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The Anti-Chomsky Reader, by Peter Collier and
David Horowitz. Encounter Books, 2004, 260 pages.
The Many Hatreds of Noam
Chomsky by Frank Fox
"The Anti-Chomsky Reader" is a recently published
collection of critical essays, edited by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, on
Noam Chomsky's political philosophy. It includes chapters on Chomsky
"Whitewashing Dictatorships in Communist Vietnam and Cambodia," "Chomsky and the
Cold War," "Chomsky and the Media: A Kept Press and a Manipulated People,"
"Chomsky's War Against Israel," "Chomsky and Holocaust Denial," "Chomsky and
9/11," and "Noam Chomsky's Anti-American Obses-sion." There are also a couple of
chapters that question Chomsky's standing among linguists.
| | Frank
Fox is the author of "God's Eye: Aerial Photography and the Katyn Forest
Massacre." |
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The book's cover is an apt one. It features Chomsky's face as a photographic
negative, his eyes quizzically peering from behind aviator glasses, his wide
mouth arranged in a shape that is at once a self-satisfied smile and a ghostly
sneer. The arresting image is fitting, evocative of the many unanswered and
troubling questions about this controversial intellectual figure.
The volume examines a variety of controversies that have swirled around the
famous scholar and anti-American propagandist. While it challenges his veracity
on a number of issues and his reputation as a pioneer linguist, it does not
provide a satisfactory explanation for Chomsky's unremitting attacks on the land
of his birth. Whence comes Chomsky's great hatred of America, a country that has
afforded him and his family a lifetime of comforts? In words penned in 1979, he
described Washington as the "torture and political murder capital of the world"
— this at the time when cruel communist regimes, particularly that of
Cambodia's Pol Pot (whose murderous reign Chomsky was unwilling to confront),
were responsible for the genocidal deaths of millions. His views on America have
not changed. He considers the 9/11 attacks a justifiable and overdue response
— America is to blame. Only an Islamic fanatic could match Chomsky for such
vehemence and vitriol.
Just as perplexing are the origins of his equally great hatred for Zionism, an
ideology he once admired, and for Israel, a country for whose welfare he
struggled as a youth. He has described as "Nazi-like" the actions of Israel
fighting for its survival. There can be no more hateful expression against the
land and people of Israel than to brand them with that label.
"The Anti-Chomsky Reader" tells the hitherto untold story of Chomsky's journey
from Zionism to contacts with neo-Nazis, from philosophical discussions to a
one-sided view of the world in which the United States and Israel are considered
the world's preeminent enemies of peace. His life is a story of betrayals. One
betrayal is of his family and its strong Jewish roots: Chomsky may aptly be
called a "self-hating Jew."
Those of us who met him as fellow students at Gratz High School in
Philadelphia in the early 1940s remember a very bright teenager in a class taught
by his mother, Elsie, the principal of the Hebrew School. She was by some
accounts a domineering woman (some described her as "tyrannical") in contrast to
her passive husband, William, an authority on Hebrew grammar. They lived in
Philadelphia's East Logan neighborhood and owned a car, a sign of affluence in
those days. Noam attended the exclusive Oak Lane Country Day School. "He was not
in the mainstream with the rest of us guys," a contemporary recalled. "He didn't
play football or baseball." |
| Whence comes Chomsky's
great hatred of America, a country that has afforded him and his family a
lifetime of comforts? |
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Long before he acquired a reputation as one of the world's bitterest critics
of Israel, Noam had a keen interest in pioneering Zionism. He joined a radical
Zionist group, Hashomer Hatzair ("The Young Watchman"), and spent some time as a
teenager working on a kibbutz. The Jewish academic community in Philadelphia was
not strongly pro-Zionist, but all of Noam's friends were, and those who knew him
then cannot understand "what happened to Noam." But surely an important clue lies
in the intemperate views on America that he has imparted to audiences all over
the world. These have caused much confusion, particularly among youth for whom
Chomsky and his radical ideology have become a lightning rod for hatreds and
disappointments. He has become an icon whose views have even been espoused and
recited by rock stars at concerts.
The second betrayal is an example of Chomsky using personal vendettas to
settle historical scores. It is a story of unrequited love, albeit of an
intellectual variety. The ideas of Professor Ellis Rivkin, a gifted and respected
scholar who has praised America's leadership in the world, influenced the young
Chomsky, but Rivkin's name is missing from the indexes of books dealing with the
foremost radical of our times. The differences between young Chomsky and Rivkin
became an intensely personal conflict, one in which the student, whose admiration
for his mentor was unbounded, eventually devoted his entire life to contradicting
his teacher's view of history.
Rivkin received his training at the Johns Hopkins University, where he
specialized in medieval history and Biblical studies. But he was principally
interested in the dynamics of change. Where Noam was convinced of the evils of
the American system, Rivkin was trying to explain to him the dynamics of change
within that system.
The controversy with Rivkin formed an early pattern in Chomsky's life. Many
who knew him in his formative years are gone, but some measure of the deep hurt
he caused to those closest to him may be gauged by the fact that the family of
Professor Selig Harris, a mentor of Chomsky's at the University of Pennsylvania,
refuses even to discuss Chomsky, convinced that his ideas on grammar were
originally those of Professor Harris. The names of those two influential
scholars, like the likenesses from the Soviet hierarchy after Stalin's purges,
are missing from the many works that deal with Chomsky's life.
Rivkin knew Chomsky when Chomsky was in his teens. It was because of Rivkin's
offbeat, dialectical approach in dealing with themes in Jewish history, and his
emphasis on economic forces, that Chomsky contemplated studying history. Rivkin
discussed the despotic aspects of the Soviet system long before the Cold War. His
knowledge of Marxist thought was grounded not only in the original ideas of its
founders but in the many splinter groups that accompanied the expulsion and
eventual assassination of Leon Trotsky. I remember sitting in Rivkin's class soon
after the war and hearing for the first time about the sham trials of the
"wreckers and saboteurs" in the Soviet Union a decade earlier. Those of us in the
service who were exposed to Ilya Ehrenburg's wartime harangues, sent courtesy of
the Soviet Embassy, knew little about these matters. Stalin was, after all, our
ally. Rivkin made us aware of the critique of those trials by the philosopher
John Dewey and others.
Chomsky and Rivkin talked before classes, took long walks, and sometimes had
dinner together. They were both disillusioned with Stalinism, but for different
reasons. Chomsky was intent on seeing how a "purer" Marxism could be achieved,
while Rivkin wanted to understand the growth of the free-enterprise system.
Rivkin's knowledge of Jewish history provided him with a starting point for
creating a new view of the world and the forces in it. He saw the Jews as
occupying a crucial place in the evolution of capitalism, from its inception to
its present global influence. According to Rivkin, the history of Jews departed
from that of other societies because of the Jews' religious concept of unity, an
idea he was to develop fully in his important work "Shaping of Jewish History: A
Radical New Interpretation" (Scribners, 1972). In this extraordinary book, Rivkin
undertook a study of the importance of developmental Judaism and developmental
capitalism. It was an intellectual tour de force which Chomsky would not
acknowledge and whose import he has ignored for more than half a century. His
attacks on Rivkin's ideas about democratic capitalism have not mentioned the name
of his former professor and close friend.
| Those of us who met
Chomsky as fellow students at Gratz High School in Philadelphia in the early
1940s remember a very bright teenager in a class taught by his mother, Elsie, the
principal of the Hebrew School. |
|
Rivkin's book is a history of changing forms, but always has at its center a
key element: the concept of unity that generated diversity. Rivkin saw the idea
of unity in the universe as the underpinning of all progress — a
contribution from Jewish tradition — as a tool for interpreting all history.
Emancipation of Jews was always part of economic, social, and political
movements. To Rivkin, the rise of Nazism was a result of the stagnation of
nation-state capitalism in Germany. The Holocaust, in his opinion, resulted from
"an entrapped nation state." America, on the other hand, was a society in a state
of "permanent revolution" (a Trotskyite expression never intended to describe a
system of developmental capitalism).
Rivkin argued that America could fashion a global system in which the profit
motive would serve a global society. This would be of crucial importance to Jews,
who found a home in every age and in every land in which there was economic
progress. When a society was in a state of growth, it drew on whatever the Jews
had to offer. Remove the economic growth, Rivkin argued, and anti-Semitism would
flourish. Conversely, when capitalism prospered, Jews were safe.
Rivkin recalled many years later the shock that Chomsky expressed in 1955 when
he told him that he was going to accept a position at Hebrew Union College in
Cincinnati and that he was talking about the future of capitalism rather than
class struggle. "I thought he was going to drag me into the Charles River,"
Rivkin recalled. "Noam's focus was on the evils of our system. I could understand
why he would raise questions," Rivkin said, but "I could not understand why he
would get angry." But then the followers of Marx were known for their intemperate
expressions, as when Marx referred to Ferdinand Lasalle, the German
Social-Democrat, as "Nigger Lassalle."
Chomsky was committed to a pure Marxism, but Rivkin was not. In contrast to
Lenin, who considered imperialism the last stage of capitalism, Rivkin saw
imperialism as a cage erected by nation-state capitalism. It kept alive the world
of cheap, replicating labor; it did not bring about the efficient capitalism that
a global economy demanded. Chomsky could not see this. He didn't understand that
those who were driven by power rather than profit motive would enslave others in
the name of some "ideal."
Rivkin often referred to the writings of George Marlen (a pseudonym for George
Spiro) and had been a keen follower of Marlen, a self-taught radical in New York
and one of the many small players in the splintered Trotskyist movement in the
1930s. Marlen was an advocate of an analytical method that Rivkin had found
useful and that Chomsky eventually used to the exclusion of all others: to
analyze "the game of nations" based on memoirs, newspaper clippings, and
little-noticed items in the press that somehow escaped the average reader's
scrutiny. In one of the most revealing essays in the "The Anti-Chomsky Reader,"
sociologist Werner Cohn, who wrote the pioneering work on Chomsky's contacts with
Neo-Nazis ("The Hidden Alliances of Noam Chomsky," 1988) and has repeated his
accusations in the essay "Chomsky and Holocaust Denial" in the Collier-Horowitz
volume, has explained the influence of Marlen on Chomsky's modus operandi.
Chomsky was "fascinated" as a teenager by the ideas of the Marlenites, a group he
must have learned about from discussions with Rivkin. These were founders of
"Council Communism," who under such leaders as Rosa Luxemburg fought against the
"dictatorship of the proletariat." Of all the essays in "The Anti-Chomsky
Reader," Cohn's is most damning, particularly on Chomsky's contacts with Robert
Faurisson and other Holocaust deniers. Chomsky excuses his ties with deniers by
appeal to the "right of free speech," but the roots of Chomsky's hatred are
shallow in their intellectual import, deep in their long-standing animosities,
and harmful in their effect on susceptible minds.
Chomsky has continued his drumbeat of hatred. In a lengthy profile by Larissa
MacFarquhar ("The Devil's Accountant," New Yorker, March 31, 2003), there are
telling sentences that show his approach to problems now facing America. The
author is struck by the manner in which he addresses those issues. She talks
about his "rage," how his "sentences slice and gash . . . envenomed by a vicious
sarcasm," and says his writing is "as ferocious as the actions he describes."
Chomsky's world is one in which his native country is ever ready to commit new
atrocities. If America wars against Iraq, the reason could not be the intent to
topple a tyrant because, according to him, we managed to get along with other
tyrants in the past.
Chomsky moralizes about the failings of America, but in his pursuit of
incriminating evidence he neglects some of the least understood factors in the
histories of nations and the lives of their leaders: instances of chance,
accident, miscalculation, or plain stupidity that have influenced events. These
are not part of Chomsky's worldview. At age 75, he continues to search in
political systems for the kind of symmetry that he sought to find in language
structure, oblivious of the fact that human beings often behave in unexpected
ways. Inspired by idealistic communists, he seems to have forgotten Karl Marx's
famous comment that men make history, but not in the way they intend it. He
ascribes the worst motives to America, never willing to consider the generous
character of a land that continues to be a beacon of hope for many in the world,
and a land of opportunity, as it has been for him. What a waste!
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