CHOMSKY AS A MULTI DIMENSIONAL PERSONALITY

AND MULTIFACETED WRITER

No writer in the second half of the 20th century has done as much to document and
exposes the crime of US imperialism as Noam Chomsky. A linguist who has taught for the
40 years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and who has made much advances
in the understanding of human language, Chomsky has collected since the early 1960s an
unequalled body of detailed investigations of US foreign policy, its impact on domestic
politics, and the apologetics of intellectuals who defend the crimes committed in the name
of ‘human rights’ and ‘support for democracy’.

Chomsky has produced a singular body of political criticism through his number of
books. His book, ‘American powers and New Mandarins’ is the first published collection of
his political essays. He has dedicated it to the brave young men who refuse to serve in a
criminal war. It contains essays that still stand out for their insight and biting criticism
three decades later. Chomsky wrote in his first collection, setting himself apart from the
vast majority of the war’s critics who saw it as a ‘tragic mistake’, rather than as an example
of American imperialism.

Since 1969 Chomsky has produced a series of books on US foreign policy in Asia,
Latin America and Middle East. Chomsky’s well documented Fateful Triangle remains an
indispensable study of the history of Israeli state terrorism and the extensive US
government support for ‘an Israeli Sparta as strategic asset’. In this book he has strongly
dismantled the official Zionist version of the Arab-Israeli conflict and its outspoken support
for Palestinian self determination still stand out.

Chomsky has also made an important contribution to the international effort to

raise awareness of the struggle for freedom of east Timor from Indonesia. He has been
much devoted to bring attention to the events of US support of state terrorism in Latin
America, Israeli aggression in the West Bank, Gaza and Lebanon, and the role of
establishment media in keeping such unpleasant details well hidden.

Recently Chomsky has taken an active stance against the Gulf War and the 1993-95
Oslo Accords. Chomsky’s writings on the Oslo document are in the best tradition of his
work, outlining the exact scope of the Palestinian defeat and the PLO’s responsibility for
betraying the struggle for Palestinian liberation. In this context, New York Times has
rightly argued that in terms of the power, range, novelty and influence of his thought,
Noam Chomsky is the most important intellectual alive today.

Chomsky has developed a damning political critique of contemporary capitalism

and has done much materially to support numerous organizations involved in the efforts
for social change.

To understand Noam Chomsky’s ideas, we have to look in part at his personal and
intellectual history and the political roots of his anarchism.

Chomsky grew up during the Depression and the rise of the fascist threat
internationally. He recalls that people sold rags at out-door. He points out the violent

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police strikebreaking, and the other Depression scenes. In 1930s it was very clear that the
Nazis were a very ominous and dangerous force that was like the dark cloud over
everything throughout his whole childhood. Chomsky grew up around working class
people, ideas and organizations, and had a sense of class solidarity and struggle at his early
age.

At a very young age Chomsky understood that the Communist Party under Stalin
was intervening decisively against the interests of the Spanish working class and had acted
to crush the workers’ revolution that had been initiated in the midst of the Spanish Civil
War (1936-39). Chomsky’s first political article on the fall of Barcelona to the fascists was
written when he was only ten years old. Chomsky saw Stalinism as a natural outgrowth of
the theory and practice of Lenin, Trotsky, and the Bolshevik Party the view that Chomsky
still holds today.

In a critical advance over the dominant understanding of linguistics, Chomsky

challenged the behaviorist orthodoxy of B F Skinner, whose views on language he
dismantled in an important 1959 critique.

In the 1950s the social sciences were dominated by behaviorism, the school of
thought popularized by John Watson and B F Skinner….. Behavior was explained by a few
laws of stimulus-response learning that could be studied with rats pressing bars and dogs
salivating to tones. But Chomsky called attention to two fundamental facts about
language. First, virtually every sentence that a person utters or understands is a brand-new
combination of words, appearing for the first time in the history of the universe. Therefore
a language cannot be a resource of responses; the brain must contain a recipe or program
that can build an unlimited set of sentences out of a finite list of words…The second
fundamental fact is that children develop these complex grammars rapidly and without
formal instruction and grow up to give consistent interpretations to novel sentence
constructions that they have never encountered before. Therefore, he argued, children
must innately be equipped with a plan common to the grammars of all languages, a
Universal Grammar.

That is, as Chomsky has written recently, ‘there is a component of the human mind
dedicated to language the language faculty’. According to Chomsky, the ‘language faculty’
includes a generative system that can produce an infinite array of sentences from finite
means. Children do not learn language by imitation, but develop the creative capacity to
use language from their infancy at a tremendously fast pace, as the stimulus of their
environment ‘sets’ the parameters of their language. Chomsky argues, therefore, that
standard divisions between languages, reflect nothing more than superficial or political
distinctions within a single Universal and highly complex human language.

From the early circulation of his linguistic reflections among specialists, Chomsky’s
views caused considerable controversy and became the subject of intense debates in
linguistics, as well as philosophy and the social sciences.

Chomsky began to make a wider political mark when he started writing long,
detailed essays denouncing the war and the role of mainstream intellectuals who
supported it for the New York Review of Books and then for left journals such as
Liberation, Ramparts, New Politics, and Socialist Revolution. The essays brilliantly

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documented and condemned the actions of the US government in Indochina and
connected the war effort to the history of US imperialism more generally. Chomsky
became one of the most important and respected critic of the US war effort, earning a
place on President Nixon’s infamous ‘enemies list’. From this point on, he was the subject
of intense ill will by various apologists of the system, much as he would later be subjected
to repeated attacks for his critical writings on Israel.

The question of Chomsky’s method has been the subject of much debate. Though
immensely thought provoking, Chomsky’s densely textured political writings suffer from
the two weaknesses: the lack of a clear theoretical framework and a lack of concreteness
about strategies for resistance.

Despite his anti-capitalism, Chomsky offers little practical advice on how to struggle
most effectively to bring about the kind of socialist society he would like to see. Though he
argues that, whatever one chooses to do politically, it is only effective through organized
and collective struggle, and Chomsky sets himself apart from socialist organization and the
revolutionary Marxist tradition.

To understand why Chomsky is so reluctant to offer this kind of political lead, we

have to return to his anarchism, because one of its features is a hesitancy to argue for
specific priorities for political activism.

Written and Composed By:

Prof. A. R. Somroo

M.A. English, M.A. Education

Cell: 03339971417