Noam Chomsky, internationally renowned scholar and a path-breaker in linguistics, arrives in India for a three-week visit.
IN the emotionally overwrought situation since the September 11 attacks in the United States, it has taken the uncompromising intellect and integrity of a Noam Chomsky to provide a sense of perspective to the situation. "Enduring Freedom" is the name given to the ongoing military operation in Afghanistan. The world is promised that this will only be the first chapter of a prolonged war. With subtle irony, Chomsky pointed out at a recent talk at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - where he has been a Professor for close to 45 years - that "endure" also means to suffer. And perhaps September 11, he suggested, was related to the fact that "there are plenty of people around the world who have endured what we (in the U.S.) call freedom."
Chomsky arrived in India in the first week of November on his first visit to the country since February 1996 (Cover Story, Frontline, February 23, 1996). In the course of just over three weeks, the acknowledged founder of the modern science of linguistics will address public gatherings in New Delhi, Chennai (on November 10, in an event sponsored by Frontline and the Media Development Foundation and supported also by more than 20 representative organisations), Thiruvananthapuram (on November 11) and Kolkata (on November 20). The issues he is slated to cover include the evolution of democracy under globalisation and the peoples' right to information. One lecture in New Delhi is expected to be a formal academic affair in the rarefied realms of linguistic philosophy. Chomsky will receive an honorary doctorate from Calcutta University before leaving for Pakistan, where he is scheduled to give major lectures in Lahore and Islamabad. Not surprisingly, a number of media interviews and interactions have been scheduled for Chomsky during this South Asian visit.
It is a safe bet that the dominant concern of the audiences that will turn up to listen to Chomsky will be the ongoing "war on terror". In Chennai and Kolkata, where he and his wife Carol will be treated as state guests, he will speak on the topic, "September 11 and its aftermath: Where is the world heading?" Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee will preside over the lecture at Kolkata's Science City Auditorium. Chomsky has had much to say on this matter since September 11. Indeed, he was one of the first persons to offer a reasoned perspective - detached from the shameful jingoism of mainstream comment - when an incredulous world began to wake up to the true magnitude of the horror.
Chomsky's reaction was quick and unequivocal: "The September 11 attacks were major atrocities. In terms of number of victims they do not reach the level of many others, for example (President Bill) Clinton's bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext, destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and probably killing tens of thousands of people (no one knows, because the U.S. blocked an inquiry at the U.N. and no one cares to pursue it). Not to speak of much worse cases, which easily come to mind."
Chomsky was largely ignored by the mainstream media in the U.S., which has learnt at considerable cost that it would engage in debate with him only at its own risk. Committed segments of the right-wing press, notably those with Zionist sympathies like The New Republic, did feel impelled to take note of what he said, though only in a derisive and dismissive manner, without the slightest intent to engage with the points he had to make. The most furious reaction came from the journalist Christopher Hitchens, ostensibly on the political Left, though best known for picking soft targets such as Mother Teresa and Diana Spencer and only occasionally turning his attention to more worthwhile foes like Henry Kissinger.
In two articles in The Nation and one in the Spectator, Hitchens condemned all those who sought to "rationalise" the attacks on the U.S. by comparing them with American atrocities in different parts of the world. What was seen that day was naked fascism "with an Islamic face" he said, in a paroxysm of outrage at the suggestion that the September 11 events had any connection to U.S. policy towards the Arab world and Israel. The rage and desperation that impelled the suicide attacks in the U.S., he argued, "predate even the Balfour Declaration, let alone the occupation of the West Bank". In a locution curiously reminiscent of the "clash of civilisations" thesis, he concluded with the assertion that "the gates of Vienna would have to fall to the Ottoman jihad before any balm could begin to be applied to these psychic wounds."
CHOMSKY responded with lofty detachment. He only chose to reply under tremendous public pressure and then with admitted reluctance, since he found it impossible to believe that Hitchens could actually mean what he said. With pointed reference to the bombing of Sudan, he reminded Hitchens that maturity required him to account not merely for the direct loss of life in the attack but also the longer term costs of depriving a poor country of its only source of essential medicines. To do so was not to argue for the "moral equivalence" of the crimes, but merely to set the context for a considered political response to the September 11 atrocities.
In the course of his fevered polemic, Hitchens perhaps unwittingly revealed his true proclivities, which are evidently to march in lock-step behind the new U.S. wars. What Chomsky thinks "no longer matters", he said, since the U.S.' "past crimes" did not close the door to expiation "by determined action."
With a scarcely concealed sneer, Hitchens concluded with the observation that Chomsky had "lost or is losing the qualities that made him a great moral and political tutor in the years of the Indochina war and that enabled him to write such monumental essays as his critique of the Kahan Commission on (the) Sabra and Shatila (massacres of Palestinian refugees) or his analysis of the situation in East Timor." For the crowds that have been thronging Chomsky's public engagements in India, this observation must surely seem both trivial and irrelevant. Unlike others who have claimed the mantle of the moral tutor in the West, Chomsky has never departed from the fundamental principle that no event or entity can be spared the rigours of rational analysis.
