Consider, too, Chomsky's writings on Indochina, the issue on which he became famous as a political controversialist. He did not only excoriate an unjust and brutal US war. He derided refugee accounts of horrors after the fall of Cambodia, pointedly referring to "alleged Khmer Rouge atrocities" and disputing a comparison of Pol Pot's rule to Nazi Germany. In an interview last year, Chomsky characteristically congratulated himself on the astuteness of this analysis, declaring: "If we were to rewrite it now, we'd do it exactly the same way."

Chomsky's output is vast, and not always wrong. He was early and right in condemning Western acquiescence in Indonesia's subjugation of East Timor (though typically he cannot now acknowledge that the reversal of that policy has provided a casus belli for Islamist terrorism). But he cannot be accused of disinterested opposition to oppression. His political writings will last, if at all, only as a monument to Xenophon's definition of the sophist as one who sells wisdom to pupils for pay.