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It is definitely absurd to deal with an anarcho-socialist dreamer in the context of Kosovo—an individual who has so anachronistic mental setup, is so irrelevant to the world that, when it is a matter of one of the worst human tragedies in this bloodiest period of human history, it will be disrespectful to the human dignity to relate him in any way to the event—, except, perhaps, as a party to it. It is ridiculous to consider such an irrational and irresponsible paper intellectualism in relation to the dangerous and dreadful entanglement of the Balkans and NATO and Russia—an unrepentant imposture which once paralleled the Khmer Rouge to the French Resistance fighters and which, by virtue of deviously evasive character, espoused systematically and with an apparent sympathy the neo-Nazis in the name of free speech and got off with it—, except, perhaps, as a party to it. Yet this must be done. And with no hesitation. For one thing, the enormous sufferings of Russians and their satellites under the brutal Soviet regime had been caused by the same irrationalism, created and supported by the equally silly materialistic ideology. While only the fear of what would happen still prevent the catastrophic full disintegration, its simulation is already being rehearsed in a lesser scale in what was once called Yugoslavia. The colossal China and some other lesser nations and ethnic groups are still being kept crushed under the equally oppressive and dangerous regimes built upon the same human folly. Only the depth of its idiocy makes the ideology still seem to be a credible intellectual enterprise, keeps it going as a respectful source providing fancy alternatives against the modern type of civilization which was born and progressed on the human mistrust, fear, and hatred. The remedy born out of the same sick tissues is no better than the disease itself. Whether an ideology is on the left or on the right side of the balance, it makes no difference. In their fully developed and matured forms, ideologies entrap the history, freeze the progress, kill the freedom and conscience, wipe out the morality, accumulate infinite hatred, and turn the humanity into killing machines. When most of us, the most sensitive, conscientious, idealist parts of us, millions of young people of the world are painfully discontent with the so-called modern open mass consumption societies and their virtual and actual hatreds and wars, when they still live under depression and repression of a world order which has so much human misery in its past and present, the will of these most energetic masses of humanity can not be kept drugged, apathied, stupefied indefinitely. It may quite well be concentrated into single points of destruction by the extremes of hatred. As we are obliged to eradicate the ignorance which
is the one single reason of the war and poverty on earth from the human
minds, to what else can we trust but the human love of wisdom? With deep
suspicion of being mere human, with self-deprecation and self-degradation,
with nihilistic and positivistic refusal of universal human reason, can
we hope to make anything resolute and vigorous other than hatred? Can we
ever hope to change the world into a peaceful and happy place without changing
ourselves? Can we overcome hatred without learning how to love?
Gary Bauslaugh (Dean of Studies, Malaspina College): ‘‘I'd like to welcome all of you to this lecture today. Several years ago, Professor Chomsky was described in The New York Times Book Review as follows: ‘Judged in terms of the power, range, novelty and influence of his thought, Noam Chomsky is arguably the most important intellectual alive.’ ’’
And although
we know the fact that no amount of evil caused by his own government
in the world, no amount of military aid to the fascist regimes by the US,
etc., is enough to justify his support of Yugoslav sadists and his ignorance
of the plight of the people of Kosovo, he may comfortably think otherwise
on his principles. His alleged sensitivity for the international law, too,
is of course merely a matter of expediency, for he knows quite well the
fact the UN member nations are overwhelmingly supportive of the NATO action
to stop the Serbian atrocities while the Security Council could have killed
that support with its veto and indeed would have done so in case its approval
has been asked. Yet formally he is perfectly right in interpreting the
international law as embodied in those impotent authorities.
Lastly,
we can not criticize him for holding responsible not the Serb forces for
their
own murders, but taking them only as a predictable result of the NATO
intervention. This is of course beyond reason, beyond any critique. As
a NATO hater, and with a relentless consistency, he turns a blind eye to
the hungry, scared, raped, murdered people, a part of humanity, a part
of us fleeing from their executioners, and defends ‘real’ victims, the
Serbs. This he would rightly and cold-bloodedly call the price of consistency.
We criticize him because, according to our presupposition (so long as he doesn’t mind), he does all of this in the name of a good cause—the Justice. But he does it in such an incredibly positivistic manner that, he seems to be totally unaware of the meaning of the concept. He defends it in such cold-blooded ways that his critiques become inspired less by the love of Justice than the hatred for what he sees as his enemy. He defends the cause of Justice in a way which somehow, without his understanding how it happens, leads nowhere except to devise apologies for the absolute evil—the destruction of the most essential value in existence, the human life. Behind an anarchco-socialistic makeup, we are confronted by an intellectual which is so intensely busy with talking and writing and commenting and answering that, he is unable to find any peace of mind to think. His intellectual activity practically inhibits the least efforts for cautious reflection, and immerses itself into the shallow chaos of magazines and newspapers and newscasts. He dilutes his logic by his media-logic. To find his way among this media material, he takes his childhood inclinations of anti-authoritarianism as his guiding principle.
An enlightening example of Mr. Chomsky’s digging into the newspapers to show how the world missed the chance of making peace with Milosevic (from one of his replies in ZNet):
What is the difference between a commentator who expects a war criminal to sit at the table to talk peace and a president who actually had done so?
It is one of the greatest ironies of the modern mass culture that this man who does not have any competence about responsible political thinking, who does not understand the absolute import of the ‘innate idea,’ of the concept except in the context of linguistics, who does not like to use ‘‘fancy polysyllables like philosophy,’’ who digs mostly newspaper reports and commentaries deep into their most ambiguous details and numbers, professing precisionism amongst the numbers which themselves are no more than rough estimations, yet becomes a fish out of water when dragged into political theory—this man who feels nothing but contempt for free and objective thinking is called the most important intellectual in the US. As is expected, by his beloved and hated media itself! Might not be something wrong with the term ‘intellectual’ itself? We pick out him because he is the contemporary prototype of the materialist intellectual in modern mass society. He provides the pattern for the mass intellectualism—a wisdom without love of wisdom, a demand for change without understanding, a critique feeding itself upon only what mass media provides for it. He is socialist with a confession of ignorance about the meaning of the term ‘socialist.’ He is feminist with a strong patriarchal temper. He is anarchist with an authoritative make-up—with all its ambivalence projected into a mass of best intentions and worst results, of humanitarian ideals and neo-Nazi apologies. We see the same apologetic style when he writes about Milosevic the war criminal. He minimizes the Serbian atrocities exactly like he did in the case of Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, of the PKK in Türkiye, of the FARC in Colombia, and so on. But he goes further. He joins forces with the leftist party in each case and supports it with his intellectual bombardments against its enemy. As if there is an ethnic sympathy on his part towards Milosevic and his Serbian irregulars (Chomsky himself comes from a Jewish family of Russian origin), he takes the KLA which was born not to smuggle narcotics but to protect the innocent against the sadists who had already killed thousands both in Kosovo and Bosnia, and compares it to the terrorists making raids on the New York City inhabitants: He needs a ‘right audience,’ indeed—an audience who is masochistic enough to let its conscience to be pounded by the reasonings of an intellectual who does not permit even the hypothetical goal of his ideology, his private understanding of the human happiness, to be prejudiced by the real humanity itself, and molds his arguments on the plane of his ego-ideal to soothe his sense of guilt. His aggressiveness grows more intensive by his unconscious sense of right and wrong, becomes more tensed by his repression of his innate moral sense.‘‘We might ask, incidentally, how the US would respond to attacks on police stations and civilians in New York by armed guerrillas supported from and based in Libya.’’
Is there any inconsistency about his preferences?
No. Not at all. Quite the contrary. If you are an anarchist, you must oppose
first of all against the first, the biggest, the most powerful authority
in existence—the US. Whatever the mental cost might be, this cardinal principle
must never be contradicted. So, by definition, whatever party the US favors
is crooked. Whatever party the US denounces is straight. Everything is
either black or white. Even if it be the Khemer Rouge or Milosevic or any
other sadistic gang or regime, the enemy of his enemy is his friend. The
principle comes first. The morality, the feeling, the meaning later. Everything
is relative to the ideology. A good anarchist is anything but a pragmatist.
Principle is absolute because it is a principle, a value of a particular
ego-ideal. It is virtually sacred. Under the authority of the anarchistic
principle, even the left and right are transitive relative terms. As a
leftist, it is quite possible to be nationalistic. As a leftist, it is
quite possible to be anti-Semitic. As a rightist, it is quite possible
to be Bolshevik. ‘National Bolshevism’? Is it a contradiction in terms?
Find it through Altavista.
Ideologue simply plays on the prejudices of his ‘right’ audience. He demands not interrogation but only obedience from his audience, because he always oversells to them only what they have already bought from somewhere else. Indeed, it makes an intellectual very respectful, powerful, and effective in the eyes of his audience when he flatters them and tells them only things which are already known to them. This is intellectual labor in the miserable sense of the word. The basic thing about being a leftist is to be materialistic. This principle grabs human mind and consistently and gradually represses the free thinking, transforms his innate idealism into nihilism, philanthropy into misanthropy, humanism into nationalism, love into hate. The Materialism destroys what is called meaning and value in existence; in the name of atheism, it kills the conscience; then, it readily supplements atheism with hate, anarchism with despotism, pacifism with aggression, the leftist paraphernalia with the rightist, half-truths with full-lies, and incorporates all this trash into one single lump of ideology. Avram Noam Chomsky sees no particular difference between right wing and the left wing ideologies when it is a matter of revolt against the authority, and in his fight against it in the name of ‘free speech,’ he actually fuses them into one. It is not a secret. For Chomsky’s entanglements with neo-Nazis, see the files in
So, besides the fact that Mr. Chomsky’s article on "‘The Current Bombings: Behind the Rhetoric’’ provides the basic direction for the arguments by the Left about what has been taking place in Kosovo, there were two special reasons to undertake a closer analysis of his article. The first is to find out how and why an admittedly progressive, populist, humanist, socialist point of view leads to justify the naked sadism by the old communist and ethno-nationalist forces in Kosovo. The answer should be very simple from the outset, for the half-truths of the materialist Left have their usual user-friendly material logic: In order to oppose the NATO intervention against a possible full scale ethnic cleansing, it is a premise to deny the premeditated mass killings of Kosovar Albanians by the Serbian police forces and army, or at least to reduce the perception of them so as to make them useless as a motive for the intervention. This sort of groundwork is strikingly visible nowadays in the so-called ‘anti-war’ sites in Internet—including the one, ZNet, of which Mr. Chomsky is a columnist among some other pacifists and anarchists, Marxist-Leninists and Maoists, and, to give some flavor to the diversity, gay and lesbian rights activists etc.—which have deleted virtually all references to the mass killings of the Albanians by the Serbs in Kosovo from their pages as well as consciences. When this is done, when the conscience has been silenced by the cold logic of ideology, what remains to be perceived in an unbearable reality is only the ‘indiscriminate’ aerial bombardment by the NATO countries over the innocent Serbs to open the Yugoslav market and exploit the resources of the country. This is anti-imperialism in its obscene form. The second
point
is to show that his almost obsessive acts of free speech against Türkiye,
that there is an ethnic cleansing and genocide of Kurdish people
in Türkiye, too, come from the same logic of ideological hatred that,
since the Kurdish PKK is a left-wing, or, more precisely, a Marxist-Leninist
organization, it has, by definition, every and any right to terrorize people
and commit whatever crime it deems right.
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