[Peace-discuss] Why Obama has to do that...

[C. G. Estabrook]

Jenifer Cartwright wrote:
> ...Chomsky's vote isn't the issue here, but rather his intelligent,
> thoughtful, appropriately nuanced and civilized way of presenting information
> and opinions. I am sure we would all be honored to have him posting to
> Peace-discuss.

[Chomsky is always worth attending to.  Here's a basic and rather flat-footed 
review of a collection of his work, from an unusual source -- "Epoch Times," a 
Falun Gong-connected newspaper based in NY.  --CGE]


	Book Review: ‘The Essential Chomsky’
	By Du Won Kang, Epoch Times Washington, D.C. Staff
	Nov 3, 2008

Many people have heard of Noam Chomsky, but few understand him. Chomsky 
dominates the field of linguistics and made major contributions to psychology, 
cognitive science, and computer science. For decades, he has been a strong and 
sustained critic of U.S. military intervention, domestic politics, and the 
corporate media.

He cannot be adequately categorized simply as a “far left” intellectual, nor can 
his arguments be fairly labeled and dismissed as “conspiracy theory.”

His recent book, The Essential Chomsky, is a collection of over 400 pages of 25 
essays and chapter excerpts from a wide range of his writings in philosophy, 
linguistics, and politics that spans half a century. It is packed with 
fascinating and important materials.

The Essential Chomsky jumps between diverse topics in chronological order, while 
mentioning important concepts in just a few words and leaving obvious questions 
unanswered. The Essential Chomsky cannot be a substitute for many of his other 
books, which present his theories more thoroughly and convincingly.

This book review attempts to shed some light on a few of the major themes of The 
Essential Chomsky, which covers complex and controversial topics that are as 
relevant today as when Chomsky first started writing about them decades ago.

Chomsky: U.S. Foreign Policy and State Propaganda

Most of the essays in The Essential Chomsky are about Chomsky’s analysis and 
strong critique of the U.S. government’s use of force abroad, the U.S. political 
system that tends to constrain democratic participation of the majority of 
Americans, and the corporate media that does not serve the public interest. 
Chomsky offers surprising clarity and perspectives on these topics, and backs 
them up with the same kind of rigor, intensity, and persistence that made him 
enormously successful in linguistics.

According to Chomsky, Americans have been indoctrinated since childhood to 
believe that the U.S. government is “for the people and by the people” and its 
purposes are benevolent and noble. He says that this is largely a myth.

In “Foreign Policy and the Intelligentsia” of The Essential Chomsky, he presents 
one of his main themes: “The United States, in fact, is no more engaged in 
programs of international goodwill than any other state has been.”

Chomsky says, “The effective ‘national purpose’ will be articulated, by and 
large, by those who control the central economic institutions, while the 
rhetoric to disguise it is the province of the intelligentsia.”

In “Imperial Grand Strategy” of The Essential Chomsky, he says that it is 
standard operating procedure to scare Americans into supporting a war.

He draws examples from the Reagan-Bush years. In 1985, President Reagan declared 
a national emergency, because “The policies and actions of the government of 
Nicaragua constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national 
security and foreign policy of the United States,” and now the pattern seems to 
repeat with Iraq, according to Chomsky.

“National security” is a technical term referring to the “special interests” of 
those who control the domestic economic institutions, according to Chomsky.

Referring to the war on Iraq, Chomsky quotes political analyst Anatol Lieven: 
that most Americans had been “duped… by a propaganda programme which for 
systematic mendacity has few parallels in peacetime democracies.”

According to Chomsky, a global agenda of the U.S., “the most powerful state in 
history,” has been to “maintain hegemony through the threat or use of military 
force, the dimensions of power in which it reigns supreme.”

The Essential Chomsky includes many examples of decades of what Chomsky regards 
as “lawlessness” and “atrocities” committed by the U.S., which pretends to be 
acting defensively for national security and noble purposes about promoting 
freedom and democracy abroad, while the U.S. corporate media systematically 
produce biased reports and “remained properly subservient to the basic 
principles of the state propaganda system, with a few exceptions...”

Chomsky singles out the New York Times in many of his examples.

Chomsky: 'Thought Control' in Democratic Societies

According to Chomsky, “thought control” in the U.S. is actually more effective 
than in totalitarian states where obedience is secured by force because thought 
control in the U.S. combines effective indoctrination while giving the 
impression that our society is free and open.

The essays and chapter long excerpts of The Essential Chomsky mention the 
“propaganda model” only briefly and do not explain convincingly how it is 
possible that propaganda and thought control in the U.S. can be very effective 
in our free and open society. For a more thorough explanation, we need to 
examine some of Chomsky’s other works.

The “propaganda model” is a central concept in an earlier book, Manufacturing 
Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, which Chomsky coauthored with 
Edward S. Herman.

The propaganda model is a framework based on how the structure of the mainstream 
media explains the general pattern of its biased performance.

According to Herman and Chomsky, some of the major factors that contribute to 
the structure of the mainstream media include: concentration of ownership by 
corporations and conglomerates such as General Electric that are driven by 
profit; funding by profit seeking advertisers that influence shaping of contents 
and distribution to more affluent segments of society; and sources for news that 
rely heavily on the government and major businesses for information.

Herman and Chomsky write, “in contrast to the standard conception of the media 
as cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in their search for truth and their 
independent authority…” the real purpose of the corporate media is to “inculcate 
and defend the economic, social, and political agenda of the privileged groups 
that dominate the domestic society and the state.”

According to Herman and Chomsky, the media serves this purpose in many ways: 
through selection of topics, framing of issues, filtering of information, 
emphasis and tone, and “by keeping debate within bounds of acceptable premises.”

Even in the cases of media involvement in the Vietnam War and Watergate, which 
are widely regarded by the public as prime examples of an independent authority 
of the media, the propaganda model performs well in predicting the general 
pattern of media behavior, according to Herman and Chomsky. They argue that the 
widely held beliefs about these events are misleading. Some of the details are 
explained in The Essential Chomsky, for example in “Watergate: A Skeptical View.”

In Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies, Chomsky 
explains that in a democratic society, independent thought can develop into 
political action, and it is important for those in power to eliminate the threat 
at its root by “necessary illusions” when it cannot be imposed by force.

According to the “propaganda model,” when considering the spectrum of opinion 
that are allowed to be expressed, the model predicts well that the “spectrum 
will be bounded by the consensus of the powerful elites while encouraging 
tactical debate within it,” he says.

Chomsky explains: “The media do contest and raise questions about government 
policy, but they do so almost exclusively within the framework determined by the 
essentially shared interests of state-corporate power. Divisions among elites 
are reflected in media debate, but departure from their narrow consensus is rare.”

Concentration of ownership of the media is high and increasing, and the elite 
media set the agenda that others generally follow, according to Chomsky.

Chomsky explains that many journalists may believe that they are being objective 
and truthful in providing information to help the public understand the world, 
and sometimes they are successful.

However, “Journalists entering the system are unlikely to make their way unless 
they conform to these ideological pressures, generally by internalizing the 
values; it is not easy to say one thing and believe another, and those who fail 
to conform will tend to be weeded out…”  he says.

Chomsky says, “The very structure of the media is designed to induce conformity 
to established doctrine.”

In Profit Over People, Chomsky outlines some of the early developments of 
systematic propaganda in the U.S. He says that the doctrines of modern political 
democracy has been accurately expressed by Edward Bernays, one of the leading 
figures of the public relations industry and member of the Woodrow Wilson’s 
Committee on Public Information, the first U.S. state propaganda agency.

Chomsky quotes Bernays: “The intelligent minorities must make use of propaganda 
continuously and systematically;” this process of “engineering consent” is the 
very “essence of the democratic process.”

Walter Lippman, one of the most respected figures in journalism, is another 
veteran of Wilson’s propaganda committee, according to Chomsky. “Manufacturing 
Consent” is a term borrowed from Lippman who said that the intelligent minority 
are responsible for setting policy and for “the formation of a sound public 
opinion,” and the public’s “function” is to be “spectators of action,” not 
participants, apart from periodic electoral exercises when they vote among the 
specialized class.

Chomsky quotes Harold Lasswell, one of the founders of modern political science: 
the masses must be controlled for their own good, and in more democratic 
societies, where force is unavailable, social managers must turn to “a whole new 
technique of control, largely through propaganda.”

‘Conspiracy Theory’ as a Reflex

Almost as a reflex, this kind of analysis is often summarily dismissed as 
“conspiracy theory.”

In the Manufacturing Consent, Herman and Chomsky say that they do not use any 
kind of “conspiracy” hypothesis in their propaganda model.

In “Foreign Policy and the Intelligentsia” of The Essential Chomsky, Chomsky 
says, “a standard and effective device for obscuring social reality” is the 
pretense “that those who pursue the rational approach are invoking a ‘conspiracy 
theory’…”

Labeling such analysis as a “conspiracy theory” can relegate it “to the domain 
of flat-earth enthusiasts and other cranks, and the actual system of power, 
decision-making, and global planning is safely protected from scrutiny,” says 
Chomsky.

Chomsky’s Focus on the U.S.

Here is a revealing excerpt from “Foreign Policy and the Intelligentsia” of The 
Essential Chomsky, which summarizes Chomsky’s view of an important aspect of the 
nature of power in the U.S. and other powerful nations throughout human history:

“In every society there will emerge a caste of propagandists who labor to 
disguise the obvious, to conceal the actual workings of power, and to spin a web 
of mythical goals and purposes, utterly benign, that allegedly guide national 
policy… that the nation is guided by certain ideals and principles, all of them 
noble… that the nation is not an active agent, but rather responds to threats 
posed to its security, or to order and stability, by awesome and evil outside 
forces.”

Both totalitarian and democratic nations do this, says Chomsky, although they 
differ in the manner in which they do them. Among the democratic nations, the 
U.S. leads in terms of its achievements in propaganda and thought control, 
according to Chomsky.

Why does Chomsky focus much of his analysis and criticism on the U.S.?

In various interviews, Chomsky explains that, as a U.S. citizen and with the 
freedom that he has, he is partially responsible for the actions of the U.S., 
the most powerful nation on earth.

This sentiment has persisted since the 1960s, if not earlier. Chomsky explains 
why he feels such a responsibility in “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” an 
essay published in 1966, and reproduced in The Essential Chomsky.

In a touching essay, “On Resistance” of The Essential Chomsky, he writes in 1967 
as a young man about his participation in civil disobedience against the Vietnam 
War and about “a moral responsibility that cannot be shirked.”

Linguistics and Philosophy of Human Nature

There are over half dozen chapters in The Essential Chomsky that clarify the 
development of Chomsky’s thoughts on linguistics and philosophy of human nature, 
  related to important aspects of psychology and cognitive science.

The first chapter, “A Review of B.F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior,” written in 
1959, is a classic. Here, Chomsky delivers a sharp criticism of the behaviorist 
approach to “accommodate human behavior involving higher mental faculties,” and 
how that approach must inevitably fail to account for major aspects of complex 
human verbal behavior.

He argues that, while Skinner’s approach fails to account for complex verbal 
behavior, the study of linguistic structure and language acquisition of a child, 
who learns a lot more than what is taught, could lead to important insights into 
the inner nature of the human mind. This work contributed to the end of the 
dominance of the behaviorist program in psychology and the beginning of a 
multidisciplinary field that is now known as cognitive science.

The Essential Chomsky also includes more recent works on related topics in 
linguistics and philosophy, for example, in “New Horizons in the Study of 
Language and Mind,” first published in 2000. Chomsky discusses how human faculty 
of language is unique to humans, distinct from animals, and “enters crucially 
into every aspect of human life, thought, and interaction.” He explains that 
this faculty of language is largely responsible for the fact that only humans 
have a history and culture.

Connections between Linguistics and Political Activism

Over the years, Chomsky has been asked the question repeatedly: Is there a 
connection between his intense research in linguistics and his political 
activism? His answers have varied between “virtually no connection” to a 
“tenuous connection.”

“Language and Freedom” in The Essential Chomsky, an essay written in 1970, 
explains the “tenuous connection” in some depth.

Chomsky writes, “A vision of a future social order is in turn based on a concept 
of human nature. If in fact man is indefinitely malleable, completely plastic 
being, with no innate structures of mind and no intrinsic needs of a cultural or 
social character, then he is a fit subject for the ‘shaping of behavior’ by the 
state authority, the corporate manager, the technocrat, or the central committee.”

Chomsky disagrees with this premise: humans are not indefinitely malleable and 
they have innate structures of mind. Human languages share common structures at 
deep levels, and they “reflect intrinsic properties of human mental 
organization,” according to Chomsky.

Chomsky also makes interesting connections from seventeenth and 
eighteenth-century philosophy and linguistics to his conception of human nature 
and dignity. He describes the developments in the modern field of linguistics, 
to which he has contributed greatly, as a kind of return to Wilhelm von 
Humboldt, an eighteenth-century theoretical linguist and advocate of libertarian 
and anarchist values.

According to Chomsky, “predatory capitalism” was successful in creating advanced 
technology and permitting some limited freedom. However, he writes, “It is 
incapable of meeting human needs… and its concept of competitive man who seeks 
only to maximize wealth and power… is anti-human and intolerable in the deepest 
sense.”

Chomsky concludes: “Social action cannot await a firmly established theory of 
man and society… The two – speculation and action – must progress as best they 
can, looking forward to the day when theoretical inquiry will provide a firm 
guide to the unending, often grim, but never hopeless struggle for freedom and 
social justice.”

The DVD, Manufacturing Consent (Noam Chomsky and the Media), shows how Chomsky 
was introduced to linguistics by his father (who was a world renown Hebrew 
grammarian) and that he grew up in a radical Jewish community in New York City 
where he was regularly exposed to anarchist literature with a sense of 
solidarity with the working class community. Hence, Chomsky was exposed to both 
linguistics and social activism since early childhood, and it is hard to say 
which influenced the other more strongly.

Chomsky’s writings appear to be entirely secular. His theories about the 
uniqueness of humans and their innate creativity are also entirely secular. He 
understands that the connection he draws between his conceptions of human nature 
and his social activism is speculative.

The connection remains tenuous. Nothing in Chomsky’s works can fully explain the 
certainty of his moral convictions that have impelled him to help others for 
half a century.

Optimism and Limitations

Independent thinking and research is Chomsky’s strength. He is a social critic 
who tries to break through the illusions and to raise the consciousness of 
others so that more people may decide on their own to participate in democracy 
more freely. He is neither a policy maker nor a leader or manager of large-scale 
social movements.

The Essential Chomsky suddenly ends with a brief and surprising tone of 
optimism, advice about promoting democracy, and a warning for the world and 
future generations if people do not act together. His other books follow a 
similar pattern.

In his other works, Chomsky explains the reasons for his optimism in greater 
detail. For example, he explains that the powerful forces that work to limit 
freedom and democracy have not been completely successful and the freedom that 
we now enjoy in the U.S. is thanks to the sacrifices of thousands of courageous 
people in the past, many of whose names have long been forgotten.

He explains that along with greater freedom, people have a greater 
responsibility, and they have to make the effort and not be passive.

Manufacturing Consent, the DVD (not the book), which is surprisingly easy to 
follow given the range of topics it covers, presents a good introduction about 
Chomsky’s life and includes some entertaining video clips of his lectures. The 
DVD includes a fuller presentation of Chomsky’s optimism and warning.

Given the controversial nature of the things that Chomsky discusses, it is no 
surprise that there are many who are highly critical of him.

For example, in The Anti-Chomsky Reader, essays by linguists, a sociologist, and 
conservative writers attack Chomsky’s various works on linguistics, political 
theories, and the mass media.

One of the more interesting criticisms of Chomsky discussed on the Internet is 
about his apparent avoidance of discussing the Bilderberg Group in his publications.

The criticisms and Chomsky’s responses to them are far beyond the scope of this 
book review.

In spite of some possible shortcomings of Chomsky, he provides very important 
and useful insights for further investigations. Whether you agree or disagree 
with Chomsky, his works are challenging and stimulating in deepening and 
broadening our perspectives on matters that are very important to our future.

The Essential Chomsky brings together much of the essentials of Chomsky’s 
numerous and wide range of writings in a single volume, and it should serve as a 
valuable reference for the important points he has been trying to make for the 
past half century.

References

Noam Chomsky. 2008. The Essential Chomsky. The New Press, New York. ISBN: 
978-1-59558-189-1

Directed by Peter Wintonick. 2002. Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky and the 
Media (DVD). Zeitgeist Films. Ltd.

Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. 1988, 2002. Manufacturing Consent, The 
Political Economy of the Mass Media. Pantheon. ISBN: 0-375-71449-9

Noam Chomsky. 1989. Necessary Illusions, Thought Control in Democratic 
Societies. South End Press. ISBN: 0-89608-367-5

Noam Chomsky. 1998, 1999. Profit Over People, Neoliberalism and Global Order. 
Seven Stories Press. ISBN: 978-1-888363-82-1

Edited by Peter Collier and David Horowitz. 2004. The Anti-Chomsky Reader. 
Encounter Books. ISBN: 1-893554-97-X

Last Updated Nov 3, 2008

http://en.epochtimes.com/n2/arts-entertainment/noam-chomsky-6579.html