CREDIT: Associated Press/Nader Daoud
IN SEPTEMBER 2006, while giving a speech at the United Nations, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela held up a copy of the Spanish edition of Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance by Noam Chomsky. Describing it as an “excellent book to help us understand what has been happening in the world throughout the 20th century,” Chávez said, “I think that the first people who should read this book are our brothers and sisters in the United States, because their threat is right in their own house.” Chávez’s endorsement stirred controversy and made headlines in the United States and throughout the world. Chávez’s comments dramatically boosted sales of the book, a stinging critique of American foreign policy that had been published two years earlier. Within two days it hit number 1 on Amazon’s best-seller list.
In the mainstream media, Chávez—like Chomsky—has been vilified as an anti-American left-winger. But to the many progressives who had been influenced by Chomsky’s writings, Chávez’s remarks were hardly surprising. For four decades, Chomsky, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), had been a persistent and influential critic of the political and economic establishment, particularly on issues of war and human rights. He first made his mark as a brilliant linguist, but in the 1960s he became better known as one of the most articulate opponents of the Vietnam War. Since then, he has written about genocide, terrorism, democracy, international affairs, nationalism, the media, propaganda, public opinion, militarism, and the history of the Cold War. Despite his prolific pen, Chomsky’s controversial views have been virtually ignored by the mainstream media, which rarely review his books, publish his essays, or interview him as an expert on foreign policy and human rights. Nevertheless, he has had a major influence, in the United States and elsewhere, in shaping the progressive analysis of American foreign policy. Chávez’s tribute expanded Chomsky’s visibility, leading many readers to discover his books for the first time, but it also heightened the debate over his views.
Chomsky was born in Philadelphia to Russian immigrant parents, who taught at the religious school of a synagogue. His father was also a highly respected expert on the Hebrew language. The Chomskys sent Noam, a brilliant and precocious student, to an experimental school inspired by the ideas of John Dewey. Young Noam would frequently visit his uncle, who was part of a circle of immigrant intellectuals and radicals in New York, including anarchists who published a Yiddish newspaper. At the University of Pennsylvania, Chomsky studied philosophy, logic, and languages. Already fluent in Hebrew, he was the only student at the university to study Arabic.
Somewhat bored with college, Chomsky considering moving to Palestine, where many idealistic radical young Jews were living on kibbutzim—collective farms—and hoping to built a secular socialist nation. But in 1947 Chomsky met Zellig Harris, a charismatic professor who founded the University of Pennsylvania’s Linguistics Department (the first in the country). Harris reignited Chomsky’s interest in academics. Chomsky wrote his honors thesis and his master’s thesis on Hebrew linguistics, then completed his Ph.D. in linguistics at Harvard in 1955. MIT hired Chomsky that year, and he has taught there ever since. In the 1950s, Chomsky’s theory of transformational grammar revolutionized the field of linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive psychology by challenging existing ideas about how humans learn and develop language skills.
As the Vietnam War escalated, Chomsky became involved in the antiwar movement. His 1967 essay “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” published in the New York Review of Books, challenged the complicity of academics, government bureaucrats, think-tank experts, and others in justifying America’s right to dominate the world, and it established him as a leading critic of US foreign policy. The article was included in his book American Power and the New Mandarins (1969), a critique of US policy in Indochina that helped shift many Americans’ thinking about the war.
Chomsky wrote numerous articles and other books documenting the American government’s lies about the origins and execution of the war. He was in great demand as a speaker at rallies, forums, and debates. He had a significant influence on the antiwar movement’s analysis of the war and of US foreign policy, but his dissenting views were rarely reported in the mainstream media. He was arrested on several occasions for engaging in antiwar protest and was included on President Richard Nixon’s infamous “enemies list.”
After the Vietnam War ended, Chomsky’s books and articles focused on the roots of American foreign policy and the Cold War, US support for Third World dictatorships, and the role of the media in rationalizing American global domination and corporate priorities. In Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (coauthored with Edward Herman in 1988) and Necessary Illusions (1989), Chomsky challenged the conventional view that the United States has a free press that acts as a watchdog on government. Instead, he viewed the media as more of a conveyor belt for government and corporate propaganda, which Americans do not recognize because they take it for granted.
Chomsky is generally less interested in the inner workings of the media than in the consequences of the media’s domination by business and government elites. He has not closely examined how the media work on a day-to-day basis. This task has been take up by progressive watchdog groups such as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting and Media Matters for America, whose thorough research routinely exposes the mainstream media’s complicity with the powers-that-be. They have revealed, for example, the media’s overreliance on establishment figures as guests on TV talk shows, or their bias toward conservative and centrist think tanks over liberal and progressive institutions as news sources. These watchdog groups use this research to embarrass and pressure editors and reporters to change how they report and frame the news.
Chomsky’s view of American government makes little room for the battle of ideas or political agendas. Like Ralph Nader, Chomsky views both major political parties as captives of the larger system of business domination. He has little to say about the existence or potential of progressives within Congress or within government agencies. He sees them as exceptions to the rule who help maintain the chimera of real democracy. Chomsky has retained the anarchist instincts he imbibed as a teenager. He is suspicious of all governments. He views the workings of government—in democracies, military dictatorships, or Communist countries—as essentially the same. In Chomsky’s worldview, politicians and government officials tend to horde and use power to expand their own influence, which leads them to be intolerant of dissent. Chomsky views the US government as a bulwark of global corporations. His writings recount America’s military invasions and business control of Third World countries. American policymakers, he believes, generally follow the logic of imperialism—including a willingness to support dictators; to murder, annihilate, and control people in other countries; to use weapons of mass destruction; and to train and arm terrorists if doing so buttresses the empire.
In the 1970s and 1980s Chomsky was one of the few to speak out about the otherwise widely ignored genocide in East Timor, where Indonesian forces armed and supported by the United States were responsible for the deaths of more than 200,000 people. Chomsky’s early Zionist sympathies were linked to support for decentralized cooperative farms (egalitarian kibbutzim) and the aspirations of Arabs. Since the 1960s, his consistent condemnation of US military and economic support for Israel has frequently ignited controversy.
Chomsky was pleased to see the Soviet Union crumble. But, he argued, the War on Terror offered the American military-industrial complex new enemies with which to justify its existence. In his book 9-11 (2002), Chomsky denounced the attack on the World Trade Center. At the same time, he traced the origins of the attack to the actions of the United States, which he labeled “a leading terrorist state.” In Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (2006), Chomsky argues that successive US governments, regardless of the party in power, have been involved in state terrorism.
Like I. F. Stone before him, Chomsky has a remarkable ability to dig out facts and examples, which he recites in his writings and speeches. In lectures, he is often able to disarm critics with his seemingly encyclopedic memory for details.
In “The Manufacture of Consent,” written in 1984, Chomsky displays his ability to use a mundane everyday incident to challenge conventional wisdom. He wrote:
During the Thanksgiving holiday a few weeks ago, I took a walk with some friends and family in a national park. We came across a gravestone, which had on it the following inscription: “Here lies an Indian woman, a Wampanoag, whose family and tribe gave of themselves and their land that this great nation might be born and grow.” Of course, it is not quite accurate to say that the indigenous population gave of themselves and their land for that noble purpose. Rather, they were slaughtered, decimated, and dispersed in the course of one of the greatest exercises in genocide in human history, which we celebrate each October when we honor Columbus—a notable mass murderer himself—on Columbus Day. Hundreds of American citizens, well-meaning and decent people, troop by that gravestone regularly and read it, apparently without reaction; except, perhaps, a feeling of satisfaction that at last we are giving some due recognition to the sacrifices of the native peoples. They might react differently if they were to visit Auschwitz or Dachau and find a gravestone reading: “Here lies a woman, a Jew, whose family and people gave of themselves and their possessions that this great nation might grow and prosper.”
Here Chomsky does not categorically identify who is responsible for the genocide of Native Americans, but it is not difficult to figure out who he is indicting: the original colonists, the land-grabbers, the federal government, the cowboys and military invaders, and the religious and secular thinkers whose writings portrayed Native Americans as subhumans or noble primitives, justifying their elimination or exploitation. At the same, he views almost the entire American public—“well-meaning and decent people”—as being so influenced by the American propaganda system that they are unable to see what Chomsky understands as the atrocity hidden by the gravestone’s inscription.
Chomsky’s loyal readers admire his prodigious research and his moral indignation in the cause of justice. But many progressives criticize Chomsky’s analysis for providing little hope for change. Chomsky views “the state” as a system with its own logic. America is an empire, a war machine, a global police force. Its leaders, and much of its population, are blinded by ideology. He tends to view the US government, regardless of who is elected to office, as a force for evil.
Progressive movements succeed in part by taking advantage of disagreements and tensions within the elite. But in Chomsky’s worldview, the “system” is a seamless web. Accordingly, there is little room for people—whether government officials, movements and their organizers, or liberal reporters—to make a difference. His supporters argue, however, that Chomsky’s important role is to provide the ammunition so that others can organize movements to challenge the system.