Online Bookstore: Seven Stories Press Power and Terror: Post 9-11 Talks and Interviews Book

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Anyway, these transcripts of talks and interviews are a better response to the terrorist attacks than his "9-11" book. There are very few footnotes, unfortunately --- you'll have to read his other 50+ books for that --- but he lays it all out fast and furious here. The pages are *packed* with information.

To read the numbing ignorance of letter writers to my local newspaper is enough to establish that the world must have a Chomsky-not to dismantle the American Empire but simply to recognize what it is and what it is doing and why it's doing it.
To blindly and mindlessly accept the evil in the world is to invite that evil into your house-to feed it and offer a soft bed and a soft blanket. If evil is kept at arms length then you are not participating in the catalogue of evil incidents that were created in other people's backyards. A blind acceptance is to become a participate in the monstrous events being carried out in your name but to know the nature of the beast at least insulates you to a feeble extent. Simply put: knowledge is the protector while ignorance is the corrupter.

9-11's only real distinction was how little it talked about September 11th, beside the half-hearted caveat that it was a "terrible atrocity" (but understandable, in Chomsky's eyes). Instead, September 11 was just instrumental for him to once again ramble ad nauseum about some article he read which obviously validates everything he then dubiously concludes from it, or about a certain reprehensible U.S. policy that nevertheless has no direct bearing on the topic, etc. Folks, we've been there, done that; while much of it can be agreed with or sympathized with, that shouldn't make us susceptible to Chomsky's often manipulative analogical and correlative tactics unless: (1) we're reading this for self-validation, rather than to learn anything; and (2) we're so misinformed about world events that we confuse Chomsky's exausted repetoire as synonymous with information. Most people immediately see this smokescreen for what it is, which is the marginalization of the attacks on the U.S., and their subordination to Chomsky's increasingly archaic political agenda.

Now, Chomsky likes it when people call him an apologist, which he is, but he is ambiguous enough about it that he can dodge the issue and try and paint his critics as irrational. In POWER AND TERROR he tries to draw an analogy between his views and some Wall Street Journal piece in a disingenuous argument that his critique is moderate common sense. Don't be taken in by these dodgy attempts to establish credibility. What makes Chomsky's discussions of terrorism so arguably apologistic is both the absence of any serious discussion on religious fundamentalism, beyond the glib and patronizing idea that America created it, and his tendency to discuss human suffering in arithmetic terms. Thus we see him trotting out dubious and self-serving statistics of past atrocities on the part of the "West," universalized as a singular personality for his convenience, to help us "understand" why the U.S. is the determining, singular-cause of suffering in the world, blah blah blah. Sure, 3000 Americans died in a heinous suicide attack by religious zealots whose object is to release a wave of nihilism-cum-religion on the poor and helpless, but gosh since Vietnam was a dirty, vile war we had it coming, and lots more people died then, so there. The implicit lesson, never courageously made explicit, is that Americans are ignorant imbeciles since they don't swallow Chomsky's correlations, and capitulation and masochism is the surest way for the world to become safely filled with sane people, like all those nice folks in Boulder, Cambridge, and Berkley. You'll read lots of hand-wringing about Turkey and the Kurds, but this ignores the fact that Kurds are about the most pro-America people on the planet besides the Marines.

Chomsky's monomania is telling, and predictable. The contradictions he wraps himself in are funny in their own right. Based on his answers in the first interview, its clear he has begun to believe the mythology that has been built around him. That is the problem when you surround yourself with sycophants for interviewers and supplicants for audiences; no criticality is introduced into the discourse, and a self-affirming feedback loop is set up that has obviously atrophied into the incoherent and barely readable books he is putting out nowadays.

Chomsky's supposed challenge to the orthodoxy is increasingly ridiculed because it is itself so limited by its own orthodoxy. One questioner asked Chomsky whether he was guilty of oversimplification, which prompted some self-righteous rant on the British Empire or something. It's not that Chomsky is guilty of simplification, which can be a useful tool as an entryway to increasingly complex awareness. Instead, Chomsky's problem is superficiality, which allows him to selectively use 'x'-event to validate his worldview as consistent, ignore 'y'-event, and distort anything else through dubious correlation-as-cause arguments. The problem is not simplicity, it is insubstantiality.

Here one will also find the same sanctimonious ramblings about how the mainstream media ignores him. This is rote in the Chomsky Mythology. However, to sell the book positive comments about it from corporate lackeys like the NYTimes, Variety, and the New York Daily are included. Chomskyites want it both ways: credibility from being ignored and marginalized, and credibility from being noticed and significant. The man has published in the Carnegie Foundation's "Foreign Policy" for crying out loud, which is about as Establishment as you can get.

People turning to Chomsky for an understanding of terrorism and world dynamics are being shortchanged. POWER AND TERROR is a badly constructed, barely coherent book that undermines, rather than elucidates, understanding of violent religious ideologies and their opposition to the United States. Don't be satisfied with Chomsky's tired two-dimensionality. While U.S. policy has miserably contributed to the level of violence in the world, "blowback" is not the simple, paint-by-numbers explanation many are searching for. Anyone trotting out mono-causal explanations ought to be immediately suspect, whether its Bush's "They hate freedom," or Chomsky's "It's just a matter of
sanity." One would be better off with serious scholarship about fundamentalist ideologies like Karen Armstrong's THE BATTLE FOR GOD, or Juergenmeyer's THE MIND OF TERROR. These kinds of books address terrorism seriously, as part of the mindset of thinking, intelligent and ruthless people with sophisticated religious ideologies who are not just inconveniences for Chomsky's shallow, deterministic worldview.