The excellent Prospect magazine (not to be confused with American Prospect) conducted a poll on the world’s top public intellectuals. Noam Chomsky took top honors. Prospect‘s November edition includes these pro and con arguments from Robin Blackburn and Oliver Kamm, respectively. I’m with Kamm.
Chomsky’s victory, according to Blackburn, “shows that thinking people are still attracted by the critical impulse….” I believe it shows the opposite. If Chomsky’s ardent followers are “critical” in spirit, why do they flock to his lectures like sheep and accept his arguments at face value?
As Kamm points out, when the U.S. attacked the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in late 2001, Chomsky argued that “plans are being made and programmes implemented on the assumption that they may lead to the death of several million people in the next couple of weeks….” Instead, the fall of the Taliban led to the largest repatriation of Afghan refugees in 30 years, as Paul Berman notes in his 2003 book Terror and Liberalism.
One can certainly argue that U.S. policy toward Afghanistan merits scathing critique. But the ouster of the Taliban did not lead to the deaths of several million people. So why is Chomsky still taken seriously?
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