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Introduction It started with the Vietnam War. Long before the fateful escalation of the war in the mid-1960s, Noam Chomsky had won recognition as a seminal figure in the field of linguistics, but was little known outside that field. He was certainly not known as a commentator on politics. That is not to say that Chomsky was apolitical. As a child growing up in the Great Depression in Philadelphia he had had an early exposure to radical political views in his family and in the wider Jewish working-class culture his family inhabited. His lifelong interest in anarchism dates at least as far back as the tender age of ten, when he wrote an article on the Spanish Civil War for his school newspaper.1 But it was not until the Vietnam War that Chomsky’s radical views led him to public activism. Chomsky was not alone. The war was the central, cataclysmic event of a decade of wrenching conflict in American society. Historians have used phrases like the “unraveling of America” and “the civil war of the 1960s” to characterize the years of upheaval that led to lasting changes in American life.2 The dispatch of hundreds of thousands of American troops to Asia beginning in early 1965 brought hundreds of thousands of protesters onto the streets of major cities in the United States. Many if not most of the protesters undoubtedly had never before thought to question the wisdom and probity of their government’s actions abroad. Prominent intellectuals joined the dissenters—people like the novelists Norman Mailer and Mary McCarthy, the poet Robert Lowell, the literary critic Susan Sontag, and the political theorist Hans Morgenthau. The recently founded New York Review of Books became the prime organ of intellectuals who defined the war as a moral issue; it soon was the most influential journal read by the nation’s intellectual elite. Noam Chomsky was one of its leading contributors; his “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” (February 1967) would become “the most important essay of the Vietnam generation.”3 Chomsky was outraged by what the United States was doing in Vietnam. In articles in the New York Review and elsewhere, and in increasingly frequent speaking engagements, Chomsky employed his powerful analytic gifts and his talent for annihilating rhetoric to demolish the rationales the US government had set forth to justify its actions in Indochina. I present and assess Chomsky’s antiwar critique in Chapter 1. The end of the war did not lead Chomsky to step back from the political arena. The perspectives and themes that Chomsky developed in opposition to US 1 intervention in Vietnam have continued to inform his views of political power in America and its role in the world: the brutality of American policy toward Third World peoples, the servitude of the mass media and much of the intellectual elite to established power, and the narrowness of the range of debate and “respectable” dissent in the United States. It was during the Vietnam War period that Chomsky first took aim at the deeply rooted, unexamined, and often implicit beliefs that underlie Americans’ thinking about their country, centering on the notion that the United States serves as a unique beacon of freedom and democracy in the world. Chomsky’s entire career as a public intellectual can be seen as a relentless assault on the myths of “American exceptionalism,” a battle he launched long before that term entered into popular usage. Chomsky had come to see the US involvement in Indochina as a natural outgrowth of long-established policy objectives pursued by America’s ruling groups in business and government. US leaders invariably framed those objectives in terms of America’s Cold War competition with the Soviet Union, but Chomsky saw the Cold War as a smokescreen for the real motivations of American policy, which were to construct a global empire open to the pursuit of profit by America’s increasingly global giant corporations. America’s defeat in Vietnam marked the loss of a piece of that empire, but the US government could be expected to continue to react ruthlessly to enforce its dominance around the world. In a series of books beginning with The Political Economy of Human Rights (1979, 2 volumes), Chomsky, sometimes working with coauthor Edward S. Herman, set himself the task of analyzing the American empire, exposing what he saw as its crimes and explaining the driving forces behind it. Chomsky’s dissection of the American imperial power system and its impact...

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