Noam Chomsky

In mid-June, there were false reports that US linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky had died.

In fact, Chomsky had been discharged from a Brazilian hospital to be cared for at home.

Chomsky, 95, suffered a massive stroke in June 2023. He was later transported by ambulance jet, to receive specialist care in São Paulo. This care enabled him to move out of intensive care, first to a regular hospital bed and then home.

Valeria Wasserman Chomsky told the Associated…

Noam Chomsky, the world’s leading critic of US foreign policy, has given several eye-opening interviews about the Ukraine crisis since it began in February, many of them to Truthout. Even though this Truthout interview was carried out on 20 April, many weeks ago, it is still extremely relevant to the diplomatic and military state of play in relation to Ukraine – and to the US-imposed disaster in Afghanistan. (Words inside [hard brackets] have been inserted by Peace News…

Gulf News: It was only several months ago that you predicted that the US withdrawal from Afghanistan would cause the collapse of the Afghan army and the government and that’s exactly what’s happened.

That’s what’s [been] unfolding in the last few weeks, as we’ve seen, and yet we see the Biden administration and others express surprise at what’s happened or at least at the speed at which it’s all happened. Where are your thoughts on that?

Chomsky: The basic problem is one that…

We’re glad to be able to present the transcript of an interview of respected US social critic Noam Chomsky on the radical US TV/radio programme, Democracy Now! The interview was carried out on 23 July by hosts Amy Goodman and Nermeen Shaikh.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! democracynow.org The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

Barely 100 days before the presidential election in November, this week president Trump announced he is sending a surge…

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn made an extraordinary speech just days after a suicide bomber killed 22 people, nine of them teenagers, one an eight-year-old, at the end of a pop concert in Manchester on 22 May.

In his speech on 25 May, Jeremy Corbyn linked the Manchester attack to British foreign policy, breaking a deeply-held taboo in British politics. (The taboo was also broken in the aftermath of the 7/7 attacks in 2005 by a number of Conservatives, including current foreign secretary…

Reviewing Noam Chomsky’s first book in 1969, Robert Sklar wrote in The Nation that the importance of American Power and the New Mandarins lay in its power ‘to free our minds from old perspectives, to stimulate new efforts at historical, political and social thought’.

Chomsky’s latest book, Who Rules the World? is at least as powerful in ‘freeing our minds’. Chomsky is not a sloganeer – in his very first sentence he admits that ‘The question raised by the…

In a recent interview posted on the website ‘Urban Times’, Norman Finkelstein noted that ‘it’s really hard to imagine how many people I have met in my life who said “reading Noam Chomsky changed my life”.... It’s a marvel. There are legions of people in the world whose lives were turned upside down literally because of reading him.’

Though a member of one of those legions, I still have to admit that there is a problem with reading Chomsky’s own writings. Though written in plain…

Extracts from an interview with Noam Chomsky recorded in London in Oct 2011. Chomsky was keynote speaker at the Rebellious Media Conference organised by Peace News and others. Thanks to Toaster Productions for filming.

The final plenary of the Rebellious Media Conference at Friends House

The RMC opened with a keynote speech by US media critic Noam Chomsky, who was introduced by his long-time friend and radical media pioneer Michael Albert, co-…

According to Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Propaganda Model (PM) of the media, the mainstream media do not operate as a fourth estate. Although they may challenge individuals and even governments, they do not challenge the edifice behind which the concentrations of economic and political power are maintained. Events that might threaten established interests are either ignored or treated with indignation, whereas events that bolster support for the status quo are given a lot of attention,…

Asked days after the 11 September 2001 attacks if US president George W Bush’s “war on terror” was winnable, Noam Chomsky responded: “If we want to consider this question seriously, we should recognise that in much of the world the US is regarded as a leading terrorist state, and with good reason. We might bear in mind, for example, that in 1986 the US was condemned by the World Court for ‘unlawful use of force’ (international terrorism) and then vetoed a Security Council resolution calling…

When the idea of the Rebellious Media Conference first bubbled up a year ago, there were two things that we really wanted to achieve with the event. We wanted to inspire people with excellent examples of radical media – the extraordinary achievements of The NewStandard were a prime example (see articles on this page). We also wanted to get a much wider circle of people (activists, journalists and others) engaging seriously with the Chomsky-Herman Propaganda Model of the media. (There are…

The Nation, the United States’ leading left-liberal magazine, once said: “Not to have read Chomsky is to court genuine ignorance”. Rarely has this been more true than today.

With Hopes and Prospects, academic and activist Noam Chomsky has produced another indispensable critique, explaining the inner workings of world affairs.

The first half of the book is largely focused on Latin America, with updated and revised versions of lectures Chomsky gave in Chile and Venezuela in 2006…

The new crimes that the US and Israel have been committing in Gaza in the past weeks do not fit easily into any standard category – except for the category of familiarity. Literally, the crimes fall under the official US government definition of “terrorism,” but that designation does not capture their enormity. They cannot be called “aggression,” because they are being conducted in occupied territory, as the US tacitly concedes.

In their comprehensive scholarly history of Israeli…