Noam Chomsky

Chomsky’s relationship with war research at MIT has been a controversial topic ever since the publication of Chris Knight’s Decoding Chomsky.

Here is Chomsky’s latest response in the debate – followed by Knight’s rejoinder:

Between 1963 and 1965, Noam Chomsky worked as a consultant on an Air Force project to establish English as an “operational language for command and control.”[1] According to one of his students, who also worked on this project, the military justification for funding this work was “that in the event of a nuclear war, the generals would be underground with some computers trying to manage things, and that it would probably be easier to teach computers to understand English than to teach the generals to program.”[2]

Chomsky has repeatedly been criticised as an apologist for the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia in the 1970s. Understandably, a common reaction on the left is to dismiss such criticism as nothing more than a right-wing smear. But it is often forgotten that one of Chomsky's earliest critics on this issue was himself a leftist, the Marxist academic, Steven Lukes.

For anyone who wants to get a handle on this complex controversy, here's a pdf of the relevant chapter from Chomsky's 1979 book, 'After the Cataclysm', followed by the subsequent debate in the 'Times Higher Education Supplement':

A French ''Oiseau-tempête" journal's (post-Situationist; Marxist autonomist/insurrectionary anarchist) critique of Chomsky translated into English. This comes from the ninth issue of Oiseau-tempête as its twelfth article and is authored Claude Guillon.