[情報] chomsky, The greatest intellectual?
The greatest intellectual?
Q: Do you regret supporting those who say the Srebrenica massacre was
exaggerated?
A: My only regret is that I didn't do it strongly enough
Emma Brockes
Monday October 31, 2005
The Guardian
Despite his belief that most journalists are unwitting upholders of western
imperialism, Noam Chomsky, the radical's radical, agrees to see me at his
office in Boston. He works here as a professor of linguistics, a sort of Clark
Kent alter ego to his activist Superman, in a nubbly old jumper, big white
trainers and a grandad jacket with pockets designed to accomodate a Thermos.
There is a half-finished packet of fig rolls on the desk. Such is the effect
of an hour spent with Chomsky that, writing this, I wonder: is it wrong to
mention the fig rolls when there is undocumented suffering going on in El
Salvador?
Article continues
Ostensibly I am here because Chomsky, 76, has been voted the world's top
public intellectual by Prospect magazine, but he has no interest in that. He
believes that there is a misconception about what it means to be smart. It
is not a question of wit, as with no 5 on the list (Christopher Hitchens) or
poetic dash like no 4 (Vaclav Havel), or the sort of articulacy that lends
itself to television appearances, like no 37, the thinking girl's pin-up
Michael Ignatieff, whom Chomsky calls an apologist for the establishment and
dispenser of "garbage". Chomsky, by contrast, speaks in a barely audible croak
and of his own, largely unsuccessful, television appearances has written
dismissively: "The beauty of concision is that you can only repeat
conventional thoughts." Being smart, he believes, is a function of a plodding,
unsexy, application to the facts and "using your intelligence to decide what's
right".
This is, of course, what Chomsky has been doing for the last 35 years, and his
conclusions remain controversial: that practically every US president since
the second world war has been guilty of war crimes; that in the overall
context of Cambodian history, the Khmer Rouge weren't as bad as everyone makes
out; that during the Bosnian war the "massacre" at Srebrenica was probably
overstated. (Chomsky uses quotations marks to undermine things he disagrees
with and, in print at least, it can come across less as academic than as
witheringly teenage; like, Srebrenica was so not a massacre.)
While his critics regard him as an almost compulsive revisionist, Chomsky is
more mainstream now than ever as disgust with the Bush government grows; the
book he put out after the twin towers attacks, called 9-11, sold 300,000
copies. Given that until recently he worked full-time at Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, there remain suspicions over how he has managed to
become an expert, seemingly, on every conflict since the second world war;
it is assumed by his critics that he plugs the gaps in his knowledge with
ideology.
Chomsky says this is just laziness on their part and besides, "the best
scientists aren't the ones who know the most data; they're the ones who know
what they're looking for."
Still, of all the intellectuals on the Prospect list, it is Chomsky who is
most often accused of miring a debate in intellectual spam, what the writer
Paul Berman calls his "customary blizzard of obscure sources". I ask if he has
a photographic memory and Chomsky smiles. "It's the other way round. I can't
remember names, can't remember faces. I don't have any particular talents that
everybody else doesn't have."
His daily news intake is the regular national press and he dips in and out
of specialist journals. I imagine he is a fan of the internet, given his low
opinion of the mainstream media (to summarise: it is undermined by a "
systematic bias in terms of structural economic causes rather than a
conspiracy of people". I would argue individual agency overrides this, but get
into it with Chomsky and your allocated hour goes up in smoke). So I am
surprised when he says he only goes online if he is "hunting for documents, or
historical data. It's a hideous time-waster. One of the good things about
the internet is you can put up anything you like, but that also means you
can put up any kind of nonsense. If the intelligence agencies knew what they
were doing, they would stimulate conspiracy theories just to drive people
out of political life, to keep them from asking more serious questions ...
There's a kind of an assumption that if somebody wrote it on the internet,
it's true."
Is there? It's clear, suddenly, that Chomsky's opinion can be as flaky as
the next person's; he just states it more forcefully. I tell him that most
people I know don't believe anything they read on the internet and he says,
seemlessly, "you see, that's dangerous, too." His responses to criticism
vary from this sort of mild absorption to, during our subsequent ratty
exchange about Bosnia, the childish habit of trashing his opponents whom he
calls "hysterical", "fanatics" and "tantrum throwers". I suspect that being on
the receiving end of lots "half-crazed" nut-mail, as he calls it (he gets at
least four daily emails accusing him of being a Mossad agent, a CIA agent or a
member of al-Qaida), has made his defensive position rather entrenched.
Chomsky sighs and says that he has never claimed to have a monopoly on the
truth, then looks merry for a moment and says that the only person who does is
his wife, Carol. "My grandchildren call her Truth Teller. When I tease them
and they're not sure if I'm telling the truth, they turn to her and say: '
Truth Teller, is it really true?'"
Chomsky's activism has its roots in his childhood. He grew up in the
depression of the 1930s, the son of William Chomsky and Elsie Simonofsky,
Russian immigrants to Philadelphia. He describes the family as "working-
class Jews", most of whom were unemployed, although his parents, both
teachers, were lucky enough to work. There was no sense of America as the
promised land: "It wasn't much of an opportunity-giver in my immediate
family," he says, although it was an improvement on the pogroms of Russia,
which none the less Chomsky can't help qualifying as "not very bad, by
contemporary standards. In the worst of the major massacres, I think about
49 people were killed."
The house in Philadelphia was crowded, full of aunts and cousins, many of them
seamstresses who weathered the depression thanks to the help of the
International Ladies Garment Union. Chomsky was four years old when he
witnessed, from a passing trolley car, strikers outside a textile plant
being beaten by the police. At 10 he wrote his first political pamphlet,
against the rise of fascism in Spain. "It was all part of the atmosphere,"
he says.
The Chomskys were one of the few Jewish families in an Irish and German
neighbourhood, and Chomsky and his brother fought often in the street; he
remembers there were celebrations when Paris fell to the Germans. His
parents kept their heads down and until their deaths, he says, "never had an
idea of what was going on outside".
Chomsky had a choice of role models. There was his father's family in
Baltimore, who were "super-orthodox". "They regressed back to the stage they
were at even before they were in the shtetl, which is not uncommon among
immigrant communities; a tendency to close in and go back to an exaggerated
form of what you came from." He smiles. "It's a hostile world."
Or there was his mother's family in New York, who crowded into a big
government apartment and got by solely on the wages of a disabled uncle, who
on the basis of his disability was awarded a small newsstand by the state.
Chomsky chose the latter and his radicalism grew out of the time he spent,
from the age of 12, commuting to New York at weekends to help on the
newsstand.
"It became a kind of salon," he says. "My uncle had no formal education but he
was an extremely intelligent man - he'd been through all the leftwing
groups, from the Communists to the Trotskyists to the anti-Leninists; he was
very much involved in psychoanalysis. There were a lot of German emigres in
New York at the time and in the evening they would hang around the newsstand
and talk. My uncle finally ended up being a pretty wealthy lay analyst on
Riverside Drive." He bursts out laughing.
It was a time, says Chomsky, when no one knew what was going to happen. They
discussed the possibility of a socialist revolution, or of the country
collapsing entirely. Anything seemed possible. Compared with these sorts of
discussion, he found high school and, later, college, "dumb and stupid". He
was thinking of dropping out of the University of Pennsylvania when he met his
second mentor, Zellig Harris, a linguistics professor who encouraged him to
pursue his own academic interests. Chomsky had grown up in a household where
language was important; his parents spoke Yiddish and his father wrote a PhD
on 14th-century Hebrew, which the young Chomsky read with interest. And so
he pursued a study of linguistics and many years down the line formulated a
ground-breaking theory, that of "universal grammar", the idea that the brain's
facility for language is innate rather than a function of behaviourism. It
sounds to me as if he was an arrogant young man who thought, with some
justification, that he knew more than his teachers. Chomsky bridles at the
word arrogant and says: "No. I assumed I was wrong and took for granted that
the standard approach [to linguistics] was correct."
Even though he went on to study at Harvard, he still, in a rare concession
to the romance of outsidership, describes himself as "self-taught".
There were only a couple of years in the mid-1950s when he gave up activism
altogether. He had met and married Carol Schatz, a fellow linguist, and they
had three young children. Chomsky had to choose whether to commit himself to
activism or to let it go. The Vietnam war protests were getting under way and,
if he chose the former, there was a real danger of a jail sentence, so much so
that Carol re-enrolled at college in case she had to become the sole
breadwinner. But Chomsky was not, he says, the sort of person who could attend
the occasional demo and then hope the world would fix itself.
"Yeah, my wife tried to talk me out of it, just as she does now. But she knows
I can be stubborn and that I'll carry on with it as long as I'm ambulatory
or whatever."
These days, Carol accompanies her husband to most of his public appearances.
He is asked to lend his name to all sorts of crackpot causes and she tries
to intervene to keep his schedule under control. As some see it, one ill-
judged choice of cause was the accusation made by Living Marxism magazine that
during the Bosnian war, shots used by ITN of a Serb-run detention camp were
faked. The magazine folded after ITN sued, but the controversy flared up again
in 2003 when a journalist called Diane Johnstone made similar allegations in a
Swedish magazine, Ordfront, taking issue with the official number of victims
of the Srebrenica massacre. (She said they were exaggerated.) In the ensuing
outcry, Chomsky lent his name to a letter praising Johnstone's "outstanding
work". Does he regret signing it?
"No," he says indignantly. "It is outstanding. My only regret is that I didn't
do it strongly enough. It may be wrong; but it is very careful and outstanding
work."
How, I wonder, can journalism be wrong and still outstanding?
"Look," says Chomsky, "there was a hysterical fanaticism about Bosnia in
western culture which was very much like a passionate religious conviction. It
was like old-fashioned Stalinism: if you depart a couple of millimetres from
the party line, you're a traitor, you're destroyed. It's totally irrational.
And Diane Johnstone, whether you like it or not, has done serious, honest
work. And in the case of Living Marxism, for a big corporation to put a
small newspaper out of business because they think something they reported was
false, is outrageous."
They didn't "think" it was false; it was proven to be so in a court of law.
But Chomsky insists that "LM was probably correct" and that, in any case, it
is irrelevant. "It had nothing to do with whether LM or Diane Johnstone were
right or wrong." It is a question, he says, of freedom of speech. "And if they
were wrong, sure; but don't just scream well, if you say you're in favour of
that you're in favour of putting Jews in gas chambers."
Eh? Not everyone who disagrees with him is a "fanatic", I say. These are
serious, trustworthy people.
"Like who?"
"Like my colleague, Ed Vulliamy."
Vulliamy's reporting for the Guardian from the war in Bosnia won him the
international reporter of the year award in 1993 and 1994. He was present when
the ITN footage of the Bosnian Serb concentration camp was filmed and
supported their case against LM magazine.
"Ed Vulliamy is a very good journalist, but he happened to be caught up in a
story which is probably not true."
But Karadic's number two herself [Biljana Plavsic] pleaded guilty to crimes
against humanity.
"Well, she certainly did. But if you want critical work on the party line,
General Lewis MacKenzie who was the Canadian general in charge, has written
that most of the stories were complete nonsense."
And so it goes on, Chomsky fairly vibrating with anger at Vulliamy and co's "
tantrums" over his questioning of their account of the war. I suggest that
if they are having tantrums it's because they have contact with the
survivors of Srebrenica and witness the impact of the downplaying of their
experiences. He fairly explodes. "That's such a western European position.
We are used to having our jackboot on people's necks, so we don't see our
victims. I've seen them: go to Laos, go to Haiti, go to El Salvador. You'll
see people who are really suffering brutally. This does not give us the
right to lie about that suffering." Which is, I imagine, why ITN went to court
in the first place.
You could pick any number of other conflicts over which to have a barney
with Chomsky. Seeing as we have entered the bad-tempered part of the
interview, I figure we may as well continue and ask if he finds it ironic
that, given his views on the capitalist system, he is a beneficiary of it. "
Well, what capitalist system? Do you use a computer? Do you use the
internet? Do you take an aeroplane? That comes from the state sector of the
economy. I'm certainly a beneficiary of this state-based, quasi-market system;
does that mean that I shouldn't try to make it a better society?"
OK, let's look at the non-state based, quasi-market system. Does he have a
share portfolio? He looks cross. "You'd have to ask my wife about that. I'm
sure she does. I don't see any reason why she shouldn't. Would it help
people if I went to Montana and lived on a mountain? It's only rich,
privileged westerners - who are well educated and therefore deeply
irrational - in whose minds this idea could ever arise. When I visit
peasants in southern Colombia, they don't ask me these questions."
I suggest that people don't like being told off about their lives by someone
they consider a hypocrite. "There's no element of hypocrisy." He suddenly
smiles at me, benign again, and we end it there.
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