Photo by John Soares

Noam Chomsky had an article in the Sept/Oct issue of the Boston Review entitled The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Redux. If you’re looking for a briefer gloss on his take on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, this short article from the Oct issue of In These Times called After 9/11, Was War the Only Option? hits the 9/11 highlights.

Chomsky’s piece in the Boston Review covers a lot of familiar territory if you’ve read his work and listened to his lectures. But he makes a very salient distinction amongst intellectuals. Of public intellectuals, he says there are two types. First, there are those intellectuals that serve the state and are generally considered responsible. And second, value-oriented intellectuals (and Chomsky would place himself in this class) are “dismissed or denigrated.” The term Chomsky prefers for value-oriented intellectuals is dissidents.

Why this distinction is interesting is because what Americans value at home differs from what we value in other countries. Chomsky uses Soviet Russia as a historical example of how this works. While intellectuals in the service of the government in U.S. receive acclaim for being a guiding force in policy, the West regarded those intellectuals (“apparatchiks and commissars, the technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals”) who served the Soviet state with disdain. Dissidents, that is, value-oriented intellectuals such as Andrei Sakharov were held in high regard. But where we appreciate a foreign dissident and give them the aid of the U.S. government, those within our sphere of influence suffer.

Chomsky often returns to Central and South America, and here he uses the example of the murder of Jesuit priests in 1990 by U.S.-sponsored state terrorists in El Salvador as a clear indication of how dissidents fair internally. The priests were intellectuals (or theologians, to use the religious term) following in the trend of liberation theology that began at Vatican II. Liberation theology was actively eliminated and discouraged in the ’80s by the Vatican through the lead of then Cardinal Ratzinger who is now Pope Benedict XVI. The Vatican’s ties with repressive Latin American governments during that time is well-known, and to wit, not just the Vatican but the U.S. as well.

I had been thinking about the term liberation in regards to liberal protest a couple of years ago. And to my mind, liberation has been a good word to describe those longings during the dissembling Bush administration. The kind Canadians at AdBusters though have endowed us with a new vocabulary. The Wisconsin protests against the policies of Governor Scott Walker started out this year in February. The Arab Spring liberated many people from repressive regimes in the Middle East, regimes that maintained the status quo for the U.S. And it comes down to this newly anointed word: Occupy.

It is not a word I like, but it is the right term for now because it reflects how the U.S. has been an occupying force in Afghanistan and Iraq for a decade. The war mongers and the hawks have had their day, their decade really. And it takes the gathering of many, many people in many cities and many countries to cry out and declare what is wrong. Enough is enough! I find these words so very interesting. Liberation and occupy are words at opposite ends of the spectrum. Liberation is to be freed. Occupy is the opposite of being free. But because of the changes our government has made since 9/11, we are less free. Our adherence to a policy of the preëmptive strike has mortgaged our future. We have fought these wars on Asian credit. Bin Laden has bankrupted us, morally and economically. He could not have had a better foil than George W. Bush.

If you prefer video to reading, you can watch Chomsky’s talk at MIT on the responsibility of intellectuals on YouTube.