America .. Imperialistic?

Noam Chomsky is the closest thing in the English-speaking world to an
intellectual superstar. A philosopher of language and political
campaigner of towering academic reputation, who as good as invented
modern linguistics, he is entertained by presidents, addresses the UN
general assembly and commands a mass international audience. When he
spoke in London last week, thousands of young people battled for tickets
to attend his lectures, followed live on the internet across the globe,
as the 80-year-old American linguist fielded questions from as far away
as besieged Gaza.

But the bulk of the mainstream western media doesn't seem to have
noticed. His books sell in their hundreds of thousands, he is mobbed by
students as a celebrity, but he is rarely reported or interviewed in the
US outside radical journals and websites. The explanation, of course,
isn't hard to find. Chomsky is America's most prominent critic of the US
imperial role in the world, which he has used his erudition and standing
to expose and excoriate since Vietnam.

Like the English philosopher Bertrand Russell, who spoke out against
western-backed wars until his death at the age of 97, Chomsky has lent
his academic prestige to a relentless campaign against his own country's
barbarities abroad  though in contrast to the aristocratic Russell,
Chomsky is the child of working class Jewish refugees from Tsarist
pogroms. Not surprisingly, he has been repaid with either denunciation
or, far more typically, silence. Whereas a much slighter figure such as
the Atlanticist French philosopher Bernard Henri-Lévy is lionised at
home and abroad, Chomsky and his genuine popularity are ignored.

Indeed, his books have been banned from the US prison library in
Guantánamo. You'd hardly need a clearer example of his model of how
dissenting views are filtered out of the western media, set out in his
1990's book Manufacturing Consent, than his own case. But as Chomsky is
the first to point out, the marginalisation of opponents of western
state policy is as nothing compared to the brutalities suffered by those
who challenge states backed by the US and its allies in the Middle East.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/07/noam-chomsky-us-foreign-polic
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