When Chomsky wept
SUNDAY, JUN 17, 2012 BY FRED BRANFMAN
I first met Noam
Chomsky in Laos, where I showed him the devastating effects of U.S. air raids
Forty-two years ago I
had an unusual experience. I became friendly with a guy named Noam Chomsky. I
came to know him as a human being before becoming fully aware of his fame and
the impact of his work. I have often thought of this experience since — both
because of the insights it gave me into him and, more important, the deep
trouble in which our nation and world find themselves today. His foremost
contribution for me has been his constant focus on how U.S.
leaders treat so many of the world’s population as “unpeople,” either exploiting them economically or engaging in war-making,
which has murdered, maimed or made homeless over 20 million people since the
end of World War II (over 5 million in Iraq and
16 million in Indochina according to official U.S. government statistics).
Our friendship was
forged over concern for some of these “unpeople” when he visited Laos in
February 1970. I had been living in a Lao village outside the capital city of
Vientiane for three years at that point and spoke Laotian. But five months
earlier I had been shocked to my core when I interviewed the first Lao refugees
brought down to Vientiane from the Plain of Jars in northern Laos, which had
been controlled by the communist Pathet Lao since 1964. I had discovered to my
horror that U.S. executive branch leaders had been clandestinely bombing
these peaceful villagers for five-and-a-half years, driving tens of
thousands underground and into caves, where they had been forced to live like
animals.
I had learned of
countless grandmothers burned alive by napalm, countless children buried alive
by 500-pound bombs, parents shredded by anti-personnel bombs. I had felt
pellets from these bombs still in the bodies of the refugees lucky enough to
escape, interviewed people blinded by the bombing, seen napalm wounds on the
bodies of infants. I had also learned that the U.S. bombing of the Plain
of Jars had turned a 700-year-old civilization of some 200,000 people into a
wasteland, and that its main victims were the old people, parents and
children who had to remain near the villages — not the communist
soldiers who could move through the heavily carpeted forests, largely
undetectable from the air. And I had soon also discovered that U.S.
Eexecutive branch leaders had conducted this bombing unilaterally, without
even informing, let alone obtaining the consent of, Congress or the
American people. And I realized that these devastated Plain of Jars
refugees were the lucky ones. They had survived. U.S. bombing of hundreds of
thousands of other innocent Lao was not only continuing but escalating.
I had grown up
believing in American values but this bombing of innocent civilians violated
every one of them. Looking at U.S. executive branch leaders from the
perspective of a Lao refugee camp, I had learned in a few weeks that they were
the enemy of human decency, democracy, human rights and international law
abroad, and that in this real world might made right and crime paid. However
much one believed America was a “nation of laws not men” at home, it was
clearly a nation of cruel, brutal and lawless men in Laos.
Without any conscious
decision on my part, I immediately found myself committing to do whatever I
could to try and stop this unimaginable horror. As a Jew steeped in the
Holocaust, I felt as if I had discovered the truth of Auschwitz and Buchenwald while
the killing was still going on. I soon found myself working as hard
as I could to take everyone I could find — including journalists
like CBS’s Bernard Kalb, ABC’s Ted Koppel, the New York Times’ Flora Lewis — out
to the camps in the hopes they would do stories about the bombing to
expose it to the world.
One day I heard that three
antiwar activists — Doug Dowd, Richard Fernandez and Noam Chomsky —
were spending a few nights at the Hotel Lane Xang in Vientiane before catching
the International Control Commission (ICC) aircraft for a week-long visit to
Hanoi. (The only way to go to Hanoi at the time other than through Phnom Penh.)
I called one of their rooms, introduced myself, we met, and Noam came out the
next day to the village where I lived for dinner, planning to leave for Hanoi
the day after.
I had spent most of
the ’60s in the Mideast, Tanzania and Laos, and knew relatively little about
Doug, Dick or Noam, though I knew Noam was a famous linguist and had written a
good deal about the Indochina war. My focus at that point was on trying to
inform them about the seriousness of the bombing, in the hopes they might
do something about it.
On a personal level I
took an immediate liking to Noam. He was mild-mannered but intense – the latter
quality was one we shared — and obviously caring. One of the reasons I was so
horrified by the bombing is that I had come to know the Lao as people by living
in my village for the previous three years – particularly a 70-year-old man named
Paw Thou Douang whom I had come to love as a kind of surrogate father. He was
kind, wise and gentle, and I respected him as much as anyone I had ever met. I
was particularly struck by how warmly Noam related to Paw Thou during our
dinner with him and his family. He clearly felt an immediate affinity with
them that I hadn’t seen in the many other visitors I had taken to the village. He
also displayed a focused curiosity about the details of what was happening in
Laos, to which I was more than pleased to respond.
The next day the three
visitors discovered disturbing news: the ICC flight to Hanoi had been canceled
and the next flight would be a week hence. All three had busy schedules, and
began making plans to return home for the week. I suggested to Noam, however,
that he might want to stay. I said I could arrange for him to meet refugees
from the bombing, U.S. Embassy and Lao Cabinet officials, Prime Minister
Souvanna Phouma, the Pathet Lao representative and a former guerrilla soldier —
as I had been doing with the media. From his perspective it was a unique
opportunity to learn about the U.S. secret war in Laos, from mine a part
of my effort to make the bombing known to the world in the hope of ending it.
Noam agreed, and I
guess we both had one of the most unique experiences of our lives — he on the
back of my motorcycle, me driving him about the streets of Vientiane, as he
sought to learn as much as he could about U.S. war-making in Laos, still at
that point largely unknown to the world outside. It was only in the next
month that Richard Nixon finally admitted for the first time that the
U.S. had been bombing Laos for the previous six years, though he and
Henry Kissinger continued to lie by claiming that the bombing was only
striking military targets.
I have a number of
particularly vivid memories of Noam from our week together. One was watching
him read a newspaper. He would gaze at a page, seem to memorize it, and then a
second later turn it and gaze at the next page. On one occasion I gave him a
500-page book to read on the war in Laos at about 10 at night, and met him the
next morning at breakfast prior to our visit to political officer Jim Murphy at
the U.S. Embassy. During the interview the issue of the number of North
Vietnamese troops in Laos came up. The Embassy claimed that 50,000 had invaded
Laos, when the evidence clearly showed there were no more than a few thousand.
I almost fell off my chair when Noam quoted a footnote making that point,
several hundred pages in, from the book I had given him the night before. I had
heard the term “photographic memory”
before. But I had never seen it so much in action, or put to such good use.
(Interestingly enough, Jim showed Noam internal Embassy documents also
confirming the lower number, which Noam later cited in his long chapter on Laos
in “At War With Asia.”)
I was also struck by
his self-deprecation. He had
a near-aversion to talking about himself — contrary to most of the “Big Foot”
journalists I had met. He had little interest in small talk, gossip or discussion
of personalities, and was focused almost entirely on the issues at hand.
He downplayed his linguistic work,
saying it was unimportant compared to opposing the mass murder going on in
Indochina. He had no interest whatsoever
in checking out Vientiane’s notorious nightlife, tourist sites or relaxing by
the pool. He was clearly driven, a man on a mission. He struck me as a genuine
intellectual, a guy who lived in his head. And I could relate. I also lived in
my head, and had a mission.
But what most struck
me by far was what occurred when we traveled out to a camp that housed refugees
from the Plain of Jars. I had taken dozens of journalists and other folks out
to the camps at that point, and found that almost all were emotionally
distanced from the refugees’ suffering. Whether CBS’s Bernard Kalb, NBC’s
Welles Hangen, or the New York Times’ Sidney Schanberg, the journalists
listened politely, asked questions, took notes and then went back to their
hotels to file their stories. They showed little emotion or interest in what
the villagers had been through other than what they needed to
write their stories. Our talks in the car back to their hotels usually
concerned either dinner that night or the next day’s events.
I was thus stunned
when, as I was translating Noam’s questions and the refugees’ answers, I
suddenly saw him break down and begin weeping. I was struck not only that most of the others
I had taken out to the camps had been so defended against what was, after all,
this most natural, human response. It was that Noam himself had seemed so
intellectual to me, to so live in a world of ideas, words and concepts, had so
rarely expressed any feelings about anything. I realized at that moment that I
was seeing into his soul. And the visual image of him weeping in that camp has
stayed with me ever since. When I think of Noam this is what I see.
One of the reasons his
reaction so struck me was that he did not know those Laotians. It was
relatively easy for me, having lived among them and loved people like Paw Thou
so much, to commit to trying to stop the bombing. But I have stood in awe not
only of Noam, but of the many thousands of Americans who spent so many years of
their lives trying to stop the killing of Indochinese they did not know in a
war they never saw.
As we drove back from
the camp that day, he remained quiet, still shaken by what he had learned. He
had written extensively of U.S. war-making in Indochina before this. But this
was the first time he had met its victims face-to-face. And in the
silence, an unspoken bond that we have never discussed was forged between us.
As I look back on my
life I feel I was a better person during this period than I have been before or
since. And I realized that at that time we were both coming from the same
place: Compared to the unconscionable Calvary of these innocent, gentle, kind
people — and so many others — everything else seemed trivial. Once you knew
that innocent people were dying, how could you justify to yourself doing
anything other than trying to save their lives?
And I realized in the
silence of that car ride that beneath Noam’s public persona as the
intellectual’s intellectual, who relied on facts and reason to make his case,
there lay a deeply feeling human being. For Noam these Lao peasants were
human beings with names, faces, dreams and as much of a right to their lives as
those who so carelessly laid waste to them. But for many of these visiting
journalists, not to mention Americans back home, these Lao villagers were
faceless “unpeople” whose lives had no meaning whatsoever.
When I returned to the
U.S., Noam and I remained in regular contact for the duration of the war. I
became more impressed with Noam as I began to read his work and realized
that no one else wrote in such detail, with such logic, and with so much depth
of understanding, about both the horrors of the war and the system that
produced them. But what impressed me even more about him — and his friend,
Boston University’s Howard Zinn — was that they went beyond writing and
speaking and actually put their bodies on the line to oppose it.
Noam and Howard were
part of my “affinity group” during the May Day demonstrations that saw
thousands arrested, and we were in adjoining jail cells during the Redress
civil disobedience action in D.C. I also learned that Noam was a leader of
Resist, a group that promoted draft and tax resistance to the war, and
would have been indicted had not the Tet Offensive occurred. He had been
speaking against the war since 1963, before most of us had even heard of it.
And he had endured numerous death threats and a wide variety of other
difficulties — to the point where his wife, Carol, went back to school to
develop a profession in case something happened to Noam that prevented him from
supporting their three children.
When the war ended I
made a fateful decision. Rather than continuing to oppose the next set of
horrors U.S. leaders were producing, I decided to work domestically to try to
replace them with a new generation of leaders who opposed war and promoted
social justice. I then spent the next 15 years on domestic politics and policy
— with Tom Hayden and the grass-roots Campaign for Economic Democracy, as a
Cabinet-level official with Gov. Jerry Brown, at Sen. Gary Hart’s think tank
and directing Rebuild America, advised by many of America’s top economists and
business leaders.
I only had sporadic
contact with Noam during this period. Part of it was that our interests now
diverged. He continued to pour out articles, books and speeches exposing
and opposing murderous U.S. policy toward East Timor, Reagan’s terrorist
wars in Central America, Clinton’s disastrous economic policies in Haiti and
other third-world nations and his bombing of Kosovo, and the issue he seems to
feel most passionately about: America’s sponsorship of Israeli mistreatment of
Palestinians. These concerns were far from my own focus on electoral politics
and domestic issues such as solar energy and developing a national economic
strategy.
As I look back on it
now, however, I realize another largely unconscious factor was at work: I
tended to avoid Noam because I assumed he would regard me as immoral for
abandoning the work of trying to save lives and entering a compromised and
corrupt political system. I often found myself suddenly engaging in defensive
dialogues in my head with him, trying to justify what I was doing — which
became harder as the electoral efforts I was associated with failed, and I
found myself far more ego-oriented than during the war.
After more than a
decade, I was in Boston and called Noam. He warmly invited me over to his home
and we chatted for a while. I finally asked him how he felt about my having
gone into electoral politics. I also mentioned that I was then staying with a
former progressive friend who was working for a major bank who had told me that
morning that he did not want to meet Noam because he assumed Noam would put him
down. Noam was genuinely shocked by the story. “Why, we’re all compromised,” he said. “Look at me. I
work at MIT, which has received millions from the Defense Department.”
He seemed genuinely puzzled and hurt that either my friend or I would think
that he would denigrate us for what we were doing.
In recent years I have
been in regular contact with Noam, mainly by email, but also when staying in
his house for 10 days prior to attending Howard Zinn’s April 3, 2010, memorial
service. It was a deeply emotional period for both of us, particularly Noam,
who had deep ties to Howard, and the visit made a deep impression on me.
I found essentially
the same Noam whom I had met 40 years earlier. No interest in small talk. Self-deprecation. Anger
at the ongoing refusal of America’s intellectuals and journalists to take a
stand on U.S. leaders’ war crimes. Great moral issues of our time. A nice
guy, offering to give me a ride back from a meeting in Cambridge, or to
pick up some groceries at the supermarket for one of our meals.
I asked Noam how he
felt about being routinely criticized for focusing on the crimes of U.S.
leaders and not those of other nations. He said he felt this was
appropriate since he was an American citizen, and U.S. leaders have by far
committed more war crimes abroad than any others since the end of WWII. I agreed, also noting that there are so many
prominent public intellectuals and journalists who criticize foreign leaders,
so few who dare point out the war crimes committed by their own.
And, as 40 years
earlier, I was above all struck by his unrelenting work. He spent almost
all his time reading, writing, being interviewed in person or over the telephone,
speaking and, in an act of generosity for which he is particularly known,
continually answering an unending stream of emails — often for as much as five
or six hours a day.
And, I discovered, he
continued to speak widely all over the country and world, to the point where
his schedule is usually filled up years in advance. At age 82 he kept a
schedule that would overwhelm someone 40 years younger.
I was also struck by
his asceticism. When I telephoned him I realized he had the same phone
number and lived in the same modest suburban home as he had 40 years ago. He
wears jeans, and has virtually no interest in food or material possessions. He
is periodically visited by friends and family, but engages in no other
leisure-time activities.
I was particularly moved
one night as I was sitting opposite him at dinner, struck as usual by the
enormous distance between what Noam knows about U.S. leaders’ slaughter of
innocents around the world and what the public realizes. I suddenly thought of
Winston Smith from Orwell’s “1984,” who sees little hope of changing society
and focuses only on trying to remain sane and commit to paper the truth in the
hope that future generations will remember it. I told Noam that to me, at that
moment, he represented Winston Smith to me.
I will always remember
his reaction.
He just looked at me.
And smiled sadly.
Noam can be tough on
those who he feels support U.S. war-making, but
he is even harder on himself. On one occasion I mentioned that I had
asked a lifelong political activist with whom we were both friendly whether,
looking back on his life, he had any regrets. Our friend had responded that he
wished he had spent more time with his family, and pursuing a variety of his
non-political interests. “Do you have any regrets?” I asked Noam. His answer
shocked me. Muttering more to himself than to me he said, “I didn’t do nearly
enough.”
On another occasion I
asked Noam how much satisfaction he took from having written so many books,
founding a new field of linguistics, being so influential around the world.
“None,” he answered grimly, explaining that he felt he hadn’t really been able to convince enough people to understand
the true depth of U.S. leaders’ savage and brutal treatment of the world’s
non-people. He felt frustrated, for example, that more people did not
understand how U.S. leaders’ killing hundreds of thousands of innocents and
destroying the very base of South Vietnamese society had succeeded, how they
had actually won in Indochina by destroying the possibility of an alternative economic
and social model to that of the U.S. emerging.
One evening as I was
climbing the stairs to my bedroom I looked into Noam’s office. He spends his
time at home these days sitting in a large office chair in front of his
computer, and his posture resembled nothing so much to me as a Buddhist monk in
meditation.
And then it hit me.
I suddenly realized,
“Noam has been living, as I did relatively briefly during the war, for the past
40 years. He has been working around the clock, reading, writing, speaking, not
wasting a minute, in a focused attempt to try and stop U.S. killing, to force
the world to realize the plight of the `unpeople.’”
And, I am
unembarrassed to say, I experienced a great love for him at that moment. And an insight. For as long as I can remember,
ever since reading of “Mahatma” Gandhi, I had wondered what the term “Great
Soul” really meant. And at that moment I finally understood. If part of being a
“Great Soul” is to fully respond to the human suffering of the voiceless, and
to pour one’s entire mind, body and soul into trying to reduce it, I had
finally met one. The Jewish tradition puts it a different way, in the legend of
the 36 “Just Men” who — without their knowing it — at any one moment keep
humanity alive. If Noam is not one of those 36, I asked myself, who is? I was
also reminded of the many who have compared Noam to honored Old Testament
prophets like Amos or Jeremiah, who also angrily criticized the corrupt rulers
of their times whose names we do not even remember.
Although decent people
can disagree over some of the stands Noam has taken in the past 40 years, I
felt that at that moment, on his stairs, such controversies seemed irrelevant
to appreciating who he is and what he represents. I realized that while I, like most people I
know, have gone in and out of hearing the screams of the victims of U.S.
war-making over the past decades, Noam has been unable to screen them out.
During my stay with
Noam he was visited by the famed Indian writer Arundhati Roy who, like so many
non-Americans around the world, clearly felt tremendous respect, admiration and
love for him. I only understood what he meant to her, however, when I read
these words from her chapter “The Loneliness of Noam Chomsky”: “Chomsky
(reveals) the pitiless heart of the American war machine … willing to
annihilate millions of human beings, civilians, soldiers, women, children,
villages, whole ecosystems – with scientifically honed methods of brutality …
When the sun sets on the American empire, as it will, as it must, Noam
Chomsky’s work will survive … As a could’ve been gook, and who knows, perhaps a
potential gook, hardly a day goes by when I don’t find myself thinking — for
one reason or another — ‘Chomsky Zindabad.’ (‘Long live Chomsky’).“
And I found myself
wondering why that is, why Noam is so affected by the suffering of U.S.
leaders’ victims.
I have for the past
decade immersed myself in the branch of psychology that holds that the key to
much of our behavior is how we unconsciously play out early childhood traumas,
particularly learning we will die, in our adult lives. And I found myself
trying to figure Noam out from that point of view.
I have learned that
our lives are largely driven by the unconscious defenses we develop early on
against emotional pain. And it became clear to me that a key to understanding
Noam is that, for whatever reason, he has fewer defenses than the rest of us
against the pain of the world. He has no “skin.” He is forever tormented, as I
was in Laos, by the suffering of the “unpeople” — and works around the clock to
try and reduce it.
And, conversely, it is
when he is with them that he feels most alive and the inner feeling most
clearly bursts through his intellectual persona.
During my stay with
him I asked Noam whom he most admired in the world. He responded by describing
several recent visits to peasants in rural areas of Colombia who are fighting
to protect their rain forests from exploitation. Noam spent several days listening
to, and recording, their stories of great pain and great courage. On his most
recent visit they climbed a hill and, led by their shamans, performed an
elaborate ceremony dedicating a forest to Carol. I had not seen him so moved,
alive and emotional since 40 years earlier in Laos.
I recently remembered
Noam weeping in the Lao refugee camp, and again found myself wondering why he
is that way. What in his childhood or life could account for that? It proved
impossible to make much progress in this area, however. For Noam not only
guards his privacy but is not particularly interested in psychological and
spiritual explanations of human behavior. Although he acknowledges that therapy
has been useful for people he knows, he regards attempts to explain human behavior
as essentially “stories.” He believes there are too many variables involved in
understanding human beings for the human brain to ever really comprehend it —
not to mention the impossibility of conducting the kind of controlled
experiments that might yield scientifically credible answers.
And, one suspects, he
regards too much time devoted to such “stories” as misplaced when so many
actual human beings are suffering and building mass movements is the only hope
of saving them.
If enough of us had
worked like Noam to try to force American leaders to stop killing and
exploiting the innocent these past 40 years, after all, countless people would
have been saved, and America and the world would not only be far richer, more
peaceful and more just. It would not be presently heading toward the collapse
of civilization as we know it from climate change. Noam believes the major
responsibility for this lies with a short-term driven corporate system that
regards climate change as an “externality,” i.e., a problem for someone else to
worry about. But it is also clear that the fact that not enough of the rest of
us, certainly including myself, respond appropriately to civilization’s looming
death is a major part of the problem as well.
And, I thus finally
realized, the important question was not why Noam responds the way he does to
the suffering of the innocent around the planet.
It was why so many of
the rest of us do not.
Fred Branfman can be
reached at Fredbranfman@aol.com. His Web site is www.trulyalive.org. MORE
FRED BRANFMAN.
