To set the historical record straight, it is necessary from time to time to point out that the majority of “Left Wing Intellectuals” did not spend the Cold War criticizing communist governments for oppressing their people, but rather attacking any attempt by the U.S. government or conservatives to oppose communism. In their eyes, Ronald Reagan was an “insane imperialist warmonger” for calling the Soviet Union an Evil Empire and attempting to fight communism throughout the world.
So in the High Church of the American Left, praising America’s fight against communism was the ultimate sin, right up there with opposing global warming. Even so, some may find it surprising just how viciously that High Church’s uncrowned Pope, Noam Chomsky, attacked Vaclav Havel for the sin of praising America as a “defender of freedom.”
Sayeth Pope Chomsky to his leftwing pal Alexander Cockburn:
As a good and loyal friend, I can’t overlook this chance to suggest to you a marvelous way to discredit yourself completely and lose the last minimal shreds of respectability that still raise lingering questions about your integrity. I have in mind what I think is one of the most illuminating examples of the total and complete intellectual and moral corruption of Western culture, namely, the awed response to Vaclav Havel’s embarrassingly silly and morally repugnant Sunday School sermon in Congress the other day. We may put aside the intellectual level of the comments (and the response) — for example, the profound and startlingly original idea that people should be moral agents. More interesting are the phrases that really captured the imagination and aroused the passions of Congress, editorial writers, and columnists — and, doubtless, soon the commentators in the weeklies and monthlies: that we should assume responsibility not only for ourselves, our families, and our nations, but for others who are suffering and persecuted. This remarkable and novel insight was followed by the key phrase of the speech: the cold war, now thankfully put to rest, was a conflict between two superpowers: one, a nightmare, the other, the defender of freedom (great applause).
Reading it brought to mind a number of past experiences in Southeast Asia, Central America, the West Bank, and even a kibbutz in Israel where I lived in 1953 — Mapam, super-Stalinist even to the extent of justifying the anti-Semitic doctor’s plot, still under the impact of the image of the USSR as the leader of the anti-Nazi resistance struggle. I recall remarks by a Fatherland Front leader in a remote village in Vietnam, Palestinian organizers, etc., describing the USSR as the hope for the oppressed and the US government as the brutal oppressor of the human race. If these people had made it to the Supreme Soviet they doubtless would have been greeted with great applause as they delivered this message, and probably some hack in Pravda would have swallowed his disgust and written a ritual ode.
I don’t mean to equate a Vietnamese villager to Vaclav Havel. For one thing, I doubt that the former would have had the supreme hypocrisy and audacity to clothe his praise for the defenders of freedom with gushing about responsibility for the human race. It’s also unnecessary to point out to the half a dozen or so sane people who remain that in comparison to the conditions imposed by US tyranny and violence, East Europe under Russian rule was practically a paradise. Furthermore, one can easily understand why an oppressed Third World victim would have little access to any information (or would care little about anything) beyond the narrow struggle for survival against a terrorist superpower and its clients. And the Pravda hack, unlike his US clones, would have faced a harsh response if he told the obvious truths. So by every conceivable standard, the performance of Havel, Congress, the media, and (we may safely predict, without what will soon appear) the Western intellectual community at large are on a moral and intellectual level that is vastly below that of Third World peasants and Stalinist hacks.
So: Vaclav Havel, a man who spent most of his adult life fighting communist oppression and imprisonment, was “morally repugnant” and worse than a “Stalinist hack” for saying that the U.S. was ” the defender of freedom.” Oh, and compared to any place America was fighting communism, “East Europe under Russian rule was practically a paradise.” So sayeth Pope Chomsky.
Havel wasn’t the only formerly left-wing public figure dying this week who attracted Pope Chomsky’s scorn for heresy. Christopher Hitchens also received condemnation for suggesting that Osama Bin Laden was, in fact, demonstrably more evil and culpable in the death of innocents than Bill Clinton. Hitchens, of course, gave at least as well as he got, and also noted the moral bankruptcy of Chomsky’s attack on Havel:
The last time we corresponded, some months ago, I was appalled by the robotic element both of his prose and of his opinions. He sought earnestly to convince me that Vaclav Havel, by addressing a joint session of Congress in the fall of 1989, was complicit in the murder of the Jesuits in El Salvador that had occurred not very long before he landed in Washington. In vain did I point out that the timing of Havel’s visit was determined by the November collapse of the Stalinist regime in Prague, and that on his first celebratory visit to the United States he need not necessarily take the opportunity to accuse his hosts of being war criminals. Nothing would do, for Chomsky, but a strict moral equivalence between Havel’s conduct and the mentality of the most depraved Stalinist.
Less than a year later, Hitchens himself would have enough of his former allies on the left and take leave from the High Church’s oldest organ, The Nation:
It’s obvious to me that the “antiwar” side would not be convinced even if all the allegations made against Saddam Hussein were proven, and even if the true views of the Iraqi people could be expressed. All evidence pointed overwhelmingly to the Taliban and Al Qaeda last fall, and now all the proof is in; but I am sent petitions on Iraq by the same people (some of them not so naïve) who still organize protests against the simultaneous cleanup and rescue of Afghanistan, and continue to circulate falsifications about it. The Senate adopted the Iraq Liberation Act without dissent under Clinton; the relevant UN resolutions are old and numerous. I don’t find the saner, Richard Falk-ish view of yet more consultation to be very persuasive, either.
This is something more than a disagreement of emphasis or tactics. When I began work for The Nation over two decades ago, Victor Navasky described the magazine as a debating ground between liberals and radicals, which was, I thought, well judged. In the past few weeks, though, I have come to realize that the magazine itself takes a side in this argument, and is becoming the voice and the echo chamber of those who truly believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden. (I too am resolutely opposed to secret imprisonment and terror-hysteria, but not in the same way as I am opposed to those who initiated the aggression, and who are planning future ones.) In these circumstances it seems to me false to continue the association, which is why I have decided to make this “Minority Report” my last one.
Condemning Havel, driving out Hitchens; two small examples of just how extensively a reflexive anti-Americanism and hatred of conservatism has warped the judgment of those still filling the pews of the High Church of the American Left.
Tags: Christopher Hitchens, Democrats, Iraq, Noam Chomsky, The Nation, Vaclav Havel
[…] this little snippety-flashbacky-thing encompasses something useful – that he drove Christopher Hitchens towards proper […]
I must admit I wasn’t aware Noam Chomsky was the uncrowned Pope of the Left. Perhaps there needs to be a distinction between progressives and the left, although I know they all get lumped together. Much in the same way the Republican party is the Tea Party.
I personally have always found Chomsky smug, a writer who obviously is in love with his own turn of phrase. He obviously has no critical thinking capability when it comes to himself. And to be honest, almost all of the progressives I know would agree. I certainly wouldn’t want him as someone representative of my world view.
[…] an obituary but probably should have done is Noam Chomsky, who, I have recently discovered (HT BattleSwarm) had some unkind things to say about Havel. The link goes to a letter Chomsky wrote to Alexander […]
A rudimentary reading of history will show the US as, in it’s imperial phase, a great obstructor of freedom. So, the Havel speech was indeed as Chomsky characterized it…
As for the scoundrel Hitchens:
Associated with the “state capitalist” International Socialists group in the UK in the 1970s and later the Nation magazine in the US, Hitchens was the sort of private school “leftist” that British society regularly turns out, essentially snobs and careerists, who ditch their former “comrades” as soon as the wind shifts or more tempting opportunities present themselves.
His autobiography is an exercise in shameless name-dropping and self-promotion. The journalist’s account of meeting Margaret Thatcher, newly elected Conservative Party leader, whose neo-colonial Malvinas War Hitchens would later endorse, is especially distasteful: “Almost as soon as we shook hands on immediate introduction, I felt that she [Thatcher] knew my name and perhaps connected it to the socialist weekly that had recently called her rather sexy [Hitchens’ own piece in the New Statesman]. While she struggled adorably with this moment of pretty confusion …” What is one to make of this?
A defender of neo-colonial war, a snitch and an ally of the most reactionary elements in American politics—what an unusual “contrarian.”
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/dec2011/hitc-d17.shtml
“So: Vaclav Havel . . . was “morally repugnant” ”
Uh . . . no. Chomsky was addressing the substance of Havel’s address before the U.S. Congress — not Havel, himself.
“two small examples of just how extensively a reflexive anti-Americanism and hatred of conservatism has warped the judgment of those still filling the pews of the High Church of the American Left.”
Well, if by “America” you mean “what the government does” . . . then, perhaps your observation has some merit. However, Chomsky goes to great lengths to distinguish between civil society and state power.
“Hatred of conservatism” ?Well, perhaps . . . provided, of course, that we re-define “conservatism” to mean violent, reactionary statism, the resort to violence over diplomacy, heavy state control over control of markets and the like.
Pāṇini of Gandhara > Chomsky
Noam Chomsky, like nearly every academic leftist these days, has said and done nothing about the jobs crisis in academia. It is happening on their watch, but they refuse to do anything about it. And since they have done nothing about it, the default solution has been a free-market solution, one which they ordinarily claim to hate.
Chomsky himself could have done a little for the crisis by retiring early, thus allowing at least one younger person to get a job. But he refused to do even that. And it’s not like he’d be hurting since he has other sources of income (namely his books and speaking engagements). Not only did he not retire early, he stayed on well past retirement age.
My hope is that fifty years from now, this is all he will be remembered for.
[…] I don’t mean to equate a Vietnamese villager to Vaclav Havel. For one thing, I doubt that the former would have had the supreme hypocrisy and audacity to clothe his praise for the defenders of freedom with gushing about responsibility for the human race. It’s also unnecessary to point out to the half a dozen or so sane people who remain that in comparison to the conditions imposed by US tyranny and violence, East Europe under Russian rule was practically a paradise. Furthermore, one can easily understand why an oppressed Third World victim would have little access to any information (or would care little about anything) beyond the narrow struggle for survival against a terrorist superpower and its clients. And the Pravda hack, unlike his US clones, would have faced a harsh response if he told the obvious truths. So by every conceivable standard, the performance of Havel, Congress, the media, and (we may safely predict, without what will soon appear) the Western intellectual community at large are on a moral and intellectual level that is vastly below that of Third World peasants and Stalinist hacks.Read More:https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=9828 […]
The irony of Hitchens calling Chomsky a Stalinist is ridiculous. When Hitchens was supporting the Iraq War because of the crimes of Saddam’s “aggression” he conveniently forgot the fact that the war was itself uncontroversially an act of aggression and that Saddam’s aggression and chemical warfare was green-lit and supported by the US to begin with.
That aside, both left-wing and right-wing dictatorships have attacked him as well as everyone:
“One of the favorite weeks of my life was in about 1980, when I received two dailies denouncing me furiously for my work on transformational grammar: One was Izvestia, denouncing it as counterrevolutionary, and the other was Argentina’s La Prensa (at the peak of the neo-Nazi military dictatorship), denouncing it as dangerously revolutionary. They’re all basically alike…”
I must agree with Harriet Thorn that the remarks were concerning the substance and hypocrisy of the *statements* and *actions* at that visit. It was akin to a propaganda love-in. Many around the world glorify the USA’s defence of liberty and freedom which is a joke so sad and pathetic that I don’t know whether to weep or cry. The difference in handling the response to oil rich nations and africa is just one example of this double standard. The USA has been primarily interested in promoting its SELF interests in just about every nation it’s been involved with. Look at many South and Central American nations, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Indonesia, Iran, etc.. and then ask how guys like Suharto, The Shah, Saddam Hussein, Pinochet and other puppet dictators put in place by the CIA et al and then ask how much praise we’re supposed to heap on the USA at a congressional visit… If he was concerned with freedom he would have given them a lecture… not praise
PS I meant laugh or cry
I don’t think you’ve quite grasped the concept of the possessive.
Havel’s speech can be silly and morally repugnant, without the man being so. If you want to attack someone at least attack what they really say.
“For one thing, I doubt that the former would have had the supreme hypocrisy and audacity to clothe his praise for the defenders of freedom with gushing about responsibility for the human race.”
And yet Noam Chomsky, cheerleader for every genocidal Communist regime from the Bolsheviks to the Castro regime to Cambodia to North Vietnam (to say nothing of his Islamist apologism) has made himself excessively wealthy doing precisely that.
Noam Chomsky is as low as it gets. If history deems to remember this pseudointellectual hack, it will be because he has a permanenet place reserved next to the Leni Reifenstahl’s and Jean-Paul Sartre’s of the world.
“he irony of Hitchens calling Chomsky a Stalinist is ridiculous.”
Not even.
Hitchens has matured and, daresay, evolved beyond his totalitarian-worshipping past. He has denounced the men and ideas he clung to in his youth vociferously, and has on many an occasion compared the idolatry he and others felt for the oppressors and mass murderers produced by Marx’s totalitarian dogma as being no different than the religious mania he dedicated the better part of his life to combatting )well, most of them; he still clung to the myths of Trotsky, Lenin and Che Guevara over the reality of their actions). One needs simply read his writng on Saddam Hussein then compared to now to see the man underwent a dramatic changed for the better.
Chomsky, on the other hand, clings to the same “Freedom is Slavery, War is Peace, Ignorance is Strength, and slavery, poverty and genocide are a-Okay if you’re a Socialist” mantra with the same fanatical fervor he’s spouted since the sixties.
I’d trust somebody who sticks to his guns more than one who has ‘evolved’ into their current ideology. The reality is that ‘evolution’ or maturity explicitly implies that at no point is the viewpoint static. Meaning, if you changed your mind once, whats to stop you from doing it again?
As for claiming that Chomsky stands up for dictators, dude, thats as dumb as donuts.