RECENT NONFICTION

Striking Back at Empire: The Steady Resistance of Noam Chomsky and Eqbal Ahmad

Noam Chomsky; Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs, South End Press, September 2000, pp. 260, $16.

Eqbal Ahmad -- Confronting Empire: Interviews with David Barsamian, South End Press, July 2000, pp. 200, $16.

In February 1967, Noam Chomsky, then a young professor at MIT, published an essay in The New York Review of Books called "The Responsibility of Intellectuals." In a stunning display of political critique, polemic, and theory, he challenged a generation of American scholars on their relationship to truth, to their government, to their society, and to the US war against Vietnam.

Eqbal Ahmad Photo copyright Rebecca A. Kandel

Consider, he asked, the fact that "Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions. In the Western world, at least, they have the power that comes from political liberty, from access to information and freedom of expression.

"For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us." Why then, he posed the question, have American intellectuals, and so many others, stood by in silence and apathy as this catastrophe slowly took shape over the past dozen years; on what page of history do we find our proper place?

In a key passage in the essay, Chomsky warned that the problem went far beyond Vietnam and darkened the future. He argued "it is an article of faith that American motives are pure, and not subject to analysis... Although it is nothing new in American intellectual history -- or, for that matter, in the general history of imperialist apologia -- this innocence becomes increasingly distasteful as the power it serves grows more dominant in world affairs, and more capable, therefore, of the unconstrained viciousness that the mass media present to us each day.

"We are hardly the first power in history to combine material interests, great technological capacity, and an utter disregard for the suffering and misery of the lower orders. The long tradition of naiveté and self-righteousness that disfigures our intellectual history, however, must serve as a warning to the Third World, if such a warning is needed, as to how our protestations of sincerity and benign intent are to be interpreted."

Noam Chomsky took up his own challenge -- few others did then or do so now -- and for the past thirty-three years has relentlessly subjected American foreign policy and its motives to analysis. In the course of this, he has merged critique, polemic, and theory into an intellectual practice that refuses to take for granted political events, actions, and explanations offered for daily consumption by the media, choosing instead to inspect each as a fragment rather than the whole; Chomsky works with an almost archaeological attention to the surroundings, antecedents, and parallels of each fragment. Then by cleaning off the dirt, he exposes their real shape and proceeds to put the fragments together.

In Rogue States, Noam Chomsky takes what he calls "a rational look at the structure of power." Nothing escapes his attention. In the wonderfully lucid opening essays he looks at "rogue states," and asks, "Who qualifies?" History, some obvious comparisons, and a little intellectual integrity make clear that a "rogue state" is "not simply a criminal state, but one that defies the orders of the powerful -- who are of course, exempt."

The other essays survey the tragedies of the Balkans, East Timor, and Cuba; and in a series of linked essays, he shows the connections between the attack on human rights and the UN system, and the depredations of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In all these cases Chomsky observes, "The contempt of the world's leading power for the framework of world order has become so extreme that there is little left to discuss." The final two essays deal with war, and in them Chomsky returns to the Vietnam war, and its terrible legacy for the people of Indochina and the "new doctrine" of humanitarian intervention, which sounds much like the old doctrine.

Many progressive-minded people share these ways of thinking at some level. For most however, the history of the persistent gap between what the US government and its power elites say and what they do is understood and condemned as a double standard. Chomsky will have none of this; his sense of responsibility carries him a step further. He notes that rather than a double standard or inconsistency, there seems to be "remarkable consistency" in the historical record of US action. He asks, "Why should we expect inconsistency when the institutional factors that under-gird policy remain intact and unchanged?" Chomsky's morality leaves him no option but to declare, "Talk of a 'double standard' is simply evasion, in fact cowardly evasion." There is only the imperial standard.

As an observer, critic, theorist and antagonist of empire Chomsky has had few peers. Among them was Eqbal Ahmad, who died in May 1999. In his introduction to Confronting Empire, Ahmad's friend Edward Said notes that "What Eqbal understood about the experience of empire was the domination of empire in all its forms, but also the creativity, originality, and vision created in resistance." These made Eqbal Ahmad, Said writes, "perhaps the shrewdest and most original anti-imperialist analyst of Asia and Africa." The interviews collected in Confronting Empire confirm that assessment and more.

The easy thing would be to write about Eqbal Ahmad's amazing life, how as a boy he met and marched with Mahatma Gandhi during the struggle to free India from British rule; how during the field work for his PhD from Princeton he ended up working with Frantz Fanon and the Algerian freedom movement, the FLN, and became an authority on guerrilla war and counter-insurgency; how he became involved in both the civil rights and anti-war movements and ended up on trial charged with plotting to kidnap (Henry Kissinger) among other things; how he met Malcolm X; his friendships with Noam Chomsky and Edward Said; how he advised and was ignored by the PLO, but was embraced by Palestinians; his effort to found a new university in Pakistan, and much more. Some of these come out in the interviews with David Barsamian.

The breadth of topics covered is stunning: the partition of India; the conflict between Pakistan and India that followed and its culmination in their respective nuclear weapons tests in May 1998; Islam, the West, and the rise of militant Islamic movements; Israel and the Palestinians; the Cold War and after; the character of third world elites; decolonization, the American empire, and globalization. These discussions are all marked by a sensitivity to the effects of imperialism, the destructive character of nationalism, and -- most of all -- deep currents of justice, solidarity, and the search for opportunities for resistance. The last of these, and in particular, the ethics of resistance, may be the enduring lesson from Ahmad's interviews. Example and analysis distilled from experience and an encyclopedic knowledge of history lead to a simple moral -- think critically and take risks.

A realist to his core, Ahmad observes that the situation has turned against such thinking in the US. He notes that over the past two decades "there has been a very deep shift in the climate of this country toward the right. This has brought with it what he calls "an intolerance of dissent that is now "defining once again the boundaries of dissent, which had been broken during the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement." He fears that for radical thinkers and activists engaged in working for social change, "These boundaries have been redrawn and we are on the other side."

In his biography of William Morris, the 19th century English artist, poet, and socialist, who was engaged in radical politics in London at the height of the British Empire, the great historian E. P. Thompson ends by citing Morris' belief that there were three qualities needed to animate the desire for a new society: "Intelligence enough to conceive, courage enough to will, power enough to compel." In their lives and work Chomsky and Ahmad offer all three.

Zia Mian is a physicist working on nuclear disarmament and nuclear energy issues at Princeton University's Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, a peace activist. He was a friend of Eqbal Ahmad's.