Conscious Choice: Noam Chomsky Asks Questions That Matter

March 2001 | Choice Books

Noam Chomsky Asks Questions That Matter

by Mark Harris

"In 1996, an interviewer on‘Sixty Minutes’ on national television asked [Secretary of State Madeline Albright] for her reaction to reports from the United Nations that half a million Iraqi children had died from the sanctions. Her answer was,‘Well, this is a price that we feel we are willing to pay.’ So we — we! — are willing to pay the price of dead Iraqi children. We do not care if we carry out mass slaughter. The deaths could, I think, properly be called a form of genocide."

— Noam Chomsky, The Hindu: India’s National Magazine

I was watching a PBS special the other day featuring psychologist and self-help author Wayne Dyer. Dyer was telling a story from his grade school days about the time he came home to report that his teacher had told him he was a "scurvy elephant." One of the adults in Wayne’s house called the teacher to find out exactly what the teacher meant by that. The teacher said, "Oh, that Wayne, he gets everything wrong. I didn’t say he was a scurvy elephant. I said he was a disturbing element!"

Dyer went on to observe that being a disturbing element is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s a good thing to question your personal motives, to forge values, priorities, and convictions "independent of the good opinion of others." It’s a good thing to be the person who questions the culture’s holy writs, who insists that every form of authority has an obligation to justify itself. It’s just a good thing to think for yourself, in an informed and thoughtful way.

But society’s nonconformists do not usually have an easy time of it, at least not while they’re alive. The way things work, Dyer remarks, society much prefers to honor its "living conformists" and "dead troublemakers." That’s partly the story of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legacy, I think. In the 1960s, Mayor Daley the First once likened King to a "communist agitator," who if he knew what was good for him, would get himself out of town fast. Indeed, across the nation King was often reviled or at best tolerated by the mainstream political leaders of the time.

Today, however, even an archconservative like John Ashcroft, the new attorney general of the United States, a man with a soft spot for the historical honor of the leaders of the slave South, will speak reverently of Dr. King’s "great legacy." As governor of Missouri, Ashcroft even signed into law a state holiday honoring Dr. King’s birthday.

Yet the King lauded by the Ashcrofts of our time is largely a made-up man, a kind of somber saint of nonviolence whose legacy has been reduced to some inspirational museum display titled, "He Loved His Enemies." It’s also a legacy good for special holiday sales on dinnerware at your local department store. Rarely do we now hear about King the dogged and defiant critic of American power, who in the case of Vietnam, for example, accused his own government of "committing more war crimes than any nation on earth." He was a man who — lest we forget — was assassinated while rallying support for striking sanitation workers.

Not to take anything away from Dyer, who has a lot of good things to say about psychology and personal growth, but a disturbing element he is not. At least not in terms of raising trenchant questions about politics, power, and justice in society. In this country you can raise all hell about issues of personal growth, and — if you’re good at it — you might even end up with your own PBS special. It is quite another thing, however, to critically dissect the political economy of society. Especially when in doing so you discover the American empire to be the proverbial unclothed emperor, a self-declared standard bearer for democratic ideals that is also a bulwark of support to dictatorship, tyranny, and human rights abusers across the globe.

Ignore at Your Own Risk

This is to some extent the story of Noam Chomsky, who is perhaps this country’s greatest living dissident. The New York Times Book Review once described Chomsky, who is professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as "arguably the most important intellectual alive." Indeed, Chomsky’s work on the nature of language and creativity has earned him a seminal ranking in the field of linguistics. Yet the force of his intellectual output traverses even wider frontiers. Over the course of more than four decades and nearly thirty books, he has articulated a voice and a vision as an advocate for social justice that rises far above the muck of modern politics. His is a voice impossible to ignore.

Yet ignore it the mainstream media and intellectual community do their best to do. The reason is obvious. Chomsky is not afraid to challenge prevailing opinions or an unjust status quo, to question the virtues of "free-market" capitalism or the morality of American foreign policy. As I’ve heard him say, his political philosophy is based on the belief that authority is obligated to justify itself. Of course, Chomsky’s critique of Washington politics, the media, or corporate ideology frequently reveals that authority to fall short, at least by the measure of the democratic ideals he believes in.

In his latest books, Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs, and Chomsky on Miseducation, the veteran political analyst is once again asking "the questions that matter." His observations represent a model of critical thinking as well as an antidote to the cynical "antipolitics" mentality so prevalent in our culture. Yet what might be called the politics of human rights advocated by Chomsky are far removed from the usual bipartisan banalities. If they exist at all in this world, he says, human rights and economic justice are products of a long legacy of dissent and social struggle. Indeed, the history of America is one woven in rebellion, of ordinary people resisting the predations of privilege and class and striving through their protest and activism to make democracy a little richer and deeper and more real.

If you’re familiar with Chomsky’s work, you know he is especially interested in the role the media plays in manipulating popular opinion, in service to corporate power. "Thought-control" American-style, as Chomsky describes is achieved largely through the manufacture of consent, not the repression of dissent. As such, he ridicules the conservative rant about the "liberal" media and its "antibusiness" bent. In fact, the media is not only friendly to big business, the media is big business. The ostensibly objective reporting of the news the mainstream media proudly declares its mantra is actually a highly filtered information product, a manufactured reality. And that reality to a large extent avoids questioning the sanctity of either the American way of doing business or justice.

Iraq and the "Principles" of a Superpower

Some reviewer once called Chomsky an "exploder of received truths." Chomsky builds his case from logic and documented facts as solid as stainless steel. Yet if his writing can at times seem almost too unvarnished or to lack flourish, the dynamite in this intellectual arsenal is also lit by a deep passion for justice. You certainly feel that passion in his critique of the Gulf War, in his condemnation of the economic sanctions imposed on Iraq by presidents Bush and Clinton, sanctions that medical groups estimate over the last ten years have directly contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children.

In fact, Chomsky’s writings on the 1991 Gulf War illustrate how truly interwoven the news media is with conservative corporate interests. In World Orders Old and New, Chomksy describes a big-business media almost utterly compliant with Washington’s decision to go to war in the wake of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. President George Bush, of course, had declared that such aggression could never go unanswered, and answer it he did, with a massive show of military force that left a trail of devastation and death in its wake. Accordingly, the media took its cue from the outset of the budding conflict. In the weeks building up to the war, the American public was saturated with flurries of outraged editorials and news coverage on the evil that was Saddam Hussein.

"As the bombs fell," Chomsky writes, citing remarks of New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, "the American population was called upon to admire‘the stark and vivid definition of principle...[baked into] George Bush during his years at Andover and Yale, that honor and duty compels you to punch the bully in the face.’" Stirring words. Yet Chomsky reminds us that Hussein had always been a bully and a tyrant. It’s just that before invading Kuwait he was "our" bully and tyrant, one blessed with a steady supply of arms shipments and support from none other than the Republican administration of Ronald Reagan and George Bush.

In fact, when Hussein gassed a Kurdish village in March 1988, Reagan and Bush — these two self-declared "men of principle" — chose to politely look the other way. But this should come as no surprise, notes Chomsky. President Bush was in some ways actually a man after Hussein’s heart, having earned the dubious distinction of being the only world leader then in office officially condemned by the World Court for "unlawful use of force," in this case against Nicaragua.

According to Chomsky, the Bush administration was also determined to go to war at all cost, rejecting from the outset any "diplomatic track" to a peaceful settlement. This despite Iraqi withdrawal offers (barely mentioned in the press) that were considered "serious" and "negotiable" at the time by at least one administration Middle East specialist. Consequently, whether Hussein was considered good or evil came down to a matter of not how democratic he was but how compliant he was with Western interests.

In Chomsky’s estimation, supporters of the war who later criticized the administration for not going all the way to oust Hussein from office misinterpret the war’s objectives. Hussein’s survival (to this day) was not so much a failure of American policy as its consummation (or at least it was not inconsistent with U.S. objectives). Because the goal of the war was never to help the people of Iraq rid their country of the iron fist of tyranny, only to tame and rein in that fist. That’s why when rebellious Iraqis in the south rose up against Hussein in the wake of his defeat, a story dramatically captured in the Hollywood movie, Three Kings, "Stormin’" Norman Schwartzkopf and all the other "heroes" of the war stood passively to the sidelines — and the Iraqi dictator was once again allowed to terrorize his own people.

Chomksy’s critique of Operation Desert Storm will challenge anyone who thought the Gulf War was motivated by high-minded principles of democracy or respect for the sovereignty of nations. One of Brazil’s leading newspapers editorialized at the time of the war that in the events then unfolding the world now stood witness to "pure barbarism," condemning the actions of both George Bush and Saddam Hussein as evidence of "an absolute scorn for human life." It was not an opinion you were likely to find in a newspaper in the United States. But Chomsky would not disagree. The U.S. war against Iraq, he concludes, was driven not by principles of honor or democracy or real concern for the people of Kuwait as much as the American (and British) desire to control the oil resources of the region, to protect the enormous profits associated with that control.

Even if it cost many thousands of Iraqi people their lives.

When Children Die

One occasional complaint from some who read Chomsky or attend his lectures is that he can leave his audience feeling overwhelmed by the bleak picture of social injustice he paints. The pessimism is understandable. Here it is, the dawn of the New Millennium, and we’ve just installed another Neanderthal administration in the White House. And I’m not just talking about the fact that this is a presidential administration that thinks Wayne Newton makes great inaugural entertainment... .

Actually, I’ve always found Chomsky’s writings to be very hopeful in spirit. You learn from his work that democracy is a flag that flies most freely in the breeze of an engaged populace, one willing to sacrifice and work for justice, and that history is rife with the heroism of so many great and ordinary people. I also like Chomsky because his humanity has remained intact. By that I mean that even when reading his most sophisticated political critique, you sense the integrity behind the words, this kind of innate belief that life should just be a certain way, that human beings deserve to live in dignity and peace.

"I remember on the day of the Hiroshima bombing I literally couldn’t talk to anybody," Chomsky once told an interviewer. He was a teenager in 1945 when the United States dropped the first atom bomb on Japan. "I walked off into the woods and stayed alone for a couple of hours. I could never talk to anyone about it and never understood anyone’s reaction. I felt completely isolated."

I thought about Chomsky’s comment the other day while listening to an old Pete Seeger song, "I Come and Stand at Every Door," as sung by the former Chicago folksinger Anne Hills. The song is in the voice of a seven-year-old Japanese girl killed in the Hiroshima bombing. It’s spare and haunting and very moving. "I come and stand at every door," Hills sings, "but none can hear my silent tread. I knock and yet remain unseen, for I am dead. I’m only seven although I died, in Hiroshima long ago. I’m seven now as I was then."

The song makes me cry. It also makes me angry. The atom bomb was dropped not so much to force Japan to surrender (the U.S. government knew secretly Japan’s surrender was imminent, according to declassified government documents) but more to send a message to the Russians about who would rule the postwar world. In such a way did the leaders of this country fire the proclaiming salvo of the new American century. In other words, children died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki for strategic geopolitical reasons. That’s the kind of world we live in.

That’s also why the world needs "disturbing elements" like Noam Chomsky. Whether you agree with him or not, Chomsky makes you think in a larger way. He is the ultimate idealist who also just happens to be a master at cracking the code of the realpolitik that
drives the world’s power struggles. You can learn a lot from Noam Chomsky.

As I listened to Anne Hills sing the song of Hiroshima, I had another thought, one perhaps unnecessary to share. But I will share it anyway. It’s a message to that young boy who has wandered off, into the woods to ponder in isolation the world’s insanity.

You are not alone.

Next month: An Interview with Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky: Select Books and Videos

Chomsky on MisEducation. Edited and introduced by Donaldo Macedo. Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000.

Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs. South End Press, 2000.

Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order. Introduction by Robert W. McChesney. Seven Stories Press, 1999.

World Orders Old and New. Columbia University Press, 1994.

Introducing Chomsky. John Maher and Judy Groves. Totem Books, 1997.

The Myth of the Liberal Media: The Propaganda Model of News (with Edward Herman). Video. The Media Education Foundation.

Mark Harris is a Chicago-based writer. Visit his Web site, A Writer’s Voice.

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