148
HENRY R . WINKLER
to read today. When it appeared, it had all the immediacy of a pain–
fully honest inquest into the limits of personal responsibility and posed
very real dilemmas of decision. Two years later, reprinted handsomely
by Pantheon, it is flat, concerned with questions more and more young
men have answered for themselves, in some ways an act of self-indul–
gence. Ernest Bevin, not my favorite British politician, once declared
(in 1935) that he was tired of pacifist George Lansbury carting
his
conscience around the Labour Movement, asking what to do with it.
I have something of the same feeling on rereading "On Resistance"
in 1969.
Perhaps that reaction stems from my irritation with two long
essays
entitled "Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship" and "The Revolutionary
Pacifism of A.
J.
Muste" where Chomsky uses his materials and presses
his analysis in quite the same fashion he finds so troubling in those he
criticizes. Who ate the "liberal" scholars - the bad guys whom we
are to distinguish, I suppose, from the "radical" good guys - about
whom he generalizes so easily? Hans Morgenthau, Robert Scalapino, John
Fairbank or Richard Leopold? Their outlooks and their interpretations
vary so widely that it isn't particularly useful to categorize them - with
whatever demurrers - in neat packages. Ernest May, for example, refers
in
American Imperialism
to various explanations of the American turn
to colonial expansionism in 1898-9. Aside from assessments stressing
Providence, a "westward trend," or the inherent nature of capitalism,
he identifies four major evaluations each stressing a different factor.
All four are by historians - Julius Pratt, Frederick Merk, Walter
La
Feher, and Richard Hofstadter - who with not too much straining of
the definitions can be identified with "liberal" scholarship. Which of
them, the.n, is representative? And to use, as Chomsky does, Gabriel
Jackson's
The SPanish Republic and the Civil War
as a microcosm of
"liberal scholarship" (in the essay on "Objectivity") is to display
all
the predisposition for warped selectivity Chomsky damns (with inter–
minable footnotes ) in the people he attacks. Since he makes a great
point of Jackson's disregard of certain materials and his overemphasis
on those who reflect a commitment in favor of liberal democracy, it
is all the more disturbing that Chomsky loads the dice at least as much
as Jackson. Also, his description of the accomplishments of the anarcho–
syndicalists, leaning heavily as it does on such works as Broue and Te–
mime's
La Revolution et la guerre d'Espagne
or Rudolf Rocker's
The
Tragedy of SPain,
is an exaggeration (here again I show my liberal
bias), however one may feel about the movement itself, quite as
obvious as any to be found among the liberals. Few of them, of course,
have any greater illusions about the role of the Communist party and
