In Noam Chomsky's world, there is a pro-American capitalist exploiter behind every tree. He is the ultimate ideologue, devoted to explaining history, or at least American history and foreign policy, through a single prism. For Chomsky, to even engage in a discussion about Vietnam was to lose one’s humanity. But that didn't prevent him from going on William F. Buckley, Jr.'s Firing Line in 1969.

Part I: Introduction to Crossing Swords
Part II: James Baldwin and the Civil Rights Movement
Part III: Dwight Macdonald and Journalism as Style over Substance
Part IV: Gore Vidal: Politics as Personality
Part V: Michael Harrington and the War on Poverty
Part VI: Norman Mailer and the Culture Wars
Part VII: Noam Chomsky and the New Left
Part VIII: John Kenneth Galbraith and Free Enterprise
Part IX: The Environmental Movement
Part X: Buckley in Perspective 

Author’s note: Parts of this article are adapted from an earlier piece, "Dissecting Chomsky," that appeared on this site several years ago. I hope readers will forgive any repetition, but the author saw no point in trying to rehash what was a lengthy critique, convincing or not, of Chomsky’s work. Nevertheless, several sections on William F. Buckley’ Jr.'s exchanges with Chomsky and Howard Zinn have been added and parts of the essay have been significantly rewritten.

In the midst of the great struggle between Communism and the West, Whittaker Chambers, the witness who made Alger Hiss a household name, asked a haunting question: was the West worth saving?

Though Soviet and Chinese atrocities had made it increasingly difficult for many on the Left to sustain an ideological commitment to the Marxist vision, the Left did not surrender easily its hopes of creating a new man and a new society, one in which religion, class, wealth and property played no significant role in human affairs.

It is by now understood by all but the most dogmatic Marxists that the Marxist vision failed because it sought to disconnect human beings from those things that are inherently part of the human makeup – family, faith, freedom, a sense of community, the hope of a better life. When the Marxists ripped crucifixes from the walls, imprisoned dissenters, created a new class of elites and sacrificed millions of helpless souls on the altar of their economic and social reforms, they not only destroyed individuals, they threatened to destroy humanity itself. The new man was mostly a new monster – one with no loyalty to anything save the Communist Party. Out of such dreams emerged the Gulag, the great purges and a real-world 1984.

But even as communism discredited itself and Bill Buckley and his anti-communist brigades at National Review sought to redefine the debate about communism, a new form of leftist radicalism mobilized in the turbulent 1960s. The New Left was inspired less by a new vision than it was haunted by a new terror of the age – Senator Mike Mansfield.

Yes, Mike Mansfield, or so declared Noam Chomsky in 1969, while debating Buckley on Firing Line.  Chomsky and like-minded intellectuals – e.g. Howard Zinn, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and Tom Hayden – rejected totally the American enterprise as they saw it taking shape during the Cold War in light of the American intervention in Vietnam. Vietnam proved, they argued, that America’s effort to contain Soviet and Chinese communism was immoral and criminal; America was not merely wrong to be in Vietnam, we were worse than the enemies we opposed. Mansfield, in the Chomsky version of American history, was reduced to playing the American Eichmann, a banal, dutiful bureaucrat who helped pull the levers of destruction in the name of a mythical fantasy about saving the world from communism.

Now this worldview, distorted as it was, put the New Left directly at odds with Buckley, who believed, first and foremost, that the United States was a force for moral good in the world. This respect for his nation and its essential decency undergirded all of his political observations even during those periods when the United States failed to live up to its highest values. He believed that our Constitution and the Bill of Rights were the foundation of our freedoms and that those freedoms, however imperfectly exercised or accessed, made this nation a bulwark against tyranny.

Moreover, he believed that world communism posed a direct threat to our liberty, our faith and our economic system, and he considered the Chomsky/Zinn version of history a “fantasy” unrelated to the realities of the world he observed. To call America a nation dedicated to death, as Zinn did in a debate with Buckley in 1971, was to rob language of any coherent meaning.

Nonetheless, Chomsky, Zinn and their vanguard spearheaded the New Left’s frontal assault on Western/U.S. foreign policy since the 1960s. In doing so, they minimized the tyranny of our adversaries and persuaded countless impressionable young that a vast conspiracy, organized by a nexus of corporate and governmental power, has misled them about their government and its evil influence around the globe.

Chomsky has played the leading role in this effort. He emerged as an intellectual force during the Vietnam War and remains a darling of leftists on college campuses where students are easily seduced by his fashionable anti-Americanism. He has a written a slew of books over the past decade or so, several of them making the bestseller lists: Failed States, Hegemony or Survival, 9/11, and Power and Terror. Samantha Power reviewed Hegemony or Survival in the New York Times and suggested that Chomsky "may be the most widely read American voice on foreign policy on the planet today."

The respected Foreign Affairs magazine has acknowledged that Chomsky, while not taken seriously in the United States (except on college campuses), has credibility in Europe and in other parts of the world where American power is resented. (FA, Sept./Oct. 2002).

Chomsky's extremism has not gone unnoticed even in those quarters where he was once celebrated. The New York Review of Books, a bastion of good liberal writing, ceased to publish Chomsky as he headed into the fringe world of conspiracies and America loathing. Paul Robinson wrote in the New York Times in 1979: “Judged in terms of the power, range, and novelty and influence of his thought, Noam Chomsky is arguably the most important intellectual alive today.” Yet Robinson, who agreed with Chomsky on many issues, found him difficult to read. It might be worth quoting Robinson at length, for he identified clearly Chomsky’s challenge as a reputable analyst of world events.

I share most of Chomsky’s political opinions . . . Yet despite these prejudices I can’t read Chomsky’s political analyses without cringing. He makes me painfully aware that the study of history is in fact a profession, that it requires more than 'a little industry and application' of which 'everybody is capable.' Unfortunately, one can’t argue with Chomsky on this matter because he insists that any claim about the need for professional competence in the analysis of historical events is part of the prevailing liberal ideology, whose main objective is to conceal and distort reality . . . The main fault with Chomsky’s historical reconstruction of postwar America is its utter flatness. For all practical purposes, only one factor is at work: the needs of American capitalism and the efforts of its liberal defenders to justify those needs.

There have been noteworthy efforts by critics to deconstruct Chomsky’s arguments and his methodology: Buckley, Lionel Abel, Stephen Morris, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and David Horowitz among others. Peter Collier and Horowitz published The Anti-Chomsky Reader, which dispelled some of the Chomsky mystique. But Chomsky continues to find a large audience and that makes him more than a mere left-wing curiosity. Take this fawning comment by Tim Adams in the Guardian Unlimited.

His writings, in linguistics (a discipline which he effectively invented) and on the hypocrisy and warmongering of America (and its principal ally) are among the few essential documents of our times. They are also not designed for the intellectually faint-hearted. As the most unforgiving critic of the Washington-run world order, Chomsky is often caricatured as supplying more reality, and more guilt, than many of us care to handle. His books have the manner and certainty of gospels, and they work by accretion, stockpiling the remorseless fact of distant atrocity done in each of our names.
– November 30, 2003

Powerful testimony, if only it were true. Taking on Chomsky is no easy undertaking, however. Whatever else you might say about him, the man is industrious. As a tenured professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he has enjoyed a privileged position from which to launch his anti-American polemics. His career underscores John Diggins' observation on the academic Left: "Having lost the confrontation on the streets in the sixties, they could later, as English professors in the eighties, continue it in the classroom." (The Rise and Fall of the American Left, p. 356.)

Chomsky did most of his major work on linguistics years ago. Tenured and comfortably ensconced at MIT, he has been free to crank out dozens of books and pamphlets all aimed at denouncing his country, the United States. He does this with great conviction, but he has – as Robinson observed — little historical training or knowledge, which might explain some of the indefensible claims made in so many of his books. He would not be taken seriously but for his position at MIT and the credibility he gained more than 40 years ago as a professor of linguistics. Though Chomsky is not nearly as witty or as entertaining as Gore Vidal or Norman Mailer, he is more difficult to get a handle on, not only because he publishes so much, but because he presents as fact so many out-of-context charges and because his own position shifts each time an opponent seeks to pin him down on one of his more lurid and extreme claims. His style is a nasty blend of fact, fiction and fantasy that can easily confuse and mislead. He is hopelessly one-sided. To quote Powers in the New York Times review of Hegemony or Survival:

For Chomsky, the world is divided into oppressor and oppressed. America, the prime oppressor, can do no right, while the sins of those categorized as oppressed receive scant mention. Because he deems American foreign policy inherently violent and expansionist, he is unconcerned with the motives behind particular policies, or the ethics of particular individuals in government. And since he considers the United States the leading terrorist state, little distinguishes American air strikes in Serbia undertaken at night with high-precision weaponry from World Trade Center attacks timed to maximize the number of office workers who have just sat down with their morning coffee . . . It is inconceivable, in Chomsky's view, that American power could be harnessed for good.

The Chomsky Paradigm

To understand Chomsky's critique, you must begin with his methodology and the assumptions interlaced with his volatile claims. This is important because readers equipped with this knowledge will begin to understand that facts matter less to Chomsky than the ideological paradigm to which he is committed. Here are a few of those assumptions, though this is hardly an exhaustive list:

·  American policies are anti-democratic and anti-freedom. The military industrial complex is a tool of political and business elites who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. To ensure the status quo is maintained, these elites have projected American power abroad in highly destructive ways, including against the working class and peasants in other countries.

·  Censorship is common. Opposition to such policies within the United States is stifled because corporate elites control the information that is disseminated to the broader public. We are all victims of mass manipulation, apparently. Chomsky calls this process "manufacturing consent."

· Our enemies are always illusory.  Communism posed no real threat to human rights or freedom. Chomsky maintains this position throughout his work, though on occasion he will concede that the Soviet Union was an imperial power. The massive human rights violations perpetrated by the Soviet regime, Communist China, North Korea's communist regime, the Cambodian communists or the Ethiopian communist regime, just to mention a few, are at best afterthoughts and irrelevant in the Chomsky paradigm. In many instances, he refuses to even identify communist guerillas and insurgents as such, but would have readers believe that the victims of American power have all been innocent peasants minding their own business tilling their fields. In some instances this might be true, in others not, but an historian who would claim to be reputable has a responsibility to differentiate, which Chomsky almost never does.

·  We are guilty by association. Any American relationship with a dictator, regime or government = U.S. control. Thus, Chomsky implicates the United States in acts of state violence in which we are not the primary mover or shaper of said policy or in which we have no involvement at all. "U.S. supported" is the operative phrase. So, if we sell weapons to the Turkish government this means, according to Chomsky, that we support the oppression of Turkish Kurds. If we brought Suharto into power in Indonesia, we also are responsible for every action that his government later perpetrates. Because the United States, naturally, has relations with virtually every nation in the world at some level, there is no end to the crimes with which Chomsky can accuse us.

·  Even when we are right, we are wrong.  That we liberated Germany and Japan, after a great war we did not start, and set those nations on a path toward freedom and democracy does not impress Chomsky, who presents our actions in both instances as an attempt to keep those nations within the "American system." This is the "Open Door" school's influence. Spearheaded by William Appleman Williams and Walter LaFeber, these historians argue that economics is the primary moving force in American foreign policy.  But even though Williams and LaFeber can be tough American critics, they are fairer and less crude in their formulations than Chomsky. (Schlesinger argues against their paradigm in "America and Empire," included in his collection of essays, The Cycles of American History.)

·  Chomsky never provides context. He gives a long list of violent actions by "U.S. supported" governments or regimes, but he never documents the violence that was ongoing before American intervention. In Central America, for example, where it must be conceded our policies have been in some instances highly questionable if not immoral, it is nevertheless true that the region was in a state of turmoil long before the United States was a determining force. The ruling classes, mostly of Spanish origin, were at war routinely with peasants, revolutionaries and native populations, many of whom themselves were prepared to do great violence in an effort to expand power and control. Moreover, to ignore the great violence done by Communists and to portray only the violence perpetrated by the United States or its allies in opposition is to misrepresent history so maliciously as to destroy credibility.
      
Having read a dozen of his books I have yet to stumble across an instance in which Chomsky gives the United States the benefit of the doubt. Not only do we deserve no credit for rebuilding Europe or Japan, we were likewise wrong in Korea, Vietnam, Kosovo, and now in Iraq. We were wrong when we supported Saddam (albeit reluctantly), and just as wrong when we toppled his regime. All the pain and suffering inflicted on millions of people around the world by the enemies of the United States is ultimately the fault of the United States, according to Chomsky, as our enemies react in fear or uncertainty because of America's imperialist designs.

The Soviet Union's decades of terror, Gulags, forced starvation and international aggression can all be traced back to a minor American intervention in Russia during the 1st World War. The communist regime in Cambodia came to power and ruled with violence and terror because the United States destabilized the country during the Vietnam War. Saddam was a murderer who had U.S. support, so argues the dean of the Left, and yet it is Chomsky who steadfastly argued against any meaningful attempt to curtail that violence. He opposed the first Gulf War and the liberation of Kuwait, just as he later opposed sanctions and, of course, the decision finally to bring the criminal regime to an end. One might want to call him a pacifist, but Chomsky’s opposition to violence flows in one direction – he is perfectly willing to celebrate as heroic those who violently oppose American influence.

Vietnam: A Case Study

Chomsky established his reputation as a major intellectual player during the Vietnam era. He joined a host of intellectuals and writers who opposed US involvement, which he himself has called criminal. He wrote several books and a number of essays on the war, most notably American Power and the New Mandarins, At War with Asia and For Reasons of State.

The most influential of these works was the first, American Power and the New Mandarins. The book is a prototype for much of his later work, for it melds his invective style with his pretense of academic and theoretical rigor. He displays early on the kinds of distortions that are typical in his work. Take this comment, noted by other reviewers when the book first appeared: "Three times in a generation American technology has laid waste a helpless Asian country." (NM, p. 4) How could any writer of history who would claim to have credibility call imperial Japan "helpless?" In fact, Japan "laid waste" Pearl Harbor and much of mainland China and Southeast Asia.

Did we "lay waste" Korea? Chomsky fails to mention the offensive launched by the North Korean communists, which triggered the Korean War. Not even Chalmers Johnson, a harsh critic of American policy in Asia, denies this basic historical fact. And if North Vietnam was helpless, how did it manage to defeat the all-powerful hegemonic United States (and without any significant support from the Soviets or China, if you want to believe Chomsky)? The government we opposed in North Vietnam is still a dictatorship. South Korea, meanwhile, is proudly democratic and at times defiantly anti-American, despite the decades-long presence of American troops. There is a message there for anti-American critics, though they are averse to getting it.

Americans, Chomsky observed in NM, are gullible where the mythologies of U.S. power are concerned. Nevertheless, he argues, "There is hope that the struggle against racism and exploitation at home can be linked with the struggle to remove the heavy Yankee boot from the necks of the oppressed people throughout the world." (NM, p. 4) Chomsky cautions those who would embrace his perspective that they might be:

. . . cut off by domestic repression or its 'functional equivalent,' to use a favorite term of the present administration: the dominance of a liberal technocracy who will serve the existing social order in the belief that they represent justice and humanity, fighting limited wars at home and overseas to preserve stability, promising that the future will be better if only the dispossessed will wait patiently, and supported by an apathetic, obedient majority, its mind and conscience dulled by a surfeit of commodities and by some new version of the old system of beliefs and ideas.
– NM, p. 5.

This is the Chomsky paradigm in a nutshell. What are the assumptions implicit in this litany of claims? First, the public is easily manipulated or duped; second, our foreign policy is driven by a need to repress rather than liberate; third, there is a concerted effort, in which most major media participate, to perpetuate myths about the benevolence of American power.

That the Vietnam War remains one of the most controversial chapters in U.S. foreign policy history is unarguable.  Our nation was deeply divided. Diggins, a respected historian, suggests that two-thirds of the country came to oppose a war that wrought great destruction without any clear path toward victory or resolution. Three schools of thought dominated the debate. There were those who felt we were right to be in Vietnam. They argued that North Vietnam, with the help of the Soviet Union and China, both communist nations, was determined to subjugate the people in the south. The result would be a repressive regime that would further destabilize Asia and encourage communist forces around the globe who were enemies not only of the United States but of freedom.

Chomsky does not allow for this possibility, however, and in his debate with Buckley went so far as to suggest that even debating the issue did a disservice to morality. (Buckley would quip that he appreciated Chomsky appearing, given the great self-restraint it required – “It really does,” Chomsky responded.) He claimed the United States "invaded" South Vietnam, that there was no significant support for our presence, nor was there a government in place that could have legitimately invited the United States to act on its behalf. In short, the American government intervened not only without the consent of the South Vietnamese, but against the wishes of the Vietnamese people.

Alas, Chomsky runs up against reality and does not fare that well. You will search in vein for mention of the more than two million refugees who fled North Vietnam when the communists consolidated their rule. When confronted by the boat people fleeing Vietnam after the communists took full control, Chomsky first denied and then sought to discredit or ignore the witnesses of North Vietnamese tyranny and repression. In the end, he retreated to his usual position and blamed the usual scapegoat — the United States. If only we had not intervened and radicalized the communists, things would have gone better in Southeast Asia. Not even former Viet Cong and North Vietnamese operatives buy this reasoning, but Chomsky and his cadre of academic leftists continue to embrace it.

Buckley, on the other hand, had been an avid anti-communist all of his life. Like most of the West, he watched the Soviet Union in the post-war period launch a campaign of intimidation, terrorism and murder as it sought to spread the communist vision first in Eastern Europe, its sphere of influence, and then around the globe. When China fell to the communists, the Truman administration became greatly concerned that world communism truly was a new form of radical despotism the United States must resist.

The great domestic events of the 1940s and 1950s centered on the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the Hiss-Chambers case and then the McCarthy phenomenon. Buckley penned a defense of McCarthy with co-author L. Brent Bozell about which even Chambers, with whom he became close friends in the 1950s and early 1960s, had doubts. Chambers felt McCarthy was reckless. Even so, Buckley remained determined. Whatever the failures of the anti-communist effort, he argued, they were a far cry from the crimes against humanity unleashed by communism and its allies.

In 1961, at Carnegie Hall, Buckley spoke at a rally organized in support of Taiwan, which had separated from communist China. Buckley framed the issue from his perspective.

The overarching tragedy for the past fifteen years has been the failure of the West’s strategic vision – a moral failure, essentially. It has led to a long series of defeats. It lead to Korea and to Suez, and to Cuba. The failures there were human, not natural. In refusing to win the war in Korea, and thus to pursue the opening that events had given us, we lost the opportunity to speak back to history and reclaim China. In failing to support the English and the French and Israelis in Suez, we failed to say to Africa what needed to be said, that our retreat from colonialism would be phased with the great strategic imperatives of freedom and justice. In Cuba, at the Bay of Pigs, we faltered, and so made known that we would tolerate an enemy beachhead in the Western Hemisphere. We showed, by our deeds that we would sooner appease the new-democratic divinities of world opinion than follow the imperatives that come from the planning boards of Western survival.
– Let Us Talk of Many Things, p. 43.

Along came Vietnam. First the communists mobilized in the north and defeated the French colonialists. They drove south one to two million Catholic refugees who feared living under communist domination. Then came the Geneva Accords, which the Eisenhower administration failed to honor – fearful that Ho Chi Minh, the popular communist leader, would win the promised election. Over the next decade, U.S. policymakers would sink their heels deeper and deeper into Southeast Asia, convinced that communism, left to its own devices, would subsume the entire region and pose a direct threat to Western interests and the freedoms the West embraced.

Buckley could sound Wilsonian when it came to his commitment to anti-communism. In his Carnegie Hall speech he observed that Kenneth Tynan, the English critic, had publicly declared that he would rather live on his knees than die on his knees. Said Buckley:

Well, assuming it is death toward which we are headed as a result of our determination to stay free, let it be said that Mr. Tynan would not need to die on his knees. He could die standing up . . . there remain impenetrable corners of the Soviet Union where Messrs. Crosby and Tynan could store their twenty-five hundred calories per day and remain absolutely free from the hounds of radioactivity, if not from the horrors of Bolshevism. But let them not contaminate the air that free men breathe. We seek not to start a war but to avoid war, and the surest way to avoid war is not so complex as to elude the understanding of professional students of drama. The appeasers and collaborationists in our midst seek to pour water into our gunpowder and lead into the muzzles of our cannons, and to leave us defenseless in the face of the enemy’s musketry . . . They are in fact the warmongers, for they whet the appetite of the enemy as surely as a stripteaser whets the appetite of the lecher.
– Let Us Talk, pages 47-48.

Later, in a speech at the Yale Political Union in which Buckley opposed the appearance of a communist speaker at Yale, Buckley argued that dialogue with communists was not possible.

We can no more collaborate with him to further the common understanding than Anne Frank could have collaborated with Goebbels in a dialogue on race relations . . . The communists are of concern to non-specialists . . . primarily as human beings suffering from the most exotic and the most mortal illness of our time, the mania of ideology, which in one of its excrescences in our time, while you were living, blithely stoked the ovens of Germany with Jewish flesh . . .
– Let Us Talk, p. 66.

In the intervening years between these comments and his 1969 Firing Line discussion with Chomsky, America’s role in Vietnam had become arguably the most contentious issue in American history since the Civil War. Buckley, still committed to the idea that communism posted a mortal threat to the West, began by quoting Chomsky’s words – that to even engage in a discussion about Vietnam was to lose one’s humanity. Buckley asked simply: if Chomsky stood to lose his humanity by discussing the matter, why did he agree to appear in the first place?

Chomsky, on the defensive, began to equivocate, arguing that he did not mean the matter could not be discussed, but that he did feel he was surrendering his humanity in doing so. Buckley did not relent, pushing Chomsky for some time on the matter of whether Chomsky’s formulation was not in itself a form of intolerance, suggesting, as it did, that compassionate people with a finely tuned sense of morality could not reach precisely the opposite conclusions of Mr. Chomsky with respect to the Vietnam War.

Eventually, they began to argue the details – were the communists a true threat to those who cherished freedom? Were the human rights abuses of the communists a systematic practice the same as the military operations carried out by the United States in trying to assist the South Vietnamese? Chomsky acknowledged that he had purposely focused only on the behavior of the United States, not the actions of the communists, nor the Vietnamese against whom we were fighting, or, for that matter, the South Vietnamese for whom we fought. This was a startling admission. It revealed a conscious intent to judge the United States by standards never applied to other nations or actors on the geopolitical stage.

Ch: Personally, I’m against all kinds of terror, there’s no question. But if you want to understand the Viet Cong situation, then, let’s recognize a very great distinction . . . let’s see what the political point of the terror was. Because after all there were, during that period, there about nine or ten thousand, according to American sources, there were nine or ten thousand village officials, of one sort or another, killed by the Viet Cong, largely with the support of villagers. At the same time, recall that there were perhaps 160,000 Vietnamese if we accept Bernard Fall’s figures again, killed by the Saigon government and the Americans, this is prior to . . .

B: Yea, I know, but it seems to me that you’re attempting to match things which are not equal….

Ch: Well, no, 9,000 and 160,000 are by no means equal.

B: Yeah, I knew you would say that, and I am prepared to answer it. My point is that one presumably distinguishes between an act of terrorism which you called depraved a moment ago . . .

Ch: Well, what you described, burning the villages, is depraved . . .

B: And a military action which is part of a military operation.

Ch: Which is even more depraved.

B: Well, why do you say that?

Ch: Malcolm Brown back in 1962 or (1963), I don’t remember, reported . . . that Saigon officials were sending American Sky Hawks, you know, airplanes over Vietnamese villages to wipe them out with Napalm raids in order to cover instances of graft, for example. Well, I think that’s depraved. And I don’t condemn that because you see, there are really three kinds of terror in Vietnam. There’s Viet Cong terror, there’s Saigon government terror and there’s American terror. And if you’ll read what I’ve written, I say practically nothing about either Viet Cong terror or terror carried out by the Saigon government. Now, if one wanted to talk about that, one would have to point out that the terror carried out by the Saigon government is incredibly greater in extent and has very different political purposes which one could discuss. But I restrict myself to discussing American terror . . . for one thing, it is just qualitatively different in scale. And for another thing because I feel that we have some responsibility about it . . .

B: Mr. Chomsky we were talking there about American terror and I think you make a very accurate observation that we are responsible for what we do, but hardly responsible for what other people do, excepting in so far as we are in a position to influence them . . . For instance, if there’s a mass starvation in Biafra, even though we did not cause it, there is a sense in which we are responsible if we don’t do something to alleviate it. Now, by the same token, if we are prepared to agree that it is not always easy to taxonomize military action into that which is terroristic and that which is purely a military operation, we are left with doubts, about the bombing of Germany in 42, 43, 44 . . . You might contend that this was terroristic and unnecessary and you might be right, although you’re not a military expert and neither am I.

But I do judge that even if we all agree that what we did in Dresden was inexcusable, as a moral question, it’s to be understood in the context of what it was that brought us to Dresden in the first place . . . and what brought us to South Vietnam in the first instance, in my judgment, was clearly a disinterested concern for the stability and possibilities of a region of the world to which we were committed . . .

* * *

At this point, Chomsky protested Buckley’s use of the word disinterested, arguing that America was engaged in an effort to reinstitute French colonialism as early as 1951.

B: It was disinterested in this sense, and I think this is an important distinction, which you touch on in your book. It’s a disinterested act if my attempt, or your attempt to help a particular nation, is in order to spare you the possibility of a great ordeal in the future which will harm you, your family, your children . . .

Ch: In that sense, Nazi Germany was also disinterested because after all Nazi Germany was conquering Eastern Europe only in order to advance the values of Christian spiritual civilization and to restore the Slavs to their rightful home.

B: I follow you and if you want to pursue that digression, I will…

Ch: But that’s not a kind of disinterestedness, you see, that’s something which includes every case of military aggression and colonialism in history. It’s all disinterested in your sense.

B: Let me simply rest my case by saying there is an observable distinction by intelligent men between a country that reaches out and interferes with another country because it has reason to believe that a failure to do will result in universal misery, and that country which reaches out and interferes with other countries because it wants to establish Coca Cola plants.

Ch: It is a conceptual distinction . . .the history of colonialism shows that these two motivations can coincide . . .

* * *

And so it went, with Buckley and Chomsky moving from Vietnam to the Belgian Congo, to Greece. And though Chomsky cleverly cloaks all American intentions as imperial and material, he provided scant evidence to demonstrate why we would expend billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives in a war whose primary motivation was to ensure that narrow economic interests were protected.

In doing so, Chomsky dismissed as apocryphal any evidence that communism as a system had wrought unprecedented destruction and misery on dozens of nations and millions of people. He even denied that millions of people perished in the purges of China. (I refer readers to Chalmers Johnson, an Asia expert who stridently opposes America’s “imperial” foreign policy but who has documented in several of his books, including Blowback, the toll of Chinese terror and policies.)

Alas, no evidence ever forces Chomsky to reevaluate his assumptions, which suggests not that he is always right, which would make him the most perfect man since Jesus, but that he is the ultimate dogmatist, a man so wedded to his preconceived notions that no reevaluation is ever in order, no matter the historical evidence arrayed against his position.  Buckley, having sought to maneuver Chomsky to some concession with respect to the global issues, finally addressed the matter directly.

B: The grand fact of the postwar world is that the Communists, the Communist imperialists, by the use of terrorism, by the use of, by deprivation of freedom, have contributed to the continuing bloodshed, and the sad thing about it is not only the bloodshed but the fact that they seem to dispossess you of the power of rationalization.

C: I think that is about five percent true. Or about 10 percent true . . . it’s perfectly true that there were areas of the world and in particular Eastern Europe, where Stalinist imperialism very brutally took control and still maintains control. But there were areas of the world where we were doing the same thing. And there’s quite an interplay in the cold war. You see, what you just described I believe is a mythology about the cold war, which might have been tenable 10 years ago, but which is quite inconsistent with contemporary scholars.

B: Ask a Czech.

CH: Ask a Guatemalan, ask a Dominican, ask the president of the Dominican Republic. Ask, you know, a person from South Vietnam.

B: Well, if you can’t distinguish between the nature of our venture in Guatemala and the nature of the Soviet Union’s in Prague, then we have a real difficulty.

* * *

Buckley, of course, tried to make the case for those who believed (and still do) that our efforts in Vietnam were noble, that, in fact, the communist regime in North Vietnam sought to subjugate the people of South Vietnam and impose on it a totalitarian system known to have brought about the deaths of millions of people around the globe. This led to an interesting exchange in which Chomsky agrees that a moral calculation is, at times, necessary. That is to say, if the sum of human suffering is reduced by an exercise in military action or even murder, a case can be made for action even if there is a human cost associated with it. He sparred with questioner Jeff Greenfield.

Ch: But then, you see, if one raises the question about attacks on people, then I think there are very tricky issues. You see one would, I can conceive, you know, I would have been against assassinating Hitler, for example, because I’m against murder, but if I believed that the assassination of Hitler would have contributed to ending the war one could give an argument.

Jeff Greenfield: Does that pertain to Lyndon Johnson?

Ch: That would pertain to Lyndon Johnson. But in neither case do I think it would have . . .

* * *

Many opponents of the war in Vietnam fall in a second category, which might include Buckley in his later years as he evaluated the cost of our Vietnam intervention on both our nation and on the Vietnamese. This group opposed the war not because it was wrong as a matter of principle, but because the costs of liberating the Vietnamese from communist rule were too high to justify our continued military intervention. Chomsky found this a distasteful discussion because it took his moral high ground and reduced it to practical calculation, though he himself conceded that Vietnam had ceased to be debatable precisely because Vietnam as a culture was in danger of destruction. In short, a case might have been made in the 1950s, but not in the 1960s.

Chomsky went further, arguing that "the health of our system would have been demonstrated by a change of policy caused by a recognition that what we have done in Vietnam is wrong, is a criminal act, that an 'American' victory would have been a tragedy." (NM, p. 11)

This leaves only one possible conclusion — that American intervention was a criminal act. Chomsky reveals in his reasoning that he is an extreme proponent of the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), which enshrined the notion of national sovereignty. Apparently, no crimes or potential crimes can justify the intrusion of outside forces into the internal affairs of another country. By this reasoning, of course, Hitler could have killed all the Jews he wanted without fear of international response provided he did it within German borders. This is, in principle, the position Chomsky takes in his essay "The Logic of Withdrawal."

"The simple fact is that there is no legitimate interest or principle to justify the use of American military force in Vietnam." (NM, p. 221).  But his prohibition against intervention is not situational, as he revealed when he discussed Neal Sheehan's writings on the war: "He (Sheehan) is disillusioned only because of the devastating consequences, for Vietnam and its people, to which this attempt led. But he still does not question that we had a perfect right to use military force to determine the structure of South Vietnamese society and to defeat an insurgent movement which we had decided 'would subject them to a dour tyranny.'" (NM, p. 245.)

Many supporters of the war have had second thoughts. My own reading of the war's history suggests that by around 1966 or so, when the South could not piece together a respectable ruling government, the cause was lost. (Two more recent histories offer diverse views on this matter. Michael Lind, in his book Vietnam, the Necessary War, argues that the anti-communist liberals were right about Vietnam and its potential implications in the Cold War. He debunks convincingly the leftist mythology about North Vietnamese nationalism, echoing an important essay in the New York Times by Fox Butterfield that demonstrated that Ho Chi Minh was in full concert with world communism and fully supported by the Soviets and communist China. Another history, Choosing War by Fred Logevall, suggests that a critical path was reached shortly after the 1964 American presidential election when President Johnson might have reversed course. Both writers agreed that pursuing the war aggressively after 1968 was futile.)

Phased withdrawal might well have been the only reasonable path by the late 1960s, but there is no doubt what the looming consequences of North Vietnamese domination were. The human rights record of Soviet- and Chinese-inspired communism had by the mid-1960s brought about the deaths of tens of millions of people and the annihilation of human and political rights for tens of millions more. Chalmers Johnson, again, one of the toughest critics of American foreign policy in Asia, documents that Mao brought on the starvation of some 30 million peasants because of his extreme collectivist agrarian policies (The Great Leap Forward). Millions more died in the purges inspired by the Cultural Revolution. If none of this could justify for Chomsky intervention as a matter of principle, one can certainly appreciate why Chomsky cannot comprehend our intervention in North Vietnam.

Chomsky is not content to argue that the principle of non-intervention is the only way to ensure a reasonably stable world-system of nations. He goes further, touting the heroic resistance of the North Vietnamese against American intervention, as if the crimes and oppression committed by communists were all a fantasy of American cold warriors. This is hardly an oversight, but a systematic effort to indict one side and exonerate by silence the other.  In short, his sovereignty sensitivity is triggered mainly with respect to those who oppose the United States. Chomsky did not rush to the defense of Kuwait, for example, a sovereign nation whose rights Chomsky effectively dismissed as soon as the United States sought to defend them.

The rest of New Mandarins was vintage Chomsky, who even suggested that de-Nazification of the United States is in order because some Americans enjoyed playing an insensitive video game. He argued that American indifference to the oppression experienced by minorities was the equivalent of our indifference to the suffering of the unfortunate in other parts of the world. And here Chomsky began to show his true colors; for what we really fear, he implied, is not that the North Vietnamese will fail, but rather that the socialist model might succeed in the way, as one writer he quotes puts it, China and the Soviet Union succeeded. (Emphasis added.)

Stephen Morris took on Vietnam and Cambodia in a critique of Chomsky’s worldview, arguing that Chomsky's inability to admit the failings of both communist regimes — in the face of overwhelming evidence — is itself an appalling act of non-scholarship.

The weight of the scholarly evidence makes clear, beyond any shadow of doubt, that the Khmer Rouge leaders carried out a radical communist revolution that led to the death of over one million, perhaps as many as two million. This dreadful situation was not a product of the world isolating Cambodia. It was the result of the Khmer Rouge dictatorship isolating Cambodia from the world while it pursued irrational economic policies, including collectivist agriculture, depopulating the cities, forcibly overworking the population, stopping private commerce, abolishing money, exterminating most of the nation's educated people, exporting to foreign countries the rice needed by the starving populace, closing down all hospitals, and refusing foreign offers of medical assistance. These facts were known at the time the Khmer Rouge were in power, as was their explanatory relevance. But Chomsky refused to believe them, and attacked the integrity of those who tried to tell the world the truth.
– ACR, p. 28.

Morris' indictment continues: "Why would Chomsky write essays and books that attempt to whitewash the repressive policies of dictatorships, using methods that are such a travesty of academic standards? The answer is unfortunately a simple one. As a radical political ideologue, he is crippled by an intense emotional commitment to the cause of anti-Americanism." (ACR, p. 29)

Their Firing Line discussion marked the only time Buckley and Chomsky debated, but Chomsky would claim, according to one report, that Buckley left the set angry, vowing a rematch at which Buckley would demonstrate his superior skills as a debater. The blogger quotes a note apparently written by Chomsky shortly after Buckley’s death earlier this year:

My main recollection was surprise at how little he seemed to know about particular issues, and how quickly he wanted to drop them when we began to go beyond general slogans. Although this was not on the tape, it's hard to forget the final moments as he walked off stage, in a fury, shouting that he'd have me back on again soon and teach me a thing or too.  When I answered politely that I'd be glad to arrange it, he got even more furious.  Of course I never heard from him again, or expected to.

CBS analyst Jeff Greenfield, who participated in that debate as a member of panel, has no recollection of such an exchange though it is hard to imagine how he might have missed Buckley shouting at Chomsky. If it occurred, Greenfield responded by email, it happened out of his earshot. Nevertheless, the notion that Buckley avoided debating Chomsky because he feared him will strike many as grandiose spin on Chomsky’s part. First of all, it is not at all clear that Chomsky got the better of Buckley in the Firing Line discussion. Chomsky repeatedly changed his position when Buckley challenged him on specific issues related to his judgmental and one-sided interpretation of the war and its implications. On at least a half dozen occasions, when Buckley quoted back to Chomsky his comments, Chomsky shifted, evaded or completely reversed himself. On the other hand, Chomsky, who seems to have total recall of every bit of minutia that supports his position, appeared to occasionally catch Buckley flat-footed over nuances that to Buckley, a generalist, seemed immaterial to the larger questions.

In any case, if Buckley sought to avoid Chomsky, it would hardly have made sense for him to agree a couple of years later to debate Professor Howard Zinn before a capacity audience at Tufts University, in the heart of liberal New England. Zinn walked in lockstep with Chomsky’s worldview. Buckley devoted three hours to the debate, “Reform or Revolution,” in which Zinn attacked the American government – from the President to the Defense Department to the State Department to the FBI. He accused the government of systematically seeking to crush dissent while waging an immoral war that could only be interpreted as imperialist and genocidal. The critical issue, which got to the heart of the New Left indictment of the United States, revolved around Zinn’s contention that the United States had dedicated itself to a culture of death in its foreign and domestic policies. Buckley found this too much.

It isn’t clear to me why it is that our society is being so railed against tonight. Certainly, of the many charges that were leveled against it by Mr. Zinn, the most serious was that we are a society dedicated to death. Which causes me to ask the question why are we such a society? If in fact I were convinced it were the case, I would say, no let’s not reform it, let’s not revolutionize against it, let’s destroy it. Because I can think of no other remedy that is appropriate to a society that is dedicated to death. But then I find myself asking why are we a society dedicated to death?

The closest Buckley can come to discerning how Zinn reached this conclusion was the alleged profiteering related to the military industrial complex. Buckley spent a minute or so refuting this claim, reminding a mostly hostile audience that defense industry profits and share prices were dropping, that publishing was a far more lucrative business and that historically big business had opposed defense spending as a means of generating profits. Well, if this did not explain Zinn’s conclusion, what did?

Is it that special kind of Satanic sadism which we know has at certain times in history actually occupied all of the energy of certain people? . . . despise Nixon as you will, but it is simply unrealistic to suppose that he gets his kicks out of administering a machine of death, and if he does he is certainly operating under extraordinary self restraint because, as we know, the weekly casualties have fallen by 80 percent since he became president.

So what are we engaged in? It seems to me that we are left finally with the following disjunction. Either Mr. Zinn is wrong that we are not a society dedicated to death, for failure to having given us any cogent evidence to that effect . . . or we must accept it as the kind of society which he has with his extraordinary palette painted for us and in which case it is especially shocking that there are so few people who have left it or have revolutionized against it. If we are that kind of nation we should not dally in a room like this, we should go out and do everything we can to destroy it. The only acceptable alternative as between those two is that to say that about this country is to say that which is perverse, to destroy the meaning of words.

By 1975 South Vietnam had fallen, millions of Vietnamese had fled in boats, and hell had been unleashed in Cambodia by the Communist Khmer Rouge. Communist Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1978 and American attention turned elsewhere. But Chomsky had found his calling and over the years has condemned every American intervention in any part of the world. He not only detests the United States, he can hardly conceal his disdain for anyone with credibility who has a different take on our country’s role in the world – say, former Czechoslovakian president Vaclav Havel, who appeared before the Congress and praised the United States for its commitment to freedom. In a vicious letter to Alexander Cockburn, Chomsky brought Vietnam and Eastern Europe together: "I don't mean to equate a Vietnamese villager to Vaclav Havel. For one thing, I doubt the former would have had the supreme hypocrisy and audacity to clothe his praise for the defenders of freedom with gushing about responsibility for the human race. It's also unnecessary to point out to the half dozen or so sane people who remain that in comparison to the conditions imposed by US tyranny and violence, East Europe under Russian rule was practically a paradise . . .." (As quoted in ACR, p. 61. Emphasis added.)

Or consider comments made in his book, Deterring Democracy:

. . . a different conception was needed as a rationale for the policies then being implemented to maintain US global domination and to provide a needed shot in the arm to high technology industry: the picture of a fearsome Soviet Union marching from strength to strength and posing an awesome challenge to Western Civilization. These illusions lacked credibility at the time, and became completely unsustainable through the next decade.
– p. 2.

Recall what was transpiring in the 1970s, the decade to which Chomsky refers in these sentences. The Soviet Union had supported a victorious communist government in Hanoi, which would impose its totalitarian rule upon both north and south and then invaded Cambodia. The communists in Cambodia unleashed mass death. Soviet troops were discovered in Cuba and the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan. In fact, the "hegemonic power," to use Chomsky's characterization of the United States, had watched, incapacitated, as communism stretched its muscles in Ethiopia, Angola, Nicaragua, Chile and El Salvador. A workers movement in Poland was trying to emerge, but was being repressed by the communist government there. There was little sign, in the 1970s, that the Soviet Union's appetite for meddling and outright repression had been satiated. Only a few years before, Soviet tanks had rolled into Prague.

Thomas Nichols, in The Anti-Chomsky Reader, sheds light on Chomsky's inability to grasp basic geopolitical realities.

. . . Chomsky also has a pressing tactical reason for avoiding the thickets of ideology. Specifically, if he were to grant that the Soviet leadership ever acted out of a real commitment to a Communist ideal, it would then force him to accept that it logically follows that the USSR was more of a danger than he has depicted — and perhaps more intimately related to his own putatively progressive agenda than he would like to admit. More damaging, it would also open the possibility that American policy might therefore have been grounded in the actions of men and women who were likewise motivated by their own set of ideals, an explanation that Chomsky, as a matter of first principles, has already excluded from consideration.
– p. 40.

As for Buckley, he would continue to contend that our efforts in Vietnam were noble even as a young former soldier, John Kerry, made a name for himself by testifying on Capitol Hill that the American war effort was immoral and criminal. Those words would come back to haunt him in 2004, when Kerry, a U.S. Senator, made his run as the Democratic nominee for president. Buckley debated Kerry on Firing Line in the early 1970s, but he was not won over to Kerry’s way of thinking. And in a speech made in 1971 he addressed Kerry’s charges directly, almost repeating his line to Zinn, that if American soldiers were a band of rapists, pillagers, torturers, kid killers and criminals, “let’s be done with it, and pray that a great flood or fire will destroy us . . ..”

He then seemed to address himself directly to Chomsky and Zinn:

John Kerry’s assault on this country did not rise full blown in his mind . . . It is the crystallization of an assault upon America which has been fostered over the years by an intellectual class given over to self-doubt and self-hatred . . . Is America worth it? That is what they are saying to you. And that is what so many Americans reacted to in the case of Lieutenant Calley. Mistakenly, they interpreted the conviction of Calley as yet another effort to discredit the military. And though they will not say it in so many words, they know that if there is no military, it will quickly follow that there will be no America, of the kind that they know, and that we know: the America that listens so patiently to its John Kerrys; the America that shouldered the burden of preserving oases of freedom after the great curtain came down with the Bolshevik subtlety that finally expressed itself in a wall, to block citizens of the socialist utopia from leaving, en route even to John Kerry’s America; the America that all but sank under the general obloquy, in order to stand by, in Southeast Asia, a commitment it had soberly made, to the cause of Containment. I shall listen patiently, decades hence, to those who argue that our commitment in Vietnam and our attempt to redeem it were tragically misconceived. I shall not listen to those who say that it was less than the highest tribute to our national motivation, to collective idealism, and to international rectitude.
– Let Us Talk, pages 182-183.

America and the rest of the world

Buckley made a distinction between Soviet dominance of Eastern Europe and US dominance of Central and South America. Was such a distinction real – or to put it another way, did the United States assert its dominance over Central and South America with the kind of brutality demonstrated by communist regimes on a consistent basis?

I would contend, as Buckley did, that one must begin with the larger question – what kind of societies existed under communism and what kinds of societies emerged from those spheres of influence dominated by the United States? One must begin by acknowledging a few hard facts that Buckley surely found uncomfortable. The United States intervened militarily in Central America numerous times, usually to put down local rebellions or to protect corporate property owned and operated by elites who were – at best – manipulating the local governments for their own profits. In these instances, American foreign policy was self-serving and destructive, particularly in the period prior to World War II. Various studies, including the much acclaimed book by Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions, suggest that our military and our foreign policy served special interests and big business at the expense of our nation's reputation and its long-term strategic interests.

But even here, the truth is far more complex than Chomsky concedes, so let us take a few moments to review the history of that troubled region. For starters, as LaFeber makes clear, the region was in constant turmoil long before the United States was playing a significant military or strategic role. Power struggles between strongmen in Guatemala and Nicaragua were ongoing. Peasant and native Indian rebellions were common. The first and most devastating colonization of the region was an exercise in Spanish power. The economic and political systems evolved over centuries, during which time disproportionate wealth accumulated to the few at the expense of the many. Those of Spanish ancestry were favored. (This was true not only in Central America, but also in the Philippines.)

Early American intervention was aimed less at subduing the region for economic or political purposes than it was to minimize the encroachment of the European powers into the affairs of the Western Hemisphere. It was not until the end of the 19th century that big business interests saw an opportunity to exploit the instability of the region. These business interventions involved a variety of players: the United Fruit Company, Major Keith, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Lee Christmas, and others who conspired with local elites to control valuable land for the production of cash crops. Peasants who had once subsisted off the land were often reduced to homeless migrant workers. Tobacco, bananas, coco and coffee generated great wealth for the region, but also consolidated the control of the economy in the hands of local elites and some American business interests.

A turning point came when the Nicaraguan rebel leader, Augusto Cesar Sandino, revolted in the 1920s against the American occupation of his country. After successfully bringing about the withdrawal of American troops, he was murdered by Anastasio Somoza, who eventually imposed his family's dictatorship on the country. This may well have been a missed opportunity for American foreign policy. Had the United States condemned the murder and insisted that the negotiations then underway continue, the situation might have been stabilized and improved. That is at best speculation, however, for the region — with the exception of Costa Rica — had little tradition of stable governance. In any case, short-term business and political interests prevailed and the Somoza regime survived for almost half a century.

Likewise, our interference in Guatemala in 1954 was questionable. Worried that the reform-minded Jacobo Arbenz government was weakly subservient to Soviet interests, the United States toppled a democratically elected government and helped destabilize an already shaky nation. On the other hand, Arbenz did not spend his exile years in Paris, but rather in the Soviet Union and in Cuba, a nation that less than a decade later would allow 40,000 Soviet troops on its soil and would begin positioning nuclear missiles aimed at the United States. That was precisely the kind of scenario that worried the Dulles brothers and Eisenhower when they chose to overthrow Arbenz. One can argue that it was the wrong thing to do, just as they could argue that Allende posed no real threat to democracy or freedom in Chile. But it is intellectually dishonest to pretend that the United States had no reason to be concerned about communist rule in such countries. Chomsky refuses to grant that such concerns were rooted in real-world events and a documented history of oppression. Nor will he point out that Chile evolved into a democracy under the hated Pinochet and that once Arbenz was removed from power, the United States withdrew its support of the United Fruit Company. Chomsky can't concede this because it would require admitting that perhaps US actions in the region have not been driven solely by the narrow business or power interests he cites as our motivation.

By the 1970s and 1980s, things began to come to a head. In Nicaragua, the Ortega brothers began to consolidate power, pushing aside democrats who had supported the toppling of the brutal Somoza regime. Even so, the Carter administration offered aid to Nicaragua, which the Sandinistas rejected as they secured their power and turned to a Soviet model. This was a standard and well-documented practice on the part of communists around the world.

The Sandanista regime did not — or was not allowed to — compile the kind of dismal human rights record of many other leftist governments, or some right-wing forces in Central America. Constant pressure put on the government by the United States and opposition forces, some of them democratic and others holdovers from the Somoza days, kept the regime on the defensive. Even so, the Sandanistas had made overtures to the Soviet Union for arms, had imprisoned opponents and abolished a variety of basic freedoms, including freedom of the press. The regime lost power in a free election in 1990. Since then, several elections have been held and Daniel Ortega has continued to participate freely in the political affairs of the country as a candidate and leader. He has been allowed to run openly on a progressive/reformist agenda, though he is still openly hostile to the United States. Nicaragua is not a perfect place, but it remains a relatively free and stable country.  Chomsky, as Horowitz observes in his article, "Noam Chomsky's Anti-American Obsession," also misrepresents the American intervention in Grenada, which was welcomed by most of the governments in the region and which liberated that nation from a radical-left Marxist government hell-bent on welcoming Soviet influence in the region. 

El Salvador also has had a tumultuous history and Chomsky always lists this country when he compiles his list of American crimes. The United States, he would have readers believe, was the major reason for the violence in that impoverished, war-torn nation. But even a left-minded historian like LaFeber rejects this notion. LeFaber observes that U.S. interest in El Salvador was not very significant prior to the 1960s when "North American investment and aid poured in. U.S. military aid more than doubled during the Alliance decade. But the North Americans arrived at a bad time. Already enduring one of the world's widest gaps between rich and poor, El Salvador was about to explode in bloodshed. Washington officials were caught in the middle of that explosion." (IR, p. 243).

In short, the United States did not seed the conflict that would embroil El Salvador for twelve years and lead to horrific violence. And for all the attempts by some on the left to lay this tragedy at the feet of the United States, the truth is that the Reagan administration brokered a compromise that helped save El Salvador. Chomsky and many on the left dismiss those efforts, calling the candidate supported by the United States, Jose Napoleon Duarte, a figurehead who acted as a U.S. proxy. But Duarte's victory over Roberto D'Aubuisson, a right-wing killer, helped stabilize the situation in El Salvador. The United Nations then had the opportunity to step in and negotiate an agreement that ushered in elections, dismantled death squads, and allowed the FMLA, leftist armed revolutionaries, to participate openly and freely in the electoral process, which it had previously refused to do. Today, the two major parties — Arena and the FMLA — are in close competition to rule the nation. Problems persist, but neither a right-wing repressive dictatorship nor a totalitarian left-wing government of the sort in Cuba came to power. Only through the distorted lens of Chomsky would such an outcome be unwelcome.

Chomsky always calls those who are supported by the United States terrorists (including those who opposed Castro), but the communists who overthrew Batista he calls guerillas, armed revolutionaries, liberators, democrats and even peasants. He deserves credit for consistency, if not accuracy. Why does Chomsky call Cubans trying to liberate their country from communist rule "terrorists" but refuse to use that term to describe those who would impose communist rule? Horowitz sums up the mindset of Chomsky and those who are his disciples. In their view, "Those who oppose socialism, Marxism, Communism, Chomskyism embody evil; they are the Great Satan himself. Chomskyism is, like its models, a religion of social hatred." (ACR, p. 197).

9/11

Chomsky published a bestseller, 9/11, in which he set forth his views that this unprovoked attack on the United States was unique only because the victims were Americans. After all, America, as he has argued for four decades, has been waging war against the oppressed people of the world since Europeans first stepped on the continent.

As we have shown, even acts that most of the world community considered legal and proper, such as the liberation of Kuwait and the toppling of the Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic, Chomsky considers criminal. That is because Chomsky considers America a criminal government. To offer one recent and timely example, Chomsky (and many on the left) tries to implicate the United States in the behavior of Saddam Hussein because we gave him minimal support during the 1980s and the Iraq/Iran war. To read Chomsky, you would think that the United States brought Saddam into power and kept him there, which is itself a falsehood. Nor does he inform readers that France, Russia and Germany were much more entangled with the regime than the United States. We are, by association, guilty of the crimes Saddam committed during that period. No allowance is made for efforts to soften regime behavior, to offset greater evils (the Iranian fundamentalist revolution threatened the region) or to pursue legitimate national interests. If you carry his logic to its natural end, the United States would be forced to disassociate from virtually every government on the planet in order to avoid being blamed for their policies or crimes.

But as David Horowitz and Ronald Radosh have shown, Chomsky's hatred of the United States is so severe that he presents even our liberation of Afghanistan, which virtually the entire world community supported, as an attempted genocide. That it prevented mass starvation, rid the country of a despotic regime, and put on the defensive one of the most notorious terrorist networks in history is all incidental to Chomsky. Chomsky endorses sovereignty for repressive regimes in Cuba, North Vietnam, Kosovo and Nicaragua under the Ortega brothers, but not for Suharto or the Saudis, or for Marcos, or for any other U.S. ally who ran a less than perfect democratic regime. Those who side with the United States are, by definition, anti-democratic and anti-human rights, a crude formulation that turns the truth upside down.

The blood of our fathers

I have dwelled at length on Chomsky’s worldview and I hope for justifiable reasons. It must be acknowledged that his has become increasingly the paradigm through which the Left, some third world nations and even much of Europe views our nation. Chomsky is as dogmatic and persistent as any Marxist of the 1920s and 1930s in his determination to fit all of history into a materialist paradigm and to condemn the United States unconditionally. To allow his attacks to go unanswered is to answer the question, is America worth it, in the negative. Neither Buckley nor those who were moved by his thought would ever accept this, and we justify America not by denying its sins. The commitment to change for the better is demonstrated not only by relentless criticism, but by the determined vindication of those qualities of our nation that are objectively and profoundly to be celebrated.

Buckley rejected the Chomsky paradigm for many reasons. To begin with, economic determinism, while a valid tool for analyzing global affairs, is limited in its ability to explain the realities of human existence. Human beings are complex and motivated by many forces – money, power, sexuality, class, race, gender, faith, lack of faith, idealism and the hatred of ideas. One could weight any of these as a motivating force. It was once said of the rabid anti-communist that he saw a communist behind every tree. Chomsky has been no less fanatical in his devotion to his paradigm, which insists there is a pro-American capitalist exploiter behind every tree. He is the ultimate ideologue, devoted to explaining history, or at least American history, through a single prism.

Let us admit that he does this with ingenuity. He has an answer for everything, but Chesterton rightly observed that only mad men have answers for everything. Can it be fairly said then that Chomsky is mad, or at least driven to madness when he attempts to comprehend the complex post-war world? Or could it be that Buckley was too naïve about the harsh forces at work in the name of anti-communism? Though he was certainly right on the big question of opposing a world communism dedicated to the destruction of free societies, Buckley would revisit some of those battles and concede that our policies were – at times – self-defeating. It is difficult, today, twenty years removed from the Cold War, to fully comprehend our actions in Iran or Guatemala or Vietnam. If the estimates on casualties in Vietnam are true (some put them as high as two to three million), there is no question the cure there may well have been worse than the communist disease. Buckley, in a discussion (1998) with Christopher Hitchens on Peter Robinson’s show, Uncommon Knowledge, acknowledged it might well have been better had we never gotten involved. That is not the same, however, as accepting Chomsky’s view that communism posed no real moral or physical threat to the West.

There is no way of knowing, as Michael Lind has argued, what might have happened had the North Vietnamese communist been allowed, unrestrained, to consolidate their rule. Can we be sure that Vietnam would not have served as a proxy for the Soviet Union and China, both of which provided critical support to the North Vietnamese? Might not all of Southeast Asia, having witnessed the failure of the West to resist, bent to communism ascendant? And given communist history, might not purges, concentration camps and mass starvation have been the fate of all of Southeast Asia? These are questions that cannot be dismissed as fantasies, however uncomfortable they are for Chomsky.

Buckley was rarely simplistic when he analyzed these issues. He had no delusions that Americans were better or worse as a people than others, for he understood, as a faithful Christian, that all men are fallen and flawed. His point was not that we were superior, but that the system of government bequeathed to us was rooted in the long march toward self-government and civil society. The totalitarian systems of fascism and communism, on the other hand, were dedicated to the proposition that state enemies are defined not by their individual character or actions, but by their birth. The communists were effectively no different than the Nazis. They collected into their hands all power – not only the power to manage the economy and to wage war, but even the power to allow others to think, to copulate, to raise a family, to imagine, to worship.

Chomsky can fantasize to his heart’s content about the sophisticated systems through which corporate and industrial America manufacture consent, and he can be credited with occasionally identifying a serious human rights problem our nation could have handled with greater care or compassion, but it is delusional to argue that there is not a profound difference between the world the United States and its allies sought to defend, and the systems of tyranny imposed by the Soviet Union, the Chinese communists or the North Korean tyrant.

Who won the debate? Chomsky supporters (you will find many of them on the web, even now claiming that Chomsky manhandled Buckley) will argue that Vietnam has been almost universally considered a mistake and that therefore Chomsky was right. Others will argue that Chomsky was wrong and Buckley right on the single most critical issue facing the free world over the past 40 years. Indeed, the list of countries that have gained their independence while under the umbrella of American power is long. Any reasonable historian seeking to weigh the pluses and minuses of America's record would take this into account. Chomsky, unfortunately, is not such an historian or commentator. He is an America hater; and an apologist for almost every form of tyranny America has opposed.

Historians will (or should) remember that when the Nazis fell and when the Berlin Wall came down, it was a vindication of those men and women, conservative and not, who were so often maligned by the Left and liberal literati, in whose minds Joseph McCarthy had become symbolically more dangerous than Joseph Stalin. Buckley, only a few short years before the fall of the Soviet system, with no way of knowing how soon the cause he led would achieve a critical victory, sought to distinguish between those who believed America worth saving and those who have used every American mistake as an excuse to undermine it from within, leveraging whatever post-modern or Marxist tools they can find to divide our nation into communities of resentment. Speaking directly to President Reagan, who was in the audience that day in 1985, Buckley concluded his remarks thus:

I was nineteen years old when the bomb went over Hiroshima, and last week I turned sixty. During the interval I have lived a free man in a free and sovereign country, and this only because we have husbanded a nuclear deterrent, and made clear our disposition to use it if necessary. I pray that my son, when he is sixty, and your son, when he is sixty, and the sons and daughters of our guests tonight will live in a world from which the great ugliness that has scarred our century has passed. Enjoying their freedoms, they will be grateful that, at the threatened nightfall, the blood of their fathers ran strong.