BRET STEPHENS: FROM CHOMSKY TO BIN LADEN
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703730804576312923866840988.html
From Chomsky to bin Laden The professor dons the militant’s cap: It fits.
How fitting that Noam Chomsky would waste little time denouncing the
killing of Osama bin Laden as the “political assassination” of an
“unarmed victim” whose complicity in 9/11 remains, in the professor’s
mind, very much in doubt. Osama was fond of quoting the MIT sage in
his periodic video messages—Jimmy Carter is another American so
honored—so maybe the eulogy was just a matter of one good turn
deserving another.
Then again, philosophical fellow traveling is always interesting, not
least for what it tells us about ourselves.
In 1946, Martin Heidegger, incomparably the most significant
philosopher of the 20th century, was banned from teaching for five
years at the insistence of occupying French forces. The crime? He had
been a Mitläufer—a “fellow-walker”—of the Nazi Party during its time
in power. He had extolled the “inner truth and greatness of this
movement.” He had tormented Jewish professors. True, he had done so
with caveats and reservations, and from a philosophical vantage that
operated according to its own logic, distinct from simple National
Socialism. But he had done it all the same.
Does anyone today doubt that the teaching ban was justified? Most of
us would say that far worse was due the man who lent Adolf Hitler an
aura of intellectual respectability.
Mr. Chomsky is no Martin Heidegger: His contributions to linguistics
and cognitive psychology, considerable as they are, pale next to
Heidegger’s contributions to political philosophy. Nor is he a
Heidegger in the sense that he has brought no material harm to anyone,
as Heidegger did to his mentor Edmund Husserl.
Yet when it comes to making excuses for monsters, the two thinkers are
evenly matched. Among the subjects of Mr. Chomsky’s solicitude have
been Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson (whom he described as a
“relatively apolitical liberal”), the Khmer Rouge (at the height of
the killing fields), and Hezbollah (whose military-style cap he
cheerfully donned on a visit to Lebanon last year).
As for bin Laden, Mr. Chomsky asks, rhetorically, “how we would be
reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound,
assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.
Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s.”
Ho-hum: Can anyone be surprised anymore by what Mr. Chomsky thinks and
says? Not really. In one of those little ironies of leftist politics,
the author of “Manufacturing Consent” has become a victim of what my
former colleague Tom Frank likes to call “the commodification of
dissent,” in which even the most radical ideas come stamped with their
own ISBN number. In the West at least, the marketplace of ideas is
also the great equalizer of ideas, blunting edges that might once have
had the power to wound and kill.
So it is that Mr. Chomsky can be the recipient of over 20 honorary
degrees, including from Harvard, Cambridge and the University of
Chicago. None of these degrees, as far as I know, was conferred for
Mr. Chomsky’s political musings, but neither did those musings provoke
any apparent misgivings about the fitness of granting the award. So
Mr. Chomsky is the purveyor of some controversial ideas about this or
that aspect of American power. So what?
Here’s what: Dulled (and dull) as Mr. Chomsky’s ideas might be in the
West, they remain razors outside of it. “Among the most capable of
those from your side who speak on this topic [the war in Iraq] and on
the manufacturing of public opinion is Noam Chomsky, who spoke sober
words of advice prior to the war,” said bin Laden in 2007. He was
singing the professor’s praises again last year, saying “Noam Chomsky
was correct when he compared the U.S. policies to those of the mafia.”
These words seem to have been deeply felt. Every wannabe
philosopher—and bin Laden was certainly that—seeks the imprimatur of
someone he supposes to be a real philosopher. Mr. Chomsky could not
furnish bin Laden with a theology, but he did provide an intellectual
architecture for his hatred of the United States. That Mr. Chomsky
speaks from the highest tower of American academe, that he is so
widely feted as the great mind of his generation, that his every
utterance finds a publisher and an audience, could only have sustained
bin Laden in the conceit that his thinking was on a high plane. Maybe
it would have been different if Mr. Chomsky had been dismissed decades
ago for what he is: a two-nickel crank.
Now bin Laden is dead. Yet wherever one goes in the Arab world, one
finds bookstores well-stocked with Chomsky, offering another
generation the same paranoid notions of American policy that mesh so
neatly with an already paranoid political culture.
In 1946 a self-confident West had no trouble demanding that Heidegger
be banned. Ideas, it was understood, had consequences. Today nobody
would dream of banning Mr. Chomsky from anything. Yet ideas have
consequences even today.
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