"Security issues are a fraud. Economic issues are real, but usually not the issues of the general population, rather of elite interests. Even Adam Smith observed this. In command economies there was little need for wage control - people were committed to war, they wanted to win. Germany didn't trust its own population. It had to buy them off with what Lyndon Johnson called 'a guns and butter war.' According to Albert Speer's analysis, this set back the German war effort by up to a year - which could have meant the difference between victory and defeat."
He restrains himself from mentioning the obvious parallel of the Indo-China War and our incursion into Vietnam.
Static. The Sound of White Noise.

Robert Manne is one of several academics who criticised Chomsky during his visit to Australia. Manne established his thorough research with a book published in 1985 that shattered conspiracy theories about the Petrov spy affair. Unlike economic rationalists or the American fundamentalist Right, Manne is a maverick who defies being pigeon-holed.

Gerald Henderson had led the way by revealing that Chomsky's colleague Alex Carey, to whom Manufacturing Consent was dedicated to, was a closet capitalist who committed suicide after the Wall Street crash of 1987.

Manne preferred to question Chomsky's record on Cambodia. He devoted a chapter in his book The Shadow of 1917 (Melbourne: Text Publishing Company, 1994) that was designed to get younger Left wing orientated students to question the current wave of "historical revisionism" and the idolatory of wall pin up icons like Che Guevera and Chomsky. He then published several articles in The Age newspaper just before Chomsky arrived in Australia.
Ironically, Chomsky and Manne share a hatred of both Soviet and Fascist style totalitarianism.

"He may be the most powerful Leftist alive today," Manne told me privately. "His tour has so far been triumphant."
Manne recognises Chomsky's "brilliance at linguistics; he combines courage and intelligence, but also extraordinary honesty and common sense." However Manne is disturbed that Chomsky is revered as "a kind of saintly hero by the younger generation of the Left."

Former Students for a Democratic Society leader David Horowitz sensed a similar trend in the 1960s of dogmatic zealots amd characterised as activists suffering from ". . . self aggrandizing romances with corrupt Third World regimes and hypocritical, self dramatising anti-Americanism" (Mother Jones, May 1987).

Both perceive an inherent negation in New Leftist radicalism. Chomsky may well polemically reply with a quote by Isaac Deutscher from the same article that caricatures the professional anti-Communists that both Horowitz and Manne have become.

In response to claims that he is a Khmer Rouge apologist (the main criticism leveled at Chomsky by Manne and other right wing critics), Chomsky exclaimed to me later, "All I said was that there were two atrocities going on at the same time in East Timor and Cambodia, and that the latter was being widely promoted in the press whilst the former was suppressed."

He later told a captive audience that, "the secret bombings of Cambodia by the US between 1969 and 1975 contributed to peasant unrest which helped Pol Pot to power. He is still supported by Thai businessmen, generals, and until very recently parts of the West. I don't have a solution to the current problems there."

By highly selective quoting from Herman/Chomsky's 180 page chapter on Cambodia in the second volume of The Political Economy of Human Rights, Manne argues that Chomsky's disbelief of particular refugee testimony was wrong and that he was more obsessed in the mid 1970s with exposing American culpability for the suffering than with the actual facts, although he later became more cautious. This may very well be correct, but although Manne also mentions an earlier article for The Nation, he doesn't examine Chomsky's later arguments in Manufacturing Consent or the doctrines presented in later geopolitical analyses.

Manne first agreed to an interview with me to discuss this complex side of his career, but later declined saying, "I don't want to spend the rest of my life fighting with Noam Chomsky. Read my articles if you want more information!"

Several hours after the Canberra Press conference, Chomsky arrived in Melbourne for a keynote speech on East Timor. The Town Hall had completely sold out within days of the initial announcement, and local activists from a wide range of areas (some irrelevent to the issues Chomsky was covering) picketed the surrounding area to rally for their cause.

Local community radio and TV stations covered the event, and it was in the press area near the stage that I met Michael Petkoff, publisher of the Success business journal.

"How many people do you think are here to see Chomsky, or really here because they care about East Timor?" he asked me. Surveying the 2000 plus ecstatic crowd, I had little answer.

Petkoff was telling me that one of Chomsky's linguistics students, John Grindler, was a pioneer in the mid 1970s of the Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) therapy movement. He was interrupted by the arrival of Jose Ramos-Horta, the East Timorese representative to the United Nations Assembly. Ramos-Horta opened the night with an amusing anecdote about meeting Chomsky in Boston Airport over a cup of expensive coffee that I could relate to after my recent debacle.

"Australia is really a small player in the super-power world," Chomsky said, perhaps intuitively realising that we manipulate our foreign policy under Prime Minister Paul Keating because we are so keen to be embraced by Asia.

"If we had voiced dissent about the 1975 invasion, which we knew was going to happen in August 1975, it might not have occurred. The US respects that this is our region and may have listened to us.

"The East Timorese society was one of few that operated outside the context of the world's consumer economic structure. It was far more egalitarian and integrated than most Western societies. The East Timorese spoke 33 dialects for a population of only 700,000 people.

"The initial invasion killed perhaps 200,000 people over several years - a genocidal level higher per population than the Pol Pot regime. It is the persistent courage of the indigenous people to fight back that is so inspiring. The story of East Timor came to the West because of the work of a small band of highly dedicated people, who will never be known. If a Nobel Prize actually meant something, these people would deserve it. Their behind the scenes work enables public figureheads like John Pilger and myself to promote the issue."