Let Us Not Inherit This Ill Wind

   I find the empirical detail pretty convincing that the Noamster was
sloppy on the Sudanese bombing. The political conclusions of Leo Casey, are
of course, arguable...But, unlike strict non-interventionists, Casey lays
out criteria for judging the advisability or not of specific military
action. And, allies of Chomsky, such as Richard Falk, who edited in the late
60's an essential book on US and other War Crimes with Gabriel Kolko, in The
Nation, has supported, for example, the intervention in Bosnia.
    Just as in all intra-left debates, the level of invective gets tiresome.
Read the case, then argue the politics espoused, pro and con. But, please
w/o accusations of fascist apologia, as happened here recently w/o any type
of proof. And esp. ironic, because one of my my main points of participation
in the last two years on left lists, has been on a mostly European based
list, Right-Wing Influences on the Left, which gathers information on "Third
Positionist, " infiltration and ideological influence on the broad left
esp. in the anti-globalization movement.
    Michael Pugliese, "Social Imperialist." ;-(

----- Original Message -----
From: LeoCasey@aol.com
To: Michael Pugliese
Sent: Monday, October 08, 2001 6:51 PM

  Let Us Not Inherit This Ill Wind:
A Rejoinder to Chomsky's "Reply to Casey" on Issues Emanating from the
September 11 Mass Murders

Leo Casey

In the hours immediately following the September 11 mass murders in New
York, Washington, DC and Pennsylvania, Noam Chomsky issued a statement which
was widely circulated over the Internet, from the web pages of magazines
like _Counterpunch_ and in e-mails on various listservs. It began thus:
The September 11 attacks were major atrocities. In terms of number of
victims they do not reach the level of many others, for example, Clinton's
bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext, destroying half its
pharmaceutical supplies and probably killing tens of thousands of people (no
one knows, because the US blocked an inquiry at the UN and no one cares to
pursue it).
On different listservs and in different print publications, there were
immediate objections to this statement. To many, the moral equivalency
between the September 11 mass murders and the bombing of the Sudanese
al-Shifa factory, between acts designed to kill the maximum number of
innocent people and taking more than 6000 lives at last count, and an act
designed to minimize the loss of human life, taking only one, was itself
profoundly repugnant. Some were also incensed by what they saw as the
indecency of not even taking a moment to offer condolences to the dead,
survivors and their families before launching into the obligatory broadside
against the U.S. government. For still others, it was Chomsky's rhetorical
form of address, the "it is true, but..." device, with its message that what
follows the "but" is what is truly important, that seemed so outrageous on a
day when so many innocents died. And some where also disturbed by the
misstatement of what had taken place in the Sudan. One of those critics was
Christopher Hitchens, who condemned the moral equivalency in a column he
wrote for _The Nation_, in a couple of lines in an article published there.

1. The Origin and Nature of This Exchange
Although Chomsky and his close associates have apparently had enough second
thoughts about this formulation to leave it out of the collection of his
interviews and writings on September 11 which are posted on the Z-Net web
page, Hitchen's criticisms were stinging enough that Chomsky mounted a
response, which is now available at The Nation website.
[www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=special&s=chomsky20011001] Chomsky dedicated
the greater portion of that response to a defense of his statement of moral
equivalency between the September 11 mass murders and the bombing of the
Sudan factory. My commentary on the Hitchens-Chomsky exchange, "The
Unbearable Whiteness of Chomsky's Arguments: Psychological Projection and
The Erasure of African Victims in Chomsky's 'Reply' to Hitchens," took up
the arguments Chomsky offered in his defense. For those who want to read my
commentary and Chomsky's response to it, both have been posted on the Z-Net
Bulletin Board [www.zmag.org/]. For purposes of clarity, I am taking up
Chomsky's arguments in point form here, focusing on, in turn, (1) the origin
and nature of the exchange; (2) substantive issues regarding the effects of
the bombing of the al-Shifa factory; and (3) the current situation in the
Sudan and the African victims Chomsky does not recognize. I conclude with a
section on (4) the significance of these issues.

A. In his "Reply" Chomsky ignores the pertinent statement cited above. He
claims that I am paraphrasing and garbling another, throw away comment,
buried in some "composite response to inquiries from journalists." The
suggestion is, of course, that I (and other critics) are taking him out of
context and misrepresenting what he says when we speak of his moral
equivalency argument; he describes this as "the initial debris that Casey
scatters in his effort to obscure the central issues." But the Internet does
provide a contemporaneous historical record, and there are still numerous
places around the Internet, albeit not on Z-Net, where one will find the
original statement. It is time for Chomsky to take responsibility for what
he said, and the way in which he said it. He should either repudiate it as a
mistake and apologize for it, or defend it, but in any case, stop pretending
that the many objections he now faces were to something else he said or
wrote, to some minor point that has been selectively highlighted by his
critics.

B. Chomsky vehemently denies that, in his response to Hitchens, he accused
him of "racist contempt" for African victims of terrorism. "Anyone with
minimal literacy," he avers, "can instantly determine that I unambiguously
and explicitly said the precise opposite." One might forgive a reader who
picked up the argument at this point if he thought that someone else had
accused Hitchens of "racist contempt," and Chomsky had rushed to his
defense. To the contrary, it is Chomsky who introduced the accusatory term
in his response to Hitchens, and who applied it to what Hitchens wrote. In a
truculent imitation of Shakespeare's account of Brutus' funeral oration for
Caesar, he tells the reader that Hitchens is an honorable man who is not a
racist, so he can not have really "meant" his words of "racist contempt." He
repeats this line that Hitchens can not mean what he says, just as
Shakespeare's Brutus repeats his reference to "honorable men" again and
again throughout his response. Chomsky has dragged this skunk into the tent
right before our eyes, and now is protesting at the top of his lungs that he
is completely opposed to the resultant noxious stench that permeates the
place. This is dishonest argumentation, and it is more reminiscent of the
old Laugh-In skit in which Richard Nixon says, "We could burgle the
Watergate, but it would be wrong [wink, wink]," than of the Shakespearean
passage after which it is fashioned. Moreover, it is an insult to the
intelligence of his readers, as if we did not understand Chomsky's
rhetorical purpose when he tells us, again and again, that Hitchens could
not have meant the words he wrote. Unfortunately, this sets a pattern
throughout the piece, as Chomsky plants insinuation next to innuendo -- such
as the suggestion that the U.S. government bombed the Sudanese factory not
out of a combination of poor intelligence, political opportunism and a
desperate attempt to do something in response to the African embassy
bombings, but out of a calculated intention to kill thousands -- without
ever taking responsibility for them, much less providing proof on their
behalf. It is time for Chomsky to either openly take these positions and
openly defend these claims, or to stop making them. To do otherwise is to
engage in a disingenuousness that ill-serves public discourse on such
important matters.

2. Substantive Issues Regarding The Effects of the Bombing Of The Sudan
Factory
In my original commentary on Chomsky's arguments, I noted that the issue
before us was not whether the bombing was an appropriate or even defensible
response to the Al Qaeda bombing of American embassies in Kenya and
Tanzania -- the overwhelming preponderance of the evidence clearly suggests
that it was based on rather poor and faulty intelligence and that it did
nothing to undermine the organizational capacity for terror from Al Qaeda --
but whether that act had led to the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent
Sudanese, as Chomsky has asserted. Chomsky, I noted, has made two types of
arguments for the latter claim -- a deductive argument and an argument from
authority. In his reply, he endeavors to rehabilitate those two arguments,
without adding new ones, so let's return to each.

A. The deductive argument rests on two central premises: [1] that the
bombing of the Sudanese factory destroyed so much of the stocks of and the
capability to produce essential medicines (anti-malarial, antibiotics,
anti-tuberculosis) that the country faced an unforeseen and calamitous
shortage, and [2] that there was no way for the Sudanese government to
remedy that shortage. In combination, the argument goes, this led to some
untold number of thousands of deaths of innocent Sudanese. In my original
critique, I pointed out that there was a contradiction between two of the
three authorities Chomsky cites on how much of the stocks of medicine and
productive capacity to make more medicine was lost in the al-Shifa bombing:
one source says that it destroyed 50% of the medicines, while another cites
90%. Chomsky responds with a parsing of terminology that would make a Bill
Clinton envious: the 50% figure referred to drugs in general, while the 90%
figure referred to "major" pharmaceutical products. Chomsky goes on to
provide a small vita for the author of the 90% figure, Jonathan Belke,
asserting that since he is works for an economic development foundation in
Cairo and has traveled in Sudan, he has firsthand knowledge of the situation
and must be right. (Chomsky also suggests, contrary to the record, that
Belke cited both the 50% and 90% figures, making the semantic distinction
Chomsky now proposes; a simple search of the Internet shows that Belke used
only the 90% figure.)

The closer one looks at this question, the clearer it becomes that the 90%
figure has been fabricated out of whole cloth. The Sudanese Minister for
External Relations, speaking to the United Nations General Assembly shortly
after the bombing on 29 September 1998, maintained that the al-Shifa factory
produced over 50% of "Sudan's requirements for essential and life-saving
medicines." [UN General Assembly Press Release 9547, 29 September 1998]
Might we not reasonably assume that the government of the Sudan has the best
access to the most accurate information, and that it, if anything, has every
reason to inflate these numbers? Might we also not wonder what qualifies as
a "major" pharmaceutical product, if not an "essential and life-saving
medicine?"

Since the Sudanese government knew that al-Shifa was only one of six
pharmaceutical factories in its capital city of Khartoum, a fact often
missing from these discussions, it undoubtedly thought that a more
substantial claim would not be greeted with great credulity. It clearly
underestimated the capacity of what one might call the "fundamentalist" left
in the West to believe almost anything, so long as it casts discredit on the
U.S. government. All one has to do is surf Internet sites of such
ideological bent to see a wide range of statistics on the subject of how
much of the Sudan's medicine stocks and medicine producing capacity was
lost, neatly arranged in regular ten point intervals -- 50%, 60%, 70%, 80%
and 90%. Not once does one find a single citation, a solitary reference, a
simple calculation, for how the particular figure was chosen. After a while,
one gets the feeling of sitting in on a bizarre game of poker: "What,
Hitchens claimed 60% in his book on Clinton? (No One Left To Lie To?) If he
said that, it has to be more. I'll see his 60%, and raise it ten percentage
points."

The most carefully and fully documented study of the question, Michael
Barletta's essay "Chemical Weapons in the Sudan: Allegations and Evidence"
(in the Fall 1998 issue of The Nonproliferation Review
[cns.miis.edu/pubs/npr/vol06/61/barlet61.pdf]) accepts an estimate of 50% to
60% as closest to the mark, based on a number of different journalistic
reports from South African and the British news media. The 50% figure seems
to me the most reasonable point of departure for this discussion, since it
is the maximum figure a reasonable person might accept: it is impossible to
imagine the Sudanese government understating the dimensions of the problem,
which would be necessary to justify a larger figure. The figure may well be
lower than 50%, but let us use the highest estimate which is in any way
plausible.

B. A 50% loss would be a significant loss, and that is why it is essential
to continue to press the U.S. government, as Human Rights Watch and former
U.S. President Jimmy Carter has done, among others, to provide compensation,
should it be unable to provide supporting evidence for its claim that the
factory was producing chemical weapons. But it is not a loss of such a
magnitude that it was beyond the means of the Sudan to replace the lost
medicine. A lot of the al-Shifa production involved medicine which is
relatively easy to manufacture (chloroquine, aspirin), and thus could be
shifted to one of the other five pharmaceutical factories in the capital
city of the Sudan. And the "essential and life-saving medicines" produced at
al-Shifa, such as chloroquine, are inexpensive and widely produced in
Europe, North America and throughout the tropics, and could be imported into
the Sudan.

In his "Reply" Chomsky insisted that substitute importation was not an
option, as a combination of sanctions and Sudan's poverty prevented it. But
again, investigation finds these claims to be groundless. The UN sanctions
against the Sudan, adopted in 1996 after Sudanese participation in an
attempted assassination of Egypt's Mubarak during a visit to Ethiopia, calls
for the diplomatic and political isolation of the Sudanese government, and
for denying Sudanese airplanes access to foreign airports. [Security Council
Resolutions 1044, 1054, and 1070]. The 1997 economic sanctions against Sudan
undertaken by the U.S. government specifically exempt from their purview
materials and articles "intended to relieve human suffering, such as food,
clothing and medicine," and specifically allow the export of "agricultural
commodities, medicine and medical devices" from the U.S. to the Sudan.

Moreover, the Sudanese government has had no difficulty in circumventing the
sanctions that have been in effect. Using greatly increased revenues from
oil fields in the southern part of the country, and despite a European Union
arms embargo in addition to the UN and US sanctions, the Sudanese government
has been able to double its military expenditures, engaging in all manner of
purchases on the international arms market, a U.S. Committee of Refugees
report on the Sudan published this last week notes.
[www.refugees.org/world/countryrpt/africa/Mid_countryrpt01/sudan.htm] When
one considers that the Sudanese government's genocidal civil war against its
African populations has been underway for nearly two decades, and when one
examines the extent of the war economy in 1998, following a decade of
dramatic increases in military expenditures [see the Human Rights Watch's
report on "Global Trade, Local Impact: Arms Transfers to all Sides in the
Civil War in Sudan" [www.hrw.org/reports98/sudan/Sudarm988.htm], the ability
of the Sudanese government to further double military expenditures in the
last two years is absolutely phenomenal. Note also that those last two years
account for two of the three years since the al-Shifa bombing. Facing this
evidence directly, what fair minded person could claim that the Sudanese
government did not have the financial capacity to purchase replacement
medicine? Or, for that matter, to rebuild a factory that had been recently
purchased for $32 million? Whether the government chose to import the
medicine is an open question, awaiting evidence not yet in the public realm,
and even if it had, such action would not absolve the U.S. government of
responsibility for compensation, should it be unable to prove its case that
the factory was being used for the production of chemical weapons. But the
fact that the Sudanese government could easily have done so is
unquestionable. The premises of Chomsky's deductive argument simply do not
stand, in the face of the available evidence. Consequently, there is no
basis for his conclusion.

C. Chomsky claims that his argument from authority was not simply that, but
a citation of the available evidence on the question. Here, "available
evidence" is nothing more than the 50% to 90% figures, and even more general
claims of devastation, offered by these authorities in the same way Chomsky
offers them -- as assertions without any demonstration. (It is touching to
see Chomsky's new found confidence in the accuracy and truthfulness of
institutions of the mainstream media. Or is it just those institutions which
print an article and commentary with quotes mirroring his assertions?) We
could not expect anything more in the way of hard evidence, Chomsky tells
us, because the data on public health in the Sudan is hopelessly imprecise,
such that even thousands of deaths would not show up in the figures of a WHO
[World Health Organization].

What Chomsky does not say is that there are public health studies of the
Sudan which cast some light, if not definitive conclusions, upon these
issues. Take, for example, a 1989 assessment of the health of Sudanese
affected by flood conditions that struck in early August of 1988 and a 1993
study of nutrition and mortality in the Southern Sudan (the former
undertaken collaboratively by the Sudanese Ministry of Health, the WHO, the
USAID and the US Center for Disease Control,  and published in the January
06, 1989 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report of the CDC
[www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00001323.htm] and the latter undertaken
by the USAID and the CDC, and published in the April 30, 1993 report
[www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00020363.htm].) Both reports indicate
that the major health problem in the Sudan, even in the wake of floods which
one might have expected to lead to increased rates of dysentery, typhoid,
cholera and malaria (diseases which can be treated with medicine), was
severe malnutrition. The 1993 report indicates the rate of malnutrition in
the southern Sudan were among "the highest ever documented," worse than
those in Somalia prior to U.S. intervention there. This information
coincides precisely with what human rights organizations have been reporting
about the Sudanese government's use of food as a weapon of war in its
genocidal campaigns in the South, and the resultant starvation and famine
which has struck the African peoples of the southern Sudan in particularly
horrific dimensions. (See the Human Rights Watch reports, "Sudan Famine
Ceasefire Needs Human Rights Protections," July 23, 1998; "Human Rights
Causes of the Famine in Sudan"; "Analysis of the Current Fighting and Its
Relation to Famine," March 2001; all are available at
www.hrw.org/campaigns/sudan98/index.htm; see also the USCR report of last
week cited above.) Human Rights Watch estimates that as many as 2.6 million
Sudanese are currently in the grips of starvation. But grappling with this
rather real threat to the lives of millions of Sudanese would require not
ungrounded speculation on the results a single ill-conceived and failed
bombing of a factory by the U.S. government, but an analysis of a long-term
and calculated campaign by the Sudanese government against its own African
peoples. It does not appear, therefore, on Chomsky's radar screen.

Finally, Chomsky argues that there is not definitive evidence establishing
deaths as a result of the al-Shifa bombing because the U.S. prevented the
United Nations from undertaking such an analysis. The U.S. government has
vetoed UN inquiries into the bombing, much to its shame, but it was not in a
similar position to prevent international human rights groups, such as Human
Rights Watch and Amnesty International, from doing such an analysis and
making public their findings. Both of those organizations have expressed
publicly serious questions concerning the appropriateness of the bombing, so
they had no reason not to make similar statements on the claims Chomsky is
making, should they believe that they are credible. But they have chosen not
to do so. [For the Human Rights Watch documents on the bombing, see
www.hrw.org/press98/sept/sudn0916.htm; for the Amnesty International
document, see
web.amnesty.org/ai.nsf/Index/AFR540042000?OpenDocument&of=COUNTRIES\SUDA
N.] But one would search in vain for such a statement.

3. The Current Situation in the Sudan and the African Victims Chomsky Does
Not Recognize
For all of the time and space he dedicates to invective about my "childish
fabrications," my "consistent lying," and my "racist contempt" (I have
apparently joined Hitchens in this category), not to mention my personal
"responsibility" for the crime of killing tens of thousands of innocent
Sudanese, Chomsky manages to avoid even one comment on the major issue I had
raised in my original commentary -- the nature of the Sudanese regime, its
crimes against its African people and its connections to the bin Laden Al
Qaeda organization (which participated, it appears, in some of those crimes
in the southern Sudan). These are not insignificant realities, and they
dwarf the bombing of the al-Shifa factory in their effect upon the Sudanese
people.

The Sudanese National Islamic Front (NIF) government came to power in a 1990
coup d'etat, and has pursued a genocidal war against its African peoples in
the South which has been ongoing for nearly two decades, with a human toll
in the millions -- as high as 3 million in some estimates. It is an extreme
fundamentalist regime, not unlike Afghanistan's Taliban, which has imposed
fundamentalist versions of religious shari'a law upon the country. Report
after report of the United Nations and international human rights
organizations have documented its abrogation of the rights of women, the
denial of religious freedom and the suppression of freedom of expression and
association; political repression is the norm. There is forced conscription
of children as soldiers and the torture of children. (Human Rights Watch
1995 Report on "Children In Sudan: Slaves, Street Children and Child
Soldiers." [www.hrw.org/reports/1995/Sudan.htm]) Not only is capital
punishment regularly employed, but it has taken the forms of stoning and
crucifixions. Government-sponsored Arabic "muraheleen" militia have engaged
in a large and thriving slave trade, in which they take by force, enslave
and sell Africans, primarily from the largest of the Sudan's ethnic group,
the Dinka. (Human Rights Watch 1999 background Paper on "Slavery and Slave
Redemption in the Sudan" [www.hrw.org/backgrounder/africa/sudan1.htm]) Add
to all of this the use of food as a weapon of war described above, resulting
in massive famine and starvation in the South. And to top that off, the
Sudanese NIF government has been providing material aid and support to an
insurgent group in northern Uganda, the Christian fundamentalist sect and
cult known as the Lords' Resistance Army, which engages in similar practices
there.

This is the government, Chomsky tells us, which was prepared to put aside
its extreme fundamentalism, to end the genocidal war against its African
people in the south and join in a war on terrorism -- all but for the
bombing of the al-Shifa factory. In his original response to Hitchens,
Chomsky approvingly, but selectively, quoted an article by Hubbard of the
_Financial Times_ to this effect, and in his "Reply" he combines a defense
of that view with the claim that I "ludicrously attributed" that view to
him. Let us ignore that last, somewhat bizarre "let me have my cake and eat
it too" point, and go to the substance of the question. The argument that
Hubbard made, and that Chomsky would like us to accept, was that the
genocidal war continued because the resistance in the south of Sudan (itself
divided along ethnic lines) were given hope by the bombing of the al-Shifa
factory -- vain, if they ever had it -- that the rest of the world, and
particularly the West, might finally pay attention to deeds of Sudan's
theocratic totalitarian state. They therefore refused to "compromise" with
the NIF government. On the basis of this chain of reasoning, if one could
use that term loosely here, Chomsky wants to lay at the foot of the U.S.
government, via the bombing of the al-Shifa factory, the continuing crimes
of the fundamentalist government of the Sudan. He glides as quickly as he
can over the issue, and does not speak on the substance of those crimes, as
though he realizes how incredulous this line of argument is.

This returns us to what is so fundamentally dishonest in Chomsky's
accusations of "racist contempt" against his critics. Nowhere in his "Reply"
or other writings on September 11 does one find even the slightest mention
of the hundreds of Africans who lost their lives, directly and as a
consequence of actions designed to produce such results, in the Al Qaeda
bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania -- and despite the fact
that the bombing of the al-Shifa factory was undertaken in response to those
deaths. Only in the most cursory way, does one find any recognition of the
human toll exacted by the NIF government in the Sudan, of the millions
already dead in the genocidal war against its African peoples in its south,
of the millions more subjected to starvation, of twenty-first century
slavery -- and then, only to cast blame for the persistence of these crimes
on the U.S. government. And mention of the thousands of people, of every
race, religion and nationality, from every corner of the globe, who lost
their lives in the September 11 mass murders, is only a cursory preface to
attacks on the U.S. government.

4. The Significance of These Issues
Why does Chomsky's "Reply" demand such a complete and detailed rejoinder?

There is great deal more at stake here than Chomsky's moral equivalency
between the September 11 mass murders and the bombing of the al-Shifa
factory, as repugnant as that was as a response to the tragedy. If that was
the sole issue, we could leave the matter with a simple repudiation of his
comments.

But there is a political perspective here -- what I call left-wing
fundamentalism -- which is represented by Chomsky's arguments. Indeed, he is
arguably the most prominent and most accomplished of its exponents. This
left-wing fundamentalism has a Manichaean world view which holds that the
U.S. is the fundamental source of all evil in the world, such that all other
crimes -- even the mass murders of September 11 and the theocratic
totalitarianism of the Taliban and the Sudanese government -- pale by
comparison. Chomsky's moral equivalency argument between the September 11
mass murders and the al-Shifa bombing is just one manifestation of that
perspective, albeit a particularly telling and offensive one.

This perspective needs to be thoroughly criticized and opposed, and not
simply because it is a wrong-headed view of the world and of the U.S.
government's role in it, not simply because it lacks any nuanced
understanding of the contradictions that circumscribe the role of the U.S.
in the world, not simply because it studiously avoids careful, concrete
analysis of discrete actions and policies of the U.S. government, not simply
because it is so dismissive of the ideals of democratic governance and an
open and free society to which the people of the U.S. aspire, and not simply
because it so quickly forgiving of human rights violations and
authoritarianism in other governments. It needs to be criticized and opposed
because insofar as it carries any influence, it undermines our capacity as
citizens to compel the U.S. government to do the right thing in the world.
When the time came to put an end to the ethnic cleansing and genocidal mass
murders that Milosevic and his henchman had visited upon Bosnia and Kosova,
the left fundamentalists were making common cause with the neo-isolationists
and xenophobes of the right, the Patrick Buchanans, in their opposition to
it. When there was a window of opportunity to put an end to the "Hutu Power"
genocide in Rwanda, and the U.S. did nothing, no left fundamentalist voice
was raised in protest. In the current context, when the Bush administration
appears prepared to overlook the bloody record of the government of the
Sudan, and to welcome it into its coalition against "terrorism" -- against
the protests of human rights groups, the AFL-CIO and the Congressional Black
Caucus -- left fundamentalists are too busy opposing any use of armed force
against Al Qaeda and the Taliban to even take notice. In his "Reply" Chomsky
goes so far as to suggest that U.S. rapprochement with the government of the
Sudan is overdue.

The problem here goes beyond the fact that the fundamentalist left opposes
any U.S. government intervention, any use of armed force by the U.S.
government, no matter how compelling and urgent the cause. Since the
fundamentalist is opposed to any intervention, he is in no position to
assume the vital role of ensuring that the form of the intervention taken by
the U.S. government is consistent with the principles of the limited use of
armed force: that it is directed at the state and its means of violence, and
not at the people, that it makes every effort to protect innocent life and
to free subjected people from their oppression. That is an essential task
that democrats must assume in the upcoming days and months.

Some thirty years ago, when I was a young activist opposed to the war in
Vietnam, I came across a Noam Chomsky who wrote and spoke about the need for
intellectuals to speak "truth" to power. I read his books, attended a few
speeches and lectures and was rather impressed with the model of an engaged
intellectual, working for social change, he presented. But today, as I read
his writings and interviews on the September 11 mass murders, I see no sign
of that man. Far from speaking truth to power, he now seems unable to speak
truth to his fellow citizens. Chomsky has become a latter day William
Jennings Bryan, a once great man who is so distorted by his fundamentalist
faith that he has lost all sense of perspective in the world, all
orientation of where those who stand with the oppressed should be. Like the
William Jennings Bryan figure in the drama _Inherit The Wind_, Chomsky has
become a captive of his own dogma. Let us chose to not inherit the ill wind
with him.

Leo Casey
United Federation of Teachers
260 Park Avenue South
New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)

Power concedes nothing without a demand.
It never has, and it never will.
If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who
want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and
lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.

-- Frederick Douglass --
http://www.topica.com/lists/asdnet@igc.topica.com/read/message.html?mid=1708
517934&sort=d&start=7115
RE: Let Us Not Inherit This Ill Wind: A Rejoinder to Chomsky's "Reply to
Chris Lowe
  Oct 08, 2001 01:38 PDT
Leo,

Thanks for this. I have learned a good deal from it. As you know, I
agree with your argument about the moral turpitude of Chomsky's willful
misrepresentations of Sudanese internal conflicts.

There are a number of ways in which I would question some of your own
depictions here of those conflicts, but they do not bear too much on the
dispute at hand, and are at least debatable points on which I could be
wrong.

I am a little more troubled by your argument about "left
fundamentalism." The problem is that it is very vague as to who or what
it applies to. You offer two somewhat different types of criteria on
which one might assess a given case.

The ones I like are in the paragraph where you call for discrete
analysis of particular situations and of U.S. exercises of power. This
is really excellent.

The one that bothers me is an openness to regarding either criticisms of
specific exercises of American power, or a more general skepticism that
such power is likely to be used in a wise or good way, as ipso facto
proof of such "fundamentalism."

Such post hoc reasoning will impede serious debates we need to have
about issues like humanitarian, human rights, ecological and labor
interventionism, about when and how to support interventions and about
the potential for "good motives" to be enlisted for bad ends, or at a
different level of generality, about re-thinking left internationalism
in the changing conditions of global capitalism and global
political-economic institutions. Also it will impede development of
effective ways talking to younger activists who are and will be learning
about deeper left internationalist traditions, for better or for worse,
through the lens of a movement that is still most easily labelled (and
misconstrued) as "anti-globalization."

I am not sure who you would include among "left fundamentalists."
Michael Klare? Institute for Policy Studies/Foreign Policy in Focus?
Kevin Danaher, Medea Benjamin and Global Exchange?

On one point, I want to disagree with you strenuously. In fact the
strongest U.S. critics of U.S. policy on Rwanda in 1994 were certain
human rights groups with strong Africa programs, and that segment of
Africa scholars and activists with hard anti-imperialist views, many of
whom I suspect you might regard as "left fundamentalists," and whom I am
certain less thoughtful critics would delight in using that label to
dismiss.

It was not only the "left fundamentalists" who were silent in 1994. Did
DSA ever take a position on Rwanda? At what date? Did anyone among the
DP inner-politics adepts in DSA ever challenge the vacuity of Clinton
adminstration policy? Did anyone challenge the perverse reasoning that
the deaths of 18 marines in Mogadishu made the whole U.S. intervention
in Somalia a failure and absolutely precluded serious efforts that might
have saved tens or hundreds of thousands of lives? Did anyone point out
how insulting this way of thinking is to the American people and to U.S.
soldiers?

Not to my knowledge, and if someone did, they didn't do it any more
effectively than the left scholar-activists did.

Clearly part of this had to do with difficulties the left has in
formulating approaches to U.S. interventions. But those difficulties
can't really be blamed primarily on "left fundamentalism," not if we're
to have a hope of finding better approaches. At most it's a secondary
impediment. At worst, focusing on "left fundamentalism" is just another
version of choosing intra-left polemics over real world engagements.
Any kind of persuasive articulation that would shift the balance in how
leftists approach issues of intervention has got to acknowledge that
there are real problems with most U.S. interventions under present
conditions.

Your post obviously is substantial in that way. The description of what
kinds of analysis are often lacking (and always needed) is also exactly
the sort of discussion needed. But I think too much focus on "left
fundamentalism," especially if it remains as vague and polemical as at
present, will tend to divert such discussion.

Let me conclude by thanking you again -- there are numbers of references
I hope to follow up and lots of argumentation I have learned from too.

Chris Lowe
http://www.topica.com/lists/asdnet@igc.topica.com/read