Noted academic and agitator Noam Chomsky made a stop in Toronto to raise eyebrows and perk up ears at a sold-out speaking engagement at the Bloor Street United Church on Nov. 10.

In an exclusive interview with The Varsity, Chomsky, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, nixed the possibility of the Canadian government developing and maintaining a foreign policy independent to that of the U.S., pointing out their symbiotic nature. “It would be tricky. Canadian and American political interests have become inextricable. Perhaps the whole hemisphere would have to question U.S. policies and interests in a collaborative fashion.” When asked if anything could challenge the U.S.’s undisputed superpower status, he answered “social change could challenge it…look at feudalism. If you asked someone in the 1700s if they thought the system was ever going to change they’d say no. Look at the twentieth century alone. Look at civil rights, and feminism, movements that changed seemingly undisputed systems. Look at social changes in the thirties around the time of the New Deal.”

Yet does it take a cataclysmic event, like a stock market crash, to make the climate conducive to this kind of change? “No. Again, take the example of the civil rights movement. Gradual resistance and civil disobedience caused such change,” he noted.

In discussing former U.S. president Jimmy Carter’s recent Nobel Peace Prize appointment, Chomsky referred to some of the points that he had already written about the Camp David Middle East peace talks during Carter’s presidency. Chomsky claims that full peace was actually offered to Israel in 1971 by Anwar Sadat, and was rejected by Israel with U.S. approval. “The 1973 war that got out of hand forced both countries into accepting terms that were already on the table. Camp David, from a U.S. perspective was actually a complete failure, because they were forced to accept Sadat’s original [1971] offer.” In this light, both Carter and Sadat became recognized as great men of peace in 1978, even though, as Chomsky points out in his book Pirates and Emperors, Old and New “his heroic stance was far less forthcoming than in 1971.”

In effect, Chomsky claimed, Carter is receiving the world’s most prestigious award for peace for actually rejecting peace, accepting it only when faced with no other choice.

Chomsky opened his lecture with a discussion of the term “axis of evil,” observing that this George W. Bush coinage “isn’t even an axis if you think about it,” explaining that an axis is an alliance of power to promote mutual interests and policies. “North Korea has about as much to do with Iraq as you do,” he noted.

Chomsky offered a radically different axis, citing the U.S., Israel, and Turkey as the “real axis of evil,” citing their connection to the arms trade as well as their alleged military domination of the Middle East.

Chomsky cited the ties between the U.S. and Israel, from 1945 to the present, with the U.S. ready to attack Iraq for the purpose of converting Iraq into what he called “an American oil pumping station.”

Despite his condemnations during the lecture, Chomsky wasn’t ready to give up on humanity just yet.

“Look,” he said in response to a question from the audience, “if you want to be a pessimist you can say that there’s something in our genes that makes us kill each other.

“If you want to be an optimist you can say that there’s something in our genes that make us help each other.”