Criticising The Brave New World

The Encyclopaedia Britannica article also demonstrates a problem peculiar to Chomsky does one hail the man for his linguistic ability or for his role as Critic Emeritus of the US media and foreign policy? Many universities follow the Encyclopaedias lead and firmly demarcate the two. As a result, you could spend three years as a student of linguistics studying Chomskys contribution with as much thoroughness as your counterpart in the department of international affairs, and have as little common ground as though you had studied two completely different people.

As followers of his work know, however, it is impossible to separate the two Chomskys. Powers and Prospects, his most recent collection of essays, contains just two pieces out of eight that deal exclusively with language. But they lead directly into the third essay, Writers and Intellectual Responsibility, and more important, they provide an essential semantic background to the other five. The opening discussion on the perception of language is crucial to the readers understanding of the remaining essays where Chomsky dissects US foreign policy with clinical ferocity.

 

To some extent, Writers and Intellectual Responsibility functions as an introduction to the reflections on US policy that follow. Chomskys central theses will not seem original to anyone whos been tuned in to the Globocop saga: the US as saviour of the world, getting to pick and choose who it wants in the role of the baddie. But Chomsky differs from other critics in the manner in which he uses language as a precision tool, the deadly clarity of his arguments, the accuracy of his research.

In a dry, point-by-point listing of the differences between the atrocities of East Timor and the atrocities of Cambodia, he explains exactly why the US acted the way it did in both cases. The Khmer Rouge atrocities were ideologically serviceable, offering justification for US crimes in Indochina for 25 years and were exploited quite deliberately for those purposes; the horrors of East Timor, on the other hand, were ideologically dysfunctional, given the locus of responsibility. The conclusion is inescapable. It was therefore expedient for the US to place the Khmer Rouge crimes alongside those of Hitler and Stalin, where they remain in the approved list of 20th century horrors, whereas the Western-backed crimes in East Timor are no symbol of evil, and no blot on our record.

In Goals and Visions, Chomsky trains the magnifying glass of his powerful logic on American values. He asks two very basic questions What kind of values do we want our society to live by? How far are we prepared to go to force these values on other societies in the name of democracy? By the time hes through, all thats left of US values is a pile of smouldering ashes.

If Goals and Visions discusses the whys, the next essay goes on to tell us how its done. He refers to Thomas Carothers study of how the Reagan administration assisted the growth of democracy in Latin America: Where US influence was least, progress was greatest: in the southern cone, where there was real progress, [it was] opposed by the Reaganites at every step. Chomskys arguments are buttressed by the examples of Nicaragua, Haiti, and the internal labour and industrial policies of the US itself.

The last two essays, on the Middle East settlement and on East Timor, should be read in conjunction with the US governments official stand on both issues for maximum impact, and then followed up with a soothing dose of Edward Said on the Palestine issue.

Powers and Prospects does not signal a startling shift in Chomskys thinking. But it does bring together essays that have not been previously published, and Chomskys analysis is likely to help future economic and social historians set the record straight. One wonders what the good professor would have had to say about the recently held premiere of Independence Day a movie about hostile aliens invading the great US of A and provoking the mother of all battles. Guess who emerges the winner in the battle for the fate of mankind?