I have been researching the sources of the current morass in the current Iraq and Mid-East wars and cannot deny the origins go back decades, not just to the current Bush/Cheney cabal. Noam Chomsky, widely published and read throughout the world and yet almost totally ignored in the US mainstream media outlets, wrote this article over 40 years ago: The Responsibility of Intellectuals. In it, he raises the essential question, that is, question everything. In particular, he penned this at the height of the Vietnam War, and compelled intellectuals to examine the issue of who is complicit in regards to war. Is it just the Nation, and the Government? Is it the individual? The Nuremberg Defense invalidated the claim of "just following orders". "The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him." While intellectuals may not literally face a firing squad for disobeying a military command, their deaths are recorded in less apparent their obligation to question authority is paramount. To expose the lies of the government. To speak truth to power. 40 years after penning this treatise, the current international and national breakdown of a moral and honest standard of conduct reveals that its restoration is more imperative than ever. I cite the opening paragraphs of the piece, and a link to read the entire article. - MSNoam Chomsky
The New York Review of Books, February 23, 1967
TWENTY-YEARS AGO, Dwight Macdonald published a series of articles in Politics on the responsibility of peoples and, specifically, the responsibility of intellectuals. I read them as an undergraduate, in the years just after the war, and had occasion to read them again a few months ago. They seem to me to have lost none of their power or persuasiveness. Macdonald is concerned with the question of war guilt. He asks the question: To what extent were the German or Japanese people responsible for the atrocities committed by their governments? And, quite properly, he turns the question back to us: To what extent are the British or American people responsible for the vicious terror bombings of civilians, perfected as a technique of warfare by the Western democracies and reaching their culmination in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, surely among the most unspeakable crimes in history. To an undergraduate i
n 1945-46—to anyone whose political and moral consciousness had been formed by the horrors of the 1930s, by the war in Ethiopia, the Russian purge, the "China Incident," the Spanish Civil War, the Nazi atrocities, the Western reaction to these events and, in part, complicity in them—these questions had particular significance and poignancy.With respect to the responsibility of intellectuals, there are still other, equally disturbing questions. Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions. In the Western world, at least, they have the power that comes from political liberty, from access to information and freedom of expression. For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us. The responsibilities of intellectuals, then, are much deeper than what Macdonald calls the "responsibility of people," given the unique privileges that intellectuals enjoy.
The issues that Macdonald raised are as pertinent today as they were twenty years ago. We can hardly avoid asking ourselves to what extent the American people bear responsibility for the savage American assault on a largely helpless rural population in Vietnam, still another atrocity in what Asians see as the "Vasco da Gama era" of world history. As for those of us who stood by in silence and apathy as this catastrophe slowly took shape over the past dozen years—on what page of history do we find our proper place? Only the most insensible can escape these questions. I want to return to them, later on, after a few scattered remarks about the responsibility of intellectuals and how, in practice, they go about meeting this responsibility in the mid-1960s.
IT IS THE RESPONSIBILITY of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies. This, at least, may seem enough of a truism to pass over without comment. Not so, however. For the modern intellectual, it is not at all obvious.
continue here: http://www.chomsky.info/articles/19670223.htm
