Relevance of 'The Responsibility of Intellectuals' by Chomsky

Express Tribune

5 days ago

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In a 1962 article Chomsky wrote that those with knowledge and influence must use their intellect to challenge falsehoods and reveal the truth. Intellectuals, whether scholars, journalists or thinkers, have a duty to question power structures and educate the public. Silence in the face of deception allows misinformation to spread.
Intellectuals are in a position to expose lies of governments: in the western world intellectuals have the power coming from political liberty, access to information and freedom of expression. They can unravel the truth from the veil of falsehood, deception and class under which the present is depicted.
The responsibility of the intellectual is far greater than the common man lacking the facilities and leisure to delve into questions of truth and lies.
We can hardly ask ourselves to what extent the American people bear responsibility for the savage assault on a rural Vietnamese people and the Israel inflictions upon the hapless, unarmed population of Gaza. Not only is the Israel assault overwhelming but indiscriminate and genocidal.
The realpotick viewpoint of US intellectuals is reflected in the suggestion of Yale University's Prof Rowe that with a view to quell communist threat in Vietnam and other South Asian countries, all the surplus wheat of Canada and the US be buried in order to cause starvation in China not as a weapon of extermination of people, which it will result in, but as a weapon against government, as the internal stability of the country cannot be maintained in the face of general starvation. Rowe has no qualms of moralism, leading one to the conclusion that this policy is the same as Ostpolitick of Nazi Germany.
It is easy for the American intellectual to deliver homilies on the virtues of liberty and freedom but if he is really concerned about, say Chinese totalitarianism or the burdens imposed on the peasantry in forced industrialisation, he should undertake a task that is infinitely more significant and challenging — the task of creating, in the US, the intellectual and moral climate, as well as the social and economic conditions that would permit the US to participate in modernisation and development in poor countries in a way commensurate with its material wealth and technical capacity. Massive capital gifts to Cuba and China (in 1950s) might not succeed in alleviating the authoritarianism and terror that tend to accompany early stages of capital accumulation, but they are far more likely to have this effect than lectures on democratic values.
Discourses on the two-party system or other democratic values that have been realised in the west are a monstrous irrelevance in the face of the effort that is required to raise the level of culture in western society to the point where it can provide a "social lever" for both economic development and development of true democratic institutions in the Third World.
An arch example of a western intellectual is symbolised by how Churchill said to Stalin in Tehran in 1934: "The government of the world must be entrusted to satisfied nations who wished nothing more for themselves than what they had. If the world-government were in the hands of hungry nations they would always be in danger."
It was not military aid funnelled from the North to South Vietnam up to 1964.
Most of the aid was in the form of "doctrinal material" and "political leadership" rather than in military assistance.
All of this is of course reasonable, so long as we accept the fundamental political axiom that the US, with its traditional concern for the weak and downtrodden, and with its unique insight into the proper mode of development for backward countries, must have the courage and persistence "to impose its will by force" until such time as other nations are prepared to accept these truths or to simply abandon hope.
It is also the responsibility of the intellectual to view events in their historical perspective.
As Munich showed, a powerful and aggressive nation with a fanatic belief in its manifest destiny will regard each victory as a prelude to the next one. Herein lies the danger of appeasement as the Chinese tirelessly point out to the Russians, which they claim is playing Chamberlain to our Hitler in Vietnam.
Of course the aggressiveness of liberal imperialism is not the same as that of Nazi Germany: we do not want to occupy Asia. The west merely wants "to help the Asian countries progress towards economic modernization as relatively 'open' and 'stable' societies to which western access is free and comfortable."
Chomsky says, "Recent history shows that it makes little difference to us as to what form of government a country has as long as it remains an open society a society which remains open to American economic penetrative or political control. If it is necessary the west will approach genocide in Vietnam [Iraq, Syria, Gaza] and this is the price we must pay in defense of freedom and the rights of man."
Meagher and Hobart said before the House Foreign Affairs Committee: "If it was possible, India would probably prefer to import technicians and know how rather than foreign corporations. Since this is not possible therefore India accepts foreign capital as a necessary evil."
During the early period, US entrepreneurs insisted upon importing all equipment and machinery where India had a tested capacity to meet some of their requirements.
By adopting strict import and price restrictions, America has helped India and other developing countries to become open societies. "Based upon a proper understanding of the core of American ideology, namely the sanctity of the individual in relation to the state in this way the US refutes the simple minded belief of the Asians that the West has been driven and then to cling on to its imperial holdings by the inevitable workings of capitalist economics."( Eugene Rostow).
In pursuing the aim of helping other countries to progress towards open societies, with no thought or desire of territorial aggrandizement, we don't see any new ground being broken. This was the policy used by Britain in India during the 18th and 19th centuries of no conquest but in a conceited fashion shortly after the initial economic steps, actually conquest was in full swing.