Chomsky on 9-11. (Reviews).

9-11. By NOAM CHOMSKY. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001.

To give due credit, it's hard to think of another man who so robustly represents the failure of progressive thought in the United States as Noam Chomsky.

Chomsky lives in a Newtonian universe of leftism where political mass and gravitational effects are predictable, and where good and bad actors spin in a foreordained social dance. All political developments are subject to interpretation within this now-ossified model, enunciated beginning with his opposition to the Vietnam War in the 1960s. This is a peculiarly American model that, while identified within the U.S. left's core literature, resists global manifestations of class difference and capitalism-as-system as explanatory contributions towards the problems it addresses. The American-ness of this model lies in its insistence on the rule of pragmatic facts, or as William James phrased it, in a turn towards alleged "concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power."

Although Chomsky has been criticized many times for this anti-theoretical blindness, most recently by Slavoj Zizek, he has not made any substantive changes in his analytic style. And it is style in which he engages, since labor, capital, and markets are notably absent from his writing. Government actions happen largely by themselves in Chomsky's model, but the social propulsion behind those actions lies beyond discussion.

In the land of uninterpreted facts, blandness rules. Style is quintessential within politics, whatever horrified and righteous protests emerge from those who believe in substance to the exclusion of style. It is precisely the earnestness of style that appeals to sober-minded believers who seem to take up the latest Chomsky pronunciamento as a substitute for a quiet evening of self-flagellation.

For all of Chomsky's insistence on logical analysis and historiographic rigor, he indulges in constant subject changes and historical ellipsis. As his new small volume-entitled simply 9-11-of seven post-attack interviews exemplifies, Chomsky slides off the subject of September 11 as if it were a well-polished playground slide just waiting for a headdive. In Chomsky's politics such events are epiphenomena to incorporate within his decades-long lecture and established intellectual model. September 11 only provides the excuse and book title; this is an interpretive chapbook for guidance to the political faithful. The book's repetitiveness turns Chomsky, most cruelly, into the very sort of "talking head" he professes to despise.

The excursion begins with a simple postulate from which flows all manner of derivatives: the United States is the leading terrorist state. Mr. Smith isn't going to Washington; Mr. Smith is going to Terrorism Central.

Chomsky prefers to indict the history of European colonization reaching back quite literally to Columbus, as if this provided any assistance towards formulating a policy response to September 11. Rather, this retrospective invocation accepts a view of world history as simplistically bifurcated as any Samuel Huntington has produced. In this historical meta-perspective, the collapse of the WTC twin towers was no more than natives returning fire at European civilization. By locating his initial analysis of September 11 events within an overarching accusation against the U.S. as the illegitimate product of a half-millennium's worth of imperialistic sin, Chomsky only recapitulates the basic theme of his earlier Year 501 (1993). Despite his own arguments, in the sixth of these interviews Chomsky rejects two-civilization theories. Acceptability seems to depend on just which political position employs such simplistic reductions.

No nation-state exists without an inheritance of pre-foundational violence and a history of violent self-maintenance, so adopting the pose of History's prosecutor-general provides no analytic light with which to examine the contemporary American Empire. An historical awareness of colonialism and imperialism is not synonymous with the realities of political decision-making. Foundational violence sheds little light on the current situation. Al-Qaeda operatives did not hijack and crash airliners as a belated protest over the empire-building 1846 war against Mexico. They did so for their own reasons, apparently religiocultural xenophobia, and certainly not out of compassion for the struggles of other peoples for self-determination.

Chomsky's reductionism projects a world of opposed global cultures and nation-states which is not too different from the classical political science formulations of Henry Kissinger or Raymond Aron from otherwise inimical points of view. All three built analytic philosophies within the academic trap of compassionless determinism, where model-meisters rule. Little methodological difference separates Chomsky's foreign policy thought from other political doyens whose thought he deplores.

Most seriously, the entire book does not contain more than one word of sympathy or solidarity towards September 11 victims. Chomsky's stem philosophical style does not embrace empathy, which for better or worse represents the contested heartland of American politics. This is a remarkable absence, unconscionable for its dismissal of human lives as sub-history. As a political traumatologist speaking to the international press (a majority of interviews published here are with European media), Chomsky adopts the manner of a Puritan minister on the fate of sinners in the United States. In his unrelenting moral sobriety, Chomsky remains incapable of articulating rhetoric of sympathetic and passionate identification with a U.S. voting public that can alter national policies. September 11 becomes only another excuse to exercise moral castigation.

In the one moment that Chomsky does utter sympathy for the day's victims, he manages to simultaneously mischaracterize global reaction as "virtually unanimous" in its outrage. Yet it was precisely the approval voiced over Al-Jazeera and in other regional media that worked to define the global fault lines that have developed in the attack's wake. It was not only an act that caused massive human suffering, but it is difficult to imagine another act that could work to such mutual advantage for Western racists and Islamic cultural isolationists.

The issue of Chomsky's failure to express anything beyond formal regrets is not a "loyalty test." Rather, it goes to the heart of the problem--or put alternately, it is a problem of avoiding the heart. U.S. politics have been a creature of sentimentalism from their outset. Public sentiment controlled political argument and eighteenth-century U.S. politics privileged sentimental argument as a democratic rhetoric, even as those same politics daily violated democratic equality by excluding African slaves, women, and native peoples. All of these oppressed classes fought their political counter-fights through sentimental narrative.

Chomsky is a creature of cold rationalism who neither understands this feature of U.S. culture nor apparently cares to understand that factuality does not describe the entirety of political life. September 11 created a gaping social wound in the United States, and Chomsky-- together with much of the U.S. left-was capable of no more than delivering lectures on present sins through sins of the great-great-grandfathers and well before. When people die in an atrocity of such magnitude, it is not a loyalty test to affirm heartfelt sympathy for victims, determination to punish those who committed the crime, or thoughts towards confronting] proliferating and aggressive theofascist movements.

Faced with a need to find international justice and social peace between the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, where is Chomsky? Actually, still discussing Nicaragua. Lengthy and repeated passages address the Reagan administration's policies towards the Sandinista government as an example of terrorism and illegitimate state violence, once condemned by the World Court. Oliver North clones may well populate the Pentagon and need regular applications of pesticide, but this is not the topic at hand. Chomsky has mastered digression in pursuit of high ideals.

Such digressions are a means of avoiding unpalatable conclusions. Chomsky uses this same technique in the present book as much as on previous excursions into print. For example, nearly all of The New Military Humanism's (1999) discussion of the Racak massacre concerns events in East Timor, where he points out unassailably that many more were murdered in Dilli than in Racak. Yet what relevance does this observation bear to the question of whether NATO should act in defense of European Moslem minorities expelled from their homes and massacred? None at all, other than as an argumentative diversion.

How might recognition of horrified sentiments have altered Chomsky's rationalistic geo-political opposition to intervention? In her introduction to Saeda Vranic's heart-rending account Breaking the Wall of Silence: The Voices of Raped Bosnia (1996), Diane Conklin writes "To read [the rape accounts] is to suffer personally." Nothing of this quality of violent suffering and social nightmare that Vranic's book exposes inhabits Chomsky's analyses, where radical empathy remains foreign. The political consequence lies in the establishment of a hierarchy of victimization, one arranged by political bloc. Neither Bosnian Moslem victims of Serb aggression nor American victims of extremist Moslem violence lie on the privileged side of this intellectual hierarchy.

Listening to Milosevic at bar in the Hague inveigh against NATO hegemony and appropriate the language of anti-globalism, nausea rises to the gorge upon realizing that this unrepentant defense of genocide relies on the same arguments that Chomsky made and continues to deploy in 9-11. It is telling that Chomsky-style arguments gain use as a defense of violence on the grounds that it represents opposition to political hegemonism, as if this were sufficient justification of itself. Clearly, neither Chomsky nor Harold Pinter, who has taken similar positions, can control who uses their arguments against U.S. foreign policy. Their rhetorical usefulness in the mouths of murderers, however, just as clearly derives from monodirectional ethics and attempted political sleight-of-hand to conceal violent and unjustifiable acts.

Chomsky's preoccupation with international political hegemony, which is never so hegemonic as it might seem, blinds him to anti-democratic threats from different quarters. While briefly deploring Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, Chomsky can describe them as only another noxious product of the American Empire and thus re-direct attention. That is much, much too simple, for Bin Laden and al-Qaeda are violent theofascists who represent a public safety menace and need more effective address than armchair citations of international law chapter and verse. Miosevic would not now be facing an international court were it not for NATO intervention, much too late as it came. As the apparatus of international justice develops and strengthens to address cases such as Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, there will be increased need to shape international force from out of national militaries. George Bush's increasingly single-handed war policy highlights this need for democratically-controlled international law enforcement.

The means of peaceful redress against the Bush administration and its business cronies are well-known in the relatively democratic society of the United States. Dealing with a right-wing administration is apolitical contest within a civil society; dealing with a violent religious underground is a very different species of contest. To frame the questions precisely, what are the legitimate means of social defense against an international theo-fascist movement and how can its originating causes be ameliorated? It is such questions that Chomsky entirely begs off.

Sadly, this can pass for progressive politics in the United States.

JOE LOCKARD is a Faculty Fellow in the English Department, University of California-Davis, and a member of the Bad Subjects Collective.