The Advocate

The Anti-Chomsky Reader
Peter Collier and David Horowitz, editors.
Encounter Books.

Reviewed by Tony Monchinski

Far be it for me to defend MIT distinguished linguist Noam Chomsky. Nevertheless, the man labeled “arguably the most important intellectual alive today” by the New York Times doesn’t always get a fair hearing—or a hearing at all—in America or the CUNY system.

Let me explain. I was exposed to Chomsky and his political writings for the first time as an undergraduate at Queens College by a professor named John “Tito” Gerassi. Since Tito’s classes, I’ve heard quite a bit of praise for Chomsky from some CUNY students, but when his name is invoked in various political theory classes I have taken at the GC, left-liberal professors dismiss Chomsky with a scoff or flippant remark. What gives?

We might expect Chomsky-bashing from the right, and Anti-Chomsky Reader co-editor David Horowitz doesn’t let us down. Born to Communist Party schoolteacher parents in Forest Hills, Queens in 1939, Horowitz broke with his Stalinist environment to help form the New Left. Once the editor of Ramparts magazine and publisher of books with such titles as Marx and Modern Economics, Horowitz pulled a political 180. In his new guise as neoconservative, he hawks his most recent publication, Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left from his web site frontpagemag.com. Noam Chomsky could have been describing Horowitz himself when, in Understanding Power, he discussed the former Leninists who, seeing that “power doesn’t lie that way … very easily become ideologist[s] for the right, and devote [their] life to exposing the sins of [their] former comrades, who haven’t yet seen the light and shifted to where power really lies.”

With Peter Collier, Horowitz edits 2004’s Anti-Chomsky Reader. In the book, Horowitz, Collier, et. al. take Chomsky to task for his “ferocious anti-Americanism and cavalier relationship with the factual record,” his “flat and fatwa-like speeches” received by an audience for whom he is a “cult figure,” with “Rock bands such as Rage Against the Machine and Pearl Jam promot(ing) Chomsky at their concerts the way the Beatles once promoted the Guru Maharaji.” Chomsky’s power comes not from his person, but because he “gives an authentic voice to the hatred of America that has been an enduring fact of our national scene since the mid-1960s.” His written works and speaking engagements are marked by an “anti-American obsession that imbues everything he writes and says.” Lest we think otherwise, Peter Collier reassures us in the introduction that his book “does not seek to deprogram members of the Chomsky cult.”

Just as Horowitz and Collier, based on their title alone, came to this project without any semblance of objectivity, I must admit that as I awaited the arrival of their tome from Amazon.com I mulled over adjectives to use in this review. Words like drivel and palaver came to mind. I am still not sure how to spell farkatke. But perhaps the best way to review such a book is to focus on a few of the allegations leveled against Chomsky and see what Chomsky himself might say to refute them.

For example, in the Anti-Chomsky Reader’s essay by Werner Cohn, Chomsky is hailed as playing “an important role in the neo-Nazi movement,” a fact we are assured is well known in France but that “Chomsky and his most determined supporters try to prevent his liberal and left-wing followers from knowing too much about” here in the US. This criticism has been leveled at Chomsky before and it stems from his defense of free speech. In the early 1980s, Chomsky signed a petition defending French holocaust-denier Robert Faurisson’s right to express his opinions. Chomsky argued that Faurisson should not be jailed by the French government for his views. In the documentary Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky makes the point that free speech prevails only in so far as it does for those who say things that we disagree with, and that any reasonable person who hears Faurisson is going to write the man and his ideas off.

Horowitz and Ronald Radosh claim that for Chomsky the September 11, 2001 attacks were “long overdue and … historically just.” Furthermore, “Chomsky seems to believe that America and Europe are still living in the age of colonial expansion—a rhetorical assumption that allows him to ignore the fact that America and its allies do not want to acquire Afghanistan or any other Third World Country, and are even reluctant to be involved to the extent that they should be.” This is where I was thinking of inserting the adjective “drivel.” Horowitz should know that imperialism itself has evolved along with capitalism. The name of the game is no longer territorial expansion per se but access to markets. Hence the US military’s presence in 34 countries around the world. Hence the long-anticipated US invasion of Iraq.

The charge that Chomsky greeted 9-11 with hands clasped in glee, or, at the least, “without any particular regret” is another thing. “Listening to Chomsky,” writes Horowtiz, “you can almost feel the justice of Osama bin Laden’s malignant death package.” If true, then how does one explain Chomsky’s condemnation of the 9-11 attacks as “horrifying atrocities” in the book Power and Terror? What gets guys like Horowitz’s goat is that Chomsky has the temerity to point out that such terrible crimes are just how “the imperial powers have treated the rest of the world for the last hundred years.” As far as charges of being an apologist for terrorists goes, Chomsky explains that “It’s not that I’m apologetic. It’s just a matter of sanity. If you don’t care if there are further terrorist attacks, then fine, let’s not pay any attention to the reasons.” “Then fine,” is exactly what neo-cons like Horowitz seem to be saying, agreeing with President Bush that our enemies attacked us because they are jealous of our freedom.

One of the other charges Horowitz and crew level is that Chomsky is a self-hating Jew, enmeshed in a “long hate affair with Israel, a country he regards as playing the role of Little Satan to the American Great Satan.” Chomsky’s great sin among the American intellegentsia of all hues is to dare criticize Israel. But let’s look at the reasons why the American Right, which itself has a history of anti-Semitism, loves Israel so much. One, Israel enforces US will in the Middle East, or, as Chomsky himself explains in Understanding Power, “…a big part of the way you run the planet is by controlling Middle East oil, and in the late 1950s, the United States began to recognize that Israel would be a very useful ally in this respect.” Besides serving as a “mercenary state for the US around the world,” right-wingers love Israel because, according to a literalist reading of the Book of Revelations, Israel must have control of the Middle East before the second coming of Christ.

That said, what is it about Chomsky that raises the hackles in certain segments of “the Left”? It’s hard to say with certainty, but I’ll proffer a possibility: a certain sense of envy is involved. Chomsky is a linguist by training, yet his political writings are far more prolific and widely read than those of most political scientists. Furthermore, his work outside his interviews, albeit dry and academic, is free of jargon and the purposefully obtuse trappings of academia that accompany such left stalwarts as Bernard-Henri Levy or the late Jacques Derrida. In a word, Chomsky is comprehensible. There is no heresthetics, heuristics, habitus or—alliteration be damned—surplus value in his work. “Don’t forget,” Chomsky reminds us, “part of the whole intellectual vocation is creating a niche for yourself, and if everybody can understand what you’re talking about, you’ve sort of lost, because then what makes you special?” In an age where one can make a living as a dissident academic, Chomsky’s example threatens to reveal that the left emperors have no clothes.

The contributors to the Anti-Chomsky Reader don’t seem to understand their target. For example, throughout the book, Chomsky is dismissed as holding Marxist views. Chomsky is just “parroting his Marxist mentors”; he is just another of the many “analysts influenced by Marxism”; Manufacturing Consent is “a vulgar Marxist tract.” Despite right-wing protestations to the contrary, Chomsky is quite critical of certain segments of what passes for the Left these days. Admitting that Marx “introduced some interesting concepts at least, which every sensible person ought to have mastered and employed,” Chomsky notes that “I’m not a great enthusiast of Marx…” He is especially critical of Marxists, noting that “It’s rather striking that you don’t find things like ‘Marxism’ in the sciences,” and that “notions like Marxism … belong to the history of organized religion.” Chomsky has repeatedly stated that he finds intellectual sustenance and inspiration in the libertarian socialist (i.e., anarchist) traditions.

As for charges that Noam Chomsky is somehow “un-American,” one need only recall the New York Times Magazine interview last year where Chomsky said he would not want to live in any country other than the US. In Understanding Power, Chomsky explains that a term like “anti-American” is “a pretty standard propaganda triumph, actually. Like, go to Italy and try using the word ‘anti-Italianism,’ call somebody there ‘anti-Italian’ and just see what happens—they’d crack up in ridicule. But here [in the US] those totalitarian values really do mean something to people….”

Are there people on the Left who fawn over Chomsky? Unfortunately, yes. Are these sycophants less worthy of our contempt because we agree with some of the views they embrace? No. Noam Chomsky is not a god. He is a man fighting, in his own way, what many of us who identify as progressives-leftists-socialists-supporters of democracy, consider the good fight. As the United States government embarks on what they see as a second American century with cheerleaders like Horowitz and Collier, Noam Chomsky and like-minded activists attempt to rally what is really good and worth promoting in Americans and human beings.

Tony Monchinski is a student in the PhD program in Political Science and a special education high school teacher.