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WHAT I’VE LEARNED FROM NOAM CHOMSKY

Date: June 21, 2024Author: Sapan News 1 Comment

As news of Noam Chomsky’s failing health makes the rounds, a journalist and
peace activist from Pakistan shares some of her learnings from interactions with
a trailblazing public intellectual whose moral compass has impacted the world.

PERSONAL POLITICAL
By Beena Sarwar

I once asked Noam Chomsky how he manages to remember so many facts and figures
and hold audience attention. He replied that he didn’t convey any new
information, that his talks are based on materials already in the public domain,
and that he simply joins the dots – providing context – and repeats the
information consistently and in different ways.

His response was typical of his humility as well as his courtesy towards a much
younger person to whom he owed nothing.

Chomsky teaches us that it is not necessary to be loud and sensationalist in
order to be heard. This, together with the clear and courageous moral compass he
has provided over decades, is a most valuable lesson.

Noam Chomsky was already a legend when I first met him over two decades ago in
December 2001 when he visited Pakistan for the inaugural Eqbal Ahmad Memorial
lecture series.

Dr Eqbal Ahmad had been an anti-Vietnam War activist in the USA in the 1960s. He
later taught at Hampshire College and was among Chomsky’s circle of friends,
which included other intellectual giants and legendary figures like Howard Zinn
and Edward Said.

He had returned to Pakistan after the death of Gen. Ziaul Haq in 1988 and was
prominent in the peace and anti-nuclear weapons movements in the region. He
passed away in May 1999, on the first anniversary of India’s nuclear test, that
Pakistan had followed.

CONFRONTING EMPIRE

In November 2001, Chomsky did a lecture series in India. Another
fellow-traveller, the well-known physics professor and activist Dr Pervez
Hoodbhoy, piggy-backed on that to invite Chomsky to Pakistan for the Eqbal Ahmad
Memorial lecture series. These events were organised months earlier, and Pervez
was initially worried about whether there would be an audience.

Then the 11 September 2001 attacks in the USA took place. Chomsky cut through
America’s outrage to point out that these attacks were historic not for their
scale but because of where they took place, mainland America, which had not been
attacked before.

Also, this was not the first, but “the second 9/11”. The earlier, “far more
serious” 9/11 was the one in 1973, the violent coup against the elected
government of Salvador Allende in Chile. 

Many in America were uncomfortable with his thoughts but in progressive circles
here and around the world, his popularity soared.

I had just returned to Pakistan from London after doing an MA in TV Documentary
and wanted to document Chomsky’s visit to Pakistan for an international
audience. Pervez agreed to let me record the series, and my Dutch friend Babette
Niemel, then at VPRO Television in Holland, fought to get it approved for their
‘Seven Days’ video diary series.

Needing some B-roll, casual footage for the documentary, I had asked the
organisers if I could follow Chomsky. They agreed to let me tag along to his
room at the Avari Hotel in Lahore with cameraperson Mariam Pasha to escort him
to the talk.

Noam Chomsky and his wife Carol had arrived in Pakistan to a celebrity welcome
that discomfited them. Now, Chomsky politely conveyed that we were welcome to
film his public events but that he and Carol were uncomfortable being followed
by the camera.

We put our equipment away until he entered the venue where he was speaking. He
walked through the packed hall to a standing ovation. A few days later, he
addressed a larger audience at another packed venue, an indoor stadium in
Islamabad.

In both places, people listened in pin drop silence as he spoke, lowkey and
without histrionics, understatedly drawing linkages between history and
politics. This has been the case whenever I’ve heard Chomsky speak.

There was a shameful exception, when he spoke at the Nieman Foundation for
Journalism at Harvard University when I was an international Fellow there,
2005-2006. In that intimate setting, another international fellow and her
husband, both from Israel, kept interrupting Chomsky, despite being admonished
by the moderator and other fellows.

Chomsky didn’t lose his cool, but I heard later that he vowed never to come back
to Lippman House. I was glad to hear that the Nieman Fellows prevailed upon him
to return in 2017 and that it went smoothly.

Poster of Eqbal Ahmad book launch at Harvard, 2006.


I was privileged to share the stage with him on a couple of occasions. In
September 2006, John “Jack” Trumpbour, a Research Director at the Center for
Labor and a Just Economy (CLJE) at Harvard Law School invited Chomsky as a
featured speaker for the launch of a collection of essays,  ‘The Selected
Writings of Eqbal Ahmad’ (Columbia University Press), September 2006. It is to
Jack’s credit that he pulled off this event in a space that has tended to keep
Chomsky out.

I was a speaker, along with Margaret Cerullo, Eqbal’s colleague from Hampshire
College and one of the book’s editors. Stuart Schaar, Eqbal’s “college buddy”
from the 1950s at Princeton University, who we had interviewed Dr Schaar for a
documentary on Eqbal produced by Geo TV, Pakistan, a couple of years earlier,
was also a speaker. Like Chomsky, he has paid the price for his support of the
Palestinian cause, sidelined in the mainstream academia as Eqbal himself was.

Another friend, the journalist David Barsamian, who runs Alternative Radio and
speaks Urdu and Hindi, flew in from Colorado for the event. A compulsive
notetaker, I later wrote about the event, which remains so relevant today.

In his speech titled ‘Confronting Empire: Eqbal Ahmad’s Legacy and the
Contemporary Crisis’, Chomsky talked about how Israeli attacks actually mean
“Israeli and US attacks, since the USA supports Israel with weapons as well as
diplomatic and ideological support”.

Israeli forces had earlier that year, on June 24, captured two Palestinian
brothers, noted Chomsky, “a far more severe crime than kidnapping soldiers” as
Hezbollah did on July 6, its first aggressive act in months.

We were then witness to an “unusual historic event” — the destruction of a
nation” as Israel punished the Palestinians for “a terrible crime they
committed: in the last free election they voted in the wrong people”.

Chomsky commented that the real reason for the Israeli (US-Israeli) aggression
is that the then Hezbollah provided the only meaningful support for Palestinian
rights, and also because they wanted to eliminate Lebanese deterrents that stand
in the way of an attack on Iran.

The aggression has two consequences, he said. First, it deters negotiations.
Second, it makes the dissidents and reformers more vulnerable, as regimes under
attack tend to become harsher.

In April 2011 the American Friends Service Committee invited Chomsky to address
a seminar at Boston University titled ‘Days of Hope and Challenge’, where I was
the other speaker.

He also generously gave me time at his office at MIT, and I feel privileged to
have been invited to contribute towards a compilation for his 90th birthday in
December 2018. In my note, I shared some of my memories and thanked him for his
vision, courage and consistency over the years, and his principled moral stands
that have given strength and courage to so many of us over the years.


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GOOD TROUBLE 

Despite his legendary status, Noam – as he was to me and to many others – was
always unfailingly humble and accessible. He always replied personally to my
emails as long as he could, even if it was a one-line response to a question
asking him to confirm whether a Twitter account in his name was genuine (“The
twitter account from what I’ve heard is honest and accurate but I have nothing
to do with it”).

He was unfailingly generous in lending his name in support of the causes I and
others reached out to him for, endorsing resolutions ranging from human rights
and democracy to peace between India and Pakistan. In 2018 he joined many public
intellectuals in urging Bangladesh to release the photojournalist Shahidul Alam.
He was also among the public intellectuals including Amartya Sen who endorsed a
letter calling on Pakistan to release the jailed publisher-editor of the Jang
Group Shakilur Rahman, in 2020.

My last interaction with him was in September 2021, almost 20 years after our
first meeting.

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I had invited him to address an online seminar hosted by the Southasia Peace
Action Network or Sapan, that over 80 of us had launched in March that year to
build a narrative for a Southasian Union along the lines of the European Union,
or at the very least, regional dialogue and collaboration between all the
countries of the Southasian* region.


When Chomsky dropped in to the Southasia Peace Action Network seminar on the
impact of 9/11 on Southasia and Southasians. Screenshot


Sapan holds public seminars on the last Sunday of every month. In September
2021, it was about ‘The Impact of 9/11 on Southasia and Southasians’. The
Taliban had recently taken over Afghanistan again.

By then Chomsky had moved to Arizona with Valeria, whom he had married after his
wife Carol had passed away. He agreed to join but didn’t show up, which was not
like him.

The meeting ended. We stopped the recording and were chatting among ourselves,
when Noam Chomsky appeared. We asked him to speak and began recording again.

As always, Chomsky put the issue into perspective, arguing for the need to put
people first. This would mean engaging with the governing authorities to
mitigate and overcome human rights violations, while working with Afghans on the
ground especially in rural areas rather than focusing on Kabul.

He advocated pressuring Afghans to shift the economy from opium cultivation to
mineral resources, encouraging trade, development, and their integration into
the region — “these moves can’t be made through sanctions”.

“Uppermost should be the fate of the Afghan people, he said, but engagement
“does not mean overlooking the abuses”.

He wrote later apologising for the delay in joining (“computer-internet
problems”) and thanking me for the invite. “Clearly a very valuable event.
Pleased to have been able to play a small part in it.”

As news of his failing health circulates, my thoughts are with all those who
have drawn strength and inspiration from him.

The best way we can pay tribute to Noam Chomsky is by following his example:
Stand firm, keep calm, keep speaking out, put information in context, and keep
doing our work.

Personal Political is a longtime occasional column by Beena Sarwar, a journalist
from Pakistan currently based in Boston. She is the founder and editor of Sapan
News. Email: beena@sapannews.com.

Lead image: Noam Chomsky in Pakistan, 2001. Screenshot from VPRO news report by
Beena Sarwar.

This is a Sapan News syndicated feature available for republication with due
credit http://www.sapannews.com.


Note on Southasia as one word: We use ‘Southasia’ as one word, “seeking to
restore some of the historical unity of our common living space, without wishing
any violence on the existing nation states” – Himal Southasian.

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Also published in:

 * The Daily Star : What I’ve learnt from Noam Chomsky, 21 June 2024.
   
 * The Wire : What I’ve learnt from Noam Chomsky, 21 June 2024.
   
 * Mainstream Weekly : What I’ve learned from Noam Chomsky | Beena Sarwar, 22
   June 2024.
   
 * The Citizen : Noam Chomsky’s Impact Will Never Fade, 22 June 2024.
   
 * Dhaka Tribune :What I’ve learned from Noam Chomsky, 25 June 2024.
   
   


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ONE THOUGHT ON “WHAT I’VE LEARNED FROM NOAM CHOMSKY”

Add Comment

 1. ahmedshakil342 says:
    June 21, 2024 at 4:11 pm
    
    No doubt Noam Chomsky is perhaps the best intellectual/philosopher of our
    
    time but the way his achievements/contributions are described by Beena
    Sarwar is really remarkable. I salute Beena for such a nice article and her
    own contributions in different spheres. I am really proud of Beena!! Kudos
    and shabbash!!
    
    LikeLiked by 1 person
    
    Reply
    


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