Noam Chomsky has been a central figure on the American left for over five decades. His
New York Review Of Books article from 1967, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” was called “the single most important piece of anti-war literature” from the Vietnam period. That helped launch him on a course to being “the most widely-read American voice on foreign policy on the planet,” as the
New York Times described three and a half decades later, in 2004.
Chomsky’s academic field is linguistics, where he’s won numerous prizes for work developing theories like universal grammar, but he’s famous mainly as an anti-propagandist. A chief attraction to his work for readers across the spectrum is his relentless, Cassandra-like habit of calling out official untruths, especially American ones, be they about war or domestic politics or the subject he seems lately to care most about, the environment.
December 21, 2006
Even Borat, the bumblingly anti-Semitic comic character, could not have contrived a more absurd and utterly offensive assemblage: David Duke, erstwhile Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, alongside Robert Faurisson, the French pseudo-academic who argues that the Holocaust never happened, accompanied for dramatic effect by a group of ultra-Orthodox Jews whose anti-Zionist fanaticism motivates them to desecrate the memory of millions of murdered Jews.
History As It Happens: Free speech for whom? washingtontimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from washingtontimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
To free speech absolutists, it comes down to a simple choice: you are either for free speech or you are not. But what about other forms of censorship or consequences for expressing offensive ideas?
As Chomsky once stated in a C-SPAN interview, “I’m personally very skeptical of any form of regulation of any kind of speech.”
In America’s raging culture wars, however, it is increasingly difficult to embrace free speech absolutism. Congressional pressure is mounting on social media platforms to police offensive content and deplatform individuals who break the platforms’ rules against disinformation.
Cancel culture-obsessed online mobs call out people for saying the wrong thing. And businesses and institutions, always fearful of negative publicity, are ready to fire or disassociate themselves from anyone who violates the new cultural orthodoxies, however arbitrarily imposed.
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