American anarchist

18 January 2006
Administrator

As George Bush becomes more of a global pariah, so Noam Chomsky is becoming a veritable international superstar, despite being almost ignored in his native US. What might be less well-known is that he attacks mainstream US politics more harshly than he does right-wing Republicans – and that he's an anarchist. By Harry Browne.

Noam Chomsky's status as an international political celebrity has skyrocketed alongside George W Bush's status as an international political pariah. In Ireland, where Bush can only peek out of a heavily fortified castle, Chomsky (previously a quiet visitor to these shores) sees thousands turned away from his packed-out Dublin talks.

It's funny that Bush's apparent extremism has helped legitimise Chomsky's particular form of dissent, because the 77-year-old academic's critique of US foreign and domestic policy is by no means confined to knocking right-wing Republicans.

His writings contain a far more fundamental attack on bipartisan mainstream politics in the US. He has, for example, devastatingly skewered liberal belief in John F Kennedy as an alleged "dove" on Vietnam, and unwaveringly highlighted the deadly consequences of Bill Clinton's actions, from Sudan to Serbia to Iraq.

In the American media, although his bestselling writings have made him more visible in recent years, he remains a peripheral figure. As his liberal opponent Paul Berman wrote with satisfaction in 2003: "In the United States, the principal newspapers and magazines have tended to ignore Chomsky's political writings for many years now, because of his reputation as a crank."

"Crank" is a comparatively mild term of abuse for Chomsky. He is an American who is often labelled "anti-American", a Jew sometimes accused of anti-semitism. (The disgusting phrase often employed in the US is "self-hating Jew".)

The labels are as misguided as they are ugly. Even in a culture that often wrongly equates criticism of Israel with anti-semitism, the fact is that Chomsky's position on Israel is moderate by the standards of much of the international left: he now favours a two-state solution in Palestine and has often praised the range of internal debate in Israel. (He reads Hebrew readily.) Moreover, while some anti-war polemics tend to blame Israel for US policy in the Middle East, Chomsky tends to view Israel as an instrument of US power rather than a manipulator of it.

Nor, in his writing, does he see anything exceptional about America's exercise of its power, notwithstanding the many critics who accuse him of painting the US as uniquely "evil". Words he wrote in 1969 continue to explain his close scrutiny of US behaviour: "(1) it is much easier to be deluded about one's own purity; (2) American force and the willingness to use it is, at the moment, the major factor in international affairs; (3) we have some hope of changing American 'intentions and objectives' if we can come to understand them."

While he is neither an anti-American nor an anti-semite, Chomsky does certainly challenge any attempt to define what an American, or a Jew, may legitimately believe. American and Jewish politics have many faces: the immigrant-filled communities of the 1930s and 1940s, like the one in Philadelphia where he grew up, were hotbeds of radical ideas – including the anarchist, anti-Leninist ones that helped define Chomsky's worldview. Arguments about Zionism raged too: the young Chomsky lived on an Israeli kibbutz for six weeks, but believed the idea of a Jewish state was exclusive and anti-democratic.

Chomsky remains a libertarian socialist, an anarchist – he planned a meeting with activists from the Workers Solidarity Movement while in Dublin. However, many other self-described anarchists were disappointed that he supported a tactical 2004 vote for the Democrat he called "Bush-lite", John Kerry. Chomsky said that "in a system of immense power, small differences can translate into large outcomes".

At any rate, for this formidable, plain-speaking intellectual there is clearly more to anarchist ideas than dressing in black and cursing at cops. "I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them," he said in a 1995 interview, adding: "unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom."

In his passion for freedom, at least, Chomsky draws on a rich vein of American thought. He believes that the desire for freedom is intrinsic to human beings, a belief that connects his politics to his hugely respected work on innate grammar and other aspects of linguistics.

His theoretical and philosophical perspectives by no means fit neatly into a simplistic left-wing scheme. For example, he has leaned toward the "nature" side of the eternal nature v nurture debate, and said many liberals' insistence that differences among human beings can be socially explained is actual risky from an egalitarian perspective, since it seems to concede implicitly that if differences could be proved to be genetically determined, then inequality could be justified. Humans, he says, can choose morally to make equality a social priority whatever the intrinsic differences among them.

Such insights, though they don't always play to the crowd, have nonetheless earned Chomsky a huge following. More than 20 years ago he told an interviewer, "Ever since I had any political awareness, I've felt either alone or part of a tiny minority." He may take some satisfaction in considering that the "Chomskyan" minority has grown.

? More info and many of Chomsky's books are free online via: www.chomsky.info