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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
The nation's most implacable critic of U.S. foreign policy argues that the war is unjust, America is the biggest terrorist state and intellectuals always support official violence.
Jan 16, 2002 | Noam Chomsky and Susan Sontag will always be remembered as the two leading American intellectuals who said the wrong thing after Sept. 11.
For Sontag, it was her now infamous New Yorker magazine slap at the idea that the terrorists were cowards. For Chomsky, it was statements like this one: "The terrorist attacks were major atrocities. In scale they may not reach the level of many others, for example, the bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext, destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and killing unknown numbers of people (no one knows, because the U.S. blocked an inquiry at the U.N. and no one cares to pursue it)." To many, it seemed Chomsky was shrugging off the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States because our country commits atrocities just as terrible and often worse.
To those abroad who consider American power grossly abusive, Chomsky is a voice of reason -- an American activist who reads their newspapers, keeps track of their suffering and never lets his countrymen forget about it. In his 2000 book, "A New Generation Draws the Line," he railed against our policies in East Timor and Israel, and most importantly, our intervention in Kosovo. What brought the U.S. to the battered region of Yugoslavia, Chomsky wrote, was not a humanitarian drive to stop Slobodan Milosevic from ethnically cleansing yet another Muslim population, but in fact the interests of our foreign policy elite. His critics argue that this is typical; the Chomsky position reflexively brands American foreign intervention as self-interested or imperialistic, regardless of what else might be at stake. But Chomsky's remarks after Sept. 11 struck many as beyond the pale, even those accustomed to his relentless style of dissent.
Chomsky's latest book, "9-11," is a collection of interviews about the "war on terrorism" -- a characterization of the current conflict he rejects. The legendary 73-year-old linguist and political essayist spoke to Salon last week from his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has taught since 1955.
In your public comments after Sept. 11, you drew comparisons to our bombing of the Sudan following bin Laden's attacks on overseas American targets. Were you implying that we brought this on ourselves?
Of course not. That's idiotic.
That wasn't your intention?
Nobody could possibly interpret it that way. [I said] look, this is a horrendous atrocity but unfortunately the toll is not unusual. And that's just a plain fact. I mentioned the toll from one bombing, a minor footnote to U.S. actions -- what was known to be a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, providing half the supplies of the country. That one bombing, according to the estimates made by the German Embassy in Sudan and Human Rights Watch, probably led to tens of thousands of deaths.
I said, look, this is a horrible atrocity but outside of Europe and North America, people understand very well that it's just like a lot of history.
I'm kind of simple-minded. I believe in elementary moral truisms -- namely, if something is a crime when it's committed against us, it's a crime when we commit it against others. If there is a simpler moral truism than that, I'd like to hear it. I think it makes sense to remind people of it.
Were you surprised by how people commonly interpreted your statement?
No, not at all. I expect the intellectual classes to behave exactly like that. That's their historical role -- to support state violence and defame people who try to bring up moral truisms.
You don't think that your statements downplayed what happened on Sept. 11?
By saying that this was a horrendous atrocity committed with wickedness and awesome cruelty, but we should understand that the toll is regrettably not unusual? What's unusual is the direction in which the guns were pointing. I think we should be honest enough to understand that.
You've said repeatedly that the United States is a leading terrorist state. What is your definition of terrorism?
My definition of terrorism is taken from the U.S. Code, which seems to me quite adequate. It comes down to the statement that terrorism is the calculated threat or use of violence with the aim of intimidating and provoking fear and damage in order to achieve political, religious, ideological and other goals, typically directed against civilian populations.
