Chomsky and Epstein

Noam Chomsky’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein are, at best, weird and disturbing.    

Chomsky had deeper ties with Epstein than previously known, documents reveal | Jeffrey Epstein | The Guardian.  

Chomsky ostensibly dedicated his life to interrogating power.  He, as the files indicate however, had some type of relationship with Epstein, who abused power in the worst possible ways.  This is extremely disappointing, to say the least.  More details may surface, which may go beyond “disturbing” and “disappointing.”  To whatever depth Chomsky’s relationship with Epstein went, the relationship necessarily helped to normalize the latter’s behavior.  For that and to Epstein’s victims, Chomsky must answer.  

I had written/quoted the below (in red) as an obituary of sorts after Chomsky’s rumored death last year.  With the revelations of his relationship to Epstein, some of it does not age as well.

This angle is a reminder, for me at least, that the trappings of celebrity and even “anti-celebrity” are real, dangerous, and also distracting from the causes we care about.  Chomsky’s dry analysis made him the anti-celebrity.  I very much celebrated that anti-celebrity.  I am guilty of putting him on a pedestal.  I am rooting that Greg Grandin's interpretation be the correct one: What the Noam Chomsky–Jeffrey Epstein E-mails Tell Us | The Nation.  But that probably says more about me and Grandin.  And not enough about Epstein's victims. Because of the vastness of his work, his research and analysis appear often in this kind-of-blog.  

Understanding Power was the first Chomsky compilation I read.  Did he understand power too much?  Not enough?  Or did he have too much of it? Do I understand power, better or worse, now?

More grounded, decentralized, anarchist, indigenous, feminist, black, working-class, global south, queer, and victim-centered lenses can discipline our movements.  They--and keeping grounded ourselves in actual struggle--can help rid us of heroes, pedestals, and the need for both.

History--and the present--will judge Chomsky.  What is the depth of his connections to Epstein?  How much should his connections to Epstein color his decades of work? 

Chomsky once said “The more privilege you have, the more opportunity you have. The more opportunity you have, the more responsibility you have.”

How the 'Epstein Class' Fails to the Top | The Chris Hedges Report (w/ Anand Giridharadas)

C'mon, Noam.  Wtf.  

Release the files.  Justice for the victims.

Original “obituary”:

Arundhati Roy:

“As someone who grew up on the cusp of both American and Soviet propaganda (which more or less neutralised each other), when I first read Noam Chomsky, it occurred to me that his marshaling of evidence, the volume of it, the relentlessness of it, was a little — how shall I put it? — insane. Even a quarter of the evidence he had compiled would have been enough to convince me. I used to wonder why he needed to do so much work. But now I understand that the magnitude and intensity of Chomsky's work is a barometer of the magnitude, scope, and relentlessness of the propaganda machine that he's up against. He's like the wood-borer who lives inside the third rack of my bookshelf. Day and night, I hear his jaws crunching through the wood, grinding it to a fine dust. It's as though he disagrees with the literature and wants to destroy the very structure on which it rests....”

Many nights on duty, circa 2005, standing the midnight-to-four, in-port OOD watch aboard the USS Pelican in Ingleside, TX, I secretly read Noam Chomsky on the bridge.  (Secretly because I wasn’t supposed to be reading anything.)  His jaws crunched through the glass-reinforced plastic hull, destroying the very structure on which we floated.

One does not have to agree with all of Chomsky’s conclusions to appreciate his work.  In fact, the least Chomskyan thing would be to turn him into an infallible idol.  But, what Chomsky brings to the table for me--so often using the government’s own declassified documents--is the “ruthless criticism of all that exists” in the service of building a better world.

Arundhati Roy, again: “Some years ago, in a poignant interview with James Peck, Chomsky spoke about his memory of the day Hiroshima was bombed. He was 16 years old:

 

‘I remember that I literally couldn't talk to anybody. There was nobody. I just walked off by myself. I was at a summer camp at the time, and I walked off into the woods and stayed alone for a couple of hours when I heard about it. I could never talk to anyone about it and never understood anyone's reaction. I felt completely isolated.’

That isolation produced one of the greatest, most radical public thinkers of our time. When the sun sets on the American empire, as it will, as it must, Noam Chomsky's work will survive.”