Noam Chomsky during an appearance at the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany in 2014 (Uli Deck/Getty)

Co-published with the Irish Independent:

When we found a stray kitten under the bed, I named it Chomsky.

It was a tribute to the influence that Noam Chomsky, linguist and political commentator, had upon the course of my career in academia and journalism.

He wrote and spoke vividly about how US foreign policy had failed to live up to American values during and after the Cold War. As the Bush Administration, with the hubris of superpower, pursued the deadly shock and awe of Iraq 2003, his was an all-too-accurate warning.

But as my devotion to Chomsky the Cat grew, my attachment to Chomsky the polemicist waned. I came to realize that as he assailed the US system over Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, and Cuba, he showed little recognition of Iraqis, Afghans, Palestinians, and Cubans —- their experiences, their fears, their aspirations. They were merely the extras in his never-ending screenplay of American perfidy.

He continued to fulminate in print and on screen, passionate, angry, and frustrated, but a complex world beyond the US and its failed superpower had passed him by.

Chomsky, 95, is recovering in Brazil from a stroke. In what is likely to be his final book, The Myth of American Idealism, he departs with lines now exhausted of value.

Focusing on America, Ignoring The Local

Completed by co-author Nathan J. Robinson, the editor of Current Affairs magazine, The Myth of American Idealism opens with an invocation to Americans to live up to their values in their actions abroad.

All very good and necessary, but how do you pursue those values when Vladimir Putin has invaded Ukraine and his Russian troops have massacred, tortured, and deporting tens of thousands of civilians? How to be just when Syria’s Assad regime has taken 100,000s of lives and displaced more than 11 million? How to do good when more than 10% of Venezuela’s population have fled the country or when up to 6 million people have been slain in the Democratic Republic of Congo since 1996?

Chomsky has no answer because Putin, Bashar al-Assad, Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, Congo’s Félix Tshisekedi —- and their populations —- are not American. Nor are their compatriots in Palestine or Afghanistan or any other country. And Chomsky’s recognition is exclusively of his US antagonists.

When a foreign persona enters the narrative, they are only as a stand-in for the villains in Washington. “The US accepted [Saddam] Hussein when he followed our rules and turned on him when he disobeyed,” Chomsky and Robinson declare.

So the book is largely a recitation of Chomsky’s criticisms of the recent history of US foreign policy —- the support for coups; the military campaigns; the economic punishments; the regime changes. He and Robinson feign that this is a tale ignored by the “mainstream” of the US political culture which has been complicit in the crimes. But it’s not: stories such as the US-UK overthrow of Iran’s government in 1953 and the subsequent support of the Shah, the assassination attempts on Fidel Castro, or the disastrous war in Vietnam are woven into American history and mythology.

This in itself is not a venal sin. What is far more serious is excusing and even vindicating destruction and murder in the process.

And that is what Chomsky and Robinson do in their portrayal of the contemporary. They are on solid ground denouncing the US war on Iraq in 2003 —- Saddam’s mass murder was not rectified by an intervention which cost many more Iraqi lives. Criticism of US support for Israel resonates as the Netanyahu Government kills more than 41,000 in Gaza so far and expands the war to Lebanon.

But Chomsky and Robinson ignore mass killings, protests, and rights if there is no US angle. There is no mention of Assad’s murderous record in Syria, Qaddafi in Libya, or indeed any regime —- even those backed by the US, such as Mubarak and Sisi in Egypt —- in the so-called “Arab Spring” across the Middle East and North Africa. The Taliban are largely absent from the Afghanistan narrative. Kosovo gets a lengthy section, but without Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic, whose abuses in Bosnia have disappeared. Look for Xinjiang in the China passage in vain —- you won’t find it.

Then there are those killers who get a free pass. For Putin’s historic assault on Ukraine, Chomsky and Robinson concoct a mix of distortion and disinformation to blame NATO for the invasion. Meanwhile, the hundreds of civilians killed in cold blood in Bucha, the many thousands who perished in Mariupol, and those dying in dying Russian missile and drone attacks are unnoticed.

Yes, it is vital that Israel’s mass killing of Gazans be recognised and critiqued. But what of those who perished and were abducted at the hands of Hamas on October 7, 2022 —- the catalyst and pretext for the Netanyahu Government’s response? Three throat-clearing sentences are a fig leaf, not a rigorous examination.

“There Can Be No Solace If They Are Never Seen”

We scattered Chomsky the Cat’s ashes in 2020. Amid 16 years of turmoil, culminating in the pandemic, she had been an independent, strong-willed comfort for us.

After his decades of commentary, there is no comfort from Chomsky the man. His bitterness and anger, while merited in some cases, gives no solace to the stateless in Palestine, the war-torn in Sudan, the oppressed in Iran, the refugees from Syria or Venezuela or Haiti or Myanmar.

There can be no solace if they are never seen — and, for Chomsky, they are only in vision as the props for his agonizing over his native land.