Noam Chomsky was the most conspicuous American intellectual to rationalize the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. The death toll, he argued, was minor compared to the list of Third World victims of the far more extreme terrorismof United States foreign policy. Despite its calculated affront to mainstream opinion, this sentiment went down very well with Chomskys own constituency. He has never been more popular among the academic and intellectual left than he is today. Two books of interviews with him published since September 11, 2001 both went straight onto the bestseller lists.[1] One of them has since been turned into a film entitled Power and Terror, now doing brisk business in the art-house movie market. In March 2002 the films director, John Junkerman, accompanied his subject to the University of California, Berkeley, where in a five-day visit Chomsky gave five political talks to a total audience of no fewer than five thousand people. Meanwhile, the liberal news media around the world has sought him out for countless interviews as the most promi- nent intellectual opposed to the American response to the terrorist attacks. Newspaper articles routinely open by reminding readers of his awesome intellectual status. A profile headlined Conscience of a Nationin the English daily The Guardian declared: Chomsky ranks with Marx, Shakespeare, and the Bible as one of the ten most quoted sources in the humanitiesand is the only writer among them still alive.The New York Times has called him arguably the most important intellectual alive. Chomsky has used his status, originally gained in the field of linguistics, to turn himself into the leading voice of the American left. He is not merely a spokesman. His own stance has done much to structure left-wing politics over the past forty years. Today, when actors, rock stars, and protesting students mouth anti-American slogans for the cameras, they are very often expressing sentiments they have gleaned from Chomskys voluminous output. Hence, to examine Chomskys views is to analyze the core mindset of contemporary radicalism, especially the variety that now holds so much sway in the academic and arts communities. Chomsky has been a celebrity radical since the mid-1960s when he made his name as an anti-Vietnam War activist. Although he lost some of his appeal in the late-1970s and 1980s by his defense of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, he has used September 11 to restore his reputation, indeed to surpass his former influence and stature. At seventy-four years of age, he is today the doyen of the American and much of the worlds intellectual left. He is, however, an unconventional academic radical. Over the past thirty years, the left in the humanities has been smitten by high theory, especially neo-Marxist, feminist, and postmodernist philosophy out of Germany and France. Much of this material was arcane enough in its own language but in translation it elevated obscurantism to a badge of prestige. It inundated the humanities with relativism both in epistemology and moral philosophy. In contrast, Chomsky has produced no substantial body of political theory of his own. Nor is he a relativist. He advocates the pursuit of truth and knowledge about human affairs and promotes a simple, universal set of moral principles. Moreover, his political writings are very clear, pitched to a general rather than specialist audience. He supports his claims not by appeals to some esoteric conceptual apparatus but by presenting plain, apparently factual evidence. The explanation for his current appeal, therefore, needs to be sought not in recent intellectual fashions but in something with a longer history. Chomsky is the most prominent intellectual remnant of the New Left of the 1960s. In many ways he epitomized the New Left and its hatred of Amerika,a country he believed, through its policies both at home and abroad, had descended into fascism. In his most famous book of the Sixties, American Power and the New Mandarins, Chomsky said what America needed was a kind of denazification. Of all the major powers in the Sixties, according to Chomsky, America was the most reprehensible. Its principles of liberal democracy were a sham. Its democracy was a four-year dictatorshipand its economic commitment to free markets was merely a disguise for corporate power. Its foreign policy was positively evil. By any objective standard,he wrote at the time, the United States has become the most aggressive power in the world, the greatest threat to peace, to national self-determination, and to international cooperation. As an anti-war activist, Chomsky participated in some of the most publicized demonstrations, including the attempt, famously celebrated in Norman Mailers Armies of the Night, to form a human chain around the Pentagon. Chomsky described the event as tens of thousands of young people surrounding what they believe to beI must add that I agreethe most hideous institution on this earth. This kind of anti-Americanism was common on the left at the time but there were two things that made Chomsky stand out from the crowd. He was a scholar with a remarkable reputation and he was in tune with the anti-authoritarianism of the student-based New Left. At the time, the traditional left was still dominated by an older generation of Marxists, who were either supporters of the Communist Party or else Trotskyists opposed to Joseph Stalin and his heirs but who still endorsed Lenin and Bolshevism. Either way, the emerging generation of radical students saw both groups as compromised by their support for the Russian Revolution and the repressive regimes it had bequeathed to eastern Europe. Chomsky was not himself a member of the student generationin 1968 he was a forty-year-old tenured professorbut his lack of party membership or any other formal political commitment absolved him of any connection to the Old Left. Instead, his adherence to anarchism, or what he called libertarian socialism,did much to shape the outlook of the New Left. American Power and the New Mandarins approvingly quotes the nineteenth-century anarchist Mikhail Bakunin predicting that the version of socialism supported by Karl Marx would end up transferring state power not to the workers but to the elitist cadres of the Communist Party itself. Despite his anti-Bolshevism, Chomsky remained a supporter of socialist revolution. He urged that a true social revolutionwould transform the masses so they could take power into their own hands and run institutions themselves. His favorite real-life political model was the short-lived anarchist enclave formed in Barcelona in 19361937 during the Spanish Civil War. etc... http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/21/may03/chomsky.htm Windsock windshuttle joins James A.Donald,David Horowitz,Stephen Schwartz,Chris Hitchens,Michael Costa and no doubt many more loony ex-trotskyists over to the lunar right.