The ultimate contradiction

What kind of a name is Noam Chomsky, anyway? I have no “Noams” in my address book. There are none in the telephone directory, and none elsewhere in my direct or indirect experience. (Although I am prepared to admit that I don’t know everything, or even everybody, and have not, at time of writing, experienced everything that there is to experience.


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Noam Chomsky, appropriately to that obscure and individualistically un-American, post-Cold War-ish, defiantly gnomic moniker that he carries like a casual badge of pride, is the ultimate anomaly, the ultimate contradiction in terms: an American intellectual.

And since this extraordinarily blasphemous name has already led us into such profane territory, let us blaspheme some more and openly say: “God bless and preserve Noam Chomsky.” Whoever God is. Whoever Noam Chomsky is. It might even turn out that they are one and the same.

I have no idea when Chomsky first became an institution. I do know that, even since my university days, Chomsky’s has been a name to conjure up whenever issues of political morality are at stake — the political morality of the last vestiges of the uncorrupted left, that is. Whatever that is.

So if our wavering uncertainty about what we know is right and wrong is so dependent on the continued reaffirmation of the Word as handed down by the lonely, selfless, Nanny Noam, how much self-respect are we left with? Who, indeed, have we become, this post-Cold War, post-liberation, post-apartheid generation of rainbow children who no longer trust themselves to even be able to distinguish night from day? Who need to revert to the (sometimes mildly irritable) feedback of the indefatigable but steadily ageing Citizen Noam to get to grips with what we really feel about the state of this out-of-control, prematurely globalised world, and our uncertain place within it?

It’s early days but I feel that I am already beginning to run out of space. There is so much to say about what Chomsky has had to say over the years about the world we are living in, especially about the terrorism we are now acquiescing to, the terrorism of the B52s and the Stealth bombers, and the born-again platitudes that wing them on their way — the terrorism of forgetting when we ourselves were the targets of those same bombs.

The thumbnail biography on the back of the average Chomsky book jacket describes him as “a world-renowned political activist, writer, and professor of linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has taught since 1955”. Since 1955? That’s the length of my lifetime, and more or less the lifetimes of most of the people that I know. If this man has been thumping the lonely tub of revolution since as long as most of us can remember, and remained unassailable in the logic of his argument since that time, why is the world still such a terrible place to live?

The answer, of course, is that power has a funny way of drowning out the uncomfortable words of the prophets. The Devil and his Wurlitzer can play louder than the loudest choirs of reason.

Chomsky’s latest offering (published here in a collaboration between M&G Books and New York’s Seven Stories Press) is simply entitled 9-11 — the emergency services dial-in number that has become permanent shorthand for that cataclysmic September morning when New York’s twin World Trade Centre towers were brought down in an audacious, unclaimed act of guerrilla warfare.

9-11 is made up of a series of methodical answers to questions put to the timeless guru of alternative politics by a series of international journalists in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Some of the interviews were done over the telephone for radio shows, but the majority of questions came, and were answered, via e-mail — a suitable medium for this kind of endeavour, given the pre-eminent place e-mail has taken as a means of communicating the shifting trends of thought that followed the attacks of September 11.

As you would expect, Chomsky not only delivers, he gives you more than you bargained for. All the years of absorption in the minutiae of world events, and in particular in the role successive United States administrations have chosen to play in them, are distilled into Chomsky’s coolly deliberate answers.

If most of us have forgotten the detail of how successive wars in South-East Asia, Africa and Latin America grew from unpromising beginnings into full-scale conflagrations through the careful manipulation of events and information, Chomsky has not. His vast bank of impeccably moral memory, it seems, will always be there to prod consciences grown lazy with age, or exhausted by the sheer, repetitively mind-numbing arrogance of superpower foreign policy.

There was something of this reawoken memory of times long past when Daniel Ortega, former Sandinista leader, attempted to take back the reigns of Nicaragua (through the democratic process of the ballot box, as he did more than 20 years ago). If he had succeeded, it would have been to take the helm of a once hopeful country whose infrastructure and aspirations were turned to ashes through the wrath of Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy — for which action the US was condemned by no less a body than the World Court for “unlawful use of force” — that is, acts of terrorism on a massive scale against innocent civilians. But he lost. You can’t turn back the clock of history.

And there is something, too, of the ashes of memory in the images of the US-sponsored Northern Alliance marching in strangely subdued triumph into Kabul, a city that no longer exists in any meaningful sense — destroyed by the horrific infighting of that very alliance some years before, and now recaptured as a shell, populated by a smattering of numb, cadaverous faces with nowhere left to run.

Noam Chomsky’s 9-11 is a wise and timely intervention in this most vulnerable historical moment. It is also a timeless reflection on a world order that offers up precious few surprises.