Sunday November 30, 2003

The Observer (UK)

He's 'The Elvis Of Academia' and 'The Devil's Accountant'.

A relentless thorn in America's side, Noam Chomsky has spent 50 years
bringing his country's elite to account.

Here, he talks to Tim Adams about genocide and genitalia

On the railings outside my local train station at Harringay, in north
London, someone has carefully placed a series of small white stickers.
The
stickers, all at eye level, are designed, I suppose, to be the first
thing
you see on the way to work and the last thing you see on your way home.
They
are all neatly typed with two words: READ CHOMSKY. Most mornings I find
myself wondering for an instant whether the words are an imperative ('If
you
do nothing else today...'), or a swaggering boast (along the lines of
some
of the station's other typical graffiti: 'Shagged Karen', say).
Anyone who has read Noam Chomsky will know that both interpretations are

justified. His writings, in linguistics (a discipline which he
effectively
invented) and on the hypocrisy and warmongering of America (and its
principal ally) are among the few essential documents of our times. They
are
also not designed for the intellectually faint-hearted. As the most
unforgiving critic of the Washington-run world order, Chomsky is often
caricatured as supplying more reality, and more guilt, than many of us
care
to handle. His books have the manner and certainty of gospels, and they
work
by accretion, stockpiling the remorseless fact of distant atrocity done
in
each of our names. They seem to demand not so much readers as disciples,

(prominent among whom you would count John Pilger and Harold Pinter,
Michael
Moore and Naomi Klein). To judge by sales figures (his little pamphlet
on 11
September has sold upwards of half a million copies) the faithful are an

ever-growing number.

Chomsky's latest book, Hegemony or Survival - a devastating history of
American foreign policy since 1945 ('No president in that time, judged
on
the principles of Nuremberg, would have escaped hanging') as well as a
sustained dissection of the motivation and disastrous consequence of the

current 'war on terror' - is the newest chapter of this lifetime of
compulsive dissent. The transgressive thrill of Chomsky's world view, in

which an American elite routinely bombs and terrorises in the name of
'freedom' and in defence of market share, has led fans such as Bono of
U2 to
describe the 73-year-old professor as the 'Elvis of academia'. In a
recent
profile in the New Yorker, Chomsky was identified, perhaps more
accurately,
as the 'Devil's accountant', totting up the foreign corpses sacrificed
in
America's 'quest for global dominance'.

Chomsky works from within the empire, in one of its more rigorous
outposts,
at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology. MIT has none of the
marginal,
down-at-heel feel of a British university. Its pristine campus, all
smoked
glass and soaring marble, across the Charles river from Boston, has the
sheen of a hi-tech business park. MIT advertises itself as 'America's
ideas
factory', and nowhere does the production line work as efficiently as in
the
offices of Professor Chomsky.

His little suite of rooms, above a wholefood cafe full of ardent
acolytes
flirting with semantics, is piled variously with books and papers from
the
world's subjugated corners and on the terra incognita of the human
brain. On
the walls are posters advertising the talks and lectures he has given
over
the years on East Timor and Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. Above a door
there is a large photo of Bertrand Russell, a fellow libertarian pin-up,
and
beside it a blue aerogram addressed to 'Palestine' and officially
stamped by
the US Postal Service 'Return to Sender, No Such Address'. In a side
office
Chomsky sits with his assistant signing off proofs, going through
letters
and deliberating over demands on his precious time; a one-man cultural
revolution. I am greeted with the stern information that today Professor

Chomsky's hours (one of which is allotted for our interview) are lasting

only 50 minutes - take it or leave it.

The interviewer of Chomsky is faced with a series of anxieties. To
anyone
who has even dipped into his books, the idea of pinning him down or
catching
him out, or even directing his attention in the course of a truncated
hour
seems vaguely absurd. In reviewing a volume in which Chomsky debated
some of
his ideas with America's leading philosophers, one critic noted how the
book
was like 'watching a grandmaster play, blindfolded, 36 chess matches
against
the local worthies'.

If great minds are casually embarrassed, Chomsky reserves much of his
scorn
for the mainstream press, which he sees as mostly in collusion with
orthodox
power structures. 'Somehow they [newspaper journalists] have to get rid
of
the stuff [dissident arguments],' he once wrote. 'You can't deal with
the
arguments, that's plain; for one thing you have to know something, and
most
of these people don't know anything. Second, you would not be able to
answer
the arguments because they're correct. Therefore what you have to do is
somehow dismiss it. One technique [is to say] "It's just emotional, it's

irresponsible, it's angry".'

In person, I'm bound to report, as in his prose, Chomsky seems anything
but
emotional or irresponsible (though a quiet anger does not often seem too
far
away). He is an unassuming presence. He pretty much always wears the
same
clothes: a navy sweater and brown cords and a pale-blue shirt. He speaks

barely audibly, leaning back a little in his chair, which has the effect
of
making you strain forward slightly, and hang on his every word.

I start tentatively enough with a question about a remark he made
recently
in the New York Times about the fact that he continued to live in
America,
because it was 'the greatest country in the world'. In what sense did he

believe this?

He starts, too, as he means to go on. 'I have to first of all give a
background,' he says, already a bit exasperated. 'That interview never
took
place. It is rather interesting, interviews like that never take place.'

The New York Times made it up?

'It was a senseless contraction of an hour-and-a-half telephone
conversation
in which I explained question by question why I am not going to answer
this
question or that question, because it is not a sensible question.'
Right.

'And the published interview was contracted from the original questions
and
sentences extracted from my often lengthy explanations of why I was not
going to answer. There is no country in the world where interviews like
these would happen. Where these kind of trivial questions would be
asked.'

I laugh a little, nervously, quickly running through some of my own more

frivolous lines of inquiry in my head. Chomsky does not smile. Does he
understand this kind of profile as an effort to marginalise him, by 'the

ruling elite'?

'Well,' he says, quietly. 'I'm not sure the New York Times was
consciously
trying to trivialise me, but the effect of it is to put everything in
the
same category as the gossip you read in the magazines you pick up at
supermarket counters. I was asked, for example, why I thought there were
so
many euphemisms for genitalia. It's not a serious question. Whatever the

purpose of such a tone is, the effect is to make it appear that anyone
who
departs from orthodox political doctrine is in some ways laughable.'

So, I say, he does not believe America is the greatest country in the
world,
then? 'My feeling is, to answer your question, that evaluating countries
is
senseless and I would never put things in those terms, but that some of
America's advances, particularly in the area of free speech, that have
been
achieved by centuries of popular struggle, are to be admired.'

(I am reminded, at this point, of the British newspaper editor who told
me
he'd once phoned Chomsky to ask him to write a piece about
'globalisation'.
'That is not the right word,' Chomsky replied, and put down the phone
without ever explaining what the correct word was.)

In this respect, Chomsky has always reserved the right not only to
answer
the questions he chooses, but also to question the terms of the
questioner.
One of the features of his deconstruction of American power is the
absence
of mitigation. He recognises little distinction between conspiracy and
cock-up. When we talk about the motivation behind the current conflict,
I
wonder if he believes coalition leaders, Tony Blair, Colin Powell, say,
are
entirely cynical and malign or simply self-deluded?

'How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question
that
interests me,' he says. 'I mean, there are very few people who are going
to
look into the mirror and say that person I see is a savage monster;
instead,
they make up some construction that justifies what they do. If you ask
the
CEO of some major corporation what he does he will say, in all honesty,
that
he is slaving 20 hours a day to provide his customers with the best
goods or
services he can and creating the best possible working conditions for
his
employees. But then you take a look at what the corporation does, the
effect
of its legal structure, the vast inequalities in pay and conditions, and
you
see the reality is something far different.'

Given 50 years of self-delusion in the land of the free, 50 years in
which,
in Chomsky's terms, it has wilfully supported and committed war crimes
across the globe (from Korea to Angola to Indonesia), I wonder if he can

countenance any possibility of redemption?

'Things are a lot better than they were 40 years ago,' he suggests,
almost
brightly. 'I mean, in the late Fifties and early Sixties, opposition to
state terror and aggression and torture and so on was zero. That was a
horrible time: the massive Kennedy terror operation against Cuba, the
first
attacks on Vietnam in 1962, the imposition of national security states
in
South America. Compare this with the current Iraq war, when for the
first
time in the United States or even in Europe there have been massive
popular
protests against a foreign aggression before it even began. Governments
don't control people like they used to.'

Since he has been at the vanguard of that dissent for so long -
imprisoned
for Vietnam protests, hero-worshipped by the anti-globalisation movement
-
does he find that fact in any respect gratifying?

'Not gratifying,' he says, predictably quickly. 'I'm happy to see it. At
the
end of my book I identify two possible long-term trajectories in global
affairs: the first sees continuing international aggression, advancing
state
terrorism and the probable destruction of the species. The second sees
civilised populations beginning to understand across the world that
there is
an alternative to that future.'

While he is saying this, I recall a remark he once made about the moment
he
heard about the bomb at Hiroshima. 'I remember that I literally couldn't

talk to anybody,' he said, of his 16-year-old self. 'There was nobody. I
was
at a summer camp and I walked off into the woods and stayed alone for a
couple of hours when I heard about it. I could never talk to anyone
about it
and never understood anyone's reaction. I felt completely isolated.'

That isolation no longer imprisons Chomsky. He has long been in constant

contact with a growing army of fellow travellers, these days by email.
He
retains, though, a sense of singularity, a feeling of himself against
the
world. It is tempting to think that there was one event in his early
childhood that gave him this mission, but he says it was always there.

'Growing up in the place I did I never was aware of any other option but
to
question everything. The first article I wrote,' he says, 'at the age of
10,
was concerned with the Spanish civil war and the rise of fascism in
Europe.
Even as a child I would haunt second-hand bookshops for radical
pamphlets.'

Did that engagement come from the example of his parents?

'Certainly I was inside a political culture,' he says. 'First generation

Jewish working class in Philadelphia, and there were strikes and
rallies,
and so on. I remember at the age of five travelling on a trolley car
with my
mother past a group of women on a picket line at a textile plant, seeing

them being viciously beaten by security people. So that kind of thing
stayed
with me.'

Chomsky's father was a rabbinical scholar who worked on medieval
grammar,
and as a child, Chomsky recalls, he would pore over whatever his father
was
engaged in, try to understand his notes.

It seems a short step from this to his revolutionary fascination with
the
structures of language but, typically, Chomsky refuses the simple link.
Instead, he says, he never imagined himself in an academic career. In
his
twenties, married and with young children, it was not clear in what area
he
would make his mark. He was given a fellowship at MIT in an electronics
lab - 'though I hardly knew the difference between a tape recorder and a

telephone'- and ironically, because the lab had been 'given a ton of
money
by the Pentagon', was pretty much left to his own devices. Instead of
studying electric circuits he devoted his time to developing an
understanding of the hard-wiring of the human mind. Quite quickly, he
published a theory that the structures of language were innate, rather
than
acquired, and that all languages shared common underlying rules. His
idea of
Universal Grammar undid the prevailing consensus that language was
entirely
a learnt skill.

Chomsky rejects any suggestion of a link between his political
theorising,
in which events are subject to a unifying theory of power, and his
academic
work, which also overturned orthodoxy with a single heretical concept.
But
still, he describes his work in similar terms.

'[Universal grammar] was obvious to me,' he says. 'And it was very
counter
to the prevailing doctrines at the time, in philosophy and psychology,
but
they were simply and demonstrably wrong. That language is a
biologically-based capacity is so obvious there is hardly any point
arguing
it; that it is a specific human capacity is also self-evident.'

He uses the same constructions when he discusses the horrors of American

foreign policy, which are, he contests, mostly 'so obvious' and 'so
self-evident' as to be beyond debate. Thus the Marshall Plan was
'clearly' a
device by which 'the American people gave $13bn to American
corporations',
and likewise the goal in Iraq is 'unequivocally' to ensure the US will
have
a client state at the heart of the oil-producing regions. 'If you
believe
that this was at all about extending democracy, then you will also
believe
that Stalin was, as he claimed, extending democracy to the countries of
Eastern Europe.'

The perfect simplicity of this kind of moral equivalence is what gives
both
Chomsky's critics and his supporters their ammunition. (The one person
to
have seriously challenged Chomsky over his stance on post-11 September
America is his one-time defender, Christopher Hitchens, who contends
that
everything for Chomsky, these days, is a truism. Their debate, conducted
in
the pages of the Nation and online, is the subject of endless webchat by

people who care about these things, a kind of mythical rumble in the
jungle
for the left, and worth seeking out simply for the rhetorical strategies

each combatant employs - Chomsky opting for the rope-a-dope tactic of
insisting Hitchens 'cannot mean what he says'.)

I wonder if the professor never finds, in such debates, the
responsibility
of being 'the conscience of America' an onerous one?

He smiles just a little wearily. 'Responsibility I believe accrues
through
privilege,' he begins. 'People like you and me have an unbelievable
amount
of privilege and therefore we have a huge amount of responsibility. We
live
in free societies where we are not afraid of the police, we have
extraordinary wealth available to us by global standards. If you have
those
things then you have the kind of responsibility that a person does not
have
if he or she is slaving 70 hours a week to put food on the table - a
responsibility at the very least to inform yourself about power. Beyond
that
it is a question of whether you believe in moral certainties or not.'

Does he ever give himself time to stop, and, as it were, smell the
roses?

'I'd like to,' he says, for once without too much conviction. 'My time
not
working is devoted pretty much to playing with my grandchildren.'

Before my time is up, we talk about Bush's visit to Britain, and the
suggestion in his book that the new Cold War will not be between America
and
another superpower, or between America and international terrorism, but
between America and informed global public opinion.

'New York is a very insular society, but 11 September came as a wake-up
call
and many people, it seems, were led to the sudden realisation that they
did
not know enough about their country's role in the world. Small
publishers
responded by reissuing some of the books that began to explain the
history.
People did not necessarily agree with the analysis, but it was clear
that
they wanted to hear it.' Can he imagine a time when that swell of
disquiet
is reflected within the US electoral spectrum?

'At the moment that does not seem possible, but there is no doubt that
it
could become so. It depends,' he says, 'on whether the United States is
capable of creating a democracy not reliant on the concentration of
capital,
or if a popular movement can overcome those restrictions.'

It depends, many might say, on how many people read Chomsky.

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http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,11913,1094708,00.html