chomsky – collaborator with the US state (august 2017)

dan-mogulof-satire-quote

…and Chomsky might as well have said “I do not agree with fascism but I defend to the death your right to recruit for it”

 

Given the current controversy about Chomsky’s opposition to anti-fascist activity in the US, it seemed worthwhile giving publicity to this post from libcom  (here):

herz2

Aug 24 2017 12:25:

On the issue of Professor Faurisson, for Chomsky to defend the freedom of speech of a fellow academic is understandable. But to claim that, despite his Holocaust denial, Faurisson was somehow not an anti-Semite but merely an ‘apolitical liberal’ is absurd.

To defend another fellow academic, Walt Rostow, and his freedom of speech (even though, as a government adviser, he had organised the US’s murderous bombing of North Vietnam) may also be understandable. But to threaten to ‘protest publicly’ if Rostow were prevented from returning to his academic job at MIT, as Chomsky did in 1969, is even more absurd.

To defend the freedom of another MIT academic, John Deutch, to research whatever he wanted (even if he did research the use of ‘chemical and biological weapons together in order to increase their killing efficiency’ as well as initiating the deployment of both MX and Midgetman nuclear missiles) is perhaps, at a stretch, understandable. But to be one of the very few people on the faculty who supported Deutch’s bid to become MIT President, as Chomsky was, is simply outrageous (as was his support in The New York Times for Deutch’s promotion from Pentagon official to the Director of the CIA in 1995).

To understand why Chomsky has often taken academic freedom to such extreme lengths, we need to understand his situation at MIT. As he says of his early career in the 1960s, MIT was about 90% Pentagon funded at that time. And I personally was right in the middle of it. I was in a military lab.’

Chomsky was recruited to work at MIT by Jerome Wiesner, a military scientist who had both helped get the United States ballistic missile program established in the face of strong opposition and had brought such missile research to MIT. Wiesner also became a nuclear strategy adviser for both Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, and, as Chomsky says himself, I’m at MIT, so I’m always talking to the scientists who work on missiles for the Pentagon.

(Police disperse a student picket of one of MIT’s nuclear missile laboratories in November 1969.)

The only way a passionate anti-militarist like Chomsky could survive in such a militarised environment was for him to believe even more passionately in academic freedom. Consequently, for Chomsky a university should be somewhere where academics are both free to do the most obscene things – such as promoting Holocaust denial or researching weaponry – and are equally free to peacefully campaign against such obscenities.

This helps us understand why, in 1969, Chomsky openly told anti-war students that, rather than trying to remove war research from the university,you ought to have the Department of Chemical and Biological Warfare right in the centre of the campus so you can see who is coming and going. It helps us understand why, at this time, Chomsky opposed students’ attempts to occupy MIT’s administrative offices in protest at their university’s military research. And it helps us understand why he now opposes any confrontational direct action against fascists.

Although a genuine belief in free speech, combined with a genuine fear of a right-wing backlash, explains some of his approach to fascism, it seems that he has also extended his rather extreme interpretation of academic freedom from the university campus to the wider political environment.

Does this mean we should ignore his views? I don’t think so. After all, Noam is not unintelligent! But we do need to understand how his position at MIT has influenced these views in order to decide how seriously to take his opinions on both politics and science.

For full references and for more on Chomsky’s situation at MIT see:

Chomsky at MIT: Between the war scientists and the anti-war students.’

‘John Deutch – Chomsky’s friend in the Pentagon and the CIA.’

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This  schizophrenia is a clear product of thought without consequences (on this, see   in particular the posts from Red Marriott on the above thread): “ideas” become just abstractions, something one happens to think at the time, and are never tested out in any risky confrontation with reality, never used to practically challenge social relations. But then intellectuals who never get their hands dirty are invariably schizophrenic. However, I hadn’t realised this level of schizophrenia, despite despising him since he gave a very unimpassioned TV interview in the mid-70s to Peter Jay, a high-up bourgeois (the son-in-law of the Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan)  who shortly afterwards became the UK ambassador to the US, in which he abstractly argued for the creation of workers councils in Spain in ’36 [see the script of this interview here]. To indulge in polite dialogue with a representative of the (very vicious) enemy shows how undangerous his ideas are, a spectacle of opposition which makes  ‘revolution’ and utterly acceptable forms of bourgeois politeness  apparently compatible. Any ‘radicality’ has the sting taken out of it.

The fact that this utterly respectable anarchism could be treated politely by a representative of the bourgeoisie and in the British mainstream media, whilst being cheered by endless lefty liberals, merely showed me how his claims to being an ‘anarchist’ meant fuck-all (as if his later support for Chavez in Venezuela had anything anarchistic about it). But I’d never realised that at MIT he’d effectively collaborated in the very things he claimed to oppose.

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“The cadre is the institutionalisation of the two-sided and contradictory nature of the spectacle which simultaneously sings its own praise and, smelling its own stench, reports it…The cadre simultaneously wants to enjoy the thrill of refusal and the security of submission…for all his talk about revolution he is terrified of having to give up the security of  this world where he enjoys certain ordinary privileges for a world where he could become anything –  a villain, a hero or simply a mediocre man…The intellectual is the cadre who is most proud that he works, who wants his work to be visible…The bourgeoisie know that they will get nothing practical from this modern-day eunuch but…they continue to subsidise the intellectual who, if he does nothing else, demonstrates the rewards of thought without consequence.”

Call it sleep

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“The spectacle’s division of labour…allots to its most precocious intellectual strata the task of presenting its image of struggle as representative of the society-as-a-whole in order to preserve the reality of proletarian misery”

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All the bullshit about “free speech”, an ideology with which Chomsky berates those who attack recruitment for white supremacists,  ignores the very obvious fact that if you exercise your “right” to free speech to a teacher, to a boss, to a cop, etc.  you find your speech is not so free at all. Besides, speech is colonised by the monologuers of the media, and inculcation by the official educators and of all the dominant forces of pseudo-communication. Originally, in the 18th century, the demand for “free speech” had something radical about it, insofar as it opposed the monopoly of ideological expression spouted by the monarchy. But the ruling class are the only section of society who have the power to put their free speech into effect, whose ideas have the most obviously concrete consequences; for the rest of us, it’s a constant battle to express ourselves freely, and we do it at risk of being imprisoned or crushed in other ways.  “Freedom of expression” does not exist in  a world where “expression” is reduced to activity needed to survive – ie wage labour.   Those specialists in one-way communication (of which Chomsky, endlessly speaking on high from conference platforms, is an adept) oppose disruption of their “free” speech because such a disruption challenges dominant hierarchical discourse.

 

For a further critique of “free speech”, see this.

 

 

 

 

 

Comments

3 responses to “chomsky – collaborator with the US state (august 2017)”

  1. Jack Sprat avatar
    Jack Sprat

    Samantha: This schizophrenia is a clear product of thought without consequences (on this, see in particular the posts from Red Marriott on the above thread)…

    The use of the term “schizophrenia” I’d most I’ll judged. Shizophrenia is a term the State created to neutralise opposition it could not through other oppressive means. By using the term you yourself are making an unwholesome alliance with the state you claim to be at odds with.

  2. Sam FantoSamotnaf avatar

    If I stopped using words created by the state or by the ruling class I wouldn’t be able to write or speak much at all: “… every critique of the old world has been made in the language of that world, yet directed against it and therefore automatically in a different language. Every revolutionary theory has had to invent its own terms, to destroy the dominant sense of other terms and establish new meanings in the “world of meanings” corresponding to the new embryonic reality needing to be liberated from the dominant trash heap. The same reasons that prevent our adversaries (the masters of the Dictionary) from definitively fixing language enable us to assert alternative positions that negate existing meanings. But we already know that these same reasons also prevent us from proclaiming any definitive certitudes. A definition is always open, never definitive. Ours have a historical value, they are applicable during a specific period, linked to a specific historical practice. “http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/10.captivewords.htm

    The term “schizophrenia” was not exactly created by the state, but by the shrink Bleuler, not that makes any essential difference, except to be more precise than your mildly inaccurate comment. In fact, I’d say that psychiatry uses it more because of their hierarchical authoritarian need to categorize and reify individuals and ignore the history of their choices in a world they haven’t chosen than “to neutralise opposition it could not through other oppressive means”. However, we could undoubtedly have an endless argument about whether it was created for this reason but that seems pointless in this context, since the context in which I use it is clearly anti-state, has nothing to do with psychiatry or anti-psychiatry and I am clearly not using it in the sense that the state and/or the psychiatric profession might use it. I am using it to mean acts and behaviour and ideas that contradict and are in total opposition to the same person’s apparent ideas etc. – to mean an absolute self-contradiction.

    You leap on a word in the same way the “politically correct” language cops will leap on expressions like “you see everything in terms of black and white” or “he blacked out” to imply that you’re racist. I’d guess it’s because, like them, you have nothing essential to say about the content or context of what is said. It’s just a case of “I must pretend to myself I have something to say and to show my radical rejection of everything associated with the state/racism/take your pick” without contributing to any genuine development of a critique and/or some form of practical opposition and/or any elucidation of facts that might contribute to these. It’s as silly as complaining that someone using the phrase “All Coppers Are Bastards” is insulting those children born from parents who never married and is “making an unwholesome alliance with the institution of state-sanctioned marriage you claim to be at odds with.”.

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