Chomsky and Epstein

 

Jeffrey St. Clair >

 
+ I started getting press calls about Chomsky and Epstein, before I’d looked at the new revelations and saw just how deep the relationship was. (“Why is the press calling the press,” I said, “if I have anything to say, I’ll write myself,” refusing any comment.)

The latest batch is very ugly and, I think, indefensible. It’s especially disgusting that Noam saw it necessary to shame the victims as hysterics. When it was first revealed that Chomsky had some kind of relationship with Epstein, I was surprised, but not terribly shocked. I assumed he was trying to pick Epstein’s very deep pockets for money for his MIT projects. Hell, Noam had taken money from the Pentagon, DIA and other unsavory sources in the past. There’s no such thing as clean money. But still…

It’s also very hard to understand how he could have maintained such close ties to someone who was a hardcore Zionist and, if not an Israeli agent himself, certainly an asset whom Israeli intelligence used frequently. It’s baffling. A couple of years ago, I gave him the benefit of the doubt and wrote off his dismissal of Epstein’s predatory sexual behavior as similar to Nader’s stubborn refusal to endorse gay rights during the 2000 campaign, when there were several gay marriage/rights initiatives on state ballots, by saying, “I don’t do gonadal politics.” But this is much more appalling and inexplicable.

What was it about Epstein that could cloud Chomsky’s judgment? If it wasn’t the money and wasn’t the opportunity to rape young women? Look at Epstein’s writing: it’s scarcely literate. The sex-trafficker masquerading as a financial genius and consciousness guru was just not that smart and you’d think Noam, of all people, would be immune to intellectual seduction and flattery.

The last time I talked to Noam was a couple of years ago to beg for a blurb for our book An Orgy of Thieves, which he graciously delivered almost immediately. He still seemed to have all of his faculties, which, as we know, are more faculties than almost anyone else on the planet has ever had. So I don’t think you can blame it on dementia–maybe the new wife (always the first reaction when your hero stumbles)? But Valeria apparently only wanted Epstein to put them up in NYC and Noam said, “I fantasize about the Caribbean.” Read that how you will, but I prefer to believe Noam was thinking about Cuba.

The right, of course, is, as Doug Henwood pointed out, scurrilously trying to link this perplexing friendship to Chomsky’s politics, which is absurd. In fact, the relationship is a contradiction of nearly everything Chomsky has stood for over the last 60 years, which is why the revelations have proved so confounding for so many of us.

+ Several people have asked what Cockburn would have thought about Chomsky’s unsettling relationship with Epstein. It’s impossible to say, really. Alex and Noam were friends and Alex was intensely loyal to his friends. Given Cockburn’s writings on sex panics, I’d guess that he would have been more unnerved about Epstein’s role as a Zionist hardliner (and probable Israeli agent) than Noam’s bizarre dismissal of Epstein’s, by then widely-known, predilection for sex-trafficking and pedophilia. At the very least, Noam’s ties to Epstein were evidence of seriously bad judgment, intellectual and moral, from someone who usually made such considered and thoroughly reasoned decisions. At least that’s how it appears on this misty morning in the Oregon country….

COUNTERPUNCH