[apologies: this started off small, but got larger as I wrote and
read, and is now a rather imposing rant.  Also, this is my first time
posting from Dejanews, so apologies in advance if formatting is off.
Finally, I am spoiled by ethernet, but have only a phone line, and am
too lazy to retrieve the URLs for my sources, though I'll try to
provide adequate citations.]

He's got you there, zztop.  Take, for example, Chomsky's stance in the
New York City panel discussion of December 15, 1967, cited as "The
Legitimacy of Violence as a Political Act?" in Alexander Klein, ed.,
Dissent, Power, and Confrontation (McGraw-Hill, 1971), pp. 95-133,
which can be found online at the Bad News: Noam Chomsky archive
(www.monkeyfist.com).  This seems like a fitting place to begin one's
research into what Chomsky thinks about the morality of violence.  He
begins by characterizing absolute pacifism -- the belief that "one
must oppose violence in general, quite apart from any possible
consequences" -- as an *im*moral argument, arguing instead that
violence is legitimate when "consequences of such action are to
eliminate a still greater evil".  The discussion which follows is
illuminating.

He addresses, as would be expected at the time, the use of violence in
the Vietnam war.  He argues that there is no possible question of
justifying the terror on the part of the United States and Saigon.  At
the time they were attempting to prevent a totalitarian terror state
(which had murdered perhaps a half a million people by the time
Chomsky made these remarks, and was itself an agent of the Soviet
empire) and their local partisans (who routinely engaged in terrorism
and assissination) from taking over the remainder of Vietnam.  Here is
violence that Chomsky clearly, unquestioningly, and unequivocally
condemns, though by his own criteria it seems obvious that the
intended consequences were to eliminate an obviously greater evil,
though I suppose one could debate the facts.

On the other hand, he doesn't think that arguments in favor of NLF
terror should be "lightly dismissed", as he lightly dismissed any
arguments in favor of US intervention.  He argues that there is a
"pretty strong case" for terror if it helps reluctant peasants
overcome their "passivity" by ridding them of their "inferiority
complex", thus allowing them to enter political life (though he
piously claims that he "would like to believe that it's not so").  How
partisan terror (directed at whom?  Chomsky is unclear) would
encourage political ambition in peasants is unclear, though his
reasoning is probably based on the rather bloodthirsty ramblings of
the likes of Frantz Fanon which would have been popular about that
time.  He supports this argument with the observation: "We know
perfectly well that, in countries such as North Korea and South
Vietnam and many others, it was necessary to rouse the peasants to
recognize that they were capable of taking over the land".  (I'm sure
the people of North Korea and South Vietnam are very grateful for this
"rousing".) Summing up these arguments:

: I don't accept the view that we can just condemn the
: NLF terror, period, because it was so horrible.  I
: think we really have to ask questions of comparative
: costs, ugly as that may sound. And if we are going to
: take a moral position on this -- and I think we
: should -- we have to ask both what the consequences
: were of using terror and not using terror. If it were
: true that the consequences of not using terror would
: be that the peasantry in Vietnam would continue to
: live in the state of the peasantry of the Philippines,
: then I think the use of terror would be justified.

Apparently one does not even need to question whether the use of
terror might prevent the peasantry of Vietnam from living in the state
of slavery, poverty, and terror that were imposed on them (and had
been imposed in the North, as was well known, a decade before Chomsky
said this).  In the end, he lamely and with unconvincing sincerity
"rejects" these "arguments":

: With all these arguments in favor of this type of
: violence, I still think there are good grounds to
: reject it.

To support this position (which apparently he has not convinced
himself is true, as he states it comes down to almost a matter of
"faith"), he makes the argument that he doesn't think "it was the use
of terror that led to the successes that were achieved".  In support
of this he cites *China under Mao* (which Chomsky believes does not
"deserve a blanket condemnation at all", but rather finds "many things
that are really quite admirable", especially the "very interesting
positive things" that "happened at the local level".  These
"interesting positive things" are left unspecified, which is just as
well, as the Cultural Revolution was raging while Chomsky spoke these
words, probably claiming many more than a million dead, which was
preceded by massacres of "hated landlords" and "wreckers", purges,
forced labour, and other totalitarian terrors which had by then
murdered probably many tens of millions of (passive?) peasants and
others.  China, Chomsky claims, achieved "communization and
collectivization" based largely on "mass participation" rather than
"mass terror" as in the Soviet Union, with "considerably greater"
success "in achieving a just society", thus perhaps terror wasn't
necessary for Third World revolution after all.

So there, see, zztop?  Chomsky did not think that all acts of violence
were bad, and was readily willing to excuse any violence if it could
be shown that it was necessary to convince reluctant and passive
peasants (though he hoped this wasn't really the case) into seizing
others' land, (regrettably?) slaughtering hundreds of thousands of
<insert favorite derogatory term (e.g. "capitalist", "bourgeoisie",
"landlord", etc.) here -- though, of course, it's understood to mean
"other peasants">, and installing a totalitarian dictatorship
subservient to the Soviet Empire (or so I gather this is what Chomsky
must mean by "eliminating a greater evil").

He gives other illuminating examples in this panel, such as his
defense of the Japanese imperialists, which he expanded on in another
1967 work on the Pacific war, also available on the internet (same
site).  I'm not sure whether he still holds the sympathetically Maoist
views that he does above (he's made noises recently suggesting that
one can blame Mao for millions of deaths in the Great Leap Forward,
but it's unclear if this was his argument or simply his using an
argument which his opponents would be sympathetic to -- in this case
the Black Book of Communism -- in a lame analogy to attack anyone who
is morally depraved enough to condemn the World Trade Center attacks
without also praising the brilliance of Chomsky's comparison of this
with the bombing of Al Shifa, which was, I believe, the context).  He
has, however, definitely referred current readers to this piece on the
Pacific war fairly recently -- in ChomskyChat, if I recall correctly.

All this was three years before he made a fawning speech praising the
totalitarian regime of Ho Chi Minh on Hanoi radio.  For a time I had
believed (or rather, wanted) this speech to be inauthentic -- the
result of some kind of CIA fraud -- or to mean something other than
what it obviously meant.  Chomsky had responded to a query about it
from (I believe) Dan Clore, with some lame evasions that apparently
persuaded Dan that he'd never given a speech on Hanoi radio (an
argument I briefly favoured), though Chomsky never explicitly denied
it (rather he obfuscated, shamed Mr. Clore for wasting his time with
this irrelevancy, and called the original source (I believe it was
David Horowitz) a Stalinist).  This belief seems extremely far-fetched
when one compares this speech with Chomsky's sympathetic report of his
journeys through North Vietnam, in which the same awed language
sometimes pokes through, and in which many of the same images are
invoked.  The speech included, among other things:

: We also saw the (Ham Ranh) Bridge, standing proud and
: defiant, and carved on the hills above we read the words,
: 'determined to win.' The people of Vietnam will win, they
: must win, because your cause is the cause of humanity as
: it moves forward toward liberty and justice, toward the
: socialist society in which free, creative men control
: their own destiny.

(cf. his description in "In North Vietnam" August 13, 1970 The New
York
Review of Books:

: Near Thanh Hoa city, the Ham Rong bridge spans the Ma
: River. [...] The bridge was attacked daily from early
: 1965 until the suspension of the bombing -- in this region,
: in April, 1968. [...] We returned to the bridge the next
: day, this time accompanied by the head of the local branch
: of the Vietnam Fatherland Front, which is essentially the
: successor organization to the Viet Minh. [...] Carved in
: the hills beyond, just visible from where we stood, were
: the words:  "Quyet Thang" -- "determined to win."
:
: The bridge still stands, severely damaged but proud and
: defiant, a symbol of deep significance to the people of
: Thanh Hoa. [...] So far as I can tell, the country is
: unified, strong though poor, and determined to withstand
: the attack launched against Vietnam by the great superpower
: of the Western world.

it seems the hope that the speech was a fraud is merely wishful
thinking).

and:

: Your heroism reveals the capabilities of the human spirit
: and human will. Decent people throughout the world see in
: your struggle a model for themselves. They are in your
: debt, everlastingly, because you were in the forefront of
: the struggle to create a world in which the chains of
: oppression have been broken and replaced by social bonds
: among free men working in true solidarity and cooperation.

An interesting exercise: contrast this with more recent moral
statements, such as his rant to Alexander Cockburn against Vaclav
Havel's (in Chomsky's words) "embarrassingly silly" and "morally
repugnant" address to Congress in 1990 (available again at Bad News).
Here he smears Havel, the Congress, the media, and "the Western
intellectual community at large" as being on a "moral and intellectual
level that is vastly below "that of "Stalinist hacks" for having the
"supreme moral hypocrisy and audacity to clothe his praise for the
defenders of freedom with gushing about responsibility for the human
race".  He ends this rant by warning Cockburn that reporting this in
his column would not be well received, that "the sign of a truly
totalitarian culture [read: the US] is that important truths [read:
Chomsky's Havel screed] simply lack cognitive meaning and are
interpretable only at the level of 'Fuck You', so they can then elicit
a perfectly predictable torrent of abuse in response". In light of
what I have discussed above, I wonder whether Chomsky and his
defenders here (or the ghost of myself were I reading this a year ago
rather than today) will interpret this rather obvious portrait of
Chomsky as totalitarian sympathizer and moral hypocrite (by his own
standards laid out above) at the level of 'Fuck You'.  I can only hope
so (nothing personal, of course.  I know how it is).  My only quibble
would be that this observation is hardly an "important truth", but
then it is no less so than Chomsky's "observation" of Havel's "moral
repugnance" (and no surprise to those who were swayed by earlier
evidence).

The mainstream media and other commentators commonly refer to Chomsky
along the lines of being "a Sixties figure", "a leading anti-war
intellectual of the Vietnam era", or some other such characterization
generally made to contrast past respectability with current
marginalization.  Even Hitchens went out of his way recently to praise
Chomsky's past views while attacking his current ones as "robotic" or
"mindless" or something similar, if I recall correctly.  My question
is: if these were his views in 1967 -- views which are transparently
sympathetic to totalitarianism and practically agnostic on the issue
of whether revolutionary terror is immoral -- why was he ever taken
seriously as a moral figure at all?  I'm no longer vain enough to try
to excuse my past support for Chomsky on some imagined degeneration of
his arguments from when they used to persuade me (mainly his critique
of the Gulf War).  Rather, I must admit that I was swayed by
sophistry, by my own ignorance and vanity, by undeserved
righteousness, by his cleverness, and by anything but reason,
objectivity, and concern for the truth, apparently, as it was not hard
to find.

  - Nathan Folkert
  nfolk...@cs.stanford.edu