Empty Posturing : Chomsky and Zizek.

'What you’re referring to is what’s called “theory.” And when I said I’m not interested in theory, what I meant is, I’m not interested in posturing....Žižek is an extreme example of it. I don’t see anything to what he’s saying'. Noam Chomsky on Zizek


'I remember when he defended this demonisation of Khmer Rouge. And he wrote a couple of texts claiming: “no this is western propaganda. Khmer Rouge are not as horrible as that.” And when later he was compelled to admit that Khmer Rouge were not the nicest guys in the universe and so on, his defence was quite shocking for me. It was that “no, with the data that we had at that point, I was right. At that point we didn’t yet know enough, so… you know” but I totally reject this line of reasoning'. Slavoj Zizek on Chomsky.

A spat between Noam Chomsky and Slavoj Zizek has apparently broken out. Though of almost no importance to most people-and Chomsky has not really argued with Zizek but merely dismissed him as not having anything of importance to say-those who regard them as gurus do seem to think it is important.

However, both Chomsky and Zizek have something in common: they attempt as intellectuals to reach a broad audience by providing those disillusioned with the way the world is with a way to rationalise global problems as mostly, if not wholly, the fault of the West. By realising this, 'we' can change the world for better.

Even so, Chomsky's books are always interesting for those too lazy to glean the facts and interpret them for themselves in the manner Chomsky does. To a point he does teach scepticism and how to challenge received opinions in the media ( or 'public diplomacy' ) especially in relation to foreign policy.

However, it is not really necessary to read more than a few of Chomsky's books. He repeats the same ideas about US Imperialism and the supposedly unmentionable horrors it perpetuates as being justified by the power of money, mandarins and the media in a way that seem rather commonplace now.

At least, that is the thrust of Zizek's challenge when he writes of Chomsky ( or 'critiques' him ) thus,

'His idea is today that cynicism of those in power is so open that we don't need any critique of ideology, you reach automatically between the lines, everything is cynically openly admitted, we just have to bring out the facts of people. Like ‘this company is profiting in Iraq’'

So basically Chomsky is a bit boring these days. For one such as Zizek, who wants to bandy about Theory and enthuse people-especially youth-towards a revolution, Chomsky seems to satisfy a market for smug know-it-alls whilst only Zizek can truly energise them.

The Stance on Egypt.

Indeed, it is noticeable that Chomsky has not yet taken a stance on the recent military takeover in Egypt as it is unclear what US policy is because Washington has no idea how to respond. Many radical leftists have backed the military takeover as a means to facilitate the ongoing unfinished secular revolution.

Chomsky lauded the Arab Spring of 2011 against Mubarak and pointed out he had been backed by the US and Britain. Neither of them have yet had any opinion of the military takeover of July 2013 because it does not fit the usual narrative that the US is to blame for suppressing a true revolution.

In fact, opinion is still divided as to whether the military takeover has snuffed out the revolution or is a stage in its unfolding or whether the military takeover is a coup or not. Maybe it is both. As for Zizek given how sanguine he was about the Arab Revolutions, the silence now may reflect the fact he got in wrong back then.

For in 2011 Zizek offered nothing of interest on Egypt either apart from the usual parochial European ideological perspectives about the 'revolution' conforming to a universal pattern that otherwise bored consumers could buy into. They could get excited about a revolution abroad applying to their own dull societies.

'The uprising was universal: it was immediately possible for all of us around the world to identify with it, to recognise what it was about, without any need for cultural analysis of the features of Egyptian society'.

That exalted claim has since been completely discredited by the course of events in Egypt. The uprising was particular to Egypt and its society has tended towards becoming more polarised in cultural terms by those wanting a secular version of revolution against a rival Islamist led by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Given that Chomsky has always been sympathetic to direct democracy and popular will in the developing world when it is directed against US backed governments that denied it, as was the case in Egypt before 2011, it seems curious that he too has no opinion on it as Washington itself is not explicitly taking sides.

Chomsky, Zizek and Cambodia.

Of course, Chomsky has no obligation to state an opinion on the military takeover in Egypt. It could be argued that he is waiting for the facts to come out before he declares his viewpoint upon it. And it is on that basis that Zizek attacked Chomsky for his position on the Khmer Rouge in the 1970.

It's more interesting that both Chomsky and Zizek have tended to view the Khmer Rouge according to their propaganda use. Unlike Chomsky, who first played down Khmer Rouge atrocities only to emphasise them  more later when the US cynically backed Pol Pot after 1979 as a counter to the Vietnamese, Zizek has in the past been more positive.

“The Khmer Rouge were, in a way, not radical enough: while they took the abstract negation of the past to the limit, they did not invent any new form of collectivity.”

Whether the victims of Pol Pot's slave state thought the Khmer Rouge was a bit unenthusiastic about its revolutionary Year Zero project does not seem to have been factored in to this 'analysis'. And Zizek then thinks he has the moral high ground in accusing Chomsky of being wrong with regards Pol Pot.

The reason for that is it provides Zizek with a means to 'critique' the contradictions in Chomsky the better to advance himself as the Lodestar of True Revolution over his rival. To Zizek, Chomsky's lumbering attempts to get the facts led him to only change his mind when the facts of Pot Pot's mass killing came out.'

For example, concerning Stalinism. The point is not that you have to know, you have to photo evidence of Gulag or whatever. My God you just have to listen to the public discourse of Stalinism, of Khmer Rouge, to get it that something terrifyingly pathological is going on there'.

Clearly, people do need to know the facts about the Gulag and the actual history of the Khmer Rouge as well as taking in the nature of the pathological 'public discourse'. Yet to both Zizek and Chomsky the main issue has always been to fit the facts to the prescriptions of a creed of revolutionary hope for Westerners.

As regards a catastrophe such as Cambodia in the 1970s, there is something callous and slightly sinister about seizing on the nature of Pol Pot's regime to make partisan polemical points as opposed to understanding how a complex variety of factors allowed such a calamity to occur.

It also should be said that one important factor behind the Khymer Rouge was the influence of violent radical Western revolutionary ideas of the same kidney that Zizek is offering. Indeed, along with another theorist, Alain Badiou,  Zizek extols the emancipatory terror of Mao's Cultural Revolution.

At least Chomsky has never actively lauded totalitarian regimes as opposed to simply regarding them as a distraction from the question at hand; that citizens in a Western democracy are confronted by the need to do something about the 'imperialism' of their states.

Even so, while Chomsky clearly never supported Pol Pot he did seek to discredit eyewitness reports and journalism on the ground from those such as Francois Ponchard. Chomsky's propaganda was demolished with precision by Bruce Sharp in Averaging Wrong Answers:Noam Chomsky and the Cambodia Controversy.

If there is anything to be learned from these sorts of 'intellectual' poses it is this-if revolutions, revolts and uprisings are deemed to be good or bad only depending on whether the US supports or opposes them, then what Chomsky has to say or not is of little importance.

That is why it is curious that so many look up to him as some sort of infallible guru. The same is true of Zizek. It is easier to criticise Zizek because he spouts jargon. It is harder to criticise Chomsky because it is interpreted as always just a means of defending the credibility of the US establishment.

The Flaw in Chomsky's Worldview

The flaw in most "anti-war" spokesmen as regards global politics comes with the idea that Western policy somehow is formed in isolation or that non aligned regimes somehow necessarily act better or more morally.

In this respect, notice can be taken of radical journalist John Pilger's laudatory backing for Hugo Chavez's Venezuela whilst ignoring his support for the tyrannies of Mugabe in Zimbabwe and Castro's Cuba.

As regards Chomsky, Gray ( who is himself an opponent of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) writes, in a review of Chomsky's latest work Making the Future,

For Chomsky, it seems there can be no place for error or mixed motives in American policies. The war was not a mistake that might have been avoided if its opponents had been better organised and more effective. Invading Iraq was just one more example of American imperialism, an expression of a regime that is quintessentially criminal and evil.

Reading these articles, published between April 2007 and October 2011, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that, for Chomsky, America is virtually the sole obstacle to peace in the world. Crimes committed by other powers are mentioned occasionally, but only in passing. Nowhere does he acknowledge the fact that many regions have intractable conflicts of their own, which will persist whatever the US does.

For Chomsky, conflict in the Middle East is exclusively the work of America and Israel. There is no struggle for hegemony between Saudi Arabia and Iran, or if any such struggle does exist it can be easily resolved so long as the US is ready to alter its policies. Again, unending war in Afghanistan does not reflect that unfortunate country's internal divisions and its long history as a focal point of geopolitical rivalry, which now includes a stalemate between India and Pakistan in Kashmir. War in Afghanistan could be ended very simply, if only the US withdrew its forces and brokered a grand diplomatic bargain.

The most formidible part of this demolition job of a much overrated thinker for thinking the world can be made better if only the US did not pursue the policies it did, as if China were not pursuing goals of Empire far more ruthlessly in Africa, for example, and that the US alone is uniquely responsible for global evil. Gray comments,

The picture Chomsky presents of the US is, in effect, a negative version of exceptionalism. For him as much as for the neocons, America is the centre of the world. Chomsky views global politics through the same Manichean lens: you are either for America or against it. The fact that much of humankind has aspirations that have nothing to do with America is not even considered. Anti-Americanism is fading along with American power, but Chomsky hasn't noticed.

Noam Chomsky offers No Alternative to Global Capitalism.

As the feeble rationalisations for going back to the future with the USSR, or posing a Bolshevik style revolution as showing the possibility of 'Another World' or 'Systemic Alternative' are still being touted by some as a way out of the global economic crisis of since 2008, there are also those who think Noam Chomsky is a guru who can offer salvation.

Chomsky is popular in the UK as much as the USA for having never have been tarred with the same brush as the Communists.

For Chomsky lauds the libertarian myth of the Russian Revolution as a workers revolution betrayed by commissars like Lenin and Trotsky who use myths of a perfect future and of global harmony and Utopia to rationalise repression and privation in the present until the ultimate goal had been reached

Perhaps those who think so could look at the history of the Russian Revolution and of the actual global communist movement as it really was instead of projecting ideological fantasies on to it and making excuses for its failure. In the conditions of the chaos caused, power was bound to fill the power vacuum.

The libertarian left myth of revolution is certainly a better one and at least accepts that Lenin and Trotsky were not interested in spontaneous freedom but in 'totalitarianism'. That's then taken to mean that the USA is no better in this regard and also based on spreading universal hegemony as the barrel of the gun.

What Chomsky and Pilger share with Leninists is the idea is that a catastrophic crisis can bring 'freedom'. Just not if it allows ideological cliques to seize power in the name of the people and to accelerate progress through apocalyptic change and telescoping social and economic development into a short period.

That was the Bolshevik plan in 1917. It has little relevance to the global crisis today. For a start it was environmentally ruinous and depended on a dogmatic idea similar to that of neoliberal capitalism: that Man can Dominate Nature and make it his exclusive servant. Yet Chomsky shares this Enlightenment myth. Overpopulation never figures in his writing.

Much of what is wrong with radical left anti-capitalism of the kind advocated by Chomsky is that it shares many of the myths of progress that have been taken from liberal democracy and capitalism. That there can be a humanistic world of superabundance and the problem is that capitalism cannot share it equitably.

Most notably there is a distinct problem with the idea that 'we' can remake the world and its only 'false consciousness' and the illusions of the media and money power of 'the system' that decide otherwise. Since the civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam protests of the 60s when Chomsky came to prominence, 'the system' has absorbed counter-culture successfully.

The only line left of Noam Chomsky, who still makes some brilliant points about US double standards in foreign policy is the ideal of anarcho-syndicalism that depend on the myth of revolution and of 'revolution betrayed' and 'deferred' by the increased sophistication of US corporate capitalism, admass society and the media machine.

New thinking about the world is necessary but real benefits can come only by ridding ourselves of illusory and burdensome hopes of a world that would be perfect if it were not for the dominance of one global system of capitalism-in Chomsky's view of the US's Imperial Elite having far more domination and control than it does.

In reality that does not exist: Chomsky like all Radical Enlightenment figures is Eurocentric and parochial in thinking that US Imperialism is the root cause of most of the globe's problems from inequality, to profligate consumerism, the arms race, racism and poverty. It depends upon three myths,

1) That the USA is and will continue to be dominant for the foreseeable future and that successful resistance against Empire will necessarily lead to freedom.

2) The reassuring thought that because the USA is an Empire and a formal democracy, global change could come from change within the USA.

3) Third World revolutionary movements , even of the Islamist type, offer the prospect of liberation for the poor and oppressed of the Middle East.

Chomsky is just another Cold War fossil who hasn't had much more of great interest to say since the Vietnam War, though his analysis of the role of a supposedly 'free media' in a liberal democratic capitalist state is still a necessary corrective to the idea that propaganda and media manipulation only occur under totalitarian regimes.