Washington Post Smears and Censors Noam Chomsky

Several years ago I interviewed Noam Chomsky on his book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media prior to his speaking engagement in Madison, Wisconsin.

It was the easiest interview that I have done. I asked two questions, one of which was “for example,” and received extensive and instructive responses.

“Thanks Noam,” I said at the end. All I really needed were a few quotes for a daily newspaper piece, but it was an engaging interview.

As I read Chomsky’s writings, I came to realize later that Chomsky is not popular with a certain class of American intellectuals, and Chomsky’s intellectual foes ranging from Jacob Weisberg, Andrew Sullivan, David Brooks and Jeffrey C. Isaac to far-right writers such as David Horowitz and Peter Collier share a perverse refusal to engage Chomsky in debate.

It’s all about vilification and—though these writers be intellectuals—juvenile name calling.

Typical of this brand of unengaged scorn is the review by Jonathan Rauch (September 2, 2007) of Chomsky’s new Interventions (City Lights) in the Washington Post.

It’s true that a book review cannot dispute a book point-by-point; that’s certainly not the objective of a book review. But one does expect at the very least an intelligent subjectivity.

Jonathan Rauch fails the readers miserably in this regard, and his editors at The Post are even worse.

Echoing David Brooks’ (NYT, January 6, 2004, cited in CounterPunch) “Planet Chomsky” derision, Rauch begins his review by noting that Chomsky is not well known in the “Capital Beltway.”

The reason behind Chomsky’s absence from this intellectual, modern-day Athens owes much to Interventions’ (and Chomsky's) “flights to a separate reality,” “tendentious whimsy,” and the “instant forgettability” of this “tired book,” revealing Chomsky’s inadequacy as the “thinker” necessary to offer the world “ …a pointed, perceptive leftist critique of Bush's foreign policy and America's blind spots.”

And I had no idea that the D.C. Beltway was so high-brow and open to criticism of the establishment foreign policy from a leftist perspective.

But Rauch does note that Chomsky goes so far as to contend that:

America, for Chomsky, has long been a major perpetrator of state terror; but now, with the advent of the Bush administration, ‘The most powerful state in history has proclaimed that it intends to control the world by force.’

Now, where would Chomsky possibly get that idea? Need we even cite?
Let’s just borrow from Brother Martin:

I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today - my own government.
- 4th April, 1967

It’s 40 years later, but one does not require the intellectual acumen of a Capital Beltway political journalist to realize the significance of the National Security Strategy for the United States of America (September 2002).

Rauch does point out, in a rare grappling with Chomsky’s arguments, that “(i)f Bush is pursuing imperialism in Baghdad, it is of a very curious sort,” because our enterprise is not going so well.

You see, the Shiite population in the south is friendly to the Shiite population in Iran (as Chomsky and everyone outside of Washington predicted would happen).

In Rauch’s logic, if imperialism is executed badly, then it must not be occurring at all, no matter those cynics who believe that if Iraq’s main exports were apples we would still be pouring $100s of billions into our efforts to export democracy, and not establishing a client oil state as cynics such as Chomsky believe.

In a rejoinder to Chomsky, Rauch uses the term “sovereign” to describe Iraq today. Call me beholden to a “separate reality,” but if over 350,000 U.S. troops and mercenaries occupy a country against the wishes of its people, then I assert that the country is not sovereign.

However, Rauch explains that: “In truth, foreign policy in the Bush years has blended aggression, humanitarianism, idealism and realism into a strange new brew.”

I see now.

One could go on; but Chomsky offered the Post’s editors a 779-word, point-by-point letter in response to Rauch’s review.

One would think that out of a sense of fairness and concern for offering readers needed information, the Post editors would be happy to run Chomsky’s letter.

Wrong.

But Chomsky knows the score. Below is Chomsky’s preface and unpublished letter now posted on his website. It makes for a nice laugh at Rauch’s expense, really, and calls into question the motivations for the style and substance of the review and the editors’ refusal to allow Chomsky’s response into print.

Posted Wednesday, September 26, 2007

The letter to the Washington Post that follows was written as an
experiment, to see just how low the editors would sink in their efforts to block a book containing evidence and analysis that they do not want to reach the public. The letter is a response to a crude and vulgar diatribe, in the form of a review of my collection Interventions. In response, I wrote a point-by-point refutation of each charge, a straightforward matter, as the editors doubtless understand. The letter was sent to the Post immediately, altogether four times, with a request for acknowledgment of receipt. Unpublished, no acknowledgment of receipt. Two weeks after the review appeared, Sept. 16, the Post did publish two letters responding to it. The letters were critical of the review, but acceptable by the standards of the editors, because they left the lies and slanders standing -- the authors could have had no way to refute them without a research project.

I think it is fair to take the editors' silence to demonstrate that they know precisely what they are doing, and are too cowardly even to acknowledge receipt.

- Noam Chomsky

Editor
Washington Post

Jonathan Rauch's review of my Interventions (WP, Sept. 2) brings to mind Orwell's famous observations on the "indifference to reality" of the nationalist, who "not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but ... has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."

Rauch runs through a series of what he regards as "flights into a separate reality" and "tendentious whimsy." When exposed, a straightforward matter, his charges may appear to be conscious deceit, but are more charitably understood as a textbook illustration of Orwell's observations.

Rauch is appalled that I should charge Washington with bombing Serbia in 1999 "not to prevent ethnic cleansing but to impose Washington's neoliberal economic agenda." I neither made nor endorsed the statement. Rather, I quoted it accurately, not in his words. The source is a high official of the Clinton administration directly involved in the Kosovo events, describing how events were perceived at the highest level. See p. 179.

Another bit of "tendentious whimsy" is the statement that "North Korea’s counterfeiting racket may actually be a CIA operation." I neither made nor endorsed the statement, but cited it, accurately, from the respected Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Rauch finds equally appalling the fact that "In Chomsky’s universe, the 2001 U.S. attack on Afghanistan was undertaken with the expectation that it might drive several million people over the edge of starvation." The statement is precisely accurate. That is why aid agencies bitterly condemned the bombing, joined by leading Afghan opponents of the Taliban, including US favorites. It is also why many months after the bombing ended, Harvard's leading specialist on Afghanistan, Samina Ahmed, wrote in the Harvard journal International Security that "millions of Afghans are at grave risk of starvation." That and more is in the book under review, but in these op-eds I did not provide full details that would be familiar to readers of the mainstream press, for example, the increase in estimate of those at the edge of starvation by 50%, to 7.5 million, when the
bombing was announced and initiated. If Rauch is indeed unfamiliar with the mainstream press, he can find precise references in books of mine cited here.

Particularly amazing in Rauch's universe is the idea, in his words, that "President Bush“ the first and only U.S. president to declare formal American support for a Palestinian state“ is the obstacle to a two-state solution that Hezbollah, Hamas and Iran are all prepared to accept (I am not making that up)." The tiny particle of truth here is that Bush announced his "vision" of a Palestinian state“ somewhere, some day, a pale reflection of the long-standing international consensus on a two-state settlement. Bush did indeed innovate: he is the first president to officially endorse Israeli annexation of the major illegal settlements in the West Bank, a long step backwards from Clinton's "parameters," and a death blow to any hope for a viable Palestinian state, as minimal familiarity with the region demonstrates.

In contrast, Iran's "supreme leader" Ayatollah Khamenei formally announced that Iran "shares a common view with Arab countries on ... the issue of Palestine," meaning that Iran accepts the Arab League position: full normalization of relations in terms of the international consensus. "Khamenei has said Iran would agree to whatever the Palestinians decide," the prominent Iran scholar Ervand Abrahamian observes. If Rauch reads the journal in which he writes, he knows that Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniye called for "statehood for the West Bank and Gaza..." (Washington Post, July 11, 2006) There are innumerable other examples, perhaps most important among them the statement of the most militant Hamas leader Khalid Mish'al, in exile in Damascus, calling for "the establishment of a truly sovereign and independent Palestinian state on the territories occupied by Israel in June 1967" (Guardian, Feb. 23, 2007). Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has repeatedly stated that as a Lebanese organization, Hezbollah will not disrupt anything agreed to by the Palestinians.

Much as it may distress the nationalist, on this matter the positions of Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah are more moderate“ that is, closer to the long-standing international consensus“ than those of the US and Israel.

In Rauch's universe, Washington "tolerates a sovereign, more or less democratic Iraq whose Shiite government is friendly toward Iran." No comment should be necessary for readers of the daily press.

That exhausts Rauch's charges. Orwell triumphs again.

It is perhaps not surprising that Rauch's furious exertions did not unearth even a misplaced comma. As he knows, the op-eds passed through New York Times fact checking. There might be a lesson there for the journal in which he is a senior writer.

Noam Chomsky
### - Crossposted at UppityWisconsin -