Noam Chomsky – Summary of Posts – The Video

The USA’s greatest dissident intellectual

The video of this post is here.

It is time to make a summary of my Noam Chomsky posts, with an accompanying video. It has been interesting over the past 36 years when I have brought up Noam with people. In the early 1990s, people would say, “Oh yeah, Chomsky the linguist. I saw him speak at my college.” Or, “I studied his work in my programming classes.” Few had heard of Chomsky the political activist. Today, he is better known for his political work, and he will go down in history as the USA’s greatest dissident intellectual. Noam is the only living human who can credibly be compared to Albert Einstein.

In 1992, my wife and I watched the documentary of his life at Ohio State University, as it never played at commercial theaters or on network TV, although it was the most popular documentary in Canadian history to its time, which essentially proved Noam’s point. Noam and I began a brief correspondence after that, when I asked him why the left did not cover the free-energy issue, and Noam guessed that it was from a lack of resources. But I later learned that the aversion was largely ideological.

Noam’s IQ is way up there, but he kind of fell into linguistics. He has been called the “Einstein of linguistics” and is credited with a revolution in linguistics, as he brought scientific rigor to the field and toppled B.F. Skinner’s behaviorist approach. Noam does not expect that his scientific ideas in linguistics will last long, as science marches onward. I have only passing familiarity with his scientific work. I have seen challenges to his work in my studies, particularly on chimps and human evolution. I suspect that Homo erectus had something like language maybe two million years ago, while Noam posited that language only arrived with behavioral modernity due to a genetic mutation. Chimps have recently been observed using the kind of creativity in communications formerly reserved for humans.

I will leave Noam’s scientific work largely aside for now and focus what he is most famous for today, which is his political work. His most famous book is Manufacturing Consent, which Ed Herman was primarily responsible for, which is why Noam insisted that Ed’s name appear first on the book’s cover. Their Propaganda Model is still the one to be reckoned with in describing how the capitalist media operates.

Noam had his coming-out party in politics in 1967, with his essay on the responsibility of intellectuals to criticize their governments and call out hypocrisy. Noam’s political views were formed as a child, as he hung out with anarchists and radicals in Philadelphia.

I always thought that Noam and Ed’s work was at its best when exposing American imperial behavior and the media’s covering for the Empire. I’ll start this by summarizing my posts on Noam’s latest and likely final book, which was all about the American Empire. The book’s basic theme was that the United States acts like all empires throughout history. All empires have asserted that they were the exception to the rule, and that their reigns were always benevolent, with violence as a last resort. That Big Lie has been a constant across all empires in world history, and the book’s purpose was to disabuse people, mainly Americans, of the idea that the USA was any different.

Noam’s primary upshot was that American imperial delusions threaten humanity’s future. Noam observed that the most unexceptional thing about Americans is how they think that they are exceptional. Noam long noted that journalists generally believe what they write, and only true believers rise in the media’s hierarchy, which is true in all of the rackets.

Noam’s book had a chapter on how the USA dominated the “Global South.” The next chapter was on the genocide in Southeast Asia, which is where Noam got his start in politics. Noam then had a chapter on the 9/11 terror attacks, followed by the American invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. The next chapter was on the American invasion of Iraq, which Noam called the crime of the century so far. The next chapter was on the USA’s relationship with Israel and Palestine, and Noam’s contribution was made before the genocide in Gaza began, which his coauthor Nathan J. Robinson wrote about. The next chapter was on the USA and China. The next chapter was on the USA, NATO, and Russia after the Cold War ended, including the “unprovoked” war in Ukraine. Noam then had a chapter on what he considered the greatest threats to humanity: nuclear war and climate change, and how the USA is leading this parade to oblivion.

The next section of Noam’s book was titled, “Understanding the Power System.” Noam had chapters on the “domestic roots of foreign policy,” “international law and the “Rules-Based Order,” and “how mythologies are manufactured.” The book’s concluding chapter was titled, “Hegemony or Survival?” That was also the title of one of Noam’s books.

One of Noam’s main points was that when declassified documents revealed how American officials discussed foreign policy, they assumed that the USA had a right to overthrow foreign governments, invade nations, slaughter their populations, and inflict virtual slavery on huge swaths of humanity, mainly peoples who had recently shed the yoke of European colonialism after World War II ended. In many instances, the USA simply became the new imperial overlords. Ed’s worthy-and-unworthy-victim framework is seen in Noam’s book. In Ed and Noam’s first book together, they noted the suffering of Africa and elsewhere.

If it ends up being Noam’s last book, it is a fitting end, as Noam called out his nation’s crimes in an attempt to curtail them, which could help save humanity. Noam thought that intellectuals could do no less. I recently reviewed a memoir by Noam’s longtime assistant at MIT, and her respect and love for Noam was obvious. Noam was one of the most approachable figures on Earth, which is partly how he got roped into the Epstein saga. I am not sure if there has ever been a greater advocate of free speech than Noam, who has defended the free-speech rights of Holocaust Deniers and even people who smeared him. He has been attacked from all sides for many years.

Noam sits firmly in my pantheon, but he and I do not see eye to eye on many issues, which I have remarked on regarding the limitations of intellectuals and politics. Noam is representative of the left’s aversion to the idea that the global economy and political system is managed by covert means, so covert that the left denies that those managers even exist. I made a recent post on the most dramatic events in American history in the past century and their likely conspiratorial nature. Noam was way off-base with his book that argued that the CIA would not have been motivated to be part of JFK’s assassination. The CIA was deeply involved in the operation that got JFK killed.

Michael Parenti expertly revealed the “conspiracy-phobia” on the left, especially Noam’s position on it, and how the gangster state operated with JFK’s murder. The left has been blinkered by its materialism, scientism, and its overreliance on structural analysis. Noam’s stance on the unvaccinated was painful to witness, although I immediately understood where he was coming from. It is legitimate to wonder if Noam’s debilitating stroke came from the COVID vaccine.

I have had experiences that armchair academics will never have, which shaped my views more than anything else, and I am sympathetic to the mental traps that Noam became ensnared in. I think that calling him a “left gatekeeper” is going too far, but Noam definitely has had a towering influence among the left. The left definitely has its ideological limits, as all political stripes do, which is why I strongly doubt that the path to a healed humanity and planets runs through retail politics. Noam is human like the rest of us, but what a great human.