Special Feature

Who is Noam Chomsky?

May 2004

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He's 'The Elvis Of Academia' and 'The Devil's Accountant'. A relentless thorn in America's side, Noam Chomsky has spent 50 years bringing his country's elite to account. Here, he talks to Tim Adams about genocide and genitalia.

On the railings outside my local train station at Harringay, in north London, someone has carefully placed a series of small white stickers. The stickers, all at eye level, are designed, I suppose, to be the first thing you see on the way to work and the last thing you see on your way home. They are all neatly typed with two words: READ CHOMSKY. Most mornings I find myself wondering for an instant whether the words are an imperative ('If you do nothing else today...'), or a swaggering boast (along the lines of some of the station's other typical graffiti: 'Shagged Karen', say).

Anyone who has read Noam Chomsky will know that both interpretations are justified. His writings, in linguistics (a discipline which he effectively invented) and on the hypocrisy and warmongering of America (and its principal ally) are among the few essential documents of our times. They are also not designed for the intellectually faint-hearted. As the most unforgiving critic of the Washington-run world order, Chomsky is often caricatured as supplying more reality, and more guilt, than many of us care to handle. His books have the manner and certainty of gospels, and they work by accretion, stockpiling the remorseless fact of distant atrocity done in each of our names. They seem to demand not so much readers as disciples, (prominent among whom you would count John Pilger and Harold Pinter, Michael Moore and Naomi Klein). To judge by sales figures (his little pamphlet on 11 September has sold upwards of half a million copies) the faithful are an ever-growing number.

Chomsky's latest book, Hegemony or Survival - a devastating history of American foreign policy since 1945 ('No president in that time, judged on the principles of Nuremberg, would have escaped hanging') as well as a sustained dissection of the motivation and disastrous consequence of the current 'war on terror' - is the newest chapter of this lifetime of compulsive dissent. The transgressive thrill of Chomsky's world view, in which an American elite routinely bombs and terrorises in the name of 'freedom' and in defence of market share, has led fans such as Bono of U2 to describe the 73-year-old professor as the 'Elvis of academia'. In a recent profile in the New Yorker, Chomsky was identified, perhaps more accurately, as the 'Devil's accountant', totting up the foreign corpses sacrificed in America's 'quest for global dominance'.

Chomsky works from within the empire, in one of its more rigorous outposts, at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology. MIT has none of the marginal, down-at-heel feel of a British university. Its pristine campus, all smoked glass and soaring marble, across the Charles river from Boston, has the sheen of a hi-tech business park. MIT advertises itself as 'America's ideas factory', and nowhere does the production line work as efficiently as in the offices of Professor Chomsky.

His little suite of rooms, above a wholefood cafe full of ardent acolytes flirting with semantics, is piled variously with books and papers from the world's subjugated corners and on the terra incognita of the human brain. On the walls are posters advertising the talks and lectures he has given over the years on East Timor and Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. Above a door there is a large photo of Bertrand Russell, a fellow libertarian pin-up, and beside it a blue aerogram addressed to 'Palestine' and officially stamped by the US Postal Service 'Return to Sender, No Such Address'. In a side office Chomsky sits with his assistant signing off proofs, going through letters and deliberating over demands on his precious time; a one-man cultural revolution. I am greeted with the stern information that today Professor Chomsky's hours (one of which is allotted for our interview) are lasting only 50 minutes - take it or leave it.

The interviewer of Chomsky is faced with a series of anxieties. To anyone who has even dipped into his books, the idea of pinning him down or catching him out, or even directing his attention in the course of a truncated hour seems vaguely absurd. In reviewing a volume in which Chomsky debated some of his ideas with America's leading philosophers, one critic noted how the book was like 'watching a grandmaster play, blindfolded, 36 chess matches against the local worthies'.

If great minds are casually embarrassed, Chomsky reserves much of his scorn for the mainstream press, which he sees as mostly in collusion with orthodox power structures. 'Somehow they [newspaper journalists] have to get rid of the stuff [dissident arguments],' he once wrote. 'You can't deal with the arguments, that's plain; for one thing you have to know something, and most of these people don't know anything. Second, you would not be able to answer the arguments because they're correct. Therefore what you have to do is somehow dismiss it. One technique [is to say] "It's just emotional, it's irresponsible, it's angry".'

In person, I'm bound to report, as in his prose, Chomsky seems anything but emotional or irresponsible (though a quiet anger does not often seem too far away). He is an unassuming presence. He pretty much always wears the same clothes: a navy sweater and brown cords and a pale-blue shirt. He speaks barely audibly, leaning back a little in his chair, which has the effect of making you strain forward slightly, and hang on his every word.

I start tentatively enough with a question about a remark he made recently in the New York Times about the fact that he continued to live in America, because it was 'the greatest country in the world'. In what sense did he believe this?

He starts, too, as he means to go on. 'I have to first of all give a background,' he says, already a bit exasperated. 'That interview never took place. It is rather interesting, interviews like that never take place.'

The New York Times made it up?

'It was a senseless contraction of an hour-and-a-half telephone conversation in which I explained question by question why I am not going to answer this question or that question, because it is not a sensible question.' Right.

'And the published interview was contracted from the original questions and sentences extracted from my often lengthy explanations of why I was not going to answer. There is no country in the world where interviews like these would happen. Where these kind of trivial questions would be asked.'

I laugh a little, nervously, quickly running through some of my own more frivolous lines of inquiry in my head. Chomsky does not smile. Does he understand this kind of profile as an effort to marginalise him, by 'the ruling elite'?

'Well,' he says, quietly. 'I'm not sure the New York Times was consciously trying to trivialise me, but the effect of it is to put everything in the same category as the gossip you read in the magazines you pick up at supermarket counters. I was asked, for example, why I thought there were so many euphemisms for genitalia. It's not a serious question. Whatever the purpose of such a tone is, the effect is to make it appear that anyone who departs from orthodox political doctrine is in some ways laughable.'

So, I say, he does not believe America is the greatest country in the world, then? 'My feeling is, to answer your question, that evaluating countries is senseless and I would never put things in those terms, but that some of America's advances, particularly in the area of free speech, that have been achieved by centuries of popular struggle, are to be admired.'

(I am reminded, at this point, of the British newspaper editor who told me he'd once phoned Chomsky to ask him to write a piece about 'globalisation'. 'That is not the right word,' Chomsky replied, and put down the phone without ever explaining what the correct word was.)

In this respect, Chomsky has always reserved the right not only to answer the questions he chooses, but also to question the terms of the questioner. One of the features of his deconstruction of American power is the absence of mitigation. He recognises little distinction between conspiracy and cock-up. When we talk about the motivation behind the current conflict, I wonder if he believes coalition leaders, Tony Blair, Colin Powell, say, are entirely cynical and malign or simply self-deluded?

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