My Allergic Reaction to Noam Chomsky

Bradford DeLong
October 23, 1998

Dear ****,

You had expressed disbelief at my strong and negative reaction (based on memories of the 1970s, when he seemed to be mocking those who tried to alert the outside world to the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia) when the name "Noam Chomsky" was raised. You said that Chomsky was one of the most intelligent, hardest-working, incisive, and moral voices on the left today.

And you suggested that I give him another chance.

So the next time I stopped by Cody's, I picked up one of Chomsky's books: his (1992) What Uncle Sam Really Wants (New York: Odonian Press: 1878825011).

But I only got to page 17. Then I put the book down--with my strong negative reaction confirmed.

The book begins by stating that it is first going to sketch out the history of U.S. foreign relations since World War II. By the second page Chomsky is in the middle of a brief discussion of planning for the postwar period. Four paragraphs are devoted to NSC 68 and its consequences, in which NSC 68 is exhibited in a vacuum. There is not a word about the gradual shift in U.S. policy from Rooseveltian cooperation with Stalin to Trumanesque confrontation, and not a word about how NSC 68 had no prospects of becoming policy until Josef Stalin took off the leash and Kim Il Sung began the Korean War.

I found this absence of any attempt to sketch the context disturbing.

After a discussion of George Kennan, Chomsky wanders off into three pages on "study groups" of the "State Department and the "Council on Foreign Relations" who sought to plan for U.S. postwar economic domination of the "Grand Area." But there is no contact with Bretton Woods, or the founding of the World Bank and the IMF, or with those--in the U.S. centered around social democrat Harry Dexter White--who actually made the policies that governed the postwar reconstruction of the global economy.

Chomsky then turns to political events in Europe in the aftermath of World War II. He begins by making it sound as though the U.S. armies conquered North Africa and Italy, and then Roosevelt decided to put fascists like Darlan and Badoglio back into power. The real history is more complicated: overextended U.S. forces and a willingness to make deals with little devils in order to get into a better position to fight the greater devil. I think that Roosevelt's decisions to back Darlan and Badoglio were mistakes: but they didn't happen the way that Chomsky says that they did.

Chomsky then moves on to how "CIA subversion" dispersed and suppressed the "anti-fascist resistance" in Italy, Greece, and Korea. No mention is made of the likely character of the regimes that would have come to power in the absence of U.S. support for the right.

Now this is a big mistake, for it is hard to look at postwar Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and North Korea and avoid the conclusions that (a) people there lived worse and suffered more than the people of Italy, Greece, and South Korea; and (b) governments like those in the first three would have held power in the second three were it not for U.S. intervention. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that U.S. support for the right in Italy, Greece, and South Korea "expanded the cage" relative to what would have happened otherwise.

It is possible to make the case that U.S. intervention in Italy, Greece, and South Korea was destructive. But any such case needs to be backed by a powerful argument that "antifascist" Italy, Greece, or South Korean governments would have been very different from the actual governments of Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, or North Korea. And Chomsky makes no such argument.

Now let me make it clear what I am objecting to. I am not objecting here to claims that U.S. foreign policy in the late 1940s was disastrous because:

that there was a real possibility for a continuation of wartime good feeling had the U.S. been less confrontational
that Stalin might well, if properly placated, have been willing to accept Finland-like regimes all along his borders
that ramping up the U.S. to fight the Cold War did immense damage to our democratic institutions and liberties.

Indeed, I agree with one and a half of those three points. (Indeed, Dean Acheson himself agreed with at least one of them.) And smart and thoughtful people whom I respect believe in all three of them. People are allowed to follow different paths and reach different analytical conclusions than I do.

What I object to is that Chomsky tears up all the trail markers that might lead to conclusions different from his, and makes it next to impossible for people unversed in the issues to even understand what the live and much-debated points of contention are.

What I object to is the lack of background, to the lack of context. In telling the history of the Cold War as it really happened--even in ten pages--there has to be a place for Stalin, an inquiry into the character of the regimes that Stalin sponsored, and an assessment of Stalinist plans and programs for expansion. And Chomsky ruthlessly suppresses half the story of the Cold War--the story of the other side of the Iron Curtain. A naive reader of Chomsky would not even know that there was a complicated and much-debated set of issues here.

In my view, the first duty that any participant in a speech situation has: to tell it like he or she thinks that it is, not to try to suppress big chunks of the story because they are inconvenient in the context of your current political goals. You can't show only half (or less than half) the picture. That's a major intellectual foul. And in a world in which there are lots of people who try hard to tell it as it really happened, I see no reason why I should waste time reading someone who tries to tell it as it isn't.

And then there are Chomsky's casual lies:

...that the (doomed) postwar partisans trying to fight guerrilla wars against Soviet rule in Ukraine, Belorus, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere were "armies that had been established by Hitler" (instead of people--a good chunk of them fascists and anti-semites--who had fought against the Nazis when the Nazis occupied eastern Europe, and they fought against the Soviets after the Red Army drove west--for they wanted and one can understand why to be ruled by neither Hitler nor Stalin).

...that the "liberal extreme" of postwar American policymaking was the George Kennan who sneers at "vague... and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization" (the liberal extreme--in fact, the vital center for much of the period--was the position that Kennan was arguing against in the passage Chomsky quotes: the position held by those who did care deeply about human, rights, economic development, and democratization., and who made them the focus of a substantial chunk of U.S. postwar policy).

...that "free trade is fine for economics departments and newpaper editorials, but nobody in the corporate world or the government takes the doctrines seriously" (how does he know better than I do what I take seriously?).

So by page 17 I had had more than enough. He's a sleazeball

Sincerely yours,

Brad DeLong