t is amazing to me, how the rest of the civilized world admires Noam Chomsky, devours his books of political analysis, and yet he is hated in his own country. Every stripe of American conservative curses him. Mainstream Media avoids him as if he were the swine flu itself. Publishers reject his manuscripts preferring instead, to publish such garbage as Sarah Palin's book, Anne Coulter's mad ravings and the laughable "historian" who tried to show that liberals were the inspiration and true function of Hitler's Third Reich. Why? After all, Chomsky's books are invariably numbered among the Top Ten sellers list of The New York Times. By not publishing Chomsky you would seem to be passing up a big money maker.True!
So why would corporate bosses willingly pass on the chance to make a big profit?
The more deeply you study Chomsky's work the more easily you understand why he is the source of deep distress among Neo-cons and other conservatives. In the words of Harold Pinter, at the Nobel Prize Ceremonies, Noam Chomsky does what few do, and he will not be intimidated, or back down. Youtube has videos of interviews with both admiring students and young, idealistic journalists, and not so admiring conservatives of the ilk of William Buckley, Jr. There is even the now famous interview on Firing Line where Buckley becomes so demoralized that he threatens Chomsky with physical violence.
Buckley flashes the baby blues, but he also slows down to an intellectually feeble limp in Chomsky's company.
Chomsky is despised in America for one simple reason: he tells the truth. The truth, you see, is very embarrassing to both the Big Bully of a central government and the big business concerns who run the government. And telling the Truth in a country whose business it is to lie; to create and dispense immense amounts of propaganda, through the agency of a Mainstream Media which has become nothing more than the handmaiden of liars, has become a radical and revolutionary act.
This video, however, shows Chomsky offering some potent insights. On government, he points out that although the public outcry against George W. Bush's unprovoked invasion of Iraq was huge and unprecedented, the Federal government's response to the anti-war demonstrations was zip, zero, nada. Bush and Cheney played "Let's Carpet Bomb, Kidnap, Torture and Murder the Innocent" with their fingers in their ears, while Halliburton poisoned our soldiers and Exxon gobbled up as much oil as they could illegally steal and then gouged the public to the tune of obscene profits. How do these sleazoids get away with such outrageous criminal activity? Again, easy. They simply shape the thoughts of the citizenry. Thus, it isn't difficult to grasp the thrust of Chomsky's most famous work, Manufacturing Consent.♦
