Deconstructing Chomsky: America's leading leftist intellectual sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest.

• Author: Bauerlein, Mark
• Position: Culture and Reviews - Book Review

The Anti-Chomsky Reader, edited by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, San Francisco: Encounter Books, 260 pages, $17.95

"ONE OF THE peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal," wrote George Orwell in 1945. He meant not the classical liberal who believed in individual freedoms and small government but the leftist liberal who glorified communist experiments and disdained middle-class life. To Orwell, the existence of intellectuals who loved the Soviet Union despite the purges, mocked "bourgeois liberty" despite the pleasing bourgeois circumstances of their own lives, and identified with revolutionary movements that would speedily ship them off to camps--this was a fact in need of explanation.

The same puzzle is presented by today's leading leftist intellectual, Noam Chomsky. For 40 years, in books, lectures, articles, and TV and radio shows, Chomsky has pioneered the leftist critique of Western imperialism, media conglomerates, and U.S.-style capitalism. The charges he raises are familiar--corporations subjugate the Third World, mass media peddle pro-capitalist propaganda, etc.--but he evidently has the ability to make them seem fresh; millions idolize him as the clear-eyed conscience of the times.

Further to his advantage, while Chomsky's discourse is extreme and accusatory, his demeanor is equable and deliberate. He is, after all, a distinguished professor at MIT and the most renowned linguist of the 20th century. For many, the combination of virulent radicalism and reasoned temperament is wholly seductive, and attacks upon Chomsky by conservatives and centrists have only granted him a martyr's aura.

Chomsky's antipathy toward the U.S. government has never wavered. Even 9/11 was fitted to the theme of U.S. guilt. The killing of 3,000 Americans, accompanied by the "you had it coming" glee of some leftists abroad, put many American progressives on the defensive. But not Chomsky. In the weeks after the attacks, he systematically interpreted them as a logical outcome of U.S. history and policy.

In 9/11, a set of interviews published in late 2001, Chomsky spared the nation no culpability: "The U.S. is a leading terrorist state, as are its clients." American history was but one bloody aggression after another, each whitewashed by compliant news media and fed to a gullible public. Chomsky was careful to describe the 9/11 attacks as a "horrendous atrocity," but he also painted violence against the U.S. as an understandable reaction to American foreign policy. In a...