One of the rare times that Noam Chomsky\u2019s name has been mentioned on a big national NPR program came two months ago. On \u201cWeekend Edition\u201d in mid-October, a week into Israel\u2019s murderous assault on civilians in Gaza, a correspondent reported while visiting a bookstore owned by a Palestinian in Jerusalem: \u201cI\u2019m seeing a lot of books by Noam Chomsky.\u201d<\/p>\n
Across the globe, people suffering from illegitimate power and violence have a lot of books by Noam Chomsky. A recent interviewer aptly\u00a0introduced him<\/a>\u00a0this way: \u201cOne of the world\u2019s most-cited scholars and a public intellectual regarded by millions of people as a national and international treasure, Chomsky has published more than 150 books in linguistics, political and social thought, political economy, media studies, U.S foreign policy and world affairs.\u201d<\/p>\n Ever since his meticulous writing and strong activism against the U.S. war on Southeast Asia in the 1960s and \u201970s, Chomsky has been exposing Orwellian and often-deadly maneuvers by the most powerful government on Earth. Along the way, he has been tireless, humanistic and uncompromising.<\/p>\n For many decades, the core of corporate greed and militarism has remained basically the same. So has the core of Chomsky\u2019s message.<\/p>\n In 1982, while visiting Philadelphia, he\u00a0appeared as a guest<\/a>\u00a0on \u201cFresh Air\u201d — back then only a local program on WHYY Radio. Host Terry Gross asked: \u201cYour radical thoughts in linguistics completely changed the field. Your radical thoughts in politics hasn\u2019t completely changed America. Has it been interesting for you to watch how your contribution to politics and linguistics has or hasn\u2019t affected things?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI see them very differently,\u201d Chomsky replied. \u201cFor one thing, in my view, linguistics is — well, it\u2019s basically a branch of sciences, it\u2019s hard intellectual work. Political analysis is not, quite frankly. I think it\u2019s easily within the range of an ordinary person who doesn\u2019t have any particular training and is simply willing to use common sense to pay attention to the available documentary record and to use a little diligence in searching beyond what\u2019s on the surface.\u201d<\/p>\n Chomsky continued: \u201cThere\u2019s an elaborate pretense that this is an area that must be left to experts. But that\u2019s simply one way of protecting power from scrutiny. So, my own interest in political analysis and writing and so on is simply to bring information to people who I think can use it for the purposes of changing the world.\u201d<\/p>\n His anti-elitism has endured, and so has enmity from some elites. One response is to block access to mainstream media. \u201cFresh Air\u201d is a case in point. A search of the program\u2019s full archive shows that after it went national on NPR in the mid-1980s, \u201cFresh Air\u201d never interviewed Chomsky again. The program\u2019s local interview with him back in 1982 was the first and last.<\/p>\n With few exceptions, in major U.S. media — notably unlike major media in most of the rest of the world — Chomsky has been persona non grata.<\/em><\/p>\n A key reason is Chomsky\u2019s implacable opposition to the many wars of aggression that the U.S. government has launched or supported. And a particularly unacceptable deviation from approved views has been his illuminating condemnations of Israel\u2019s historic and ongoing suppression of Palestinian rights. For several decades, as a result, vast quantities of hostility and distortion have been directed at him.<\/p>\n Here’s a sample: In the mid-1990s, the longtime host of NPR\u2019s \u201cAll Things Considered\u201d program, Robert Siegel — operating within a lofty \u201cpublic radio\u201d bubble — wrote a letter to the industry newspaper Current declaring that Chomsky \u201cevidently enjoys a small, avid, and largely academic audience who seem to be persuaded that the tangible world of politics is all the result of delusion, false consciousness and media manipulation.\u201d<\/p>\n Chomsky, who turned 95 last week, has been spotlighting the inherent and expansively violent cruelties of Zionism for a very long time. His landmark 1983 book \u201cFateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians\u201d dispelled many readers\u2019 illusions about the goals and consequences of U.S. support for Israel.<\/p>\n In 1986, journalist David Barsamian launched \u201cAlternative Radio<\/a>\u201d — a national one-hour program that got underway by bringing Chomsky\u2019s voice to listeners around the United States and far beyond. In the nearly 40 years since then, the weekly show has aired\u00a0several hundred speeches and interviews<\/a>\u00a0with Chomsky (whose\u00a0website<\/a>\u00a0also overflows with a cornucopia of vital information and analysis).<\/p>\n \u201cSolidarity is not some abstract concept for him,\u201d Barsamian told me. \u201cIf you needed advice, a signature, a check, a fundraising talk, Noam would be there.\u201d<\/p>\n Behind the scenes, working with Chomsky for so long while seeing him interact with a wide array of people, \u201cwhat always impressed me was his kindness and decency,\u201d Barsamian said. \u201cBehind the mental acuity, stunning level of knowledge and intellectual brilliance is a mild-mannered gentle man. Working with Noam over many years has been the most rewarding experience of my life.\u201d<\/p>\n If you ever receive an email from David Barsamian, the bottom lines of it will be this quote from Noam Chomsky: \u201cIf you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, then there is a possibility that you can contribute to making a better world.”<\/p>\n The post Conformist Media Outlets Hide Realities of Power. Noam Chomsky Exposes Them.<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the rare times that Noam Chomsky\u2019s name has been mentioned on a big national NPR program came two months ago. On \u201cWeekend Edition\u201d in mid-October, a week into Israel\u2019s murderous assault on civilians in Gaza, a correspondent reported while visiting a bookstore owned by a Palestinian in Jerusalem: \u201cI\u2019m seeing a lot of More<\/a><\/p>\n The post Conformist Media Outlets Hide Realities of Power. Noam Chomsky Exposes Them.<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1392539"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1392539"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1392539\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1392540,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1392539\/revisions\/1392540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1392539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1392539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1392539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}