Noam Chomsky (11 page)

If they raise their voices too much they must fear for their lives though – if they are Arab, not Jewish. As it happens, Chomsky points out that such activism is tolerated in Israel to a greater degree than in the
USA
. Jewish dissidents in Israel are better off than dissidents in the West and face no threats, other than verbal abuse. Of course, if they refuse to serve in the occupied territories they will receive some punishment, but this is a tap on the wrist compared with what may face resisters in the
US
. Again, treatment of Jews and Arabs is radically different.

Chomsky, to his credit, is always very humble in the face of the real dangers people have to confront in places where oppression is more physical than legal. Still, the very idea of doing something outside one’s professional interests is very much ingrained in Jewish professional and working-class tradition. Thus what must seem a natural way of doing things – that is to be a political activist – is a natural continuation of being Jewish in some way. Not that Chomsky sees it this way, after all he made a conscious decision, as we shall see, to be a political activist in addition to being a professional linguist. Zellig Harris may well have been the catalyst for both.

Chomsky joined the establishment in 1955 by virtue of being employed as an academic by
MIT
. Their ages placed Chomsky and his wife Carol in a peculiar situation. When the turbulent 1960s arrived they were too old to become hippies and too young to become establishment figures. They became something in between, occupying a somewhat uncomfortable middle ground, politically speaking.

In 1962, however, things changed dramatically when the
US
launched all-out war against the Viet Cong. Chomsky decided to become a political activist. It was a difficult decision as it would impact on his family life, make life generally uncomfortable, mean much additional work and travel, and it would alienate him from a hitherto sympathetic community of apolitical academics. He began to participate actively in the protest movement. He recalls that his first talks about the war were in churches or in someone’s living room. Few people were interested: the primary audience consisted of the young mums and dads of the unionized Democrats. As is the mark of the true activist, this did not deter him in the least, indeed it encouraged him as he met with the salt of the earth. To educate one person is better than none. In fact it makes all the difference, as any good teacher will tell you. Later there were talks at colleges and universities, too, organized by the newly confident student bodies that increasingly became politicized.

Meanwhile Chomsky, as the dedicated academic, was always scrupulous to keep his politics out of his linguistics classrooms. This did not deter him from teaching some courses outside his departmental responsibilities. Teaming up with humanities lecturers, he would run informal classes dedicated to social and political issues. One such course was announced as ‘Intellectuals and Social Change’, another as ‘Politics and Ideology’.
¹⁴
Luckily
MIT
did not stifle such seeming dissent, and Chomsky experienced no alienation from the faculty. They didn’t agree, of course, with a few exceptions, but the prevailing atmosphere at
MIT
was real academic freedom. In fact, Chomsky was awarded a name professorship, later Institute Professorship, at the time of the most intense activism when he was carrying out activities that came quite close to being charged as treasonable offences.

As the 1960s came to resemble a roller-coaster ride, it even became fashionable among certain academics to declare one’s left-wing credentials. To be a Marxist became cool. To be a Timothy Leary one had to go to Berkeley in California and do sit-ins, love-ins and tune in and drop out. While such hallucinational developments passed Chomsky by, he became increasingly sought after as a speaker for political events and demonstrations organized by fledgling movements that subscribed to the new phenomenon of people power. Chomsky recalls that his ‘first big public event was in October 1965, on the Boston Common’.
¹⁵
He was to be a speaker but pro-war crowds attacked the demonstrators. The local media went into overdrive, denouncing the demonstration and Chomsky.

As the student protest movements of the 1960s took on a wider scope there was a curious delineation between them and Chomsky. At least, it was curious to those who simply took Chomsky to be a protester, not realizing that he was also vehemently opposed to Soviet-style Marxism and its offshoots. Hence Chomsky did not become an icon for student protest, even though many a radical student protester took him to be a natural ally and flushed with excitement at the mere suggestion that Chomsky is some sort of anarchist. On the other hand, the establishment’s fear that he was one of their own out to unmask the establishment from within appeared to make him a more potent enemy, precisely because Chomsky acted from a position of privilege – and when that happens things must be pretty serious. Not that Chomsky was alone: the now infamous list of political enemies compiled for President Nixon includes hundreds of such ‘internal enemies’, including Professors Chomsky and Galbraith, the latter teaching at Harvard.

US
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara with a map of Vietnam at a 1965 press conference.

One of the key developments in the formation of Chomsky’s political activism was the meeting of minds with fellow activist Paul Lauter. Lauter

Together with fellow activists Hans Koning, Richard Ohmann and Wayne O’Neil, Lauter and Chomsky formed a group called
RESIST
. The current
RESIST
website tells us that the manifesto was

Article 9 of the manifesto against the Vietnam War reads:

Note the reasoned but uncompromising approach and the call for the pillars of society – universities and churches – to take up the cause. Note also how different this is to the approaches of the radical fringe student movement, which vowed to crush all pillars of society. Indeed, if these establishment groups had not actively voiced their deep concerns, the
US
governments of the day would have safely ignored the student voices. Not that
RESIST
was content with publishing manifestos: it became active in organizing actual resistance. Nor was
RESIST
the only organization involved in protest action. One event not directly organized by
RESIST
, for example, took place on 21 October 1967, when marchers outside the Pentagon were confronted by military police, who sprayed Mace and made arrests. Naturally there were no firm boundaries between organizers and organizations, many of which sprang up
ad hoc
.

Thus began a celebrated chapter in the history of political dissent in the
USA
, immortalized in
The Armies of the Night
by Norman Mailer, who was himself an active participant and spent a night in jail with Chomsky. Mailer’s impression of Chomsky is recorded as ‘Chomsky – by all odds a dedicated teacher – seemed uneasy at the thought of missing class on Monday’,
¹⁹
and ‘a slim sharp-featured man with an ascetic expression, and an air of gentle but moral integrity’. Chomsky, Mailer and others were released from jail the next day, but the state had to make an example. A grand jury indicted five protesters, none of them from
RESIST
, who seemed to have been selected according to peculiar criteria by the
FBI
. Indeed there was no indication that participation in the Pentagon protest had anything to do with the trials. It seems that the
FBI
picked people who had appeared at the press conference where the Call to Resist was announced, and who carried draft cards into the Justice Department at the time of the Pentagon March (that was real resistance, but separate from the Pentagon demonstration). Spock, Coffin, and Goodman satisfied both conditions – but Spock and Coffin had nothing to do with
RESIST
or resistance activities, and agreed to show up at the press conference mainly to help bring out the press. Chomsky was not chosen because he was on the steps of the Justice Department, giving a talk to the support demonstration, when the draft cards were brought in. Raskin was picked because they mixed him up with Art Waskow Of the five chosen only Goodman was actually involved in the activities. The best-known individual of the so-called Boston Five who went to trial was Dr Benjamin Spock, author of
Baby and Child Care
. Spock was found guilty but was acquitted on appeal, as recorded by the controversial British activist Jessica Mitford in
The Trial of Dr Spock
(1969). In an interview Chomsky summed up the whole fiasco:

As a political activist Chomsky also has the gift of writing up his activist talks and lectures, including voluminous research notes as a back-up: before long he had also become the activist writer whose books, articles and pamphlets reached a much wider audience than others of his persuasion. The first talk that anyone heard, outside the circle of activists, was given at Harvard in 1966 to, of all things, a meeting of Hillel, the Foundation for Jewish Campus Life; this was published in the
New York Book Review
a year later as ‘Responsibility of Intellectuals’.
²¹
He was then asked in 1969 by Pantheon to publish his talks and articles in a book entitled
American Power and the New Mandarins
. Since it defines his entry as an important political commentator (and some would say political philosopher), we will pause to present the major ideas contained in this book, especially as it sets the scene for things to come.

The first of the eight essays in the book is ‘Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship’. It introduces the reader to the ‘new mandarins’ in
US
foreign policy, those university-educated technocrats and policy advisers who, often in the guise of intellectuals and experts, advocate
US
intervention, by any means, in any country or region that defies
US
hegemony. In the aftermath liberal scholarship acts as apologist, evidenced especially in the ‘deep-seated bias of liberal historians’.
²²
That
US
foreign policy is essentially of the imperialist mode is demonstrated in the second essay, where Chomsky draws parallels between the Vietnam war and Japanese military expansion in China in the 1930s. The third and fourth chapters deal with the Vietnam war directly. Chomsky ridicules the
US
foreign policy obsession that the Viet Cong are part of the domino theory by which the evils of communism will roll back Western civilization. Indeed the very notion will force the Viet Cong to adopt Stalinist methods, thus
US
policy will shoot itself in the foot, as usual. That some American liberals, like Arthur Schlesinger, concede that
US
policy is wrong in its military aims, but correct in its moral stance, is also a bone of contention for Chomsky. This is putting the cart before the horse and thus expresses the fundamental malaise of
US
foreign policy. Chomsky maintains that ‘the United States has no unilateral right to determine by force the course of development of the nations of the Third World’.
²³
Among the remaining chapters is the article ‘Responsibility of Intellectuals’, which had been published earlier in the
New York Book Review
. Chomsky can be extremely scathing when it comes to so-called intellectuals of the Western World, denoting them as Stalinist commissars, frauds and liars. This may well be so in many cases, but there is little chance that the notion of the ‘intellectual’ will be dispensed with forthwith or become a dirty word. Ironically, just about every book about Chomsky touts the line that ‘he is one of the leading intellectual figures of modern times’.
²⁴