Chomsky is evil again. posted by Richard Seymour

Ever since Emma Brockes and the Three Witches who tried to defend her bit the dust, there has been an itch that needed scratching. Actually, it has long been a favourite itch of the liberal press, particularly The Observer under Roger Alton - they call it Chomsky. Or, knowing Alton's communicative proclivities, Fucking Bollocking Chomsky The Tosser. His profile and renown especially since 9/11 has aroused the ire of those who would enter into a relationship with imperialism, at first shy, blushing and tentative, and later passionate and tempestuous, with only the occasional tiff. Nick Cohen did his best to Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival, and Peter Beaumont (left) has been asked to attend to the task this time. It is definitely an attempt to exorcise the Brockes Syndrome, because Beaumont goes to some lengths to evince a familiarity with the book he is reading (citing page numbers once or twice), and thereby evacuate the unpleasant whiff of the Guardian Media Group having been caught outrageously lying. The facetious, personalised tone is set from the beginning: Beaumont met Chomsky and didn't like his voice. Wheedling. Bullying. Nagging. Brooks no dissent. His voice, mark you, brooks no dissent. Then the glibness: Chomsky finks "it really wasn't the poor Serbs what done it, but nasty Nato". Anyone still reading The Observer must either have thrown the paper away in disgust at this point or reached for the Kleenex. Anyway, that's a clue that what follows in Beaumont's broadside is not a professional piece of work: Brockes knew how to play dumb, but this guy is trying to play smart and he has no fucking idea.

Beaumont wants to establish that he is a Good Person: "I was opposed to what I believed was an illegal war in Iraq ... I, too, have been troubled by the consequences of occupation". But he's not like Chomsky, because "I reject Chomsky's view that American misdeeds are printed through history like the lettering in a stick of rock." While Chomsky's thought is doctrinal, lofty and as rigid as Brighton rock, Beaumont's is supple, nuanced and rooted in experience: "the conclusions I have drawn from more than a decade of reporting wars on the ground is that motivations are complex, messy and contradictory, that the best intentions can spawn the worst outcomes and, occasionally, vice versa." That is an interesting thought, but the implicit standard is one he appears curiously reluctant to extend to official enemies. At any rate, he is supposed to be discussing Chomsky's book and has offered not a single example of what he is talking about so far.

Chomsky is a hard fighter, a brawler, who hits you with "five facts" before you've even got your coat off. And yet, in Chomsky "you discover exactly the same subtle textual biases, evasions and elisions of meaning as used by those he calls 'the doctrinal managers' of the 'powerful elites'. The mighty Chomsky, the world's greatest public intellectual, is prone to playing fast and loose." The resentment and fear is palpable - Chomsky is important because he is representative of far left academics and "the blogosphere", hence his importance as a target. He isn't a lone nut. There follows a sarcastically inept adumbration of Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent: "Chomsky is essential to save you, dear reader, from the lies we peddle." One feels the elbow in the ribs. You're a reader of The Observer, so you like to believe you aren't being systematically lied to. Who is this conspiracy theorist? you are supposed to exclaim over your toast. Not a single example, still, of what he is talking about.

So now to the book Beaumont is supposedly reviewing, Failed States - almost half-way through the review, mind you. Chomsky sez: "the US has become the ultimate 'failed state', a term usually reserved for places like Somalia. It is a terrorist state and a rogue state, a country that has brought us to the brink of annihilating darkness. These big claims are bolstered by his familiar arsenal of exaggeration, sarcasm and allusion", and " Chomsky chooses to deal with America's growing democratic deficit not by putting it under a microscope, but by reaching for hyperbole." Tragically so, because the "issues" are so "crucial" - Beaumont is not insensitive to the "issues", he merely opposes the putative use of exaggeration, sarcasm and (yes) allusion. Not a single example of exaggeration offered so far and one can forget about sarcasm and allusion, since Beaumont himself both alludes and is sarcastic in abundance.

Now, more than half-way through the review, there is the first hint of specific engagement with the text: "He suggests an America in the grip of a 'demonic messianism' comparable to that of Hitler's National Socialism. Except that it isn't. Conveniently missing from Chomsky's account is the fact that the failure and overreach of George W Bush's policies, both on the domestic and the international front, has had serious consequences for his brand of neo-conservatism: disastrously collapsing public-approval ratings." I have Chomsky's book - the section on 'demonic messianism' stretches from pages 209 to 213 - and I'll roughly summarise what Chomsky says. He cites conservative scholars who have expressed serious worries about the fascistic propensites in the Bush administration, such as Fritz Stern, a refugee from Nazi Germany who compares in his capacity as an historian his understanding of the Nazi period with certain tendencies in the Bush administration. Chomsky cites Amos Elon, an Israeli exile, on the achievements of Weimar Germany before the Nazi period as an illustration of how quickly an advanced civilisation can turn to barbarism; he notes that the Nazis borrowed their propaganda techniques from various businesses and Anglo-American societies; he notes that they made use of these techniques, ("symbols and slogans", "tremendously reiterated impressions" that appeal to fear), because they represented a minority of a minority, an extreme and narrow sector of society dedicated to the short-term interests of that minority and to global domination; and he suggests that these commitments currently guide US policy. There follows some discussion of the declining position of the American working class and the sheer opulence of the rich, particularly under the Bush administration, and the attempt to divert people from this by tapping into racist or hysterical elements in US popular culture. What he does not say, anywhere, is that the US is in the "grip" of demonic messianism, and in fact he discusses precisely the polls that Beaumont adverts to - in the section immediately ensuing in the book.

Beaumont complains that Chomsky doesn't include things like the Marshall Plan in his account of US power, or "the genuine fear of the Soviet Union". Beaumont treats these as if a discussion of them would be, in some way, morally redeeming: yes, we hear all these bad things about the Romans, but what about the fucking aqueduct, eh? Chomsky has discussed the Marshall Plan before (for instance in World Orders, Old and New, 1994), and he has stipulated some fairly commonplace facts (to crudely summarise, the money went back to American companies who benefited from the stimulated markets for goods, and that was the purpose of the Plan). Chomsky has also discussed the "genuine" fear of the Soviet Union several times over: from the 'arms gap' to Dean Acheson's making things "clearer than true", to the briefly impressive achievements of the Soviet economy in the 1950s and early 1960s. He even goes into it a little bit in the book - the 'genuine' fear was initially that the Bolshevik 'virus' would spread, meaning that there would be socialist revolutions in Europe and perhaps America.

We are then onto some "rhetorical stunts": "long riffs on ideas extracted out of single sentences from journalistic articles or academic papers, sometimes by now-discredited figures" - no names mentioned, no sentences mentioned, no review of the referenced material. Then "he elides rumour with quotes taken out of context, for example where he refers to: 'A Jordanian journalist [who] was informed by officials in charge of the Jordanian-Iraqi border after US and UK forces took over that radioactive materials were detected in one of every eight trucks crossing into Jordan destination unknown. "Stuff happens," in Rumsfeld's words.' That's all pretty puzzling - as four pages earlier, Chomsky gives the impression that the weapons of mass destruction thing was all a deception." Beaumont's "gotcha" would be more impressive if he had bothered to describe why he thinks Jordanian journalist Rami Abdelrahman's report is mere 'rumour', and especially if Chomsky did not say on the page immediately opposite that which he was drawing from: "It is common to say that claims about WMDs in Iraq were quickly undermined when, after an exhaustive search, no traces were found. That is not quite true, however. There were stores of equipment for developing WMDs in Iraq ... those produced in the 1980s ... These sites had been secured by UN inspectors, but the invaders dismissed them, leaving the sites unguarded" (pp 28-9). Chomsky did "four pages earlier" cite a Mr Prados, national security expert, who suggested that the administration knew that the weapons programmes were either nascent, moribund or non-existent - which happens to be entirely compatible with the supposition that former weapons sites with some materials in them had been looted and radioactive content transported across the border.

Beaumont is still on the hunt: "Between pages 60 and 62, for instance, he cannot decide whether an alleged bribe paid to UN official is $150,000 or $160,000. Maybe it's a typo. Maybe not." Well, nuance eh? So, Chomsky stands accused (maybe, tentatively) of trying to clear ten grand from the alleged debt of a UN diplomat named Benon Sevan. If not that, then it's an instance of Chomsky's "sloppiness". Maybe it is, maybe it isn't.

Still, Chomsky does get the administration on the Kyoto Protocol, Israel, nuclear proliferation and trade, Beaumont concedes - which Beaumont refers to as "US double standards", the hackneyed phrase of the liberal critic which somehow sounds sophisticated and daringly nuanced to liberal hack ears. But these are not "novel" areas of concern (stay off our turf, peasant), and anyway, the main point of the book is to prove that "the US is uniquely awful", which is to say that Chomsky has a "desire to create a moral - or rather immoral - equivalence between the US and the greatest criminals in history.". Unique, but much like other criminals. He is "selective", and so "allies himself with some obnoxious characters". For instance, "he does portray a certain sympathy for Slobodan Milosevic", because "Kosovo, in his reading, began in 1999 with Nato bombers, not in 1998 with Serbian police actions that cleared villages, towns and valleys of their populations. (I know this, Mr Chomsky, because I saw them do it.)" That last clause seethes, doesn't it? Leaving aside the question of whether this putative view of when "Kosovo" began portrays (betrays?) "sympathy" for Milosovic, Beaumont's claim happens to be entirely and exclusively bollocks. Chomsky discusses Kosovo less in this book than in previous accounts - The New Military Humanism, A New Generation Draws the Line, Rogue States and even Hegemony or Survival - but he does address pre-1999 violence in Kosovo on page 99, citing the conclusions of the British government (that is, the most hawkish government involved in the bombing of Yugoslavia). Those conclusions (that the KLA were responsible for the bulk of deaths prior to January 1999) are also supported by international legal scholar Nicholas Wheeler, who supported the bombing. Those conclusions do not make Beaumont's observations impossible, particularly if one remembers the theory-ladenness of observation (and no observer is more laden than The Observer).

Back to "moral" - or "immoral" (snigger) - "equivalence": "on page 129, comparing a somewhat belated US conversion to the case for democracy in Iraq after the failure to find WMD, Chomsky claims: 'Professions of benign intent by leaders should be dismissed by any rational observer. They are near universal and predictable, and hence carry virtually no information. The worst monsters - Hitler, Stalin, Japanese fascists, Suharto, Saddam Hussein and many others - have produced moving flights of rhetoric about their nobility of purpose.'" Comparison is out. One doesn't compare. It is "immoral". Beaumont adds: "is that really what you see, Mr Chomsky, from the window of your library at MIT? Is it the stench of the gulag wafting over the Charles River?" Killing, gulags, torture, mass murder doesn't matter, then, if it is the darkies who are getting it. It doesn't count if one can't smell it from within the confines of the MIT (which, we are invited to imagine, Chomsky inhabits in a hermitic fashion, occasionally dispensing angered polemics).

Finally: "The faults of the Bush administration will not be changed by books such as Failed States. They will be swept away by ordinary, decent Americans in the world's greatest - if flawed and selfish - democracy going to the polls." On that ringing, declarative note, with its touching faith in "the world's greatest" democracy, and its selfless recitation of Ordinary, Decent Americans, the review ends. Chomsky is mauled. Beaumont, having slain his foe, rededicates himself to Ordinary Bloody People, who certainly have nothing with this faceless academic and his hotheaded books. Books don't change things - voting does. Ask anyone. Ask Richard Nixon. Communist Manifesto? In one ear and out the other. Swing to the Democrats? Some of them are now saying it isn't treasonous to question the Leader. Books - pah! I don't even know why he bothered reading it, much less reviewing it for a national newspaper. I mean, it's not like it'll change anything.