A few years ago, local historian and controversialist Keith Windschuttle penned an article on linguist and critic Noam Chomsky, titled 'The hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky' (The New Criterion, Vol. 21, No. 9, May 2003; see also 'A disgraceful career', Windschuttle's review (The New Criterion, Vol. 23, No. 1, September 2004) of The Anti-Chomsky Reader, Peter Collier and David Horowitz, editors, Encounter Books, 2004; the Reader is briefly dispatched by Michael Leon in 'The Anti-Chomsky Reader Continues a Soviet-Style Assault', CoreWeekly, January 13, 2005).
So what? Well, a commenter on Jeremy's blog, 'SB', has referred to it approvingly, and I thought I'd re-read it (having originally done so some time ago). My conclusion now, as it was then, is that it's a rather poor piece of writing -- not unexpectedly, given the quality of Windschuttle's other writings on history and politics.
Of course, Windschuttle's essay is hardly the first to accuse Chomsky of being a criminal, 'hypocrisy' tending to be one of the lesser crimes of which he's accused: others include Holocaust revisionism and support for the Pol Pot regime. Both criticisms were previously addressed by Christopher Hitchens over 20 years ago in 'The Chorus and Cassandra', Grand Street, Autumn, 1985.
More recently, Chomsky has been taken to task for his commentary on 9/11. Thus Windschuttle, in his hypocritical essay, writes:
Noam Chomsky was the most conspicuous American intellectual to rationalize the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. The death toll, he argued, was minor compared to the list of Third World victims of the “far more extreme terrorism” of United States foreign policy. Despite its calculated affront to mainstream opinion, this sentiment went down very well with Chomsky’s own constituency. He has never been more popular among the academic and intellectual left than he is today.
Leaving aside the question of his popularity, what Chomsky said and wrote may be found in an interview with Chomsky conducted by Radio B92 on September 18, 2001 and, more extensively, in the book 9-11 (Greg Ruggiero, editor, Seven Stories Press, 2002). Point being, I've searched for the phrase "far more extreme terrorism" occurring in Chomsky's remarks, and I don't seem to be able to find it. However, the phrase does occur in an earlier text by Chomsky ('Force and Opinion', Z Magazine July-August, 1991):
Appreciation of the "salutary efficacy" of terror, to borrow John Quincy Adams's phrase, has been a standard feature of enlightened Western thought. It provides the basic framework for the propaganda campaign concerning international terrorism in the 1980s. Naturally, terrorism directed against us and our friends is bitterly denounced as a reversion to barbarism. But far more extreme terrorism that we and our agents conduct is considered constructive, or at worst insignificant, if it meets the pragmatic criterion. Even the vast campaign of international terrorism launched against Cuba by the Kennedy administration, far exceeding anything attributed to official enemies, does not exist in respected academic discourse or the mainstream media. In his standard and much respected scholarly study of international terrorism, Walter Laqueur depicts Cuba as a sponsor of the crime with innuendos but scarcely a pretense of evidence, while the campaign of international terrorism against Cuba merits literally not a word; in fact, Cuba is classed among those societies "free from terror."
The guiding principle is clear and straightforward: their terror is terror, and the flimsiest evidence suffices to denounce it and to exact retribution upon civilian bystanders who happen to be in the way; our terror, even if far more extreme, is merely statecraft, and therefore does not enter into the discussion of the plague of the modern age. The practice is understandable on the principles already discussed.
Huge massacres are treated by much the same criteria: theirs are crimes, ours statecraft or understandable error. In a study of U.S. power and ideology a decade ago [The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism: The Political Economy of Human Rights: Volume I and After the Cataclysm: The Political Economy of Human Rights: Volume II, South End Press, 1979], Edward Herman and I reviewed numerous examples of two kinds of atrocities, "benign and constructive bloodbaths" that are acceptable or even advantageous to dominant interests, and "nefarious blood-baths" perpetrated by official enemies. The reaction follows the same pattern as the treatment of terrorism. The former are ignored, denied, or sometimes even welcomed; the latter elicit great outrage and often large-scale deceit and fabrication, if the available evidence is felt to be inadequate for doctrinal requirements...
What Chomsky actually remarked and wrote at the time about the attacks on New York and Washington was the following. In the interview with Radio B92 he said:
The horrendous terrorist attacks on Tuesday are something quite new in world affairs, not in their scale and character, but in the target. For the US, this is the first time since the War of 1812 that its national territory has been under attack, even threat... It is correct to say that this is a novel event in world history, not because of the scale of the atrocity -- regrettably -- but because of the target. How the West chooses to react is a matter of supreme importance. If the rich and powerful choose to keep to their traditions of hundreds of years and resort to extreme violence, they will contribute to the escalation of a cycle of violence, in a familiar dynamic, with long-term consequences that could be awesome. Of course, that is by no means inevitable. An aroused public within the more free and democratic societies can direct policies towards a much more humane and honorable course.
In the 9-11 title itself, Chomsky writes (as quoted by Paula Zahn) that "nothing can justify crimes such as those of September 11, but we can think of the United States as an innocent victim only if we adopt the convenient path of ignoring the record of its actions and those of its allies, which are, after all, hardly a secret" ('On 9-11: Noam Chomsky debates with Bill Bennett', CNN, May 30, 2002). Attacks upon Chomsky's political integrity at this time are also canvassed in 'Noam Chomsky and His Critics', Louis Proyect, MarxMail, August 15, 2002.
To return to Windschuttle's critique, 'SB' claims that Chomsky ("that mad hypocritical anti-semitic liar who can never admit his mistakes") was "a big fan of China, particularly during the cultural revolution, and of Vietnamese socialism". As evidence, 'SB' cites Windschuttle, who writes:
For all his in-principle disdain of communism, however, when it came to the real world of international politics Chomsky turned out to endorse a fairly orthodox band of socialist revolutionaries. They included the architects of communism in Cuba, Fidel Castro and Che Guevera, as well as Mao Tse-tung and the founders of the Chinese communist state.
As proof, Windschuttle refers to a panel Chomsky took part in in New York in 1967, along with Hannah Arendt (another "mad hypocritical anti-semitic liar"?), Susan Sontag (ditto?) and others. The subject of their discussion was not their common love of Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong) and Hồ Chí Minh, surprisingly, but 'The Legitimacy of Violence as a Political Act?'. In any case, Windschuttle continues:
Chomsky told a forum in New York in December, 1967 that in China “one finds many things that are really quite admirable.” He believed the Chinese had gone some way to empowering the masses along lines endorsed by his own libertarian socialist principles:
China is an important example of a new society in which very interesting and positive things happened at the local level, in which a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step.
When he provided this endorsement of what he called Mao Tse-tung’s “relatively livable” and “just society,” Chomsky was probably unaware he was speaking only five years after the end of the great Chinese famine of 1958–1962, the worst in human history. He did not know, because the full story did not come out for another two decades, that the very collectivization he endorsed was the principal cause of this famine, one of the greatest human catastrophes ever, with a total death toll of thirty million people...
In fact, Chomsky was well aware of the degree of violence that communist regimes had routinely directed at the people of their own countries. At the 1967 New York forum he acknowledged both “the mass slaughter of landlords in China” and “the slaughter of landlords in North Vietnam” that had taken place once the communists came to power. His main objective, however, was to provide a rationalization for this violence, especially that of the National Liberation Front then trying to take control of South Vietnam. Chomsky revealed he was no pacifist.
I don’t accept the view that we can just condemn the NLF terror, period, because it was so horrible. I think we really have to ask questions of comparative costs, ugly as that may sound. And if we are going to take a moral position on this—and I think we should—we have to ask both what the consequences were of using terror and not using terror. If it were true that the consequences of not using terror would be that the peasantry in Vietnam would continue to live in the state of the peasantry of the Philippines, then I think the use of terror would be justified.
First, regarding Chomsky's acknowledgement of the slaughter of landlords in China and North Vietnam, it's important to note the context for these remarks. Chomsky says: "...I think one has to be rather cautious about accepting as absolute the alternatives peaceful stagnation and violent revolution. There's also a possibility of spontaneous revolution that uses both violence and nonviolent tactics, that minimizes the use of terror except as necessary in defense. I certainly don't think that things like the mass slaughter of landlords in China contributed in any significant way to the revolutionary successes, just as I don't think the slaughter of landlords in North Vietnam contributed in any respect to the successes of the revolution there, such as they were; and in fact the North Vietnamese agree with this judgment."
In other words, rather than "rationalize violence", Chomsky's concern here and throughout the course of his speaking is the utility of nonviolence. Thus: "What one has to ask about a revolution is whether its success is based on its violence; and if we look at revolutions that have taken place I think it's not at all clear that the success has been based on the violence. In fact to a significant extent it seems to me that the successes have been based on the nonviolence." The extent to which a social revolution relies on violence to succeed, in other words, is a significant indicator of its potentially degenerative -- which is to say, distinctly reactionary -- nature. Or as Chomsky says:
With all these arguments in favor of this type of [revolutionary] violence, I still think there are good grounds to reject it. It seems to me, from the little we know about such matters, that a new society rises out of the actions that are taken to form it, and the institutions and the ideology it develops are not independent of those actions; in fact, they're heavily colored by them, they're shaped by them in many ways. And one can expect that actions that are cynical and vicious, whatever their intent, will inevitably condition and deface the quality of the ends that are achieved. Now, again, in part this is just a matter of faith. But I think there's at least some evidence that better results follow from better means.
In essence, Windschuttle has taken Chomsky's observations on violence and stood them on their head.
Secondly, regarding Chomsky's observations on the economic and social changes brought about in twentieth-century China, Windschuttle claims that the kind of collectivisation Chomsky endorses -- that which proceeds along "lines endorsed by his own libertarian socialist principles" -- produced terrible famine in China; "the great Chinese famine of 1958–1962, the worst in human history".
Unfortunately, here Windschuttle confuses forced collectivisation -- which Chomsky, along "lines endorsed by his own libertarian socialist principles" -- opposes, and the voluntary collectivisation Chomsky supports. Further, in the same panel discussion, Chomsky makes his support for such principles and practices quite clear. Thus according to Chomsky, "the anarchist revolution in Spain, I think, is a nearly classic example of this sort of thing, where the great success of the revolution was largely due to the very long period of preparation -- extending over a generation, in fact -- during which the groundwork was laid for what turned out to be a very sudden, spontaneous, and I think highly successful revolutionary action"; the forced collectivisation, adoption of Lysenkoist farming methods and so on that produced the famines in China are in fact the product of the exact opposite of Chomsky's political vision.
The remainder of Windschuttle's critique proceeds in a similar vein.
For Chomsky's views on anarchism ('libertarian socialism'), see:
Chomsky On Anarchism, Barry Pateman, editor, and Noam Chomsky, AK Press, 2005;
Noam Chomsky on Anarchism, (with Tom Lane), December 23, 1996;
Noam Chomsky on Anarchism, Marxism & Hope for the Future, interview with Kevin Doyle, May 1995;
'Notes on Anarchism', Noam Chomsky, in Daniel Guérin, Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, 1970.
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An ABC of Windschuttle:
A) The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One, Van Diemen's Land, 1803-1847, Macleay Press, 2002*
B) Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle's fabrication of Aboriginal history, Robert Manne, editor, Black Inc, 2003
C) Washout: On the academic response to the fabrication of Aboriginal history, John Dawson, Macleay Press, 2004
[D The History Wars (Second Edition), Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark, Melbourne University Press, 2004]
*"At the time of the publication of Volume One it was announced that a second volume, to be published in 2003, would cover claims of frontier violence in New South Wales and Queensland, and a third, in 2004, would cover Western Australia. On 20 January 2006, Windschuttle was reported as saying that the second volume would be published within twelve months. On 9 February 2008, however, it was announced that the second volume, to be published later in 2008, would be entitled The Fabrication of Australian History, Volume Two: The "Stolen Generations" and would address the issue of the removal of Aboriginal children -- the "stolen generation" -- from their families in the 20th century. No recent reference has been made to the previously projected second and third volumes."
See also : 'Silenced Voices', Eve Vincent and Clare Land, Arena magazine, No.67, October - November 2003: "The 'history wars' have been conducted in the substantial absence of Indigenous voices and with the exclusion of non-Western forms of knowledge. It is time to resituate, rethink and listen anew."
Oh yeah...
Bob Gould penned an open letter to Keith and Liz Windschuttle titled 'Deconstructing the 1960s and 1970s', June 30, 2000; I think it may have gotten lost in the mail. Robert Manne -- in writing with regards 'PM's contempt for ABC' (The Age, June 17, 2006) -- also briefly reviews Windschuttle's political trajectory from Marxist to neo-con. On Chomsky, see also 'The Wild Man in the Wings', Clinton Fernandes, overland, No.180, Spring 2005 and subsequent correspondence with Philip Mendes in No.181, concentrating on the subject of Chomsky, Faurisson, and the Holocaust.
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