Noam Chomsky & Owen Jones reveal leftist DECAY!

Niall McCrae

From stop the war to stop the peace – how the Left has changed!  A recent interview by Guardian writer Owen Jones with Noam Chomsky, veteran critic of US imperialism, caused furore. The Twitterati were incensed that Chomsky did not give full and unqualified support to the current war-by-proxy in Ukraine, and that Jones sat nodding his head when Chomsky took a more cautious approach than that of the hawks in Washington. Yet both were in favour of fighting the Russians. Their crime, as judged by ‘progressive’ critics, was not outright heresy but merely insufficient worship of a highly sanctimonious war effort.  

The old Left versus Right contrast is becoming redundant. Take, for example, George Galloway, who has more in common with Tucker Carlson of Fox News than with Labour Party politicians. This is not because Galloway has changed his view, but because the old Left representation in socialist or social democratic parties has been evicted from mainstream politics. The Democrats in the US, like Labour in the UK, have no interest in the traditional working class. 

Jones has directly experienced the bitter divorce of the old marriage of mass labour and Fabian intellectuals. The latter are ascendant: pied pipers who lead the younger generations to the tunes of ‘woke’ identity politics, climate change alarm and covid puritanism. For Jones, Jeremy Corbyn had the right combination of old and new policies, but the political establishment and mainstream media ensured his downfall.  As a Corbyn supporter, Jones was marginalised and has been accused of aiding the Tories by constantly criticising the direction of Labour under Blairite centrist Sir Keir Starmer. 

Chomsky has iconic status on the Left for his opposition to US militarism and neo-colonialism, but he is becoming a self-contrarian. By agreeing with the US sending ‘lethal aid’ to Ukraine, he is doing the opposite of what he always stood against. To be fair, he expressed concern about escalation to nuclear war, claimed that the Ukrainian people do not want prolonged war, and suggested a political settlement affording autonomy to the Donbas region. But Chomsky should know that military intervention is difficult to control, and tends to override initial constraints in a retaliatory cycle fired by moralistic zeal.  

For twenty years Jones has assailed Labour figures who approved the war in Iraq. Tony Blair told the House of Commons that Saddam Hussein had missiles that could strike Western targets with no more than 45 minutes of warning. MPs were duped by the dodgy dossier of weapons of mass destruction. The lies were ludicrous, but opinion polls at the time showed that a majority of the public supported the war. The same is now happening with Ukraine, but rather than using his critical faculties Jones appears as gullible as the mass recipients of state propaganda.  

A crucial factor here is the long campaign of vilification of Vladimir Putin and the Russian generally. The Kremlin was blamed for Brexit and Trump, the twin electoral shocks of 2016. Indoctrination in the West has made it easier for people to believe that Russian soldiers are raping and murdering Ukrainian children, and that Putin is a reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. 

Particularly relevant to Jones’ newfound lust for war is the alleged discrimination against LGBT in Russia, although this obviously pales into insignificance compared to gay rights in Saudi Arabia (which has been attacking Yemen for years, with no international outrage). Jones clearly regards Putin as a nasty homophobe, and that justifies anything. The transformation in Chomsky’s outlook is stark. His double-standards may not be so surprising, though, because he and fellow anti-imperialists such as Michael Moore are politically partisan. They always blame wars on ‘neo-cons’, despite modern history showing that almost all military misadventures, from the Korean War through Vietnam to the current conflict in Ukraine, were Democrat interventionism. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, while Republicans are inclined to isolationism, the Democrats are the party of perpetual war. 

But anyone who genuinely wants peace, freedom and democracy should know not to rely on Chomsky for a moral compass. In October 2021 he called for people who refused the Covid-19 vaccine to be isolated from society. Bodily autonomy should be overridden by the state, Chomsky argued, when you would expect a human rights activist to regard vaccine mandates as crimes against humanity. 

Yet Chomsky has also been a trenchant advocate of ‘my body, my choice’. In a speech at University College Dublin in 2013, he argued that abortion is fundamental to the advancement of women’s rights, which have improved ‘although they are nowhere near where they ought to be and it’s going to be a long struggle’. The right to abortion, supported by a majority of society within reasonable time limits, has been distorted by extremists and willing parliaments to extend to time of birth (or beyond, in some US states). For Chomsky, the foetus, at whatever stage of development, cannot have the protection of a human being. 

Chomsky and Jones are displaying the moral decay of the Left. By approving of weapons of mass destruction being sent to Ukraine, these long-term opponents of NATO’s wars are contributing to the potential for World War Three. The outrage following their interview was for all the wrong reasons. Now more than ever, true conservatives (not Tory traitors) are needed to put the brakes on progressive folly.