by Marie Snyderat 3 Quarks Daily: Noam Chomsky was rumoured to have left us almost a month ago, but he always told us not to trust the media!
It appears he’s still alive at time of writing, and recovering at home from a stroke. Both The New Statesman and Jacoben published obituaries. Yanis Varoufakis claims his article about his friend was inadvertently published as an obituary (despite referencing Chomsky’s passing in it). That article has since disappeared. In shows that even the best of us can be duped. Vivek Chibber’s piece morphed into a tribute in which he said,
“Noam hasn’t just pointed to injustice where he saw it, no matter how remote–he has felt it . . . as an affront to his own sensibility. . . . He doesn’t just have educated opinions on a bewildering array of topics and geographical regions–he has real expertise. This is what has made him such a towering figure.”
Absolutely.
The benefit of mistakes like this (and there have been a lot of them) is getting to see what people really think of you!
Chomsky is a different person than you or me — well, than me for sure. He has a wealth of knowledge and an astute analysis of events pretty much from the beginning of time to now all in his head and instantaneously available to him, but he’s also very down to earth, of the people. Most importantly, he gives us a framework of the world that’s necessary to understand in order to help us fight the good fight.
Out of the multitude of writings he’s produced in his 95 years, I think one of the most comprehensive places for the uninitiated to start is with Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, a collection of talks given between 1989 and 1999. Below, I’ve summarized the ideas down to ten common threads often seen elsewhere in his work, abridged without all the evidence – you have to read the full 400-paged book for that. (Page numbers are from the 2002 paperback edition.)
1. He openly disparages the use of unnecessarily complex words and ideas (like “praxis”), and explains how and why the university system (tied to corporations and governments) breeds elitist intellectualism:
“I think the idea that you’re supposed to have special qualifications to talk about world affairs is just another scam….it’s just another technique for making the population feel that they don’t know anything, and they’d better just stay out of it and let us smart guys run it. In order to do that, what you pretend is that there’s some esoteric discipline, and you’ve got to have some letters after your name before you can say anything about it. The fact is, that’s a joke” (137). “Don’t forget, 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? I think people should be extremely skeptical when intellectual life constructs structures which aren’t transparent….most of the time it’s just fakery” (229). “Universities…in many respects are not very different from the media in the way they function….they’re parasitic institutions that need to be supported from the outside” (233). Typically you’re going to find major efforts made to marginalize the honest and serious intellectuals, the people who are committed to what I would call Enlightenment values – values of truth, and freedom, and liberty, and justice. And those efforts will to a large extent succeed” (261).
2. He has a plethora of evidence of shocking atrocities committed by the U.S. (and elsewhere) including using mercenary states which allow them to overtly support one side while covertly supporting the other. This in-depth information ensure that the public can see the severity of the current problem with our system:
“There’s a whole network of U.S. mercenary states….a massive international terrorist network run by the United States…military groups that unite the Western Hemisphere….Other countries hire terrorists, we hire terrorist states” (4-5). “In the 1960s, Israel started to be used as a conduit for intervening in the affairs of black African countries…the United States increasingly turned to Israel as a kind of a weapon against other parts of the Third World – Israel would provide armaments and training and computers and all sorts of other things to Third World dictatorships at times when it was hard for the U.S. government to give that support directly” (126). “The United States is permitted to carry out war crimes, it’s permitted to attack other countries, it’s permitted to ignore international law. On those things there’s a complete consensus” (56).
