Noam Chomsky’s 90, His Work Has Not Been More Important.
Noam Chomsky has turned 90 years old.
Noam Chomsky has been America’s foremost dissident intellectual. Authoring over a hundred books and providing innumerable lectures, Chomsky’s activism and advocate work have endured while remaining virtually unheard in corporate news press. Chomsky, an intellectual radical in word and in action. Partnering with other intellectuals and writers and journalists, he has worked tirelessly to study and advocate human rights, legal rights, and moral rights in the face almost continuous war and conflict since the Vietnam war.
Receiving virtually no airtime despite his expertise in linguistics, foreign policy, and political history, Chomsky never once appeared on CBS, NBC, ABC, or Fox. On a rare occasion on April 3, 1969, Chomsky debated prominent conservative William F. Buckley on his show, Firing Line. He also protested the Vietnam war, openly vocal and denouncing it as an act of imperialism. He has been arrested numerous times and Richard Nixon added Chomsky to his unofficial “enemies list.”
Noam Chomsky has been heralded as a salient voice of reasonableness by activists, journalists, and other dissenters. He is also known as “the father of modern linguistics.”
Much of his work includes detailed criticisms of the crimes committed by Western heads of state and imperial institutions, including “acts of aggression.” He has also criticized the corporate media that whitewashes, ignores, and supports those crimes; we see this most clearly in the hagiography of recently passed political leaders, George H W Bush and John McCain. He also has specific criticisms for the intellectual class, who he sees as upholding the conventional and preferred order, thereby continuing to what is our current trajectory.
Perhaps Chomsky’s most important work, given today’s culture, is his media criticism. We reside in a culture that resists and opposes almost any clashing or adversarial viewpoint of official narratives unless, of course, it is within the “allowable spectrum of debate.”
I was exposed to Chomsky through the reading of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, published in 1988 just before the end of the cold war and authored by Noam Chomsky and Edward S Herman. This masterpiece of media criticism explored the propaganda model which elite mass news media apply and use to influence public opinion. It is this model, a series of filters, which serves to maintain and impose preferred order by elite institutions and pillars of power in a democratic society.
It is in Manufacturing Consent that Chomsky and Herman expose the delusional claims of the institution of journalism. That for the mainstream corporate faction of journalism and news media the myth is that they are independent, adversarial, courageous, and struggling against power. While there does exist journalists, media sections, and programs that exhibit these traits, they are allowed to operate as such within a conventional framework and structure that decides what and how issues and reporting are to be carried out — “allowable spectrum of debate.”
“The general population doesn’t know what’s happening, and it doesn’t even know that it doesn’t know,” remarks Chomsky in regards to the general populations understanding of decisions made on its behalf. Carried out by what Chomsky/Herman describes as a “selection of right-thinking personnel and by the editors’ and working journalists’ internalisation of priorities and definitions of news-worthiness that conform to the institution’s policy.” Preferably achieved in this fashion as opposed to blunt and overt intervention or force; serving the ability to “convince” and “manufacture consent” of a population rather than impose it forcefully.
In an interview with BBC journalist Andrew Marr, Chomsky is asked, “How can you know that I’m self-censoring?” Chomsky responds:
I’m not saying you’re self-censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.
As Manufacturing Consent celebrates its 30th anniversary, the tenants and systems of our current propaganda model in Western democratic media institutions have not changed; instead, they have strengthened and become even more concentrated.
In 1988, following a lecture about his book, Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies, David Frum suggested that for Chomsky, based on his writings, some corpses weigh more heavily (theirs) than others (ours). Chomsky responded by explaining why this was — and still is — untrue. Instead, it is the media’s treatment of the victims that he describes. That the filters used are ones that give importance to some victims over others.
In fact, it was in Manufacturing Consent that distinguished the “worthy” and “unworthy” victim narrative used by news media which is used to support official narratives, which Frum dutifully employs to this day. David Frum was also the future author of the now infamous “Axis of Evil” speech that reinforced public support for George W Bush’s horrific war in Iraq.
The brutal US-led invasion and subsequent occupation of a sovereign state of Iraq could not have been possible without the public manufacturing of consent. Justifying those actions on lies and falsehoods from the highest office in the world and dutifully trumpeted by mainstream news media, in part, facilitated by the Western intellectual class.
At the time of the invasion, I was not politically active or aware of the ubiquitous nature of political forces and how concentrated private power is tied to political power. I had, like many others, then supported Saddam’s removal, who was a brutal dictator. Little did I know that Saddam had been a close regional ally of the US, whom they armed and funded during his war with Iran, which was never intended to end. Henry Kissinger exclaimed that “the continuation of fighting between Iran and Iraq was in the American interest.”
The national media rarely, if ever, challenged the US government’s Iraq war rhetoric, which David Frum helped to provide. The obedience and conformity of dominant media outlets effectively turned them into state megaphones. So how is the public to know or understand the greater context of impending war and to act responsibly if that context is not explored by an ostensibly adversarial media?
Looking back at Iraq’s history now, we see a devastated country ripped apart by violence with estimates of up to or over a million dead. Also, the rise of ISIS and the subsequent devastation are as the result of the US invasion and occupation, not in some arbitrary vacuum. Still, violence continues to this day, the country still not even remotely recovered. These are “the predictable consequences of our actions” Chomsky described.
Based on international law — “simple” ethics and the moral argument aside — it was our leaders who have committed notable atrocities or worked to facilitate them. The perpetrators of those crimes are then and continue to be, held in lofty and high regard. In the highest almost ordained order, the funerals of John McCain and George H W Bush illustrate that.
Don’t speak ill of the dead.
This moral journalistic point is rarely applied in major news media and criticism of these dead leaders in virtually outlawed. Elite news-media journalists are expected to participate in the deification of these leaders, read CNN’s Jake Tapper Twitter page. To omit George H W Bush’s’ war crimes is journalistic malpractice, which is done with enthusiastic conformity.
Bush’s crimes include a family legacy that has ties to Naziism, the invasion of Panama, and the pardoning of the Iran-Contra criminals to avoid possible jail. He administered dirty wars in Central America and carrying out Operation Condor, supporting Saddam in Iraq, and helped to install brutal sanctions that killed countless Iraqis. This is all blood on Bush’s hands and conveniently omitted during his national eulogies. These crimes contain “unworthy” victims.
The order and religion of American Exceptionalism must be maintained.
The New York Times and Washington Post are hugely influential. In fact, for example, the New York Times is outpacing Canadian news media outlets for online subscriptions. Publishing outright lies and propaganda is a regular occurrence for our media. Yet, unironically, we are only concerned with propaganda, lies, disinformation, or “fake news” — whatever that means — of our enemies or from those we disagree with.
These are the “Necessary Illusions” Chomsky skillfully articulates. Where news media operate to maintain required order and doctrine. In Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies, he writes:
Within the reigning social order, the general public must remain an object of manipulation, not a participant in thought, debate, and decision.
And we wonder why trust in news media is at an all-time low. Moreover, how can someone like President Trump call journalists “enemy of the people”? News pundits and people like David Frum are appalled at Trump’s brazen vocal incitement for violence against journalists and cannot understand why that public sentiment would exist.
Yet, major news media conglomerates have dutifully ensured the preferred state capitalist world order for decades. It’s agents of influence carrying out brazen manipulation of public attitude regarding elite interests — manufacturing consent.
Trump has not been the catalyst of the current disdain for news media; instead, he is the predictable result of our actions. Actions carried out by pundits and cable news who give countless time slots to ex-military officials, career politicians, and elite CEO’s; all having a vested interest in maintaining their preferred dominant order.
In 1967 Chomsky wrote an article for The New York Review of Books. In it, he stated, “IT IS THE RESPONSIBILITY of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies.”
Chomsky’s opening line described him reading Dwight Macdonald’s articles in Politics on the responsibility of peoples — and specifically, intellectuals — concerning war crimes. Following the Vietnam war, he reread them. That spurred him to write the essay. He wrote, “they seem to me to have lost none of their power or persuasiveness.” Macdonald was concerned with the question of war guilt and to what extent are a countries citizens responsible for their countries crimes, in this case, Japan and Germany. Chomsky follows Macdonald and asks the same question about us in current context.
To anyone whose political and moral consciousness had been formed by the horrors of the 1930s, by the war in Ethiopia, the Russian purge, the “China Incident,” the Spanish Civil War, the Nazi atrocities, the Western reaction to these events and, in part, complicity in them — these questions had particular significance and poignancy.
Reading Chomsky’s The Responsibility of Intellectuals following almost 18 years of US-led war in Afghanistan and it’s global military footprint, Chomsky’s essay has lost none of its power or persuasiveness either.
With respect to the responsibility of intellectuals, there are still other, equally disturbing questions. Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions. In the Western world, at least, they have the power that comes from political liberty, from access to information and freedom of expression. For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us. The responsibilities of intellectuals, then, are much deeper than what Macdonald calls the “responsibility of people,” given the unique privileges that intellectuals enjoy.
Chomsky’s thoughts on how the intellectual class not only supports western militarism and imperial ambitions but most importantly is used — butressing the vanguard of corporate news media — to secure the public consent needed to carry them out. The Western intellectual class, in large part, stay silent in the face of impending war crimes or after they have been carried out but also actively participate in making them possible.
It is a sobering and predictive analysis — one that still continues to this day.
This section in The Responsibility of Intellectuals is worth reading, for those interested click the link to find the full essay.
You can find a collection of Noam Chomsky’s work here.
The deceit and distortion surrounding the American invasion of Vietnam is by now so familiar that it has lost its power to shock. It is therefore useful to recall that although new levels of cynicism are constantly being reached, their clear antecedents were accepted at home with quiet toleration. It is a useful exercise to compare Government statements at the time of the invasion of Guatemala in 1954 with Eisenhower’s admission — to be more accurate, his boast — a decade later that American planes were sent “to help the invaders” (New York Times, October 14, 1965). Nor is it only in moments of crisis that duplicity is considered perfectly in order. “New Frontiersmen,” for example, have scarcely distinguished themselves by a passionate concern for historical accuracy, even when they are not being called upon to provide a “propaganda cover” for ongoing actions. For example, Arthur Schlesinger (New York Times, February 6, 1966) describes the bombing of North Vietnam and the massive escalation of military commitment in early 1965 as based on a “perfectly rational argument”:
“so long as the Vietcong thought they were going to win the war, they obviously would not be interested in any kind of negotiated settlement.”
The date is important. Had this statement been made six months earlier, one could attribute it to ignorance. But this statement appeared after the UN, North Vietnamese, and Soviet initiatives had been front-page news for months. It was already public knowledge that these initiatives had preceeded the escalation of February 1965 and, in fact, continued for several weeks after the bombing began. Correspondents in Washington tried desperately to find some explanation for the startling deception that had been revealed. Chalmers Roberts, for example, wrote in the Boston Globe on November 19 with unconscious irony:
“[late February, 1965] hardly seemed to Washington to be a propitious moment for negotiations [since] Mr. Johnson…had just ordered the first bombing of North Vietnam in an effort to bring Hanoi to a conference table where the bargaining chips on both sides would be more closely matched.”
Coming at that moment, Schlesinger’s statement is less an example of deceit than of contempt — contempt for an audience that can be expected to tolerate such behavior with silence, if not approval.[2]
