Profile: Guru of dissent and leading critic of US foreign policy, Noam Chomsky, may find an audience more worshipful than challenging when he visits Dublin this week, writes Shane Hegarty
He's the anarcho-syndicalist you'd bring home to your grandmother. Avuncular and quiet-spoken, when not castigating the dark machinations of the West's elite Noam Chomsky likes to sail, swim and watch the occasional TV cop show before retiring for the night. Yet he has been described as "an extraordinarily violent man".
Chomsky has been called many things. A recent magazine poll ranked him as "the world's greatest intellectual", but a critic has described him as having "a sick mind". It's tempting to say that Wednesday's lecture in Dublin's RDS will give the 2,000-strong audience a chance to make up its own mind, but it's likely many people will be going more to worship rather than challenge.
The lecture's organiser, Amnesty International, has serious concerns that hundreds will turn up without tickets and with no prospect of getting in. There are 3,000 names on the waiting list. Seats for his UCD lectures will be in similar demand.
It is not a new-found popularity. When Chomsky spoke on "World Order and its Rules" in UCD in the early-1990s, he filled two of the university's largest lecture halls at the same time, with one taking a live television feed. Since then his status as the guru of dissent has only grown, but a man regularly described as speaking from the political margins has become very much a voice of mainstream opinion.
He arrives in Ireland at a time when the coherence of the anti-war movement has long since shattered, but the Shannon issue continues to show how strong the underlying sentiment remains among the general population. In an era when the left is devoid of political leadership, Chomsky offers intellectual authority. Walk into any Irish bookstore, and his works set the tone for bookshelves buckling under the weight of books that criticise American policy. On Wednesday, Chomsky's rhetoric will bite, but it will be soothing for most of his audience.
For all his undoubted intellectual brilliance, his rigorous examination of some disturbing truths about global dynamics, there is the sense that he is a veteran act on a greatest-hits tour. He's likely to do all the popular stuff - Iraq, George W Bush, Tony Blair, American imperialism, the media - and his fans are unlikely to leave disappointed by the notes he's hit.
At 77, Chomsky is several decades down the line from his childhood in a first- generation Jewish working-class household in post-Depression Philadelphia. At age 10 he wrote an essay for the school newspaper on the fall of Barcelona in the Spanish civil war, and by his teenage years was identifying with anarchist politics. His early political education came from witnessing the sometimes violent suppression of strikes and rallies, from hanging around his communist uncle's New York news-stand (although Chomsky is not a communist) and from radical literature picked up in second-hand bookstores.
While his political awareness blossomed during university years in Pennsylvania and Harvard, his revolutionary influence was first felt in linguistics. In the 1950s, he shifted the entire framework of the field by suggesting that human beings have an innate understanding of the basic grammatical structures common to all language, challenging the orthodoxy of behaviourism. In the discipline, his influence has been equated with Freud's on psychology or Einstein's on physics. Based in Massachusetts Institute of Technology for half a century, he has been described as "the 800lb gorilla in linguistics".
Assessing that, an MIT colleague, Dr Steven Pinker, might just as easily have been referring to Chomsky's political reputation when he noted that he "has rabid devotees, who hang on his every footnote, and sworn enemies, who say black whenever he says white". A vital critic of the foreign policy implemented by successive US administrations, he campaigned against the Vietnam war before it became a mass movement, and almost landed in jail because of his refusal to pay taxes during that time.
HE IS A Jew opposed to the Israeli state, has railed against the Western powers' interference in the Middle East, South America and South-East Asia, and continually drew attention to the West's complicity in Indonesia's invasion of East Timor.
In describing the US as a "leading terrorist state", Chomsky has concluded that "one simple way to reduce the threat of terror: stop participating in it". He says that, by presiding over dishonest and malignant policies that have cost countless innocent lives, by the standards of the Nuremberg trials every post-war American president could have been hanged. He may have given qualified support to John Kerry in the most recent US presidential election, but only because he considers the current Bush administration to be the most dangerous in American history, driving the world to the brink of nuclear and environmental destruction.
He has been central to the now widespread belief that the US terrorises, meddles, oppresses and bombs while espousing freedom, when it is only fulfilling the economic interests of the elite. In this, adds Chomsky, it is aided by a consenting media that has become only another product in the market, serving the needs of its patrons and dismissing dissent as , irresponsible and emotional.
The US and its allies would never have invaded Iraq if that country's chief exports were "lettuce and pickles", he maintains. When asked by a student whether it mattered who got rid of a brutal dictator such as Saddam, Chomsky replied: "Suppose we could get Saddam Hussein to conquer North Korea. Would you be in favour of it?"
Such exercises in moral auditing have made him a target for critics, while also alienating some of his followers. The day after the attacks on the World Trade Center, for instance, he wrote that although it was a terrible atrocity, it didn't really compare with Bill Clinton's 1998 bombing of a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant, which he claims may have ultimately been responsible for tens of thousands of deaths. Chomsky's reaction was seen as further proof that he criticises American policy while overlooking the crimes of its opponents.
Kicking off what became a bruising debate between himself and a former idol, Christopher Hitchens wrote in The Nation that "to mention this banana-republic degradation of the United States in the same breath as a plan, deliberated for months, to inflict maximum horror upon the innocent is to abandon every standard that makes intellectual and moral discrimination possible". Yet, despite scant press attention, Chomsky's subsequent pamphlet, 9-11, was a bestseller in a US traumatised by the attack on its soil, and keen to understand why it happened. However, the problem with looking to Chomsky for answers, critics point out, is that one always get the same answer: it was the US's fault.
AS AN AMERICAN citizen, Chomsky has remarked, it is his responsibility to point out the crimes of his leaders, especially given that they run the world's sole superpower. It inevitably leads to occasions when his logic twists back on itself. Despite his excoriation of the West's role in the invasion of East Timor, in 1999 he was against those same powers' attempts to undo this historical wrong. Similarly, he was against Nato's intervention in the Balkans.
His method of rhetorical attack is to compare a current situation with previous ones, effectively arguing that the US's track record in the world, and its likely motives in any intervention, bars it from intervening anywhere else, even in situations - such as the Kosovan crisis - which were plainly crying out for assistance. In doing so he is accused of typifying the contortionists of the left, whose inability to see the US as anything but a destructive imperialist power results in it turning against the very outcomes it had originally lobbied for.
His forensic analysis means that his mistakes do not go unnoticed. In the 1970s he insisted that reports that Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge was carrying out massacres in Cambodia were exaggerations. In 1980, he was still writing that "the positive side of [ the Khmer Rouge] picture has been virtually edited out of the picture". At least 1.67 million Cambodians - 20 per cent of the population - were slaughtered.
There was also a concurrent episode in which he became associated with French Holocaust-denier Robert Faurisson, who used Chomsky's defence of freedom of speech essay as a preface to his work. Chomsky is not a Holocaust-denier, but if his radical position is one reason for his being marginalised by the mass media, this chapter caused lasting damage to his reputation.
THESE, THOUGH, ARE seen by supporters as predictable digs, and Chomsky is not one for apologies. He is pugnacious, both in offence and defence, and will tackle perceived sleights or inaccuracies with vigour. He has a talent for prose that is at once direct and evasive.
During the debate in the magazine The Nation he insisted that he had not at all referred to Hitchens's "propensity to racist contempt", when he had very obviously accused Hitchens of showing racist contempt. In his rebuttal he managed to be as accurate as he was disingenuous.
Those who question him are often treated to a withering response, although when the guru of dissent visits Dublin there will probably be little dissent from the throng. "People just want to hear something outside the rigid dogma they're used to," he has explained. "They're not going to hear it in the media."
That leaves open the question of how much Chomsky's unwavering stance has simply replaced one dogma with another. And while he is a gifted polemicist, he is not so strong at offering salient solutions.
"An early question in every Q&A is: 'You've told us everything that's wrong but not what we can do about it'," his wife Carol told New Yorkermagazine in 2003. "And they're right. He hasn't. So he gives what to me is a fake answer: 'You've got to organise, because a lot of people think these things but they're isolated from each other.' He's doing it because people walk out too depressed. He's responding to people saying, 'Just give us something to hang on to'."
In addition to his already booked-up lecture in the RDS on Wednesday, Noam Chomsky delivers two public lectures in UCD's O'Reilly Hall this week: Democracy Promotion: Reflections on Intellectuals and the State (Tue, 7pm) and Biolinguistic Explorations: Design, Development, Evolution (Fri, 4.30pm). Seats will be on a first come, first served basis and doors open one hour beforehand
Who is he?
Recently voted "the world's greatest intellectual", he is a leading critic of successive US administrations' foreign adventures
Why is he in the news?
Will be in Dublin this week to give the 2006 Amnesty Lecture in the RDS, on the "War on Terror". He'll also give a series of lectures in UCD
Most likely to say?
"If the US wants to end terrorism, then it should stop terrorising the world"
Least likely to say?
"I was wrong"
Most appealing characteristic?Unrelenting in his attacks on US foreign policy; public opinion has moved towards him rather than away
Least appealing characteristic?
Great at identifying the problems, but not so good at providing answers