Chomsky ponders Trump 'False Flag' Op

As you may know, I'm a big advocate of the work of Noam Chomsky. His writing and talks changed my political outlook. I discovered Chomsky when I was 17 and it quickly set me on the course to where I am today. Though I am no longer a left-wing libertarian, I am still a socialist and I think there are important lessons to be drawn from the anarchist tradition. Chomsky is a key figure in contemporary anarchism.

One of the main attractions of Chomsky's work is the level of moral clarity and intellectual honesty. He cuts through the bone to the marrow with precision. Going to the fundamentals of a political question is the cornerstone of radical thought. As an analytical critic Chomsky takes apart US foreign policy and unravels its claims before our eyes. It's a thankless task in many ways. Another side of this has been Chomsky's opposition to 9/11 conspiracism on the left.

Yet in a recent interview Noam Chomsky contradicts his past record on combating conspiracy theories. He suggests that the Trump administration may opt for a 'false flag' operation to save its right-wing agenda. When I first heard about this I didn't believe it until I read the Alter-Net interview. In his own words, Chomsky says: "I think that we shouldn't put aside the possibility that there would be some kind of staged or alleged terrorist act, which can change the country instantly."

I was very surprised to read these words and I even feared the old man may be losing his touch. If you want the full context, here it is for your judgement:

JF: Do you think there will ever be a moment of awakening, or a disconnect for Trump's supporters of his rhetoric and what he's been doing in Washington, or can this just keep going? 

NC: I think that sooner or later the white working-class constituency will recognize, and in fact, much of the rural population will come to recognize, that the promises are built on sand. There is nothing there.

And then what happens becomes significant. In order to maintain his popularity, the Trump administration will have to try to find some means of rallying the support and changing the discourse from the policies that they are carrying out, which are basically a wrecking ball to something else. Maybe scapegoating, saying, "Well, I'm sorry, I can't bring your jobs back because these bad people are preventing it." And the typical scapegoating goes to vulnerable people: immigrants, terrorists, Muslims and elitists, whoever it may be. And that can turn out to be very ugly. 

I think that we shouldn't put aside the possibility that there would be some kind of staged or alleged terrorist act, which can change the country instantly.

Now let's break this down. It's certainly true that the Trump administration is increasingly unpopular and isolated. President Trump's approval rating stands 35% - a historically low precedent for a new president. Even George W Bush only reached 25% at his lowest point, just as Nixon reached 36% after Watergate. In these conditions, it is plausible that the administration would want something, anything to shore up support for the government. But this is not the basis for a false flag operation.

I should add I'm not saying the US government has not been guilty of false flags in the past: the Gulf of Tonkin being the obvious example. It's now uncontroversial that the Johnson administration leapt on Tonkin to expand the war against Vietnam. It's also true that there are real conspiracies in history. Look up COINTELPRO or the Iran-Contra affair, if you want to see a real conspiracy in action. There are even questions around Pearl Harbour and the extent to which FDR provoked Japan.

So, what is the problem with Chomsky's points here? Professor Chomsky might be defended on the grounds that this was a throw-away remark - one line in a full interview, with little clarification. There are gradients of what a 'staged' or 'alleged' attack could mean. Many of the 9/11 conspiracy theorists accept the case that the Bush administration had "advance knowledge" and simply allowed the attacks to go ahead. A more plausible theory is that the administration was so incompetent that it failed to act on the information it had about the plot.

This is a long way from the Ickean dimension of reptilian lizards, the whackjob theory that the Twin Towers falling was CGI, or the blatant anti-Semitism behind the idea that it was all staged by Mossad. However, the view that the US government had some role in the 9/11 attacks still belongs to the conspiracists. Chomsky has dealt with these theories well in the past. He would point out that the 9/11 attackers were mostly Saudi citizens. If it was an 'inside job', it would make little sense to frame Saudi Arabia if the aim was to invade Iraq. This is still a major hole in the theories.

I have yet to hear an account of the 9/11 attacks which can account for this hole. Most conspiracy theorists don't even talk about it because it's outside the reach of their assumptions. The politics of conspiracism are uncritical of the surrounding world, in fact, the point of such theories is to reinforce passivity and provide excuses for inaction. Why try to change the world when the Illuminati run everything? They're all powerful. So any attempt to challenge them is doomed to failure. This is why there are no movements or parties based on these theories.

Serious political action and theory requires hard work. It requires commitment. Naturally the online 'truthers' have jumped on Chomsky's comments, while the remarks have left many of Chomsky's friends and fans perplexed. I am not alone in this regard. Israel-based journalist Jonathan Cook has criticised Chomsky's comments. Here's what Cook posted on his Facebook page:

One doesn't need to be convinced that Bush-Cheney or the US security services were implicated in 9/11 to see that there is a deep problem with Chomsky adopting his new position. He has previously suggested in different places both that a major false-flag operation in the US would be almost impossible to conceal and that it is a waste of the left's energies, and its credibility, to indulge in this kind of speculation. 

That was at least a plausible position for him to adopt. But it is entirely inconsistent with his new position that we should expect Trump to carry out a false-flag operation and even accuse him of intending to do so before it occurs.

I have no doubt that Chomsky was right to argue that conspiracy theories are a dead-end for the left. So it's disappointing to read these comments, even in their full context. This isn't a reason to discard everything Chomsky has ever written. Demanding infallibility is unrealistic and ultimately puerile and rather conservative. Let's be mature about this. Furthermore, it is more in line with Chomsky's free thinking to disagree with him than it is to blindly follow him.

Another Comrade Lost.

It's not often that there are two such prominent exits at the same time. First Bob Crow, now Tony Benn. Let's hope these passings don't come in threes as it is so often said. Tony Benn was a veteran of the Second World War, a stalwart campaigner, a democratic socialist, a diarist, and historian. He was one of the few 'moderates' to see that it wasn't good enough to try and run the system slightly better. Benn had seen the Labour government of the 1960s try to offset a redistribution of wealth by trying to boost growth. In the 1970s Benn saw the Labour Party swallow monetarism and a package of austerity measures for the IMF. In one of the best cases of a person becoming more left-wing as they get older Benn concluded that there had to be a radical opposition for there to be an opposition at all. Benn took a stand against the neoliberal agenda of privatisation and deregulation. And that is why he is referred to as 'divisive'.

Nothing marks out the predominance of liberal Oxbridge graduates in the commentariat than the use of 'divisive' as a pejorative. There is nothing inherently wrong with sparking a division. If anything we have too little division in the trilateral consensus in Whitehall and we could do with much more dissensus. In fact, that would be to understate the dire stasis we're enduring right now. The liberals at the BBC (let alone the conservatives there) want to believe that Benn cost Labour the election with the potency of his 'dangerous ideas'. It's impossible for them to imagine that the combination of the Falklands war, Callaghan's record in the 70s, the SDP insurgency, and the ineffectuality of the Labour leadership, set Michael Foot for defeat in 1983. Foot was then succeeded by Neil Kinnock, who led the Labour Party with much greater concessions to Thatcherism. It's no coincidence that the SDP evolved into the Liberal Democrats who now share a bed comfortably with David Cameron. Only such mush-heads could find the word 'consensus' beautiful.

Tony Benn has been forgiven in his old age as he was no longer a threat to the system. His passing has been greeted with qualified statements of '... even if you didn't agree with him' and the like. Unlike Bob Crow, who was very much a figure of the 21st Century, the late Anthony Wedgewood was one of the most significant British socialists of the latter half of the 20th Century. This connects him with the post-war settlement and its breakdown in the 1970s and 80s. It's precisely because this man stood up to the Thatcherites and the rightward shift in the Labour Party that he can't simply be mourned without hesitation. The past is scary and historical reflection is even more terrifying. It's inconvenient. One might ask uncomfortable questions. Some would like to know why the IMF bailout was received and the package of austerity measures, implemented under Callaghan, if it were unnecessary as Mr Benn claimed and Denis Healey confirmed. Not only does it raise troubling questions about the way our society was transformed in the 1980s, it raises troubling questions about what is going on in government right now.

You Got More With Gore.

There is a lot one could say about Gore Vidal so naturally Nicholas Wrathal found himself spoilt with access to rolls of archive footage. That was on top of the footage Wrathal accumulated of the late author over several years. There would’ve been plenty of substance for United States of Amnesia even without the interviews conducted. By this time, Gore Vidal was in what he described as the ‘bright spring of my senility’ though even as an octogenarian he was still confident that there was no problem that could not be solved if people would only listen to him. All in all Wrathal seeks to strike a balance between the personal and the political. Of course, the personal is political but in the case of some the character and private life follow through into politics and chime together in unison.

It would be impossible to cover one and not the other. The film opens with Gore at the grave of his partner – a grave he now shares, as he knew he would then – speaking with some solemnity and distinctive witticism. Vidal was not one to give away too much on private matters, certainly not the five decades he spent with Howard Auster. The word ‘love’ was conspicuously absent in his vocabulary, instead he described his relationship with Auster as a business arrangement and even as platonic. As he himself put it “I can understand companionship. I can understand bought sex in the afternoon, but I cannot understand the love affair.” And yet we find a very different Gore Vidal penned love letters to Anaïs Nin in his early twenties. “You are quite necessary to me as you know” he wrote before offering marriage and a new life together. This was not a subject included in the film.

In a way this is appropriate as it would go too far in one direction and serve to over-humanise the subject. We are what we pretend to be, as Vidal’s friend Kurt Vonnegut once remarked. This astute observation captured the extent to which the performative fictions we undertake are constitutive of our reality. It’s not just that it was the work he produced and the ideas he kept as a reservoir are what drew people to him. It was that the show he put on – as we all do – was more who he was than the vulnerable and desperate letters of a nascent writer in the 40s. It was more becoming when Gore remarked “I am exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside.” It was this Gore who was on show in the public feuds with William F Buckley, Jr., Norman Mailer and Truman Capote.

The love letters to Anaïs Nin were written around the same time as The City and the Pillar (1948) which shocked readers in its depiction of homosexuality not only as a kind of sexual conduct but as a form of love as well. It was a love affair between two all-American boys, no deviants or fairies to be found. It provoked quite a storm and Gore found himself effectively blacklisted by The New York Times. He would write for television and theatre to make money as he was effectively ostracised by the literary establishment. In his own words Wrathal wanted to look at the US in the last half of the 20^th Century through the eyes of Gore Vidal – a viewpoint often neglected. Rightly then Wrathal includes not just the way in which Vidal contributed to the changing perceptions of homosexuality, but the celebratory inventions he devoted to ‘triumphant women’ in books like Myra Breckenridge (1968) as the prospects of sexual liberation flourished.

Gore Vidal had become a litterateur by this point and was thoroughly embroiled in the American political discourse, especially when it resembled nothing more than a bloodsport. Under the slogan ‘You’ll Get More With Gore’ he ran for office in 1960 and won more votes than any other Democrat in decades. Shocked further left by the Kennedy administration and its depredations in Cuba and Vietnam he became involved in the People’s Party in an effort to break the duopoly. The Party had called for a maximum wage and maintained a tough stance on the Vietnam War. He would later reflect that this made sense given that the last potentially revolutionary moment in the US was in the 1930s. In the end Gore threw his weight behind the McGovern campaign – probably the last liberal progressive campaign to be waged – and once the McGovernites were vanquished Vidal later ran against Jerry Brown in California to challenge the Reagan era as it was ushered in.

The way he had refused to concede any ground to the thuggish anti-Communism of the Cold War was admirable to put it mildly. With this in mind Wrathal arranged for Gore Vidal to meet with Mikhail Gorbachev and take a boat ride in Venice. The film charts Vidal’s opposition to Vietnam through to his historical fiction and the controversial view he takes of Roosevelt’s entry into WW2. To the accusations of being a ‘conspiracy theorist’ on such matters Wrathal lets Gore speak for himself. It is in these clips that the journalist he once considered his ‘dauphin’ appears on screen to contribute. Wracked with cancer Christopher Hitchens gives his viewpoint and we are shown the last meeting between the two of them where Gore shows some reluctance to engage. By then the late Hitchens had broken with his former comrades on the invasion of Iraq and Vidal was among those who denounced him. Not surprisingly we find the passing of Hitchens was much more mourned by the liberal intelligentsia than Gore. The reason is obvious: the Hitch had conceded in principle where Vidal remained stern. Vidal saw the American Republic in ruin, or approaching it at least, its institutions crumbling and an economy heavily militarised. It was a system to be criticised and even condemned, but not defended in such dark times.

This article was originally written for Red Monthly.

Strange Bedfellows on Syria.

The opposition to another war has its usual crowd of seasoned anti-war activists, from Lindsey German and John Rees to George Galloway and Tariq Ali. Yet the push for intervention has attracted a considerably broad range of opposition voices. Somewhat surprisingly Glenn Beck, Nick Griffin and Nigel Farage have all come out in opposition to any intervention in Syria albeit for reasons we can only describe as nutty. Nick Griffin claims we must take the side of the Assadian abattoir because a war with Syria is only a stone’s throw away from a war with Russia – a country he designates as the “last great bastion of the white race” - though I’m sure Putin will be glad to hear Mr Griffin is on his side. As for Farage it is, no doubt, more about the huge sacrifices of ‘our boys’ out in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as an extension of his calls for serious austerity. Of course, if it weren’t so damn costly (to us) it would be fine to rush in and drench ourselves in the blood of the Syrian people. It looks like another way for the UKIP to soak up the puddles of Tory disenchantment. And naturally Glenn Beck frames the events in terms of a coming apocalypse because there are to be ”no winners in the West” from sending guns to Syria’s Islamists.

At the leading newspapers of reaction we can find major columnists who have all come out in stern opposition and criticism of David Cameron and his hawkish posturing. Only weeks ago Con Coughlin was scathing about the naïveté of Peter Oborne in his latest book on Iran’s right to enrich uranium (a case refreshing in its incongruity to the hysteria around its subject) and yet Coughlin and Oborne were unified against the prospect of another war in the Middle East. At The Daily Mail, the reactionary Peter Hitchens was quick to express gratitude to Parliament for the outcome and had nothing but ferocious contempt for Cameron’s adventurism and went as far as to call for the PM’s resignation. Even the interminable Lord Tebbit came out to damn Cameron for this and suggested it would Cameron’s fault if he was ousted over this. This isn’t the first time the Right has turned out to oppose a war, Iraq had right-wing opponents such as Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan. It shouldn’t be a surprise in a sense, solidarity is not a value of the Right given that the system they represent already exists and has far from any serious competitors or enemies on the horizon poised to supersede it.

Meanwhile it is the self-appointed guardians of social democracy who have taken a more vocal line of support. Paddy Ashdown and Shirley Williams turned out to pen a war-hungry article with Simon Hughes and Nick Clegg in The Evening Standard. Though I am never disappointed in Simon Hughes and the lows to which he will stoop. It was sad to see Shirley Williams on board for war as she had taken a noble stand over Iraq, then one may recall that she voted for the Health & Social Care act (so it’s hardly the first betrayal). The opposing article was written by Tory MP Douglas Carswell, it was a modestly sceptical piece of writing which stood in stark contrast to the delusions of the Liberal chickenhawks. Paddy Ashdown seems to honestly believe that the only way to strengthen international law is to take the side of the Obama administration, which has been blunt that the intervention will be made outside of the UN and thereby violating international law. As if this wasn’t cretinous enough Lord Ashdown had a hissy fit as soon as the government couldn’t get its way. The list of reasons to torment these people to the end of the earth gets longer by the day it would seem.

This article was written for The Third Estate on September 2nd 2013.