The Chomsky Reader by Noam Chomsky; edited by James Peck (Pantheon: $22.95; 486 pp.)

“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about,” remarked Oscar Wilde almost 100 years ago. Noam Chomsky, the famed MIT professor of linguistics and indefatigable critic of American power, probably would agree. For it has been Chomsky’s singular fate to have been banished to the margins of political debate. His opinions have been deemed so kooky--and his personality so cranky--that his writings no longer appear in the forums (the New York Review of Books, for instance) in which he was once so welcome. Quite simply, Chomsky has become a pariah.

What pushed Chomsky beyond the pale was his repeated and spirited defense in the early 1980s of Robert Faurisson, a French professor of literature who insisted that the Holocaust was a lie invented by Western and Zionist propagandists. Chomsky who has made a specialty of disbelieving American and Israeli casualty figures was perhaps a sympathetic candidate for Faursisson’s claptrap, for he wrote in a recent tract on terrorism (not included in “The Chomsky Reader”) that Americans live within a “doctrinal system that far surpasses the achievements of totalitarian states in protecting the public against improper thoughts.”

Chomsky claimed that he was merely defending Faurisson’s right to free speech, not that he was endorsing the man’s views. But Chomsky failed to see that he had done something more than to play Voltaire. By coming to Faurisson’s aid, he had helped to confer an aura of legitimacy upon a man who might otherwise have been dismissed as a mere lunatic. What was puzzling about the affair was Chomsky’s frequent insistence (elsewhere in his work) that people accept moral responsibility for the “predictable consequences” of their acts. In a world where the fires of fanaticism continue to glow, his defense of Faurisson was an act that can be said to have had “predictable consequences.” It was an act so striking in its moral implications that one would have thought Chomsky would discuss it in any compendium of his political writings, if only to still his critics. But this collection drops the whole sorry affair down the memory hole.

The omission of any mention of the Faurisson affair diminishes the value of “The Chomsky Reader.” Nevertheless, this book offers a large sampling of his political work from his early lecture-essay on the responsibilities of intellectuals (first published in 1966) to his recent broadsides against American meddling in Central America, all selected by Chomsky himself and edited by James Peck, a senior editor at Pantheon Books, whose hagiographic introduction claims that “In all American history no one’s writings are more unsettling” than Chomsky’s.

To read Chomsky is to enter a world inhabited only by the good, the bad, and the ugly. There are the powerless (the good), the powerful (the bad), and the intellectuals (the ugly). We live, Chomsky says, within a “system of indoctrination” so pervasive that few can penetrate the web of deceit and fraud. Intellectuals, whom Chomsky calls a “secular priesthood,” are least able to perceive the truth about a system whose privileges they work so assiduously to ensure. “Propaganda is to democracy what violence is to totalitarianism,” declares Chomsky. America is a “highly indoctrinated society where elementary truths are easily buried.” We are accomplices in a “shameful and sordid history”--a history Chomsky excoriates at every turn.

Even so innocuous a holiday as Columbus Day is not immune from his blistering and humorless rage. Here’s Chomsky on the slaughter of the American Indians: “One of the greatest exercises in genocide in human history . . . which we celebrate each October when we honor Columbus--a notable mass murderer himself. . . .”

Mistrust of the state and its activities is doubtless a prerequisite for political wisdom. Chomsky is right to remind us that “Violence, deceit, and lawlessness are natural functions of the state, any state.” Such cynicism sometimes stands him in good stead. He was nearly the only critic to condemn American complicity in the Indonesia slaughter of some 200,000 East Timorese, a shameful episode largely ignored by the American press. Chomsky has a pit bull’s tenacity for seizing upon a story and never letting go. There are people in East Timor who are alive today because of Chomsky’s refusal to permit the story to be buried. Nor is he altogether wrong to read the American press the way a Soviet dissident (or cynic) might peruse Pravda. But he too often excuses those states he considers to be on the right side of history. The giveaway comes in his essay, “The Manufacture of Consent.” “No rational person will approve of violence and terror,” Chomsky writes. “In particular, the terror of the postrevolutionary state, fallen into the hands of a grim autocracy, has more than once reached indescribable levels of savagery. Yet no person of understanding or humanity will too quickly condemn the violence that often occurs when long-subdued masses rise against their oppressors, or take their first steps toward liberty and social reconstruction.” Perhaps it was this kind of charitable compassion that led Chomsky to suspect that the claims of those in the West who charged Pol Pot with the murder of millions were inflated. But in what respect was the bloody hemorrhage that ravaged Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, or Pol Pot’s Cambodia rooted in a popular revolt against tyranny, or a fresh start toward freedom and “social reconstruction”? Chomsky’s brand of understanding is a form of absolution.

The only arena that Chomsky imbues with the tint of moral complexity is the criticism of regimes he supports. “American dissidents face a dilemma,” he writes. “They have to face the fact that they are living in a state with enormous power, used for murderous and destructive ends. And what we do, the very acts we perform, will be exploited where possible for those ends. Honest people will have to face the fact that they are morally responsible for the predictable human consequences of their acts. One of those acts is accurate criticism, accurate critical analysis of authoritarian state socialism in North Vietnam or in Cuba or in other countries that the United States is trying to undermine and subvert. The consequences of accurate critical analysis will be to buttress those efforts, thus contributing to suffering and oppression.”

And so Chomsky mutes his criticism of regimes such as that of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua which he regards as struggling for survival against the American imperium. But his apology for a double standard is both morally indefensible and intellectually shabby. The duty of intellectuals, if they are honest, is to speak the truth--without fear or favor. Why should people respect anything less?

Chomsky once knew better. In his excellent essay, “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship,” written neary 20 years ago, he shows how a great deal of scholarship neglected or distorted the fundamental contribution of anarchism in the bloody whirligig that was revolutionary Spain. Chomsky’s sympathy with the precepts of anarchy--with its inherent distrust of Leninism--should have been sufficient to arm him against the blandishments of present-day elitist movements, however radical their rhetoric, whose ability to exploit the opportunities for power unleashed by popular upheavals is well-documented. But Chomsky’s suspicion of the state and its representatives and apologists is curiously absent when he lectures at the University of Managua. In Nicaragua there is only virtue; in the United States only deceit.

The sad fact is that Chomsky has little to add to the political debate over American foreign policy other than the heat of his passion. Seeing his political essays collected this way, however selectively, makes it only too plain that he is a wholly unoriginal political thinker. His critique of American power in the postwar period is derived wholesale from the Cold War revisionism of Gabriel Kolko; his indictment of the conformist impulse of liberal capitalist democracy is taken whole cloth from the notion of repressive tolerance as advanced by Herbert Marcuse. What he lacks in originality, however, he makes up for in sheer vitriol. His polemics are an exercise in the dialectics of denunciation. He preaches to the converted; he will not convince a skeptic; and by now many, even, of the converted have found other preachers.