Noam Chomsky - Intellectual, Dissident, and Scholar
Noam CHOMSKY
Short Biography
Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928)
Noam Chomsky is an intellectual, political activist,
and critic of the
foreign policy of the United States and other governments.
One of the most cited scholars in history, Chomsky has influenced a broad array of
academic fields. He is widely recognized as a paradigm shifter who helped spark
a major revolution in the human sciences, contributing to the development of a
new cognitivistic framework for the study of language and the mind.
In Chomsky's view, the truth about political realities is systematically distorted or suppressed through elite corporate interests, who use corporate media, advertising, and think tanks to promote their own propaganda. His work seeks to reveal such manipulations and the truth they obscure. He believes that "common sense" is all that is required to break through the web of falsehood and see the truth, if it (common sense) is employed using both critical thinking and an awareness of the role that self-interest and self-deception play both on oneself and on others.
He believes it is the moral responsibility of intellectuals to tell the truth about the world, but that few do so because they fear losing prestige and funding. He argues that (as an intellectual), it is his duty to use his privilege, resources, and training to aid popular democracy movements in their struggles.
Although he has joined protest marches and organized activist groups, he
identifies his primary political outlet as education, offering free lessons and lectures to encourage
wider political consciousness.
·
Linguist
·
philosopher
(analytic philosophy)
·
cognitive
scientist (one of the founders of the field of cognitive science)
·
social
critic
·
political
activist
·
libertarian
socialist
·
sympathizer
of anarcho-syndicalism
·
key
intellectual figure within the left wing of politics of the United States
·
member
of the Industrial Workers of the World international union
·
member
of the consultative committee of the International Organization for a
Participatory Society
Chomsky:
·
Holds a
joint appointment as Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT)
·
Is Laureate
professor at the University of Arizona
·
was
appointed to Harvard University's Society of Fellows, where he developed the theory
of transformational grammar
·
is the
author of over 100 books on topics such as
o linguistics
o war
o politics, and
o Mass media
·
was a
National Science Foundation fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study
·
emerged
as a significant figure in the field of linguistics
for his landmark work Syntactic
Structures, which played a major role in remodeling the study of language
·
is
credited as the creator or co-creator of
o the universal grammar theory
o the generative grammar theory
o the Chomsky hierarchy, and
o the minimalist program
o Chomsky also played a pivotal role in the
decline of behaviorism, being
particularly critical of the work of B. F. Skinner.
In addition to his continued scholarly research, Chomsky remains a leading critic of
·
U.S.
foreign policy
·
neoliberalism and contemporary state capitalism
·
the
Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and
·
Mainstream
news media
·
Strongly
opposed U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, which he saw as an act of American
imperialism
·
In 1967
Chomsky rose to national attention for his anti-war essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals".
·
With the
New Left, he was arrested multiple times for his activism and placed on
President Richard Nixon's Enemies List.
·
In
collaboration with E. Herman, Chomsky articulated the propaganda model of media criticism in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
·
He worked to expose the Indonesian occupation of
East Timor
·
His
defense of freedom of speech – including Holocaust denial – generated significant
controversy in the Faurisson affair of the 1980s.
·
His
ideas have proved highly significant within the anti-capitalist and
anti-imperialist movements
Following his retirement from MIT, Chomsky
now teaches at the University of Arizona, and has continued his vocal political
activism.
Political
Views (Click on topic to go to
new webpage)
The propaganda model is a conceptual model in political economy advanced by Noam Chomsky to explain how propaganda and systemic biases function in corporate mass media. The model seeks to explain how populations are manipulated and how consent for economic, social, and political policies is "manufactured" in the public mind due to this propaganda. The theory posits that the way in which corporate media is structured (e.g. through advertising, concentration of media ownership, government sourcing) creates an inherent conflict of interest that acts as propaganda for undemocratic forces.
First presented in the 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, the propaganda model views private media as businesses interested in the sale of a product—readers and audiences—to other businesses (advertisers) rather than that of quality news to the public. Describing the media's "societal purpose", Chomsky writes,
"...
The study of institutions and how they function must be scrupulously ignored,
apart from fringe elements or a relatively obscure scholarly literature".
The theory postulates five general classes of
"filters" that determine the type of news that is presented in news
media.
1. Ownership of the medium
2. Medium's funding sources
3. Sourcing
4. Flak, and
5. Anti-communism or "fear ideology".
The first three are generally
regarded by the author as being the most important. In versions published after the 9/11 attacks on the United
States in 2001, Chomsky updated the fifth
prong to instead refer to the "War
on Terror" and "counter-terrorism", although they state that
it operates in much the same manner.
Although the model was based mainly on the characterization of United
States media, Chomsky believes the theory is equally applicable to any country
that shares the basic economic structure and organizing principles that the
model postulates as the cause of media biases.
Chomsky’s assessment has been confirmed by a number of scholars.
The propaganda role of the media has since been confirmed empirically in
countries and regions like the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, and Latin
America.
Personal
influences
Interview with Noam CHOMSKY
QUESTION: I
am struck by how seldom you mention literature, culture, culture in the
sense of a struggle to find alternative forms of life through artistic means;
rarely a novel that has influenced you. Why is this so? Were there some works that did influence you?
CHOMSKY: Of course, there have been, but it
is true that I rarely write about these matters. I am not writing about myself,
and these
matters don’t seem particularly pertinent to the topics I am addressing.
There are things that I resonate to
when I read, but I have a feeling that my feelings and attitudes were largely
formed prior to reading literature.
In fact, I’ve been always resistant consciously
to allowing literature to influence my beliefs and attitudes with regard to
society and history.
QUESTION: You once said, “It is not unlikely that literature will forever
give far deeper insight into what is sometimes called ‘the full human person’
than any modes of scientific inquiry may hope to do.”
CHOMSKY:
That’s perfectly true and I believe
that.
I would go on to say it’s not only
unlikely, but it’s almost certain.
But still, if I want to
understand, let’s say, the nature of China and its revolution, I ought to be
cautious about literary renditions.
Look, there’s no QUESTION
that as
a child, when I read about China, this influenced my attitudes —
Rickshaw Boy, for example. That had a powerful effect when I read it. It was so
long ago I don’t remember a thing about it except the impact.
And I don’t doubt that, for me,
personally, like anybody, lots of my perceptions were heightened and attitudes
changed by literature over a broad range — Hebrew literature, Russian
literature, and so on.
But ultimately, you have to face the world as
it is on the basis of other sources of evidence that you can evaluate.
Literature can heighten your
imagination and insight and understanding, but it surely doesn’t provide the evidence that you
need to draw conclusions and substantiate conclusions.
QUESTION: But it might be very influential in making
one sensitive to areas of human experience otherwise not even asked about.
CHOMSKY: People certainly differ, as they
should, in what kinds of things make their minds work.
QUESTION: You seem a little reticent about it.
CHOMSKY:
Well, I’m reticent because I don’t
really feel I can draw any tight connections. I can think of things that I read that had a
powerful effect on me, but whether they changed my attitudes and understanding
in any striking or crucial way, I can’t really say.
QUESTION: What kind of schools did you go to as a
child?
CHOMSKY:
I was sent to an experimental
progressive school from infancy, before I was two, until about twelve years old,
until high school, at which point I went into the academic, college-oriented
school in the city.
QUESTION: In New York?
CHOMSKY:
In Philadelphia. That
experience, both the early experience in the progressive school and the later
experience in the academically oriented high school, elite high school, was
very instructive.
I was very surprised when I got
into high school and discovered that I was getting all A’s and that was supposed
to be a big deal. In fact, every student in the school I had previously
attended was regarded as somehow being a very successful student. There was no sense
of competition, no ranking of students. It was never anything even
to think about. It just never came up that there was a QUESTION of
how you were ranked relative to other students.
Well, anyway, at this particular
school, which was essentially a Deweyite school [emphasized social interaction and
group learning over individual education] and I think a very good one, judging from my
experience, there
was a tremendous premium on personal creativity, not in the sense of
slapping paints on paper, but doing the kind of work and thinking that you were
interested in.
Interests were encouraged and children were
encouraged to pursue their interests. They worked jointly with
others or by themselves. It was a lively atmosphere, and the sense was that
everyone was doing something important.
It wasn’t that they were a highly
select group of students. In fact, it was the usual mixture in such a school,
with some gifted students and some problem children who had dropped out of the
public schools. But nevertheless, at least as a child, that was the sense that
one had — that, if competing at all, you were competing with yourself. What can
I do? But no sense of strain about it and certainly no sense of relative
ranking. Very different from what I notice with my own children, who as far
back as the second grade knew who was “smart” and who was “dumb,” who was
high-tracked and who was low-tracked. This was a big issue.
Well, then I got to high school,
the academic high school in the public school system, which was supposed to be
a very good high school, and it was a real shocker. For one thing, as I said,
there was the shock of discovering that I was a good student, which had never
occurred to me before. And then there was the whole system of prestige and
value that went along with that. And the intense competitiveness and
regimentation. In fact, I can remember a lot about elementary school, the work
I did, what I studied and so on. I remember virtually nothing about high
school. It’s almost an absolute blank in my memory apart from the emotional
tone, which was quite negative.
If I think back about my
experience, there’s a dark spot there. That’s what schooling generally is, I
suppose. It’s a period of regimentation and control, part of which involves
direct indoctrination, providing a system of false beliefs. But more
importantly, I think, is the manner and style of preventing and blocking
independent and creative thinking and imposing hierarchies and competitiveness
and the need to excel, not in the sense of doing as well as you can, but doing
better than the next person. Schools vary, of course, but I think that those features
are commonplace. I know that they’re not necessary, because, for example, the
school I went to as a child wasn’t like that at all.
I think schools could be run quite
differently. That would be very important, but I really don’t think that any
society based on authoritarian hierarchic institutions would tolerate such a
school system for long. As Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis have pointed out, it
might be tolerated for the elite, because they would have to learn how to think
and create and so on, but not for the mass of the population. There are roles
that the public schools play in society that can be very destructive.
QUESTION: What was
your college experience like?
CHOMSKY: I was probably lucky in that respect. I
never really went to college. I did finally get a Ph.D, and I did go through
the first two years of college, but after that I did not really attend college,
but after that, I did not really attend college in the normal manner.
I attended the University of
Pennsylvania, living at home, of course, which meant several hours commuting,
and working, mainly teaching Hebrew school afternoons and Sunday, sometimes
evenings as well. There was no thought in those days of attending college in
any other way in our circles, and no financial means to do so. The first two
years of college were pretty much an extension of high school, except in one
respect. I entered with a good deal of enthusiasm and expectations that all
sorts of fascinating prospects would open up, but these did not survive long,
except in a few cases — an exciting freshman course with C. West Churchman in
philosophy, for example, and courses in Arabic that I took and became quite
immersed in, in part out of political interests, in part out of an interest in
Semitic linguistics that derives from my father’s work in that area, and in
part through the influence of Giorgio Levi Della Vida, an antifascist exile
from Italy who was a marvelous person as well as an outstanding scholar. At the
end of two years, I was planning to drop out to pursue my own interests, which
were then largely political. This was 1947, and I had just turned eighteen. I
was deeply interested, as I had been for some years, in radical politics with
an anarchist or left-wing (anti-Leninist) Marxist flavor, and even more deeply
involved in Zionist affairs and activities — or what was then called “Zionist,”
though the same ideas and concerns are now called “anti-Zionist.” I was
interested in socialist, binationalist options for Palestine, and in the
kibbutzim and the whole cooperative labor system that had developed in the
Jewish settlement there (the Yishuv), but had never been able to become close
to Zionist youth groups that shared these interests because they were either
Stalinist or Trotskyite and I always been strongly anti-Bolshevik. We should
bear in mind that in the latter stages of the Depression, when I was growing
up, these were very lively issues.
I intended to drop out of college
and to pursue these interests. The vague ideas I had at the time were to go to
Palestine, perhaps to to a kibbutz, to try to become involved in efforts at
Arab-Jewish cooperation within a socialist framework, opposed to the deeply
antidemocratic concept of a Jewish state (a position that was considered well
within the mainstream of Zionism). Through these interests, I happened to meet
Zellig Harris, a really extraordinary person who had a great influence on many
young people in those days. He had a coherent understanding of this whole range
of issues , which I lacked, and I was immensely attracted by it, and by him
personally as well, also by others who I met through him. He happened to be one
of the leading figures in modern linguistics, teaching at the University of
Pennsylvania. His interests were very broad, linguistics being only a small corner
of them, and he was a person of unusual brilliance and originality. I began to
take his graduate courses; in fact the first reading I did in linguistics was
the proofs of his book Methods in Structural Linguistics, which appeared
several years later. At his suggestion, I also began to take graduate courses
in philosophy — with Nelson Goodman, Morton White, and others — and mathematics
— with Nathan Fine — fields in which I had no background at all, but which I
found fascinating, in part, no doubt, thanks to unusually stimulating teachers.
I suppose Harris had it in my mind to influence me to return to college, though
I don’t recall talking about it, particularly, and it all seemed to happen
without much planning.
Anyway, it worked, but I had a
highly unconventional college experience. The linguistics department consisted
of a small number of graduate students, and in Harris’ close circle, a very
small group that shared political and other interests apart from linguistics,
and was quite alienated from the general college atmosphere. In fact, our
“classes” were generally held in the Horn & Hardart restaurant across the
street or in Harris’ apartment in Princeton or New York, all-day sessions that
ranged widely over quite a variety of topics and were intellectually exciting
as well as personally very meaningful experiences. I had almost no contact with
the university, apart from these connections. I was by then very deeply
immersed in linguistics, philosophy, and logic, and received (highly
unconventional) B.A. and M.A. degrees.
Nelson Goodman recommended me for
the Society of Fellows at Harvard, and I was admitted in 1951. That carried a
stipend, and was the first time I could devote myself to study and research
without working on the side. With the resources of Harvard available and no
formal requirements, it was a wonderful opportunity. I did technically receive
a Ph.D. from Penn in 1955, submitting a chapter of a book I was then working on
— it was quite unconventional, so much so that although pretty much completed
in 1955-56, it wasn’t published until 1975 as the Logical Structure of
Linguistic Theory, and then only in part. But I hadn’t actually been there
since 1951 and had no contact with the university apart from Harris and
Goodman. So my college experience was unusual to say the least.
QUESTION: Was it
after college that you went to live on a kibbutz in Israel?
CHOMSKY: I went for a few months when I was at
the Society of Fellows, in 1953. The kibbutz where we lived, which was about
twenty years old, was then very poor. There was very little food, and work was
hard. But I liked it very much in many ways. Abstracting it from context, this
was a functioning and very successful libertarian community, so I felt. And I
felt it would be possible to find some mixture of intellectual and physical
work.
I came close to returning there to
live, as my wife very much wanted to do at the time. I had nothing particularly
attractive here. I didn’t expect to be able to have an academic career, and was
not particularly interested in one. There was no major drive to stay. On the
other hand, I did have a lot of interest in the kibbutz and I liked it very
much when I was there. But there were things I didn’t like, too. In particular,
the ideological conformity was appalling. I don’t know if I could have survived
long in that environment because I was very strongly opposed to the Leninist
ideology, as well as the general conformism, and uneasy — less so than I should
have been — about the exclusiveness and the racist institutional setting.
What I did not then face honestly
was the fairly obvious fact that these are Jewish institutions and are so
because of legal and administrative structures and practice. So, for example, I
doubt if there’s an Arab in any kibbutz, and there hardly could be, because of
the land laws and the role the institution plays in the Israeli system. In
fact, even the Oriental Jews, some of whom were marginally at the kibbutz or in
the immigrant town nearby, were treated rather shabbily, with a good deal of
contempt and fear. I also visited some Arab villages, and learned some
unpleasant things, which I’ve never seen in print, about the military
administration to which Arab citizens were subjected.
Now I had some fairly strong
feelings about all of that at the time. In fact, as I mentioned, I was very
strongly opposed to the idea of a Jewish state back in 1947-48. I felt sure
that the socialist institutions of the Yishuv — the pre-state Jewish settlement
in Palestine — would not survive the state system, as they would become
integrated into a sort of state management and that would destroy the aspects
of the Yishuv that I found most attractive.
But, if we abstract away from those
factors, the external environment, it was a kind of anarchist community.
QUESTION: What did
you do on the kibbutz? Did you find the intellectual life stimulating? And why
did you leave?
CHOMSKY: Remember that I was only there for
about six weeks. I was completely unskilled, so I was doing only unskilled
agricultural work, under the guidance of kibbutz members. I actually enjoyed
the work very much, though for how long I would have, I don’t know. As for
intellectual life, this kibbutz was Buberite in origin, mainly German Jews who
were quite well-educated though one of the people I came to know best was a
Christian immigrant who had left a large farm he owned in Rhodesia out of
hatred for the racist society there, and who was really a first-class
agronomist with many interesting ideas. There were very interesting people there,
but it was surreal in some ways. This was 1953, at the time of the Slansky
trials in Czechoslovakia and the last stages of Stalinist lunacy. These late
Stalin purges had a strong anti-Semitic element, but people there actually
defended them. They even defended the trial of a fellow kibbutz member who was
an emissary of the kibbutz movement there and was charged with being a spy,
which they knew to be false. Not all did, of course. Those who thought about
these things — many did not — were orthodox Marxist-Leninists, and I could
discern no visible departure from a fairly rigid party line, though there may
well have been much that I never saw.
It was a short visit, and I
returned to Harvard, planning to come back, maybe to stay, in a few years. My
term at the Society of Fellows was supposed to end in 1954, but I had no job
prospects and asked for a year’s extension, which I received. My wife,
meanwhile, went back to the kibbutz for a longer visit. We planned then to
return to stay, but by then I had obtained a research position at MIT and was
very much involved in my own linguistic work. For one reason or another,
without any particular conscious decision at any point, we never did return.
QUESTION: Were you
active in political organizations in earlier years in the United States?
CHOMSKY: I didn’t have any affiliation to any
group, the Zionist left or elsewhere. Partly it was that I’m not much of a
“joiner,” I guess. Furthermore, every organization that I knew of, on the left
at least, was Leninist, either Stalinist or Trotskyite. I was always very
anti-Leninist, and I simply didn’t know of any group at all that shared my
views. This was true of the Zionist left, and of much of the American left at
the time, as far as I knew. This is the early forties that we’re talking about.
Quite frankly, I didn’t see any significant difference between the Trotskyites
and the Stalinists, except that the Trotskyites had lost. They of course saw a
big difference. There are some differences, but basically I thought they were exaggerated.
That’s what I felt at the time, and I still do feel that essentially. So there
was no group that I knew of that I could have had any affiliation with. But I
was personally very involved in lots of things that were happening.
QUESTION: Did you come
out of a political family? Was politics something that was discussed within the
family?
CHOMSKY: Well, my immediate family, my parents,
were normal Roosevelt Democrats, and very much involved with Jewish affairs,
deeply Zionist and interested in Jewish culture, the revival of Hebrew, and
generally the cultural Zionism that had its origins in the ideas of people like
Ahad Ha’am, but increasingly, in mainstream Zionism. The next range of family,
uncles and cousins and so on, was in part Jewish working class, or around that
kind of social group. A number of them were Communists, or close to such
circles, very much involved in the politics of the Depression period. In
particular, one uncle who had a lot of influence on me in the late thirties and
later, had a newsstand in New York which was sort of a radical center. We’d
hang out all night and have discussions and arguments, there or in his small
apartment nearby. The great moments of my life in those years were when I could
work at the newsstand at night and listen to all this.
QUESTION: What part
of the city was that in?
CHOMSKY: That was at the kiosk at Seventy-second
Street and Broadway, if it’s still there. There used to be four newsstands
there. There were two on the way that most people left the subway station,
which was to Seventy-second Street. And there were two on the other side, where
few people ever left. He had one of those. It was very exciting intellectually,
but I guess they didn’t make much money selling newspapers. In the late
thirties, it became a center for some European emigres and others, and it was
quite lively. He had been through a lot of the Marxist sectarian politics —
Stalinist, Trotskyite, non-Leninist sects of one sort or another. I was just
beginning to learn about all of that. It was a very lively intellectual
community.
The Jewish working-class culture in
New York was very unusual. It was highly intellectual, very poor; a lot of
people had no jobs at all and others lived in slums and so on. But it was a
rich and lively intellectual culture: Freud, Marx, the Budapest String Quartet,
literature, and so forth. That was, I think, the most influential intellectual
culture during my early teens.
QUESTION: Were you
also brought up in certain aspects of the Jewish cultural traditions?
CHOMSKY: I was deeply immersed in that. In fact,
I probably did more reading in that area than any other until I was maybe
fifteen or sixteen.
QUESTION: You rarely
draw on it in your public writings. Are there reasons for that?
CHOMSKY: No, it didn’t seem to be particularly
relevant. It’s there, I mean, it certainly had a good amount of influence on
me. For example, the brilliant nineteenth-century Yiddish-Hebrew writer Mendele
Mocher Sfarim, who wrote about Jewish life in Eastern Europe, had tremendous
instinct and understanding It cheapens it to call it proletarian literature,
but it gave a kind of understanding of the lives of the poor with a mixture of
humor and sympathy and cynicism that is quite remarkable. I also read fairly
widely in the works of the nineteenth-century Hebrew renaissance — novels,
stories, poetry, essays. I can’t say what long-term effect this reading had on
me. It certainly had an emotional impact.
QUESTION: There seem
to be in your thinking certain insights about society and intellectuals that
span the course of your adult life. So much so that you are not surprised by
what often seems to shock others. You are not shocked when intellectuals
perform certain ideological functions — you expect this of them. You are not
surprised when American power operates by cloaking itself in an idealistic garb
to conceal its pursuit of various interests — you expect it of such power. And
so on. Your insights seem less derived initially from prolonged historical
observation than a sense of how things are expected to operate.
CHOMSKY: I guess I just always assumed it. It
seems to me to follow from the simplest and most uncontroversial assumptions
about motivation and interests and the structure of power.
QUESTION: And yet in
some ways those assumptions are at the heart of what outrages individuals about
your thoughts and writing. They have to be dismissed because if people were to
confront them, they’d have to write differently about the United States.
CHOMSKY: Well, it’s interesting that it doesn’t
enrage anyone when I say this about enemies of the United States. Then it’s
obvious. What outrages them is when I try to show how these patterns also
exhibited in our own society, as they are. If I were talking to a group of
Russian intellectuals, they would be outraged that I failed to see the idealism
and commitment to peace and brotherhood of the Russian state. That’s the way
propaganda systems function.
QUESTION: But do you
wonder why so many share such assumptions — and you do not?
CHOMSKY: Well, maybe part of the reason is that
in a certain sense I grew up in an alien culture, in the Jewish-Zionist
cultural tradition, in an immigrant community in a sense, though of course
others reacted to the same conditions quite differently. I suppose I am also a
child of the Depression. Some of my earliest memories, which are very vivid,
are of people selling rags at our door, of violent police strikebreaking, and
other Depression scenes. Whatever the reasons may be, I was very much affected
by events of the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War, for example, though I was barely
literate. The first article I wrote was an editorial in the school newspaper on
the fall of Barcelona, a few weeks after my tenth birthday. The rise of nazism
also made a deep impression, intensified perhaps because we were practically
the only Jewish family in a bitterly anti-Semitic Irish and German Catholic
neighborhood in which there was open support for the Nazis until December 1941.
QUESTION: Yet the
“New York intellectuals” have become prime exponents of a virulent
anticommunism that denies almost all the insights you start with as “common
sense.”
CHOMSKY: In part, I think, age maybe was a lucky
accident in my case. I was just a little too young to have ever faced the
temptation of being a committed Leninist, so I never had any faith to renounce,
or any feeling of guilt or betrayal. I was always on the side of the losers —
the Spanish anarchists, for example.
QUESTION: Do you look
back and see this as exceptional?
CHOMSKY: Oh, yes. I always felt completely out
of tune with almost everything around me. As I mentioned, I never joined any
organized group because of sharp disagreement and skepticism about them, though
emotionally I was drawn to such youth groups as Hashomer Hatzair, which in
those days professed a commitment to socialist binationalism in Palestine and
kibbutz values, as well as the Hebraic culture that I was very much a part of.
In fact, I was rather skeptical
about the Second World War. I didn’t know anybody who shared that skepticism,
literally not a single person. But I used to go to the Philadelphia public
library — this must have been 1944 or 1945, when I was about fifteen or sixteen
— to read sectarian leftist literature of a very strange nature. For example,
groups like the Marlenites, who probably you’ve never heard of, who were trying
to show that the war was a phony war, that it was simply a war designed by the
capitalists of the West, acting in conjunction with the state capitalists of
the Soviet system to try to destroy the proletarians of Europe. I never really
believed the thesis, but I found it intriguing enough to try to figure out what
they were talking about. Enough rang true to make me very skeptical about much
of the patriotic interpretation of the war. I also recall being appalled by the
treatment of German POWs. For some reason, there were some in a camp right next
to my high school, and it was considered the red-blooded “thing-to-do” to taunt
them across the barbed wire. That struck me as disgraceful at the time, though
I was much more of a committed anti-Nazi than the kids engaging in this sport.
I recall bitter arguments about it.
I remember on the day of the
Hiroshima bombing, for example, I remember that I literally couldn’t talk to
anybody. There was nobody. I just walked off by myself. I was at a summer camp
at the time, and I walked off into the woods and stayed alone for a couple of
hours when I heard about it. I could never talk to anyone about it and never
understood anyone’s reaction. I felt completely isolated.
As for the things that I was
involved in directly, like the Zionist issues again, the position that I held,
while I wouldn’t say I was the only person in the world to hold it,
nevertheless it was very far from the mainstream. It was a position that did
have some standing and some support in the Zionist movement. But it was also
one that was distinct from those of any of the existing movements, except for
ones that were Stalinist or Trotskyite, therefore out for me, so I couldn’t
join in. I don’t know how far back it goes. But, anyway, ever since I had any
political awareness, I’ve felt either alone or part of a tiny minority.
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