Noam Chomsky: September 11

By SIMON COLLINS

Noam Chomsky has become a most peculiar phenomenon, a kind of left-wing intellectual equivalent of Jonah Lomu or Princess Diana.

He is a critic of the market who somehow draws the same mass response as the most potent symbols of mass marketing.

When he visited New Zealand a couple of years ago, his audience in Wellington filled two theatres simultaneously.

This year, within a few hours of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center on September 11, his e-mail box apparently was inundated by hundreds of people wanting his interpretation of events.

So it is no wonder that his publishers have jumped on the opportunity and produced a book, called simply September 11, just in time for us to buy it for Christmas.

It's a slim 125 pages, including an appendix, and consists of quick transcripts of interviews which Chomsky gave on the radio, by e-mail and in person to American and European journalists in the first month after the attack on the World Trade Center.

You can read it in an hour or two.

Its theme is the self-delusion of what we like to call "the West", by which we usually mean people of European ethnic heritage.

When "the West" is attacked by non-Europeans, in Europe, the United States or Israel, we call it "terrorism".

But when our own governments retaliate against non-European people because of the sins of their leaders, we barely even notice what is happening. So we delude ourselves that we are fighting a just "war against terrorism".

Chomsky shatters our delusion, declaring that "the US itself is a leading terrorist state".

Much of this book recites the evidence: the US-backed military campaign that overthrew Nicaragua's Sandinistas at the cost of tens of thousands of lives in the 1980s; a US-approved truck bombing that killed 80 people in Beirut in 1985; the deaths of maybe a million Iraqis as a result of the still-existing trade embargo imposed on Iraq in 1991; the crushing of Kurds by US ally Turkey in the early 1990s; the bombing of a medicine factory in Sudan in 1998, combined with trade sanctions, which caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people who could not get medicines in subsequent years; and the US decision after September 11 to cut off food aid to Afghanistan.

Actually, Chomsky believes that the events of September 11 have helped to jolt the Western public into seeing this. He himself has had "considerably more access even to mainstream media in the US than ever before".

From a New Zealand perspective, the extraordinary public enthusiasm for Chomsky seems to stem from the same root as the passion that packed halls for the Dalai Lama a few years back, did the same for No Logo author Naomi Klein in July and drew 10,000 people into Queen St against genetic engineering on September 1 and has inspired hundreds of thousands internationally to protest against globalisation.

While business leaders urge ever faster economic growth, a widening segment of the public is finding such materialism both unsustainable and unsatisfying.

We are searching for ways to live useful lives in harmony with the environment.

This short book does not provide the answers. But it takes a valuable step towards understanding the world better so that we may find our own ways to live in it.

Allen & Unwin

$22.95

* Simon Collins is a senior Herald journalist.

Story archives:

Terror in America - the Sept 11 attacks

Bioterrorism

War against terrorism

Links: Terror in America - the Sept 11 attacks

Timeline: Major events since the Sept 11 attacks