Noam Chomsky is the closest thing in the English-speaking world to an intellectual superstar. A philosopher of language and political campaigner of towering academic reputation, who as good as invented modern linguistics, he is entertained by presidents, addresses the UN General Assembly and commands a mass international audience. When he spoke in London last week, thousands of young people battled for tickets to attend his lectures, followed live on the Internet across the globe, as the 80-year-old US linguist fielded questions from as far away as besieged Gaza.
However, the bulk of the mainstream Western media doesn’t seem to have noticed. His books sell in their hundreds of thousands, he is mobbed by students as a celebrity, but he is rarely reported or interviewed in the US outside radical journals and Web sites. The explanation, of course, isn’t hard to find. Chomsky is the US’ most prominent critic of the US imperial role in the world, which he has used his erudition and standing to expose and excoriate since Vietnam.
Like the English philosopher Bertrand Russell, who spoke out against Western-backed wars until his death at the age of 97, Chomsky has lent his academic prestige to a relentless campaign against his own country’s barbarities abroad.
In contrast to the aristocratic Russell, however, Chomsky is the child of working class Jewish refugees from Czarist pogroms. Not surprisingly, he has been repaid with either denunciation or, far more typically, silence. Whereas a much slighter figure such as the Atlanticist French philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy is lionized at home and abroad, Chomsky and his genuine popularity are ignored.
Indeed, his books have been banned from the US prison library in Guantanamo. You’d hardly need a clearer example of his model of how dissenting views are filtered out of the Western media, set out in his 1990s book Manufacturing Consent, than his own case. But as Chomsky is the first to point out, the marginalization of opponents of Western state policy is as nothing compared to the brutalities suffered by those who challenge states backed by the US and its allies in the Middle East.
We meet in a break between a schedule of lectures and talks that would be punishing for a man half his age. At the podium, Chomsky’s style is dry and low-key, as he ranges without pausing for breath from one region and historical conflict to another, always buttressed with a barrage of sources and quotations, often from US government archives and leaders themselves.
But in discussion he is warm and engaged, only hampered by slight deafness. He has only recently started traveling again, he explains, after a three-year hiatus while he was caring for his wife and fellow linguist, Carol, who died from cancer last December. Despite their privilege, his concentrated exposure to the continuing injustices and exorbitant expense of the US health system has clearly left him angry.
Public emergency rooms are “uncivilized, there is no health care,” he says, and the same kind of corporate interests that drive US foreign policy are also setting the limits of domestic social reform.
HEALTHCARE
All three schemes now being considered for US President Barack Obama’s healthcare reform are “to the right of the public, which is two to one in favor of a public option. But the New York Times says that has no political support, by which they mean from the insurance and pharmaceutical companies.”
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