On conspiracy theories
Thoughts on the Arab-Israeli conflict
Book Review - The Terror (2007)
Why the Jews?
Turning back to the Jews, he continued, if there is a superior race, it's them. Whatever the world throws at them, they survive, and they thrive. After millennia of persecution, in whatever country they live, they are in the creme of society, among the most successful, most educated, most resourceful people. "But how can you say this, if you hate them?" - asked someone in the audience. "I'm at least honest about my reasons." - came the response.
I frankly don't remember a single thing from the book apart from this scene. It stuck with me for two reasons. One, it made complete sense. Two, only in fiction you find such compelling characters who are so clear-eyed about their moral shortcomings.
Thesis
But there are and always have been overachieving minorities. The prime example today is the Asian Americans who form the highest-income ethnic group in the US, earning well above the majority whites. The business elite in Vietnam was for a very long time dominated by ethnic Chinese. I've listened to a podcast recently that listed similar minority groups in Iran, Africa, and the Caucasus, whose names I heard for the first time, then forgotten quickly.
Why is it then that only the Jews have become the global bogeyman? I think the answer is the Catholic Church.
History - beginnings
In the early days of Christianity, the followers of Jesus were just one of the many small Jewish apocalyptic sects in historic Palestine. As small sects tend to be, they were persecuted by the religious majority of Judaism. After Christianity's improbable rise to be the state religion of the Roman Empire, the boot was on the other foot, and the "turn the other cheek"-part was put on the back burner. Unlike the pagan religions, the Christianity demanded exclusivility. The Church persecuted all other religions, but the Jews were singled out as its vilest enemies. First, it was payback time, and secondly, the believers of other faiths at least had the excuse of being ignorant. But in the Christian mind, the Jews knew the Messiah and rejected him. They were God-killers. The facts that the Old Testament is part of the Christian Holy books, and Christianity tacitly accepts that the Jews are God's Chosen People, and Jesus himself was a Jew, were conveniently put aside. There is no cognitive dissonance that cannot be suppressed.
I don't know enough about Islam to trace the roots of Muslim Antisemitism with confidence. But my guess would be that Islam and Christianity share a basis of animosity against Judaism because they both see it as their parent religion that rejected the final messenger from God - Mohamed - or God himself. To them, Judaism is much closer to heresy than being a completely different faith, like Hinduism, and heretics are always hated more than non-believers. On the other hand, the concept of God-killing was missing from Islam, and for many Muslims, both Jews and Christians were people of the Book.
History - medieval times
As mentioned above, the Christians were not so relaxed about these things, therefore in Medieval Christendom Jews lived under the constant threat of persecution, pogroms, or at least dispossession. They were not allowed to own land, to be part of the nobility, or to have a position in state administration. The paths of integration into respectable society were blocked to Jews, leaving only those professions available to them that were beneath a good Christian. Like finance, banking, or academic studies. Jews, whose culture has always valued learning and intellectual curiosity, proved to be very successful in these fields, which wasn't exactly the Christian intention.
In the Islamic Middle Ages, life for Jews was definitely better than in Western Europe for the reasons mentioned above. The Muslim religious fervor manifested itself more in conquering rather than in converting. The Muslims were much more tolerant towards other religions on the territories they controlled as long as the subjugated minorities paid their taxes and kept their heads down. But the popular concept of the golden age of Muslim tolerance is oversold. Minorities were second-class citizens without the protection of the law, at the mercy of the majority.
History - modern times
In the modern era, religiosity in the West has slowly receded. Modernity eroded the significance of ethnicity, birthright, and social status, and elevated the importance of education and intelligence. The ways of making a living Jews had been basically forced into earlier - notwithstanding that due to their traditional reverence for learning they had an affinity to -, like banking, law, and medicine, have become increasingly more important and more profitable. The old aristocracy of land was gradually pushed into irrelevance by the new one, the aristocracy of money, and it was disproportionately represented by Jewish families, like the Rothschilds. Religious animosity from the majority was increasingly replaced by material envy as the stories about baby-blood-drinking Jews were replaced by conspiracy theories of Jewish cabals secretly running the world.
From the nineteenth century, credit to these views was given by the fact that Jews were indeed overrepresented by the vanguards of ideological currents that turned the world upside down. Capitalism came first, which benefited those who held an already long tradition of being involved in finance, banking, and trading. Then Communism swept over Europe, which toppled the Christian regimes. Jews were in general disproportionally present among intellectuals, thus not surprisingly, even more so in anti-religious intellectual movements.
The Jews have been in the middle of another societal battle as well. Because of the prohibition of owning land and of their traditional professions, Jews have always converged to cities to ply their trades. The urban-rural political divide - that pitted the presumably unsullied people of the land against the decadent urbanites - always had a distinct antisemitic undertone. Furthermore, the Jews have stubbornly refused to fully assimilate.
But after the Second World War, open Antisemitism became a strong taboo in the West. Not in the Muslim world, though, where the creation and flourishing of Israel and its successive military victories over its Arab neighbors pushed them into a collective frenzy. Israel managed to defeat the combined forces of its enemies on the battlefield over and over again. Israel is a Western-style democracy, the Arab states are corrupt and incompetent. Israelis are living on Western standards (on the only land in the Middle East without oil), Arab citizens in poverty and oppression. Jewish Nobel-prize winners are a cliche, while the number of such scientists the Arab world has produced is exactly zero. The dissonance between reality and what Muslims think their rightful place in the world should be (being the receivers of the final revelation from God), is as enormous as the inferiority complex that follows it.
Matthew Effect
"For to every one who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away."
There is another factor that is so mundane that it can be easily overlooked. Every instance of publicly blaming Jews for something grows the history of Antisemitism. So the next time someone is groping for a culprit to explain away his or his tribe's failure, he can recall some antisemitic rumor more readily - this is called availability bias. He runs away with his instinct and the self-reinforcing cycle is closed. This I think is just the Network Effect, or as sometimes called, the Matthew Effect. From all the social networks available to them, people choose the ones where they can connect to the most people. From all the available conspiracy theories that explain a given state of affairs, all things being equal, we tend to choose the ones shared by the most. And conspiracy theories involving Jews have been around so long and therefore have so many followers, that they are now impossible to displace.
Summary
To summarize, Antisemitism is rooted at the foundation of Christianity. Jews have been initially persecuted for purely theological reasons, then forced into certain occupations for the same reasons, which by chance and with time have given them power that earned the envy and jealousy of the majority. They have become the perpetual culprit for any calamity or lack of success of majorities, even when the original reasons were no longer relevant. The image of scheming Jews is unerasably part of our collective psyche. As long as Jews refuse to die out or assimilate perfectly, Antisemitism will be always with us.
Is Antisemitism on the rise?
The question is now how has Antisemitism become practically mainstream again in all but name?
From my childhood in the 80s and 90s of Eastern Europe, I don't remember discussing Jews or Antisemitism at all, either at home or in school (apart from the topic of WWII), or among friends. There was simply no ambiguity about racism or the Holocaust. The worst thing you could call anyone was "nazi", barring "pedophile". But I knew the word "Nazi", as a synonym for evil, long before I came across "pedophile". I recall only a couple occasions when someone in the schoolyard used the word "Jew" as a slur, but they were without exception not the sharpest knives in the drawer.
I was in my late teens when I experienced actual Antisemitism for the first time. A family member of mine, one who then was best described as a Christian nationalist, once expressed the view that the Jews really take advantage of the Holocaust - that is, they abuse the collective guilt of society to get unfair advantages. And one of my best friends at that time, who generally was a very nice person, turned out to be a rather loud anti-semite when he got in the mood. But as I said, he was a decent and generous fellow, and so was the aforementioned relative, so I saw these as personal quirks of otherwise normal individuals and not part of some general trend in any sense. Once I also noticed a Nazi swastika tattoo on a guy in my sports club, but he was a former convict and also not one of the brightest, so I didn't consider him representative either.
During my university years, I have never heard anyone among my fellow students mentioning Jews a single time, at least according to my recollection. I was in my early twenties and working already when a close colleague of mine during a common lunch in the office's kitchen started talking about how it was actually the British who "invented" concentration camps in South Africa, and Hitler was a bad man perhaps, but not the worst. I was flabbergasted and found myself out of words. But I still remember thinking how bizarre it is that young, university-educated professionals think it perfectly normal to find excuses for Hitler in front of their peers. In his defense, the said colleague was quite supportive of Israel, or at least definitely preferred them to the Arabs.
In the years to come, there was another couple of occasions when acquaintances or distant family members (everyone has a crazy aunt?) brought up the Jews in public. Not many, but enough. My dad told me once half laughing, half exasperated, that people in the local pub, whose knowledge of the outside world ended at some Greek beach, explained to him with great confidence the machinations of New York Jews. My erstwhile friend by that time had completely gone down the rabbit hole, and on one occasion in a small company of friends, he told us in a hushed, conspirational voice that secret multi-party negotiations were being held to import 2 million Jews to Hungary.
These incidents were isolated and anecdotal. Then George Soros started a late-life career as the bogeyman of Eastern Europe and the lid seemed to open. I have heard good faith arguments against my belief that Soros's prominence is due to his Jewishness. None was convincing. Still, by and large, I believed that anti-semitism is mostly spread among the not very-highly educated.
However, very recently a friend of mine, a very elite, a very leftish American, who never misses an opportunity to lambast the US for its racism against the blacks, in the middle of a conversation casually dropped that the Jews have too much influence in Washington. And he followed it up with a reference to the strange sartorial habits of the Orthodox Jews, whom, he said with a wink in his eye, he just calls "penguins".
Another acquaintance from Hungary told me that in his city, among the well-off people, open homophobia and gypsy jokes are now passé, but people don't feel inhibited when the conversation turns to Jews. Which it does not infrequently.
And then came Oct 7, 2023. Thousands of Hamas terrorists broke into Israel and killed more than a thousand Israelis specifically targeting civilians. They gang-raped women, killed children and elderly people, and kidnapped more than a hundred of them. They posted videos of kids lying as bloody lumps in their cribs and dead women barely recognizable as human bodies anymore. And in London, Sydney, and many capitals in the world, and at Ivory League universities like Princeton, Standford, and Berkeley, people stormed to the streets celebrating Hamas and condemning Israel. It merits repetition. There are students and professors at the world's best universities, who celebrated not the vague idea of Free Palestine, but the massacre itself.
In the past two weeks, hundreds of anti-semitic attacks have been reported in Western countries. This absolutely blows my mind.
People have been recently and currently massacred, violently oppressed, and abused all over the world. Minorities in Arab countries. Uyghurs in China, countless ethnicities in Africa, and in the post-Soviet states. Nothing could happen to them that would provoke a similar wave of street protests in the Western world, and what is mind-boggling, is that these protests now are triggered not by what Jews did to Palestinians, but the exact opposite. By a massacre of Israeli civilians carried out by one of the two Palestinian quasi-governments elected by Palestinians.
After the original shock and inevitable sympathy for Israel, it only took a week for the New York Times to come out with a front page on the bombing of a hospital in Gaza by Israeli forces. They published the report based on information solely from Hamas and didn't think any verification was needed. It turned out that the missile was fired by not the IDF but by an Islamist organization. No apologies came from the Times. Whatever was behind the Times' actions, the story fits very well in the Leftish trend of desperate attempts for bothsideism.
What the fuck is going on?
I have a very simple thesis that partially explains growing anti-Semitism, and goes like the following. Antisemitism, and racism in general, is the natural state of the world. A chronic disease of society, if you will. A leftover from pre-historic times. It causes only mild discomfort when things go well, but sometimes it bursts into a violent fever. In this metaphor, the Second World War and the Holocaust in particular worked as a vaccination against unsavoury ideologies. It was such a strong dose that it has inoculated almost the whole world against racism, permanently and completely pushing it out of the accepted range of public discourse for many decades. Its effect is fading now in tandem with the memories of the war, but for generations, it was so strong that it made people oblivious of how remarkable and novel this new shared mindset was historically.
We tend to think that the ban on open racism and the collective moral judgment of Nazism came into effect right after 1945. People were so shaken by the horrors of the war, that by the time it was over, they were united in rejecting racist ideologies for good. But actually, surveys showed that as late as the 60s, a third of Germans had a positive view of pre-war Hitler. That is, they thought that barring that catastrophic decision to launch a World War, Hitler wasn't a bad chancellor. It took decades until a consensus had crystallized, which lasted for many decades.
The general opinion about eugenics and racial purity right before the war is similarly shocking when someone reads about it for the first time. Quotas on Jewish university admittance were commonplace not only in Germany and Eastern Europe but in the United States as well. John Maynard Keynes, one of the most famous liberal economists of the 20th century was an active supporter of eugenics. And in that regard, he wasn't an eccentric.
And if you think Jews had it bad in the first half of the twentieth century, just go further back in history. Pogroms, lynchings, and witch hunts used to be for the masses what football matches are today.
What is unique about the current anti-semitism, that perhaps for the first time in history, it is driven by Left-wing morons instead of the usual suspects (in the West at least. East from the Elbe, it's the same old story). Bone fide antisemite right-wing nutjobs like Marine Le Pen in France and Marjorie Taylor Green in the US came out immediately in support of Israel (probably because they figured they hate the Arabs more) while Jeremy Corbyn and Jean-Luc Mélenchon on the other hand couldn't even bring themselves to condemn Hamas. Neither could some prominent leftists in the US Congress. From American universities, which never missed any chance to hector society about social justice and the ever-present racism, the silence has been deafening. And Harvard students found that the best time to go to the street for Free Palestine is when Palestinian terrorists massacred Jewish civilians, babies included, and gang-raped women - and posted videos to social media to boast about it.
Communists and Socialists have always been low-key anti-semites. The hated capitalist financial system was of course run by the Jews, after all. Just eight years after the holocaust, another pogrom (to "thwart" the Jewish Doctors' Plot) was unfolding in the Soviet Union and was canceled only by the death of Stalin. But it was never so outspoken, maybe because of the lofty universal ideas of Communism, maybe because they always posed as anti-fascist, and fascism got intertwined with anti-semitism.
At first glance, it can seem surprising that anti-semitism can surge right now in the current Zeitgeist, which is so loudly anti-racist, when woke idiots find a fascist in every bush. But it's actually not that hard to explain (this is not a sophisticated worldview). A crude but not inappropriate definition of being woke is to be constantly and obsessively on the look for oppression everywhere and sympathize with the underdog unconditionally. Israel, for the first time in thousands of years, is a dominant regional power, and it doesn't matter that it's a tiny island in a sea of Arabs (look at the map. Just take a break and look at the map), the Palestinians are the downtrodden, so the Jews have to be the evil ones.
Still, this explanation is incomplete. The Chechens have been brutalized by the Russians, the Uyghur by the Chinese, Saddam Hussein wiped out Kurdish villages with chemical weapons, and African warlords and dictators did and are doing unspeakable things all the time. Yet, there are rarely any public protests against these in the West.
The difference is that progressives designate Jews as white and Palestinians as people of color and this tells you all you need to know about who the bad guys are in this simple place called the Middle East.
Based on all the above, a simplified but useful way of thinking about the question is that there are two strands of anti-Jewish sentiment. Those characterizing themselves as anti-Zionists are nominally agnostic about Jews themselves but critical of the actions of Israel as a state. This itself is a heterogeneous group consisting of general anti-West activists (like Noam Chomsky), people sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians, and people who sympathize with anyone who seems to be on the short end of the stick.
The other strand is represented by run-of-the-mill antisemites who vent out their frustration in the local pubs and blame the Jews for their national or personal misfortunes, and talk about Rothschilds and Jewish plots for world domination. Based on my personal experiences, I would estimate at least 30 percent of the population being susceptible to these ideas to varying degrees. This is a spectrum running from rabid anti-semites to otherwise normal men of the street with half-baked ideas about the world which is too complex for them.
The two strands reinforce each other. The first makes criticism of the Jews a morally defensible stance and with that, it provides an umbrella for real Jew-haters for whom Israel is just a pretext. Those are happy to finally find themselves in a respectable company, while progressives don't much care what company they are in as long as everyone joins the choir.
To summarize it from a bird's-eye view, the different forces in play are the following. Our modern moral values rooted in the Enlightenment are locked in a constant battle with the much older grass-root Antisemitism courtesy of religion which is fed heavily by our instinct of xenophobia courtesy of human nature. Against those atavistic tendencies stand the taboo set by the Holocaust, which time erodes a bit more every year. And finally, there is the modern anti-Israel sentiment which is reinvigorated by the woke craze, pushing the taboo more and more to the side, so Antisemitism can flow freer again under some more palatable guise.
Zen and Stoicism
Imagine two persons equal in most aspects with one relevant difference. One of them follows Zen teachings, the other is a Stoic. A casual observer of their daily lives would find it hard to guess which is which. In personal relations, both are generous and compassionate. They both take hardships in life with equanimity and rarely give in to rage or anxiety. They notice and appreciate everyday joys but are unperturbed if circumstances stand between them. For those with eyes for this kind of things, they both carry an aura of detachment. And, among other unlisted similarities, they both tend to regularly spend some time of the day with quiet contemplation.
Zen and Stoicism are indeed strikingly similar, especially considering that they emerged independently of each other in very different cultures. One is from a land where spirituality permeated every aspect of life, the other is the product of a society that laid the foundations of the modern rational worldview. I make an attempt below to examine the likeness between the two, then the differences. Considering the many different schools of Zen especially, the observations below will be crude simplifications, but hopefully not far off their marks.
To start with the greatest common denominator, both traditions share the view that real and enduring happiness (or at least peace of mind) is to be found inside one's own mind irrespective of external circumstances. One can be poor or sick or in a prison cell and be free and at peace with oneself at the same time. Their shared psychological observation, thousands of years ahead of their time, is that our perception of reality is the source of our discontentment.
Both advise enjoying what life offers without becoming dependent on them. To be present in the moment and to see everything, possessions, loved ones, and life itself as impermanent that can be and eventually will be taken away.
They are both indifferent about deities and the afterlife. This is barely worth mentioning today but was remarkable in their times of origin. Buddhism was born in India with its countless gods, and Stoicism emerged in a similarly polytheistic society. The norms in both societies demanded the veneration of gods, spirits, and alike, therefore in the eyes of Zen Buddhists and Stoics who lived thousands of years ago, supernatural entities and the afterlife were a given. They were also unimportant. Both traditions teach the importance of the here and now, and that one's redemption lies not in the hand of gods, but is to be discovered inside. It's safe to assume that indifference instead of hostility to existing religious beliefs was in both cases more of a rational survival strategy than a principled choice in times and places where open atheism could make one ostracized or executed.
The Buddhists and Stoics were anyway much more interested in practice than theory. They share an emphasis on regular exercises, both mental and in interaction with others.
Finally, they both have the concept of the ideal they aspire to be. What is the Enlightened One for Buddhists, is the Sage for Stoics.
And now come the differences.
Among which, the most significant is the one in aspirations. The purpose of Stoicism is to live a good life, which according to the Stoics, is a virtuous life. The purpose of Zen is to see through the illusion and see the truth, reality as it is. The Zen concept of the world as an illusion is alien to the down-to-earth Stoics.
Instead of breaking free of it, the Stoics encouraged full engagement with the world. They recognized that humans are social animals and strongly advocated, like good Greeks, active participation in the life of the community. In Asian cultures from the Indian to the Japanese, the Enlightened one is expected to transcend the constraints of society.
The roads to perfection might be through continuous practice in both schools, but the concepts of practice itself differ. The Stoics preached continuous self-improvement in the modern sense. Day by day, you hone your skills, mend your imperfections, and slowly and steadily become a better and better version of yourself. Zen is much more ambiguous about gradual improvement. Some schools advocate for it, but some teach that Enlightenment just happens (or not), doesn't matter how long you have been practicing. Practice is simply maintaining a state of being open to possible Enlightenment there and then, and the gains don't accumulate. That being said, I think Western (or Secular) Buddhism is much closer to the Stoic way.
The practices themselves are quite different. The center of Stoicism is to see obstacles in life (physical hardships, personal slights, social stepbacks) as tests of character and opportunities for improvement. The Stoics actively seek out difficulties (not shying away from hard conversations, abstaining from culinary pleasures, stepping out of their comfort zone) to perfect themselves. The Stoic meditator reviews his actions at the end of the day to identify what can be done better next time. The essence of Zen practice, mediation is wholly missing from the Stoic world. In Zen meditation (nowadays known mostly as mindfulness meditation), one doesn't engage in an active thinking process. On the contrary, one tries to calm his mind and dispassionately observe thoughts rising and passing in the mind. And while doing this one realizes that the self, as the coherent unchanging essence of being, is just an illusion.
The psychological insights Zen and Stoicism impart are profound and very modern, but the overlap is little. The core insight of Stoicism is that humans are affected by the events in the world not directly, but through their own interpretation of them, and the only real control one has in life is that over his own mind. Zen's main discovery is that most of the time we are the slaves of our minds and not the other way around. Thoughts and emotions come and go uncontrollably as they please, but one can learn to be aware of this process and break free of it.
To sum it up, practicing Zen or Stoicism produces very similar characters but through different exercises that are built on very different worldviews.
The most useful idiot
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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