Forever a dissident – Chomsky’s first visit to the mainland

 

Noam Chomsky speaks at Peking University about the future and world order. CFP Photo

 

By He Jianwei

Linguist, philosopher and political activist Noam Chomsky is one of the most influential intellectuals of the last half-century.

Last Friday, Chomsky spoke about world order at Peking University on his first visit to the mainland. Many Chinese intellectuals believe the lasting influence of his visit will be comparable to the legacy of Bertrand Russell and John Dewey early last century.

Clad in a blue shirt and silver tie, the gray-haired 82-year-old professor spoke in his characteristic slow, low voice as he delivered his lecture “Contours of the World: Continuities and Changes.”

The lecture, somewhat a stern warning, identified environmental catastrophe and nuclear power as the two greatest threats to humankind.

Chomsky blamed the consumer economy and businesses’ unyielding push for short-term profits and high Gross Domestic Product (GDP) at any cost for the most rapid destruction of environments around the world.

Even before the Copenhagen Climate Conference last year that was intended to address environmental disaster, Chomsky knew it would be a failure and that none of its decisions would be in line with the severity of the crisis.

“Rich countries (are unwilling) to provide adequate assistance to the developing world and to control their own destructive reliance on fossil fuels – in part the result of huge state-corporate social engineering programs designed over many years to magnify that reliance, and with it the profits of the energy and manufacturing industries,” he said.

While Chomsky lauded China for its spectacular development following national reform and opening in 1978, he said the government must not neglect the resulting pollution and social inequalities.

To combat the second nuclear danger, Chomsky said immediate action was required to reduce the number of and proliferation of weapons. One of the most important steps is the establishment of nuclear weapons free zones (NWFZ), he said.

He said a new Middle East NWFZ should be set up to include Israel, Iran and all US forces operating in the region.

“The year 2010 seems to be the year for Iran, because the Western media announced that Iran would be the greatest danger,” he said. “In the West, Israel’s nuclear weapons are not considered a threat, just as our own are not.”

Since the George W. Bush administration, the US has grown to become the world’s largest supplier of dangerous arms and military training, Chomsky said. The country was active in 20 of the world’s 27 major wars as of 2007.

When asked what his future plans are, Chomsky said: “Trying to do something about the suffering and desperate fate of a huge number of people and, by now, the entire species.”

While he will continue his research in linguistics, philosophy and cognitive science, he said his greater “commitments remain.”

Chomsky is regarded as the father of modern linguistics for his theory of transformational grammar released in the 1950s. However, since the Vietnam War in the 1960s, Chomsky’s image has become that of a political dissident.

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to scholarly parents, Chomsky describes his childhood neighborhood as a Jewish ghetto where he got an early taste of anti-Semitism.

He developed a considerable awareness of international politics, and by his early teens that awareness led Chomsky to identify with anarchist philosophy and politics.

According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, an index of 1,100 of the world’s leading arts and humanities journals, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar between the years 1980 and 1992. He was the eighth most-cited source.

In 2005, he was voted as the top intellectual by Prospect magazine, followed by Italian writer and academic Umberto Eco, British professor Richard Dawkins and Czech playwright Vaclav Havel.