His work ethic is legendary. Besides being an incredibly prolific author, and world-class scholar in a field completely unrelated to his political activism, he reputedly replies to every email he receives regardless of the sender's status or importance.
It's nigh impossible to list all the events Chomsky has written about, but one can be sure that whatever geopolitical affairs the US had been involved in since its foundation, Chomsky commented on them all. And his interpretations were damning to America, to a fault. Which is not necessarily a bad thing on its face. The US is now the sole superpower on Earth, and it deserves scrutiny proportional to its status. America, like every great power in history, has intervened in other nations' business countless times and has committed plenty of mistakes and intentional crimes along the way. Especially its general Cold War conduct in South America, which involved supporting murderous regimes by direct intervention or explicitly encouraging torture and bloody oppression of their opposition, is by and large a stain on the nation.
But other great powers have done the same things and much worse. Consider Nazi Germany, pre-WWII Japan, the Soviet Union, or by our modern standards, every single power in earlier history, and the US probably comes out reasonably well in comparison to either of them.
Or not, according to Chomsky who genuinely believes not only that America (and the West) is a net negative force in the world, but that it is the worst of all contenders. He called and US and UK the greatest terrorist states in the world. Comparing the US to the Soviet Union, Chomsky has claimed that the latter was morally superior, if only marginally. Considering that the Soviet Union was practically a slave empire that killed millions of its own citizens, imprisoned ten times as many, and installed similarly brutal regimes everywhere it had its way, that's quite a statement.
As logically follows, Chomsky regards NATO as the most aggressive and violent military alliance in the world. Why countries in the Soviet sphere of influence have been begging to join doesn't merit serious attention from him.
Despite his obvious ideological bias, Chomsky's encyclopedic knowledge of the facts (he copiously cites dates, names, UN resolutions, acts of Congress, ... to support his arguments) makes most of his criticism credible. But with occasionally capital misfires. Anyone opposing the US can count on some sympathy from Chomsky, even unspeakable regimes like the Khmer Rogue. Pol Pot's nightmarish rule had seen almost 1 in every 4 Cambodians killed, which puts Pot far beyond even Hitler, Mao, or Stalin, as mass-murderer dictators go, at least proportionally to population. Chomsky spent years claiming that the regime's genocidal crimes were wildly exaggerated by Western media. After the facts have become undeniable, Chomsky never apologized. On the contrary, he argued that considering the information available at the time, he was right.
Chomsky in general has a poor track record with genocides, as the US hasn't committed any in recent history, and its evil vindicates the crimes of its enemies. Virtually singularly among serious Western scholars, Chomsky denies that the Bosnian massacres during the Yugoslav wars in the nineties were ordered by Milosevic, or in some cases, that they actually took place. In his interpretation, the Serbs were provoked into mass murders by the US to provide a pretext for NATO bombing. The reason? The US could not allow a successful socialist state to exist in Europe.
After almost thirty years, Chomsky is still the main perpetrator of the lie that the concentration camps, revealed to the world by the infamous photos of emaciated men standing behind barbed wire fences, were a fabrication of Western journalists to besmirch the Serbs. One would think that sentences handed down in The Hague that were based on witness testimonies from both victims and perpetrators would put an end to such speculations. Not for Chomsky. To this day, he is willing to appear on Serb television to be used as a tool of anti-Western propaganda. As a side note, it's worth mentioning that the current leader of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, served as a propaganda minister in Milosevic's bona fide fascist government. To be fair, it's not that Chomsky doesn't acknowledge the war crimes of the Serbs. He just doesn't care about them.
Considering his past stances, Chomsky's assessment of the current Ukraine-Russian war is predictable in its direction. But it's still surprising in its extent. There are many interviews with him on the war today and they generally follow the same pattern. After the mandatory and very short throat-clearing about the brutality and injustice of the Russian onslaught, Chomsky quickly moves on to clarify that it was fully provoked by the US. America refused to respect the Russian sphere of influence (like it refuses to respect the Chinese one, Chomsky adds, if already on the topic). It is a surprising dose of realpolitik from a self-proclaimed anarchist and humanitarian. And something that never appeared in Chomsky's writings vis-à-vis Western powers.
The haste in condemnation of the aggression is balanced by a lengthy and patient monologue about how the color revolutions that toppled corrupt politicians in the region were CIA-staged coups. No credit goes to the oppressed masses Chomsky claims to champion. Georgians, Belorussians, or Ukrainians do not openly challenge the brutal regimes they live under, they are just unwitting puppets in a Western ploy. Chomsky never extends this condescending attitude to people who rise up against American-friendly oppressive regimes.
One expects similar Pavlovian sentiments from run-of-the-mill leftists, like the thousands of Jeremy Corbyns, who will never recover from the hangover from the Cold War, and will always think that reflexively defending any Russian action is a matter of principle. But Chomsky knows better and even his sympathetic audience anticipates some afterthought that would add a bit of nuance. Chomsky, as a true iconoclast, brushes aside such bourgeois expectations. He declares that the anti-Russian hysteria overtaking the West surpasses even the anti-German hysteria during the Second World War. That's some food for thought.
Although the worldwide anti-American sentiment is inexhaustible, it is also limited, and most people in Europe and the US consider America a flawed but relatively benevolent empire, at least compared to other powers. How does that square with Chomsky's own worldview? Chomsky explains this mass delusion as the result of the brainwashing of corporate media and institutions serving capitalist interests. In Chomsky's mind, liberal democracy is just a thin veneer over the ruthless, exploitative rule of the rich and powerful. Those who help maintain the facade, scholars, politicians, businessmen, and journalists, are either deceived themselves or active agents of the concerted effort to tell a false story of the world.
To make it more concrete, if Chomsky is right, then every single politically centrist journalist in, let's say the New York Times, and every similarly inclined scholar of geopolitics in academia is either evil or a fool. US politicians of course are the worse of all. When talking about them (not Rumfelds or Dick Cheneys, but old-time Democrats like FDR, Kennedy, or Johnson), Chomsky's voice is dripping with cold contempt. In his interpretation, these people are never simply wrong on some matters or have honest but mistaken beliefs. They are evil.
Ironically, despite his hatred for his motherland, Chomsky is a quintessentially American figure. The US might be the only country in the world where someone so antagonistic to it can achieve status, fame, and respect without the fear of being silenced by administrative or more direct means. His most receptive audience is American, too. Western Marxists are usually not held in high esteem in countries that actually lived under the system they advocate. Chomsky has particularly fallen out of favor with Eastern-European anti-communist intellectuals when he went to Prague and explained to them how pampered their lives were under socialist regimes compared to the people's who rebelled against American-backed dictatorships in South America. Many of these people were imprisoned and persecuted during the socialist era and the audience understandably felt a bit disrespected on behalf of those described as cowards and opportunists by someone who only saw their countries from afar and never risked his life or livelihood.
As noted earlier, despite his advanced age, Chomsky is still very much active. He's been authored or co-authored six books since 2020, and he still makes appearances sometimes and gives interviews on a daily basis. He is astonishingly sharp for a 94-year old and time hasn't seemed to dampen his elephantine memory. Yet his interviews are often frustrating. He is wont to go off on a tangent to deliver long (but coherent) monologues of something he deems important. Chomsky has found one of the few advantages of being a thousand years old. It is the unspoken permission to simply ignore an awkward question. Just answer another one. It works all the time because it would seem very rude to call it out and seem to put verbal pressure on a frail old patriarch. In a recent interview, even Piers Morgan waited meekly every time until the grand old man finished his monologue on a question he wasn't asked. The same Piers Morgan who very rarely gives his guests the opportunity to utter even their opening sentence uninterrupted.
There is also a pettiness in Chomsky unbecoming of a man with his fame and intellect. He is thin-skinned to the point that he takes disagreements as personal affronts. He rejected a to engage in a public debate with Sam Harris whom he simply labels "slanderer" even though Harris is anything but, and who made his challenge in as much good faith as possible. Nick Cohen, a left-wing British journalist, who called out Chomsky on his mistakes and pernicious influence on the Left, earned the qualifier "maniac".
Having made any misjudgments doesn't fit Chomsky's self-image either. A couple of weeks ago, Tyrell Cowen asked him in an interview if he has any regrets after 70 years of political activism. That's an understandable question, even a saint would make some mistakes in a lifetime. It's also a good one. The answer almost always gives nuance to the person's espoused worldview and lets fans see the human side of their hero. Not Chomsky's, though. His answer was as cringe-worthy as the proverbial job interviewee's who is asked to tell something about his negative qualities and responds with "Sometimes I just work too hard". Chomsky's rephrase was: "My only regret is that I didn't fight even harder". That's something to say after trying to whitewash the Khmer Rogue. Tyler, and others before him, also asked Chomsky to name anyone whose work he admires. Chomsky repeatedly refused to do so and instead said that he admires the young people on the street fighting for justice. No one to look up to from his vantage point, it seems. Noam Chomsky has to be peerless.
And in some respect, he truly is. Very few people in the world have his intellect and factual knowledge about world affairs. And this is what shields him from sounding like a caricature, even though his ultimate judgments often are not better than any reflexively anti-Western idiot's you read on an internet forum. With great intellectual effort - or dishonestly simply by ducking, evading, or explaining away inconvenient facts, like genocides - he squeezes everything into his warped view of the world according to which Western countries are on the evil side of history, and there is little more to the matter.
But in some respect, he is not unique at all. The old observation about socialists - "they don't love the poor, they hate the rich" - applies to "anti-imperialists" like Chomsky perfectly. Just replace "poor" with "oppressed" and "rich" by America, and America only. His reversed Christian credo of beams and motes in one's eyes is also common among self-hating Westerns, Chomsky's just stands out by the merit of his caliber.
For better or worse, Noam Chomsky lived in and contributed greatly to this world for 90+ years and will continue to live (and be used) in the world of his admirers and opportunistic propagandists for many decades to come.
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