[Peace-discuss] Noam Chomsky gets it wrong about hearing from RT, Lavrov, and Russian news

[J.B. Nicholson]

I wrote:
> https://twitter.com/SizweLo/status/1550548521882947586 appears to have an excerpt
> from a recent and (as far as I know) new Chomsky interview by Russell Brand. I 
> couldn't find the whole interview. Here's a transcript of that excerpt.


Jimmy Dore just covered this in 
https://rumble.com/v1dmvd1-u.s.-censorship-worse-than-in-soviet-russia.html with his 
guests Aaron Maté and Kurt Metzger. Sadly they too seem to have gotten a significant 
part of the story wrong by not listening very closely to what Chomsky said or doing a 
small bit of their own research. Dore makes some good points toward the middle but 
then cites a clumsy so-called "discrediting" of Chomsky around 3m58s, time better 
spent on far better arguments to discredit what Chomsky's claims. Maté brought up 
valid and interesting points on how RT, in particular, was kept from participating in 
news reporting but none of those points were raised by Chomsky.

To remind you, here's a transcript of the slightly longer clip presented on the Jimmy 
Dore segment linked above from rumble.com:


> Noam Chomsky: Take the United States today -- it is living under a kind of 
> totalitarian culture which has never existed in my lifetime and is much worse in 
> many ways than the Soviet Union before Gorbachev. Go back to the 1970's, people in
> Soviet Russia could access BBC, Voice of America, German television if they wanted
> to find out the news. If today in the United States you wanted to find out what
> Prime Minister Lavrov of Russia is saying, can't do it. It's barred. Americans are
> not permitted to hear what Russians are saying. Can't get Russian television,
> can't access Russian sources. That means also that fine American journalists like
> Chris Hedges, one of the best, is cut out, barred from Americans 'cause he happens
> to have a program running on RT (Russian television). You wanna find out what the
> adversary is saying, which is of utmost importance, you can maybe tune into Indian
> state television and find it out or you can read it on Al Jazeera. But the United
> States has imposed constraints on freedom of access information which are
> astonishing. And which, in fact, go beyond what was the case in [post?] Stalin
> Soviet Russia. That's a remarkable fact. It goes well beyond any [length?] who
> dares to break the party line on the dominant issues today -- Ukraine is simply
> demonized, vilified, can't be sent to the gulag it's a free country still but you
> can barely talk. And that has very dangerous implications for the current
> situation and beyond.

Dore called Chomsky's assessment "very well said and I agree with everything he said" 
when it was substantially easily disproven rubbish, the kind of junk I expect Jimmy 
Dore to debunk because the means of debunking it is so trivial (literally visiting a 
website whose domain name is easily guessed such as "rt.com").

There are two main parts to this clip:

Part 1. What I reviewed earlier[1] covered the clip up to "That's a remarkable fact".

Part 2. The part of Chomsky's response starting with "It goes well beyond any length 
who dares to break the party line on the dominant issues today..." is a more sensible 
but undefended point which is separate from the first. But I don't think that these 
restrictions are as unprecedented as Dore's discussion claims. We saw some of this 
during the run-up to the US/UK invasion of Iraq (back when Democracy Now was 
"breaking the party line").

If you take Chomsky (and I suppose Dore) seriously here, it's worth asking yourself 
what, exactly, is the consequence for Americans watching RT's works on VK.com, 
Rumble.com, Odysee.com, or RT.com (all of which are readily available to Americans)? 
As far as I can tell the consequence is that Americans get to see precisely what 
Chomsky claimed Americans can't see.

Chomsky used to have a better take on free speech[2] but he has apparently dropped 
that in favor of echoing establishment views on the COVID narrative.

This is certainly another low point for Chomsky and (for co-signing Chomsky's entire 
clip without exception) a low point for Dore & Maté as well.



[1] In https://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/2022-July/053657.html I 
detailed how easy it is to access every source and kind of video Chomsky listed. 
Access to those videos and sources is not an issue for Americans. It's sad that 
YouTube censors on behalf of the US government but don't let yourself believe that 
online video is only YouTube. Most Americans don't believe that. Proof of this is 
easy to see -- many millions of Americans pay to access Disney+ and Netflix.

[2] "Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If 
you’re really in favor of free speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech for 
precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of free speech." 
--Noam Chomsky