Noam Chomsky (12 page)
Authors: Wolfgang B. Sperlich
In the last chapters of
American Power and the New Mandarins
(1969) Chomsky details what all of us, including intellectuals, must do to achieve a modicum of human value: to
RESIST
. Such resistance should be non-violent. Draft resistance is seen as a great example of that strategy. The book was selling well in the
USA
and abroad.
American Power and the New Mandarins
was in danger of succeeding as a subversive treatise that could affect the outcome of the Vietnam war. A year after publication Chomsky went to Hanoi as part of a group of anti-war activists, the others being Dick Fernandez (a minister in the United Church of Christ) and Doug Dowd (an economics professor at Cornell). Chomsky was invited specifically to lecture at the remains of the Polytechnic University in Hanoi, during a bombing halt, when people could come in from the countryside. He described it in detail in
At War with Asia
(1970). Before going to Hanoi, Chomsky had spent a fair amount of time in refugee camps in Laos interviewing some of the thousands of people who had just been driven out of the Plain of Jars by the
CIA
mercenary army after years of intense bombing.
Since the
US
administration, however, was already well advanced in its plans to extricate itself from a war it could not win, it looked to so-called political extremists to provide an honourable reason for the defeat in Vietnam by claiming that the mighty
USA
was defeated, not by the external enemy, but by the internal one. Interestingly Chomsky holds the opposite view, outlined in his book
At War with Asia
, namely that the
US
had achieved all the major aims of its war and that the
US
corporate world pressured the administration to end the war.
Forms of internal repression in the
US
were mainly of the subtle but effective variety, such as
COINTELPRO
(an acronym of counter INTELligence PROgram), an
FBI
programme aimed at investigating and disrupting dissident political organizations within the
US
. Given such repression at home, the
US
activists retreated into what they knew best: dissent by speaking out and writing. One of the champions of this activist genre was going from strength to strength: Noam Chomsky. The problem with dissemination was, of course, that the corporate media – chastened by the Vietnam experience – joined the internal repression and even put aside the commercial incentive that dissent, in its non-violent pacifist versions, sells well. Chomsky and some of his fellow activists were to dedicate considerable efforts to unmask the repressive propaganda machine that the American media and its international servants had become (discussed in chapter Four). Suffice to mention here that Chomsky and others had engendered an alternative co-operative publishing enterprise. Former
MIT
student president Mike Albert founded both the South End Press and, later, the on-line z Magazine. Both outlets published many Chomsky books and articles (and other forms of dissemination that arose with the Internet).
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One of the most vicious episodes of the Vietnam era was the bombing campaign in Cambodia, which President Nixon and his lieutenant Henry Kissinger began in 1969. Over a four-year period 539, 129 tons of ordnance were dropped on the country, much of it in indiscriminate
B
-52 carpet-bombing raids (the tonnage is about three and a half times as great as that dropped on Japan during the Second World War). Up to 600, 000 Cambodians died, and the raids were militarily ineffective, the
CIA
reporting that they served only to increase the popularity of the Khmer Rouge among the Cambodian population. The
US
corporate media did not report on the events – hence the campaign is known as the ‘secret war’ – but political activists knew exactly what was happening and were aghast. The unprecedented slaughter visited upon the people of Indochina provoked Chomsky and one of his collaborators, Edward S. Herman, to give a detailed account in a publication aptly named
Counter-Revolutionary Violence: Bloodbaths in Fact & Propaganda
. The book was ready for publication in 1973 but was blocked by a Warner Communications executive. Having had a look at the manuscript he was quoted as saying that it was ‘a pack of lies, a scurrilous attack on respected Americans, undocumented, a publication unworthy of a serious publisher’.
26
While an updated and enlarged manuscript was finally published by South End Press, together with other material, as
The Political Economy of Human Rights
(1979), it is instructive to quote from the original manuscript:
Even a cursory examination of recent history, however, suggests that concern over violence and bloodbaths in Washington (in Moscow and Peking as well) is highly selective. Some bloodbaths seem to be looked upon as ‘benign’ or even positive and constructive; only very particular ones are given publicity and regarded as heinous and deserving of indignation. For example, after the
CIA
-sponsored right-wing coup in Cambodia in March 1970, Lon Nol quickly organized a pogrom-bloodbath against local Vietnamese in an effort to gain peasant support. Estimates of the numbers of victims of this slaughter range upward from 5000 and grisly reports and photographs of bodies floating down rivers were filed by western correspondents. The United States and its client government in Saigon invaded Cambodia shortly thereafter, but not to stop the bloodbath or avenge its victims; on the contrary, these forces moved in to support the organizers of the slaughter, who were on the verge of being overthrown.
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As we shall see in more detail in chapter Four, Chomsky and Herman embarked on a particular form of critique that unmasked the role of the mainstream media as a propaganda tool to make ‘bloodbaths’ benign when perpetrated by the
US
, and to portray them as malignant when perpetrated by the acclaimed enemy. Indeed much of Chomsky’s political activism takes on this perspective.
In terms of publishing his dissident materials, Chomsky had as little access to the mainstream media as before. The one exception was the
New York Review
between 1967 and about 1973, but that had little to do with Chomsky, since just about everyone on the Left was in on it. Only Pantheon had kept faith with Chomsky. For European editions there was Fontana, bringing out editions of books published by Pantheon in the
US
. As such Fontana helped to popularize Chomsky in Europe, bringing out in quick succession
At War with Asia
(1971),
The Backroom Boys
(1973),
For Reasons of State
(1973) and
Peace in the Middle East?
(1975).
In
For Reasons of State
, the essay ‘Notes on Anarchism’ clearly restates Chomsky’s position on what does and what does not conform to his brand of anarcho-syndicalism. While he insists that every new generation must, as it were, generate its own social theory and praxis so as to be able to respond to new developments, there is a long succession of thought and action upon which we can build our contemporary stance. As such Chomsky approvingly cites a long list of social activists from the past, including (in no particular order) Rocker, Bakunin, Guérin, Santillan, Pelloutier, Buber, Humboldt, the early Marx, Proudhon, Fourier, de Tocqueville, Pannekoek, Paul, Fischer and Souchy. Anyone who really wants to understand Chomsky should make an effort to consult the works of some, if not all, of these authors. As a mere indication, the following is a list – however incomplete – of some of the key anarcho-syndicalist ideas endorsed or formulated by Chomsky:
For the anarchist, freedom is not an abstract philosophical concept, but the vital concrete possibility for every human being to bring to full development all the powers, capacities, and talents with which nature has endowed him, and turn them to social account. The less this natural development of man is influenced by ecclesiastical or political guardianship, the more efficient and harmonious will human personality become, the more will it become the measure of the intellectual culture of the society in which it has grown. (Rocker)
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Anarcho-syndicalists are convinced that a Socialist economic order cannot be created by the decrees and statutes of a government, but only by the solidaric collaboration of the workers with hand and brain in each special branch of production; that is, through the taking over of the management of all plants by the producers themselves under such form that the separate groups, plants, and branches of industry are independent members of the general economic organism and systematically carry on production and the distribution of the products in the interest of the community on the basis of free mutual agreements. (Rocker)
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The suppression of the State cannot be a languid affair; it must be the task of the Revolution to finish with the State. Either the Revolution gives social wealth to the producers, in which case the producers organize themselves for due collective distribution and the State has nothing to do; or the Revolution does not give social wealth to the producers, in which case the Revolution has been a lie and the State would continue. (Santillan)
30
I am a fanatic lover of liberty, considering it as the unique condition under which intelligence, dignity and human happiness can develop and grow; not the purely formal liberty conceded, measured out and regulated by the State, an eternal lie which in reality represents nothing more than the privilege of some founded on the slavery of the rest. (Bakunin)
31
It is true that classical libertarian thought is opposed to state intervention in social life, as a consequence of deeper assumptions about the human need for liberty, diversity, and free association. On the same assumptions, capitalist relations of production, wage labor, competitiveness, the ideology of ‘possessive individualism’ – all must be regarded as fundamentally antihuman. Libertarian socialism is properly to be regarded as the inheritor of the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment. (Chomsky)
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Every anarchist is a socialist but not every socialist is necessarily an anarchist. (Fischer)
33
A consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of production and the wage slavery which is a component of this system, as incompatible with the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and under the control of the producer. (Chomsky)
34
The civilization and justice of bourgeois order comes out in its lurid light whenever the slaves and drudges of that order rise against their masters. Then this civilization and justice stand forth as undisguised savagery and lawless revenge … the infernal deeds of the soldiery reflect the innate spirit of that civilization of which they are the mercenary vindicators … The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror at the destruction of brick and mortar. (Marx)
35
The dominant ideologies have been those of state socialism or state capitalism (of increasingly militarized character in the United States). (Chomsky)
36
The problem of ‘freeing man from the curse of economic exploitation and political and social enslavement’ remains the problem of our time. As long as this is so, the doctrines and the revolutionary practice of libertarian socialism will serve as an inspiration and guide. (Chomsky)
37
The Reagan presidency of the 1980s gave no grounds for optimism. Here we highlight the
US
foreign policy disaster in Central America and Chomsky’s responses. Policies from the previous decade towards Latin America, especially Allende’s assassination in 1973 in Chile and Kissinger’s quip that ‘I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people’,
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found new resonance in Reagan’s administration, which held that evil communists, socialists and anarchists were assembling in Nicaragua and El Salvador. A band of fascist Contras was trained and equipped by the
CIA
, under the personal responsibility of Colonel Oliver North, Reagan’s minion in such matters. Their mission was to search and destroy anything that appeared to pertain to an evil Sandinista empire, including Catholic liberation theologians and nuns who might stand in the way. As usual the
US
administration was shooting itself in the foot, but not before it inflicted pain and suffering on a small Central American population on a scale never seen before.
To Chomsky’s credit, he not only raised his voice in protest, but during the 1980s travelled to the hotspots to support the people and organizations that battled for freedom and a better life in Nicaragua and El Salvador. At the time Managua was a refuge for writers, priests, human rights activists and others who could not survive in their own countries because of the
US
-backed state terrorist atrocities, rather as Paris was in the 1930s. Meeting with a wide range of groups and workers’ organizations in Managua to discuss the situation on the ground, Chomsky also managed to deliver linguistics lectures at the local university in the mornings and public lectures on politics and power in the afternoon. One such major event was in 1985, when, over a week, he delivered a series of talks that were published by South End Press as
On Power and Ideology: The Managua Lectures
(1987). The morning lectures were published by
MIT
Press as
Language and Problems of Knowledge: The Managua Lectures
.
Chomsky had, of course, written many articles on Central America before 1985, but
The Managua Lectures
caught the imagination of political activists like no other. By 1986 Daniel Ortega had been president of Nicaragua for just two years and Reagan had responded by describing the Nicaraguan Contras as ‘freedom fighters’, comparing them to America’s founding fathers. Reagan also initiated economic sanctions against Nicaragua. In 1986 a plane carrying
US
military supplies to the Contras was shot down and the only American survivor was captured. The
US
government announced that, contrary to the congressional Boland Amendment, the
US
had been providing military aid to the Contras. The supplies had been purchased with funds diverted from the sale of
US
arms to Iran. The covert operation became known as the Iran-Contra affair.
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