"The Triumph of Anarchism"

Shelley Walia, The Hindu

Noam Chomsky deserves the recent vote that ranks him as the
most important intellectual today; a thinker who is an
effective counterweight and an independent critic of the
state. A comment.

"Each individual, according to Chomsky, has the
responsibility and the creative acumen to take control of
his/her society."

An essay supporting the anarchist philosophy at the age of
10; hours spent at the bookshops on Manhattan's 4th Avenue
engaged in anti-authoritarian polemics; and then a life time
spent in analysing what ails international relations in the
context of the widespread infringement of human rights and
the numerous wrongs which fester our society. Indeed,
Chomsky deserves the recent vote that ranks him above
Umberto Eco or Howard Zinn as the most important
intellectual today, an intellectual who is an effective
counterweight and an independent critic of the State. As he
writes in a famous essay "Objectivity and Liberal
Scholarship": ". . . access to power, shared ideology,
professionalisation may or may not be deplorable in
themselves, but there can be no doubt that they interact so
as to pose a serious threat to the integrity of scholarship
in fields that are struggling for intellectual content and
are thus particularly susceptible to the workings of a kind
of Gresham's law. What is more, the subversion of
scholarship poses a threat to society at large."

Searching for Journalistic Integrity

Charles Sullivan

The Concord naturalist and writer Henry Thoreau had a great disdain for the
news — especially that conveyed in the newspapers of his time. Thoreau
never read a newspaper and he was critical of anyone who did. Thoreau
refused to profane his mind with the muck and slime of the daily news,
especially as it related to commerce. Being a critical thinker, Thoreau was
deeply suspicious of anything that appeared in the newspapers. Thoreau gave
us the literary masterpieces Walden, Civil Disobedience and fourteen volumes
of superlative journals. Civil Disobedience has inspired political movements
around the world. Both Martin Luther King and Gandhi were inspired to action
by Thoreau’s powerful political essays. There were many others.

Chomsky Answers Guardian

Noam Chomsky, Z Mag

This is an open letter to a few of the people with whom I had discussed the
Guardian interview of 31 October, on the basis of the electronic version,
which is all that I had seen. Someone has just sent me a copy of the
printed version, and I now understand why friends in England who wrote me
were so outraged.

It is a nuisance, and a bit of a bore, to dwell on the topic, and I always
keep away from personal attacks on me, unless asked, but in this case the
matter has some more general interest, so perhaps it’s worth reviewing what
most readers could not know. The general interest is that the print version
reveals a very impressive effort, which obviously took careful planning and
work, to construct an exercise in defamation that is a model of the genre.
It’s of general interest for that reason alone.

A secondary matter is that it may serve as a word of warning to anyone who
is asked by the Guardian for an interview, and happens to fall slightly to
the critical end of the approved range of opinion of the editors. The
warning is: if you accept the invitation, be cautious, and make sure to have
a tape recorder that is very visibly placed in front of you. That may
inhibit the dedication to deceit, and if not, at least you will have a
record. I should add that in probably thousands of interviews from every
corner of the world and every part of the spectrum for decades, that thought
has never occurred to me before. It does now.