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Finkelstein on Chomsky
NN - 02.02.2011 00:08
On Noam Chomsky
By: Norman Finkelstein
I first met Professor Chomsky a little over a quarter century ago while still a graduate student.
I had written a short paper documenting that a bestselling book on the Israel-Palestine conflict was a hoax. I sent my exposé to a score of prominent scholars known to be sympathetic to the Palestinians.
The only one who replied was Chomsky. I am sure the others tossed my article aside without reading it: what could an unknown graduate student teach them about the Israel-Palestine conflict?
But Chomsky was different.
 http://chomsky.nl/over-chomsky/27-norman-finkelstein-on-noam-chomsky
He didn’t judge competence by academic pedigree but rather by the merits of the argument.
A reader of Chomsky’s footnotes will notice citations from the most mainstream scholarship, but also from way-off-the beaten-track sources.
It must be said that meeting Chomsky changed my life.
For whatever I have accomplished in life, I am in debt first to my late parents, but next to Chomsky.
He was not just a model of what exacting scholarship infused by moral passion looks like, and how one can successfully synthesize both, but also a personal support (along with his wife Carol) when the going got rough, as it often did.
Wherever I go I always hear the same refrain: "Reading Chomsky changed my life." I suspect that one reason Chomsky spends so much time answering email is that he knows that a reply from him can inspire.
The columnist Alexander Cockburn once said that Chomsky has written a counter-history of the twentieth century. In fact he has single-handedly also created a counter-culture.
A vast community spanning all corners of the globe is tied together by one slender but unbreakable thread: they all read (and quote from) Chomsky.
A few years ago I attended a public celebration of the ninetieth birthday of the leftwing folk singer Pete Seeger, and a few weeks later a public celebration of Chomsky’s eightieth birthday. Both events drew huge crowds.
There was one noticeable difference, however: Seeger’s audience was mostly white and graying; Chomsky’s audience included representatives, young and old, from probably every branch of the human family.
Chomsky’s writings are deceptively simple. It is often said—and Chomsky himself reinforces the belief—that he lacks an overarching framework.
It’s true that Chomsky makes no grand theoretical claims, mostly (I think) because he believes that human affairs are much too messy and unpredictable to be captured in a formula, however nuanced and complex.
Instead, he starts from what he calls uncontroversial assumptions: people in power will do what whatever they can to aggrandize their power and concomitant privilege. What reasonable person could quarrel with this notion?
He likes to say that its commonplace to start from this presumption with everyone else except ourselves.
One reason Chomsky’s works have managed to endure and reading essays of his from decades ago still reward is that they are blessedly free of “theory,” which more often than not is just jargon tacked onto platitudes in order to lend an aura of profundity to ideas possessing all the depth of a perfectly flat plane.
It is frankly an embarrassment—although quite a lot of fun—to read “theoretical” “interventions” of the Left. Chomsky lacks the glitter, but makes up for it many fold in substance.
If it’s true that Chomsky eschews a theoretical framework, it’s not true that he just aggregates facts.
His analyses are always situated in a political framework. He presents this framework as so “obvious,” however, that one often doesn’t notice that his facts come wrapped in a political argument.
When Chomsky wrote Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians in 1983, he coined the phrase “international consensus.” Up until the book’s publication the public debate (to the extent that there was one) juxtaposed the Israeli against the Arab (“Palestinians” didn’t yet exist) viewpoint.
But then Chomsky pointed out another viewpoint that was absent from the debate: what the rest of humanity thought. He showed that in fact the international community had reached consensus a long time ago on how to resolve the conflict; that the Palestinian leadership had more or less acquiesced in this consensus; and that the only outliers were Israel and the United States.
In this single, and singular, innovation he completely reshaped the contours of the debate.
Fateful Triangle became an instant classic and bible for the nascent solidarity movement. Chomsky wrote it in a few months burning the midnight oil after work.
He likes to tell the story that at one point he nearly lost everything on the computer so, reluctantly, he and Carol had to drag their young son (a computer whiz) out of school to recover the lost text. For the Chomsky parents it was a grave moral dilemma whether to request leave of their son from the principal.
Chomsky’s first approximation that the rich and powerful cling to their riches and power is often dismissed as vulgar Marxism. In fact his first approximation is only an approximation while the precise conclusions he draws are the end-product of what the biologist and Nobel laureate Salvador Luria once called Chomsky’s “terrifying storehouse of knowledge” and Edward Said referred to as Chomsky’s uniquely encyclopedic grasp of detail.
It is this vast collection of multitudinous facts that has enabled Chomsky to be more often right than wrong in his political predictions. When everyone else in the Israeli and Palestinian "peace" camps was singing paeans to the Oslo Accord in 1993, only a trio of voices expressed deep skepticism: Chomsky, Said, and the human rights activist (and organic chemist) Israel Shahak.
But if Chomsky’s mastery of detail has served him well, it’s also true to say that he happens to be gifted with an innate political sense and knack for good political—and moral—judgment honed over a lifetime of immersion in the great struggles for human freedom and dignity.
It is an open question whether Chomsky put his stupendous mind to the best use by devoting so much of his time and energy to rescuing this or that unknown fact from oblivion. But it cannot be doubted that much of humanity is in his debt for the decision he made.
 Website: http://chomsky.nl/over-chomsky/27-norman-finkelstein-on-noam-chomsky
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