Distant Voices (45 page)

For me, Noam Chomsky has been liberating the ‘obvious' since I read him while reporting from the United States on the American war in Vietnam. Without Chomsky's rigorous marshalling of evidence, his critique of American power and his courage, the truth, the ‘obvious' about that war, would not have been told: nor the truth about so many ‘small wars' and human upheavals in our time. His pursuit of truth is unquestionably heroic; and I, along with millions who have been informed by him, owe him much. For only Chomsky has consistently breached the walls of Orwellian ‘truth' that conceal so much about our ‘free' society and the suffering of those throughout the world who pay for our ‘freedom'.

In his essays, books and speeches he has demolished authorised myth upon myth, relentlessly, with facts and documentation drawn mostly from official sources. His disclosures and clarity exemplify Kundera's aphorism that the ‘struggle of people [against power] is the struggle of memory against forgetting'. He has shown that the war in Vietnam, far from being a ‘tragic mistake', as it is so often misrepresented, was a logical exercise in imperial power, and that the United States, in furthering its strategic interests in the region, invaded a small peasant country, systematically devastating
its environment and killing its people, communist and non-communist. Without a significant body of opposition in the United States, owing much to Noam Chomsky's intellect and pen, President Reagan might well have invaded Nicaragua with American troops.

I first read Noam Chomsky's
The Backroom Boys
on a flight to Vietnam in 1974. ‘Peace with honour', the pledge upon which Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger had been returned to power, was well under way. American ground troops had been withdrawn and American bombers were dropping a greater tonnage of bombs on Indo-China than had been dropped during all of the Second World War.

The Asian war was no longer news.

In
The Backroom Boys
, Chomsky quoted an American pilot explaining the ‘finer selling points' of Napalm: ‘We sure are pleased with those backroom boys at Dow [Chemical]. The original product wasn't so hot [sic] – if the gooks were quick enough they could scrape it off. So the boys started adding polystyrene – now it sticks like shit to a blanket. It'll even burn under water now.'
⁴

I knew this to be true; I once touched a Napalm victim and her skin came away in my hand. What Chomsky did in that and other books, and in his speeches and papers, was not simply to chronicle modern savagery, but to place it within a systematic ‘division of labour'. One group of backroom boys had approved the development of Napalm and another had refined it ‘so it'll keep on burning right down to the bone'. The pilots merely delivered it. Meanwhile, the media ensured that the whole unthinkable process remained virtually invisible, and acceptable.

In this way, political leaders, whose ‘moderation' contained not a hint of totalitarianism, could, at great remove in physical and cultural distance, execute and maim people on a scale comparable with the accredited monsters of our time. Thus, John Kennedy terror-bombed Vietnam; and Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger backed genocide in East Timor; and George Bush, with John Major in tow, conducted last year's slaughter in the Gulf and called it a ‘moral crusade'.

In identifying such truths, Chomsky has got himself into a great deal of trouble. One of the roots of the hostility towards him is that he strikes at the heart of America's libertarian self-image, distinguishing between liberals and conservatives only to illuminate their common ground. Indeed, his first two books,
The Responsibility of Intellectuals
(1967) and
American Power and the New Mandarins
(1969), were frontal assaults on American intellectuals and journalists whose liberalism, he maintained, served to mask their role as ‘ideological managers' of a lawless, imperial system that caused death and destruction around the world.

Like the dissident writers of the former Soviet empire, he returns in most of his work to a fundamental theme of morality: that Americans, and by implication those of us living within the American orbit, are subject to ‘an ideological system dedicated to the service of power' which has no notion of conscience, and demands of the people ‘apathy and obedience [so as] to bar any serious challenge to elite rule'.
⁵

Alternative views are marginalised by a ‘device of historical amnesia and tunnel vision cultivated in intellectual circles'.
⁶
He refers to American academics and journalists as a ‘secular priesthood' to whom America's ‘manifest destiny', its ‘right' to attack and coerce small nations, is seemingly God-given.
⁷

For this he has been frequently denied publication, notably in the great liberal newspapers which he unnerves and shames; for, in his analysis of imperial power, he has achieved the intellectual independence so often claimed by liberal journalists and his critics. What is often forgotten in recalling the scandals of Watergate, Irangate, the secret bombing of Cambodia and the endemic corruption of the Reagan years is that so few journalists tried or were allowed to expose them. On Zionism – still one of the great American taboos – Chomsky wrote in
The Culture of Terrorism
that the relationship of Anierican liberal intellectuals with Israel compares with their predecessors' flirtation with the Soviet Union in the 1930s. They are fellow-travellers, he wrote, with ‘protective attitudes towards the Holy State and the effort to
downplay its repression and violence, to provide apologetics for it . . .'
⁸

What has infuriated Chomsky's enemies is that he is almost impossible to pigeon-hole. He was against the manipulations of both sides in the Cold War, believing that the superpowers were actually united in suppressing the aspirations of small nations. It is characteristic of this brilliant maverick that, while many chose to celebrate the end of the Cold War, he was cautious. He describes as an American nightmare ‘the dominance of the Eurasian land mass by one unified power' – Europe; and that what we are seeing today ‘is a gradual restoration of the trade and colonial relationship of Western Europe with the East'. He says, ‘The big growing conflict in world affairs is between Europe and the United States. It's been true for years, and it's now becoming pretty serious . . . They [the US establishment] really want to stick it to the Europeans.'
⁹

Although Chomsky describes himself as a libertarian socialist, he supports no ideology. Indeed, his political stands seem oddly untheoretical for one who made his name as a theorist, in linguistics. He believes revolutions bring violence and suffering and he argues that ‘one who pays some attention to history will not be surprised if those who cry most loudly that we must smash and destroy are later found among the administrators of some new system of repression'. If he has a faith it is in ‘the commonsense of ordinary people . . . ever since I had any political awareness I was always on the side of the loser.' The essayist Brian Morton recently wrote that ‘many Americans are no longer convinced that our government has the right to destroy any country it wants to – and Chomsky deserves much of the credit.'
¹⁰
The late Francis Hope wrote of him: ‘Such men are dangerous; the lack of them is disastrous.'
¹¹

I have corresponded with Noam Chomsky for years, but had not met him until recently. In 1989 I went to hear him speak in a packed hall in Battersea in London and, to my surprise, found not an accomplished orator but a gentle, self-effacing man with an endearing dash of anarchy about him.
He could barely be heard past the third row and was much concerned with responding to the convoluted interruption of a heckler. His commitment to the principle of free expression, ‘the voice of all the people being heard', has often got him into difficulty; the man haranguing him, and whose right to be heard Chomsky defended, had neo-fascist views. He struck me as a humane and thoroughly moral man; and I liked him.

Certainly, his gentleness belies the hell-raiser, reminding me of Norman Mailer's description of him in his book,
The Armies of the Night
(they shared a prison cell in 1967 following the march on the Pentagon), as ‘a slim, sharp-featured man with an ascetic expression, and an air of gentle but absolute moral integrity'.
¹²
He is also very funny; his use of farce and irony, often miscast as sarcasm, allows him to turn officialspeak around.

When we met, I asked him about this, specifically the power of common political shorthand like ‘moderates' and ‘extremists'.

He said, ‘In educated circles they're taken very seriously. No journalist, no intellectual, no writer can simply express the truth about the Vietnam war that the United States
attacked
South Vietnam. That isn't being moderate . . . In the 1930s, the American government described Hitler as a moderate, standing between the extremists of the left and right; therefore we had to support him. Mussolini was a moderate. In the mid-1980s Saddam Hussein was a moderate, contributing “stability” to the region. General Suharto of Indonesia is described regularly as a moderate. From 1965, when he came to power, slaughtering maybe 700,000 people, the
New York Times
and other journals described him as the leader of the Indonesian moderates.'

I said, ‘But they often describe you as an extremist.'

‘Sure, I
am
an extremist, because a moderate is anyone who supports Western power and an extremist is anyone who objects to it. Take for example, George Kennan [the post-war American Cold War strategist]. He was one of the leading architects of the modern world and is at the soft or dovish
end of the US planning spectrum. When he was head of the policy planning staff he quite explicitly said – in internal documents, not publicly of course – that we must put aside vague and idealistic slogans about human rights, democratisation and the raising of living standards and deal in straight power concepts if we want to maintain the disparity between our enormous wealth and the poverty of everyone else. But it's rare that someone is that honest.'

I said, ‘You've had some spectacular rows. Arthur Schlesinger accused you of betraying the intellectual tradition.'

‘That's true, I agree with him. The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't betray it I'd be ashamed of myself.'

I reminded him that he had accused Schlesinger and other liberals of being a ‘secular priesthood' in league with the US government in some vicious policies abroad. Could that ever be substantiated?

‘Well yes, I've documented it. Actually the term “secular priesthood” I borrowed from Isaiah Berlin who applied it to the Russian commissar class; and of course we have one, too. “Commissar” is an accurate and useful term. In any country there is the dominance of the respected and respectable intellectuals who serve external power. We may honour Soviet dissidents but internally they were not honoured; they were reviled. The people who were honoured were the commissars, and this goes back in history. The people who were honoured in the Bible were the false prophets. It was the ones we call the prophets who were jailed and driven into the desert, and so on. If a British intellectual writes vulgar apologetics for US government atrocities, that's no different from the vulgar apologetics of any American intellectual for Stalin.'

I said, ‘Your books are almost never reviewed in the American mainstream press and you're never asked to write for them. Have they made you, in established circles, a non-person?'

‘Oh sure. In fact, if that wasn't the case I would wonder what I was doing wrong . . . Take the city where I live, Boston. The
Boston Globe
is probably the most liberal
newspaper in the United States. I have many friends in the
Globe.
They not only can't review my books, they can't list them in a listing of books by local authors! In fact, the book review editor has said that none of my books would be reviewed and no book by South End Press, the local collective, would ever be reviewed as long as they were publishing anything of mine.'

I said that his attacks were mainly aimed at the United States and he often referred to the ‘dark side of America'. And yet he acknowledged that America was probably the freest society in history. Wasn't there a fundamental contradiction there?

‘No. The United States is, in fact, the freest society in the world. The level of freedom and protection of freedom of speech has no parallel anywhere. This was not a gift; it's not because it was written in the Constitution. Up to the 1920s, the United States was very repressive, probably more so than England. The great breakthrough was in 1964 when the law of seditious libel was eliminated. This, in effect, made it a crime to condemn authority. It was finally declared unconstitutional in the course of the civil rights struggle. Only popular struggle protects freedom.'

‘But if America is the freest society on earth, where is the systematic oppression you so often attack?'

‘Britain was one of the freest countries in the world in the nineteenth century and had a horrendous record of atrocities. There's simply no correlation between internal freedom and external violence. In fact, things are even more complex in the United States, which probably has the most sophisticated system of doctrinaire management in the world. You see, the basic idea which runs right through modern history and modern liberalism is that the public has got to be marginalised.

‘The general public are viewed as no more than ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, a bewildered herd. And it's the responsible men who have to make decisions and to protect society from the trampling and rage of the bewildered herd. Now since it's a democracy they – the herd, that is – are
permitted occasionally to lend their weight to one or another member of the responsible class. That's called an election.'