- After September 11, the mainstream media's blatant performance
as the U.S Government's propaganda machine has only served to highlight
the business of `managing' public opinion. The resultant `mistrust of the
mass media' would at best be a political hunch or at worst a loose accusation,
if it were not for the relentless and unswerving media analysis of one
of the world's greatest minds. And this is only one of the ways in which
Noam Chomsky has radically altered our understanding of the society in
which we live. Rationally and empirically, he has unmasked the ugly, manipulative,
ruthless American universe that exists behind the word 'freedom', says
ARUNDHATI ROY, in an essay written as an introduction for the new edition
of Noam Chomsky
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- AFP
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- Noam chomsky
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- "I will never apologise for the United States
of America ÷ I don't care what the facts are."
- -- President George Bush Sr.
-
- SITTING in my home in New
Delhi, watching an American TV news channel promote itself ("We report.
You decide."), I imagine Noam Chomsky's amused, chipped-tooth smile.
-
- Everybody knows that authoritarian regimes, regardless
of their ideology, use the mass media for propaganda. But what about democratically
elected regimes in the "free world"?
-
- Today, thanks to Noam Chomsky and his fellow media analysts,
it is almost axiomatic for thousands, possibly millions, of us that public
opinion in "free market" democracies is manufactured just like
any other mass market product ÷ soap, switches, or sliced bread.
We know that while, legally and constitutionally, speech may be free, the
space in which that freedom can be exercised has been snatched from us
and auctioned to the highest bidders. Neoliberal capitalism isn't just
about the accumulation of capital (for some). It's also about the accumulation
of power (for some), the accumulation of freedom (for some). Conversely,
for the rest of the world, the people who are excluded from neoliberalism's
governing body, it's about the erosion of capital, the erosion of power,
the erosion of freedom. In the "free" market, free speech has
become a commodity like everything else ÷ ÷ justice, human
rights, drinking water, clean air. It's available only to those who can
afford it. And naturally, those who can afford it use free speech to manufacture
the kind of product, confect the kind of public opinion, that best suits
their purpose. (News they can use.) Exactly how they do this has been the
subject of much of Noam Chomsky's political writing.
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- AP
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- The U.S. 'empire' rests on a grisly foundation.
-
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- Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, for instance, has a
controlling interest in major Italian newspapers, magazines, television
channels, and publishing houses. "[T]he prime minister in effect controls
about 90 per cent of Italian TV viewership," reports the Financial
Times. What price free speech? Free speech for whom? Admittedly, Berlusconi
is an extreme example. In other democracies ÷ the United States
in particular ÷ media barons, powerful corporate lobbies, and government
officials are imbricated in a more elaborate, but less obvious, manner.
(George Bush Jr.'s connections to the oil lobby, to the arms industry,
and to Enron, and Enron's infiltration of U.S. government institutions
and the mass media ÷ all this is public knowledge now.)
-
- After the September 11, 2001, terrorist strikes in New
York and Washington, the mainstream media's blatant performance as the
U.S. government's mouthpiece, its display of vengeful patriotism, its willingness
to publish Pentagon press handouts as news, and its explicit censorship
of dissenting opinion became the butt of some pretty black humour in the
rest of the world.
-
- Then the New York Stock Exchange crashed, bankrupt airline
companies appealed to the government for financial bailouts, and there
was talk of circumventing patent laws in order to manufacture generic drugs
to fight the anthrax scare (much more important, and urgent of course,
than the production of generics to fight AIDS in Africa). Suddenly, it
began to seem as though the twin myths of Free Speech and the Free Market
might come crashing down alongside the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.
-
- But of course that never happened. The myths live on.
-
- There is however, a brighter side to the amount of energy
and money that the establishment pours into the business of "managing"
public opinion. It suggests a very real fear of public opinion. It suggests
a persistent and valid worry that if people were to discover (and fully
comprehend) the real nature of the things that are done in their name,
they might act upon that knowledge. Powerful people know that ordinary
people are not always reflexively ruthless and selfish. (When ordinary
people weigh costs and benefits, something like an uneasy conscience could
easily tip the scales.) For this reason, they must be guarded against reality,
reared in a controlled climate, in an altered reality, like broiler chickens
or pigs in a pen.
-
- Those of us who have managed to escape this fate and
are scratching about in the backyard, no longer believe everything we read
in the papers and watch on TV. We put our ears to the ground and look for
other ways of making sense of the world. We search for the untold story,
the mentioned-in-passing military coup, the unreported genocide, the civil
war in an African country written up in a one-column-inch story next to
a full-page advertisement for lace underwear.
-
- We don't always remember, and many don't even know, that
this way of thinking, this easy acuity, this instinctive mistrust of the
mass media, would at best be a political hunch and at worst a loose accusation,
if it were not for the relentless and unswerving media analysis of one
of the world's greatest minds. And this is only one of the ways in which
Noam Chomsky has radically altered our understanding of the society in
which we live. Or should I say, our understanding of the elaborate rules
of the lunatic asylum in which we are all voluntary inmates?
-
- Speaking about the September 11 attacks in New York and
Washington, President George W. Bush called the enemies of the United States
"enemies of freedom". "Americans are asking why do they
hate us?" he said. "They hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion,
our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with
each other."
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- SHAJU JOHN
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- If people in the United States want a real answer to
that question (as opposed to the ones in the Idiot's Guide to Anti-Americanism,
that is: "Because they're jealous of us," "Because they
hate freedom," "Because they're losers," "Because we're
good and they're evil"), I'd say, read Chomsky. Read Chomsky on U.S.
military interventions in Indochina, Latin America, Iraq, Bosnia, the former
Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and the Middle East. If ordinary people in the
United States read Chomsky, perhaps their questions would be framed a little
differently. Perhaps it would be: "Why don't they hate us more than
they do?" or "Isn't it surprising that September 11 didn't happen
earlier?"
-
- Unfortunately, in these nationalistic times, words like
"us" and "them" are used loosely. The line between
citizens and the state is being deliberately and successfully blurred,
not just by governments, but also by terrorists. The underlying logic of
terrorist attacks, as well as "retaliatory" wars against governments
that "support terrorism", is the same: both punish citizens for
the actions of their governments.
-
- (A brief digression: I realise that for Noam Chomsky,
a U.S. citizen, to criticise his own government is better manners than
for someone like myself, an Indian citizen, to criticise the U.S. government.
I'm no patriot, and am fully aware that venality, brutality, and hypocrisy
are imprinted on the leaden soul of every state. But when a country ceases
to be merely a country and becomes an empire, then the scale of operations
changes dramatically. So may I clarify that I speak as a subject of the
U.S. empire? I speak as a slave who presumes to criticise her king.)
-
- If I were asked to choose one of Noam Chomsky's major
contributions to the world, it would be the fact that he has unmasked the
ugly, manipulative, ruthless universe that exists behind that beautiful,
sunny word "freedom". He has done this rationally and empirically.
The mass of evidence he has marshalled to construct his case is formidable.
Terrifying, actually. The starting premise of Chomsky's method is not ideological,
but it is intensely political. He embarks on his course of inquiry with
an anarchist's instinctive mistrust of power. He takes us on a tour through
the bog of the U.S. establishment, and leads us through the dizzying maze
of corridors that connects the government, big business, and the business
of managing public opinion.
-
- Chomsky shows us how phrases like "free speech",
the "free market", and the "free world" have little,
if anything, to do with freedom. He shows us that, among the myriad freedoms
claimed by the U.S. government are the freedom to murder, annihilate, and
dominate other people. The freedom to finance and sponsor despots and dictators
across the world. The freedom to train, arm, and shelter terrorists. The
freedom to topple democratically elected governments. The freedom to amass
and use weapons of mass destruction ÷ chemical, biological, and
nuclear. The freedom to go to war against any country whose government
it disagrees with. And, most terrible of all, the freedom to commit these
crimes against humanity in the name of "justice", in the name
of "righteousness", in the name of "freedom".
-
- Attorney General John Ashcroft has declared that U.S.
freedoms are "not the grant of any government or document, but...
our endowment from God". So, basically, we're confronted with a country
armed with a mandate from heaven. Perhaps this explains why the U.S. government
refuses to judge itself by the same moral standards by which it judges
others. (Any attempt to do this is shouted down as "moral equivalence".)
Its technique is to position itself as the well-intentioned giant whose
good deeds are confounded in strange countries by their scheming natives,
whose markets it's trying to free, whose societies it's trying to modernise,
whose women it's trying to liberate, whose souls it's trying to save.
-
- Perhaps this belief in its own divinity also explains
why the U.S. government has conferred upon itself the right and freedom
to murder and exterminate people "for their own good".
-
- When he announced the U.S. air strikes against Afghanistan,
President Bush Jr. said, "We're a peaceful nation." He went on
to say, "This is the calling of the United States of America, the
most free nation in the world, a nation built on fundamental values, that
rejects hate, rejects violence, rejects murderers, rejects evil. And we
will not tire."
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- AP
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- Indo-China ...the lush, tropical background for
the
U.S. "to enact its fantasies of violence" ...
-
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- The U.S. empire rests on a grisly foundation: the massacre
of millions of indigenous people, the stealing of their lands, and following
this, the kidnapping and enslavement of millions of black people from Africa
to work that land. Thousands died on the seas while they were being shipped
like caged cattle between continents. "Stolen from Africa, brought
to America" ÷ Bob Marley's "Buffalo Soldier" contains
a whole universe of unspeakable sadness. It tells of the loss of dignity,
the loss of wilderness, the loss of freedom, the shattered pride of a people.
Genocide and slavery provide the social and economic underpinning of the
nation whose fundamental values reject hate, murderers, and evil.
-
- Here is Chomsky, writing in the essay "The Manufacture
of Consent," on the founding of the United States of America:
-
- During the Thanksgiving holiday a few weeks ago, I took
a walk with some friends and family in a national park. We came across
a gravestone, which had on it the following inscription: "Here lies
an Indian woman, a Wampanoag, whose family and tribe gave of themselves
and their land that this great nation might be born and grow."
-
- Of course, it is not quite accurate to say that the indigenous
population gave of themselves and their land for that noble purpose. Rather,
they were slaughtered, decimated, and dispersed in the course of one of
the greatest exercises in genocide in human history... which we celebrate
each October when we honour Columbus ÷ a notable mass murderer himself
÷ on Columbus Day.
-
- Hundreds of American citizens, well-meaning and decent
people, troop by that gravestone regularly and read it, apparently without
reaction; except, perhaps, a feeling of satisfaction that at last we are
giving some due recognition to the sacrifices of the native peoples....
They might react differently if they were to visit Auschwitz or Dachau
and find a gravestone reading: "Here lies a woman, a Jew, whose family
and people gave of themselves and their possessions that this great nation
might grow and prosper."
-
- How has the United States survived its terrible past
and emerged smelling so sweet? Not by owning up to it, not by making reparations,
not by apologising to black Americans or native Americans, and certainly
not by changing its ways (it exports its cruelties now). Like most other
countries, the United States has rewritten its history. But what sets the
United States apart from other countries, and puts it way ahead in the
race, is that it has enlisted the services of the most powerful, most successful
publicity firm in the world: Hollywood.
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- AFP
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- Iraq.. a new type of war waged with super weapons.
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- In the best-selling version of popular myth as history,
U.S. "goodness" peaked during World War II (aka America's War
Against Fascism). Lost in the din of trumpet sound and angel song is the
fact that when fascism was in full stride in Europe, the U.S. government
actually looked away. When Hitler was carrying out his genocidal pogrom
against Jews, U.S. officials refused entry to Jewish refugees fleeing Germany.
The United States entered the war only after the Japanese bombed Pearl
Harbour. Drowned out by the noisy hosannas is its most barbaric act, in
fact the single most savage act the world has ever witnessed: the dropping
of the atomic bomb on civilian populations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The
war was nearly over. The hundreds of thousands of Japanese people who were
killed, the countless others who were crippled by cancers for generations
to come, were not a threat to world peace. They were civilians. Just as
the victims of the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings were civilians.
Just as the hundreds of thousands of people who died in Iraq because of
the U.S.-led sanctions were civilians. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
was a cold, calculated experiment carried out to demonstrate America's
power. At the time, President Truman described it as "the greatest
thing in history".
-
- The Second World War, we're told, was a "war for
peace". The atomic bomb was a "weapon of peace". We're invited
to believe that nuclear deterrence prevented World War III. (That was before
President George Bush Jr. came up with the "pre-emptive strike doctrine".
Was there an outbreak of peace after the Second World War? Certainly there
was (relative) peace in Europe and America ÷ but does that count
as world peace? Not unless savage, proxy wars fought in lands where the
coloured races live (chinks, niggers, dinks, wogs, gooks) don't count as
wars at all.
-
- Since the Second World War, the United States has been
at war with or has attacked, among other countries, Korea, Guatemala, Cuba,
Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Grenada, Libya, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama,
Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan. This list should also
include the U.S. government's covert operations in Africa, Asia, and Latin
America, the coups it has engineered, and the dictators it has armed and
supported. It should include Israel's U.S.-backed war on Lebanon, in which
thousands were killed. It should include the key role America has played
in the conflict in the Middle East, in which thousands have died fighting
Israel's illegal occupation of Palestinian territory. It should include
America's role in the civil war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, in which more
than one million people were killed. It should include the embargos and
sanctions that have led directly, and indirectly, to the death of hundreds
of thousands of people, most visibly in Iraq.
-
- Put it all together, and it sounds very much as though
there has been a World War III, and that the U.S. government was (or is)
one of its chief protagonists.
-
- Most of the essays in Chomsky's For Reasons of State
are about U.S. aggression in South Vietnam, North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
It was a war that lasted more than 12 years. Fifty-eight thousand Americans
and approximately two million Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians lost
their lives. The U.S. deployed half a million ground troops, dropped more
than six million tons of bombs. And yet, though you wouldn't believe it
if you watched most Hollywood movies, America lost the war.
-
- The war began in South Vietnam and then spread to North
Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. After putting in place a client regime in
Saigon, the U.S. government invited itself in to fight a communist insurgency
÷ Vietcong guerillas who had infiltrated rural regions of South
Vietnam where villagers were sheltering them. This was exactly the model
that Russia replicated when, in 1979, it invited itself into Afghanistan.
Nobody in the "free world" is in any doubt about the fact that
Russia invaded Afghanistan. After glasnost, even a Soviet foreign minister
called the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan "illegal and immoral".
But there has been no such introspection in the United States. In 1984,
in a stunning revelation, Chomsky wrote:
-
- For the past 22 years, I have been searching to find
some reference in mainstream journalism or scholarship to an American invasion
of South Vietnam in 1962 (or ever), or an American attack against South
Vietnam, or American aggression in Indochina ÷ without success.
There is no such event in history. Rather, there is an American defence
of South Vietnam against terrorists supported from the outside (namely
from Vietnam).
-
- There is no such event in history!
-
- In 1962, the U.S. Air Force began to bomb rural South
Vietnam, where 80 per cent of the population lived. The bombing lasted
for more than a decade. Thousands of people were killed. The idea was to
bomb on a scale colossal enough to induce panic migration from villages
into cities, where people could be held in refugee camps. Samuel Huntington
referred to this as a process of "urbanisation". (I learned about
urbanisation when I was in architecture school in India. Somehow I don't
remember aerial bombing being part of the syllabus.) Huntington ÷
famous today for his essay "The Clash of Civilizations?"÷
was at the time Chairman of the Council on Vietnamese Studies of the Southeast
Asia Development Advisory Group. Chomsky quotes him describing the Vietcong
as "a powerful force which cannot be dislodged from its constituency
so long as the constituency continues to exist". Huntington went on
to advise "direct application of mechanical and conventional power"÷
in other words, to crush a people's war, eliminate the people. (Or, perhaps,
to update the thesis ÷ in order to prevent a clash of civilizations,
annihilate a civilisation.)
-
- Here's one observer from the time on the limitations
of America's mechanical power: "The problem is that American machines
are not equal to the task of killing communist soldiers except as part
of a scorched-earth policy that destroys everything else as well."
That problem has been solved now. Not with less destructive bombs, but
with more imaginative language. There's a more elegant way of saying "that
destroys everything else as well". The phrase is "collateral
damage".
-
- And here's a firsthand account of what America's "machines"
(Huntington called them "modernising instruments" and staff officers
in the Pentagon called them "bomb-o-grams") can do. This is T.D.
Allman flying over the Plain of Jars in Laos.
-
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- SANDEEP SAXENA
-
-
-
- Even if the war in Laos ended tomorrow, the restoration
of its ecological balance might take several years. The reconstruction
of the Plain's totally destroyed towns and villages might take just as
long. Even if this was done, the Plain might long prove perilous to human
habitation because of the hundreds of thousands of unexploded bombs, mines
and booby traps.
-
- A recent flight around the Plain of Jars revealed what
less than three years of intensive American bombing can do to a rural area,
even after its civilian population has been evacuated. In large areas,
the primary tropical colour ÷ bright green ÷ has been replaced
by an abstract pattern of black, and bright metallic colours. Much of the
remaining foliage is stunted, dulled by defoliants.
-
- Today, black is the dominant colour of the northern and
eastern reaches of the Plain. Napalm is dropped regularly to burn off the
grass and undergrowth that covers the Plains and fills its many narrow
ravines. The fires seem to burn constantly, creating rectangles of black.
During the flight, plumes of smoke could be seen rising from freshly bombed
areas.
-
- The main routes, coming into the Plain from communist-held
territory, are bombed mercilessly, apparently on a non-stop basis. There,
and along the rim of the Plain, the dominant colour is yellow. All vegetation
has been destroyed. The craters are countless.... [T]he area has been bombed
so repeatedly that the land resembles the pocked, churned desert in storm-hit
areas of the North African desert.
-
- Further to the southeast, Xieng Khouangville ÷
once the most populous town in communist Laos ÷ lies empty, destroyed.
To the north of the Plain, the little resort of Khang Khay also has been
destroyed.
-
- Around the landing field at the base of King Kong, the
main colours are yellow (from upturned soil) and black (from napalm), relieved
by patches of bright red and blue: parachutes used to drop supplies.
-
- [T]he last local inhabitants were being carted into air
transports. Abandoned vegetable gardens that would never be harvested grew
near abandoned houses with plates still on the tables and calendars on
the walls.
-
- (Never counted in the "costs" of war are the
dead birds, the charred animals, the murdered fish, incinerated insects,
poisoned water sources, destroyed vegetation. Rarely mentioned is the arrogance
of the human race towards other living things with which it shares this
planet. All these are forgotten in the fight for markets and ideologies.
This arrogance will probably be the ultimate undoing of the human species.)
-
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- AP
-
- "The Marines have landed" ... a call
that
echoed throughout the Vietnam war.
-
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- The centrepiece of For Reasons of State is an essay called
"The Mentality of the Backroom Boys", in which Chomsky offers
an extraordinarily supple, exhaustive analysis of the Pentagon Papers,
which he says "provide documentary evidence of a conspiracy to use
force in international affairs in violation of law". Here, too, Chomsky
makes note of the fact that while the bombing of North Vietnam is discussed
at some length in the Pentagon Papers, the invasion of South Vietnam barely
merits a mention.
-
- The Pentagon Papers are mesmerising, not as documentation
of the history of the U.S. war in Indochina, but as insight into the minds
of the men who planned and executed it. It's fascinating to be privy to
the ideas that were being tossed around, the suggestions that were made,
the proposals that were put forward. In a section called "The Asian
Mind ÷ the American Mind", Chomsky examines the discussion
of the mentality of the enemy that "stoically accept[s] the destruction
of wealth and the loss of lives", whereas "We want life, happiness,
wealth, power", and, for us, "death and suffering are irrational
choices when alternatives exist". So, we learn that the Asian poor,
presumably because they cannot comprehend the meaning of happiness, wealth,
and power, invite America to carry this "strategic logic to its conclusion,
which is genocide". But, then "we" balk because "genocide
is a terrible burden to bear". (Eventually, of course, "we"
went ahead and committed genocide any way, and then pretended that it never
really happened.)
-
- Of course, the Pentagon Papers contain some moderate
proposals, as well.
-
- Strikes at population targets (per se) are likely not
only to create a counterproductive wave of revulsion abroad and at home,
but greatly to increase the risk of enlarging the war with China and the
Soviet Union. Destruction of locks and dams, however ÷ if handled
right ÷ might... offer promise. It should be studied. Such destruction
does not kill or drown people. By shallow-flooding the rice, it leads after
time to widespread starvation (more than a million?) unless food is provided
÷ which we could offer to do "at the conference table".
-
- Layer by layer, Chomsky strips down the process of decision-making
by U.S. government officials, to reveal at its core the pitiless heart
of the American war machine, completely insulated from the realities of
war, blinded by ideology, and willing to annihilate millions of human beings,
civilians, soldiers, women, children, villages, whole cities, whole ecosystems
÷ with scientifically honed methods of brutality.
-
- Here's an American pilot talking about the joys of napalm:
-
- We sure are pleased with those backroom boys at Dow.
The original product wasn't so hot ÷ if the gooks were quick they
could scrape it off. So the boys started adding polystyrene ÷ now
it sticks like shit to a blanket. But then if the gooks jumped under water
it stopped burning, so they started adding Willie Peter [white phosphorous]
so's to make it burn better. It'll even burn under water now. And just
one drop is enough, it'll keep on burning right down to the bone so they
die anyway from phosphorous poisoning.
-
- So the lucky gooks were annihilated for their own good.
Better Dead than Red.
-
-
- SHAJU JOHN
-
- Noam Chomsky ... weaving his spell over Chennai
in November
2001. He spoke on "September 11 and its aftermath".
-
-
- Thanks to the seductive charms of Hollywood and the irresistible
appeal of America's mass media, all these years later, the world views
the war as an American story. Indochina provided the lush, tropical backdrop
against which the United States played out its fantasies of violence, tested
its latest technology, furthered its ideology, examined its conscience,
agonised over its moral dilemmas, and dealt with its guilt (or pretended
to). The Vietnamese, the Cambodians, and Laotians were only script props.
Nameless, faceless, slit-eyed humanoids. They were just the people who
died. Gooks.
-
- The only real lesson the U.S. government learned from
its invasion of Indochina is how to go to war without committing American
troops and risking American lives. So now we have wars waged with long-range
cruise missiles, Black Hawks, "bunker busters". Wars in which
the "Allies" lose more journalists than soldiers.
-
- As a child growing up in the state of Kerala, in South
India ÷ where the first democratically elected Communist government
in the world came to power in 1959, the year I was born ÷ I worried
terribly about being a gook. Kerala was only a few thousand miles west
of Vietnam. We had jungles and rivers and rice-fields, and communists,
too. I kept imagining my mother, my brother, and myself being blown out
of the bushes by a grenade, or mowed down, like the gooks in the movies,
by an American marine with muscled arms and chewing gum and a loud background
score. In my dreams, I was the burning girl in the famous photograph taken
on the road from Trang Bang.
-
- As someone who grew up on the cusp of both American and
Soviet propaganda (which more or less neutralised each other), when I first
read Noam Chomsky, it occurred to me that his marshalling of evidence,
the volume of it, the relentlessness of it, was a little ÷ how shall
I put it? ÷ insane. Even a quarter of the evidence he had compiled
would have been enough to convince me. I used to wonder why he needed to
do so much work. But now I understand that the magnitude and intensity
of Chomsky's work is a barometer of the magnitude, scope, and relentlessness
of the propaganda machine that he's up against. He's like the wood-borer
who lives inside the third rack of my bookshelf. Day and night, I hear
his jaws crunching through the wood, grinding it to a fine dust. It's as
though he disagrees with the literature and wants to destroy the very structure
on which it rests. I call him Chompsky.
-
- Being an American working in America, writing to convince
Americans of his point of view must really be like having to tunnel through
hard wood. Chomsky is one of a small band of individuals fighting a whole
industry. And that makes him not only brilliant, but heroic.
-
- Some years ago, in a poignant interview with James Peck,
Chomsky spoke about his memory of the day Hiroshima was bombed. He was
16 years old:
-
- I remember that I literally couldn't talk to anybody.
There was nobody. I just walked off by myself. I was at a summer camp at
the time, and I walked off into the woods and stayed alone for a couple
of hours when I heard about it. I could never talk to anyone about it and
never understood anyone's reaction. I felt completely isolated.
-
- That isolation produced one of the greatest, most radical
public thinkers of our time. When the sun sets on the American empire,
as it will, as it must, Noam Chomsky's work will survive.
-
- It will point a cool, incriminating finger at a merciless,
Machiavellian empire as cruel, self-righteous, and hypocritical as the
ones it has replaced. (The only difference is that it is armed with technology
that can visit the kind of devastation on the world that history has never
known and the human race cannot begin to imagine.)
-
- As a could've been gook, and who knows, perhaps a potential
gook, hardly a day goes by when I don't find myself thinking - for one
reason or another - "Chomsky Zindabad".
-
- Arundhati Roy is the author of The God of Small Things.
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- http://www.hinduonnet.com/mag/2003/08/24/index.htm
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