From a documentary broadcast on BBC2 on November 25 1992.
PILGER: And yet you’re often described as an extremist
CHOMSKY: Sure. I am an extremist. Because a ‘moderate’ is anyone who supports western power, and an extremist is anyone who objects to them
PILGER: Now you’ve had some quite spectacular rows | Arthur Schlesinger accused you of betraying the intellectual tradition | Er
CHOMSKY: I agree with him
PILGER: You agree with him?
CHOMSKY: The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power and if I didn’t betray it I’d be ashamed of myself
PILGER: Of course around this time you’d accused Schlesinger and others of being what you called ‘a secular priesthood’
CHOMSKY: Well, let’s take Schlesinger. This was.. sorry..
PILGER: I was going to say a ‘secular priesthood’ because you were identifying a whole class. You were saying the liberal intelligentsia of America are in bed with the US government in some of its more vicious policies around, as they applied around the world. Quite an accusation
CHOMSKY: I should say.. Well, yeh. I tried to document it. In fact I’ve written thousands of pages of documentation when I think they show the point. Actually, the term ‘secular priesthood’ I borrowed er from Isaiah Berlin, who applied it to the Russian Commissar class. And I think it’s correct, they’re a secular priesthood, and we have one too, namely the educated sector, typically
PILGER: Can I just interrupt there a second. Do you use the term ‘Commissar’, ‘Secular priesthood borrowed from the Russian experience’, and ‘Stalinist’ when you describe the Western system
CHOMSKY: Yeh
PILGER: Do you do that to infuriate them?
CHOMSKY: No, I do it to be accurate. Er I think that the term Commissar is a useful one. There is the dominance in virtually any country you look at, the respected and respectable intellectuals are those who serve external power. We may honour the Soviet dissidents, but internally they were not honoured, they were reviled. Er the people who were honoured were the Commissars. And this appears all the way back in history. Let’s take the Bible. The people who were honoured in the Bible were the false prophets. It was the ones we call the prophets who were jailed and driven into the desert and so on. Er that’s typical and entirely understandable. We should have the honesty to look at ourselves by the standards we quite easily apply to others. So if say a British intellectual writes apologetics, vulgar apologetics, for US government atrocities, that’s no different than if an American intellectual were involved in apologetics for Stalin. And it happens all the time.