Voted many times by UK and US magazines as the most important public intellectual in the world, Noam Chomsky, scientist, linguist, human rights activist, suffered a stroke at age 95 and can no longer speak. Yet as 2025 begins, Chomsky at 96 gifts the world his examples of inquiry and dissent. These qualities he might say, remain the much needed means to strive for freedom, justice and peace.

His early life tells us something of the promise to follow.

He grew up in a Jewish family of first generation immigrants living in Philadelphia, attended a Hebrew school, wrote his Master’s thesis in Hebrew and in his youth moved to Israel with the intention of living on a kibbutz. He acknowledges being impressed by Roosevelt New Deal values and policies, and even more by an uncle in New York, “an ex-Trotskyite who introduced him to visions of social democracy, to anarchism and the intellectual responsibility of curiosity and dissent.

A chance meeting with a charismatic Professor Zeilig Harris taught the young Chomsky about anti-state activism, and influenced his chance to study “a hodge podge of courses” at Harvard, from mathematics to psychology and linguistics to philosophy. He subsequently moved to what he has called a post-war “culture of discovery” at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, became Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics, and remained there for decades until his move to the University of Arizona in 2017.

In conversation and in lectures, Chomsky gives precise, usually brief explanations, in which case, recall of his teaching should also attempt to be informative but uncluttered.

Freedom of expression, the value of dissent

Influenced by the Voltaire notion, “I disagree with everything you say, but I shall fight to the death for your right to say it”, Chomsky regarded freedom of expression as a whole which could not be cut into pieces. He endorsed Edward  Said’s teaching that an intellectual’s whole being should be staked on a sense of being unwilling to accept easy formulas, not just passively unwilling, but actively willing to say so in public.

From that position, Chomsky demonstrates the value of dissent in anarchism. Labelled an anarchist, he has relied on language to demystify terms. Questions about authority, hierarchy and domination may be perceived as anarchistic, he says, but such questions have Renaissance qualities. By questioning old premises, even the sciences are basically anarchistic.

As a dissenter, Chomsky challenges assumptions about universal justice unless a questioner defies official authority and its enforcers. Along with his friend, the historian Howard Zinn, he asked, “what life is best worth living- the life of the proper, obedient, dutiful follower of law and order, or the life of an independent thinker?”

In the current culture of Australian, UK and US universities, where staff or students can be punished for dissent, where respect for corporate capitalism is seen as essential for an institution’s survival, where the worst of crimes is to support the human rights of Palestinians and thereby risk being called anti-Semitic, Chomsky has advice. He teaches that academics enjoy a political liberty that comes from access to information and to a basic freedom of expression, but too many protect their careers by compliance with establishment rules. With few exceptions, as in public support for the  Boycott, Divestment Sanctions movement for Palestinians’ human rights, Chomsky is dismayed by a culture of fear on university campuses and a consequent fearfulness among academics.

Throughout his life, Chomsky’s courageous, refreshing critiques have targeted US foreign policy and a rock solid alliance with Israel.

US imperialism and the state of Israel

Depicting US foreign policy as a charade because it speaks of democracy and the rule of law, but acts against the precepts of both, makes it easy to accuse Chomsky of being anti-American, though he and his colleagues say they have only followed a responsibility to protect the vulnerable, a principle present in ideals resplendent in the Statue of Liberty.

As a leader in US campus protests against the Vietnam war, Chomsky insisted that the US state was criminal, that protesters had the right to stop criminals from committing murder.

On a visit to Australia in 1995, he spoke at the Sydney Town Hall about East Timor’s rights to self determination and castigated the US, UK and Australian aid for Indonesia’s genocidal operations in a country where, between 1975 and 1999, 30% of the population had died.

In the Sydney Town Hall in 2011, he peppered his Sydney Peace Prize address with reminders that the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians had much in common with the slaughter of Australian Aboriginals. He reminded the packed audience that powerful states ride roughshod over peoples they regard as inferior.

Chomsky acts as the research scientist able to present facts unpalatable to establishment views, not least concerning massive US aid to Israel through supply of weapons and finance. In consequence, the US is unwavering even in its support for an ongoing genocide, so the world is treated to the spectacle of the US as a partner of death and destruction in Gaza, the latest inhumanities a continuation of what had been happening since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

Twenty years earlier,  Chomsky pleaded that Israel should cease to exist in its present form, “because it is a state based on the principle of discrimination”.

In US/Israel attitudes to international law, Chomsky identifies their common ground. Both insist they are exceptional, that international law is not applicable to them, which means they may do what they like and never be held accountable. “Any Palestinian lawyer,” says Chomsky, “will tell you the legal system in occupied Palestinian Territories is a joke. There is no law, just pure authority.”

The manufacturing of consent

In their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Chomsky and Edward Herman showed how the mass communication media in the US were effective and had become powerful ideological institutions to carry out propaganda functions with simplistic accounts of enemies and supporters, with support for a cheerleading nationalism and a consequent marginalising of dissent. Such propaganda and its manufacture has spread beyond the US.

In Chomsky tradition, but in Pearls & Irritations, Angela Smith has repeatedly exposed the fearful ignorance of Australian mainstream media who repeat “Israel has a right to defend itself”, who assume that a one-sided slaughter can be depicted as a war, that lies by Prime Minister Netanyahu and spokesperson Admiral Hagari can be presented as infallible truths.

In the same vein, in the same Chomsky tradition, John Menadue shows that Australian journalists “are on a Washington drip feed”. He asks the same scribes, “why have you failed to report Israel’s blatant murdering campaign?”

Chomsky answers that question by identifying mainstream media influence on what citizens may think is important, almost the same as saying “we will teach you how to think”. In contemporary Australia, China must be the enemy hence the military alliance with the US, the cost of living will be the main election issue, which means little or no space for pondering the costs of not living, in Sudan, Syria, Gaza, the West Bank or in famine-ravaged northern Kenya.

During his visit to Australia in 2011, Noam Chomsky was guest at a lunch staged by the board of the Sydney Opera House. The food was generous, almost all the guests dressed in their best. Chomsky wore the same well-worn navy blue sweater. Conversation turned to the most recent Israeli invasion of Gaza in which hundreds of Palestinian children had been killed. To command the lunch time table, a confident, “people seldom question me” CEO of a major company proclaimed that Palestinian terrorists were responsible for the violence. Chomsky gave a gentle fact-based reply, but later in the quiet of  a parking lot and with a wry grin, he commented, “that guy was from central casting”, meaning that this confident man had been taught, socialised even manufactured for his assertive one eyed views.

For a common humanity

Chomsky would be offended if he thought he’d been depicted as saintly. He is not but he does threaten governments which abuse human rights. He has not been deterred by commentary that he is “dangerously left wing”, an anarchist, a self-hating Jew, each label explaining why mainstream US media avoid him.

In accounts of Chomsky’s intellectual leadership, his humanitarianism should not be overlooked. He is a loving, humorous, generous husband, father and friend. A high achiever, but humble, willing to respond to requests for comment on political issues, always finding time for conversation with those who want to meet him, even if  his minders advise “there is no time”.

In November 2011, in a crowded Sydney schedule, he stood on the steps at the entrance to the Town Hall alongside the “women in black” during their weekly vigil for Palestinians. He then strolled to Martin Place to join students  in their Australian protest to support the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York. At that point he received a request from the young musicians who would precede him that evening on the Town Hall stage before he gave his peace oration. His minders insisted, “You should preserve your energy, there’s no time for this”. Ten minutes later, Chomsky greeted the musicians and listened to their explanations as to why music was a crucial way to inspire love and radicalism. As he had with other bands, Chomsky behaved as though he was with them, would have liked to play, though they would shortly have to sing and he to talk.

The voice is still there, paradoxically silent, yet expressing a zest for life, an enthusiasm for equality, a disdain for ignorance inherent in abusive populism.

Perhaps the key to comprehending the Chomsky influence, love and legacy is contained in the words expressed by the large cutout figure who greeted all those who met Chomsky in his MIT office. The cutout was the philosopher, mathematician, social critic, campaigner for nuclear disarmament, Bertrand Russsell.

In the confines of the MIT educator’s office, it is obvious why Chomsky chose Russell as his permanent university companion. Russell described his lifetime concerns as “the longing for love, the search for knowledge and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind”.

Asked in one of his last television  interviews about threats to life on earth, Chomsky expressed a need for courage and hope, but warned about threats of nuclear war and the race to environmental destruction.

The Chomsky voice remains original. His opposition to abusive power, his efforts to revive respect for a common humanity are needed as much now as they were 96 years ago.

https://johnmenadue.com/noam-chomsky-the-voice-silenced-the-legacy-unending/

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

HYPOCRISY ISN’T ONE OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS SINS.

HENCE ITS POPULARITY IN THE ABRAHAMIC TRADITIONS…

PLEASE DO NOT BLAME RUSSIA IF WW3 STARTS. BLAME JAKE SULLIVAN.