The Apocalyptic Chomsky

A few years ago, Noam Chomsky came to Portland State University to give a lecture. The tickets were sold days before the event and virtually everywhere, there was talk about Chomsky. I found a ticket for the event at the last moment. It cost me $8.00, the regular price. Before the event, fans had the opportunity to purchase myriad products offered by the progressive organization. There were Chomsky books, the Chomsky book trilogy, Chomsky single articles, Chomsky cassettes, Chomsky videotapes and finally Chomsky T-shirts. I thought, "This is a good organization, considering that Chomsky proclaims himself an anarchist." But if the Chomsky case contains contradictions, this is not the greatest one. Chomsky also proclaims himself to be a fighter for human rights.

What is often unknown is that this fighting has been rather selective. While he was and still is an ardent critic of the U.S. policy in Vietnam, he will also praise the authorities of North Vietnam for "their progressive and social results." The North Vietnamese authorities tortured, killed, and imprisoned hundreds of thousands. When it came to the killings of the Khmer Rouge, he said, "They have numbered at most in the thousands," although the real estimation is more than two million.

Later on he wrote the preface for the book by a certain Robert Faurisson, whose thesis in the book is as Faurisson explained on French radio, "The alleged massacre in gas chambers and the genocide of the Jews is part of one and the same lie, a gigantic political and financial racket for the benefit of Israel and international Zionism." Chomsky later says that he was defending the right of Faurisson to express his opinion.

But in an interview he gave to Le Monde he characterized the reaction of the public to the book as "hysterical" and accused it for having a "taste for the irrational and a contempt for facts." And all that about Faurisson, whom Chomsky characterized in that preface as, "A relatively political sort of liberal." These monstrous actions of Chomsky have received little or no attention. Generally Chomsky is known, as we find it in his book, Manufacturing Consent, as, "America's leading dissident intellectual." Chomsky's political analysis can hardly even be rated mediocre. It can be summarized in the interview he gave in 1996 to the Red & Black Revolution. "Corporate mercantilism, with huge and largely unaccountable private tyrannies exercising vast control over the economy, political systems, and social and cultural life, operating in close co-operation with powerful states that intervene massively in the domestic economy and international society." Once you have accepted the Chomsky dogma, there is nothing in the world to refute it simply because the dogma doesn't have anything to make it refutable. Suppose that CNN reports about a foreign event. That, to Chomsky, signals pure propaganda. Now, if CNN chose to report crap, say gossip about a celebrity, that's because they want to distract people from real issues. If finally, CNN has a show about Noam Chomsky himself, that's because they just want to show that they are open to different perspectives. Try any imaginable action that corporations or governments might take, you will get the same thing. The Chomsky dogma is so vague and wide that it never can be tested. It's a sort of religion, once accepted, everything else becomes a confirmation.

Maybe Chomsky is a dogmatist, but he offers an alternative: don't be so optimistic. In an instructive interview he gave to Tom Lane, he said, "Personally, I have no confidence in my own views about the 'right way' and am unimpressed with the confident pronouncements of others, including good friends." When asked (a) if people in an "egalitarian society would have less incentive to work," and (b) if "the absence of government would allow the strong to dominate the weak" and (c) if "democratic decision- making results in excessive conflict, indecision and mod rule." To question (a) he answered with an aphorism of today's work place, to question (b) he replied with a "we don't know" and to inquiry (c) he stated, "The answers are unknown. We would have to learn by trial." The last time Chomsky endorsed social experimentation was when he called the doings of the North Vietnamese dictatorship "constructive work of the social revolution." This social experimentation cost the lives of two million people. The fact is, these days Chomsky doesn't contest as he did before about the "tales of Communist atrocities."

It seems as though all the social experiments of this century (Bolshevism, Nazism, gulags, Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward, or Khmer Rouge) have not caused Mr. Chomsky any doubt concerning his radical proclamations. Not a shred. He has failed, as Ralph Waldo Emerson would put it, to see the "cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end pre-exists in the means, the fruit in the seed."