shouldn't be expected to point the exact way out. Chomsky's ambitions, after all, are high enough. It's hard to imagine any American reading this book and not seeing his country in a new, and deeply troubling, light.

Jonathan Freedland is an editorial page columnist for The Guardian of London.

[Gary Sisco]

Chomsky's been publishing the same book under different titles since the 60s. What's new here?

Americans don't care, for the most part, about what's true. What they care about is what they agree with or don't.

[rollhead]

Chomsky doesn't resort to fatuousness to rationalize his laziness.

[walto]

I think Chomsky's programme has been harmed by his style. If he'd consider other views, respond to criticism and cut down on the insults, he'd probably have had a bigger effect over the years. He never wrote that way when he did semantics, but he seems always to have believed that works on politics should be written after the manner of "The Communist Manifesto".

[Gary Sisco]

Actually, he claims, incredibly, to be an anarchist. I've always found that hilarious.

Thing is, he's exactly what most Americans want. Someone who writes in such a way as to confirm for them what they already think and to not in any way challenge it. The idea that there are people reading Chomsky who don't already agree with him is as absurd as the idea that there are Chomsky disciples out there reading books by Pat Buchanan, just to try on his ideas for size.

[JamesH]

Gary,

Political writers are supposed to make compelling arguments for what they believe, not convert the blind.

He also educates those who may in general agree with his message but not have all the answers. I find him compelling and when I've mastered what he has to offer, as I assume you already have, I'll just move on, not criticize him for not giving me more.

Man, you're a hard ass.

[john williams]

I sometimes agree with his point of view.

However-

Chomsky doesn't know what he is!

He certainly needs a fact checker as he's been so historically incorrect on many occasions; he thought the Cambodian genocide was a US propaganda. He buddy's up with neo-nazi publishers (he wrote a foreward to fool Holocaust denier Robert Faurrison's book) to get make a weak point about free speech that he could have made without attaching it to a book of lies.

The quote below sums up my thoughts on Chomsky and as a student of modern history I just can't have any respect for anything NC has to say:

“I would guess that Noam Chomsky probably has a higher I.Q. than anyone in this room,” Flynn continued, “I would also guess that he is wrong probably more than everyone in this room.” The source of Chomsky’s errors was his decision to “[let] his ideology rather than his brain do his thinking.” Chomsky is one of “the people who rely on theory, rather than facts, to guide them, and you’re gonna get lost if you do that.” Flynn cited Chomsky’s denial of Pol Pot’s massacres in Cambodia in a 1977 article he wrote for The Nation and a 1992 pamphlet Chomsky released claiming “that the postwar world was entirely constructed by a conspiracy between State Department officials here in the U.S. and ex-Nazi army officers” as examples. Chomsky’s followers “went in for it. Didn’t matter if it was true or false,” Flynn said. Chomsky was “factually incorrect, politically correct.”

http://www.campusreportonline.net/ma...les.php?id=138

This site has a collection of great Chomsky cartoons.
http://postmodernhaircut.com/

[JamesH]

I'm not an historian but my instincts tell me that the reason Chomsky is disrespected in some circles is that he is right. The problem is that his interest go against power and the status quo. This of course makes him wrong by default.

[walto]

I'm not an historian but my instincts tell me that the reason Chomsky is disrespected in some circles is that he is right. The problem is that his interest go against power and the status quo. This of course makes him wrong by default.

Well, he was right in semantics and he overturned at least couple of settled traditions with his work on transformational grammar, but I don't think he was disrespected in any of those circles--just feared. Again, I think the tone he takes in his politics books hasn't helped his cause.

[rollhead]

Originally Posted by walto

Well, he was right in semantics and he overturned at least couple of settled traditions with his work on transformational grammar, but I don't think he was disrespected in any of those circles--just feared. Again, I think the tone he takes in his politics books hasn't helped his cause.

Walto, what -- exactly -- is the proper tone?

As long as we live in a democracy, I am not sure that there is a proper tone.

Ultimately, it isn't going to be a rational, well conceived argument that is going to sway the people who Chomsky criticizes. It is going to be pure political force brought on by the victims of this nation's policies.

No amount of polite communication is going to disuade the right from its positions.

No reasoned argument.

No facts.

No science.

No white gloves and tea cups.

No progressive movement in this country was made without a fight. People died at the Haymarket fighting for the eight hour day, and people like John Lewis had their head bloodied fighting for civil rights.

The fact that the left has been taken over by Hollywood, "intellectuals," and lawyers is why we have regressed so far in this country.

Too few are willing to fight to keep what they had to fight to get to begin with.

The faint of heart who don't like Chomsky's tone aren't the people who are going to fight for anything at all.

[Gary Sisco]

JBW -- That isn't true what you said about what Chomsky wrote about Cambodia. I read both volumes of that book in jail. Likely one of the tiny handful of people who's read the whole thing. But I had a lot of time on my hands....

He came perilously close to trivializing it -- which wasn't a genocide by the way as no one was trying to put an end to Cambodians as a people -- what it was was a lunatic savagery -- by attempting to show that the numbers used in the US press were exaggerated while the numbers of dead in Vietnam (and other wars) were always reported with the most conservative estimates of all, if any. Most of the time in the US one reads that 52,000 some odd people died in Vietnam. The number of Americans in other words, as if the several million SE Asians (Vietnamese, Laotians, various tribespeoples in Vietnam and Laos, and Cambodians) who were killed in the war weren't people or something.

One reads the same nearly every day today when Bush is called up for having gotten 2500 people killed in his Iraq adventure, when actually it's much more 52,500 dead.

I was one of the ones who took Chomsky to task at the time, but he should be taken to task for what he's actually written, not what people say he's written or have "heard" he's said.

As for the comment above about his unpopularity with power -- a tenured professor at MIT is not exactly outside the establishment, yo. Particularly when his claim to fame has long since not been his academic credentials. One of the reasons is his sanctimonious self-righteousness, actually, which is even more evident in person than in his books.

He once angered the shit out of me when he was giving a talk on Nicaragua. Someone asked him about the Mosquito Indian question (the war had several sides, not two -- more like six). Chomsky's only reply was "What Indians?" Stuff like that hasn't helped in any way.

Myself, I just think he's a glorified letter-to-the-editor writer. Sometimes reading his books you'd think that if the NYT had only taken a different editorial line, all of history would have been different. But, the NYT being first of all a corporation and second of all, the voice of the liberal bourgeoisie, what would one expect of it, actually, other than what one gets? Old-school leftists would have taken these things for granted. They were concerned with historical and social forces, not the editorial pages of the bourgeoisie. They certainly didn't expect imperial forces to act like anything other than the Klingons that they are.

He's an example of what I mean when I say, as I have for decades, that much of the 60s "left" was actually rather a section of the liberal bourgeoisie who went on a temper tantrum when they realized the mythologies they'd been taught about the US and its history and place in the world were just that.

But that would have been an understood in the left as such, not a surprise.

[Gary Sisco]

He's also frankly just boring. I wasn't kidding with my remark about writing the same book multiple times. He uses the same quotations from the same people relentlessly as well. George Kennan particularly got on his nerves for decades, so each book would have the same handful of quotes from him with the same tirades from Chomsky about them afterward. I stopped reading him after *Turning The Tide* which was, what, '84? Somewhere in there. It became pointless to read him after a while since it was already entirely predictable what he had to say on any given subject. His books are meant for those who need to have their own notions confirmed for them by someone else. They aren't intended, I don't believe, to be persuasive to anyone else. He's called a theorist, all too casually. What he is, is a writer of screeds.

[Nim Chimpsky]

Originally Posted by walto

Well, he was right in semantics

Something of a generalisation I think walto.

Originally Posted by walto

and he overturned at least couple of settled traditions with his work on transformational grammar,

Which in their turn are being overturned by insights from corpus linguistics - a discipline which Chomsky refuses to acknowledge.

Originally Posted by walto

but I don't think he was disrespected in any of those circles--just feared.

I'm not quite sure why you'd think that linguists would have any cause to fear one of their peers. There is a great deal of disrespect for Chomsky among a lot of scholars (G.K. Pullum's essays or Gethin's Antilinguistics spring instantly to mind). Some of Chomsky's ideas about the development of language as a genetic mutation and his writings on phonology are second-rate at best.

[Gary Sisco]

I wish I still had it but one night at work, early 90s, I read an article in the dreaded Times about Chomsky, where he repudiated key parts of his own linguistics theories in the interview and said he'd changed his mind. Hasn't altered his standing in any way I've noticed. As I said, his claim to fame has long *not* been his academic standing.

[Gary Sisco]

Other species have symbolic forms of communication (which is all language is after all) in any case so if a mutation it was one that took place somewhere earlier than the development of homo sapiens sapiens. Not to say communication in any anthropomorphic sense but communication nevertheless. Whale song, for instance. Bird song. Hell, dog barks, far's that goes. In the summer at our place we can often hear one band of coyotes communicate with another farther off. Black bears, too, from one ridge to another.

Neandrathals had funeral rites, also, so clearly had some means of communication plus the ability for a developed abstract thought and imagination.

[JamesH]

Gary,

Are there any writers with a political activist bent that you are reading and recommend? I've heard that Greg Palast is saying some good things, though I haven't read anything by him yet.

(I admit that Chomsky is a difficult and boring read although I like his general message. Recently I've watched a few DVD's of speeches he's given and I've been very impressed).

[Gary Sisco]

James -- I don't read advocacy writing anymore because once you have ideas of your own, you don't need anyone else to tell you how to analyze a given situation and decide your position. It's been a long while since I have, so I don't have any recs of that nature to hand off.

I agree in broad, general terms with Chomsky's foreign-policy positions, most of the time (not always; like too many, he tends to demonize the US to an extent that can seem even to me preposterous and sometimes obnoxious) but once out of the broadest terms, he bores and annoys the shit out of me. And for someone who insists he's an anarchist, he's never had any problem lining up with statists on the left and being an entirely partisan cheerleader and even apologist (as in the Mosquito issue, above, where he was more partisan even than the FSLN itself, which at least admitted to having made some very serious mistakes and sought, if bumblingly, to rectify them, eventually). Foreign policy is a bizarre tight-focus to have for an anarchist, anyway, really. I mean, you're talking states by definition, on all sides.

Also, once he's done critiquing, when asked for his own political ideas, he's reduced to platitudes and bromides that in the end say nothing at all about what he thinks ought to be and how people might get there. He has next to know offered analysis of the social order itself, either, apart from its states.

I tend to prefer straightforward history or reporting, to the extent that it can still be found. I can decide what to think about it on my own.

[walto]

Quote:
Originally Posted by walto
Well, he was right in semantics

Originally Posted by nim chimpsky

Something of a generalisation I think walto.

You're right. I should have said that his criticisms of many of those who preceded him were right. I'm not competent to respond to your other points, and I'm willing to take your word for them.

[Gary Sisco]

Another thing with Chomsky that annoys me, and that he holds in common with conspiracy theorists, is that he gives his nemeses way too much credit. Just because something happens the way it does does not in itself mean that it was planned to happen that way, as he often tries to make it sound, to his intellectual discredit. I don't believe in any way, for example, that anyone in DC decided to go fuck up a subcontinent and kill several million Asians during the US's Vietnam debacle out of any cold, cool plan.

I just think they were stupid and vainglorious, with an accompanying, idiotically simplistic view of the world, and (something they still, again idiotically, have) also possessed of an irrational and unshakeable belief that firepower and firepower alone decides all armed struggles. Clearly, that isn't the case. Never was. But part of being stupid is an ability to learn from experience. So there it is.

Today's Gang-in-Charge I just consider thugs, basically, who, thank goodness only temporarily, have the means to operate on a global level. My best friend, who's a registered Republican by the way -- and actually voted for Alfred E. Bush, Inc., the first time out -- calls them republithugs today. I like that one.

[john williams]

Originally Posted by Gary Sisco

which wasn't a genocide by the way as no one was trying to put an end to Cambodians as a people -- what it was was a lunatic savagery --

That doesn't really work either. It was an extermination pure and simple. Anyway, All the pertinent literature refers to the mass extermination in Cambodia as genocide. No big deal really. I wasn't talking about any two volume book, I was referring to the article in The Nation.

Tha fact are that Chomsky did play down the situation in Cambodia to make the US look worse than it already did to the rest of the world.

Their scholarship collapses under the barest scrutiny. To cite a few cases, they state that among those evacuated from Phnom Penh, “virtually everybody saw the consequences of [summary executions] in the form of the corpses of men, women and children rapidly bloating and rotting in the hot sun,” citing, among others, J.J. Cazaux, who wrote, in fact, that “not a single corpse was seen along our evacuation route,” and that early reports of massacres proved fallacious (The Washington Post, May 9, 1975). They also cite The New York Times, May 9, 1975, where Sydney Shanberg wrote that “there have been unconfirmed reports of executions of senior military and civilian officials ... But none of this will apparently bear any resemblance to the mass executions that had been predicted by Westerners,” and that “Here and there were bodies, but it was difficult to tell if they were people who had succumbed to the hardships of the march or simply civilians and soldiers killed in the last battles]

[and]

To give an illustration of just one neglected source, the London Economist (March 26, 1977) carried a letter by W.J. Sampson, who worked as an economist and statistician for the Cambodian Government until March 1975, in close contact with the central statistics office. After leaving Cambodia, he writes, he “visited refugee camps in Thailand and kept in touch with Khmers,” and he also relied on “A European friend who cycled around Phnom Penh for many days after its fall [and] saw and heard of no ... executions” apart from “the shooting of some prominent politicians and the lynching of hated bomber pilots in Phnom Penh.” He concludes “that executions could be numbered in hundreds or thousands rather than in hundreds of thousands,”

Noam Chomsky.
http://billstclair.com/jim/www.jim.c...dis.htm#Bodies


Chomsky is merely a second rate propagandist who happens to get it right some of the time and certainly had an agenda with regards to Cambodia.

What bothers me the most is that the 'left' in my neck of the woods are almost cultish with regards to Chomsky. He can do no wrong in their eyes and if you call into question any facts he may have been mistaken about, you are either labelled a right-wing nut job or they say "Oh well we all make mistakes".

[Clay Fink]

He's quite the cunning linguist.

[Gary Sisco]

JBW -- People often use the word genocide incorrectly, to refer to horrific killing, but they are not the same things. Sorry. The Germans didn't wage a genocide against the Soviet Union in WW2 and no one in any war's suffered more killing, from anyone, than the Soviets did in that war, with tens of millions dead. It takes the reality of genocide -- the attempt to exterminate a people as a people -- away to use the word the way it is too often used. There was no attempt to exterminate Cambodians as Cambodians because they were Cambodians. I'm not even sure a people could commit genocide on itself.

The Nazi attempt to destroy European Jewry, which very nearly succeeded, is an example of genocide. The thirteen east-coast tribes that were entirely exterminated, no survivors, no descendants, by European colonists in North America were genocides. Etc.

Saying that what happened in Cambodia was not a genocide is not at all to diminish what it was. Calling something what it wasn't doesn't make it any more serious, either. Things should be dealt with honestly as what they were. Cambodia was such a horror show it doesn't require words like genocide to be used incorrectly to make the horror plain.

And your reply says something entirely different than what you accused Chomsky of in your first post, which is what I was responding to. He did not claim that the killing in Cambodia was a US propaganda ploy, as you said in your first, and hence attacking him for it is intellectually dishonest. His book The Political Economy of Human Rights is the one that first launched this whole debate over Chomsky and Cambodia, the reason I refered to it.

Criticize him all you like. I'm one of his harshest critics myself. But criticize him for what he's said or done, not for what he hasn't. Putting words in someone's mouth and then attacking him for it isn't any more intellectually honest than what you're attacking. You yourself backtracked on your original tack in your reply. The facts speak for themselves. Embellishments don't add anything to the discussion.

I agree with you about the cult of Chomsky on the alleged left (I don't agree that there is a left, though there is something that likes to think it's one; politically and ideologically speaking, its real derivation is from 60s-era liberalism, as is its political behavior, when there is one apart from personalistic protest).

[Ennis Snavely]

Originally Posted by Clay Fink

He's quite the cunning linguist.

Gosh, Clay, I've never heard that one before. People are trying to have a serious, adult conversation here. Why don't you fuck off.

[Gary Sisco]

'Cause he's a Fink?