The Public Life of Noam Chomsky

 Shame Was The Spur

 

“A man of stupendous brilliance.”

 

                                    -----NormanFinkelstein

 

“A gargantuan influence.”

 

                                    -----ChrisHedges

 

“ . . . brilliant . . . unswerving . . . relentless . . .heroic.”

 

                                    -----ArundhatiRoy

 

“Preposterously thorough.”

 

                                    -----EdwardSaid

 

“[A] fierce talent.”

                                               

                                    -----EduardoGaleano

 

“An intellectual cannon.”

                                               

                                    ----IsraelShamir

 

“A lighthouse over a sea of hogwash.”

                                               

                                    -----KathleenCleaver

 

 

by Michael K. Smith

www.legalienate.blogspot.com

 

He had a disarming frankness, a toothy grin, a dazzling mindthat never rested.

 

He always felt completely out of tune with the world. At ten,he published his first article (in the school paper) – a lament on the fall ofBarcelona to Franco. At thirteen, he was haunting anarchist bookstores in NewYork City and working a newsstand with his uncle, eagerly soaking up everythinga brilliant mix of immigrant minds had to offer, by far the richestintellectual environment he was ever to encounter. At sixteen, he went off byhimself at the news of Hiroshima, unable to comprehend anyone else’s reactionto the horror. At twenty-four, he abandoned a Harvard fellowship to live on a kibbutz, returning only by chance tofulfill an academic career. At twenty-eight, he revolutionized the field oflinguistics with his book, SyntacticStructures. At twenty-nine, he became associate professor at MassachusettsInstitute of Technology (and full professor three years later), though hiscompetence with technology was limited to the tape recorder. At thirty-five, hethrew himself into anti-war protest, giving talks, writing letters andarticles, promoting teach-ins, and helping to organize student demonstrationsand draft resistance against the Vietnam War. At thirty-eight, he risked afive-year jail term protesting at the Pentagon, spending the night in jail alongsideNorman Mailer, who described him in Armiesof the Night as “a slim sharp-featured man with an ascetic expression, andan air of gentle but absolute moral integrity.”Atforty, he was the only white face in the crowd at Fred Hampton’s funeral, afterthe young Black Panther leader was gunned down by the FBI in a Gestapo-styleraid.

 

Such was the early life of America’s greatest dissidentintellectual, raised in a deeply anti-Semitic German-Irish neighborhood inQuaker Philadelphia, later awarded an elite linguistics professorship at thecenter of the Pentagon system at MIT.

 

Fulfilling a brilliant academic career at the pinnacle ofthe Ivory Tower, Chomsky railed against his fellow intellectuals’ subservienceto power, dismissing pious declarations of Washington’s alleged commitment tofreedom, equality, and democracy, with abundant demonstrations of its actualvalues - greed, domination, and deceit. He forensically examined the claim thatthe establishment media operate as an objective check on the excesses of thepowerful, marshalling overwhelming evidence showing that in fact they are apropaganda service working on their behalf. Laboriously debunking the flood oflies and distortions targeting mass audiences, he transformed dangerousmisperceptions of U.S. benevolence into insightful comprehension of imperialreality.

 

Thus we learned that the Vietnam War was not a noble questto defend freedom, but a quasi-genocidal assault on a former French colonydesigned to subjugate a defenseless peasantry; that Israel was not a gloriousexample of uniquely decent democratic socialism, but a modern Sparta on a pathto self-destruction; that the Cold War was not a contest between freedom andslavery, but a shared opposition to independent nationalism, in which a galaxyof neo-Nazi U.S. client states masqueraded as the “Free World.”

 

Such insights were anathema in academia, and Chomsky quicklyearned a reputation as a political crank among his more subservient colleagues(the vast majority), even as he gained considerable stature as a publicintellectual in American society at large and internationally. Thesecontrasting perceptions of his credibility made for a striking schizophrenia inhow he was evaluated: dismissed as a lunatic by pundits and professors, Chomsky’spolitical lectures were sold out years in advance to overflow general audiencesthroughout the world.

 

Elite commentators who wrote him off as a novice for hislack of credentials in political science contradicted themselves by recognizinghim as a genius for his linguistics work, though he had no formal credentialsin that field either. Nevertheless, they were right about his genius. WhenChomsky first entered linguistics the prevailing model of language acquisitionwas behaviorist, the assumption being that children acquire language byimitation and “reinforcement” (gratifying responses from others for the correctuse of language), which Chomsky immediately realized couldn’t begin to accountfor the richness of even the simplest language use - obvious from an early agein all healthy children - who routinely manifest patterns of use they’ve neverheard before.

 

When Chomsky subjected the behaviorist paradigm to rationalscrutiny it promptly collapsed, replaced by recognition that language capacityis actually innate and a product of maturation, emerging at an appropriatestage of biological development in the same way that secondary sexcharacteristics not evident in childhood emerge during puberty. Like so manyother Chomsky insights, the idea that language capacity is part of theunfolding of a genetic program seems rather obvious in retrospect, but in the1950s it was a revolutionary thought, vaulting the young MIT professor tointernational academic stardom as the most penetrating thinker in a field hisun-credentialed insights utterly transformed.

 

At the time, Chomsky appeared to be living the perfect lifefrom a purely personal standpoint. He had fascinating work, professionalacclaim, lifetime economic security, and a loving marriage with young childrengrowing up in a beautiful suburb of Boston, an ideal balance of personal andprofessional fulfillment. But just then a dark cloud called Vietnam appeared onthe horizon, and Chomsky – with supreme reluctance – launched himself into amajor activist career, sacrificing nearly all of his personal life along theway.

 

In the Eisenhower years the U.S. had relied on mercenariesand client groups to attack the Vietminh, a communist-led nationalist forcethat had fought the French and was seeking South Vietnamese independence withthe ultimate goal of a re-unification of South and North Vietnam throughnational elections. Though the U.S. was systematically murdering its leaders,the Vietminh did not respond to the violence directed against them for many years.Finally, in 1959, came an authorization allowing the Vietminh to use force inself-defense, at which point the South Vietnamese government (U.S. clientstate) collapsed, as its monopoly of force was all it had had to sustain itselfin power.

 

Plans for de-colonization proceeded. The National LiberationFront was formed, and in its founding program it called for South Vietnameseindependence and the formation of a neutral bloc consisting of Laos, Cambodia,and South Vietnam, with the ultimate goal of peacefully unifying all ofVietnam. At that point there were no North Vietnamese forces in the South, andno North-South military conflict.That would emerge later, as a direct result of U.S. insistence on subjugatingthe South.

 

To head off the politicalthreat of South Vietnamese independence, President Kennedy sent the U.S. AirForce to bomb rural South Vietnam in October 1962 and drive the villagers into“strategic hamlets” (concentration camps), in order to separate them from thenationalist guerrilla movement Pentagon documents conceded they were willinglysupporting. This overt act of U.S. aggression was noted in the press, butwithout a flicker of public protest, which would only come years later.

 

When Chomsky first began speaking out on Vietnam, venueswere scarce and public support for the effort virtually nil. He was actuallygrateful for the customary police presence, which prevented him from gettingbeaten up. “In those days, protests against the war meant speaking severalnights a week at a church to an audience of half a dozen people,” Chomskyremembered years later, “mostly bored or hostile, or at someone’s home where afew people might be gathered, or at a meeting at a college that included thetopics of Vietnam, Iran, Central America, and nuclear arms, in the hope thatmaybe participants would outnumber the organizers.”The quality of his analysis was extraordinary and Chomsky placed himself “inthe very first rank” of war critics (Christopher Hitchens) from the start,helping to spark a mass anti-war movement over the next several years.Unlike “pragmatic” opponents of the war, who justified U.S. imperialism inprinciple but feared it would not bring military victory in Vietnam, Chomskycalled out U.S. aggression by name, sided with its victims, and urged the warbe terminated without pre-conditions.

 

Though a radical departure from establishment orthodoxy,Chomsky’s positions on the war were always carefully thought out, never blindlyoppositional. For example, though he opposed the drafting of young men to fightin a criminal war, he was not opposed to a draft per se. In fact, he emphasizedthat a draft meant that soldiers could not be kept insulated from the civiliansociety of which they were a part, leading to what he regarded as an admirablecollapse of soldier morale when the anti-war movement exposed U.S. interventionin Vietnam as naked aggression. When the draft was terminated in 1973, thePentagon shifted to a “volunteer” army, that is, a mercenary army of the poorand low-income, which Chomsky regarded as one much less likely to be affectedby popular anti-war agitation, even aside from the more serious issue ofunjustly assigning responsibility for “national defense” to the mosteconomically exploited sector of the population. For these reasons he felt thata universal draft was to be preferred to a “volunteer” army brought into beingby strongly coercive economic forces.

 

Unlike hisestablishment critics, Chomsky did not consider class analysis a conspiracytheory, but rather, an indispensable tool in properly accounting for knownfacts. For example, while there was no nationalinterest in attacking South Vietnam, there very much was an elite interest in suppressing thecontagious example of a successful national independence movement in SoutheastAsia, as the failure to do so might encourage other countries in the Pacific to“go communist” (i.e., seek independence), which could ultimately have reversedthe outcome of WWII in the Pacific had Japan ended up accommodating the officiallysocialist world instead of Washington.

 

Given theunanswerable nature of this type of (anti-capitalist) analysis, Chomsky waskept well away from mass audiences. On the rare occasions he did appear in thecorporate media, his overwhelming command of relevant fact meant that hecouldn’t be distracted or derailed. When interviewers attempted to get him offtrack, they were quickly confronted by the soft query – “Do the facts matter?”– followed by an informational tsunami leading inexorably to a hereticalconclusion.

 

Given his mastery ofevidence and logic, it was frankly suicidal for Chomsky’s establishment criticsto confront him directly, which probably accounts for why so few of them everdid. The handful that tried were promptly obliterated by a massive bombardmentof inconvenient fact. Since “facts don’t care about your feelings,” all of thelatter group were obligated to examine which irrational emotions had encouragedthem to adopt the erroneous conclusions Chomsky showed them they held, but noneof them did.

 

William F. Buckleyhad his error-riddled version of the post-WWII Greek civil war exposed on hisown show – Firing Line. “Your historyis quite confused there,” commented Chomsky to Buckley’s face, after thecelebrated reactionary referred to an imaginary Communist insurgency prior to the Nazis’ Greek intervention.

 

Neo-con RichardPerle tried to divert his discussion with Chomsky from U.S. intervention anddenial of national independence around the world to an analysis of competing developmentmodels, an entirely different topic. With no answer for fact and reason he wasreduced to rhetorically asking the audience if it really didn’t findestablishment mythology more plausible than what he called Chomsky’s “deeplycynical” arguments revealing the shameful truth.

 

Boston Universitypresident John Silber complained that Chomsky hadn’t provided proper contextwhen mentioning that the U.S. had assassinated Salvadoran Archbishop OscarRomero, blown up the church radio station, and cut the editor of theindependent newspaper to pieces with machetes. Silber neglected to disclosewhat context could possibly redeem such atrocities.

 

Dutch Minister ofDefense Frederick Bolkestein dismissed Chomsky and Edward Herman’s thesis oncapitalist media as a conspiracy theory and Chomsky’s anarchist convictions asa “boy’s dream.” In the course of their debate, however, Chomsky refuted everyone of Bolkestein’s charges, while pointing out their complete irrelevance toevaluating the thesis advanced in Chomsky and Herman’s book, “ManufacturingConsent,” which was the purpose of the debate.

 

The term“Manufacturing Consent” derives from the public relations industry, thepractices of which more than amply confirm Chomsky and Herman’s thesis thatunder capitalism the broad tendency of the mass media is to function as apropaganda service for the national security state and the private intereststhat dominate it. In any case, Bolkestein himself confirmed Chomsky andHerman’s propaganda model in his very attempt to refute it, objecting to Chomsky’sallegedly undercounting of killings attributable to Pol Pot (an official enemyof the U.S.) while completely ignoring U.S. client Indonesia’s massacres inEast Timor, to which Chomsky had compared the killings in Cambodia. This is exactlywhat the propaganda model predicts: crimes of state committed by one’s own sidewill be ignored or downplayed while those of official enemies will be exaggeratedor invented, while occasioning great moral indignation, which is never inevidence when one’s own crimes are under discussion.

 

These fourintellectual knockouts by Chomsky appear to have deterred the rest of theestablishment pack from even entertaining debating with him.A story told by the late Alexander Cockburn suggests they were actually afraidto do so. “One prominent member of the British intellectual elite,” relatedCockburn, warned him not to get into a dispute with Chomsky on the grounds thathe was “a terrible and relentless opponent” who confronted central issueshead-on and never ceded ground as part of a more complicated maneuver. That waswhy, explained Cockburn, the guardians of official ideology so often targetedChomsky with gratuitous vilification and childish abuse: “They shirk the real argument they fear they will lose, and substituteinsult and distortion.”(emphasis added)

 

So unprepared werethese establishment mouthpieces to engage in substantive discussion that theyactually refused Chomsky the customary right to defend himself even againsttheir repeated personal attacks. After demonstrating that elite assertionsabout him were no more than vulgar smears, Chomsky found his letters to theeditor went unprinted or were mangled beyond recognition by hostile editing.

 

Rather than takeoffense, Chomsky shrugged off such treatment as only to be expected. If hehadn’t received it, he often said, he would have had to suspect that he wasdoing something wrong.

 

As unperturbed as hewas by personal attacks, the same cannot be said of his reaction to propagandapassed off as news. Christopher Hitchens and Alexander Cockburn both told thestory of how Chomsky once went to the dentist and was informed that he wasgrinding his teeth in his sleep. Consultation with Mrs. Chomsky determined thatthis was not the case. Further investigation found that Chomsky was indeedgrinding his teeth, but in the daytime – every morning when he read the New York Times.

 

The explanation forthese disparate reactions is straightforward. Chomsky could see that vilificationwas infantile and inconsequential and therefore easily dismissed it. But thedeadly impact of mass brainwashing made him react with the whole of his being,unconsciously gnashing his teeth at elite hypocrisy.

 

This fury fed his boundless reading appetite, equipping himwith the insurmountable advantage of a lifetime of determined preparation. Anavid reader from early childhood, he devoured hundreds, if not thousands, ofbooks growing up, checking out up to a dozen volumes at a time from thePhiladelphia public library, steadily working his way through the realistclassics – Austen, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Eliot, Hardy, Hugo, Tolstoy, Turgenev,Twain, and Zola – as well as Hebrew literature, including the Bible, andMarxist and anarchist texts.

 

This insatiable appetite for books continued throughout hislife, supplemented by countless other print sources. At home or at work he wasalways surrounded by enormous stacks of books, more than anyone could read inseveral lifetimes. The practical results of such a studious life could beamusing. Chomsky himself told the story of how he and his first wife Carol onceheard a loud crash at 4:30 a.m., thinking it was an earthquake. In fact, itturned out to be a mountain of books cascading to the floor in an adjoiningroom.

 

Though Chomsky could only read a portion of all that hewould liked to have read, that portion was of staggering dimensions for anyordinary reader. Aside from the mountain of books he read growing up, accordingto his wife Carol he read six daily newspapers and eighty journals of opinion,in addition to thousands of personal letters he received from the generalpublic, an important part of his reading load.Before 911, Chomsky spent an average of twenty hours a week on personalcorrespondence, a figure that probably increased after 911 when interest inChomsky’s work surged.His longtime personal assistant Bev Stohl confirms that he answered e-mailsevery night until 3:00 a.m.,while Chomsky himself used to say he wrote 15,000 words a week responding to personalletters, which he drily claimed was “a C.I.A. estimate.” Even subtracting outthe writing time for private correspondence, one can see that Chomsky’s readingwas beyond enormous, and not at all recreational, a preference that manifesteditself early in life when he read a draft of his father’s dissertation on DavidKimhi (1160-1236) a Hebrew grammarian,which turned out to be the first step on a complicated path to intellectualstardom sixteen years later with the publication of Syntactic Structures.

 

Chomsky’s boundless reading appetite appears to have beenmatched by the public’s appetite to hear him speak. He probably spoke to moreAmericans in person than anyone else in history, giving political lectures andtalks at a staggering rate for nearly sixty years. In the pre-zoom era thatmeant considerable travel, the demands of which he embraced without complaint,whether driving, flying, or taking the train. In addition to destinations allover the U.S. he also went to Colombia, Palestine, Nicaragua, Ireland, NewZealand, Australia, Canada, India, Mexico, Britain, Spain, France, Cuba, Laos,Vietnam, Japan, Italy, Turkey, and South Africa, among other places activistsinvited him to visit.

 

The talks were brilliant, and standing ovations routinely followedthem. But the question and answer periods were where Chomsky’s unparalleledmastery stood out. Hour after hour questions were put to him on dozens ofdifferent topics, from labor history to union organizing to guerrilla tacticsto drone warfare to economic theory to counter-insurgency and popularresistance, and hour after hour he patiently answered with illuminatingprecision and fascinating detail, at the same time providing an astonishingarray of book titles, article summaries, history lessons, revealing quotes, andclarifying context about a seemingly limitless number of political conflictspast and present. His prodigious power of recall was vastly superior to anymerely photographic memory, which overwhelms with irrelevant detail, whereasChomsky always selected from a vast trove of information just what was immediatelyand historically relevant to a single person’s inquiry, before moving on to thenext, and the next, and the next, and the next, in city after city, decadeafter decade after decade.

 

The size of his audiences mattered little to him, whether hespoke on a tiny college radio station or in front of thousands at a prestigiousuniversity. If anything, the larger audiences – though routine for Chomsky –were less desirable, as they highlighted the discouraging fact that too fewintellectuals were willing to take up the challenge of political education andpopular organization, a conformist constriction of supply in relation to strongpublic demand. In short, libertarian socialist Chomsky had no interest in beinga “hot commodity,” and the fact that he could be regarded as such represented afailure of the intellectual class to politically engage with the public morethan it did any personal merit on his part. Furthermore, as far as merit to hisspeaking ability goes, Chomsky deliberately refused to cultivate it, shunningoratory and rhetorical flourish in preference for what he called his “proudlyboring” style of relying solely on logic and fact. Swaying audiences withemotion, he thought, was better left to propagandists.

 

This preference for the analytical over the emotionallygratifying was always in evidence with Chomsky. For example, in the earlyeighties a massive build-up of first-strike nuclear weapons sparked theemergence of the Nuclear Freeze movement, which mobilized enormous popularsupport for a bilateral freeze (U.S.-U.S.S.R.) in the production of new nuclearweapons by relentlessly focusing public attention on apocalyptic visions ofnuclear annihilation.

 

From the moment the incineration of Hiroshima was publiclyannounced, of course, Chomsky, too, had recognized the danger of a worldwired-up to explode in atomic fury, but he dissented from the view thatparalyzing visions of utter destruction were an effective way of achievingnuclear disarmament. On the contrary, Chomsky felt that public attention neededto be focused on imperial policy, not military hardware, as it was policy thatproduced outcomes. When theNuclear Freeze movement attracted more than a million people to New York Cityin 1982 to protest the accelerating nuclear arms race, Chomsky withdrew fromthe event when no mention was made of Israel’s ongoing invasion and devastationof Lebanon, including the killing of Soviet advisers, a direct incitement topotentially terminal superpower confrontation.

 

While the Freeze continued to focus laser-like on theawesome destructiveness of nuclear bombs, Chomsky found the approachinsultingly simplistic, and expressed no surprise when its efforts wereultimately absorbed into the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, then headedby Kenneth Adelman, who was given the position after saying in his confirmationhearings that he had never given any consideration to the idea of disarmament.

 

In spite of dissenting in such ways even from the views ofpopular movements he sought to encourage, Chomsky’s public stature continued togrow. While subject to an almost complete blackout in the corporate media (foryears after the end of the Vietnam War his writings could most reliably befound in the pages of the right-wing magazine Inquiry and the worker-owned and managed South End Press), Chomsky nevertheless won widespread acclaim forhis analytical brilliance, tireless activism, and unflagging commitment toexposing the truth. Though he himself downplayed personal accolades, he wonpraise from a dazzling array of admirers, from learned professors and radicaljournalists to students, activists, authors, spiritual leaders, politicalhopefuls, movie directors, musicians, comedians, world champion boxers,political prisoners, international leaders, and awestruck fans throughout theworld. With their constant compliments  ringing in his ears, it’s doubly remarkable that he neverlost his humility.

 

Physicist Lawrence Krauss remembered being deeply impressedby Chomsky’s consistent willingness to spend an hour of his time talking to himwhenever Krauss dropped by his office as a young student at MIT, though Chomskyhad no professional obligation to students outside of linguistics. “He showed mea kind of respect I wasn’t anticipating,” said an appreciative Krauss yearslater, while pronouncing Chomsky’s work “incisive, informative, provocative,and brilliant.”

 

Activist and journalist Fred Branfman was impressed byChomsky’s apparent ability to X-Ray vast reams of print and extract the essencefor immediate practical use. When Chomsky visited Laos in 1970 to learn aboutrefugees of U.S. saturation bombing of the region, Branfman gave him a 500-pagebook on the war in Laos at 10:00 one night, and was amazed to see him refute apropaganda point in a talk with a U.S. Embassy official the next day by citinga footnote buried hundreds of page into the text. Branfman was also struck bythe fact that, unlike many intellectuals, Chomsky retained access to hisdeepest emotions. While witnessing Laotian peasants describing the horrificeffects of U.S. bombing, he openly wept.Overall,Branfman found Chomsky to be intense, driven, and unrelenting in combatinginjustice, but also warm, caring, wise, and gentle.   

 

A documentary about Chomsky released in 2003 saluted hisamazing productivity, calling him “[a] rebel without a pause,” which was thetitle of the film. After four decades of public intellectual work featuring eighteen-hourworkdays, the MIT professor was well-known for working through the nightdrinking oceans of coffee, yet somehow still making himself available formorning interviews.

 

Journalist and friend Alexander Cockburn emphasized Chomsky’sprovision of a coherent “big picture” about politics, “buttressed by the dataof a thousand smaller pictures and discrete theaters of conflict, struggle andoppression,” all the product of his extraordinary responsiveness to injustice.“Chomsky feels the abuses, cruelty and hypocrisies of power more than anyone,”wrote Cockburn. “It’s a state of continual alertness.”

 

Famed American author and wilderness defender Edward Abbeywrote that Chomsky deserved the Nobel Prize for Truth, if only one had existed.

 

British philosophy professor Nick Griffin declared Chomsky“extraordinarily well-informed,” and found the experience of simply talking tohim “astonishing.” “He’s read everything and remembered what he’s read,” hemarveled.

 

Referring to the dissident classic, “American Power and theNew Mandarins,” historian and gay rights activist Martin Duberman hailedChomsky’s seemingly Olympian detachment, his tone so “free of exaggeration ormisrepresentation,” his avoidance of “self-righteousness,” and his rare ability“to admit when a conclusion is uncertain or when the evidence allows forseveral possible conclusions.” Perhaps most remarkably, Chomsky was able, saidDuberman, “to see inadequacies in the views or tactics of those who share hisposition – and even some occasional merit in those who do not,” a rare talentin the best of times and virtually non-existent in the frenzied tribalism soprevalent today.

 

The brilliant Palestinian scholar Edward Said expressedadmiration for Chomsky’s tireless willingness to confront injustice and for theawesome extent of his knowledge. “There is something deeply moving about a mindof such noble ideals repeatedly stirred on behalf of human suffering andinjustice. One thinks here of Voltaire, of Benda, or Russell, although morethan any of them Chomsky commands what he calls ‘reality’” – facts – over abreathtaking range.”

 

Pantheon editor James Peck noted a kind of intellectualvertigo in reading Chomsky, finding his critiques “deeply unsettling” andimpossible to categorize, as “no intellectual tradition quite captures hisvoice” and “no party claims him.” Always fresh and original, “his position[was] not a liberalism become radical, or a conservatism in revolt against thebetrayal of claimed principles.” He was “a spokesman for no ideology.” Hisuniqueness, said Peck, “fits nowhere,” which was in itself “an indication ofthe radical nature of his dissent.”

 

People’s historian Howard Zinn resorted to leg-pulling ironyto describe the Chomsky phenomenon: “I found myself on a plane going southsitting next to a guy who introduced himself as Noam Chomsky. . . . It occurredto me, talking to him, that he was very smart.” Zinn, a popular speakerhimself, was sometimes asked for the latest count of the learned professor’sstaggering output of books. He would begin his reply with the qualification,“As of this morning,” and then pause for dramatic effect, drolly suggesting thatany number he might offer stood a good chance of being abruptly renderedobsolete by Chomsky’s latest salvo.Daniel Ellsberg was of similar mind, once saying that keeping up with Chomsky’spolitical work was a considerable challenge, as “he publishes faster than I canread.”

 

Establishment liberal Bill Moyers was impressed by Chomsky’sapparently greater admiration for the intelligence of ordinary people than forthe specialized talents of his elite colleagues. In an interview at the end ofthe Reagan years he told Chomsky: “[It] seems a little incongruous to hear aman from the Ivory Tower of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a scholar, adistinguished linguistics scholar, talk about common people with suchappreciation.” Chomsky found no paradox at all in this, replying that hisappreciation flowed naturally from the evidence provided by language studyitself, which demonstrated overwhelmingly that ordinary people have deep-seatedcreative intelligence that separates humans from every other known species.

 

Where paradox doesexist is in elite intellectuals’ apparently boundless capacity to pervertnatural human intelligence into specialized cleverness at serving the ends ofpower. However, this makes them not the most intelligent part of the population,as they believe themselves to be, but, on the contrary, the most gullible andeasily deceived, a point Chomsky made often.

 

In Chomsky’s final public years the fruit of using ourspecies intelligence to serve institutional stupidity manifested itself ingrowing threats of climate collapse, nuclear war, and ideological fanaticismdisplacing all prospect of democracy, calling into question the very survivalvalue of such intelligence.

 

Helpfully, Chomsky has left us with sage advice about whichdirection our intelligence should take and also avoid, in order to escapelooming catastrophe. As to the first, he said, “You should stick with theunderdog.”About the second, he said, “We should not succumb to irrational belief.”

 

In June 2023, Chomsky suffered a massive stroke, leaving himparalyzed down the right side of his body, and with limited capacity to speak.

 

His appetite for news and sensitivity to injustice, however,remain intact. When he sees the news from Palestine, his wife reports, heraises his remaining good arm in a mute gesture of sorrow and anger.

 

Still compassionate and defiant at 96.

 

Incredibly well done, Professor Chomsky.

 

Happy Birthday.

 

Mailer quoted in Robert F.Barksy, “Chomsky – A Life of Dissent,” (MIT, 1997) p. 129.

 

Chomsky’s childhood, seeMark Achbar, ed. “Manufacturing Consent – Noam Chomsky and the Media,” (BlackRose, 1994) pps. 44-50. Also, Robert F. Barsky, “Noam Chomsky – A Life ofDissent,” MIT Press, 1997) Chapter 1. Chomsky at Fred Hampton’s funeral seeChristopher Hitchens, Covert Action Information Bulletin event at theUniversity of the District of Colombia, C-SPAN 1995 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODfic8Z818

 

On U.S. neo-Nazi clientstates, see Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, “The Washington Connection AndThird World Fascism,” (South End, 1979), and many subsequent works. On Vietnam,see Noam Chomsky, “American Power and the New Mandarins – Historical andPolitical Essays; (Vintage, 1969); Noam Chomsky; “At War With Asia – Essays onIndochina,” (Pantheon, 1970); and Noam Chomsky; “For Reasons of State,” (TheNew Press, 2003). On the Middle East, see Noam Chomsky, “The Fateful Triangle –The United States, Israel & The Palestinians,” (South End, 1983); NoamChomsky & Gilbert Achcar, “Perilous Power – The Middle East And U.S.Foreign Policy,” (Paradigm, 2007); Noam Chomsky, “Middle East Illusions,”(Rowman & Littlefield, 2007). On the Cold War, see Noam Chomsky, WorldOrders Old and New, (Columbia, 1994).

 

Chomsky appears to neverhave confused symbols of knowledge (credentials) with knowledge itself, and hehad early evidence that the brightest minds were often without credentials. Theuncle whose newsstand he helped work was extremely intelligent and well-read,even had a lay practice in psychoanalysis, but never went beyond fourth grade.Similarly, though his mother never went to college, Noam agreed that she was“much smarter” than his father and his friends, who he said “were all Ph.Ds,big professors and rabbis,” but “talking nonsense mostly.” On Chomsky’s uncle,see Mark Achbared.,“Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media,” (Black Rose, 1994), p.50. On Chomsky’s mother, see Noam Chomsky (with David Barsamian), “ImperialAmbitions –Conversations On The Post-9/11 World,” (Metropolitan Books, 2005), p. 158.

 

Chomsky found politicalactivism distasteful, and hated giving up his rich personal life. See MarkAchbar ed., “Manufacturing Consent – Noam Chomsky and the Media,” (Black Rose,1994) pps. 65-6.

 

Noam Chomsky interviewed byPaul Shannon, “The Legacy of the Vietnam War” –Indochina Newsletter, Issue 18,November-December, 1982, pps. 1-5, available at www.chomsky.info.net

 

Noam Chomsky, “The ChomskyReader,” (Pantheon, 1987) pps. 224-5.

 

Chomsky quoted in Milan Rai,“Chomsky’s Politics,” (Verso, 1995), p. 14.

 

Christopher Hitchens, CovertAction Information Bulletin event at the University of the District ofColombia, C-SPAN, 1995, available on You Tube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODficd8Z818

 

Peter R. Mitchell and JohnSchoeffel, eds. “Understanding Power – The Indispensable Chomsky,” (New Press,2002) pps. 35-6

 

See Noam Chomsky, “Vietnamand United States Global Strategy,” The Chomsky Reader, (Pantheon, 1987) pps.232-5.

 

“Firing Line with William F.Buckley: Vietnam and the Intellectuals,” Episode 143, April 3, 1969.

 

“The Perle-Chomsky Debate –Noam Chomsky Debates with Richard Perle,” Ohio State University, 1988,transcript available at www.chomsky.info.net.

 

“On the Contras – NoamChomsky Debates with John Silver,” The Ten O’clock News, 1986, transcriptavailable at www.chomsky.info.net

 

Mark Achbar, “ManufacturingConsent – Noam Chomsky and the Media,” (Black Rose, 1994) pps. 128-31

 

There was also a “debate”between Chomsky and Alan Dershowitz in 2005 on the future of Israel/Palestine,although Dershowitz’s performance was not much more than intellectual clowning,with repeated “I” declarations demonstrating his inability to move beyondnarcissistic fantasy (“I believe,” “I think,” “I call for,” “I propose,” “Isupport,” “I have written,” “I can tell you,” “I favor,” “I see,” “I hope,”etc.). He irrelevantly quoted Ecclesiastes, called for a “Chekhovian” asopposed to “Shakespearean” peace, and ignored decades of total U.S.-Israeliopposition to anything remotely like national liberation for Palestinians.Chomsky wryly congratulated him for the one truthful statement he made, i.e.,that Chomsky had been a youth counselor at Camp Massad in the Pocono Mountainsin the 1940s. See “Noam Chomsky v. Alan Dershowitz: A Debate on theIsrael-Palestinian Conflict,” DemocracyNow, December 23, 2005

 

Alexander Cockburn in DavidBarsamian, “Chronicles of Dissent – Interviews with Noam Chomsky,” (CommonCourage, 1992) p. xii

 

An understandable reactiongiven the “Newspaper of Record’s” grotesque distortions. On Chomsky’steeth-grinding, see Alexander Cockburn in David Barsamian, “Chronicles ofDissent – Interviews with Noam Chomsky,” (Common Courage, 1992) p. ix;Christopher Hitchens, Covert Action Information Bulletin event at theUniversity of the District of Colombia, C_SPAN, 1995, available on You Tube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODficd8Z818

 

Robert Barsky, “Chomsky – ALife of Dissent,” (MIT, 1997) pps. 13, 19; Mark Achbar ed., “ManufacturingConsent – Noam Chomsky and the Media,” (Black Rose, 1994) p. 44

 

Noam Chomsky in DavidBarsamian, “Class Warfare – Interviews With David Barsamian,” (Common Courage,1996) p. 26

 

“Noam Chomsky: RebelWithout a Pause,” 2003 Documentary

Robert Barsky, “NoamChomsky – A Life of Dissent,” (MIT, 1997) p. 45

Bev Bousseau Stohl,“Chomsky And Me – A Memoir,” (OR Books, 2023) p. 53

Robert F. Barsky, “NoamChomsky – A Life of Dissent,” (MIT, 1997,) p. 10

“A narrow focus on strategicweapons tends to reinforce the basic principle of the ideological system . . .that the superpower conflict is the central element of world affairs, to whichall else is subordinated.” Noam Chomsky, “Priorities For Averting TheHolocaust,” in “Radical Priorities,” (Black Rose, 1984) p.

 p. 283

“The conclusion is that ifwe hope to avert nuclear war, the size and character of nuclear arsenals is asecondary consideration.” Noam Chomsky, “The Danger of Nuclear War and What WeCan Do About It,”  “RadicalPriorities,” (Black Rose, 1984) p. 272.

“Chomsky and Krauss: AnOrigins Project Dialogue,” You Tube, March 31, 2013

 

Fred Branfman, “When ChomskyWept,” Salon, June 17, 2012

 

Bev Boisseau Stohl, “ChomskyAnd Me – A Memoir,” (OR Books, 2023) p. 92

 

Alexander Cockburn in DavidBarsamian, “Chronicles of Dissent – Interviews with Noam Chomsky,” (CommonCourage, 1992) pps. x - xi

 

Edward Abbey, ed., “The Bestof Edward Abbey,” (Counterpoint, 2005), preface.

 

Quoted in the documentaryRebel Without a Pause, 2003.

 

Martin Duberman quoted onthe back cover of “American Power and the New Mandarins,” 1969 (first VintageBooks edition).

 

Edward Said, “The Politicsof Dispossession,” (Chatto and Windus, 1994) p. 263

 

James Peck, introduction toThe Chomsky Reader, (Pantheon, 1987) pps. vii - xix

 

 

Howard Zinn, “The Future ofHistory – Interviews With David Barsamian,” (Common Courage, 1999), pps. 39-40.Though Chomsky’s total book count has ended up around 150 (with collaborationswith activist friends still coming out), it’s possible nobody knows the exactfigure with certainty. Lifelong activist and friend Michael Albert tells thestory of how Chomsky’s immense body of work once convinced a group of activistsin Eastern Europe that there were two different Chomskys, one a linguist, andthe other a political activist. Given Chomsky’s preposterous output and farfrom unusual surname in that part of the world, it was perhaps anunderstandable error. See Michael Albert, “Noam Chomsky at 95. No Strings onHim,” Counterpunch, December 8, 2023.

 

Paul Jay, “Rising Fascismand the Elections – Chomsky and Ellsberg,” The Analysis News, You Tube November2, 2024

 

Bill Moyers, “A World ofIdeas – Conversations With Thoughtful Men and Women,” (Doubleday, 1989). Theinterview is also available online on You Tube. See “Noam Chomsky interview onDissent (1988),” <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEYJM...

 

Milan Rai, “Chomsky’sPolitics,” (Verso, 1995) p. 6

 

Chomsky in “Chronicles ofDissent – Interviews With David Barsamian,” (Common Courage, 1992) p. 159

“Noam Chomsky,hospitalizado en Brasil,” La Jornada, June 12, 2024 (Spanish)

 

Chomsky was born on December7, 1928.

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