Great piece! Though I can't help wondering if our American moralizing of politics is correct... perhaps there is more to our unending American exceptionalism than meets the eye. I do think consumerism and empire has tainted it, but it's still the lens through which the crowds see things. (Woke folk!)
I find my cosmic sense of justice leads me to the same conclusions: humility in assessing the minister's call, stepping back in acceptance of my finitude, logging off from the thousand and one voices just as blind as I am. Yet, I still think Russia is a dark place, Ukraine is a sovereign state (we all agreed to that, right?) and that Bibi is the problem, because he is wicked and power hungry.
All this to say, there are two things about humankind that are always true: We are drawn to create ethics and confine ourselves in them and we are AWFUL at seeing second and third order consequences of our 'ethical' actions.
One last thought: There is something powerful in an uprising, it's an idealism willing to throw down. To say, "I'm putting my chips on the table, consequences come what may." That's an incredible stake to claim! But your rejection of it in the interest of disinterest, why? What is the good outcome of politics? lives saved; peace maintained, victory or outcomes at a later date? There's a prior there, and on top of it some more moral assumptions, that we probably agree on, about the best way to achieve the goal. Like NOT fascism.
What you are talking about is a responsibility for the world. Most outcomes of the 'worlding urge' only deal with this indirectly (Outcomes include : religion/morality~ethics/art). They deal with this responsibility for it indirectly because they highlight some contingent even more derivative outcome or "form" as Platonists might declare, as a priority: (tribe/city/cult/culture/identity/sovereignty/temple/god/).
These doubled-down 'shouldy' practices become dogma and doctrinal "co-ordination dances" which lead to war. They are semi-conscious attempt to world, where the responsibility to world is occluded by outcomes of the (by-products? pollution? ) social process unaware of itself.
This is why you end up taking a moral stance on moralizing. And is the question I ask and discuss the implications of on my substack 'Why we should -- what is the ethical response to morality?"
The main factor in all of this tendency towards dogma and death cults (paranoid sick agency) run amuck, is our inability to police the narcissists on our side, who split us off against each other in self-fulfilling paranoid.
We are human because we have meetings and meals, not conflict and war. Narcissists unpoliced will always lead us into the death cult, because they confuse the self with the world as a _sweorld_. Thus their confusion of existential threat with their own person/status. Responsibility for the world is an act of empathy, we create this world when we step forth as children into childhood by way of the 'reality principle' that there are others in 'our' world.
Neither the self nor the world exist, but both are what we live. It is a Janus dance.
I respectfully disagree. To begin with, no one who knows anything about the history of American foreign policy can find it the least bit plausible that concern for legality and morality has played even the smallest part in it, whatever George Kennan says. To see how ridiculous this claim is, have a look at any of Noam Chomsky's many books, especially his new one, "The Myth of American Idealism."
It's also absurd to suggest that the obstacle to a Middle Eastern settlement is too much moral sentiment. On the contrary, the near-complete lack of Israeli recognition of the profound harm they have occasioned the Palestinians in 1948 and since is the primary cause of the conflict. Are you seriously suggesting that the development of a moral conscience among the rabidly chauvinistic Israeli right would not be the first step toward peace?
More fundamentally, any attempt to radically separate the moral and the prudential is incoherent. It is impossible to frame an argument -- any argument -- without knowing what one wants or what, in the most general sense, is desirable. Of course, as a matter of logic, one can say: "If X, then Y." But as a mtter of politics, the next question is always: "Why Y?"
David Hume made this point long ago: "Reason is always, and ought to be, a servant of the passions." Richard Rorty in "Consequences of Pragmatism" and Michael Walzer in several books have shown how to apply Hume's insight to contemporary moral reasoning.
George, many thanks for your comment. And while I’m sure we do disagree, I want to clarify the nature of that disagreement on a couple of points. I didn’t say (and don’t believe) that our or any other country’s foreign policy has in fact been moral per se. Moral ≠ moralism, and even Kennan felt that that moralistic strain did not necessarily result in moral actions. In any case, my focus was largely on the way that we as citizens think and talk about politics, and especially geopolitics, rather than what policymakers get up to (my disagreements with Messr. Chomsky will have to be left for another day).
Second, I wouldn’t (and didn’t intend to) say that too much moral sentiment is the main obstacle to a Middle Eastern settlement. What I might say is that a belief in the rightness of one’s claims in the absence of the material capacity to meaningfully advance those claims has contributed to the intractability of the conflict. Otherwise, I’m a bit perplexed by your point here. Much of the historiography of the harms Israel has done against the Palestinians is itself Israeli, and there are plenty of Israelis who accept this history. Similarly the text of Oslo refers to the legitimate rights of Palestinians and the need for reconciliation. But politics is not a court of law, and there’s no formula for converting an acknowledgment of grievances into a set of mutually acceptable concessions.
Now, I assume you disagree on this point and that’s fine, but the disagreement itself points to the circular character of moralized discussions of inherently controversial political disputes, insofar as your preferred solution seems to require the widespread acceptance of views you already hold and deem correct. But then of course there wouldn’t be a dispute in the first place!
As for the larger question of not separating the moral and the prudential, I am inclined to think this is also begging the question, in that it conflates what is desirable with what is moral. Or, to put it another way, “moral” here could cash out as either what is “good” or what is “right.” I have no problem whatsoever with speaking of the good, and generally think we should do so more forthrightly in the classical manner. But people are bound to disagree about their conception of what is good, especially when they belong to different political communities, and speaking of “right” raises those same juridical assumptions that I think are misapplied when it comes to politics.
Finally, on this point, it may be relevant that Hume’s claim about reason and the passions is a classic statement of modern political thought—one that neatly inverts the ancient view. Here, again, I confess my anachronistic preference for the classical view, which better preserves the independence of politics as a distinct domain of human practice—though it may be that this is another point of disagreement. In any case, thanks for reading.
I confess I'm slightly dumbfounded. US foreign policy is not immoral? We signed the Geneva Accords in 1954 guaranteeing a free election to determine the government of a unified Vietnam. Then, because we realized that our favored candidate could not win, we called off the election and advised our favored candidate -- who had no popular legitimacy -- to forcibly suppress . the likely winners of th cnceled election, the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front. When the NLF resisted, the US began arming and training its client, the South Vietnamese Army, and when it became obvious that they could not succeed, we invaded, beginning in the early 1960s. The American conduct of the war was utterly barbarous, dropping more bombs on a small region than we had used in all of World War ll. We defoliated much of the country, used banned weapons like white phosphorus, and altogether killed around 2 million people, mostly civilians. Our crimes, wholesale and retail, were innumerable.
In the Korean War, we killed 2 million people. again mostly civilians, in the most intensive bombing campaign in history, including destroying dams, a war crime. There was very nearly no building in North Korea left standing; much of the population lived underground for years.
In Latin America, we have subverted numerous democratic governments and movements, instead bringing extremely brutal regimes to power.
The amount of suffering occasioned by American foreign policy since World War ll is staggering. In nearly all cases, there was not the slightest legal justification for these actions. I'm simply at a loss to understand what you can mean by saying that these and (many) other appalling American actions are not immoral.
Perhaps you think I'm more of a booster of U.S. foreign policy than I am. I think much of what we've done--particularly since the end of the Cold War--has been pointlessly destructive. Even where they have had a point, that we have done terrible things is inarguable. Where I think we specifically disagree is in the application of legal justification, which I've tried to argue is an inapt criterion.
More broadly, I don't know what it would meant to declare U.S. foreign policy categorically immoral. Compared to what? The conduct of individuals? The conduct of states generally? The conduct of great powers or empires throughout history? One can of course just declare the lot of them to be brigands and gangsters on a grand scale, which is essentially the Augustinian position, but I don't get the sense that's yours. Similarly, many of your examples have to do with the horrors of war, and war is indeed horrific, but this is an indication of the importance of prudence (as I emphasized) rather than pacifism, which no state adopts anyway.
The problem with speaking in terms of its violations of legal strictures, as I see it, is that it is neither practically nor philosophically helpful. Practically, it is mostly impotent. Philosophically, it does not offer a meaningful guide to conduct, because states--especially great powers--have complex obligations for which law serves as a limited guide, and the stakes are very, very high. To take your Vietnamese example, it is highly unlikely that the election was in fact meaningfully legitimate and free of outside interference. Being the only party that adheres to empty Accords is not, I think, a mark of virtue but of something else. This is not by the way a defense of our decision to commit to the Vietnam War or of our conduct within it, but again the chief reasons to critique our policies there were because they disregarded any proportionate link between means and objectives, producing terrible mutual destruction with little justification. That in fact goes for many of our policies, as it frankly does for those of so many great powers in history. But this is why I emphasized an ethos of responsibility, rather than adherence to suprapolitical standards of morality.
The irony here is that we probably agree in our actual evaluation of many events in world politics, but for very different reasons, I suspect.
Immoral compared to what, you ask? Compared to the course we did not follow, the course clearly prescribed in the UN Charter, which is our solemn treaty obligation, and according to which resort to force is barred without the authorization of the Security Council. Compared to not dropping millions of tons of bombs on an area not that much bigger than Texas, killing millions of people, as we did both in Korea and Southeast Asia. Compared with not overthrowing legitimate governments in Latin America and installing murderous thugs like Pinochet, the Argentine and Brazilian generals, the Guatemalan colonels, and many others.
These were not merely a matter of disproportion between means and ends. The ends themselves were illegitimate, by the UN Charter and the common laws of humanity. The US simply had no right to determine by force who ruled Vietnam, Chile, and dozens of other countries, any more than Putin had the right to invade Ukraine.
Forgive me if this seems an exasperating question, but would you be willing to say that the actions of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were grossly immoral, and why or why not?
But this recourse to rights and/or int'l law brings us back to the problem of question-begging I mentioned earlier. Why should we ascribe such moral significance to these treaties (which you call solemn)? Is this a permanent feature of international law, or something that only materializes in the postwar era? To say we had no "right" to do XYZ may be true in some sense (though that too requires arguing), but if so it is just as true of other powers during the Cold War (and prior), and I don't believe that ceding geopolitical position to them (which is what relying on law amounts to) gets us out of the ethical dilemma here.
Relatedly, it does not exasperate me to have to say that Hitler, Stalin, et al. were grossly immoral. But doing so is easy—indeed anyone can do it—and it does little to help us think about the hard questions of politics. Indeed, this kind of free associative moral denunciation is far more common than prudential argument these days.
There is something weightless about such denunciations. Moreover, if you hold there are evils in the world at such scale what do you propose to do about them? Abjuring the tools of force and fraud so as to avoid doing evil oneself is not a solution seeing as it effectively surrenders the field to those with no such compunction. Meanwhile deferring to the authority of international organizations/law presupposes that those institutions possess some higher moral status—a position that requires ignoring the farcical realities of such institutions. Not to mention the fact that those same institutions inevitably become a venue for power politics themselves, given the structure of, eg, the UN Security Council (which itself historically included the Soviet Union under Stalin and the PRC under Mao).
Again the answer as I see it should not be “anything goes” but rather a more prudential consideration of our unavoidable interests in the world, which perhaps ironically might produce more comparatively moral outcomes than the alternative.
“Why should we ascribe such moral significance to these treaties?” I’m not sure I understand the question. We should because we ratified the UN’s founding treaty, and our Constitution says that treaties are binding. It’s generally thought that one has a moral obligation to keep one’s most solemn promises – ie, promises on which the rest of the world is expected to rely. We have no right to do what we have promised not to do – above all, use force against another country without Security Council authorization. Does that position “require argument”? I don’t see why.
It is indeed easy to say that Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were immoral, but not so easy to say why in a way that does not also imply that US crimes in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East are immoral, which you seem, for some reason, eager to avoid doing.
So you think that behaving ethically would afford geopolitical advantages (“cede position”) to our adversaries? So our own view (i.e., the government’s view) of our “national interest” trumps our legal and humanitarian obligations? Why didn’t you just say so to begin with? We are absolved of our ethical obligations when we don’t care to pay the costs? As far as I can see, this is what every Cold War realist believed, notably Kissinger. If that’s the company you want to keep …
The argument that “the other guy does it too” is really not a very sophisticated one. In general, it ignores what is practically the only empirically solid finding of social science: namely, Tit for Tat as a game-theoretical strategy. That is, in the long run, you get the best results by behaving ethically. And in our specific historical circumstances, it ignores the fact that after the Second World War, the United States was overwhelmingly the world’s dominant military, economic, diplomatic, and cultural power. If the US had played by the rules, rather than following the despicable advice offered by George Kennan in the passage I quoted earlier (a violent and lawless strategy documented at pitiless length by Chomsky), a law-abiding world order just might have stumbled into existence.
“Might” – of course there’s no certainty. What’s certain, however, is that if we keep playing the lethal game of grand strategy and great power politics, international conflicts will result, and one of them, whether in the 21st, 22nd, 23rd, or a subsequent century, will end civilization.
How to prevent this? By establishing for the first time, in the US and elsewhere, a genuinely accountable democracy and not leaving matters in the hands of the business and financial elites that currently dominate states. But this requires much further discussion. I feel I’ve said all I have to say (and probably more) about our present topic, so I’ll leave the last word to you.
Thanks for your courteous reply. On the first point: I don't see how George Kennan's criticizing "the American tendency to view international relations in legal and moral terms" can mean anything other than that he thinks the American approach to international relations has been significantly influenced by law and morality. Which I found ridiculous and still do. I mention Chomsky as a shorthand indication of my views, but I'm always happy to argue at any level of detail that American foreign policy has been uniformly and gravely immoral. If you disagree, though, you really should look at Chomsky's new book, "The Myth of American Idealism." The very title should prove irresistible to you.
The fact that a few courageous Israeli intellectuals -- Simha Flapan, Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappe, Gideon Levy, Tanya Reinhart, et al -- have demonstrated the cruelty and illegality of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians hardly means that the Israelis in general or their state have a moral attitude toward the Palestinians. I referred to the "rabidly chauvinistic majority," whose representatives have been in power for more than 30 years. They're the ones who need to get moral. As for the Oslo Accords, they were many miles from a just solution to the Palestinian problem. For details, see Avi Shlaim's "The Iron Wall" and Chomsky's "Fateful Triangle."
When you speak of "the circular character of moralized discussions," I'm a little confused. Surely you recognize an essential difference between morality and moralism, between moral and moralistic? Camus's searching meditations are moral; Amanda Gorman's banal poems are moralistic. Edward Said's eloquent statements of the Palestinian case may or may not be valid, but they are hardly moralistic.
As for the rest: yes. we do indeed differ about the superiority of classical over modern philosophy.
Thanks, George. But I think this gets a little closer to the nature of our disagreement. I certainly don't intend to argue that U.S. foreign policy has been especially moral (and I understand why such claims raise hackles); I rather think that claims of grave immorality or illegality are category errors. It is insufficient to argue, as Chomsky does, that what the U.S. gets up to is simply immoral, because it implies a standard of judgment that itself requires justification. Does it make sense to apply the same standard of judgment to the conduct of states as to individuals in a society (what Hedley Bull calls the 'domestic analogy')? For that matter, should we apply the same standard to great powers as to small ones? Perhaps we should, but I think this needs to be argued rather than assumed. This is partly what I mean by the circular character of moralized discussions.
In any case, even if we allow for the distinctiveness of great power politics, this doesn't necessarily absolve great powers from all judgment, but it implies a different category of judgment. Thus I can think of many, many foolish and needlessly destructive things the United States has done (and does), but the problem is not that it is immoral in some absolute sense, but that its actions proved harmful to other states with no real justification or benefit to itself. This is part of the lesson of the Melian Dialogue, as I see it.
As for Israel, I think similarly that there has been no shortage of highly-moralized commentary, not to mention intense international focus for many decades on a geostrategically minor conflict. I don't think this has proven ameliorative. The claim for a "just solution" seems to me to run into the same circular problem, for the basic reason that there is little agreement on what would constitute such a solution. Even if there were some sort of widespread adoption among Israelis of what you would call a "moral attitude," it is not clear how this would lead to such a solution. Or at any rate, I cannot honestly see a solution that wouldn't create a host of other problems, which is one reason I alluded to the South African case. Such is politics.
I would contend pointing to Chomsky for accurate information about US foreign policy is rather a big mistake. Considering his record on Cambodia, Kosovo, and Syria to name just three I'd be looking in another direction for information and moral arguments about US foreign policy.
I think I lean closer to David's direction than yours as well on these questions. I don't necessarily see a massive distinction between prudential and moralising on political questions as you describe. It seems perfectly possible via a political realist framing to say 'it's not an ideal situation and it's probably morally bad but it's the least worst reality'. Unlike neoconservatives view of politics many practitioners can recognise practical limits when thinking about politics while maintaining their moralistic frames.
Could you be more specific? I've read a great deal of Chomsky on all those subjects and don't know of any shortcomings in his writings.
The neoconservatives were not moralists, unless "promoting the interests of America's ruling class to the extent possible in every situation" counts as a moral principle. The notion that the neoconservatives cared about promoting democracy in Iraq or anywhere else is laughable. "Democracy promotion" was an entirely transparent marketing strategy for American interventionism in Iraq, the Balkans, and Central America, as it had been also in Vietnam. That the mainstream media was so regularly taken in should raise questions about the freedom and independence of media in a liberal capitalist society.
Yeah sure. I would suggest Chomsky has a strong history of genocide denial infecting his work which stems from his anti-americanism. In the Cambodian case he was, along with a small group of far left activists, casting doubt on testimony and works from french authors who had interviewed people who had escaped cambodia and even some who had experienced life under the Khmer Rouge. He did this until essentially it could no longer be denied. This I think is a particularly ugly recording of Chomsky defending his views and obfuscating his record which turned out to be utterly incorrect.
As James Bloodworth and others have outlined Chomsky has also denied the genocide at Srebrenica calling it an exaggeration and that he regrets not going in hard enough in defence of his views. He has defended the works of denialists despite what we now know and has been condemned by the international criminal court as genocide. Even prominent voices on the left, such as George Monbiot, have distanced themselves from Chomsky over these actions.
The Syrian case follows a similar pattern from the other two. You have Chomsky casting doubt on the Assad regime conducting gas attacks, pretending the only alternative was IS and Al-Nusra, and critiquing America for 'imperialism' while casually ignoring Russian and Iranian action in the region. Even worse, Chomsky then becomes quotable for supporters of the Assad regime such as the disgraced Aaron Mate.
In essence, Chomsky a linguist by trade has his politics and tries to fit the facts around them. When that doesn't work he obfuscates and fails to admit he was either gravely mistaken or digs in and tries to defend himself. I'm not dismissing all his work such as on manufactured consent, although I'm not overly convinced by his arguments, but Chomsky over his career has made repeated mistakes which if made by other writers and thinkers would have destroyed them.
On the question of neoconservatism you're squashing more than three decades of foreign policy together in massively different contexts. For a start, Clinton (certainly not a neoconservative) did not even want to go into the Balkans and had to be pushed kicking and screaming into doing so not only by domestic pressure but international actors.
Iraq was a result of the Bush administration which curated a new foreign policy post 9/11 of 'pre-emptive intervention'. It's worth noting that none of the major players in the Bush administration were neoconservatives (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice were more traditionally conservative) with relatively junior actors such as Paul Wolfowitz subscribing to the neoconservative school of thought.
So, I would suggest american foreign policy action generally needs to be seen outside of neoconservatism which has generally not been overly influential except for a small period of time as identified in books such as 'they knew they were right' and neoconservatism edited by Irwin Stelzer.
I found the Sampson essay biased and inaccurate in numerous respects, as one would expect from an essay in the New Criterion dealing with any leftist, let alone Chomsky. But as to the central point, here is what Sampson wrote about Chomsky in Twentieth-Century Culture: “he forfeited authority as a political commentator by a series of actions widely regarded as ill-judged (repeated polemics minimizing the Khmer Rouge atrocities in Cambodia; endorsement of a book—which Chomsky admitted he had not read—that denied the historical reality of the Jewish Holocaust).” Both parts of this statement are false.
Chomsky and Herman’s original essay on postwar Cambodia was “Distortions at Fourth Hand,” (Nation, June 6, 1977). They compared the initial, sensational story that appeared in Readers’ Digest (circ. 18 million) and was extensively reported in TV Guide, the Times, Post, and Wall St Journal and which violated every scholarly and journalistic norm, with a dozen other accounts by journalists, academics, and scholarly journals that gave a far different account of the evacuation of Phnom Penh, the character and policies of the Khmer Rouge, and crucially, the role of the cataclysmic American assault on Cambodia in destroying the society and leaving only the most extreme and violent, which were reported nowhere in the US. They then pointed out that a genocidal assault on East Timor was carried out at nearly the same time (1976) by our ally Indonesia, using almost exclusively American weapons, but received virtually no coverage in mass or mainstream media. What this says about the role of the American media in the manufacture of popular consent – this is the burden of the article.
Near the end of the piece, they write:
We do not pretend to know where the truth lies amidst these sharply conflicting assessments; rather, we again want to emphasize some crucial points. … It is a fair generalization that the larger the number of deaths attributed to the Khmer Rouge, and the more the U.S. role is set aside, the larger the audience that will be reached. The Barron-Paul volume is a third-rate propaganda tract, but its exclusive focus on Communist terror assures it a huge audience. Ponchaud’s far more substantial work has an anti-Communist bias and message, but it has attained stardom only via the extreme anti-Khmer Rouge distortions added to it in the article in the New York Review of Books. The last added the adequately large numbers executed and gave a “Left” authentication of Communist evil that assured a quantum leap to the mass audience unavailable to [leftists].
In 1979, two years before Sampson published his biography in Twentieth-Century Culture and five years before his New Criterion essay, Chomsky and Herman published The Political Economy of Human Rights, vol. 2, which contains a 160-page chapter on Cambodia. In the first paragraph, they write: “There is no difficulty in documenting major atrocities and oppression, primarily from the reports of refugees.” The rest of the chapter deals exhaustively – and critically – with American journalism about postwar Cambodia. As always, his primary concern is official ideology and the manufacture of consent.
Sampson’s other charge is even easier to refute. Robert Faurisson was a literature professor at a French public university. He published some articles and a book denying the Holocaust. He was dismissed from his post and put on trial for “falsification of history.” Chomsky signed a petition protesting this, and when this scandalized various French intellectuals, he wrote an essay explaining that “free speech means freedom for the speech we hate.” (Nation, 2/18/81) He made no comment about the contents of the book, not only because he hadn’t read it – rightly, because he was not addressing its thesis but rather defending its author’s right to publish offensive speech without state sanctions – but also because it was perfectly plain from his own writings that he had no such doubts about the reality of the Holocaust. There was no “endorsement.”
Richard Bloodworth, like Sampson, apparently can’t be bothered to read Chomsky’s books before disparaging him. He concludes grandiosely: “If anything, the reaction of a number of prominent Left-wing intellectuals to the Srebrenica genocide was a taster of things to come,” having made clear that Chomsky is one of these “prominent Left-wing intellectuals.” But in The New Military Humanism (1999) Chomsky wrote: “[Tim] Judah suggests that the US also [ie, as it had in Croatia] gave a green light to the Serb attack on Srebenica, which led to the slaughter of 7000 people …” (p. 32). Denial?
I haven’t seen the Johnstone book, but if Bloodworth on Chomsky is any indication, Bloodworth on Johnstone should be taken with a grain of salt.
Idrees Ahmad’s complaint about Chomsky seems to be that he “has remained mostly silent in the face of Assad and Putin's colossal crimes.” I don’t see how that can be reconciled with this: https://chomsky.info/20130911/ or this https://chomsky.info/05172016-6/. Idrees Ahmad also raises the usual obtuse objection that Chomsky only seems interested in condemning American crimes, ignoring Chomsky’s repeated insistence that everyone’s primary responsibility is to oppose crimes for which he is morally responsible, ie, those of his own government. What Ahmad calls “standing with the oppressed” is important mainly insofar as it will actually help the oppressed rather than merely signaling the speaker’s political virtue. Chomsky is always mindful of this; his critics not so much.
We differ about the meaning of “neoconservative.” It’s been applied to two groups. First were the ex-leftists who moved rightward in the 50s-70s: Kristol, Podhoretz, Glazer, Bell, Lipset, et al. They paid little attention to international affairs, except for Podhoretz, who was a hysterical Cold Warrior, seeing the specter of Soviet totalitarianism behind even the mildest expression of organized discontent in the Third World. What differentiated this group from conservatives was their early Marxism and consequent concern with ideology.
The second group was the interventionists of the 90s and 00s: Kristol Jr, Walkowitz, Perle, Cheney, Rumsfeld. What distinguished them from traditional conservatives, from La Follette to Dole, was the pretense that American policy – and specifically military intervention – served to promote democracy abroad. The – largely imaginary, I would say – Soviet threat having disappeared, we had to find other pretexts. Ridiculous as it may seem that the US, with its extensive history of overthrowing democratically elected governments and installing autocracies, wanted to bring democracy to the Middle East, the Balkans, or Central America, a great many intellectuals – and even some of the public – bought it. Traditional conservatives, by and large, did not.
On Cambodia, Chomsky even as early as 1972 was wrote an introduction for a khmer rouge apologist called Malcolm Caldwell (later murdered by the regime he admired) arguing that the new regime could bring about future conditions of prosperity. None of what you've written actually contradicts the central claim that Chomsky was denying atrocity reports from refugees until they became undeniable. In the video I shared he illustrates an explanation for it, albeit an utterly unconvincing one since he claims to have trusted US intelligence which given his work and ideology strikes me as slightly farcical.
On Serbia he said this "The mass slaughter in Srebrenica, for example, is certainly a horror story and major crime, but to call it 'genocide' so cheapens the word." That is outright denialism nothing more and nothing less which is at odds with the ICC's verdict. I notice you didn't engage with Monbiot who kept trying to hack his way through Chomsky's self-aggrandising explanation for his egregious comments over the years.
I found the first interview you linked utterly nauseating. On Syria, the Russian 'plan' was to buy Assad time, bomb out the most moderate rebels, starve them out and keep Assad in charge under the pretence of a false peace process. The fact you've linked these articles of your own volition and not spotted this may highlight a blindspot with you and Chomsky. The quote below on its own is enough to say Chomsky shouldn't be listened to on Syria and hasn't got the slightest clue as to what was actually going on at the time.
"The further step would be to move towards the kinds of negotiations, Geneva negotiations, that the U.N. negotiator, Lakhdar Brahimi, has been calling for, with Russian support and with the United States kind of dragging its feet"
"The godfather of the Mafia understands it perfectly well. In the Mafia system, if some small storekeeper decides not to pay protection money, the money may not mean anything to the godfather, but he’s not going to let him get away with it. And, in fact, he’s not just going to go in and send his goons to get the money; he’s also going to beat him to a pulp, because others have to understand that disobedience is not tolerated. In international affairs, that’s called “credibility.” The bombing of Kosovo, Wesley Clark’s bombing of Kosovo, was the same."
You can't just call people who believe in international intervention neoconservative for me. That way you end up flattening the distinction between neo-conservatives, liberal interventionists, and socialist internationalists. All can advocate for intervention but for very different reasons in very different scenarios. Neither Cheney or Rumsfeld fit the neoconservative mold and neither did any of the most senior members of the Bush administration.
“Chomsky was denying atrocity reports from refugees until they became undeniable.”
I would edit this statement slightly: “Chomsky was calling for a suspension of judgment about refugee claims – particularly claims so ideologically serviceable to the United States – until they were reported in some more responsible and verifiable form than Barron and Paul, particularly since there was no obviously useful response to such claims and they could conceivably motivate a resumption of the horrifically violent American military intervention in that country.” Did you read his discussion of Barron and Paul? Did they seem credible to you?
On “trusting” the CIA: in the law, there’s an elementary principle of evidence. Evidence that incriminates the witness is prima facie more credible than evidence that exculpates him. Obviously the CIA lies constantly, but when it acknowledges inculpatory facts, it is more believable.
“The mass slaughter in Srebrenica, for example, is certainly a horror story and major crime, but to call it 'genocide' so cheapens the word." That is outright denialism nothing more and nothing less” It is nothing of the sort. He described the atrocity accurately and disagreed with the label you (and the ICC) applied to it. In 1940 the Soviets killed 22,000 Poles at Katyn. An even greater atrocity than Srebenica, but not generally referred to as “genocide.”
“The further step would be to move towards the kinds of negotiations, Geneva negotiations, that the U.N. negotiator, Lakhdar Brahimi, has been calling for, with Russian support and with the United States kind of dragging its feet"
I’m not sure what’s so disgraceful about this sentence. Were the Russians not supporting the negotiations?
Liberal interventionists are neoliberals. Conservative interventionists are neoconservatives. What is your definition of “neoconservative”?
"To begin with, no one who knows anything about the history of American foreign policy can find it the least bit plausible that concern for legality and morality has played even the smallest part in it, whatever George Kennan says. To see how ridiculous this claim is, have a look at any of Noam Chomsky's many books, especially his new one, "The Myth of American Idealism.""
I believe you're confusing commentary for policy. Commentary on foreign policy (and virtually everything else) is saturated with moralism.
I agree with your other points, though I don't find them to be particularly at odds with Mr. Polansky's essay. He's saying that you should look at a situation in detail, and spend more work on "what's possible" than on "what's right." Or, said another way, given the set of feasible actions, and the set of reasonably reliable facts, which action produces the outcome that is most just / moral, given my ideas about justice / morality? This is a hard question to discern; decided what we think is the most moral outcome without respect to what might be possible is, by comparison, easy. It's also more psychologically satisfying and more likely to generate attention (the driving reason that commentary exists).
Edit: I'd like to amend my post. The second paragraph I mostly skipped over because I was more interested in the conceptual aspects of the article. However, your second paragraph is exactly the kind of over-moralism the original article is suggesting creates problems. You write, "Are you seriously suggesting that the development of a moral conscience among the rabidly chauvinistic Israeli right would not be the first step toward peace?" I believe the article's answer to that question is "Yes, that is most definitely the wrong first step to peace." It's the wrong first step because it's not in the realm of the doable. Do you think it very likely that the Israeli right is going to "develop a moral conscience" if they have not to this point? I don't claim that they have or have not; I merely ask if you think it's a feasible political plan to expect the Israeli right to change who they are? THAT is exactly the sort of over-moralizing that gets in the way of what progress *can* be made. At least, that's what I believe the article is saying.
As humans we need to be moral first and casuistic afterwards. If morality isn't primary our society becomes more corrupt and dysfunctional. As you point out reacting morally is easier and simpler than working out the possibilities, and more psychologically satisfying. We were born to do it because it helps human societies to survive. On the other hand politics nationally and globally are complex and don't mesh well with moral viewpoints or the view from nowhere. The moral system by itself isn't enough and we need international law, and international treaties, the United Nations, and international alliances to continue to prosper. It's difficult to view all of humanity as one vast group, because it is made up of so many different societies with different values and code of ethics. Nonetheless, people everywhere agree that we should not harm each other outside of warfare, and this is the basis of morality - protection from harm. We need to use moral judgement all the time. Think of the situation that involves Russia, China, and the United States, Iran, etc. The United States is a democracy. Russia, China and Iran are totalitarian states. We need to understand something about totalitarianism. Fascism and communism are disastrous for a country's citizens. People are terrorized for speaking their mind or being politically independent. A totalitarian state, such as Nazi Germany or Russia, often requires wars of conquest to fuel its existence. This has led to untold death and destruction for the people's living adjacent to these states. As a democracy, and the most powerful nation, the U.S. is obliged to defend global democracy against totalitarianism. We cannot let Russia go down the road of restoring it's empire from the soviet days, nor can we allow China to take over the South Pacific. In this case U.S. interests coincide with moral interests.
Great piece! Though I can't help wondering if our American moralizing of politics is correct... perhaps there is more to our unending American exceptionalism than meets the eye. I do think consumerism and empire has tainted it, but it's still the lens through which the crowds see things. (Woke folk!)
I find my cosmic sense of justice leads me to the same conclusions: humility in assessing the minister's call, stepping back in acceptance of my finitude, logging off from the thousand and one voices just as blind as I am. Yet, I still think Russia is a dark place, Ukraine is a sovereign state (we all agreed to that, right?) and that Bibi is the problem, because he is wicked and power hungry.
All this to say, there are two things about humankind that are always true: We are drawn to create ethics and confine ourselves in them and we are AWFUL at seeing second and third order consequences of our 'ethical' actions.
One last thought: There is something powerful in an uprising, it's an idealism willing to throw down. To say, "I'm putting my chips on the table, consequences come what may." That's an incredible stake to claim! But your rejection of it in the interest of disinterest, why? What is the good outcome of politics? lives saved; peace maintained, victory or outcomes at a later date? There's a prior there, and on top of it some more moral assumptions, that we probably agree on, about the best way to achieve the goal. Like NOT fascism.
Whot ‘e said!
What you are talking about is a responsibility for the world. Most outcomes of the 'worlding urge' only deal with this indirectly (Outcomes include : religion/morality~ethics/art). They deal with this responsibility for it indirectly because they highlight some contingent even more derivative outcome or "form" as Platonists might declare, as a priority: (tribe/city/cult/culture/identity/sovereignty/temple/god/).
These doubled-down 'shouldy' practices become dogma and doctrinal "co-ordination dances" which lead to war. They are semi-conscious attempt to world, where the responsibility to world is occluded by outcomes of the (by-products? pollution? ) social process unaware of itself.
This is why you end up taking a moral stance on moralizing. And is the question I ask and discuss the implications of on my substack 'Why we should -- what is the ethical response to morality?"
The main factor in all of this tendency towards dogma and death cults (paranoid sick agency) run amuck, is our inability to police the narcissists on our side, who split us off against each other in self-fulfilling paranoid.
see also (crossposted to/from the substack https://whyweshould.substack.com/ : )
https://whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com/topics-and-projects.html
We are human because we have meetings and meals, not conflict and war. Narcissists unpoliced will always lead us into the death cult, because they confuse the self with the world as a _sweorld_. Thus their confusion of existential threat with their own person/status. Responsibility for the world is an act of empathy, we create this world when we step forth as children into childhood by way of the 'reality principle' that there are others in 'our' world.
Neither the self nor the world exist, but both are what we live. It is a Janus dance.
I respectfully disagree. To begin with, no one who knows anything about the history of American foreign policy can find it the least bit plausible that concern for legality and morality has played even the smallest part in it, whatever George Kennan says. To see how ridiculous this claim is, have a look at any of Noam Chomsky's many books, especially his new one, "The Myth of American Idealism."
It's also absurd to suggest that the obstacle to a Middle Eastern settlement is too much moral sentiment. On the contrary, the near-complete lack of Israeli recognition of the profound harm they have occasioned the Palestinians in 1948 and since is the primary cause of the conflict. Are you seriously suggesting that the development of a moral conscience among the rabidly chauvinistic Israeli right would not be the first step toward peace?
More fundamentally, any attempt to radically separate the moral and the prudential is incoherent. It is impossible to frame an argument -- any argument -- without knowing what one wants or what, in the most general sense, is desirable. Of course, as a matter of logic, one can say: "If X, then Y." But as a mtter of politics, the next question is always: "Why Y?"
David Hume made this point long ago: "Reason is always, and ought to be, a servant of the passions." Richard Rorty in "Consequences of Pragmatism" and Michael Walzer in several books have shown how to apply Hume's insight to contemporary moral reasoning.
George, many thanks for your comment. And while I’m sure we do disagree, I want to clarify the nature of that disagreement on a couple of points. I didn’t say (and don’t believe) that our or any other country’s foreign policy has in fact been moral per se. Moral ≠ moralism, and even Kennan felt that that moralistic strain did not necessarily result in moral actions. In any case, my focus was largely on the way that we as citizens think and talk about politics, and especially geopolitics, rather than what policymakers get up to (my disagreements with Messr. Chomsky will have to be left for another day).
Second, I wouldn’t (and didn’t intend to) say that too much moral sentiment is the main obstacle to a Middle Eastern settlement. What I might say is that a belief in the rightness of one’s claims in the absence of the material capacity to meaningfully advance those claims has contributed to the intractability of the conflict. Otherwise, I’m a bit perplexed by your point here. Much of the historiography of the harms Israel has done against the Palestinians is itself Israeli, and there are plenty of Israelis who accept this history. Similarly the text of Oslo refers to the legitimate rights of Palestinians and the need for reconciliation. But politics is not a court of law, and there’s no formula for converting an acknowledgment of grievances into a set of mutually acceptable concessions.
Now, I assume you disagree on this point and that’s fine, but the disagreement itself points to the circular character of moralized discussions of inherently controversial political disputes, insofar as your preferred solution seems to require the widespread acceptance of views you already hold and deem correct. But then of course there wouldn’t be a dispute in the first place!
As for the larger question of not separating the moral and the prudential, I am inclined to think this is also begging the question, in that it conflates what is desirable with what is moral. Or, to put it another way, “moral” here could cash out as either what is “good” or what is “right.” I have no problem whatsoever with speaking of the good, and generally think we should do so more forthrightly in the classical manner. But people are bound to disagree about their conception of what is good, especially when they belong to different political communities, and speaking of “right” raises those same juridical assumptions that I think are misapplied when it comes to politics.
Finally, on this point, it may be relevant that Hume’s claim about reason and the passions is a classic statement of modern political thought—one that neatly inverts the ancient view. Here, again, I confess my anachronistic preference for the classical view, which better preserves the independence of politics as a distinct domain of human practice—though it may be that this is another point of disagreement. In any case, thanks for reading.
David,
I confess I'm slightly dumbfounded. US foreign policy is not immoral? We signed the Geneva Accords in 1954 guaranteeing a free election to determine the government of a unified Vietnam. Then, because we realized that our favored candidate could not win, we called off the election and advised our favored candidate -- who had no popular legitimacy -- to forcibly suppress . the likely winners of th cnceled election, the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front. When the NLF resisted, the US began arming and training its client, the South Vietnamese Army, and when it became obvious that they could not succeed, we invaded, beginning in the early 1960s. The American conduct of the war was utterly barbarous, dropping more bombs on a small region than we had used in all of World War ll. We defoliated much of the country, used banned weapons like white phosphorus, and altogether killed around 2 million people, mostly civilians. Our crimes, wholesale and retail, were innumerable.
In the Korean War, we killed 2 million people. again mostly civilians, in the most intensive bombing campaign in history, including destroying dams, a war crime. There was very nearly no building in North Korea left standing; much of the population lived underground for years.
In Latin America, we have subverted numerous democratic governments and movements, instead bringing extremely brutal regimes to power.
The amount of suffering occasioned by American foreign policy since World War ll is staggering. In nearly all cases, there was not the slightest legal justification for these actions. I'm simply at a loss to understand what you can mean by saying that these and (many) other appalling American actions are not immoral.
Perhaps you think I'm more of a booster of U.S. foreign policy than I am. I think much of what we've done--particularly since the end of the Cold War--has been pointlessly destructive. Even where they have had a point, that we have done terrible things is inarguable. Where I think we specifically disagree is in the application of legal justification, which I've tried to argue is an inapt criterion.
More broadly, I don't know what it would meant to declare U.S. foreign policy categorically immoral. Compared to what? The conduct of individuals? The conduct of states generally? The conduct of great powers or empires throughout history? One can of course just declare the lot of them to be brigands and gangsters on a grand scale, which is essentially the Augustinian position, but I don't get the sense that's yours. Similarly, many of your examples have to do with the horrors of war, and war is indeed horrific, but this is an indication of the importance of prudence (as I emphasized) rather than pacifism, which no state adopts anyway.
The problem with speaking in terms of its violations of legal strictures, as I see it, is that it is neither practically nor philosophically helpful. Practically, it is mostly impotent. Philosophically, it does not offer a meaningful guide to conduct, because states--especially great powers--have complex obligations for which law serves as a limited guide, and the stakes are very, very high. To take your Vietnamese example, it is highly unlikely that the election was in fact meaningfully legitimate and free of outside interference. Being the only party that adheres to empty Accords is not, I think, a mark of virtue but of something else. This is not by the way a defense of our decision to commit to the Vietnam War or of our conduct within it, but again the chief reasons to critique our policies there were because they disregarded any proportionate link between means and objectives, producing terrible mutual destruction with little justification. That in fact goes for many of our policies, as it frankly does for those of so many great powers in history. But this is why I emphasized an ethos of responsibility, rather than adherence to suprapolitical standards of morality.
The irony here is that we probably agree in our actual evaluation of many events in world politics, but for very different reasons, I suspect.
Hi David,
Immoral compared to what, you ask? Compared to the course we did not follow, the course clearly prescribed in the UN Charter, which is our solemn treaty obligation, and according to which resort to force is barred without the authorization of the Security Council. Compared to not dropping millions of tons of bombs on an area not that much bigger than Texas, killing millions of people, as we did both in Korea and Southeast Asia. Compared with not overthrowing legitimate governments in Latin America and installing murderous thugs like Pinochet, the Argentine and Brazilian generals, the Guatemalan colonels, and many others.
These were not merely a matter of disproportion between means and ends. The ends themselves were illegitimate, by the UN Charter and the common laws of humanity. The US simply had no right to determine by force who ruled Vietnam, Chile, and dozens of other countries, any more than Putin had the right to invade Ukraine.
Forgive me if this seems an exasperating question, but would you be willing to say that the actions of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were grossly immoral, and why or why not?
But this recourse to rights and/or int'l law brings us back to the problem of question-begging I mentioned earlier. Why should we ascribe such moral significance to these treaties (which you call solemn)? Is this a permanent feature of international law, or something that only materializes in the postwar era? To say we had no "right" to do XYZ may be true in some sense (though that too requires arguing), but if so it is just as true of other powers during the Cold War (and prior), and I don't believe that ceding geopolitical position to them (which is what relying on law amounts to) gets us out of the ethical dilemma here.
Relatedly, it does not exasperate me to have to say that Hitler, Stalin, et al. were grossly immoral. But doing so is easy—indeed anyone can do it—and it does little to help us think about the hard questions of politics. Indeed, this kind of free associative moral denunciation is far more common than prudential argument these days.
There is something weightless about such denunciations. Moreover, if you hold there are evils in the world at such scale what do you propose to do about them? Abjuring the tools of force and fraud so as to avoid doing evil oneself is not a solution seeing as it effectively surrenders the field to those with no such compunction. Meanwhile deferring to the authority of international organizations/law presupposes that those institutions possess some higher moral status—a position that requires ignoring the farcical realities of such institutions. Not to mention the fact that those same institutions inevitably become a venue for power politics themselves, given the structure of, eg, the UN Security Council (which itself historically included the Soviet Union under Stalin and the PRC under Mao).
Again the answer as I see it should not be “anything goes” but rather a more prudential consideration of our unavoidable interests in the world, which perhaps ironically might produce more comparatively moral outcomes than the alternative.
David,
“Why should we ascribe such moral significance to these treaties?” I’m not sure I understand the question. We should because we ratified the UN’s founding treaty, and our Constitution says that treaties are binding. It’s generally thought that one has a moral obligation to keep one’s most solemn promises – ie, promises on which the rest of the world is expected to rely. We have no right to do what we have promised not to do – above all, use force against another country without Security Council authorization. Does that position “require argument”? I don’t see why.
It is indeed easy to say that Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were immoral, but not so easy to say why in a way that does not also imply that US crimes in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East are immoral, which you seem, for some reason, eager to avoid doing.
So you think that behaving ethically would afford geopolitical advantages (“cede position”) to our adversaries? So our own view (i.e., the government’s view) of our “national interest” trumps our legal and humanitarian obligations? Why didn’t you just say so to begin with? We are absolved of our ethical obligations when we don’t care to pay the costs? As far as I can see, this is what every Cold War realist believed, notably Kissinger. If that’s the company you want to keep …
The argument that “the other guy does it too” is really not a very sophisticated one. In general, it ignores what is practically the only empirically solid finding of social science: namely, Tit for Tat as a game-theoretical strategy. That is, in the long run, you get the best results by behaving ethically. And in our specific historical circumstances, it ignores the fact that after the Second World War, the United States was overwhelmingly the world’s dominant military, economic, diplomatic, and cultural power. If the US had played by the rules, rather than following the despicable advice offered by George Kennan in the passage I quoted earlier (a violent and lawless strategy documented at pitiless length by Chomsky), a law-abiding world order just might have stumbled into existence.
“Might” – of course there’s no certainty. What’s certain, however, is that if we keep playing the lethal game of grand strategy and great power politics, international conflicts will result, and one of them, whether in the 21st, 22nd, 23rd, or a subsequent century, will end civilization.
How to prevent this? By establishing for the first time, in the US and elsewhere, a genuinely accountable democracy and not leaving matters in the hands of the business and financial elites that currently dominate states. But this requires much further discussion. I feel I’ve said all I have to say (and probably more) about our present topic, so I’ll leave the last word to you.
David,
Thanks for your courteous reply. On the first point: I don't see how George Kennan's criticizing "the American tendency to view international relations in legal and moral terms" can mean anything other than that he thinks the American approach to international relations has been significantly influenced by law and morality. Which I found ridiculous and still do. I mention Chomsky as a shorthand indication of my views, but I'm always happy to argue at any level of detail that American foreign policy has been uniformly and gravely immoral. If you disagree, though, you really should look at Chomsky's new book, "The Myth of American Idealism." The very title should prove irresistible to you.
The fact that a few courageous Israeli intellectuals -- Simha Flapan, Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappe, Gideon Levy, Tanya Reinhart, et al -- have demonstrated the cruelty and illegality of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians hardly means that the Israelis in general or their state have a moral attitude toward the Palestinians. I referred to the "rabidly chauvinistic majority," whose representatives have been in power for more than 30 years. They're the ones who need to get moral. As for the Oslo Accords, they were many miles from a just solution to the Palestinian problem. For details, see Avi Shlaim's "The Iron Wall" and Chomsky's "Fateful Triangle."
When you speak of "the circular character of moralized discussions," I'm a little confused. Surely you recognize an essential difference between morality and moralism, between moral and moralistic? Camus's searching meditations are moral; Amanda Gorman's banal poems are moralistic. Edward Said's eloquent statements of the Palestinian case may or may not be valid, but they are hardly moralistic.
As for the rest: yes. we do indeed differ about the superiority of classical over modern philosophy.
Thanks, George. But I think this gets a little closer to the nature of our disagreement. I certainly don't intend to argue that U.S. foreign policy has been especially moral (and I understand why such claims raise hackles); I rather think that claims of grave immorality or illegality are category errors. It is insufficient to argue, as Chomsky does, that what the U.S. gets up to is simply immoral, because it implies a standard of judgment that itself requires justification. Does it make sense to apply the same standard of judgment to the conduct of states as to individuals in a society (what Hedley Bull calls the 'domestic analogy')? For that matter, should we apply the same standard to great powers as to small ones? Perhaps we should, but I think this needs to be argued rather than assumed. This is partly what I mean by the circular character of moralized discussions.
In any case, even if we allow for the distinctiveness of great power politics, this doesn't necessarily absolve great powers from all judgment, but it implies a different category of judgment. Thus I can think of many, many foolish and needlessly destructive things the United States has done (and does), but the problem is not that it is immoral in some absolute sense, but that its actions proved harmful to other states with no real justification or benefit to itself. This is part of the lesson of the Melian Dialogue, as I see it.
As for Israel, I think similarly that there has been no shortage of highly-moralized commentary, not to mention intense international focus for many decades on a geostrategically minor conflict. I don't think this has proven ameliorative. The claim for a "just solution" seems to me to run into the same circular problem, for the basic reason that there is little agreement on what would constitute such a solution. Even if there were some sort of widespread adoption among Israelis of what you would call a "moral attitude," it is not clear how this would lead to such a solution. Or at any rate, I cannot honestly see a solution that wouldn't create a host of other problems, which is one reason I alluded to the South African case. Such is politics.
I would contend pointing to Chomsky for accurate information about US foreign policy is rather a big mistake. Considering his record on Cambodia, Kosovo, and Syria to name just three I'd be looking in another direction for information and moral arguments about US foreign policy.
I think I lean closer to David's direction than yours as well on these questions. I don't necessarily see a massive distinction between prudential and moralising on political questions as you describe. It seems perfectly possible via a political realist framing to say 'it's not an ideal situation and it's probably morally bad but it's the least worst reality'. Unlike neoconservatives view of politics many practitioners can recognise practical limits when thinking about politics while maintaining their moralistic frames.
Sam,
Could you be more specific? I've read a great deal of Chomsky on all those subjects and don't know of any shortcomings in his writings.
The neoconservatives were not moralists, unless "promoting the interests of America's ruling class to the extent possible in every situation" counts as a moral principle. The notion that the neoconservatives cared about promoting democracy in Iraq or anywhere else is laughable. "Democracy promotion" was an entirely transparent marketing strategy for American interventionism in Iraq, the Balkans, and Central America, as it had been also in Vietnam. That the mainstream media was so regularly taken in should raise questions about the freedom and independence of media in a liberal capitalist society.
Yeah sure. I would suggest Chomsky has a strong history of genocide denial infecting his work which stems from his anti-americanism. In the Cambodian case he was, along with a small group of far left activists, casting doubt on testimony and works from french authors who had interviewed people who had escaped cambodia and even some who had experienced life under the Khmer Rouge. He did this until essentially it could no longer be denied. This I think is a particularly ugly recording of Chomsky defending his views and obfuscating his record which turned out to be utterly incorrect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3IUU59B6lw
https://newcriterion.com/article/censoring-aoe20thacentury-culturea-the-case-of-noam-chomsky/
As James Bloodworth and others have outlined Chomsky has also denied the genocide at Srebrenica calling it an exaggeration and that he regrets not going in hard enough in defence of his views. He has defended the works of denialists despite what we now know and has been condemned by the international criminal court as genocide. Even prominent voices on the left, such as George Monbiot, have distanced themselves from Chomsky over these actions.
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/james-bloodworth/sections-of-the-left-shou_b_1520929.html
https://www.monbiot.com/2012/05/21/2181/
The Syrian case follows a similar pattern from the other two. You have Chomsky casting doubt on the Assad regime conducting gas attacks, pretending the only alternative was IS and Al-Nusra, and critiquing America for 'imperialism' while casually ignoring Russian and Iranian action in the region. Even worse, Chomsky then becomes quotable for supporters of the Assad regime such as the disgraced Aaron Mate.
https://www.newarab.com/opinion/chomsky-and-syria-revisionists-lefts-moral-cul-de-sac
https://mronline.org/2020/10/28/chomsky-opcw-cover-up-of-syria-probe-is-shocking/
In essence, Chomsky a linguist by trade has his politics and tries to fit the facts around them. When that doesn't work he obfuscates and fails to admit he was either gravely mistaken or digs in and tries to defend himself. I'm not dismissing all his work such as on manufactured consent, although I'm not overly convinced by his arguments, but Chomsky over his career has made repeated mistakes which if made by other writers and thinkers would have destroyed them.
On the question of neoconservatism you're squashing more than three decades of foreign policy together in massively different contexts. For a start, Clinton (certainly not a neoconservative) did not even want to go into the Balkans and had to be pushed kicking and screaming into doing so not only by domestic pressure but international actors.
Iraq was a result of the Bush administration which curated a new foreign policy post 9/11 of 'pre-emptive intervention'. It's worth noting that none of the major players in the Bush administration were neoconservatives (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice were more traditionally conservative) with relatively junior actors such as Paul Wolfowitz subscribing to the neoconservative school of thought.
So, I would suggest american foreign policy action generally needs to be seen outside of neoconservatism which has generally not been overly influential except for a small period of time as identified in books such as 'they knew they were right' and neoconservatism edited by Irwin Stelzer.
Comment – Mace
I found the Sampson essay biased and inaccurate in numerous respects, as one would expect from an essay in the New Criterion dealing with any leftist, let alone Chomsky. But as to the central point, here is what Sampson wrote about Chomsky in Twentieth-Century Culture: “he forfeited authority as a political commentator by a series of actions widely regarded as ill-judged (repeated polemics minimizing the Khmer Rouge atrocities in Cambodia; endorsement of a book—which Chomsky admitted he had not read—that denied the historical reality of the Jewish Holocaust).” Both parts of this statement are false.
Chomsky and Herman’s original essay on postwar Cambodia was “Distortions at Fourth Hand,” (Nation, June 6, 1977). They compared the initial, sensational story that appeared in Readers’ Digest (circ. 18 million) and was extensively reported in TV Guide, the Times, Post, and Wall St Journal and which violated every scholarly and journalistic norm, with a dozen other accounts by journalists, academics, and scholarly journals that gave a far different account of the evacuation of Phnom Penh, the character and policies of the Khmer Rouge, and crucially, the role of the cataclysmic American assault on Cambodia in destroying the society and leaving only the most extreme and violent, which were reported nowhere in the US. They then pointed out that a genocidal assault on East Timor was carried out at nearly the same time (1976) by our ally Indonesia, using almost exclusively American weapons, but received virtually no coverage in mass or mainstream media. What this says about the role of the American media in the manufacture of popular consent – this is the burden of the article.
Near the end of the piece, they write:
We do not pretend to know where the truth lies amidst these sharply conflicting assessments; rather, we again want to emphasize some crucial points. … It is a fair generalization that the larger the number of deaths attributed to the Khmer Rouge, and the more the U.S. role is set aside, the larger the audience that will be reached. The Barron-Paul volume is a third-rate propaganda tract, but its exclusive focus on Communist terror assures it a huge audience. Ponchaud’s far more substantial work has an anti-Communist bias and message, but it has attained stardom only via the extreme anti-Khmer Rouge distortions added to it in the article in the New York Review of Books. The last added the adequately large numbers executed and gave a “Left” authentication of Communist evil that assured a quantum leap to the mass audience unavailable to [leftists].
In 1979, two years before Sampson published his biography in Twentieth-Century Culture and five years before his New Criterion essay, Chomsky and Herman published The Political Economy of Human Rights, vol. 2, which contains a 160-page chapter on Cambodia. In the first paragraph, they write: “There is no difficulty in documenting major atrocities and oppression, primarily from the reports of refugees.” The rest of the chapter deals exhaustively – and critically – with American journalism about postwar Cambodia. As always, his primary concern is official ideology and the manufacture of consent.
Sampson’s other charge is even easier to refute. Robert Faurisson was a literature professor at a French public university. He published some articles and a book denying the Holocaust. He was dismissed from his post and put on trial for “falsification of history.” Chomsky signed a petition protesting this, and when this scandalized various French intellectuals, he wrote an essay explaining that “free speech means freedom for the speech we hate.” (Nation, 2/18/81) He made no comment about the contents of the book, not only because he hadn’t read it – rightly, because he was not addressing its thesis but rather defending its author’s right to publish offensive speech without state sanctions – but also because it was perfectly plain from his own writings that he had no such doubts about the reality of the Holocaust. There was no “endorsement.”
Richard Bloodworth, like Sampson, apparently can’t be bothered to read Chomsky’s books before disparaging him. He concludes grandiosely: “If anything, the reaction of a number of prominent Left-wing intellectuals to the Srebrenica genocide was a taster of things to come,” having made clear that Chomsky is one of these “prominent Left-wing intellectuals.” But in The New Military Humanism (1999) Chomsky wrote: “[Tim] Judah suggests that the US also [ie, as it had in Croatia] gave a green light to the Serb attack on Srebenica, which led to the slaughter of 7000 people …” (p. 32). Denial?
I haven’t seen the Johnstone book, but if Bloodworth on Chomsky is any indication, Bloodworth on Johnstone should be taken with a grain of salt.
Idrees Ahmad’s complaint about Chomsky seems to be that he “has remained mostly silent in the face of Assad and Putin's colossal crimes.” I don’t see how that can be reconciled with this: https://chomsky.info/20130911/ or this https://chomsky.info/05172016-6/. Idrees Ahmad also raises the usual obtuse objection that Chomsky only seems interested in condemning American crimes, ignoring Chomsky’s repeated insistence that everyone’s primary responsibility is to oppose crimes for which he is morally responsible, ie, those of his own government. What Ahmad calls “standing with the oppressed” is important mainly insofar as it will actually help the oppressed rather than merely signaling the speaker’s political virtue. Chomsky is always mindful of this; his critics not so much.
We differ about the meaning of “neoconservative.” It’s been applied to two groups. First were the ex-leftists who moved rightward in the 50s-70s: Kristol, Podhoretz, Glazer, Bell, Lipset, et al. They paid little attention to international affairs, except for Podhoretz, who was a hysterical Cold Warrior, seeing the specter of Soviet totalitarianism behind even the mildest expression of organized discontent in the Third World. What differentiated this group from conservatives was their early Marxism and consequent concern with ideology.
The second group was the interventionists of the 90s and 00s: Kristol Jr, Walkowitz, Perle, Cheney, Rumsfeld. What distinguished them from traditional conservatives, from La Follette to Dole, was the pretense that American policy – and specifically military intervention – served to promote democracy abroad. The – largely imaginary, I would say – Soviet threat having disappeared, we had to find other pretexts. Ridiculous as it may seem that the US, with its extensive history of overthrowing democratically elected governments and installing autocracies, wanted to bring democracy to the Middle East, the Balkans, or Central America, a great many intellectuals – and even some of the public – bought it. Traditional conservatives, by and large, did not.
On Cambodia, Chomsky even as early as 1972 was wrote an introduction for a khmer rouge apologist called Malcolm Caldwell (later murdered by the regime he admired) arguing that the new regime could bring about future conditions of prosperity. None of what you've written actually contradicts the central claim that Chomsky was denying atrocity reports from refugees until they became undeniable. In the video I shared he illustrates an explanation for it, albeit an utterly unconvincing one since he claims to have trusted US intelligence which given his work and ideology strikes me as slightly farcical.
On Serbia he said this "The mass slaughter in Srebrenica, for example, is certainly a horror story and major crime, but to call it 'genocide' so cheapens the word." That is outright denialism nothing more and nothing less which is at odds with the ICC's verdict. I notice you didn't engage with Monbiot who kept trying to hack his way through Chomsky's self-aggrandising explanation for his egregious comments over the years.
I found the first interview you linked utterly nauseating. On Syria, the Russian 'plan' was to buy Assad time, bomb out the most moderate rebels, starve them out and keep Assad in charge under the pretence of a false peace process. The fact you've linked these articles of your own volition and not spotted this may highlight a blindspot with you and Chomsky. The quote below on its own is enough to say Chomsky shouldn't be listened to on Syria and hasn't got the slightest clue as to what was actually going on at the time.
"The further step would be to move towards the kinds of negotiations, Geneva negotiations, that the U.N. negotiator, Lakhdar Brahimi, has been calling for, with Russian support and with the United States kind of dragging its feet"
"The godfather of the Mafia understands it perfectly well. In the Mafia system, if some small storekeeper decides not to pay protection money, the money may not mean anything to the godfather, but he’s not going to let him get away with it. And, in fact, he’s not just going to go in and send his goons to get the money; he’s also going to beat him to a pulp, because others have to understand that disobedience is not tolerated. In international affairs, that’s called “credibility.” The bombing of Kosovo, Wesley Clark’s bombing of Kosovo, was the same."
You can't just call people who believe in international intervention neoconservative for me. That way you end up flattening the distinction between neo-conservatives, liberal interventionists, and socialist internationalists. All can advocate for intervention but for very different reasons in very different scenarios. Neither Cheney or Rumsfeld fit the neoconservative mold and neither did any of the most senior members of the Bush administration.
“Chomsky was denying atrocity reports from refugees until they became undeniable.”
I would edit this statement slightly: “Chomsky was calling for a suspension of judgment about refugee claims – particularly claims so ideologically serviceable to the United States – until they were reported in some more responsible and verifiable form than Barron and Paul, particularly since there was no obviously useful response to such claims and they could conceivably motivate a resumption of the horrifically violent American military intervention in that country.” Did you read his discussion of Barron and Paul? Did they seem credible to you?
On “trusting” the CIA: in the law, there’s an elementary principle of evidence. Evidence that incriminates the witness is prima facie more credible than evidence that exculpates him. Obviously the CIA lies constantly, but when it acknowledges inculpatory facts, it is more believable.
“The mass slaughter in Srebrenica, for example, is certainly a horror story and major crime, but to call it 'genocide' so cheapens the word." That is outright denialism nothing more and nothing less” It is nothing of the sort. He described the atrocity accurately and disagreed with the label you (and the ICC) applied to it. In 1940 the Soviets killed 22,000 Poles at Katyn. An even greater atrocity than Srebenica, but not generally referred to as “genocide.”
“The further step would be to move towards the kinds of negotiations, Geneva negotiations, that the U.N. negotiator, Lakhdar Brahimi, has been calling for, with Russian support and with the United States kind of dragging its feet"
I’m not sure what’s so disgraceful about this sentence. Were the Russians not supporting the negotiations?
Liberal interventionists are neoliberals. Conservative interventionists are neoconservatives. What is your definition of “neoconservative”?
"To begin with, no one who knows anything about the history of American foreign policy can find it the least bit plausible that concern for legality and morality has played even the smallest part in it, whatever George Kennan says. To see how ridiculous this claim is, have a look at any of Noam Chomsky's many books, especially his new one, "The Myth of American Idealism.""
I believe you're confusing commentary for policy. Commentary on foreign policy (and virtually everything else) is saturated with moralism.
I agree with your other points, though I don't find them to be particularly at odds with Mr. Polansky's essay. He's saying that you should look at a situation in detail, and spend more work on "what's possible" than on "what's right." Or, said another way, given the set of feasible actions, and the set of reasonably reliable facts, which action produces the outcome that is most just / moral, given my ideas about justice / morality? This is a hard question to discern; decided what we think is the most moral outcome without respect to what might be possible is, by comparison, easy. It's also more psychologically satisfying and more likely to generate attention (the driving reason that commentary exists).
Edit: I'd like to amend my post. The second paragraph I mostly skipped over because I was more interested in the conceptual aspects of the article. However, your second paragraph is exactly the kind of over-moralism the original article is suggesting creates problems. You write, "Are you seriously suggesting that the development of a moral conscience among the rabidly chauvinistic Israeli right would not be the first step toward peace?" I believe the article's answer to that question is "Yes, that is most definitely the wrong first step to peace." It's the wrong first step because it's not in the realm of the doable. Do you think it very likely that the Israeli right is going to "develop a moral conscience" if they have not to this point? I don't claim that they have or have not; I merely ask if you think it's a feasible political plan to expect the Israeli right to change who they are? THAT is exactly the sort of over-moralizing that gets in the way of what progress *can* be made. At least, that's what I believe the article is saying.
As humans we need to be moral first and casuistic afterwards. If morality isn't primary our society becomes more corrupt and dysfunctional. As you point out reacting morally is easier and simpler than working out the possibilities, and more psychologically satisfying. We were born to do it because it helps human societies to survive. On the other hand politics nationally and globally are complex and don't mesh well with moral viewpoints or the view from nowhere. The moral system by itself isn't enough and we need international law, and international treaties, the United Nations, and international alliances to continue to prosper. It's difficult to view all of humanity as one vast group, because it is made up of so many different societies with different values and code of ethics. Nonetheless, people everywhere agree that we should not harm each other outside of warfare, and this is the basis of morality - protection from harm. We need to use moral judgement all the time. Think of the situation that involves Russia, China, and the United States, Iran, etc. The United States is a democracy. Russia, China and Iran are totalitarian states. We need to understand something about totalitarianism. Fascism and communism are disastrous for a country's citizens. People are terrorized for speaking their mind or being politically independent. A totalitarian state, such as Nazi Germany or Russia, often requires wars of conquest to fuel its existence. This has led to untold death and destruction for the people's living adjacent to these states. As a democracy, and the most powerful nation, the U.S. is obliged to defend global democracy against totalitarianism. We cannot let Russia go down the road of restoring it's empire from the soviet days, nor can we allow China to take over the South Pacific. In this case U.S. interests coincide with moral interests.
Very good!
Many thanks, John.