Critique or programme?

Noam Chomsky is one of the foremost Western intellectuals, a major figure in linguistics, and a blistering critic of the politics of the powerful. Condemning 'intellectuals' for justifying the oppressive actions of, in particular, his own governments in the USA, he has seen his role as to redress the balance. The New Military Humanism is typical of his work, annihilatingly denouncing the hypocrisies of the US and British governments and NATO, and their apologists.

The focus, then, is on US/UK/NATO policy during the Balkans war, comparing it, and the justifications of its spokespeople, to other policies elsewhere. Particular fire is levelled at the quite different attitude taken to Turkey's brutal war against the Kurds, comparable in scope to Serbia's towards the Kosovars (at least before the onset of bombing). Turkey is a member of NATO, therefore a 'friend'; not only has no action been taken to prevent slaughter of the Kurds, it is effectively supported through the military aid and weapons sales Turkey receives from its NATO allies. Other atrocities of comparable scale (East Timor, Colombia, Laos; for some reason he doesn't mention Rwanda) condemn the Western powers. Either they have done nothing, or made the problem much worse.

There is no 'double standard' here, Chomsky says: it's the same standard, determined by the interests of the big powers and their military alliance. The war against Serbia was conditioned at least in part by the need to preserve NATO's 'credibility', as well as geopolitical concerns.

Written in Chomsky's typical, exhaustively researched style, polemically sarcastic in tone (he refers throughout to the 'enlightened powers', but without quote marks), the book is a powerful indictment of Western policy throughout the world.

Chomsky's focus on the violence and hypocrisy of the big powers (countries where he and we live) is honourable enough. But as an exclusive focus it has led him into difficulties before, as when he was famously uncritical of Pol Pot in the 1970s, reserving his anger for Henry Kissinger. Here, also, the limits of this approach are evident.

Chomsky is by no means an apologist for Milosevic; he details how earlier US opposition to the KLA was interpreted by Belgrade as a 'green light' to step up ethnic cleansing. Yet a balanced study would focus far more than this does on the brutality of the Milosevic regime, both in Kosova and earlier in Bosnia. He mentions these facts, but in passing, and there is no sense of outrage towards the crimes of Serb nationalism comparable to his outrage at NATO. Thus there is an irksome one-sidedness to the analysis and the politics which flow from it. And despite dealing in turn with every other pro-war argument available, he signally fails to address the two most powerful, namely (except in a sub-clause) that the Kosovars seemed to support the bombing, and that after the war the situation in Kosova was improved.

Indeed, he is all but agnostic on the matter of what should have been done to prevent genocide of the Kosovars (although, unlike some anti-war writers, doesn't question that terrible things were happening), relying on the 'Hippocratic principle' that 'first, do no harm'. Underlying Chomsky's view, in reality, seems to a more ambivalent attitude, but his focus prevents him from drawing this out.

Chomsky appears again in Ken Coates' Spokesman special on 'ethical imperialism'. In fact the article is a cut-and-paste job on extracts from the book, but so bowdlerised and mutilated that either Chomsky had nothing to do with the editing and never saw the proofs, or it reveals an underlying train of thought far worse than shown in the book itself. For instance, a passage in the book which compares numbers of deaths and refugees in Colombia with Kosova before the war is edited to delete the word 'before'.

After Chomsky's, the articles gradually get worse, until we are confronted with a truly appaling piece by Zhores Medvedev which not only refers to Milosevic's Serbia as 'an island of independence and socialism', but appears, in so far as I can understand it, to rail against Albanian 'illegal immigrants' swarming across Europe to a degree that can only be described as racist.

The Chomsky book, despite its flaws, is a valuable account of the world's injustices to which the West turns a blind eye, or actively encourages. Chomsky is right that sharp criticism of the institutions and practices of international power is a vital task; his problem is that he has no agenda of building a socialist movement (he has described himself as some kind of anarchist), and so the critique remains that of an isolated intellectual commentator, spelling out no programme, and resulting in a reformist preoccupation with diplomatic solutions.

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The New Military Humanism, by Noam Chomsky

Ethical Imperialism, edited by Ken Coates