As the Vietnam War rages, an MIT linguist by the name of Noam Chomsky throws a stone into the pond with the publication of a short titled essay The responsibility of intellectuals in the pages of New York Review of Books. Several years later, the work has just been published in French for the first time with new texts and reflections on the current state of the world.
In 1966, Chomsky gave a lecture to Harvard students. The conflict intensified in Southeast Asia and the academic, then little known to the general public, inveighed against academics and scientists, reproaching them for their submission to political power. This speech, condensed from “Chomskyan” thought, will serve as the basis for this work considered to be the most influential of anti-war literature of the Vietnam War period.
In the same vein as Dwight Macdonald, an influential editor and publisher who had already pondered the question of responsibility for the war in a series of articles published in 1945 in the journal PoliticsChomsky then sheds light on several troubling questions about the relationship of intellectuals with capitalist democracies.
The first victim of a war is the truth, said the writer Rudyard Kipling. What then are the particular moral responsibilities of intellectuals, given the unique privileges they enjoy? wonders Chomsky.
The answer seems obvious: intellectuals must “tell the truth and denounce the lies”, believes the American activist. The latter challenges those who have “the leisure, the infrastructure and the training necessary to seek the truth which hides behind the veil of distortion and alteration, of ideology and of class interest through which the events of the current story are presented”.
Indeed, for Chomsky, Western intellectuals who refuse to point out the crimes of Western powers bear a greater fault than those who live under dictatorship, since the latter expose themselves to heavy sanctions “while ours have only their servility to assert”.
Readers of Chomsky will recognize his brash but methodical style in which he sheds light on the gap between the official rhetoric and the practice of successive American governments, whether Democratic or Republican.
As such, the book is punctuated with reflections on American imperialism, interventions in Latin America, particularly in Chile, with the overthrow of democratically elected President Salvador Allende, supported by the CIA. The author lays bare the speeches relayed by the intellectuals of the time who are content to take up the doxa of the officials.
With this essay, Noam Chomsky lays the first milestones of his political thought. The author of Who leads the world? over the pages denounces with a direct and unadorned tone what he calls the “hypocritical moralism of the past”. He also points to the destructive acts of American governments around the world and the sometimes complicit silence of certain conformist thinkers of the time.
The interest of this well-argued short essay, which has obviously not aged, lies in its incredible topicality. The work also benefits from an edition supplemented by the comments and adaptations that the author gave on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday. Chomsky thus discusses the famous “war against terrorism” and the “brutal interrogations” committed on prisoners during the Bush years (2001-2009). Chomsky devotes a long passage to the consequences of September 11, 2001, which allowed the militarization of the United States to unprecedented levels.