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CounterPunch
October
9, 2002
Eight Ways to
Smear Noam Chomsky
by LAWRENCE MCGUIRE
I just read a recent article in The Nation, 'The
Left and 9/11' (September 23, 2002) by Adam Shatz, which purports
to be a measured analysis of the differences between the so-called
'Left' in the United States over the war in Afghanistan and in
Iraq. In reality the article is a clever misrepresentation of
Chomsky, and of others who share his view of U.S. foreign policy.
Just as there is more than one way to
skin a cat, there is more than one way to smear Chomsky. I counted
eight in Shatz's article.
1. Accuse him of being 'anti-American':
"The MIT linguist and prolific essayist
Noam Chomsky has emerged as a favorite target of those keen on
exposing the left's anti-Americanism."
"While Falk [unlike Chomsky] did
not evaluate the war through the distorting prism of anti-Americanism..."
I'll point out the obvious: Noam Chomsky
is American, so how can he be against himself? For that matter
I am American and I've never read anything Chomsky wrote that
was anti-me. If Shatz means that Chomsky consistently opposes
the foreign policy of the United States Government, then why
doesn't he say it? The phrase 'the distorting prism of anti-Americanism'
has no political meaning. It is the responsibility of any citizen
of a democracy to oppose the policy of their government if they
think it is illegal, immoral, or both.
2. Accuse Chomsky of being unsympathetic
to the victims of the September 11th atrocities:
"Although Chomsky denounced the
attacks, emphasizing that "nothing can justify such crimes,"
he seemed irritable in the interviews he gave just after September
11, as if he couldn't quite connect to the emotional reality
of American suffering. He wasted little time on the attacks themselves
before launching into a wooden recitation of atrocities carried
out by the American government and its allies."
"The problem was not so much Chomsky's
opposition to US retaliation as the weirdly dispassionate tone
of his reaction to the carnage at Ground Zero, but, as Todd Gitlin
points out, "in an interview undertaken just after September
11, the tone was the position."
This reminds me of King Lear's rage when
Cordelia doesn't express her love in the proper way, while his
other daughters Regan and Goneril do so with hypocritical effusions
of false affection. As Kent says in response 'Nor are those empty
hearted whose low sounds reverb no hollowness'.
Since when, in any serious assessment
of a person's political position, do you judge a person according
to how you perceive their tone rather than  by the words they
speak? I wonder what would have satisfied Shatz and Gitlin? For
Chomsky to break down crying when talking about September 11th?
By what almighty right do they judge any person's emotional response
to a human catastrophe?
3. Accuse, by implication, Chomsky
and others of actually being happy (the code word here is 'glee')
that 3,000 people were killed in a terrorist attack on September
11th. Shatz is more careful here. He repeats an assertion of
Michael Walzer, editor of Dissent, about certain unnamed
people who felt 'glee' over the attacks, then he uses the word
as if people had actually felt 'glee', then he tells us that
Micahel Walzer's focus of attack is Chomsky.
"In "Can There Be a Decent
Left?", an essay in the spring Dissent, Michael Walzer--who
lent his signature to "What We're Fighting For," a
prowar manifesto sponsored by the center-right Institute for
American Values--accused the antiwar left of expressing "barely
concealed glee that the imperial state had finally gotten what
it deserved." (When I asked him to say whom he had in mind,
he said: "I'm not going to do that. Virtually everyone who
read it knew exactly what I was talking about.")
"Unlike most Americans, leftists
didn't have to ask the question "Why do they hate us?"--and
not because of any glee that the chickens had come home to roost.
"At Dissent's first editorial
board meeting after the attacks, the liveliest topic of conversation
was reportedly Chomsky, whom Walzer appears to regard as an even
greater menace to society than Osama himself."
This is the classic sneaky attack by
innuendo. If Shatz wants to repeat such slanderous accusations
about Noam Chomsky then he should have the courage to do so openly.
4. Accuse Chomsky of trivializing
the victims of September 11th :
"In a clumsy analogy, Chomsky likened
the attacks to Clinton's bombing of the Al Shifa pharmaceutical
plant in Sudan (wrongly suspected of manufacturing biological
weapons), which resulted in one direct casualty. According to
Chomsky, because the destruction of the plant placed tens of
thousands of Sudanese at risk of malaria and other lethal diseases,
it was "morally worse" than 9/11."
Exactly what makes this a 'clumsy' analogy?
Is it true that Clinton bombed a pharmaceutical plant? Yes. Shatz
says it was 'wrongly suspected of manufacturing biological weapons'.
Wrongly suspected by whom? The U.S. Government knew without a
doubt that it was a pharmaceutical plant. So here Shatz repeats
the propaganda of the Clinton administration, by singing the
constant refrain of the apologists for state power: 'oh, it was
just a mistake'. How many people died because the pharmaceutical
plant was destroyed? Thousands, according to the sources Chomsky
cited. Do their lives have equal value to the lives of the people
killed on September 11th? If so, then what is the problem with
the analogy? Perhaps you agree, perhaps you disagree, but the
implicit assumption is that Chomsky should not equate the suffering
of poor people in Africa with that of the victims of September
11th.
5. Misrepresent Chomsky's proposal
for treating the September 11th as a crime against humanity rather
than an act of war:
"And yet there are some settings
in which police methods can hardly be expected to work, like
Afghanistan. "Which was the court where these guys could
be summoned?" asks Todd Gitlin. "Were subpoenas to
be dropped at the mouths of the caves of Tora Bora?" What's
more, the call for "police work" rather than war sounded
somewhat disingenuous, coming as it did from some of the same
people who used to call for the abolition of the CIA, an organization
to which much of the policing would presumably be entrusted."
What Schatz doesn't point out here is
the glaringly obvious fact that Chomsky and others called for
September 11th to be treated as a crime against humanity and
dealt with by the United Nations, according to international
law. So, why would the C.I.A. be entrusted with policing overseen
by the United Nations? The International Criminal Court, which
the Bush Administration has refused to join, and has also tried
to destroy in its cradle, is precisely the type of court that
could have dealt with an international crime of this magnitude.
6. Misrepresent Chomsky's view of
the motivations for American foreign policy, pretending as if
he thinks that 'we' are somehow 'evil':
"One can differ with Chomsky on
Afghanistan and still see much of value in his critique of the
war on terrorism. "I don't believe that we're ideologically
committed to do evil," says playwright Tony Kushner. "On
the other hand, what Chomsky says about the globalization of
the war is absolutely true. It's the beginning of an unapologetic
imperium, and that's quite frightening."
In fact, Chomsky always analyzes U.S.
foreign policy in terms of domestic concentrations of political
power.
7. Repeat the smear that Chomsky was
'wrong' about Cambodia:
"Chomsky's framework for understanding
US foreign policy is appealing because it appears to see through
the fog, while allowing those who accept it to feel like they're
on the side of history's angels. His world is an orderly, logical
one in which everything is foretold. The shape events assume
may be unexpected, but the events themselves are the predictable
outcome of this or that American policy. Applied to Vietnam,
East Timor and Palestine, Chomsky's analysis of American imperialism
has demonstrated uncommon prophetic powers. Applied to Cambodia
and the Balkans, it has prevented him from comprehending evil
that has not been plotted from Washington."
Shatz doesn't even attempt to offer any
proof for the assertions of this paragraph. He can state it as
if it is true because similar false accusations have been launched
for years, to the point where people think 'oh, it must be true'.
This is the same smear that far-right ideologue Richard Bennett
used in his CNN debate with Chomsky a few months ago.
8. Create a false representation of
two wings of the so-called Left, with Chomsky and Christopher
Hitchens at opposite extremes offering two 'paradigms' of U.S.
foreign policy:
"Despite their strengths, since
September 11 both these paradigms have proved to be unreliable
compasses. Chomsky's jaundiced perspective on American power
makes it virtually impossible to contemplate the possibility
of just American military interventions, either for self-defense
or to prevent genocide. Hitchens's intoxicated embrace of American
power has left him less and less capable of drawing the line
between humanitarian intervention and rogue-state adventurism.
What the left needs to cultivate is an intelligent synthesis,
one that recognizes that the United States has a role to play
in the world while also warning of the dangers of an imperial
foreign policy."
Exactly why is Chomsky considered to
have a 'jaundiced' perspective? This is simply another accusation
without evidence. It's easy to find Chomsky's view on the issue
of humanitarian intervention. If the concentrations of power,
(the people who own and control huge corporations, and who thus
have the dominant influence over U.S. foreign policy) have not
changed, then it is ridiculous to think the U.S. Government is
going to militarily intervene in other countries in a humanitarian
way. You can paint a tiger pacific blue but its teeth and appetite
won't disappear with its stripes.
The last paragraph of Schatz's article
shows just how blind he is to the reasons ordinary Americans
and people all over the world oppose U.S. foreign policy:
"Why does the left oppose war on
Iraq? Do we oppose it because the US government's reasons for
going to war are always deceitful, or because the United States
has no right to unseat foreign governments that haven't attacked
us first, or because this war is ill-timed and is likely to backfire?
Do we oppose it because it's unilateral and illegal under international
law, or because the American government has failed to put forward
a coherent vision of Iraq after Saddam? As with Afghanistan,
there are more than two ways to be for or against an intervention
in Iraq. Like the war on terror, the debate on the left over
the uses of American force has no end in sight."
Nowhere does Shatz mention the obvious,
the huge glaring fact that apologists for mass murder like Christopher
Hitchens have refused to acknowledge: many Americans are opposed
to U.S. foreign policy because they recognize the suffering it
causes to thousands of other human beings. This is the same reason
that many Americans rely on Noam Chomsky, and other courageous
intellectuals, for an understanding of that policy.
More civilians were killed in Afghanistan
by U.S. bombing than were killed on September 11th 2001 in New
York City. In addition many more died in the refugee camps they
fled to because of the bombings. As The Nation itself has pointed
out, Afghanistan did not become a better place for its people
because of U.S. bombing. As the New York Times has pointed out,
Al Queda is more dangerous now than it was before the bombing.
Chomsky's crime, for the left and the
right, has always been the same: he takes seriously the bedrock
moral assumption that all human beings in the whole wide world
have lives of equal value. There is no such thing as 'our victims'
and 'their victims'.
Schatz's article, by misrepresenting
Chomsky and other opponents of the bombing of Afghanistan, serves
to prepare the way for many on the Left to support the war in
Iraq by ignoring the victims there also. No doubt opponents of
the war in Iraq will be accused of not developing what Shatz
calls "an informed critique that transcends pacifist platitudes."
In fact, Chomsky has been developing
that informed critique for decades.
And as for myself, I would far rather
speak out with 'pacifist platitudes' than repeat mindlessly the
militarist platitudes of 'humanitarian intervention', otherwise
known as war; which is in fact mass murder.
Lawrence McGuire
is the author of The
Great American Wagon Road. He lives in France. He can
be reached at: blmcguire@hotmail.com
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