Following the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, John F. Kennedy is reported to have said, “Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.” It is no surprise, then, that the revelation of Noam Chomsky’s long-standing friendship with the late billionaire sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein would trigger an ideological paternity dispute.
Overnight, the public intellectual long considered something of a father figure to the broader political left was transformed into an embarrassing uncle, as representatives of various factions lined up to deny any relation while insisting that his disgrace bore the unmistakable mark of their ideological rivals.
The denunciations and disavowals that followed seemed to describe entirely different people – a callous sexist who benefited from an “old boys club” network, an America-hating zealot who made excuses for authoritarian tyrants abroad, or a weak-willed liberal whose critiques failed to confront imperialism. Yet in their rush to absolve themselves and tar their enemies by association, critics have missed both the unique nature of Chomsky’s position within the left and the deeper issues that enabled his downfall.
“Feminist critics have suggested that Chomsky’s problem was a general blind spot towards women’s issues particularly endemic among men of his stature. This has an undeniable ring of truth, echoed in Chomsky’s dismissive characterization of the #metoo phenomenon as “hysteria” in his emails to Epstein”
Image: Jeffrey Epstein, 27, in a personals ad published in the July 1980 issue of Cosmo magazine, July 1980, Cosmo magazine, Photographer: Stephen Ogilvy, public domain.
To be sure, the condemnations have not been unanimous, as the once-esteemed professor, incapacitated by a stroke and unable to shed any light on the situation himself, has not lacked for defenders. Some, like his wife, have rather unconvincingly argued that he’d been innocently misled and did not know the full extent of Epstein’s wrongdoing. Others have asserted that any error of judgment he committed was a strictly private one, just as fans of Michael Jackson or Varg Vikernes might urge us to separate the art from the artist. And some have even suggested that Chomsky’s association with Epstein had been necessary to gain access to influential figures like Ehud Barak, in an echo of QAnon die-hards and Trump loyalists insisting the president was secretly working to bring down the Lolita Express from the inside. All of these feeble objections are barely worth dignifying. If we were to grant the most generous interpretation of how little Chomsky knew about Epstein’s worst crimes, what he certainly knew at a minimum was that this was a billionaire financier who hired teen models, often from poor and destabilized countries, to “entertain” the global elite on his private island. Even if he had naively and implausibly believed that all of this was being done legally and consensually, we are left with the fact that a man who built a lifetime reputation as a sensitive paragon of moral conscience denouncing the evils of predatory capitalism had in fact cultivated a yearslong personal friendship – not simply a business relationship or professional contact – with someone who could not have been a more blatant and literal embodiment of it. To insist that so glaring a contradiction could be irrelevant to Chomsky’s politics can only come from an understanding of politics so narrow and impoverished as to be useless.
Alternatively, feminist critics have suggested that Chomsky’s problem was a general blind spot towards women’s issues particularly endemic among men of his stature. This has an undeniable ring of truth, echoed in Chomsky’s dismissive characterization of the #metoo phenomenon as “hysteria” in his emails to Epstein (whom he already knew to have been convicted for sex trafficking), as well as his own admission that a man of his generation may not have fully absorbed the impact of the feminist movement. But Chomsky is far from the worst offender in this regard, even within the world of male academics. For instance, his close friend and collaborator Norman Finkelstein, known for being extremely correct on exactly one issue and egregiously wrong on many others, has spent much of his recent career railing against #metoo, pronouns, and cancel culture, yet had no trouble immediately grasping Epstein’s depravity and rejecting his advances in characteristically blunt fashion – despite being far less established in his career and far more in need of a wealthy patron. While ingrained sexism may have been a necessary condition to explain Chomsky’s sympathy for Epstein, it was not a sufficient one.
“…connecting Chomsky’s moral failure to his politics requires accurately understanding those politics in the first place, as well as why many critics have struggled to do so.”
Still from a video recording of the famous 1971 debate between Foucault and Chomsky on Power vs Justice, in which Chomsky reiterates his objection to the Vietnam war and his support of civil disobedience. Screenshot from 7:28, Chomsky-Foucault Debate on Power vs Justice (1971), Philosophy Overdose, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpVQ3l5P0A4.
Thus, connecting Chomsky’s moral failure to his politics requires accurately understanding those politics in the first place, as well as why many critics have struggled to do so. In contrast to most leftist public intellectuals, Chomsky comes from a background more rooted in STEM; in fact, he is widely credited with transforming the linguistics field from a social science into a computational one. This groundbreaking work earned him a top position at MIT during the height of the Cold War, when the university was heavily involved in military technology. Thus, when Chomsky first spoke out against the Vietnam War, it was not as a writer or theoretician rooted in the radical fringe of humanities academia or the communist movement, but as a leading scientific mind within the mainstream establishment of one of the nation’s leading research institutions. Catapulted to prominence by his 1967 essay “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” and his subsequent activism, the professor would go on to produce a staggering amount of political and social commentary across over one hundred published books and countless speeches and interviews. Furthermore, unlike many of his leftist contemporaries, Chomsky would consistently avoid academic jargon, theoretical debates, and historical factional disputes, at times evincing a hostility to the very concept of political theory. For many years of his career he would respond to every email he received from virtually anyone, on virtually any topic, earning a reputation as a particularly accessible and uncondescending public intellectual. With the bulk of his work focusing on concrete contemporary political issues and aimed at general audiences as a “common sense” view of moral decency and humanitarian concern, the soft-spoken intellectual would not only emerge as a household name but for decades served as many people’s gateway to radical anti-capitalist politics in general – a sort of leftist St. Peter, his kindly yet serious visage hovering above the sectarian fray.
Nevertheless, Chomsky was not without particular affiliations. Shaped by his childhood reading about the Spanish Civil War and strained interactions with Stalinist and Trotskyist formations in the Jewish youth milieu, the thinker and activist would reject Soviet Bolshevism as the ideology of state capitalist authoritarian bureaucracy, instead identifying variously as a libertarian socialist and an anarcho-syndicalist while maintaining membership in both the Industrial Workers of the World and the Democratic Socialists of America. This predictably earned him the ire of avowed Marxist-Leninists such as political scientist Michael Parenti, who already in the 1990s was denouncing Chomsky as an anti-communist and “left McCarthyist” parroting Reaganite propaganda to besmirch “actually existing socialism.” Similar criticisms have since been echoed by various alphabet soup micro-parties, internet influencers with various flag emojis in their usernames, and more recent academics like Gabriel Rockhill. From this angle, Chomsky represents a “compatible left” that American imperialism uses to channel discontent into safe avenues of cultural critique and peaceful protest while discrediting revolutionary theories and movements that could (supposedly) pose a real threat to its power; as such, it was no surprise that he was found consorting with the most sordid representatives of the Western capitalist elite.
“[Chomsky’s] approach follows a well-worn pattern: any reports of human rights violations by a government or faction that happens to be on bad terms with the current American foreign policy establishment are immediately treated with the utmost skepticism and picked over with a fine-tooth comb, using standards that one would never apply elsewhere.”
At first glance, these charges seem well supported. You could, for example, point to the low-hanging fruit of Chomsky’s academic position at MIT being directly funded by the U.S. military-industrial complex – something the man himself has openly addressed and agonized over. You could likewise note that despite his frequent criticisms of both major political parties as mere factions of an ultimately hegemonic “business party,” he nevertheless consistently advocated supporting Democratic Party candidates as a lesser evil, at times stridently criticizing radicals who instead pushed for a complete break with the electoral system. And you might even recall his approval, albeit a cautious and qualified one, of U.S. military interventions in Iraq and Syria to protect Kurdish populations. But despite these ostensible transgressions, a cursory look at Chomsky’s best-known public positions over the years reveals more similarities between him and his Marxist-Leninist critics than either would like to admit. Surely Chomsky is due some credit from self-appointed champions of “actually existing socialism” for his dogged defense of the Khmer Rouge, in which he tenaciously downplayed, questioned, and scrutinized any reports of its mass killings as anti-communist propaganda designed to distract from earlier American crimes.1 It was in passages such as this one from Distortions at Fourth Hand that Chomsky pioneered the tactic, now ubiquitously employed by atrocity apologists, of treating refugees as unreliable witnesses with suspect allegiances in contrast to the hypothetical loyal and satisfied workers who remain behind: “Refugees are frightened and defenseless, at the mercy of alien forces. They naturally tend to report what they believe their interlocuters [sic] wish to hear. While their reports must be considered seriously, care and caution are necessary. Specifically, refugees questioned by Westerners or Thais have a vested interest in reporting atrocities on the part of Cambodian revolutionaries, an obvious fact that no serious reporter will fail to take into account.” If the late Michael Parenti could only have found it in him to forgive Chomsky’s incivility towards Stalin, the man who co-chaired the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milošević would have discovered much common ground with the one who wrote a glowing foreword to a book denying the Bosnian Genocide and described the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo as an understandable response to separatist unrest. And the assorted Trotskyists and Maoists who condemned Ukraine’s Maidan uprising as a “fascist coup” and its subsequent defense against Russia’s invasion as an “imperialist proxy war” should at least show some appreciation for Chomsky’s insistence that Russia was provoked by NATO and should be given chunks of Ukraine in order to prevent the threat of nuclear apocalypse.
In fact, such positions have been the norm rather than the exception for Chomsky, whose criticisms of the USSR have rarely extended to its clients, imitators, and successors. For these, the approach2In socialist internationalist circles, this vulgar form of anti-imperialism is referred to as campism – so called because it splits the world into geopolitical blocs or camps based on the alliances of the major nation-states, choosing to align with one over the others in the name of opposing imperialism. Usually, this takes the form of designating all nation-states (such as China, Russia, Iran, etc) opposed to the US and its vassals as “the anti-imperialist camp” and excusing their own capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, or other forms of exploitation, militarism, and oppression as either nonexistent or necessary evils. Though most often an occupational hazard of Leninists, campism is unfortunately widespread in the US left among democratic socialists and even certain anarchists (this last, in no small part due to Chomsky’s influence). It is most common among leftists whose profound opposition to US imperial atrocities (such as the dozens of imperialist wars and fascist dictatorships it’s perpetuated upon Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America since 1945) blinds them to the similar activities of the regional or competing powers that oppose it. And the problem with campism, ultimately, is that there is no one “imperialist bloc”; rather, the global nation-state system is fundamentally one of inter-imperial conflict, often with shifting or even reversing alliances. And all would-be imperial powers, great or small, are states whose ruling classes exploit their own working classes and those of their vassals; hence, siding with one ruling class over another in the name of workers is a tenuous proposition at best. That said, the “third campist” position historically advocated by socialist internationalists like Gendler and this magazine (“neither Washington nor Moscow but the international working class!”) has proven elusive in practice. Much of the discourse around Chomsky and the Leninist campists, or around particular conjunctures like Syria and Ukraine where the great imperial powers clash, is really about what the appropriate stance of the left should be in a world where opposing one power bloc always aids the other, and the intelligence services of each are always attempting to coopt organic social movements of the working class opposed to their state rivals. Does wanting Iran to win the Iran War, so as to halt the Gaza genocide and humiliate the far-right Israeli and US governments, abet the Islamic Republic that shoots or imprisons feminists and socialists? Does wanting Ukraine to win the Russo-Ukrainian War, to halt the expansionist ambitions of Russia’s far-right government, abet the US imperial bloc in shoving neoliberalism down Ukraine’s throat? Can a good socialist want both at the same time? Does advocating for either automatically make you a paid agent or useful idiot of the relevant opposed power? How does one organize at all outside one’s own borders, or build connections with the working class of other countries, given these dynamics? These are questions that the magazine will continue to explore and propose answer to in essays to come. –Eds. follows a well-worn pattern: any reports of human rights violations by a government or faction that happens to be on bad terms with the current American foreign policy establishment are immediately treated with the utmost skepticism and picked over with a fine-tooth comb, using standards that one would never apply elsewhere. Any perceived inconsistencies or exaggerations are trumpeted as sufficient reason to dismiss entire accounts; death tolls are not treated as credible unless accompanied by explicit forensic evidence and a signed order; and every possible benefit of the doubt is given to the perpetrators and their motives. The country was facing a difficult situation and encircled by enemies. The leaders were decisively responding to a real threat. Is it really fair to attribute deaths from starvation to government actions? Maybe something bad happened, but calling it a genocide is an insult to the victims of the Holocaust. And how could it have been a genocide when the population may have actually slightly increased? Why are you paying so much attention to this event anyway when there are so many other awful things happening in the world?
If all of these lines sound familiar, it is because we have recently seen them deployed almost verbatim by Israel while conducting the largest slaughter of children in modern history. The irony, however, is lost on the Zionists, neocons, and other assorted villains for whom Chomsky has long been a favorite target and who did not hesitate to take a victory lap in reaction to the Epstein news. “Legitimizing evil is what Chomsky does,” wrote the Times of Israel, conveniently forgetting Epstein’s own well-documented links to Israeli intelligence and the presence of vocal Zionists such as Alan Dershowitz and Larry Summers among Epstein’s closest associates. But aside from this hypocrisy, the right-wing portrayals of Chomsky as a typical America-hating leftist also miss the mark. Unlike his Marxist-Leninist detractors, who defend dictatorships and their atrocities in the sincerely (if idiotically) held belief that they are necessary steps on the road to a workers’ utopia, Chomsky has no such ideological commitments; whenever his analysis of international affairs has been challenged, the author has made clear that his interest lies neither in the particular events nor the regimes perpetrating them, but in how we discuss them.3 In After the Cataclysm, Chomsky and Herman write: “As in the other cases discussed, our primary concern here is not to establish the facts with regard to postwar Indochina, but rather to investigate their refraction through the prism of Western ideology, a very different task.” As Sophal Ear points out, “This convenient cloak allows its authors to legitimately attack the media’s coverage of the new Kampuchea, while appearing not at all concerned with searching for “truth” in and of itself.”
Chomsky’s best-known work is the oft-quoted – and, in the retrospective light of the scandal, unfortunately named – Manufacturing Consent, co-authored with Edward Herman. First published in 1988, the book describes the “propaganda model” through which corporate mass media, while appearing free and objective, nevertheless works to present news in a way that upholds the prevailing ideology and priorities of the political establishment. By examining and comparing coverage of particular news stories from Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, Chomsky and Herman convincingly demonstrate how American media tends to highlight the crimes of the country’s official enemies while downplaying those of its allies, reproduce government accounts as statements of established fact, and create a hierarchy of which victims of human rights violations are worth more public sympathy and attention. Crucially, unlike state propaganda in authoritarian countries, this process occurs without conscious intent as a result of structural factors such as media ownership, advertising, and access to official sources, with journalists and editors fully convinced they are making a good faith effort to keep the public informed. When read on its own as a general illustration of media trends, the book holds up fairly well even today. But in Chomsky’s statements and media appearances, the “propaganda model” has often served as the hammer that turns everything into a nail. Global tragedies become a mere backdrop to showcase the apparently stunning observation that media reflects the views of government and society, and that American foreign policy is not based in purely noble intentions – a point that Chomsky, regardless of what year it is or who his interlocutor may be, has never failed to treat as if it were mind-blowing forbidden knowledge being imparted to a college freshman for the first time.
Even a college freshman, however, may be able to notice the circularity at play. You might think that the most effective way to demonstrate bias would be to use evidence to establish the actual truth of a given situation in order to then show how it is being distorted in media coverage – but that’s why you’re not a MacArthur Genius. For Chomsky, the idea of Western media bias is axiomatic; thus, a preponderance of reports detailing atrocities perpetrated by a government serves not as evidence of genocide but of how unfairly that government is being treated by the media. And because this is the case, the proper task of a media critic is to cast doubt on these “mainstream” reports while buttressing underrepresented opposing claims – say, propaganda from figures sympathetic to the regime in question – as worthy of serious consideration. Bruce Sharp aptly compared this exercise to a mathematician “averaging wrong answers” to solve a problem.4 “The value of a theory lies in how it relates to the truth, not in how it relates to other theories. By habitually parroting only the contrarian view, Chomsky creates a skewed, inaccurate version of events. This is a fundamentally flawed approach, more concerned with persuasiveness than the truth. It’s the tactic of a lawyer, not a scientist. Chomsky seems to be saying, “If the media is wrong, I’ll present a view which is diametrically opposed.” Imagine a mathematician adopting Chomsky’s method: rather than ensuring the accuracy of the calculations, problems would be “solved” by averaging different wrong answers.” But we may also recall arguments that the media should present “both sides” of the climate change question, “teach the controversy” of creationism versus evolution, or give a fair hearing to Holocaust denial – as Chomsky indeed argued when he wrote in defense of French academic Robert Faurisson.
Indeed, the Faurisson affair, Chomsky’s statements on Cambodia, and his exchange with George Monbiot regarding Bosnia all reveal the same curious pattern: whether or not the gas chambers or the killing fields or the mass graves existed or whether the writers Chomsky had chosen to champion were themselves operating in good faith is of secondary, if any, importance – what’s important is him never being at fault. Thus, when confronted with concrete evidence that he has either gotten an analysis horribly wrong or lent his imprimatur to those who did, Chomsky immediately shifts into defense lawyer mode with all the pedantic testiness of a right-libertarian drawing distinctions between hebephelia and ephebephilia. One favored strategy is to selectively quote fragments of his own statements like “The record of atrocities in Cambodia is substantial” or “the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a major war crime” as if they are his clearly stated primary positions, neglecting to mention that these appear as little more than throat-clearing concessions immediately preceding a main argument devoted to downplaying and denial.5 Such insistence on only evaluating the literal wording of individual sentences while doggedly refusing to engage with normal elements of human communication like context, tone, and implication may seem strange for a linguist, until you recall that Chomsky is known for the controversial theory that language is pre-programmed within individuals independently of socialization and that sentences constitute independent units of meaning. As Chris Knight writes in Aeon, quoting the work of the theoretical linguist Adele Goldberg, “to study written sentences in isolation – the Chomskyan strategy favoured by most theoretical linguists until recently – may be ‘akin to studying animals in separate cages in a zoo.’” Similarly, Chomsky marshals an impressive level of deliberate obtuseness and feigned outrage to assert that he cannot possibly fathom how writing a laudatory foreword to a book could in any way imply endorsement of its contents or author, while insisting in the same breath that he has not read the work in question, that it cannot possibly contain anything abhorrent (but if it did it wouldn’t matter), and that he is in any case not qualified to evaluate its accuracy or integrity but is merely defending the freedom of speech by ensuring that unpopular or marginalized perspectives are heard (without addressing why he chose this particular perspective to defend). You will inevitably find him pivoting the discussion to the subject of American war crimes, indignantly lamenting that the controversy only proves his point about ideological repression, or maintaining that his judgment had been correct as certain facts had not been known at the time (even though he devoted great energy to undermining and resisting those facts as they emerged). But what you will never find, across decades of interviews and mountains of correspondence, is a single instance of Noam Chomsky admitting he was ever wrong about anything at all.
Which of course brings us back to Chomsky and Epstein. What’s striking about this saga is how closely it follows the pattern established above, from Chomsky’s immediately hostile response to the reporter who first asked him about the relationship, to his fixation on legalistic details while ignoring the obvious social import of the question, to his later-revealed personal emails directly expressing sympathy over Epstein’s predicament. Like Pol Pot and Milošević before him, Epstein is presented as an unjustly maligned victim of an ideologically driven media panic bearing all the characteristics of a Stalinist show trial or McCarthyist witch hunt. Through this lens, Chomsky’s friendship with the billionaire sex trafficker becomes not a judgment error or a character flaw but a principled stand for the rights of convicted criminals and a healthy skepticism towards “hysterical” allegations. Rather than a shocking betrayal of all Chomsky has stood for, the episode reveals an almost admirable consistency on his part – obstinate motivated reasoning driven by a hostility towards “establishment narratives” and a defensive intellectual narcissism that both precedes and precludes any sincere attempt to seek where the truth may lie.
“While expressing a distaste for centralized authority in theory, Chomsky’s concrete politics always treat the state – and the interests of individual states – as a given in practice.”
Prof. dr. Noam Chomsky, 1977. Photographer : Peters, Hans / Anefo. With thanks to the Nationaal Archief (NL), public domain.
One may wonder whether this commitment to contrarianism over substance isn’t simply a regrettable personal tic. But Chomsky’s statements over the years reveal that it is a strategic choice – a feature, not a bug. For instance, when discussing his comments on international affairs, Chomsky has explained his approach as follows: one should focus on crimes perpetrated by one’s own government and allies rather than by its enemies, since it is the former and not the latter that one has the most capacity to influence. And much like his propaganda model, this principle – informally dubbed as the “Chomsky rule” by supporters – seems reasonable enough in theory yet immediately falls apart when applied to concrete cases as a guide to action. For as we have seen, Chomsky has not simply limited himself to speaking out about American crimes while leaving criticism of abuses by “enemy” regimes to their own internal dissidents; instead, he has gone out of his way to discredit, dismiss, or minimize the latter, on the logic that their testimonies could theoretically be used to justify U.S. military action. However genuine such fears may be, it is difficult within this framework to see under what circumstances dissenters against America’s “official enemies” should ever be heard at all. Since they usually cannot speak freely in their own countries, the only option for dissidents in places like Russia or Iran is usually to seek an audience within Western media in the hopes of drawing global attention to their plight. Yet in Chomsky’s model, any sympathetic airing of their complaints can only serve imperial interests as long as there is even a hypothetical threat of American intervention – which is to say, always. The “Chomsky rule” thus serves not as a way to best direct the efforts of radicals in different countries, but to segregate them by geography and set them directly at odds with each other.
While a worldview that precludes any possibility for activists and dissidents to cooperate across geopolitical borders might be considered a problem for a purported anarchist, Chomsky’s actual relationship to anarchist thought and tradition has, by his own admission, been rather tenuous.6 In a 1976 interview with Peter Jay, Chomsky flat out states, “Let me just say I don’t regard myself as an anarchist thinker.” With little patience for radical theoretical and class-based critiques of social concepts such as authority or justice, the professor has instead approached politics from a “practical” perspective much more reminiscent of classical liberalism – a tradition he has also identified with.7 From a 1995 interview with Robert McChesney: “I’m frankly sceptical of what are called ‘theories’ in the study of social and political issues, or just about anything of real and direct human significance.” Thus, while expressing a distaste for centralized authority in theory, Chomsky’s concrete politics always treat the state – and the interests of individual states – as a given in practice. This explains why he draws more on “realist” international relations theory than radical models of communal self-organization, why he is more likely to cite Mearsheimer than Makhno when weighing in on Ukraine, and why he so often ends up overlapping with authoritarians in having a greater concern for the international reputation and “legitimate security interests” of state regimes than the testimonies and experiences of their inhabitants.8 John Mearsheimer is the right-wing ‘foreign policy realist’ who has been inexplicably embraced by sections of the left as an expert on Russia and Ukraine despite being no such thing and despite having been wrong in virtually every prediction he has made since the start of the war in 2022. Nevertheless, he continues to make media appearances to advocate Ukraine’s surrender, sometimes in explicitly Russian-sponsored fora. Nestor Makhno is the historical anarchist leader who briefly established an autonomous self-governing territory in southern Ukraine during the Russian Civil War and who has more recently served as an inspiration for leftists involved in Ukraine’s armed defense. Accordingly, the masses are seen not as equals to be sincerely engaged with, but as predictably manipulable subjects that “responsible intellectuals” like himself must reprogram with perspectives carefully calibrated to counterbalance the establishment narratives they have passively absorbed.
“Chomsky’s lasting legacy will be the impressive feat of having combined the worst aspects of just about every leftist and progressive tendency: anarchists’ lack of economic theory and class analysis, Marxist-Leninists’ defense of state atrocities and insistence on viewing politics as a global chessboard, and liberals’ elitist disdain for the masses’ ability to be trusted with interpreting information.”
Besides being deeply cynical, Chomsky’s supposed pragmatism has not stood the test of time. The neat division of the globe into enemies and allies was a naïve and shallow frame of analysis even during the comparatively simpler Cold War years when the professor formulated his approach – one need only have looked at the Suez Crisis, where the U.S. and USSR found themselves aligned against a British-French-Israeli campaign, or Chomsky’s own Cambodian example, where the ups and downs of the Sino-Soviet split resulted in the Khmer Rouge moving from communist villain to indirect American client. Today, the world consists not of two or three but several axes of power with overlapping and contradictory alliances and different factions within countries’ ruling classes openly backing different geopolitical networks. Meanwhile, any notion of establishment consensus has been fragmented into fractal shards of communication that traverse borders, with entire “alternative media” ecosystems funded by the world’s most powerful financial interests and heeded by its most powerful politicians pumping out conspiracy theories about “elites” and “mainstream media” – often framed in heavily vulgarized yet strikingly familiar echoes of Chomsky’s magnum opus. Ironically, all of this comes at a time when the Chomsky model of how American power functions – that we should always be wary of criticizing official enemies lest the CIA and State Department (who ostensibly accord great importance to the utterances of leftist academics and social critics) pluck our words from the ether and use them to “manufacture consent” for a military intervention – has proven questionable at best. In reality, very little consent was manufactured for either the regime change in Venezuela or the assault on Iran, both of which have enjoyed minimal public support and were given at most a series of half-hearted and mutually contradicting justifications before being openly acknowledged as naked resource grabs. We may have manufactured consent once upon a time, but America has long since transitioned to a post-manufacturing economy.
Perhaps it has been his guilty conscience regarding his position at MIT along with a hubristic overestimation of his own capacity for individually grasping the essence of any global matter that led Chomsky to saddle himself with the task of producing counter-propaganda rather than searching for truth; perhaps it was the idea of himself as an American statesman trying to advise policy rather than an international organizer that led him to prioritize a friendship with someone who could provide access to figures like Ehud Barak and Steve Bannon over consideration for his victims. Whatever the case, Chomsky’s lasting legacy will be the impressive feat of having combined the worst aspects of just about every leftist and progressive tendency: anarchists’ lack of economic theory and class analysis, Marxist-Leninists’ defense of state atrocities and insistence on viewing politics as a global chessboard, and liberals’ elitist disdain for the masses’ ability to be trusted with interpreting information.
Ultimately, Chomsky has misunderstood both the nature of truth and its relation to communication. For those interested in human liberation, truth is not something discovered in private by “responsible” experts who must then decide how to disseminate it to achieve particular ends, but something that emerges from the collective commitment of a community engaged in open debate and discussion among equals. Such a project will not be achieved by imagining ourselves as “little Kissingers” endlessly triangulating between different powerful interests (even if we may at times be forced to make temporary use of their resources), but by creating that community ourselves through building connections between workers and activists engaged in similar struggles in different parts of the world – regardless of the slogans and positions of “their” respective governments. A wise man once said, “We shouldn’t be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas.” Perhaps we should heed his advice. ~
