Chomsky’s America-Centric Prism Distorts Reality, by Yassin al-Haj Saleh – 15 March 2022

The author’s perception of Washington’s role in the world has ossified into a theology, with the U.S. as a malevolent God

From New Lines Magazine.

Just three weeks following my release after 16 years in prison in Syria, I started translating a book into Arabic. The book was “Powers and Prospects: Reflections on Human Nature and the Social Order,” by Noam Chomsky. It had taken me some time to realize that the leading linguist and the harsh critic of American imperialism was the same person. I saw this as a remarkable and much-needed example of the social and political responsibility of scientists and intellectuals. His active participation in the civil rights movement and mobilization against the Vietnam War were impressive, along with his prolific written works about both linguistics and politics. In the book I translated, there were two essays on linguistics, one about the intellectual’s responsibility and five on politics.

For former communist political prisoners who had spent long years in detention and had experienced the fall of communism while still in prison, this American bellwether was important. He told us that the struggle for justice and freedom was still possible, that we had partners in the world and we were not alone, and that the fall of the Soviet bloc could be emancipatory rather than a backbreaking loss.

The second book I co-translated with another former political prisoner was Robert Barsky’s “A Life of Dissent.” It was about Chomsky’s life and politics. Even at that early stage, we had some criticisms of Chomsky’s rigid system of thought, limited by U.S. centrism, which is only partly helpful in analyzing many struggles, ours included. We were ourselves dissidents in our country and on two levels: opposing a regime that was showing blatant discriminatory and oppressive tendencies, and expressing critical views about the Soviet Union and its communism. One main principle of the party I was a young member of was “istiklaliyya” (independence or autonomy), which meant that it was we, and we alone, who decided the right policies for our country and our people, not any center abroad. So, we were not orphans looking for a new father, nor were we driven by a want to replace Marxism-Leninism by a Chomskian catechism of sorts. However, we always thought that our cause was one: fighting inequality and oppression everywhere, and on an equal and brotherly basis.

But time revealed this to be an illusion, for which we alone must bear responsibility. In the 11 years since the start of the Syrian revolution in March 2011, Chomsky has not written once about Syria to inform his many readers about the country’s plight. His scattered comments reveal that he views the Syrian struggle — as with every other struggle — solely through the frame of American imperialism. He is thus blind to the specificities of Syria’s politics, society, economy and history.

What’s more, his perception of America’s role has developed from a provincial Americentrism to a sort of theology, where the U.S. occupies the place of God, albeit a malign one, the only mover and shaker. Understandably, such a perspective raises questions about the autonomy of other actors, with echoes of the debates about free will by Islamic theologians some 1,200 years ago. Chomsky seems closer to the jabriyyeen, who fully deny human freedom and ascertain the omnipotence of God, than to the qadariyyeen, who thought that God’s justice and human freedom went together.

Jihadists today subscribe mainly to the tradition of jabriyyah. Chomsky has been persistent in his own jihad for decades, in a way that reminds one of Ibn Hanbal or Ibn Timiyyah, though without risking freedom or life as the two fathers of modern Salafism did (except for his brief detention following a protest at the Pentagon during the Vietnam War).

The U.S. has never been a force for democracy, rule of law and human rights in the Middle East. Its destructive role in the region, since 1967 at least, is justifiably compared to the role of state tyranny and possibly Islamic nihilism after the American occupation of Iraq. However, the U.S. has not been central to the Syrian catastrophe, as a statement that Chomsky himself signed in March 2021 acknowledges. If anything, the U.S. has done its best not to harm the Assad regime, even after it violated international law forbidding the use of chemical weapons and crossed then President Barack Obama’s “red line” in 2013, as well as many times before and after.

Chomsky’s Americentric perspective tends systematically to minimize the crimes of states that are opposed to the U.S. In a recent interview published in DAWN in January 2022, he said: “You can hardly accuse Iran of illegal or criminal behavior by supporting the [United Nations’] recognized government” of Syria. Supporting a regime that Chomsky himself happens to describe as “monstrous” is not criminal or illegal, he insists. He finds nothing illegal about supporting a regime that denies its subjects any rights, and he thinks it would be illegal to punish that same regime for killing over 1,400 of its citizens with chemical weapons in a clear breach of international law. He said this to Independent Global News in September 2013.

What Chomsky calls Syria’s “recognized government” is the dynastic regime that has been in power for 52 years, precisely half of the 104 years that are the entire history of the modern Syrian state. During these five decades, Syria has suffered from internal strife twice. There were tens of thousands of victims in the first wave (1979-82) and hundreds of thousands in the second (2011-present). Both are structurally related to the cliquish and discriminatory formation of the regime.

Commentators like Chomsky make a point of calling the regime “brutal” and “monstrous” but merely as a preface to what they consider the real problem: the role of the U.S. and its allies in the region. They are mistaken.

The monstrous character of the regime is the central fact of this conflict, indeed of Syria’s history since 1970. It is the key to understanding the country’s continuing catastrophe and the root of everything else. But Chomsky’s approach has the effect of relativizing the regime’s crimes, which account for 90% of the victims and destruction. It seems that if the U.S. cannot be blamed for these crimes, then they are not very important.

It is also quite curious that Chomsky mentions in a rather bland, offhand way that when Iran extends its influence in the region, it does so mainly in the “Shia or near-Shia areas,” as if this is somehow a neutral fact without destructive social and political implications. We leftists and nationalists in the region call this sectarianism, and it has been a singularly important source of civil strife and genocidal massacres in many countries. Chomsky appears not to have engaged at all with the work of many Arab intellectuals, mostly leftists, on sectarianism and its destructive effects since the 1970s. So maybe one should pose a Spivakian question to him: Can subaltern intellectuals speak? Based on my recent personal experience, the answer is no. My letter to the Progressive International about Syria failed to appear, and the people there stopped contacting me after I sent the letter to them, though it was their initiative to talk to me in April 2020 and to invite me to curate a whole dossier about Syria for them (that “letter to the Progressive International” was later published on Aljumhyuriya.net). Apparently, there is no place for us, Syrian leftists and democrats who oppose the Assad regime, in an international progressive coalition.

[READ THE REST]

Yassin al-Haj Saleh is a Syrian author and former political prisoner.

Views: 1