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Noam Chomsky: often wrong, always worth listening to. The BFD. Illustration by Lushington Brady.

I always stress the importance of reading and listening outside your comfort zone. Echo chambers are inherently mentally stultifying. As J S Mill, the great philosopher of free speech, said, not hearing an opinion is robbing yourself, as well as the other person. After all, if they’re right, you’ve missed a chance to learn something. If they’re wrong, it just makes the truth clearer by comparison.

Even the most busted clock might be wrong most of the time, but now and then it can strike the hour with perfect accuracy. In his latest interview, Noam Chomsky does both.

Veteran left-wing intellectual Noam Chomsky has praised Paul Keating’s sanguine assessment of China’s growing power, slamming the AUKUS security pact in a marathon interview that also argued lionising Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky “as Churchill” was hampering the need for a negotiated settlement with Russia.

Keating’s assessment isn’t “sanguine”, it’s supine – and sponsored. Keating has made quite a lot of money out of China advocacy: he sits on the International Advisory Board of the CCP-run China Development Bank. Which might go some way to explain his turnaround from signing an Indonesian security pact aimed at containing China in 1995 to blithely dismissing China as a potential threat 27 years later. Yet, even as he handwaves away Chinese aggression, he tacitly acknowledges it. When Keating argues that we don’t have an alliance with Taiwan, he conveniently neglects to acknowledge that the sole reason for that is fear of Chinese retaliation.

But, on Zelensky and Ukraine Chomsky is dead on the mark.

“A war with either China or Russia means nice knowing you, goodbye civilisation,” Chomsky said, speaking on a podcast earlier this month.

In a rare rapprochement, Chomsky is echoing the warnings of historian Niall Ferguson. Ferguson warned that wars tended to escalate the longer they lasted. In Ukraine, the US and its allies are now openly admitting what I first pondered a month ago: they are deliberately prolonging the war in Ukraine in order to “weaken Russia”. Every day they do so sees the risk of a devastating Europe-wide – if not global – war increase.

Chomsky, who condemned Russia’s invasion as an “utterly stupid” war crime that had “handed Europe to the US on a golden platter”, said a negotiated settlement in Ukraine should be the world’s top priority rather than “fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian”.

“There are two ways for war to tend: one way is for one side to be destroyed; the other is a negotiated settlement, and the Russians won’t be destroyed,” he said, suggesting the emotional attachment to Zelensky was impeding a rational assessment of the war’s likely trajectory.

The infantile hero-worship of Zelensky by Western media and social media might be useful propaganda for the Masters of War, but it ignores inconvenient realities. If Putin is an autocrat oligarch, Zelensky is little better: as the Pandora Papers showed, he has amassed a typically Eastern European leader’s overseas fortune, and he has a long and continuing record of brutally silencing political and media opposition, as well as allowing a free rein to neo-Nazi militias in Ukraine’s east.

Yet, even Zelensky has for weeks admitted the plain, if unpalatable, fact: the least worst outcome of this war is a negotiated settlement, sooner rather than later. But that’s not what the US and NATO want.

“Zelensky’s very clear, explicit serious statements about what could be a political settlement, [such as] neutralisation of Ukraine, those have been literally suppressed for long period […] in favour of heroic Winston Churchill impersonations,” he said.

The Australian

The Biden administration and EU leaders are playing with matches and burning the Russian bear’s toes with a cavalier disregard for where it could all lead. And even less regard for the human cost of using Ukraine as their cat’s paw.

That doesn’t mean that Putin should escape vigorous censure for actually launching the war, but pretending that it’s a bad-guy-good-guy fight and the West is on wholly the side of the angels is rank hypocrisy. When Western leaders thunder against Putin’s invasion, well, as Chomsky says, a great many other countries are entitled to point out: “What’s new? What’s the fuss about? We’ve been subjected to this from you as far back as it goes.”

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