Chomsky's Challenge to American Power

Anthony F. Greco

Description

Noam Chomsky is a pioneering scholar in the field of linguistics, but he is better known as a public intellectual: an iconoclastic, radical critic of US politics and foreign policy. Chomsky's Challenge examines most of the major subjects Chomsky has dealt with in his nearly half century of intellectual activism--the Vietnam War, America's broader international role (especially its interventions in the Third World), the structure of power in American politics, the role of the media and of intellectuals in forming public opinion, and American foreign policy in the post-Cold War world.

Chomsky is as controversial as he is influential. Admirers see him as a courageous teller of unpleasant truths about political power and those who wield it in the United States. Critics view him as a propagandist and ideologue who sees only black and white where there are multiple shades of gray. While Chomsky's fans tend to view him uncritically, his critics often don't take him seriously. Unlike any previous work, this book takes Chomsky seriously while treating him critically. The author gives Chomsky credit for valuable contributions to our understanding of the contemporary political world, but spares no criticism of the serious deficiencies he sees in Chomsky's political analyses.

Sujets

• International Relations
• Political Science
• Histoire
• History of the United States
• United States
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Vanderbilt University Press
• Date de parution: 15 janvier 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780826519498
• Langue: English

Extrait

Chomsky’s Challenge to American Power
CHOMSKY’S CHALLENGE TO AMERICAN POWER
A Guide for the Critical Reader
Anthony F. Greco
Vanderbilt University Press Nashville
© 2013 by Vanderbilt University Press
Nashville, Tennessee 37235
All rights reserved
First printing 2013
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file
LC control number 2013007827
LC classification JZ1312.G74 2014
Dewey class number 327.73—dc23
ISBN 978-0-8265-1947-4 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-8265-1948-1 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-8265-1949-8 (ebook)
To Celia
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Vietnam
America’s War in Vietnam: A Synopsis
The Vietnam War According to Chomsky
Conclusions
Indochina Afterword
Chomsky and Cambodia
2. Cold War Empire
American Foreign Policy during the Cold War: A Chomskian Overview
America’s Third World Empire: How Evil? How American?
The American Empire: Some Observations
3. Domestic Power and Global Purpose
The US Power Structure
Explaining America’s Cold War
4. Ideology, Illusion, and the Media
The Propaganda Model: The Framework
Case Studies
The Propaganda Model in Perspective
The Role of Intellectuals
5. America in the Post–Cold War World
Empire Redux
Interventions: Assets Turned Rogue
Interventions: Humanitarianism and Kosovo
Varieties of Terrorism
Hegemony and Its Discontents
Summary and Conclusions
How Chomsky Has Been Right
The Problems with Chomsky
The Chomsky Conundrum
Notes
Index
Preface and Acknowledgments
PROFESSOR NOAM CHOMSKY IS A GIANT in the field of linguistics. This book is not about Chomsky the linguist. It is about Noam Chomsky the thinker-activist whose searing critiques of American foreign policy and politics have earned him a reputation as one of the world’s leading public intellectuals. I am interested in exploring and evaluating Chomsky’s writings on politics—“politics” understood broadly to mean the workings of government, and people’s efforts to influence government, in both foreign and domestic affairs. Since the great bulk of Chomsky’s writings on politics have been about American foreign policy, that subject takes up most of the book.
Whatever one thinks of Chomsky, no one can deny that during the course of his nearly fifty-year career as a public intellectual he has dealt provocatively with important issues worthy of the attention of informed citizens: the Vietnam War, America’s broader international role (especially its interventions in the Third World), the structure of power in American politics, the role of the media and of intellectuals in forming public opinion, and American foreign policy in the post–Cold War world. My decision to write about Chomsky was motivated by the simple fact that he has written about things that I care intensely about—things that I think other citizens should care about as well. Ultimately, my interest is not so much in Chomsky personally as it is in his contribution to our understanding of these issues. Accordingly, this book is as much about the issues as it is about Chomsky’s treatment of them.
I see the reader as a partner in this search for understanding: when I use the word “we” I mean not the editorial “we” (I prefer the first person singular) but the author and the reader joined in a common effort.
Chomsky is an unusually polarizing figure. His admirers tend to be fervent and his critics fierce. It is very hard to find perspectives on Chomsky between those poles. With this book I take up a spot on that lonely middle ground. I didn’t set out to arrive there—I don’t necessarily believe that the truth lies somewhere in the middle—but that is where I ended up. I believe that while much of Chomsky’s work on politics is insightful and important, it is marred by glaring defects. Unfortunately, the value of his work can easily be obscured in the glare of those defects. I hope that a careful, balanced analysis of Chomsky’s deficiencies as well as his merits will help to remove the glare and thus serve to reveal what is genuinely worthwhile. I expect that this book will displease Chomsky fans and foes alike, but my objective is to serve critical readers—readers seeking not confirmation of their biases, but genuine understanding. My aim is to help such readers to see patterns in Chomsky’s work—to see where his strengths lie, and where his reliability may be subject to doubt.
Some aspects of Chomsky’s political writings will not be examined here. They fall into two categories: things that I think do not require serious attention, and things that are deserving of attention but that I simply don’t have room for in this book.
To take the second category first: The author of dozens of books and countless articles, Chomsky has been an amazingly prolific writer on a tremendous range of topics in politics and world affairs. A careful and truly comprehensive assessment of this corpus of work would take volumes. It would require an interdisciplinary team of social scientists and historians with expertise in several world regions. No such team is at my disposal. I have therefore had to be selective. Chomsky has written on many topics that are not treated in this book. My most important omission is Israel and Palestine, a subject about which Chomsky has written extensively and repeatedly. Many books have dealt with the respective merits of the opposing narratives in the historic conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. I don’t see that I can add appreciable value to this literature in the context of this book.
The major subject in the category of things I do not believe require serious attention is Chomsky’s political philosophy, the outlook that he sometimes calls anarchism, sometimes libertarian socialism. This omission may seem surprising: a book about a person’s analyses of politics should, presumably, include a discussion of the philosophic underpinnings of those analyses. The omission is nevertheless justified on two grounds, both reflecting my primary interest in Chomsky’s analyses of actually existing politics and society. First, while Chomsky’s anarchism reflects a radical sensibility—a conviction that existing society needs to be radically transformed—it doesn’t specifically inform his approach to political analysis. Unlike, say, Marxism, anarchism doesn’t provide a set of theoretical constructs for or methodological approaches to political and social analysis. One can reject Chomsky’s radical anticapitalist perspective and still agree with most of his assumptions and conclusions about how the real world works. Second, there is simply not that much to say about Chomsky’s anarcho-socialism. Chomsky himself disavows any original contribution of his own to this field of thought, and he is right to do so. His vision of a libertarian socialist society, to the extent that he has described it, is both sketchy and utopian—utopian in that it is unconnected to any concrete analysis of real-world possibilities.
A second omission in the unmeritorious category is the notorious Faurisson Affair. In the mid-1970s Chomsky wrote a statement in defense of the right of Robert Faurisson, a holocaust denier, to express his views. That statement showed up as a preface to a book authored by Faurisson. Chomsky’s culpability in this matter has been debated at length by his defenders and detractors. I see no intel lectual payoff to attempting to sort out the tangle of claims and counterclaims advanced by the two sides. The issue ultimately is only relevant insofar as it bears on the charge, advanced more or less explicitly by some of his critics, that Chomsky is somehow anti-Semitic. That charge is directed at a Jew who grew up in a household immersed in Hebrew-language studies and later lived for a time on a kibbutz. It doesn’t deserve serious consideration.
A final note on what this book is and is not about: It is a book about Chomsky’s ideas and his approach to political analysis. It is not a biography, or even an intellectual biography—the latter meaning a work that seeks consistently to place its subject’s ideas in the context of his life experiences and to explain their development over time. Nor am I interested here in analyzing Chomsky psychologically. I deal with the content of his writings and ask whether they make sense. I avoid speculating about psychological motivations that might explain what he says.
I WANT TO ACKNOWLEDGE the friends and scholars who have read and commented on portions of the manuscript or have otherwise given me help and encouragement in this project: Eric Alterman, Michael Bérubé, Fred Block, Daniel Greco, Jack Hammond, Wallace Katz, Peter Parisi, Edward Scher, Ida Susser, Jeffrey Tannenbaum, and Michael Teitelman. I owe thanks most of all to my wife, Celia Orgel, who has always been there for me all the way.
Introduction
IT STARTED WITH THE VIETNAM WAR. Long before the fateful escalation of the war in the mid-1960s, Noam Chomsky had won recognition as a seminal figure in the field of linguistics, but was little known outside that field. He was certainly not known as a commentator on politics. That is not to say that Chomsky was apolitical. As a child growing up in the Great Depression in Philadelphia he had had an early exposure to