nazalost, biti ljevicar (ili bilo sta drugo) do kraja nije uvijek najbolje rjesenje...The Greatest Intellectual?
Despite his belief that most journalists are unwitting upholders of western imperialism, Noam Chomsky, the radical’s radical, agrees to see me at his office in Boston. He works
here as a professor of linguistics, a sort of Clark Kent alter ego to his activist Superman, in a nubbly old jumper, big white trainers and a grandad jacket with pockets designed to accomodate a Thermos. There is a half-finished packet of fig rolls on the desk. Such is the effect of an hour spent with Chomsky that, writing this, I wonder: is it wrong to mention the fig rolls when there is
undocumented suffering going on in El Salvador? Ostensibly I am here because Chomsky, 76, has been voted the world’s top public intellectual by Prospect magazine, but he has no interest in that. He believes that there is a misconception about what it means to be smart. It is not a question of wit, as with no 5 on the list (Christopher Hitchens) or poetic dash like no 4 (Vaclav Havel), or the sort of articulacy that lends itself to television appearances, like no 37,
the thinking girl’s pin-up Michael Ignatieff, whom Chomsky calls an apologist for the establishment and dispenser of "garbage". Chomsky, by contrast, speaks in a barely audible
croak and of his own, largely unsuccessful, television appearances has written dismissively: "The
beauty of concision is that you can only repeat conventional thoughts." Being smart, he believes, is a function of a plodding, unsexy, application to the facts and "using your intelligence
to decide what’s right". This is, of course, what Chomsky has been doing for the last 35 years, and his conclusions remain controversial: that practically every US president since the
second world war has been guilty of war crimes; that in the overall context of
Cambodian history, the Khmer Rouge weren’t as bad as everyone makes out;
that during the Bosnian war the "massacre" at Srebrenica was probably overstated.
(Chomsky uses quotations marks to undermine things he disagrees with and, in print at least, it can come across less as academic than as witheringly teenage; like, Srebrenica was so not a
massacre.)
While his critics regard him as an almost compulsive revisionist, Chomsky is more mainstream now than ever as disgust with the Bush government grows; the book he put out after the twin towers attacks, called 9-11, sold 300,000 copies. Given that until recently he worked fulltime
at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, there remain suspicions over how he has managed to become an expert, seemingly, on every conflict since the second world war; it is assumed
by his critics that he plugs the gaps in his knowledge with ideology. Chomsky says this is just laziness on their part and besides, "the best scientists aren’t the ones who know the most data;
they’re the ones who know what they’re looking for."
Still, of all the intellectuals on the Prospect list, it is Chomsky who is most often accused of miring a debate in intellectual spam, what the writer Paul Berman calls his "customary blizzard of
obscure sources". I ask if he has a photographic memory and Chomsky smiles. "It’s the other way round. I can’t remember names, can’t remember faces. I don’t have any particular talents that everybody else doesn’t have."
His daily news intake is the regular national press and he dips in and out of specialist journals. I imagine he is a fan of the internet, given his low opinion of the mainstream media (to summarise: it is undermined by a "systematic bias in terms of structural economic causes rather than a
conspiracy of people". I would argue individual agency overrides this, but get into it with Chomsky
and your allocated hour goes up in smoke). So I am surprised when he says he only goes online if he is "hunting for documents, or historical data. It’s a hideous time-waster. One of the good things about the internet is you can put up anything you like, but that also means you can put up any kind of nonsense. If the intelligence agencies knew what they were doing, they would stimulate conspiracy theories just to drive people out of political life, to keep them from asking more serious questions ... There’s a kind of an assumption that if somebody wrote
it on the internet, it’s true."
Is there? It’s clear, suddenly, that Chomsky’s opinion can be as flaky as the next person’s; he just states it more forcefully. I tell him that most people I know don’t believe anything they read on the internet and he says, seemlessly, "you see, that’s dangerous, too." His responses to criticism vary from this sort of mild absorption to, during our subsequent ratty exchange about Bosnia, the childish habit of trashing his opponents whom he calls "hysterical", "fanatics" and "tantrum throwers". I suspect that being on the receiving end of lots "half-crazed" nut-mail, as he calls it
(he gets at least four daily emails accusing him of being a Mossad agent, a CIA agent or a member of al-Qaida), has made his defensive position rather entrenched. Chomsky sighs and says that he has never claimed to have a monopoly on the truth, then looks merry for a
moment and says that the only person who does is his wife, Carol. "My grandchildren
call her Truth Teller. When I tease them and they’re not sure if I’m telling the truth, they turn to her and say: ’Truth Teller, is it really true?’"
These days, Carol accompanies her husband to most of his public appearances. He is asked to lend his name to all sorts of crackpot causes and she tries to intervene to keep his schedule under control. As some see it, one ill-judged choice of cause was the accusation made by Living
Marxism magazine that during the Bosnian war, shots used by ITN of a Serb-run detention camp were faked. The magazine folded after ITN sued, but the controversy flared up again in 2003
when a journalist called Diane Johnstone made similar allegations in a Swedish magazine, Ordfront, taking issue with the official number of victims of the Srebrenica massacre. (She said they were exaggerated.) In the ensuing outcry, Chomsky lent his name to a letter praising
Johnstone’s "klix work". Does he regret signing it? "No," he says indignantly. "It is klix. My only regret is that I didn’t do it strongly enough. It may be wrong;
but it is very careful and klix work." How, I wonder, can journalism be wrong
and still klix? "Look," says Chomsky, "there was a hysterical fanaticism about Bosnia in western culture which was very much like a passionate religious conviction. It was
like old-fashioned Stalinism: if you depart a couple of millimetres from the party line, you’re a traitor, you’re destroyed. It’s totally irrational. And Diane Johnstone, whether you like it or
not, has done serious, honest work. And in the case of Living Marxism, for a big
corporation to put a small newspaper out of business because they think something
they reported was false, is outrageous."
They didn’t "think" it was false; it was proven to be so in a court of law. But Chomsky insists that "LM was probably correct" and that, in any case, it is irrelevant. "It had nothing to do with
whether LM or Diane Johnstone were right or wrong." It is a question, he says,
of freedom of speech. "And if they were wrong, sure; but don’t just scream well, if you say you’re in favour of that you’re in favour of putting Jews in gas chambers."
Eh? Not everyone who disagrees with him is a "fanatic", I say. These are serious, trustworthy people. "Like who?" "Like my colleague, Ed Vulliamy."
Vulliamy’s reporting for the Guardian from the war in Bosnia won him the international reporter
of the year award in 1993 and 1994. He was present when the ITN footage of the Bosnian Serb concentration camp was filmed and supported their case against LM magazine. "Ed Vulliamy is a
very good journalist, but he happened to be caught up in a story which is probably not true."
But Karadic’s number two herself [Biljana Plavsic] pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity.
"Well, she certainly did. But if you want critical work on the party line, General Lewis MacKenzie who was the Canadian general in charge, has written that most of the stories were complete
nonsense." And so it goes on, Chomsky fairly vibrating with anger at Vulliamy and co’s
"tantrums" over his questioning of their account of the war.
I suggest that if they are having tantrums it’s because they have contact with the survivors of Srebrenica and witness the impact of the downplaying of their experiences. He fairly explodes. "That’s such a western European position. We are used to having our jackboot on people’s necks, so we don’t see our victims. I’ve seen them: go to Laos, go to Haiti, go to El Salvador. You’ll see people who are really suffering brutally. This does not give us the right to lie
about that suffering." Which is, I imagine, why ITN went to court in the first place.
You could pick any number of other conflicts over which to have a barney with Chomsky. Seeing as we have entered the bad-tempered part of the interview, I figure we may as well continue and ask if he finds it ironic that, given his views on the capitalist system, he is a beneficiary
of it. "Well, what capitalist system? Do you use a computer? Do you use the internet? Do you take an aeroplane? That comes from the state sector of the economy. I’m certainly a beneficiary of this state-based, quasi-market system; does that mean that I shouldn’t try to make it a
better society?" OK, let’s look at the non-state based, quasi-market system. Does he have a
share portfolio? He looks cross. "You’d have to ask my wife about that. I’m sure she does. I don’t see any reason why she shouldn’t. Would it help people if I went to Montana and lived on a mountain? It’s only rich, privileged westerners – who are well educated and therefore deeply irrational - in whose minds this idea could ever arise. When I visit peasants in southern Colombia, they don’t ask me these questions." I suggest that people don’t like being told off about their lives by someone they consider a hypocrite. "There’s no element of hypocrisy." He suddenly smiles
at me, benign again, and we end it there.