Chomsky, Epstein, Parenti and the US
Ashraf Jehangir Qazi

As a life-long admirer of Noam Chomsky, I have been deeply saddened by the revelations of the Epstein files that show him to have been a close friend and confidante of Epstein even after his conviction as a paedophile blackmailer and Mossad agent. Even the severest critics of Chomsky, such as the New York Times, were compelled to publicly acknowledge that he was the world’s most influential public intellectual who, after the Bible and Shakespeare, was the most cited intellectual in the history of the western world. He has been nothing less than an intellectual terrorist for the ‘tout’ intellectual establishment of the US-led capitalist imperialist world and its ruling satellites spread across the globe. According to Penguin, “For well over half a century Noam Chomsky has committed himself to exposing governing ideologies and criticising his country’s unchecked use of military power. At once thorough and devastating, urgent and provocative.” Not calculated to make any friends in the US deep state and establishment! According to Arundhati Roy, “Chomsky is one of a small band of individuals fighting a whole industry. And that makes him not only brilliant, but heroic.” According to the New York Times Book Review, “Chomsky is a global phenomenon…he may be the most widely read American voice on foreign policy on the planet.” And that made him persona non grata in the State Department, and terrifying for the American Masters of the Universe!
Chomsky was essentially a scientist who reinvented the science of linguistics, which was as profound as the modern revolutions in western and much of global thinking brought about by Newton, Darwin, Marx, Freud and Einstein. Even though Chomsky had an encyclopedic knowledge of philosophy, history and politics, he did not regard himself as a philosopher or ideologist. He was a gadfly in the tradition of the prophets of the Old Testament, and Socrates. Question everything! You will find most ruler-approved sages and experts have no answer. Accordingly, Chomsky has essentially been a humanist who has sought to address and reduce the scale of social injustice and human suffering in the world, particularly in the aftermath of the US nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the emergence of the US as a global hegemon after World War II; the end of the Cold War that confirmed the US as the unchallenged leader of a unipolar world; 9/11 which gave carte blanche to the US through its phony War on Terrorism to militarily and economically terrorise the world in order to suppress any resistance anywhere to its extractive global hegemony, and the emergence of climate change as a mortal threat to human civilisation, primarily as a result of US-led profit maximising and globally polluting predatory capitalism – a charge that has been abundantly and openly reconfirmed by Trump’s deliberate, comprehensive and criminal acceleration of global warming. Mark Carney’s much celebrated recent speech at Davos was at best a weak echo of Chomsky’s message over the decades.
In his pursuit of a better world Chomsky has authored over 150 books apart from countless articles and talks on a whole range of scientific, political, cultural and social issues. Eqbal Ahmad who, along with Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Sibte Hassan, Hamza Alavi, Abid Hassan Manto, etc., was among Pakistan’s most renowned public intellectuals once admiringly complained of Chomsky (who in turn was an admirer of Eqbal) that he was so relentlessly logical, factual and convincing in his arguments that he left his interlocutors – whether sympathetic or critical –speechless. The one exception that comes to mind was his famous debate with Foucault in which the latter held his own even though I thought Chomsky certainly had the better of the argument. Chomsky, incidentally, had very little regard for the contemporary French intellectual tradition since its public intellectuals behaved and were received like film stars even though their mind blowing arguments and opinions seldom stood the test of serious scrutiny. For example, he observed that logical positivism, which was well known around the world, was almost unknown in France! However, the one discussion that I would have wished to witness but which never happened would have been between Chomsky and Michael Parenti, whose criticisms of Chomsky’s criticisms of Marxism are not easily brushed aside. Nevertheless, Chomsky in his defence might have cited Engels, Marx’s close associate, who said Marx himself denied he was a Marxist! Scientists produce falsifiable theories instead of ideologies that presume to be immune to falsification.
Chomsky seemed to remember every book he had read – and they numbered in the thousands – and he seemed able to recall whole passages from almost any of them in support of his arguments. And yet his opinions were always his own. They were just enormously informed opinions. Typically, his favourite public intellectuals were the great humanists and educationists of the past and more contemporary times from Socrates to Spinoza to Hume to Goethe to Humboldt to Bakunin to Dewey to Russell.
I first heard of Chomsky when I was a young third secretary in the Pakistan High Commission in London during the Vietnam War. His first political book, American Power and the New Mandarins had come out, which taught me that whatever knowledge of international affairs I had picked up, including my reservations about US policies in the Subcontinent and the Middle East, was utterly inadequate to understand the real drivers of US foreign policy and international affairs.
Since then I have had the opportunity to meet Chomsky on a few occasions. The first was in New Delhi and later in Lexington at his home outside Boston in the US. Meanwhile, I have accumulated a small library of Chomsky’s books and articles. Despite his formidable reputation I found him genuinely modest and interested in my views, especially during the period when I was the UN Secretary General’s Special Representative (SRSG) in Iraq, and later Sudan. On one occasion, he mentioned how amused he was to read a comment by my brother-in-law, Sardar Khair Bux Marri, about how puzzling it was that the US produced such disreputable Presidents and yet was able to produce such an admirable intellectual like Noam Chomsky! At my request he gave me a signed copy of one of his books for Khair Bux in appreciation of his struggle for the rights of his people. Elsewhere, I have mentioned that when I was the UN SRSG in Iraq, and later Sudan, I met Chomsky whenever I visited the US and he always gave me the impression of being far more interested in my views than in informing me of his own – not that he ever hesitated to answer my queries in detail. Getting to know Chomsky was, accordingly, a highlight of my stay in the US.
It is in this context that I learned of Chomsky’s relationship with Epstein when it first came to light some years back before Chomsky suffered his stroke that left him unable to speak or write. Chomsky had somewhat brusquely if not convincingly explained away the relationship. However, since his stroke further revelations have recently indicated how close they had become although there is no suggestion that Chomsky ever participated in any of the disgusting paedophile entrapment orgies organised by Epstein on behalf of Israel’s Mossad. Chomsky was, moreover, well into his eighties when he first got to know Epstein, apart from the fact that he has never ever been accused of being a sexual pervert.
Chomsky’s wife, Valeria, has recently explained how they were taken in by Epstein’s interest in politics and science as well as his contacts with prominent persons whose views on a range of subjects interested Chomsky. She claims they had no idea of the extent of Epstein’s heinous activities and apologised for being so completely deceived. Earlier, before his illness, Chomsky made clear he knew of Epstein’s conviction on “serious charges” but felt that once a convict had served his sentence and paid his debt to society he was entitled to be received back into it. Moreover, there were far worse villains in the world whose company very prominent persons publicly sought.
However, many of Chomsky’s close associates like Vijay Prashad and Chris Hedges have refused to accept these explanations as credible. They argue that it is not possible to believe Chomsky had no idea of the extent of Epstein’s satanic activities. His correspondence and financial dealings with Epstein according to such disappointed friends and admirers left little room for them to doubt that at the very least Chomsky had exercised very poor judgment, and at worst he had cynically ignored the trauma of Epstein’s female child victims. Much as I would like to be able to, I cannot dismiss these views although some extremely respected associates of Chomsky do not go to the extent of Hedges and Prashad in their criticisms of Chomsky’s lapses. For example, Norman Finkelstein, who rebuffed Epstein’s attempts to befriend him, even after the revelations and despite his disappointment, nevertheless continues to describe Chomsky as “a stupendous force of nature and an indefatigable force for good.”
What is particularly galling is the extent to which many liberal and leftist commentators have gone to discredit the entire body of Chomsky’s intellectual output as a result of the Epstein files. Many of them have suggested Chomsky was right from the start a fake leftist planted by the US deep state to challenge the genuine Marxist left and divide progressive liberal critics of US foreign and economic policies. In other words, the focus of criticisms of Chomsky have very quickly changed from legitimate outrage over Chomsky’s apparent condoning or underplaying of Epstein’s paedophilia to the wholesale discrediting of the entire corpus of his intellectual output. It is easy to smell a rat in this transition.
While I am indeed sorry to have to concede that Chomsky, despite his declining years, merits censure for his unconscionable decision to befriend a child molesting fiend, that does not, indeed cannot, translate into a rubbishing of the incomparable value of his intellectual output, which derives its value from an uncompromising moral imperative to expose injustice and evil in all its manifestations. Why then, one might ask, did this moral imperative not extend to a refusal to have anything to do with a monster like Epstein, just as Finkelstein rebuffed Epstein’s approaches to him? One can only speculate upon possible reasons, including his advanced age, his belief in the rehabilitation of people who have served their sentences, his lack of knowledge of Epstein’s continued evil even after his return to society, his stubborn refusal to be morally dictated to even by his own children, the influence of his current wife whom he deeply loves for having brought him a new lease of life after the tragic illness and death of Carol, his first wife. Valeria, his current wife, was apparently even more charmed by and fond of Epstein.
There is another aspect to this sorry episode that needs to be considered. This is the historically significant role of Chomsky in irrefutably exposing in phenomenal detail the global evil of US elitist and deepstate driven neo-imperialist extractive and militarist policies that have blighted and/or terminated the lives of millions upon millions of innocent people around the world. It is no exaggeration to say that two major obstacles to the US dream of exclusive and perpetual global hegemony have been the geo-strategic, geo-political, and geo-economic rise of China on the one hand, and the global intellectual influence of Chomsky that has challenged the soft power and moral image of the US on the other. The strategic containment of China and the intellectual and moral discrediting of Chomsky are, accordingly, complementary policies. The irony here is that China and Chomsky have not been mutual admirers.
One of the more amusing aspects of the current intellectual assault on Chomsky by phony liberals and progressives is the way they counterpose Michael Parenti’s views to Chomsky’s although they hardly ever mentioned Parenti during his lifetime. Parenti was indeed a major Marxist intellectual and as mentioned earlier he took issue with Chomsky, especially in his articles “Another View of Chomsky” and “Left Anticommunism: the Unkindest Cut”. Many of Parenti’s criticisms of Chomsky’s criticism of “left intellectuals” are substantial even if they are not entirely convincing. In one of his severest criticisms of Chomsky’s “political underdevelopment”, Parenti says, “Chomsky appeals to the young and not so young. For he can evade all the hard questions about organised struggle, the search for a revolutionary path, the need to develop and sustain a mass resistance, the necessity of developing armed socialist state power that can defend itself against the capitalist counterrevolutionary onslaught, and all the attendant problems, abuses, mistakes, victories, defeats, and crimes of Communist revolutionary countries and their allies.” Parenti concludes: “Bereft of a dialectical grasp of class power and class struggle, Chomsky and others have no critical defence against the ideological anti-Communism that inundates the Western world, especially the United States. This is why when talking about the corporations, Chomsky can sound as good as Ralph Nader, and when talking about existing Communist movements and society, he can sound as bad as any right-wing pundit. In sum, I cannot join in heaping unqualified praise upon Chomsky’s views.”
Chomsky, however, is not a Marxist and he is most certainly anti-Leninist. He is a non-Marxist anarchist-socialist who ultimately, if not immediately, rejects all authority, including state authority that refuses to justify itself to those from whom it demands unquestioning fidelity and acceptance of its authority. In practical terms this is more a philosophical difference than a practical one as Parenti also refuses to concede the legitimacy of Stalinism although he correctly cites western anti-Russian and anti-Soviet interventionist policies for its rise. While both Parenti and Chomsky differed with Rosa Luxemburg’s views, they would have agreed with her that the world is confronted with “a fundamental choice between socialism and barbarity.” Trump has today confirmed the enduring validity of Luxemburg’s profound insight.
Another possible criticism of Parenti’s observations is that, contrary to what he says, Chomsky has not just been an armchair intellectual radical. He has been an untiring activist on behalf of persecuted peoples all over the world. The book, Chomsky for Activists details his life-long activism including his directions for activists today. One of Chomsky’s last books, Surviving the Twenty First Century, is an extended discussion between him and Jose “Pepe” Mujica, who was a Tupamaros guerrilla during the Uruguayan dictatorship and spent almost 15 years in prison. Subsequently he became President of Uruguay. He was every bit a socialist revolutionary as much as Parenti. While there was obvious mutual admiration between Chomsky and Mujica, there was a much cooler relationship laced with mutual criticism between Chomsky and Parenti. Temperaments and circumstances as much as ideology account for such variations.
In conclusion, the coming days will witness further releases of the Epstein files, which might throw more light on Chomsky’s relationship with Epstein. While Chomsky’s judgment in his declining years was indeed unfortunate, I believe history will acknowledge his nonpareil contribution to the global struggle for a better and safer world against the so-called ‘Masters of the Universe’. Despite his failings, Chomsky has been and his legacy will remain the political conscience of the world that might yet help it to halt and reverse time on the Doomsday Clock. When asked how he would like to be remembered, Chomsky answered: as someone who did his best. He did, and he will be.