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The Responsibility of Intellectuals The Responsibility of Intellectuals EthicsTheCanada Responsibility and in the FrameAesthetics ofofCopyright, TranslationIntellectuals Collections and the Image of Canada, 1895– 1924 ExploringReflections the by Work Noam of ChomskyAtxaga, Kundera and others and Semprún after 50 years HarrietPhilip J. Hatfield Hulme Edited by Nicholas Allott, Chris Knight and Neil Smith 00-UCL_ETHICS&AESTHETICS_i-278.indd9781787353008_Canada-in-the-Frame_pi-208.indd 3 3 11-Jun-1819/10/2018 4:56:18 09:50PM First published in 2019 by UCL Press University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT Available to download free: www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press Text © Contributors, 2019 Images © Copyright holders named in captions, 2019 The authors have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as authors of this work. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library. This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Non-derivative 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work for personal and non-commercial use providing author and publisher attribution is clearly stated. Attribution should include the following information: Allott, N., Knight, C. and Smith, N. (eds). The Responsibility of Intellectuals: Reflections by Noam Chomsky and others after 50 years. London: UCL Press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.14324/ 111.9781787355514 Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ Any third-party material in this book is published under the book’s Creative Commons license unless indicated otherwise in the credit line to the material. If you would like to re-use any third-party material not covered by the book’s Creative Commons license, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. ISBN: 978-1-78735-553-8 (Hbk.) ISBN: 978-1-78735-552-1 (Pbk.) ISBN: 978-1-78735-551-4 (PDF) ISBN: 978-1-78735-554-5 (epub) ISBN: 978-1-78735-555-2 (mobi) DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787355514 Contents List of figures vii Contributors viii Preface x Introduction: ‘The Responsibility of Intellectuals’: what it does and does not say 1 Nicholas Allott Remarks on the historical context of the essay ‘The Responsibility of Intellectuals’ 5 Noam Chomsky 1 Reflections on Chomsky’s ‘The Responsibility of Intellectuals’ 7 Neil Smith and Amahl Smith 2 ‘I don’t want no peace’– a black, Jewish activist’s take on the responsibility of intellectuals 26 Jackie Walker 3 The responsibility of intellectuals in the era of bounded rationality and Democracy for Realists 32 Nicholas Allott 4 The propaganda model and the British nuclear weapons debate 45 Milan Rai 5 Speaking truth to power – from within the heart of the empire 53 Chris Knight 6 The abdication of responsibility 71 Craig Murray 7 Replies and commentary 75 Noam Chomsky CoNtENtS v 8 Conference Q&A 102 Noam Chomsky Bibliography 121 Index 138 vi tHE RESPoNSIBILItY oF INtELLECtUALS List of figures Fig. 5.1 Jerome Wiesner (far left), the scientist who recruited Chomsky to MIT, with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and Vice-President Lyndon Johnson in the White House, 1961. (Courtesy of White House Photographs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston. Photo: Abbie Rowe) 64 Fig. 5.2 Preparation for nuclear war: the SAGE (Semi- Automatic Ground Environment) air defense system. In the 1960s, the Pentagon sponsored linguists in the hope of making such computer systems easier to use. (Photo: Andreas Feininger/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images) 64 Fig. 5.3 Protesters demonstrate outside one of MIT’s nuclear missile laboratories, November 1969. (Courtesy of MIT Museum, Cambridge, MA) 65 Fig. 5.4 Police disperse protesters, November 1969. (Courtesy of MIT Museum, Cambridge, MA) 65 Fig. 5.5 Building the US nuclear stockpile: General James McCormack (in uniform), a future vice-president at MIT, next to Robert Oppenheimer (second on the left), on the way to Los Alamos, 1947. (Photo: US Dept of Energy, Washington, DC) 66 Fig. 5.6 Former MIT Provost, and future Director of the CIA, John Deutch at the Pentagon. (Photo: James E. Jackson, 12 April 1993. US Department of Defense, Washington, DC. The appearance of US Department of Defense (DoD) visual information does not imply or constitute DoD endorsement) 66 LISt oF FIgURES vii Contributors Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and laureate professor at the University of Arizona, and probably the most prominent linguist in history. His ideas have revolutionised the study of language and have had a profound impact on psychology, philosophy and intellectual life more broadly. He is also a longstanding political activist and leading critic of US foreign policy. His political work includes many books, hundreds of articles, and countless speeches, interviews, letters and emails. Nicholas Allott is senior lecturer in English language at the University of Oslo. Previously he has been research fellow at CSMN, University of Oslo, and a teaching fellow at UCL, where he completed his PhD in linguistics in 2008. His research interests include pragmatics, semantics of natural languages, legal language and interpretation, and philosophy of linguistics. He is co-author of Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Chris Knight is a research fellow at UCL, a longstanding political activist and the author of Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture (Yale University Press, 1995) and Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics (Yale University Press, 2016). He is co-founder of EVOLANG, the interdisciplinary conference series on the evolution of language, and has co-edited several books on human cultural origins. Craig Murray is a writer and activist. He is the author of Murder in Samarkand (Mainstream Publishing, 2006) and other non-fiction best- sellers, and was the Rector of Dundee University. He became well known to the public when he resigned as British ambassador to Uzbekistan in protest against British collusion with the Uzbek dictatorship during the ‘war on terror’. For this act of whistleblowing, he received the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence in 2006. Milan Rai is a longstanding anti-war activist and writer. He is the author of several books including Chomsky’s Politics (Verso, 1995), the only viii tHE RESPoNSIBILItY oF INtELLECtUALS monograph on the subject, and 7/7: The London Bombings, Islam and the Iraq War (Pluto, 2006). He has been co-editor of Peace News since 2007. Amahl Smith is a charity finance director. He is a former treasurer of Amnesty International UK and of the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre. Neil Smith is emeritus professor of linguistics at UCL. His first career was as an Africanist and from 1964 to 1972 he was Lecturer in West African languages at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. He was then appointed head of linguistics at UCL, a position he kept until his retirement in 2006. He is best known for his research on first language acquisition, especially the acquisition of phonology; for his investiga- tion over many years into the remarkable abilities of a polyglot savant, Christopher; and for his work on Chomsky. He is co-author of Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and has also written a number of books of essays popularising linguistics. Jackie Walker is a black, Jewish activist and author, a founding member of Jewish Voice for Labour, a defender of Palestinian rights, a long- standing campaigner against racism and the former Vice-Chair of Momentum, the left-wing movement in the British Labour Party. Author of the acclaimed family memoir Pilgrim State (Sceptre, 2008), she has recently staged a one-woman show, The Lynching, designed to combat racism – including antisemitism – in certain sectors of British political life. Like Chomsky, Walker has been criticised for voicing perspectives on Israel and aspects of Jewish history that prominent supporters of Israel have described as controversial or even antisemitic. In 2016, allegations of this kind, which Walker strongly rejects, led to her suspension from the Labour Party. Chomsky is one of a number of Jewish intellectuals to have lent public support to her campaign to be reinstated. CoNtRIBUtoRS ix Preface With the publication of ‘The Responsibility of Intellectuals’ in the New York Review of Books in February 1967, Noam Chomsky burst onto the US political scene as a leading critic of the war in Vietnam. The essay was then republished many times, starting with its inclusion in Chomsky’s first political book, American Power and the New Mandarins, in 1969. ‘The Responsibility of Intellectuals’ has aptly been described as ‘the single most influential piece of anti-war literature’ of the Vietnam period.1 By the late 1960s, Chomsky had been involved in the nascent anti-war movement for some time. But until the essay appeared he was known to the wider public, if at all, only for his ground-breaking work in linguistics. Since then, Chomsky has been a leading public intellectual, publishing hundreds of essays and dozens of books and giving thousands of talks and interviews. By 2004, even the New York Times – not the greatest fan of Chomsky’s political writings – had to admit that ‘if book sales are any standard to go by, he may be the most widely read American voice on foreign policy on the planet today’.2 Chomsky’s political commentary has ranged from US wars in Indochina, Latin America and the Middle East to analyses of western political and economic policy more broadly. He is also known for his work on the special role of the media in modern democracies, how they ‘manufacture consent’ by keeping certain views and topics off the agenda.
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