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Noam Chomsky at Harvard in 2002. Getty Images/William B. Plowman Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an Institute Professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and creator of the Chomsky hierarchy, a classification of formal languages. His works in generative linguistics contributed significantly to the decline of behaviorism and led to the advancement of the cognitive sciences. Outside of his linguistic work, Chomsky is also widely known for his radical left-wing political views and his criticism of the foreign policy of U.S. governments. Chomsky describes himself as a libertarian socialist and a supporter of anarcho-syndicalism. The eponymous adjective Chomskyan has come to be used to refer to his ideas; however, Chomsky has disparaged the term as making "no sense" and belonging "to the history of organized religion".
BiographyChomsky was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Hebrew scholar William Chomsky. Starting in 1945, he studied philosophy and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, learning from Zellig Harris, a professor of linguistics with whose political views he identified. Chomsky conducted much of his doctoral research during four years at Harvard University as a Harvard Junior Fellow, and received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955. In his doctoral thesis, he began to develop some of his linguistic ideas, elaborating on them in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures, perhaps his best-known work in the field of linguistics. After receiving his doctorate, Chomsky taught at MIT for 19 years, receiving the first award from the Ferrari P. Ward Chair of Modern Languages and linguistics. It was during this time that Chomsky became more publicly engaged in politics: from around 1964, he became one of the leading opponents of the Vietnam War. Since that time, Chomsky has become well known for his political views, speaking on politics all over the world, and writing numerous books. His far-reaching criticism of US foreign policy and the legitimacy of US power has made him an extremely controversial figure. He has a devoted following among the radical left, but he has also come under increasing criticism from liberals as well as from the right, particularly because of his response to the September 11, 2001 attacks. In 1979, Paul Robinson wrote in the New York Times Book Review that "Judged in terms of the power, range, novelty and influence of his thought, Noam Chomsky is arguably the most important intellectual alive today." However, Robinson goes on to describe Chomsky's political writings as "maddeningly simple-minded." Chomsky notes that "if it wasn't for that second sentence I would begin to think that I'm doing something wrong. ... It's true that the emperor doesn't have any clothes, but the emperor doesn't like to be told it, and the emperor's lapdogs like The New York Times are not going to enjoy the experience if you do." [1] (http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/mc/mc-script-1.html) According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, between 1980 and 1992 Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any living scholar, and the eighth most cited source overall. Chomsky has also received credits from cultural groups. Rage Against The Machine takes copies of his books on tour with the band. Pearl Jam ran a small pirate radio on one of their tours, playing Chomsky talks mixed along with their music. REM asked Chomsky to go on tour with them and open their concerts with a lecture (he declined). Chomsky lectures have been featured on the B-sides of records from Chumbawamba and other groups. [2] (http://indy.pabn.org/news.php?id=90) Bono of U2 has said "If the job of a rebel is to tear down the old and prepare for the new, then this is Noam Chomsky, a 'rebel without a pause,' the 'Elvis of academia....' As rock 'n roll in the '90s continues to be gagged, it is ironic that a man of 65 years turns out to be the real rebel spirit." Rolling Stone wrote Chomsky "is up there with Thoreau and Emerson in the literature of rebellion." And the Village Voice comments "How adroitly [Chomsky] cuts through the crap and actually says something." A review in The Nation contained the remark that "Not to have read [Chomsky]... is to court genuine ignorance." "Avram" is a form of "Abraham". "Noam" is a Hebrew word which means 'pleasantness'. "Chomsky" is the Russian name "Хомский". The original pronunciation, using the International Phonetic Alphabet, is /avram noam 'xomskij/. This is normally Anglicised to /'ævræm 'nəʊm 'tʃɒmpski/, or /'ævræm 'noʊm 'tʃampski/ in an American accent. Contributions to linguisticsSyntactic Structures was a distillation of his book Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (1955,75) in which he introduces transformational grammars. The theory takes utterances (sequences of words) to correspond to abstract "surface structures," which in turn correspond to more abstract "deep structures." (The hard and fast distinction between surface and deep structure is absent in current versions of the theory.) Transformational rules, along with phrase structure rules and other structural principles, govern both the creation and interpretation of utterances. With a limited set of grammar rules and a finite set of terms, humans are able to produce an infinite number of sentences, including sentences nobody has ever said before. The capability to structure our utterances in this way is innate, a part of the genetic endowment of human beings, and is called universal grammar. We are largely unconscious of these structural principles, as we are of most other biological and cognitive properties. Recent theories of Chomsky's (such as his Minimalist Program) make strong claims regarding universal grammar — that the grammatical principles underlying languages are innate and fixed, and the differences among the world's languages can be characterized in terms of parameter settings in the brain (such as the pro-drop parameter, which indicates whether an explicit subject is always required, as in English, or can be optionally dropped, as in Spanish), which are often likened to switches. (Hence the term principles and parameters, often given to this approach.) In this view, a child learning a language need only acquire the necessary lexical items (words, grammatical morphemes, and idioms), and determine the appropriate parameter settings, which can be done based on a few key examples. This approach is motivated by the astonishing pace at which children learn languages, the similar steps followed by children all across the world when learning languages, and the fact that children make certain characteristic errors as they learn their first language, whereas other seemingly logical kinds of errors never occur (and, according to Chomsky, should be attested if a purely general, rather than language-specific, learning mechanism were being employed). Chomsky's ideas have had a strong influence on researchers investigating the acquisition of language in children, but most researchers who work in this area today do not support Chomsky's theories, often preferring emergentist or connectionist theories based around general processing mechanisms in the brain. Generative grammarNoam Chomsky using a speech recognition application. The Chomskyan approach towards syntax, often termed generative grammar, though quite popular, has been challenged by many, especially those working outside the United States. Chomskyan syntactic analyses are often highly abstract, and are based heavily on careful investigation of the border between grammatical and ungrammatical constructs in a language. (Compare this to the so-called pathological cases that play a similarly important role in mathematics.) Such grammaticality judgments can only be made accurately by a native speaker, however, and thus for pragmatic reasons such linguists often focus on their own native languages or languages in which they are fluent, usually English, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Japanese or one of the Chinese languages. However, as Chomsky has said:
Sometimes generative grammar analyses break down when applied to languages which have not previously been studied, and many changes in generative grammar have occurred due to an increase in the number of languages analysed. However, the claims made about linguistic universals have become stronger rather than weaker over time; for example, Richard Kayne's suggestion in the 1990s that all languages have an underlying Subject-Verb-Object word order would have seemed implausible in the 1960s. One of the prime motivations behind an alternative approach, the functional-typological approach or linguistic typology (often associated with Joseph H. Greenberg), is to base hypotheses of linguistic universals on the study of as wide a variety of the world's languages as possible, to classify the variation seen, and to form theories based on the results of this classification. The Chomskyan approach is too in-depth and reliant on native speaker knowledge to follow this method, though it has over time been applied to a broad range of languages. Chomsky hierarchyChomsky is famous for investigating various kinds of formal languages and whether or not they might be capable of capturing key properties of human language. His Chomsky hierarchy partitions formal grammars into classes, or groups, with increasing expressive power, i.e., each successive class can generate a broader set of formal languages than the one before. Interestingly, Chomsky argues that modelling some aspects of human language requires a more complex formal grammar (as measured by the Chomsky hierarchy) than modeling others. For example, while a regular language is powerful enough to model English morphology, it is not powerful enough to model English syntax. In addition to being relevant in linguistics, the Chomsky hierarchy has also become important in computer science (especially in compiler construction and automata theory). His seminal work in phonology was The Sound Pattern of English. He published it together with Morris Halle. This work is considered outdated (though it has recently been reprinted), and he does not publish on phonology anymore. Criticisms of Chomsky's linguisticsAlthough Chomsky's is the best known position in linguistics, his views have been criticised. Perhaps the best known alternative to Chomsky's position is that proposed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Their cognitive linguistics was developed out of Chomskyan linguistics but differs from it in significant ways. Specifically, they argue against the neo-Cartesian aspects of Chomsky's theories, and state that Chomsky fails to take account of the extent to which cognition is embodied. Another strong source of criticism of Chomsky's linguistics comes from researchers who study language acquisition. As noted above, most researchers in this field do not take a Chomskyan approach, and many, such as Michael Tomasello and Elizabeth Bates, are very critical of the Chomskyan approach to language learning. Most of this criticism surrounds Chomskyan concepts of innateness. Researchers who study language acquisition see very little evidence for the principles and parameters approach to language acquisition, which suggests that language learning involves setting a finite and predetermined set of parameters. These researchers argue that their data points to a lack of syntactic structure in children's early utterances, which contradicts the idea of any predetermined syntax parameters. Most of these researchers suggest that their results are far more compatible with connectionist or emergentist views of learning, which do not need to posit any preexisting structure. As well, researchers involved in computational linguistics and machine learning have had far more success in applying statistics or neural networks to artificial acquisition of natural language than they have had with a principles and parameters approach. As time goes on, fewer and fewer researchers involved in learning, either artificial or natural, see the Chomskyan approach as a feasible theoretical framework — many believe that traditional Chomskyan linguistics is doomed to extinction due to its problems with learning. As well, newer movements in psychology, such as, for example, situated cognition and discursive psychology are not compatible with Chomsky's views. In a much more radical way, philosophers in the tradition of Wittgenstein (such as Saul Kripke) argue that Chomskyans are fundamentally wrong about the role of rule following in human cognition. In a similar way philosophers in the phenomenological/existential/hermeneutic traditions oppose the abstract neo-rationalist aspects of Chomsky's thought. The contemporary philosopher who best represents this view is, perhaps, Hubert Dreyfus, also famous (or notorious) for his attacks on artificial intelligence. A far more general objection to the various incarnations of Chomsky's theories is that they do not follow the scientific method, that is, that they cannot be falsified. For example, Chomskian grammars incorporate deep structure, transformations (see transformational grammar), and empty categories, but there is no empirical evidence for these elements of the theory, and no way to test them. In fact, it is questionable how these elements can possibly be learned by children acquiring a language, since these structures never come to the surface (i.e., are unspoken). Another common criticism of Chomskyian analyses of specific languages is that they force all languages into an English-like mold, so that even VSO (verb subject object) languages are underlyingly SVO (subject verb object), just like English. Contributions to psychologyChomsky's work in linguistics has had major implications for psychology and its fundamental direction in the 20th century. His theory of a universal grammar was a direct challenge to the established behaviorist theories of the time and had major consequences for understanding how language is learned by children and what, exactly, is the ability to interpret language. The more basic principles of this theory (though not necessarily the stronger claims made by the principles and parameters approach described above) are now generally accepted. In 1959, Chomsky published a long-circulated critique of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior, a book in which the leader of the behaviorist psychologists that had dominated psychology in the first half of the 20th century argued that language was merely a "behavior." Skinner argued that language, like any other behavior — from a dog's salivation in anticipation of dinner, to a master pianist's performance — could be attributed to "training by reward and penalty over time." Language, according to Skinner, was completely learned by cues and conditioning from the world around the language-learner. Chomsky's critique of Skinner's methodology and basic assumptions paved the way for a revolution against the behaviorist doctrine that had governed psychology. In his 1966 Cartesian Linguistics and subsequent works, Chomsky laid out an explanation of human language faculties that has become the model for investigation in other areas of psychology. Much of the present conception of how the mind works draws directly from ideas that found their first persuasive author of modern times in Chomsky. There are three key ideas. First is that the mind is "cognitive", or that the mind actually contains mental states, beliefs, doubts, and so on. The former view had denied even this, arguing that there were only "stimulus-response" relationships like "If you ask me if I want X, I will say yes". By contrast, Chomsky showed that the common way of understanding the mind, as having things like beliefs and even unconscious mental states, had to be right. Second, he argued that large parts of what the adult mind can do are "innate". While no child is born automatically able to speak a language, all are born with a powerful language-learning ability which allows them to soak up several languages very quickly in their early years. Subsequent psychologists have extended this thesis far beyond language; the mind is no longer considered a "blank slate" at birth. Finally, Chomsky made the concept of "modularity" a critical feature of the mind's cognitive architecture. The mind is composed of an array of interacting, specialized subsystems with limited flows of inter-communication. This model contrasts sharply with the old idea that any piece of information in the mind could be accessed by any other cognitive process (optical illusions, for example, cannot be "turned off" even when they are known to be illusions). Opinion on criticism of science cultureChomsky strongly disagrees with deconstructionist and postmodern criticisms of science:
Chomsky notes that critiques of "white male science" are much like the anti-Semitic and politically motivated attacks against "Jewish physics" used by the Nazis to denigrate research done by Jewish scientists during the Deutsche Physik movement:
Chomsky's influence in other fieldsChomskyan models have been used as a theoretical basis in several other fields. The Chomsky hierarchy is often taught in fundamental Computer Science courses as it confers insight into the various types of formal languages. A number of arguments in evolutionary psychology are derived from his research results. The 1984 Nobel Prize laureate in Medicine and Physiology, Niels K. Jerne, used Chomsky's generative model to explain the human immune system, equating "components of a generative grammar ... with various features of protein structures". The title of Jerne's Stockholm Nobel lecture was "The Generative Grammar of the Immune System". Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who learned 125 signs in ASL, was named after Noam Chomsky. Political viewsChomsky at a debate with Michel Foucault in 1971 Chomsky is one of the best known figures of left-wing American politics. He defines himself in the tradition of anarchism, a political philosophy he summarizes as challenging all forms of hierarchy and attempting to eliminate them if they are unjustified. He especially identifies with the labor-oriented anarcho-syndicalist current of anarchism. Unlike many anarchists, Chomsky does not always object to electoral politics; he has even endorsed candidates for office. He has described himself as a "fellow traveller" to the anarchist tradition as opposed to a pure anarchist to explain why he is sometimes willing to engage with the state. Chomsky has also stated that he considers himself to be a conservative (Chomsky's Politics, pp. 188) presumably of the classical liberal variety. He has further defined himself as a Zionist; although, he notes that his definition of Zionism is considered by most to be anti-Zionism these days, the result of what he perceives to have been a shift (since the 1940s) in the meaning of Zionism (Chomsky Reader). In a C-Span Book TV interview, he stated:
Overall, Chomsky is not fond of traditional political titles and categories and prefers to let his views speak for themselves. His main modes of actions include writing magazine articles and books and making speaking engagements. Today he is one of the most globally famous figures of the left, especially among academics and university students, and frequently travels across the United States, Europe, and the Third World. Chomsky has a very large following of supporters worldwide as well as a dense speaking schedule, drawing large crowds wherever he goes around the world. He is often booked up to two years in advance. He was one of the main speakers at the 2002 World Social Forum. Chomsky on terrorismIn response to US declarations of a "war on terrorism" in 1981 and 2001, Chomsky has argued that the major sources of international terrorism are the world's major powers, led by the United States. He uses the definition of terrorism from a US Army manual, which describes it as "the calculated use of violence or the threat of violence to inculcate fear; intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological." Thus terrorism is an objective description about certain actions, whoever their agents may be. As he notes in relation to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan:
On the efficiency of terrorism:
As regards support for or condemnation of terrorism, Chomsky opines that terrorism (and violence/authority in general) are generally bad and can only be justified in those cases where it is clear that greater terrorism (or violence, or abuse of authority) is thus avoided. Chomsky considers that terrorism (as defined in the US Army manual) carried out by the US government does not pass this test, and condemnation of this terrorism is one of the main thrusts of his writings. He is also sceptical that other acts of terrorism pass the test, and has thus condemned such things as Khmer Rouge terror in Cambodia, the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and similar acts. Chomsky’s reaction to the September 11th, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington DC were widely criticized from people on different sides of the political spectrum. One critic was the author and journalist Christopher Hitchens. In an exchange between the two Hitchens also said that Chomsky’s opposition to military action in Afghanistan coupled with his portrayal of the NATO military action in the Balkans as naked aggression and persecution of the Serbs as evidence that Chomsky was in fact soft on terrorism and fascism. He also criticized Chomsky’s comparison between Al Qaeda’s attacks and the 1998 bombing of a Sudanese pharmaceutical facility as an attempt of moral equivocation. [4] (http://www.thenation.com/special/20010911exchange.mhtml) Criticism of United States governmentChomsky has been a consistent and outspoken critic of the United States government, and criticism of the foreign policy of the United States has formed the basis of much of Chomsky's political writing. Chomsky focuses on the United States for two reasons. First, he believes that his work can have more impact when directed at his own government, and second, the United States is the world's sole remaining superpower and so, Chomsky believes, it acts in the same offensive ways as all superpowers. (However, Chomsky will criticize official enemies like the former Soviet Union in passing.) One of the key things superpowers do, Chomsky argues, is try to organize the world around themselves using military and economic means. Thus, the US government bombed Vietnam in the Vietnam War and the larger Indochina conflict for daring to break away from the US economic system. He has also criticized US interference in Central and South American countries and military support of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. Chomsky has repeatedly emphasized his theory that much of the United States' foreign policy is based on the "threat of a good example" (which he says is another name for the domino theory). The "threat of a good example" is that a country could successfully develop independently from the US sphere of influence, thus presenting a model for other countries, including countries in which the United States has strong economic interests. This, Chomsky says, has prompted the United States to repeatedly intervene to quell "independent development, regardless of ideology" in regions of the world where it has no inherent economic or safety interests. In one of his most famous works, What Uncle Sam Really Wants, Chomsky uses this particular theory as an explanation for the United States' interventions in Guatemala, Laos, Nicaragua, and Grenada. Chomsky believes the US government's Cold War policies were not entirely shaped by anti-Soviet paranoia, but rather toward preserving the United States' ideological and economic dominance in the world. As he wrote in Uncle Sam: "What the US wants is 'stability,' meaning security for the upper classes and large foreign enterprises." While he is almost uniformly critical of the United States government's foreign policy, Chomsky expresses his admiration for the freedom of expression enjoyed by US citizens in a number of interviews and books. Even other Western democracies such as France and Canada are less liberal in their defense of controversial speech than the US, and Chomsky is not hesitant to criticize them for it, as shown by the Faurisson affair. Views on socialismNoam Chomsky at a peace rally in Boulder, Colorado, in 2003. Chomsky is deeply opposed to what he calls "corporate state capitalism", practiced by the United States and its allies. He supports Mikhail Bakunin's anarchist (or "libertarian socialist") ideas, requiring economic freedom in addition to the "control of production by the workers themselves, not owners and managers who rule them and control all decisions." He refers to this as "real socialism," and describes Soviet-style socialism as similar in terms of "totalitarian controls" to U.S.-style capitalism, saying that each is a system based in types and levels of control, rather than in organization or efficiency. In defense of this thesis, Chomsky sometimes points out that Frederick Winslow Taylor's philosophy of scientific management was the organizational basis for the Soviet Union's massive industrialization movement as well as the American corporate model. Chomsky has illuminated Bakunin's comments on the totalitarian state as predictions for the brutal Soviet police state that would come. He echoes Bakunin's statement that "...If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Czar himself," which expands upon the idea that the tyrannical Soviet state was simply a natural growth from the Bolshevik ideology of state control. He has also termed Soviet communism as "fake socialism," and said that contrary to what many in America claim, the collapse of the Soviet Union should be regarded "a small victory for socialism," not capitalism. Though highly critical of the Soviet Union, Chomsky has sometimes been more positive in his assessment of Communist movements in Asia. In a 1968 essay, "Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship", Chomsky praised aspects of the Chinese and Vietnam communist revolutions, noting "certain similar features" with the Spanish anarchist movement of the 1930s (which he greatly admires), while at the same time cautioning that "the scale of the Chinese Revolution is so great and reports in depth are so fragmentary that it would no doubt be foolhardy to attempt a general evaluation." In December 1967, while participating in a forum in New York, he said that in China "one finds many things that are really quite admirable", and that "China is an important example of a new society in which very interesting and positive things happened at the local level, in which a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step." [5] (http://www.chomsky.info/debates/19671215.htm) Similarly, in a speech given in Hanoi on 13 April 1970 and broadcast by Radio Hanoi on 14 April 1970, Chomsky spoke of his "admiration for the people of Vietnam who have been able to defend themselves against the ferocious attack, and at the same time take great strides forward toward the socialist society". [6] (http://www.no-treason.com/Starr/3.html) More recently, Chomsky has spoken of Communist China as a "totalitarian regime" and, referring to the starvation of millions during the Great Leap Forward (which was not widely known in the late '60s), written: "The terrible atrocity fully merits the harsh condemnation it has received for many years, renewed here. It is, furthermore, proper to attribute the famine to Communism." [7] (http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2000-01/10chomsky.htm) In his 1973 book For Reasons of State, Chomsky argues that instead of a capitalist system in which people are "wage slaves" or an authoritarian system in which decisions are made by a centralized committee, a society could function with no paid labor. He argues that a nation's populace should be free to pursue jobs of their choosing. People will be free to do as they like, and the work they voluntarily choose will be both "rewarding in itself" and "socially useful." Society would be run under a system of peaceful anarchism, with no state or government institutions. Work that was fundamentally distasteful to all, if any existed, would be distributed equally among everyone. Mass media analysisAnother focus of Chomsky's political work has been an analysis of mainstream mass media (especially in the United States), its structures and constraints, and its role in supporting big business and government interests. Unlike totalitarian systems, where physical force can readily be used to coerce the general population, more democratic societies like the US must turn to more non-violent means of control. In an often-quoted remark, Chomsky states that "propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state." (Media Control) Edward S. Herman and Chomsky's book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media explores this topic in depth, presenting their "propaganda model" of the news media with numerous detailed case studies demonstrating it. The model explains systemic bias of the mass media in terms of structural economic causes rather than a conspiracy of people. It argues the bias derives from five "filters" that all published news must "pass through" which combine to systematically distort news coverage.
The model describes how the media form a decentralized and non-conspiratorial but nonetheless very powerful propaganda system, that is able to mobilize an elite consensus, frame public debate within elite perspectives and at the same time give the appearance of democratic consent. Chomsky and Herman test their model empirically by picking "paired examples" — pairs of events that were objectively similar except for the alignment of domestic elite interests. They use a number of such examples to show that in cases where an "official enemy" does something (like murder of a religious official), the press investigates thoroughly and devotes a great amount of coverage to the matter. But when the domestic government or an ally does the same thing (or worse), the press downplays the story. Crucially, also they test their model against the case that is often held up as the best example of a free and aggressively independent press, the media coverage of the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War. Even in this case, they again find that the press was behaving subserviently to elite interests. Critics of Chomsky and Herman’s mass media analysis, including author and historian Victor Davis Hanson severely disagree with Chomsky and Herman’s theories. They see the idea of “Manufacturing Consent” as nothing more than a recycling of the Marxist idea of "false consciousness" in where the masses have been so manipulated that they have neither the perspective or intellect to see beyond the propaganda and require superior intellects like Chomsky's to point out to them the real truth. Arch Puddington of the Hoover Institution also points out what he sees as virtually no empirical evidence in media coverage, specifically with Chomsky and Herman’s analysis of the mass media’s treatment of Cambodia and East Timor, to back the claims made in “Manufacturing Consent”. Chomsky and the Middle EastChomsky "grew up...in the Jewish-Zionist cultural tradition" (Peck, p. 11). His father was one of the foremost scholars of the Hebrew language and taught at a religious school. Chomsky has also had a long fascination with and involvement in left-wing Zionist politics. As he described:
He is highly critical of the policies of Israel towards the Palestinians and its Arab neighbours. Among many articles and books, his book The Fateful Triangle is considered one of the premier texts among those who oppose Israeli treatment of Palestinians and American support for Israeli government policies. He has also condemned Israel's role in "guiding state terrorism" for selling weapons to apartheid South Africa and Latin American countries that he characterizes as U.S. puppet states, e.g. Guatemala in the 1980s, as well as US-backed right-wing paramilitaries (or, according to Chomsky, terrorists) such as the Nicaraguan Contras — see Iran-Contra Scandal. (What Uncle Sam Really Wants, Chapter 2.4) In addition, he has consistently condemned the United States for its unconditional military, financial and diplomatic support of successive Israeli governments. Chomsky characterizes Israel as a "mercenary state" within the US system of hegemony. He has also fiercely criticized sectors of the American Jewish community for their role in obtaining unconditional US support, stating that "they should more properly be called 'supporters of the moral degeneration and ultimate destruction of Israel'" (Fateful Triangle, p.4). He says of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL):
See also: Middle East Politics, a speech given at Columbia University in 1999 CriticismChomsky's outspoken opposition to US foreign policy has made him a controversial figure with many critics. Though Chomsky extensively cites his sources, some accuse him of using out-of-context quotations and facts to support his arguments or citing sources of dubious legitimacy. Even Stanley Hoffmann, a fellow opponent of the Vietnam War and a sympathetic interlocutor, described Chomsky in a 1969 exchange of letters as having a "tendency to draw from an author's statements inferences that correspond neither to the author's intentions nor to the statements' meaning" [9] (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/11370). For example, Samuel Huntington charges Chomsky with "mutilating the truth in a variety of ways with respect to my views and activities on Vietnam". Huntington argues that Chomsky pieced together several sentences to make it appear that Huntington advocated the demolition of Vietnamese society, when in fact Huntington was arguing for a compromise peace. The debate between the two can be found here [10] (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/11044). To quote Huntington: "The three paragraphs of Mr. Chomsky to which I have referred constitute less than five percent of his article. I do not know if the level of veracity which he achieves in them is typical of the entire piece. If these paragraphs are representative, however, the article as a whole should contain, by conservative extrapolation, approximately 94 other serious distortions and misstatements of fact." Also, although Chomsky is critical of many states and groups hostile to the United States, many feel that he does not condemn them enough, and therefore consider him to be "anti-American", "one-sided", or "a propagandist" or that he is a "supporter", "cheerleader" or "apologist" for terrorists, fascists and so forth. Another very common general criticism of Chomsky is that he is the centre of some kind of "cult", and so people who agree with him are denounced as "followers", "acolytes", "Chomskyites", and so on. Chomsky has replied to many attacks on his ideas, but some attacks are ad hominem. When asked how he could react to certain accusations, Chomsky has replied, "You really can't. There's no way to respond. Slinging mud always works." [11] (http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/interviews/dissent-excerpts.html) Below are various topics on which specific criticisms have been made of Chomsky's position. CambodiaMuch of the early accounts of Khmer Rouge atrocities was documented by François Ponchaud, in his book Cambodia Year Zero published in 1977. After several favourable reviews in the US media, Chomsky began to critically write about what he saw as the media's slanted coverage of Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge. Chomsky and Edward Herman wrote Distortions at Fourth Hand for the Nation Magazine in 1977 in an attempt to criticize the negative reports coming from Ponchaud. Distortions at Fourth Hand is criticized for relying heavily on Khmer Rouge sources and Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, by George Hildebrand and Gareth Porter. Porter and Hildebrand's work is notable for its largely uncritical and sympathetic treatment of the Khmer Rouge, allegedly including defence of the evacuation of Phnom Penn and the use of peasants as agricultural beasts of burden. Porter distanced himself from Starvation and Revolution in 1978 when in an interview with CBS he lamented the atrocities being committed in Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge. Describing the media coverage of Southeast Asia as a "farce", Chomsky and Herman contrasted the grim reports on Vietnam by New York Times reporter Fox Butterfield with the with more favorable comments of the members of a handful of non-governmental groups. This, Chomsky and Herman asserted, was evidence of a campaign of disinformation. In After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology, Chomsky and Herman, claim that the American media used unsubstantiated refugee testimonies and distorted sources with regard to the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge to serve US government propaganda purposes in the wake of the Vietnam War. He also denied that the Cambodian violence was inspired by Marxist ideology, maintaining that it was "the direct and understandable response to the violence of the imperial system". Bruce Sharp, one of the more noteworthy critics of Chomsky and Herman's early work on The Khmer Rouge, points out
Chomsky argued that he had acknowledged the atrocities. In Manufacturing Consent (also co written with Ed Herman), Chomsky responds:
Some scholars who reviewed this controversy, such as Milan Rai, consider it to have been part of a propaganda campaign against Chomsky, designed to generate "endless defence" in response to critics in order to distract attention from the substantive issues, while others, such as Stephen J. Morris, regard it as evidence that he is an extreme left-wing propagandist. Christopher Hitchens, who once defended Chomsky against charges of being a Pol Pot apologist in a 1985 article titled The Chorus and the Cassandra, has since changed his mind on the subject. He believes that Chomsky and others on the far left have become so determined to resist American domination that they are willing to overlook the true nature of America's enemies. SudanOn 20 August 1998, following the al-Qaeda bombings of the United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum was destroyed in cruise missile strikes launched by the United States, with the stated justification that there was evidence the factory had been used to manufacture chemical weapons for al-Qaeda. In Summer 2001, Werner Daum, the former German ambassador, wrote an article [12] (http://hir.harvard.edu/articles/index.html?id=909&page=1) in which he stated that the attack may have caused "several tens of thousands" of deaths of Sudanese civilians. The regional director of the Near East Foundation, who has direct field experience in the Sudan, published in the Boston Globe another article with the same estimate. Human Rights Watch expressed concern that the attack would worsen the "terrible crisis" gripping Sudan [13] (http://www.hrw.org/press98/sept/sudan915.htm). Noam Chomsky has quoted these sources more than once when making comparisons between these attacks and the attacks on New York on 11th September 2001, arguing (in a reductio ad absurdum) that if the US had the right to bomb Afghanistan in retaliation for the latter attack, then "Sudan [would have] every right to carry out massive terror [against America] in retaliation" for the attack in Khartoum. On 16 January 2002, Suzy Hansen of Salon.com telephoned Chomsky and conducted an interview [14] (http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20020116.htm) in which he said "That one bombing, according to the estimates made by the German Embassy in Sudan and Human Rights Watch, probably led to tens of thousands of deaths", thus accidentally implying that Human Rights Watch had put a number on it. This led to Carroll Bogert, communications director of Human Rights Watch, writing to Salon.com to deny they had made an estimate. In subsequent clarifications made in an article on Salon.com [15] (http://archive.salon.com/people/letters/2002/01/29/chomsky/) and elsewhere, Chomsky has asserted that any ambiguity in a "telephone interview [which] does not have quotes, details or footnotes" is easily cleared up by "turn[ing] to what is in print". Nevertheless, right-wing critics such as Windschuttle have argued that Carroll Bogert's denial that Human Rights Watch made the quoted estimate is proof that Chomsky is a liar, as well as finding the comparison "odious" [16] (http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/21/may03/chomsky.htm). David HorowitzConservative author David Horowitz is one of Chomsky's more vocal critics. He has described Chomsky as the "Ayatollah of Anti-American Hate" and "the most treacherous intellect in America" claiming Chomsky has "one message alone: America is the Great Satan" [17] (http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=1020). Horowitz claims "It would be easy to demonstrate how on every page of every book and in every statement that Chomsky has written the facts are twisted". Chomsky has not responded in detail to Horowitz's allegations, stating in an interview that "I haven't read Horowitz. I didn't read him when he was a Stalinist and I don't read him today." [18] (http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20011016.htm) This response has in turn been disputed by Horowitz, who argues that in his most extreme left-wing days he was a Trotskyist, never a Stalinist, though some have failed to recognize the differences between the two ideologies. He further argued that Chomsky has in fact read and analyzed his writings in the past [19] (http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=4499), notably during his time as editor of Ramparts newspaper, which frequently featured Chomsky's articles. Peter Collier and David Horowitz compiled a set of critical essays in 2004, called the The Anti-Chomsky Reader that analyze some of Chomsky’s more popular work. The Anti-Chomsky Reader points out that many of the sources in Chomsky’s works are himself. Thomas Nichols essay Chomsky And The Cold War illustrates Chomsky's rage against anti-communists when the Soviet Union fell apart. There is also an extensive criticism of Chomsky claim that the US invasion of Afghanistan would result in millions of deaths in what Chomsky critics labeled as the "Silent Genocide" claim. Charges of anti-Semitism: the Faurisson affairRobert Faurisson Main article: Faurisson affair In 1979, Robert Faurisson published a book which claimed the Holocaust did not happen. Faurisson's political views are not clear, but unlike most Holocaust-deniers he does seem not to be a neo-Nazi or anti-Semite since he speaks of the "heroic insurrection of the Warsaw [Jewish] ghetto" and praises those who "fought courageously against Nazism" in "the right cause". His claims were interpreted as defence of Nazism, and suspended from teaching by his university. He was then convicted of defamation and subjected to a fine and prison sentence. Chomsky was one of many who signed a petition to give Faurisson "free exercise of his legal rights" in line with the concept of free expression regardless of the views expressed. Chomsky then wrote an essay called Some Elementary Comments on The Rights of Freedom of Expression (http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/articles/8010-free-expression.html) explaining the importance of freedom of speech. He also notes that Faurisson does not appear to be a Nazi anyway, and that not believing in the Holocaust is not in itself proof of anti-Semitism (he later elaborated: "[for example,] if a person ignorant of modern history were told of the Holocaust and refused to believe that humans are capable of such monstrous acts, we would not conclude that he is an anti-Semite"). Faurisson subsequently used this essay as a preface to his Mémoire en défense, a book in which he defends himself, without asking Chomsky. Chomsky was attacked by various individuals and groups for position he took: he was accused of supporting Faurisson's ideas and not just his right to express them. His impression of Faurisson as "a relatively apolitical liberal of some sort" was taken to be a cover-up for Faurisson's anti-Semitism. The wording of the petition he signed was criticised for speaking of Faurisson's research and findings in uncritical terms. He was accused of guilt by association regarding his personal friendship with Serge Thion (who has links with Holocaust-deniers). He was accused of writing his essay on freedom of speech specifically as a preface to Mémoire en défense. Chomsky was also criticised after Noontide Press, the publishing arm of the revisionist Institute for Historical Review, published The Fateful Triangle — a move that saved the beleaguered publisher. Generally, Chomsky was described as an anti-Semite and a Nazi apologist for both the Faurisson affair and his criticism of Israel policy, notably in Werner Cohn's book "Partners in Hate: Noam Chomsky and the Holocaust Deniers" (ISBN 0964589702) [20] (http://www.wernercohn.com/Chomsky.html). Chomsky has replied once to Werner Cohn's allegations, calling him "a pathological liar" [21] (http://www.chomsky.info/letters/19890601.htm). Charges of anti-Semitism: IsraelAlthough a Jew and a Zionist, Chomsky is highly critical of the behaviour of the state of Israel. He has also denounced the influence that fellow Jews have in the United States. For these views, he has been accused of being an anti-Semite. In 2002, the president of Harvard University Lawrence Summers drew attention by claiming that the "Noam Chomsky-led campaign" to have universities divest from companies with Israeli holdings is "anti-Semitic in effect, if not in intention". The viewpoints that Chomsky expressed on such matters have occasionally caused his political adversaries, notably Jewish American scholars, to accuse him of supporting left-wing fascism. In fact, Chomsky is sceptical of the boycott campaign, though he "understand[s] and sympathize[s] with the feelings behind [the] proposal" [22] (http://euroisrael.huji.ac.il/letters.html). Criticism from pro-Palestinian activistsAlthough he routinely condemns the Israeli government's actions in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Chomsky has recently come under fire (http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=6109) from pro-Palestinian activists for his advocacy (http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=5240) of the relatively moderate two-state plan, as described by the Geneva Accord. Chomsky responds (http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=22&ItemID=6110) to this by stating that proposals without significant international backing are not realistic goals:
Criticism from anarchistsChomsky is generally respected among anarchists, but has occasionally come under criticism for being too reformist or for articulating only a general left-wing, humanitarian analysis of imperialism instead of a full anarchist critique. The anarcho-primitivist John Zerzan, for example, expresses such views, and go so far as to say that "[t]he real answer, painfully obvious, is that he is not an anarchist at all" [23] (http://www.primitivism.com/chomsky.htm). Zerzan also criticises Chomsky's focus on US foreign policy, not for being "anti-American" (Zerzan notes disapprovingly that Chomsky is motivated by his duty as an American citizen), but for representing a certain conservative "narrowness" not befitting an anarchist. BibliographyLinguisticsSee a full bibliography on Chomsky's MIT homepage [24] (http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/www/bibliography/noam.html).
Political worksSome of the books are available online [25] (http://www.zmag.org/chomskybooks.htm).
About Chomsky
Films
See also
External links
Select speeches and interviews
Select articles
Articles about Chomsky
Criticism of ChomskyGeneral The Definitive Anti-Chomsky Link List (http://plaza.ufl.edu/slasher/antichomsky.htm) Cold War history
Terrorism
Cambodia
Faurisson affair
Israel and Palestine
Yugoslavia
Media
Conspiracy theories
Linguistics
From the right
From noninterventionists
From Marxists
Satirization
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