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A review by guojing
11-Sep by Noam Chomsky
4.0
Typical Chomsky.
Wouldn't have minded some more footnotes and an expanded bibliography, but what can be expected from a book that was clearly copied-and-pasted together immediately following 9/11?
Contrary to some of the very frequent criticisms I have encountered against Noam, he does not hate America and he does not support tyranny abroad; this is a weak argument made by blind überpatriotic Americans who have totally bought into the propaganda that America = Good, Everyone Else = Evil, that nothing America does is for anything but the most humanitarian, pro-democratic reasons. As far as I can tell, he hates hypocrisy and he hates assaults on human rights, which are two very worth-while things to hate.
That said, the book itself is somewhat boring; it is derived from a series of interviews which took place within a month of 9/11 by various reporters from around the western world, and so the statements made by Noam tend to be repetitive and thus tedious. But, from already so short a book, to remove any of this repetition would be to turn an already short 120-page book into a 75-page book. Numerous important points are made in the text, things which are too far removed from the public consciousness and deserve being realigned. Unfortunately, that is probably never to happen, or at least not in this generation; it seems that it always takes future generations to look back and curse the deeds of forefathers, rather than the deeds of oneself or even of the previous generation.
Wouldn't have minded some more footnotes and an expanded bibliography, but what can be expected from a book that was clearly copied-and-pasted together immediately following 9/11?
Contrary to some of the very frequent criticisms I have encountered against Noam, he does not hate America and he does not support tyranny abroad; this is a weak argument made by blind überpatriotic Americans who have totally bought into the propaganda that America = Good, Everyone Else = Evil, that nothing America does is for anything but the most humanitarian, pro-democratic reasons. As far as I can tell, he hates hypocrisy and he hates assaults on human rights, which are two very worth-while things to hate.
That said, the book itself is somewhat boring; it is derived from a series of interviews which took place within a month of 9/11 by various reporters from around the western world, and so the statements made by Noam tend to be repetitive and thus tedious. But, from already so short a book, to remove any of this repetition would be to turn an already short 120-page book into a 75-page book. Numerous important points are made in the text, things which are too far removed from the public consciousness and deserve being realigned. Unfortunately, that is probably never to happen, or at least not in this generation; it seems that it always takes future generations to look back and curse the deeds of forefathers, rather than the deeds of oneself or even of the previous generation.