Noam Chomsky (15 page)

As such Chomsky did more to advance the cause of the East Timorese than anyone, other than the investigative journalist John Pilger. Another contributory factor was the first screenings in Australia (from 1992) and elsewhere of the documentary film
Manufacturing Consent
, which was based on the book of the same title by Herman and Chomsky. The film covers the East Timor issue and Burns quotes the producer/director Mark Achbar as saying:

A little-known story that involves East Timor and New Zealand also speaks volumes about Chomsky. In November 1991, three weeks after Kamal Bamadhaj, a twenty-year-old New Zealand-Malaysian student, had arrived in East Timor as a member of an Australian aid organization, he was shot in the back, fatally, by Indonesian military police. For four years Kamal’s mother, journalist Helen Todd, crusaded to bring the perpetrators of the crime to justice. The New Zealand government of the time was as cowardly as its Australian counterpart, and Helen Todd received no support whatsoever from the New Zealand authorities. Nonetheless her investigations revealed some of the Indonesian military officers in charge at the Dili massacre. Names were circulated among the international community of political activists and human rights campaigners, including that of one General Sintong Panjaitan. In 1994, with supreme impunity, the same general enrolled in a course at Harvard University. Since many of the top brass of the Indonesian armed forces had previously trained in the us, it was nothing unusual for the elite classes of both countries to have exchanges at all levels: to protect their immunity they simply adopted different names for the time being. Chomsky came to hear about this from East Timor activists, either there or perhaps in Australia; local activists in the Boston area then alerted the Harvard authorities. Of course the Harvard establishment at first denied all knowledge of such a connection, but positive proof soon led to pickets at the general’s up-market house. News of these events reached Helen Todd in New Zealand. When the general was warned, most likely by the
US
government, that moves were underway to start
US
civil proceedings against him, he immediately left the country. Chomsky still relishes what he calls his favourite headline ever in the
US
press: ‘Indonesian General Flees Boston’. With the assistance of a group of United States lawyers working for the Center for Constitutional Rights, including Chomsky’s sister-in-law, Todd’s quest ended in 1994 in a Boston courtroom, where, in a groundbreaking case, she successfully sued General Sintong Panjaitan –
in absentia
. Panjaitan was ordered to pay $NZ22 million,
$NZ16
million of which was for Todd herself for punitive damages. The general called the ruling a joke and continues to refuse to pay. Chomsky has never met Helen Todd in person but communicated with her on many occasions during that period. A New Zealand Green Member of Parliament, Keith Locke, wrote in 1998:

The same Don McKinnon’s present position (2005) as Secretary-General of the Commonwealth has given rise to the cynical observation that generals and ministers don’t die, they just get recycled to different posts.

When public opinion in the us, Australia and New Zealand swung around in favour of East Timorese independence, or at least autonomy from Indonesia, all three governments took the moral high ground. It was opportune to do so, since the Suharto regime began to crumble in 1998 and soon some of the dirty deals he had made with the governments in question might be revealed. For almost ten years after the Dili massacre in 1991 all three governments had held Suharto’s hand, but faced with the Islamist tendencies of his successor, Habibie, there would be a total reversal. The slaughter that followed the 1999 East Timorese vote for independence put
US
foreign policy under pressure and President Clinton withdrew support from the Indonesian military. They in turn withdrew immediately from East Timor and the Australian-led International Force in East Timor (
INTERFET
) landed unopposed on 20 September 1999. Lauded by the international mainstream media as a noble humanitarian intervention, Chomsky pours scorn on the claim, saying that ‘there was no intervention, let alone humanitarian intervention’.
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What really happened was that the us, as elsewhere in the world, had supported a gangster regime for too long and lost control of the chief gangster, in this case Suharto. It then had to close down the operation, leaving chaos all round. The East Timorese population paid the price – up to 100, 000 lives. As Australia took control of the newly independent Timor-Leste, via its aid industry, there came another surprise, revealing, some might say, the height of duplicity and cynicism. The Australian government under John Howard demanded that Australian access to oil and gas under the 1989 Timor Gap Treaty, which had been negotiated with Indonesia as thanks for recognizing the legitimacy of the 1975 invasion, was to be renewed unchanged with Timor-Leste, providing vast access to Australian/us oil and gas companies. While negotiations drag on with no end in sight, East Timorese activists have a new battle on their hands:

The independence East Timor achieved in May 2002 is a real tribute to the handful of, mostly young, East Timorese activists who, over a period of 25 years, devoted enormous energy and efforts to achieving it, and to their (considerably more numerous) counterparts in Australia and other countries throughout the West.

9/11
AND THE ‘WAR ON TERROR.’
When the world changed, as they say, on 11 September 2001, there was an incredible media frenzy to explain, to vilify, to call for revenge, to mitigate, to confuse, to replay the scene again and again, to opine, to investigate … across every shade of the political spectrum. Naturally, Chomsky was much in demand, and he gave many interviews in September and early October. Sadly perhaps, he was persuaded that a collection of these interviews should be published in a slim volume, entitled
September 11
, which was already in print by 15 October. He and many such others were caught in limbo. Chapter 7 of Chomsky’s book is entitled ‘Considerable Constraint?’ (ironically with a question-mark). It appears that Chomsky and many others completely missed the point: for a minute Chomsky thought that Bush and Co. would indeed show constraint:

Chomsky maintains that he was right in that the
US
did not respond as massively as they could have. It seems a moot point. The ensuing slaughter in Afghanistan – and as it continues to this day – cannot be dismissed. While any misjudgements of the situation can easily be excused by the resulting political confusion, that it should have happened to Chomsky in print was perhaps an avoidable misjudgement. Chomsky’s
September 11
is thus an odd contribution to the history of events, knocked flat by some publicist’s eagerness to cash in on the Chomsky phenomenon. Not that the collection of interviews is devoid of words of wisdom: Chomsky quotes a Mexican bishop who famously tells the Americans to ‘reflect on why they are so hated, having generated so much violence to protect their economic interests’.
⁶⁴
Of course the book was bitterly attacked because it didn’t line up for the patriotic parade. Not surprisingly, though,
September 11
still proved to be a publishing success for New York-based Seven Stories Press, which was able to claim that ‘Noam Chomsky’s 9–11 became the single most influential counter-narrative of dissent, selling over 300, 000 copies and was the #1 paperback in Canada throughout 2002.‘
⁶⁵

While the world watched the fall of Kabul on
CNN
, with some alternative shots from the newly established Arab television stations such as Al Jazeera (but waited in vain for the scalp of Osama bin Laden), a new world order was introduced that sought to contain, once and for all, any resistance to
US
global dominance. On a roll in Afghanistan, here was an opportunity to subdue the remaining members of the ‘axis of evil’ as well, starting with Iraq and its extremely important oil reserves. This was the real
raison d’être
of
US
foreign policy, as Chomsky had pointed out over and over again for many years. Iraq, Iran and Syria must be taught a lesson and brought to heel. They must accept that their oil is to be pumped by American-dominated multinational corporations, cheaply and effectively, to maximize corporate profits that in turn purchase geopolitical power in Washington’s armaments industry. The cynical charades played by Secretary of State Colen Powell to convince the world that Saddam Hussein, Washington’s own man, had WMDS (interpreted by one wit as ‘weapons of mass deception’), and so justifying the necessity to invade, are by now also history or, as Marx would say, ‘history as farce’.

These events in Iraq, and all the other regional wars raging across the world,
AIDS
and poverty in Africa, turmoil in the former Soviet states, Russia’s terror in Chechnya suddenly becoming a legitimate war on terror in league with the
US
and China, the whole world reeling in a merry-go-round of capitalist excess and luxury as the economic and political elites exploit anyone they can only intensifies Chomsky’s commitment to political activism. Now in his seventies, he travels more than ever, gives more talks, writes more. Ever the optimist, he puts his faith in new peoples’ movements, such as the World Social Forum, which he has attended in India and Brazil. His network of political activists widens as he travels the world. Increasingly activists associated with the World Social Forum, that is activists from the so-called Third World (or the South, as Willy Brandt had called it), turn to Chomsky as their comrade-in-arms. Good things happen. Chomsky has long known Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as a good man, and now he is as President of Brazil. I ask Chomsky if Lula da Silva shouldn’t have abolished the state of Brazil by now and introduced council communism or anarcho-syndicalist freedom. Chomsky answers that it’s easy for us to say such things because we do not have to live with the consequences – Lula da Silva has to. I agree. In India Chomsky has teamed up with writer turned activist Arundhati Roy, who began a speech at the opening of the Mumbai World Social Forum on 16 January 2004 in the following brilliant fashion: ‘Last January thousands of us from across the world gathered in Porto Alegre in Brazil and declared – reiterated – that “Another World Is Possible.” A few thousand miles north, in Washington, George Bush and his aides were thinking the same thing.’
⁶⁶

Arundhati Roy and Chomsky at his 75th birthday celebration.

The previous year Arundhati Roy had written ‘The Loneliness Of Noam Chomsky’.
⁶⁷
First she affirms that if she were asked to choose one of Noam Chomsky’s major contributions to the world, it would be the fact that he has unmasked the ugly, manipulative, ruthless universe that exists behind that beautiful, sunny word ‘freedom’. He has done this rationally and empirically. The mass of evidence he has marshalled to construct his case is formidable. Terrifying, actually. The starting premise of Chomsky’s method is not ideological, but it is intensely political. He embarks on his course of inquiry with an anarchist’s instinctive mistrust of power. He takes us on a tour through the bog of the
US
establishment, and leads us through the dizzying maze of corridors that connects the government, big business, and the business of managing public opinion.
⁶⁸