Chomsky in Dublin

Last night, a friend and I attended Noam Chomsky's Amnesty International lecture on "The War on Terror" at the RDS. I knew exactly what I had let myself in for, and my fears were quickly confirmed; as soon as Chomsky walked out, the gentleman sitting directly behind us emitted a trill of glee at the fact that he was wearing the same jacket as him, and proceeded to laugh rather too loudly at the good Professor's many 'jokes' throughout the talk. While I'll likely comment more extensively upon reviewing the transcript/video, the following is a quick response to certain points that struck me as particularly noteworthy.

Chomsky started by outlining his familiar axioms; namely, that:

• Facts matter, even when inconvenient or uncomfortable, and
• Universal principles must apply
  

Forgoing any further commentary at this point, I shall instead move directly to some observations of the lecture's content.

• in response to the question of which post-WW2 military interventions he regarded as being justified, Chomsky cited Pearl Harbour as having the beneficial effect of "driving the white man out of Asia" (though he declined to specifically endorse it). He goes into slightly more detail in this post on his blog, adding that Japan received "plenty of local support" for its efforts against the "imperial powers". It takes quite a feat of logical gymnastics to see the Empire of Japan as an anti-imperial force - the clue being in the name - and even more so to assert that they were cheered on by, for instance, the Chinese or Koreans, but Chomsky is clearly up to the task. And as this commenter notes, decolonisation was a global phenomenon in the immediate post-war decades; attributing it to Pearl Harbour is, to borrow his phrase, "beneath comment".
  
  With breathtaking audacity, Chomsky also lauded Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia - forgetting, perhaps, that he spent much of that period romanticising the Khmer Rouge as vanguards of "national liberation" and "social justice", denying that the Cambodian massacres had taken place, and arguing that the attendant "hysteria" was detracting from the Khmer's positive achievements. Indeed, he originally argued that the Vietnamese invasion was disastrous for Cambodia, an act of aggression tacitly promoted by the US government and Western media - before literally inverting his position to credit the Vietnamese with having forestalled the Cambodian regime's democide. Unsurprisingly, this latter view emerged after the American government denounced the invasion, revealing his earlier analysis to be rather fundamentally flawed. The key feature in all this, of course, is that the US is both wrong and culpable no matter which version of events Chomsky decrees to have occurred.
  
  As Shalom Lappin notes, Chomsky has arrived at what one must assume is his current view with no retraction or acknowledgement of his previous stance; a cynic might speculate that these are uncomfortable facts which, to Chomsky, genuinely don't matter. In any case, it is instructive that his first impulse upon being asked this question is to reach for the greatest outright military attack in American history, together with the invasion of one despotic regime, which he previously supported, by another... which he previously supported.
  
  
• a theme repeated throughout the talk was the idea that the Western press and intellectual circles are curtailed (either through complicity or "intentional ignorance", another of his recurring mantras) to a degree that "they probably couldn't manage in North Korea." Here, Chomsky was obviously being facetious - although, one suspects, not as much as he should have been - but the implication is clear enough. To my mind, it seemed an odd time to expound his theories of mass censorship; a public lecture, given by the world's most-cited living academic, staged by an extremely prominent international organisation, in Dublin's premier venue, attended by a crowd of two thousand eager fellow-travellers with a similar number on the ticket waiting-list. The intensity with which Chomsky makes this charge seems to derive from a pronounced conviction that he is an archetypal dissident, and thus that any form of opposition is either repression, willful stupidity, depravity, or some combination of the three; this would also go some way towards explaining his severe allergies to both public debate and interviewers who decline to afford him the requisite adulation. And I have no idea where he gets the notion that these views are never heard, given that most of the talk consisted of the same old stock bromides on which I was weaned as a youth, and which - until I started reading for myself - I accepted as near-unquestioned truth. No doubt this would count as "intentional ignorance" under Chomsky's definition.
  
  
• he off-handedly dismissed the phenomenon of Islamofascism/Islamism, absent a Western animus. How exactly he squares this with the explicit and diametrically-opposed proclamations of, to take one of innumerable examples, Abu Bakar Bashir - or indeed, with his own principle of universalism and his contempt for the West's perceived latent racism in believing that dark-skinned people are "different from us", unless Muslims are somehow immune to the virulent ideologies that have enveloped other peoples at various times - is left to the imagination of the audience.
  
  
• he asserted that weapons of mass destruction (or at least their constituents) were found in significant quantities in Iraq, but that the bumbling incompetence of the US forces allowed them to be stolen and exported by militant factions. Which leaves his acolytes with an unpleasant choice: is Chomsky wrong, or was Bush right?
  
  
• in response to a question from an anti-war activist, Chomsky stated that the movement should return to the streets to campaign for an immediate end to the occupation, and in doing so would be supporting the will of the Iraqi people as expressed in a recent poll. This is one of Chomsky's more egregious intellectual disingenuities of late, given that - as Johann Hari has pointed out - he steadfastly avoided any mention of Iraqi opinion polls in the period during which they showed substantial majority support for the continuing presence of the Coalition troops, yet has been trumpeting them incessantly since they took a turn for the negative. In addition, those same polls indicated that a clear majority of Iraqis were in favour of the initial invasion; once again, "uncomfortable facts" would appear to matter only in cases where the subject of the discomfort is someone other than Chomsky. If polls are a crucial factor in arguing for policy change - and they are, although now superceded by the existence of a democratic process which allows Iraqis to vote for pro-withdrawal parties if they so choose - then surely the logical conclusion is that Chomsky should have supported the will of the Iraqi people by backing the initial invasion, as many principled people of the left (including Hari) did? Or is it simply that the Iraqis weren't sophisticated enough to understand the complexities involved, and have only belated started coming around to the "correct", Chomsky-approved view? And if so, is that not itself a failure to apply the universal principle of self-determination so earnestly championed by Chomsky?
  
  Incidentally, it's worth pointing out that, according to a more recent poll - published in December 2005 by ABC-TIME-BBC in conjunction with Oxford Research International - 52% of Iraqis want the Coalition forces to remain at least until security is restored, 46% still regard the initial invasion as justified despite the turbulence of the past three years (rising to 59% in Shiite areas), and 64% want a democratic government within five years. A yet more recent poll, conducted for World Public Opinion in January by the Program on International Policy Attitudes, found that 77% of Iraqis approve of the invasion even in view of its consequences; as Jeff Weintraub notes, similar margins of support have been replicated in every poll taken over the past three years, with the ABC-TIME-BBC effort producing the only ambiguous result. Why Chomsky chose to overlook these seemingly pertinent facts is anyone's guess.



• he attributed the Irish economic "miracle" (scare quotes vocally implied) to the state industrial sector, which is... just patently not true.

As usual, Chomsky's recall and presentation of information was impressive; his selective conclusions and contradictory logic, considerably less so. In retrospect, I wish that I had raised some of these issues at the lecture, particularly since the questions on offer weren't so much 'questions' as fawning requests for validation from a rather limited pool of anti-war activists and anti-capitalists (which, I would wager, was more a function of the audience's demography than deliberate engineering), but images of Daniel in the Lion's Den were dancing through my mind. Which is to say, I hadn't the balls.

I did, however, manage to pick up a copy of "Marxism 2006" and a couple of anarchist newsletters from some helpful pamphleteers outside, so the evening wasn't a total loss.

UPDATE: HIRED GOON 11:16pm THURSDAY JANUARY 19th 2006

For any Chomsky fans who stumble across this post - please, please, please do yourselves the courtesy of reading Oliver Kamm's illuminating critiques of Chomsky's work. Start here for the first in a series of treatises on his political writings, and just keep reading. Then go here, here and here for Kamm's reply to Chomsky's indignation at the former's Prospect article decrying his nomination as the World's Top Public Intellectual. See also here, here, here, here, here and here for his response to the Emma Brockes controversy (briefly, Chomsky branded a rigorous interview which failed to show him the proper deference as a "scurrilous" "defamation exercise", likened it to the killing of Jesuit priests in El Salvador, and successfully had it removed from The Guardian site). And chase it down with a sip of this.