y in Sudan, which killed one person?
But it’s when you look at the extraordinary moral force of Chomsky’s writings that you start to get an understanding of why he’s so influential. There is surely a whiff of the cult here. This may seem far-fetched – Chomsky doesn’t appear to be after followers in the same way as, say, Marx was. He’s no patriarch: more Woody Allen than Moses. He’s the picture of modesty, just simply presenting the facts. And I don’t want to push this too far: I’m not arguing that Chomsky actually runs a cult. But there’s a continuum between on the one hand the normal exchange of information in a free society with people talking, arguing, writing articles and books, up through more charismatic individuals with a point to get across, through movements, religions, cults. And Chomsky is somewhere along that continuum. His attitude to who those who disagree with him, is, by and large, one of contempt. The only reason they can’t see the simple truth of what he’s saying is that they are, in one way or another, morally deficient. Normally this moral deficiency takes the form of selling out to the establishment. People want to get on in their career but they see which way the wind blows – if they write the truth they don’t last long, don’t get promotion, don’t win those Pulitzer prizes – so they write what the establishment wants to hear. So there they are, hypocrites, tossing and turning in their beds raddled with guilt, while outside – can you hear it? – there’s a still small voice, the voice they’re trying to marginalise, the voice which sick, violent, mainstream America doesn’t want you to hear, the voice of Noam Chomsky, telling the plain unadorned truth. Have you got the moral character to respond to that voice? Not many do (oh it’s a cruel, shallow world) but for those chosen few they can look around them, in the street, on the tube, in the office, and think to themselves “The fools! The blind stupid fools! They think they’re the good ones, threatened by terrorists, but it’s the other way around! We’re the real terrorists! And those pathetic cries of Democracy and Freedom – they’re just advertising slogans to dupe you.”
This, I think, is verging on cult territory. The Chomskian world is almost exactly a reverse of the way most of us view things, but only a few, those with special moral vision, can see it. For Chomsky, one of whose favourite terms is “Orwellian”, we already live in the world of Big Brother. But to spell this out is immediately to see how fatuous it is, and what an insult it is to everything that Orwell stood for. To pretend that we in the West are living in an Orwellian state is simply grotesque while Kim Jong Il still rules in North Korea.
But you can’t ignore it: that small insistent voice goes on and on. Just the plain and simple truth, which anyone, if they’re not corrupted by the wicked world, can understand. In the past few years the US and its allies have bombed and invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s true. Go back a bit and they were blasting away at the Serbians. Can you deny it? And they’ve been doing it for decades. Go back sixty years and they were storming across the Pacific leaving a trail of destruction in their wake, bombing and killing, then virtually flattening Tokyo before dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and setting up a pro-western government to rule over a devastated country. At the same time in Western Europe they killed hundreds of thousands with targeted bombing on German cities before advancing across Germany, deposing the legitimate elected government and setting up a puppet government in Bonn. That’s how it was, but that’s not the story you’ll read about in the mainstream press.