A review by whogivesabook
The Essential Chomsky by Noam Chomsky

4.0

One of the world’s greatest living thinkers. Also, one of the saltiest guys I’ve ever read, academically.

The essays on the middle-east are scathing critiques. The overview of American foreign policy and the wide-reaching fallout of its actions is fascinating. We need more people with an objective viewpoint.

I’ve always appreciated his perspective when I stumble across a video interview with him on Youtube. So, owning to the fact that I’ve been meaning to read On Language, as well. I figured I’d take them both at the same time and see what all the fuss is about.

In short, this book reinforced my endless plea to anyone I meet who professes any love of the hippest new trending movement on twitter.

Don’t just be another typical young person (18-34)!

Don’t just say you support Palestine without learning about the issues. Don’t say you support protest causes without exploring the reasons they came about. If you don’t learn about it, you’re promoting ignorance and nothing will change. Because the people in control will ignore you because ideas are not threats. They want you to think they are, but they are not. People are threats. And a people with no concept of what they actually want and how to get it will fade away. They like that. Don’t be like that.

Look at Occupy, Not In Our Name, BLM... all of them fizzle out. Because protests don’t change things. People change things. If you have a cause, get smart about it, educate people. Sharing posts is not something, it is the bare minimum. And, if you ask me (which I know you didn’t) you sharing that and not really giving a shit is actually adding to the watering down of the power of those movements and leads to their decline.

Chomsky points out that a lot of the key evils in the world are purposefully not covered by the media. East Timor, for example. So, if it is in the newspapers maybe question why and register that it probably has a lot to do with them controlling your outrage and channelling it into causes that make them look like saviours or allow them to leverage funds to ‘help’ those people. In any case, fast-forward 20 years and those people will be in a worse position.

So I would recommend this to anyone who was born since 1985. Because before that date, you probably knew a lot of the content from long-form journalism. Damn, I really miss great journalism. I can’t think of an article I read in the last 10 years that wasn’t just click-bait.

Anyway, read this!