> On 12/19/2011 6:03 PM, Andy wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 5:04 PM, farmelantj at juno.com
>> <farmelantj at juno.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> I think I will disagree with Ravi. The Old Hitch, that is the
>>> younger Hitch, was a much better writer than most left-wing writers.
>>> His defection was a loss for the radical left.
>> Is there a collection, or some examples that illustrate this? (Not
>> trying to be aggro, I'd just like to see what I missed.)
>
> Have you ever read The Chorus and Cassandra? In 1985 he wrote a
> gargantuan essay in a tiny review (the excellent old Grand Street)
> defending Noam Chomsky from his neoconservative attackers in the
> atmosphere of high Reaganism. The piece takes a meticulous, forensic
> approach:
>
> http://www.chomsky.info/onchomsky/1985----.htm
Here, by the way, is how it opens:
> 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.
>
> Elsewhere in his entry, Sampson alluded foolishly to "relationships
> between the academic and political sides of Chomsky's thought," going
> so far as to say that "Chomsky has sometimes made such links explicit,
> for instance in arguing that Lockean empiricist philosophy paved the
> way for imperialism," and concluding lamely that "recently, however,
> Chomsky has insisted on a rigid separation between the two aspects of
> his work." This, insofar as it was not a simple-minded non sequitur, I
> knew to be flatly untrue from my attendance at the John Locke Lectures
> in 1969. In a 1985 article in The New Criterion, Sampson made an
> equally false claim about threats of legal action against his person
> from Chomsky, succeeded in convincing only its editor, the
> too-credulous Hilton Kramer, and the undiscriminating Martin Peretz,
> of The New Republic, of his veracity, was made to apologize by
> Cockburn, and, as I said, disappeared like breath off a razor blade.
>
> My curiosity was ignited, not at first by the debate over the
> integrity of the Bullock crib, but by the fact that anything so
> cavalier and crude had been published at all. Bullock and his deputies
> are nothing if not respecters of persons. And we live in a world where
> fact checkers, subeditors, and (except for people like Chomsky, who
> eschew them on principle) libel lawyers work mightily to protect
> reputations on both sides of the Atlantic. How came it that Noam
> Chomsky, among the few Americans of his generation to lay claim to the
> title of original thinker, could be treated in such an offhand way? As
> I later found, Chomsky had written to a stoically indifferent Bullock:
>
> "If you would have the time or interest to look into the matter, I
> would be intrigued to hear your opinion about what the reaction would
> be under the circumstance that such scurrilous lies were to appear in
> a biographical dictionary -- or were to be published in a book by a
> reputable publisher such as Oxford or Fontana -- about a person who is
> not known as a political dissident."
>
> All this began to interest me at about the turn of the New Year. In
> the following weeks, without even trying, I was able to glean the
> following merely from the journals and papers to which I subscribe in
> the ordinary way...