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Local News & Opinion
01.26 Local Democrats Invited to Brainstorming Session on Sun., Jan. 31 Ref. : Local Newsbriefs Travel
Books, Films, Arts & Education
02.04 'The Power of Nightmares': Underwear vs. Reason Letters
Ref. : Letters to the editor Open Letters:
Health & Environment
Video National Health Care Systems In Other Countries 02.03 Drugmaker Got Kickbacks for Nursing Home Patients 01.18 Drugmaker Got Kickbacks for Nursing Home Patients Media Watching
02.04 Err-America 02.03 The Right Gets Itself 'Wired' Ref. : The Daily Howler Legal Matters
01.25 Thinking About Fictions 01.24 US Democracy's End of the Road 01.22 Editorial: U.S. Supreme Court Nails Down the Coffin of Democracy 01.22 Security Fools US Politics, Policy & Culture
02.09 Palin, Psy-Ops & 'Condescending' Libs 02.09 Growing Hunger in America 02.08 The US Government has Lost its Reason for Being 02.08 Thinking About Oracles 02.06 No Direction Home: Pakistan and the Imperial Principle 02.04 Howard Zinn and the State of the Union 02.04 The US Supreme Court: Vanguard of Friendly American Fascism? 02.04 The New War Against Money 02.04 David Brooks Goes After Greedy Geezers 02.02 Obama's Budget Ducks Pentagon Cuts 02.02 Budgets, War and Blind Ambition: The Limited Minds of the American Elite 02.01 Thinking About Definitives 02.01 Remembering Howard Zinn (1922 - 2010) 01.29 American History 101: We Are Devo 01.29 Obama's Outreach to Americans: Empty Rhetoric, Business As Usual 01.28 The Supreme Court's Partisanship 01.27 Freeze Frame: Flopsweat and Farce in the Hollow Halls of Power 01.25 Granny D on Campaign Finance Reform 01.25 S.C. Republican’s Plan: Starve the Poor So They’ll Stop “Breeding” 01.23 It's Time for Kucinich, Conyers, Feingold and Other `Progressives' in Congress to Take a Stand 01.21 Massachusetts' Message of Stupid 01.21 Terrorism Defined: Bill Clinton Lights Our Way to Truth 01.21 How Obama Lost His Way 01.21 Political Earthquake Rocks Massachusetts 01.20 Obama Cuts Deal that Will Reduce Social Security, Medicare and all Entitlements 01.20 Critical Mass: Dem Agenda Opens Right-Wing Doors 01.19 Outsourcing War: The Rise of Private Military Contractors High Crimes?
01.25 The Silence and the Shield: Depraved Indifference to the Atrocities of Power 01.19 Dark as a Dungeon: A Brutal System Stripped Bare Economics & Business Non/Mis/Malfeasance
02.07 AIG-Gate: The World's Greatest Insurance Heist 02.06 The Free Market Fetish 02.04 The Crisis is Not Over 02.03 States Face Worsening Recession with Health Care Funds on the Chopping Block 02.02 Rule by the Rich 01.29 The Battle of the Titans: JPMorgan vs. Goldman Sachs 01.27 State of the Union: Obama’s “Automatic IRA” Plan Could Make Bush’s Wildest Dreams Come True 01.26 Obama, Read Your Reagan on Capital Gains Taxation 01.24 Funding Public Health Care with a Publicly-Owned Bank: How Canada Did It 01.18 Thinking About Accelerants International
02.08 Aafia Siddiqui: Victimized by American Injustic 02.07 Annals of Liberation: Obama Surge Driving Thousands From Their Homes 02.05 Human Rights Abuses in Israel and Occupied Palestine 02.03 Child Slavery in Haiti 01.30 Blood is His Argument: Tony Blair's Gentle Cuddling at Iraq "Inquiry" 01.28 Obama Ignores Key Afghan Warning 01.27 Haiti's Earthquake: Natural or Engineered 01.26 Helping Haiti’s Elders 01.26 Focus on Israel: Harvesting Haitian Organs 01.25 Focus on Haiti: Washington's Militarized Takeover 01.22 The Lessons of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions 01.18 Disaster Capitalism Headed to Haiti We are a non-profit Internet-only newspaper publication founded in 1973. Your donation is essential to our survival.
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BACKGROUND:Who is Noam Chomsky?While Chávez is a fiery independent socialist, Chomsky is a methodical and systematic doubter in the tradition of Bertrand Russell and René Descartes.
Dr. Noam Chomsky received second billing to the devil this past week during a speech presented by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez to the U.N. General Assembly. Chávez went to verbal and visual lengths to encourage Americans to read Chomsky’s book, Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance. It is his recommendation that has been heeded; the book has reached number one in sales on Amazon.Chávez has a reputation as an edgy leader. Chomsky is equally considered edgy, though most are unfamiliar with his particular methods of rabble-rousing. While Chávez is a fiery independent socialist, Chomsky is a methodical and systematic doubter in the tradition of Bertrand Russell and René Descartes. In most respects, the suggested reading by Chávez was an unexpected and enigmatic presentation, and it was sufficiently noteworthy as to provoke the public into acts of purchase. It remains to be seen whether those who buy the book will actually read it. As has been widely reported recently in the U.S. press, Chomsky is an icon in Europe, yet remains a controversial figure in America. This disparity is both easy and difficult to fathom. His body of work is enormous and spans disciplines and decades. His critics largely focus on his recent writings centered around criticism of the foreign policies of the U.S. and Israel. He is frequently described by the catch-phrase, “The world’s leading intellectual,” though most would not be able to explain why he has earned that title. Criticism that appears at street level and on blogs usually follow along the lines of, “he hates America,” and, “I don’t care for his opinions on society.” In the most unguarded cases, he is described as “the worst kind of Jew; a self-hating Jew.” What can be said about Chomsky with little equivocation is that his work in linguistics, beginning in the 1950s up until the present, has been revolutionary. His theories on transformational/generative/universal grammar, syntactic structures, language competence and acquisition have become the bedrock of modern linguistics. Chomsky has been an advocate of the idea that intellectuals have an ethical obligation to involve themselves in a public way with contemporary politics.
His reputation as an activist and proponent of the far left emerged during the Vietnam War. Chomsky was an outspoken critic of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and equally was an advocate of the idea that intellectuals have an ethical obligation to involve themselves in a public way with contemporary politics. In the 1967 article, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” Chomsky wrote, “For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us.”Chomsky’s life as a responsible intellectual, or, as he is often called, a dissenter, is not a separate identity from that of the linguistics professor and scholar. His identity, if viewed panoramically, is a logical extension of the Western and Talmudic intellectual traditions applied to the landscape of contemporary politics and active engagement. And at the age of 77, Chomsky continues to walk his talk. For all those who oppose or iconically extol the persona and work of Noam Chomsky, the voluminous footnotes are there. Likewise, the reading recommendation by President Chávez is an insightful footnote as to what the world might be reading and the ways in which they may be thinking in the very near future. Laray Polk is a political writer and activist who lives in Dallas, Texas. She can be contacted at laraypolk@earthlink.net.
Copyright © 2006 The Baltimore Chronicle. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Baltimore Chronicle content is expressly prohibited without their prior written consent. This story was published on September 26, 2006. |
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