It was as a 10-year-old that Noam Chomsky first confronted the
perils of foreign aggression.
“The first article that I wrote for the elementary school
newspaper was on the fall of Barcelona (in 1939),” Chomsky recalled when we
spoke recently via video call. It charted the advance of the “grim cloud of
fascism” across the world.
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“I haven’t changed my opinion since, it’s just gotten
worse,” he sardonically remarked. Due to the climate crisis and the threat of
nuclear war, Chomsky said, “we’re approaching the most dangerous point in human
history … We are now facing the prospect of destruction of organized human life
on Earth”.
At the age of 93, as perhaps the world’s most cited living
scholar, Chomsky could be forgiven for retreating from the public sphere. But
in an era of permanent crisis, he retains the moral fervor of a young radical –
more preoccupied with the world’s mortality than his own. He is a walking
advertisement for Dylan Thomas’s injunction: “Do not go gentle into that good
night”, or for what Chomsky calls “the bicycle theory: if you keep going fast, you
don’t fall off”.
The occasion for our conversation is the publication of
Chronicles of Dissent, a collection of interviews between Chomsky and the
radical journalist David Barsamian from 1984 to 1996. But the backdrop is the
war in Ukraine — a subject about which Chomsky is unsurprisingly voluble.
“It’s monstrous for Ukraine,” he said. In common with many
Jews, Chomsky has a family connection to the region: his father was born in
present-day Ukraine and emigrated to the US in 1913 to avoid serving in the
tsarist army; his mother was born in Belarus. Chomsky, who is often accused by
critics of refusing to condemn any anti-Western government, unhesitatingly
denounced Vladimir Putin’s “criminal aggression”.
Because of Trump’s fanaticism, the worshipful base of the Republican Party barely regards climate change as a serious problem. That’s a death warrant to the species.
But he added: “Why did he do it? There are two ways of
looking at this question. One way, the fashionable way in the West, is to plumb
the recesses of Putin’s twisted mind and try to determine what’s happening in
his deep psyche.
“The other way would be to look at the facts: for example,
that in September 2021 the US came out with a strong policy statement, calling
for enhanced military cooperation with Ukraine, further sending of advanced
military weapons, all part of the enhancement program of Ukraine joining NATO.
You can take your choice, we don’t know which is right. What we do know is that
Ukraine will be further devastated. And we may move on to terminal nuclear war
if we do not pursue the opportunities that exist for a negotiated settlement.”
How does he respond to the argument that Putin’s greatest
fear is not encirclement by NATO but the spread of liberal democracy in Ukraine
and Russia’s “near abroad”?
“Putin is as concerned with democracy as we are. If it’s
possible to break out of the propaganda bubble for a few minutes, the US has a
long record of undermining and destroying democracy. Do I have to run through
it? Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973, on and on… But we are
supposed to now honor and admire Washington’s enormous commitment to
sovereignty and democracy. What happened in history doesn’t matter. That’s for
other people.
“What about NATO expansion? There was an explicit,
unambiguous promise by [US secretary of state] James Baker and president George
HW Bush to Gorbachev that if he agreed to allow a unified Germany to rejoin
NATO, the US would ensure that there would be no move one inch to the east.
There’s a good deal of lying going on about this now.”
Chomsky, who observed in 1990 that “if the Nuremberg laws
were applied, then every postwar American president would have been hanged”,
spoke witheringly of Joe Biden.
“It’s certainly right to have moral outrage about Putin’s
actions in Ukraine,” he said of Biden’s recent declaration that the Russian
president “cannot remain in power”.
“But it would be even more progress to have moral outrage
about other horrible atrocities…. In Afghanistan, literally millions of people
are facing imminent starvation. Why? There’s food in the markets. But people
who have little money have to watch their children starve because they can’t go
to the market to buy food. Why? Because the US, with the backing of Britain,
has kept Afghanistan’s funds in New York banks and will not release them.”
Chomsky’s contempt for the hypocrisies and contradictions of
US foreign policy will be familiar to anyone who has read one of his many books
and pamphlets (his first political work, American Power and the New Mandarins,
published in 1969, foretold the US’ defeat in Vietnam). But he is now perhaps
most animated when discussing Donald Trump’s possible return and the climate
crisis.
“I’m old enough to remember the early 1930s. And memories
come to mind,” he said in a haunting recollection.
“I can remember listening to Hitler’s speeches on the radio.
I didn’t understand the words, I was six years old. But I understood the mood.
And it was frightening and terrifying. And when you watch one of Trump’s
rallies that can’t fail to come to mind. That’s what we’re facing.”
Though he self-identifies as an anarcho-syndicalist or a
libertarian socialist, Chomsky revealed to me that he had voted for Republicans
in the past (“like them or not, they were an authentic party”). But now he
said, they were a truly dangerous insurgency.
“Because of Trump’s fanaticism, the worshipful base of the
Republican Party barely regards climate change as a serious problem. That’s a
death warrant to the species.”
Faced with such existential threats, it is perhaps
unsurprising that Chomsky remains a dissident intellectual – in the manner of
one of his heroes, Bertrand Russell (who lived to 97 and similarly straddled
politics and philosophy). But he also still spends hours a day answering emails
from admirers and critics, and teaches linguistics at the University of
Arizona, the state where he lives with his second wife, Valeria Wasserman, a Brazilian
translator.
Chomsky is also still engaged by British politics.
“Brexit was a very serious error, it means that Britain will
be compelled to drift even further into subordination to the US,” he told me.
There are plenty of young people who are appalled by the behavior of the older generation, rightly, and are dedicated to trying to stop this madness before it consumes us all. Well, that’s the hope for the future.
“I think it’s a disaster. What does it mean for the
Conservative Party? I imagine they can lie their way out of it, they’re doing a
good job of lying about a lot of things and getting away with it.”
Of Keir Starmer, he scornfully remarked: “He’s returning the
Labour Party to a party that’s reliably obedient to power, that will be
Thatcher-lite in the style of Tony Blair and that won’t ruffle the feathers of
either the US or anyone who’s important in Britain.”
The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci advised radicals to
maintain “pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will”. What, I asked
Chomsky at the close of our conversation, gives him hope?
“A lot of young people; Extinction Rebellion in England,
young people dedicated to trying to put an end to the catastrophe. Civil
disobedience – it’s not a joke, I’ve been involved with it for much of my life.
I’m too old for it now [Chomsky was first arrested in 1967 for protesting
against the Vietnam War and shared a cell with Norman Mailer]… It’s not
pleasant to be thrown in jail and beaten, but they’re willing to undertake it.
“There are plenty of young people who are appalled by the
behavior of the older generation, rightly, and are dedicated to trying to stop
this madness before it consumes us all. Well, that’s the hope for the future.”
This article was previously published in The New Statement
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