http://www.chomsky.info/onchomsky/1985----.htm
The Chorus and Cassandra Christopher Hitchens Grand Street, Autumn, 1985
In his imperishable Treatise on the Art of Political Lying, published in 1714, Dr. John Arbuthnot laid down a standard for falsifiers and calumniators that has yet to be excelled:
Detractory or defamatory lies should not be quite opposite to the qualities the person is supposed to have. Thus it will not be found according to the sound rules of pseudology to report of a pious and religious prince that he neglects his devotions and would introduce heresy; but you may report of a merciful Prince that he has pardoned a criminal who did not deserve it.
Sixteen years ago I went to the Examination Schools at Oxford University to hear Professor Noam Chomsky deliver the John Locke Lectures. The series was chiefly concerned with modern theories of grammar, syntax, and linguistics, but Chomsky attached a condition which the syndics of the university could not easily decline. He insisted on devoting one entire, self-contained lecture to the American war in Indochina and to the collusion of "academic experts" in an enterprise which was, he maintained, debauching America even as it savaged Vietnam.
Several things intrigued me about the stipulation. First, I liked the way Chomsky separated his political statement from his obligation as a guest lecturer rather than, as was and is the style at Oxford, pretending to objectivity while larding the discourse with heavily sarcastic political "pointers." There was no imported agenda of the kind one got from Hugh Trevor-Roper, Max Beloff, or John Sparrow. Second, I was impressed by his insistence, which was the inverse of the shifty practice of Tory and liberal scholars, that academics could and should have a role in political life but should state their allegiance squarely. It had, after all, been only a few months since Gilbert Ryle had told us, as we clamored about the crushing of Czechoslovakia, "What can we do? We are philosophers, not lifeboat men." That there was something wrong with the Rylean bleat I was certain. What it was, I was not sure. Chomsky seemed to suggest that you need not politicize the academy in order to take a stand, but that if you did not take a stand, then you were being silent about a surreptitious politicization of it. To the hundreds of us who broke the habit of many terms and for once attended lectures consistently and on time, he seemed to have a measured, unshakable, but still passionate manner that contrasted rather well with the ardent ultraleft confusion and the creepy conservative evasions that were competing at the time.
Still, Chomsky was unmistakably on the left, though he scorned the sectarians and the know-alls. In those days, also, you could read him everywhere; his name had a kind of cachet. He was interviewed with respect on television and radio, though more often abroad than in America. He was a seminal contributor to The New York Review of Books. His predictions about a widening of the Indochina war, and a consequent narrowing of the choices between a Sovietization of the peninsula and an utter devastation of it, now seem almost banal in their accuracy. Nineteen sixty-nine was before Nixon's "madman theory," before Kissinger's "decent interval," before the Christmas bombing, the Church Committee, the "plumbers," and all the rest of it. Tumultuous as it seemed at the time, the period in retrospect appears an age of innocence. The odd thing -- and I wonder why it didn't occur to me more forcefully then -- was that, the more Chomsky was vindicated, the less he seemed to command "respect." To the extent that I reflected about this at all, I put it down to shifts in fashion ("Chomsky? -- a sixties figure"), to the crisis undergone by many superficial antiwar commentators when the American war was succeeded by Spartan regimes (of which more later), and to the fact that Chomsky had started to criticize the Israelis, seldom a prudent course for those seeking the contemplative life.
As "wound healing" went on in American society, and as we were being bidden to a new age where "self-doubt and self-criticism" were things of the past, and just as I was wondering whether one would admire an individual who had put self-doubt and self-criticism behind him, Oxford struck back at Noam Chomsky. In the 1983 Biographical Companion to Modern Thought, edited by Alan Bullock, there appeared a 550-word entry under Chomsky, Avram Noam. Of these 550 words, the most immediately arresting were those which maintained that he had
forfeited authority as a political commentator by a series of actions widely regarded as ill-judged (repeated polemics minimising the Khmer Rouge atrocities in Cambodia; endorsement of a book -- which Chomsky admitted he had not read -- that denied the historical reality of the Jewish Holocaust).
The piece was written by Geoffrey Sampson, an academic nonentity who made various other incautious allegations and who later, while engaged in an exchange with my friend Alexander Cockburn [The Nation, December 22, 1984, and March 2, 1985], strolled into the propellers and was distributed into such fine particles that he has never been heard from again.
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