The Responsibilities of Intellectuals

Foreword: I think there is an article that reads right, even though it was published in 1967, although the author is Noam Chomsky - a linguist, although he refutes the numbness of American intellectuals at the time to the Vietnam War, although He thought at the time that there should be a more open attitude towards China and the Soviet Union...but the emphasis on intellectuals' basic responsibility to think independently and tell the truth still makes us think again.

The responsibility of intellectuals

The New York Times Book Review, February 23, 1967

Twenty years ago, Dwight MacDonald published a series of articles in Politics about the responsibilities of people, especially intellectuals. I read it occasionally as an undergraduate, a few years after World War II, and I reread it a few months ago. In my opinion, the power and persuasiveness of these articles remains undiminished. MacDonald focused on the issue of war crimes, asking the question: To what extent are the people of Germany or Japan responsible for the atrocities committed by their governments? He uses this question to aptly ask us: to what extent the British or American people are responsible for vicious terrorist attacks on civilians. These bombings, which perfected the methods of warfare in Western democracies and culminated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, must be one of the most shameful crimes in history. Any kind of political and moral consciousness - from the horrors of the 1930s, to the Ethiopian war, the Russian purges, the "China affair", the Spanish Civil War, Nazi atrocities, the Western world's response to these events, and to some extent All of the people who became complicit in these events—for a college student between 1945 and 1946—have special and profound meaning.

As for the responsibility of intellectuals, it is also a perplexing question. Intellectuals are able to expose the lies of the government, and can analyze the purpose of the government in terms of its causes, motives, and often hidden intentions. Intellectuals, at least in the Western world, have power from political freedom, access to information, and freedom of speech. Western democracy provides time, convenience and training for this privileged minority (meaning intellectuals) to seek the truth behind the veil of distorted facts, ideologies and class interests through which we can see to contemporary historical events. Therefore, the responsibility of the intellectual is much deeper than what MacDonald calls the "responsibility of the people", because the intellectual enjoys the above-mentioned privileges.

The questions MacDonald asked twenty years ago are just as relevant today. We cannot help but ask ourselves how much the American people are responsible for the brutal attacks by American troops on the largely helpless peasants in Vietnam. In the eyes of Asians, this is yet another atrocity in the "Gamma Age" of world history. As for those of us who have slowly begun to remain silent and indifferent to this disaster over the past dozen years, on which page of history have we found our place? Only the most insensitive people shy away from these questions. I want to talk about the responsibility of intellectuals and how they exercised it in the mid-1960s.

It is the responsibility of intellectuals to tell the truth and expose lies. At least, it seems like a self-evident truth, needless to say. But this is not the case, and to modern intellectuals, the truth is completely ambiguous. Hence the fact that Martin Heidegger wrote in his 1933 manifesto in support of Hitler that "truth is the revelation of that which makes a people certain, clear and powerful in action and consciousness", and only this "truth" People have a responsibility to speak up. Americans are more explicit. In November 1965, The New York Times asked Arthur Schlesinger (American historian and social critic) to explain his article on the Bay of Pigs incident (the CIA organization in the United States). The conflict between reports of Cuban fugitives rebelling against Castro's government) and the stories he told the media at the time of the attack led Schlesinger to say he had lied. Days later, he continued to laud the plan as being in the "national interest" and withheld information about the invasion. In recent comments on the Kennedy administration, Schlesinger flattered this group of arrogant and self-deceitful people. There is no particular stake in a single man who chooses to lie for something he knows is injustice, what matters is that such events have so little repercussions in the intellectual world—for example, that no one questioned, to a What's wrong with historians offering a major chair in the humanities that has a duty to tell the world that the U.S.-sponsored invasion of a neighboring country, namely Cuba, had ulterior motives. What about the series of unbelievable lies our government and its spokespeople have been telling about issues such as the Vietnam negotiations? Those who want to know know these facts. Both domestic and foreign media have provided information to refute every seemingly false fact. But the power of the government propaganda apparatus is so great that it is almost impossible for citizens without the possibility of careful research to count on the facts to oppose the government's voice. (It is the conscience and responsibility of the intellectuals that they can rely on.)