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Chomsky belongs to the latter
category, an anarchist who believes in the struggle to find
forms of social organisation that are viable alternatives to
organised government and its legal and political institutions
that are inherently coercive. He believes in the community of
free association where people would act not according to the
established hierarchical order but with a sense of creativity
and freedom which leads to the development of a free society.
Apparently, the reality of this view is easily comprehensible by
a common man, and there is really no theory underpinning Chomsky’s
politics. As Ken Jowitt writes: "The rule is disguised by
an ideology of benevolence and harmony, and disseminated (most
influentially in the New York Times) by intellectual
chimps in the conscious or unconscious service of the capitalist
gorillas they serve`85in this revised, but not essentially
different situation, transnational corporations, with the aid of
state violence and intellectual auxiliaries, have created a
framework of liberal internationalism crafted for the needs of
power and profit."
Towards a New Cold
War offers an
exploration of Chomsky as a political activist within the
landscape of political depravity and intellectual dishonesty
from Vietnam to Reagan. It mirrors the patterns of resistance
and oppression that have underpinned the growth of powerful
nations in the ‘New World Order.’ As John Pilger, the
internationally acclaimed journalist writes in the Foreword to
the book, "What Chomsky has made vivid is the truth that
western political leaders, respectable people whose ‘moderation’
contains not a hint of totalitarianism, can at great remove in
physical and cultural distance, kill and maim people on a scale
comparable with the accredited monsters of our time."
Can we agree with
Chomsky that nothing seems to have changed? The five hundred
years history since Columbus has been of subversion, aggression
and brutal genocide that was inherent even in the Cold War. With
the demise of the Cold War, things stand where they are, though
now the West is given a free reign in its imperial designs which
previously could not have a free reign in the pre-Glasnost era.
The Third World escaped any interference from the West for many
decades, till the expiry of the Soviet Union brought about a
unilateral world of America’s nefarious actions of
international meddling. The Soviet Union ruled over Eastern
Europe, but probably less viciously than America’s treatment
of Latin America. For example, it is a revelation to see the
American hand in involving erstwhile Nazi generals in the whole
exercise of terror and domination in Latin America. And the
world goes on in a state of ‘repressive tolerance,’ a
Marcuseian conception that is applied globally. Chomsky is
enraged by this remorseless transnational hegemony. His idea of
power as violence is deep down an intellectual stance of
articulating an appraisal of the existing world order where
persecution and carnage have been integral and more recently in
the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Killing from a distance is
out-and-out a rebuff of the ethics of any war and requires to be
damned. Chomsky’s indictment is more Fanonist, lacking the
theoretical underpinnings, which seems to be currently missing
in any socially ingrained philosophy.
Chomsky is here
being more of a vulgar Marxist with a historical approach which
goes to counter the views of many contemporary political
scientists. The mayhem in Africa, the blood-spattered ethnic
conflicts all over the world, the violence in many cities of the
West, all go to indicate times when we see a form of aggression
that is scattered, arbitrary, alarming and new. Perry Anderson,
Christopher Lasch, Francis Fukuyama, Hans Magnus Enzensberger
are of the view that the world has undergone a change and
disagree with Chomsky’s view that there are ‘no fundamental
changes.’ The collapse of the state power is apparent in
Czechoslovakia, the anarchy in Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone,
Afghanistan and Iraq; the disorganisation in China, in Canada
and in India and political loss of nerve in the United States
imply possibilities of primary changes and the consequent need
to devise new paradigms.
Undoubtedly,
Chomsky is passionately gripped with cataloguing American
hypocrisy and the evil nature of her foreign policy, but he has
shown, indeed, the evidence of America’s support for client
tyrannies around the world along with the inculcation of a dream
within America that the world would finally be a duplication of
American culture. World community has now, in the words of
Huntington, "become a euphemistic collective noun`85to give
global legitimacy to actions reflecting the interests of the
United States and other Western powers. Through the IMF and
other international economic institutions, the West promotes its
economic interests and imposes on other nations the economic
policies it thinks appropriate." Use of force in Grenada
and Panama, and now in Iraq; violation of international law,
engagement in self-promoting geo-economics and expression of
faith in the free market while incessantly keeping foreign
governments under a check simply goes to show the smokescreen of
the principle of democracy with "almost as many democratic
facades in the period after the Cold War as one found national
facades in the aftermath of decolonisation."
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WINDING
up his book World Orders, Old and New, Chomsky comes to a
characteristic conclusion:
