B. Kerstein: Chomsky is a man who dedicated his public life to political evil

Now there are many, many cases over the last century of intellectuals lending their minds or simply their names to dubious causes, and over time we’ve developed a certain sense of what the responsibility of the intellectual ought to be. It obviously isn’t an easy question. Was Jean Paul Sartre a monster, for example, because he was a Stalinist for a time? I would say no, though he did have an awful lot to answer for.

In the case of Chomsky, however, I think we have one of the most egregious cases. He didn’t just support an ideology, he essentially created it, or at least played a major—perhaps the decisive—role in doing so. And there isn’t just one case of lending his skills to justifying horrendous acts of political evil, there are many.

And as I noted before, he has never owned up to any of them and as far as I can tell never will. What we’re looking at with Chomsky is a man who has dedicated essentially his entire public life to political evil. I think we are justified in calling such a person a monster.

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From an interview of Benjamin Kerstein in World Affairs