Chomsky: Putting the Lie to the Liars

Here's my recent review of Noam Chomsky's Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World . A friend of mine, a member of that vanishing breed, the moderate Republican, once asked me: "Why does Chomsky hate America so much?" Never having read Chomsky, I decided to find out if indeed he does hate America. After reading about four of his books, I felt informed enough to tell my friend that Chomsky doesn't hate America. What he hates are the money and power grubbing that is done in the name of America. He's also pretty upset about injustice, lying, and war. All good things to hate.

Facts Are Stubborn Things, October 23, 2005

There is an exquisitely satisfying moment in the DVD documentary "Manufacturing Consent" where Noam Chomsky flatly contradicts William F. Buckley's version of events in Greece in the immediate aftermath of WWII. Clearly flabbergasted by Chomsky's command of the facts but perhaps even more so by his refusal to accept the standard cold-war inspired interpretation of these events, Buckley eventually loses his temper and is reduced to insisting that he is right and that Chomsky is wrong.

At this remove, the interview, conducted sometime in the late 70s or early 80s, is a disturbing artifact of a time when facts were important in the making of political argument, for it is apparent that Buckley is chagrined by his inability to rebut Chomsky on the facts and reduced to repeating his position with greater and greater insistence. Now, of course, as the right itself acknowledges, conservatives do not deign to traffic in "fact-based reality." They instead weave and then don bright, shining garments of red, white and blue, and viciously attack anyone who might suggest they are clothed in raiment of gray lies and dun dissemblance.

And that is precisely why Chomsky is so valuable. He offers a compelling, fact-based counternarrative to the triumphalist ideology of Buckley and the scores of conservative apparatchiks that Buckley and his billionaire inheritance-baby buddies have spawned over the past 30 years -- that same triumphalist nonsense that, for instance, predicted US troops would be greeted in Baghdad as they were Paris in WWII -- with flowers, champagne and kisses.

A self-described "anarcho-syndicalist" in the one-party state that is the US these days, Chomsky's views are apparently too dangerous to allow him more than an occasional interview on radio or television in this great democracy of ours. (Why is it that in the US media that is supposed to be so "liberal," Chomsky is rarely if ever seen, but that we have an endless supply of right wing provocateurs preaching their furious farrago of free market fantasy and unchristian Christianity?).

If you've never read Chomsky, this latest work is a very good introduction to his bracing, fact-based version of American history as imperial adventure and botched conquest. If you're content with the fumigated Sunday school version of reality offered by the mainstream media or the knee-jerk nationalism peddled by the revanchist reactionaries on Fox, Chomsky is probably not for you. But if as a thinking American you have come to doubt the infallibility of our president's heart as naturally right in all things -- e.g., his latest nomination to the Supreme Court, etc. -- you will in reading Chomsky come to use your own head and your own heart, and see American foreign policy for what it truly is.