MIT’s Jerome Wiesner, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and Vice-President Lyndon Johnson in the White House, 1961.JFK Library. All rights reserved.Whenever I need to understand the latest turn in US foreign policy, the first person I turn to is Noam Chomsky. His ability to cut through the fake news and highlight the real issues is simply unparalleled.
Chomsky’s political radicalism goes back to his early teenage years, but some later experience must explain why he chose to devote so much of his adult life to anti-militarist activism. I suspect an unusually intimate encounter with the US military during the early part of his career. After all, it is no secret that Chomsky’s linguistic work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was initially funded by the Pentagon. As he himself explains: ‘I was in a military lab. If you take a look at my early publications, they all say something about Air Force, Navy, and so on, because I was in a military lab, the Research Lab for Electronics.’
Chomsky has always been adamant that military funding had no effect on his work. Asked in 2016 if the military hoped to make use of his research, he replied: ‘That’s actually a widespread illusion. … It’s very widely believed but basically the military didn’t care what you were doing.’ The government, according to Chomsky, used the military ‘as a kind of a funnel by which tax-payer money was being used to create the hi-tech economy of the future.’ Chomsky cited the early development of the Internet, saying of the scientists who worked for the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) during the 1960s: ‘the military funded them but nobody had any military purpose.’
