Photograph Source: Andrea Womack – Public Domain

“A man of stupendous brilliance.”
– Norman Finkelstein

“A gargantuan influence.”
– Chris Hedges

“ . . . brilliant . . . unswerving . . . relentless . . . heroic.”
– Arundhati Roy

“Preposterously thorough.”
– Edward Said

“[A] fierce talent.”
– Eduardo Galeano

“An intellectual cannon.”
– Israel Shamir

“A lighthouse over a sea of hogwash.”
– Kathleen Cleaver

He had a disarming frankness, a toothy grin, a dazzling mind that never rested.

He always felt completely out of tune with the world. At ten, he published his first article (in the school paper) – a lament on the fall of Barcelona to Franco. At thirteen, he was haunting anarchist bookstores in New York City and working a newsstand with his uncle, eagerly soaking up everything a brilliant mix of immigrant minds had to offer, by far the richest intellectual environment he was ever to encounter. At sixteen, he went off by himself at the news of Hiroshima, unable to comprehend anyone else’s reaction to the horror. At twenty-four, he abandoned a Harvard fellowship to live on a kibbutz, returning only by chance to fulfill an academic career. At twenty-eight, he revolutionized the field of linguistics with his book, Syntactic Structures. At twenty-nine, he became associate professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (and full professor three years later), though his competence with technology was limited to the tape recorder. At thirty-five, he threw himself into anti-war protest, giving talks, writing letters and articles, promoting teach-ins, and helping to organize student demonstrations and draft resistance against the Vietnam War. At thirty-eight, he risked a five-year jail term protesting at the Pentagon, spending the night in jail alongside Norman Mailer, who described him in Armies of the Night as “a slim sharp-featured man with an ascetic expression, and an air of gentle but absolute moral integrity.”[1]At forty, he was the only white face in the crowd at Fred Hampton’s funeral, after the young Black Panther leader was gunned down by the FBI in a Gestapo-style raid.[2]

Such was the early life of America’s greatest dissident intellectual, raised in a deeply anti-Semitic German-Irish neighborhood in Quaker Philadelphia, later awarded an elite linguistics professorship at the center of the Pentagon system at MIT.

Fulfilling a brilliant academic career at the pinnacle of the Ivory Tower, Chomsky railed against his fellow intellectuals’ subservience to power, dismissing pious declarations of Washington’s alleged commitment to freedom, equality, and democracy with abundant demonstrations of its actual values – greed, domination, and deceit. He forensically examined the claim that the establishment media operate as an objective check on the excesses of the powerful, marshalling overwhelming evidence showing that in fact they are a propaganda service working on their behalf. Laboriously debunking the flood of lies and distortions targeting mass audiences, he transformed dangerous misperceptions of U.S. benevolence into insightful comprehension of imperial reality.

Thus we learned that the Vietnam War was not a noble quest to defend freedom, but a quasi-genocidal assault on a former French colony designed to subjugate a defenseless peasantry; that Israel was not a glorious example of uniquely decent democratic socialism, but a modern Sparta on a path to self-destruction; that the Cold War was not a contest between freedom and slavery, but a shared opposition to independent nationalism, in which a galaxy of neo-Nazi U.S. client states masqueraded as the “Free World.”[3]

Such insights were anathema in academia, and Chomsky quickly earned a reputation as a political crank among his more subservient colleagues (the vast majority), even as he gained considerable stature as a public intellectual in American society at large and internationally. These contrasting perceptions of his credibility made for a striking schizophrenia in how he was evaluated: dismissed as a lunatic by pundits and professors, Chomsky’s political lectures were sold out years in advance to overflow general audiences throughout the world.

Elite commentators who wrote him off as a novice for his lack of credentials in political science contradicted themselves by recognizing him as a genius for his linguistics work, though he had no formal credentials in that field either. Nevertheless, they were right about his genius. When Chomsky first entered linguistics the prevailing model of language acquisition was behaviorist, the assumption being that children acquire language by imitation and “reinforcement” (gratifying responses from others for the correct use of language), which Chomsky immediately realized couldn’t begin to account for the richness of even the simplest language use – obvious from an early age in all healthy children – who routinely manifest patterns of use they’ve never heard before.

When Chomsky subjected the behaviorist paradigm to rational scrutiny it promptly collapsed, replaced by recognition that language capacity is actually innate and a product of maturation, emerging at an appropriate stage of biological development in the same way that secondary sex characteristics not evident in childhood emerge during puberty. Like so many other Chomsky insights, the idea that language capacity is part of the unfolding of a genetic program seems rather obvious in retrospect, but in the 1950s it was a revolutionary thought, vaulting the young MIT professor to international academic stardom as the most penetrating thinker in a field his un-credentialed insights utterly transformed.[4]

At the time, Chomsky appeared to be living the perfect life from a purely personal standpoint. He had fascinating work, professional acclaim, lifetime economic security, and a loving marriage with young children growing up in a beautiful suburb of Boston, an ideal balance of personal and professional fulfillment. But just then a dark cloud called Vietnam appeared on the horizon, and Chomsky – with supreme reluctance – launched himself into a major activist career, sacrificing nearly all of his personal life along the way.[5]

In the Eisenhower years the U.S. had relied on mercenaries and client groups to attack the Vietminh, a communist-led nationalist force that had fought the French and was seeking South Vietnamese independence with the ultimate goal of a re-unification of South and North Vietnam through national elections. Though the U.S. was systematically murdering its leaders, the Vietminh did not respond to the violence directed against them for many years. Finally, in 1959, came an authorization allowing the Vietminh to use force in self-defense, at which point the South Vietnamese government (U.S. client state) collapsed, as its monopoly of force was all it had had to sustain itself in power.

Plans for de-colonization proceeded. The National Liberation Front was formed, and in its founding program it called for South Vietnamese independence and the formation of a neutral bloc consisting of Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam, with the ultimate goal of peacefully unifying all of Vietnam. At that point there were no North Vietnamese forces in the South, and no North-South military conflict.[6] That would emerge later, as a direct result of U.S. insistence on subjugating the South.

To head off the political threat of South Vietnamese independence, President Kennedy sent the U.S. Air Force to bomb rural South Vietnam in October 1962 and drive the villagers into “strategic hamlets” (concentration camps), in order to separate them from the nationalist guerrilla movement Pentagon documents conceded they were willingly supporting. This overt act of U.S. aggression was noted in the press, but without a flicker of public protest, which would only come years later.[7]

When Chomsky first began speaking out on Vietnam, venues were scarce and public support for the effort virtually nil. He was actually grateful for the customary police presence, which prevented him from getting beaten up. “In those days, protests against the war meant speaking several nights a week at a church to an audience of half a dozen people,” Chomsky remembered years later, “mostly bored or hostile, or at someone’s home where a few people might be gathered, or at a meeting at a college that included the topics of Vietnam, Iran, Central America, and nuclear arms, in the hope that maybe participants would outnumber the organizers.”[8] The quality of his analysis was extraordinary and Chomsky placed himself “in the very first rank” of war critics (Christopher Hitchens) from the start, helping to spark a mass anti-war movement over the next several years.[9] Unlike “pragmatic” opponents of the war, who justified U.S. imperialism in principle but feared it would not bring military victory in Vietnam, Chomsky called out U.S. aggression by name, sided with its victims, and urged the war be terminated without pre-conditions.

Though a radical departure from establishment orthodoxy, Chomsky’s positions on the war were always carefully thought out, never blindly oppositional. For example, though he opposed the drafting of young men to fight in a criminal war, he was not opposed to a draft per se. In fact, he emphasized that a draft meant that soldiers could not be kept insulated from the civilian society of which they were a part, leading to what he regarded as an admirable collapse of soldier morale when the anti-war movement exposed U.S. intervention in Vietnam as naked aggression. When the draft was terminated in 1973, the Pentagon shifted to a “volunteer” army, that is, a mercenary army of the poor and low-income, which Chomsky regarded as one much less likely to be affected by popular anti-war agitation, even aside from the more serious issue of unjustly assigning responsibility for “national defense” to the most economically exploited sector of the population. For these reasons he felt that a universal draft was to be preferred to a “volunteer” army brought into being by strongly coercive economic forces.[10]

Unlike his establishment critics,........

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