Interventions by Noam Chomsky

Chomsky’s op-eds have been picked up widely by the international press, but much less so in the United States where “newspapers of record” have declined to publish them. None of the essays distributed by the Syndicate have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post or Boston Globe, though they have been picked up and published by a few regional papers, like the Register Guard, the Dayton Daily News, and the Knoxville Voice, a Tennessee-based monthly.

That our mainstream media system seems unwilling to tolerate a range of political thought wide enough to include Chomsky’s but is willing to market them outside our intellectual and geographic borders is ironic and revealing. Tariq Ali says that “if Chomsky were living in Italy, Germany, France, or Britain, he would have a regular column in one of those countries’ major newspapers.” Chomsky’s columns have appeared in the mainstream British press, including the International Herald Tribune, the Guardian, and the Independent. One of Mexico’s national newspapers, La Jornada, publishes Chomsky frequently; it just hasn’t happened yet in Chomsky’s home country.

It is thus a great honor to present readers in the United States with Interventions, a complete collection of the op-eds Chomsky has written to date for the New York Times Syndicate, minus one or two that were verbatim excerpts from his recent books.

Interventions also includes one piece–“A Wall As a Weapon”–written specifically for the New York Times newspaper, not for the Syndicate, two parts of the same company. Chomsky has taken the occasion of producing this collection to add notes and, in some cases restore passages from his original drafts that had been edited out for reasons of space. He also added material expanding what was in the original drafts–background, and other information. As a book, Interventions has benefited from these additions.

It is important to note that during the period that Chomsky wrote the essays in this book–2002 to 2007–he also wrote several major works: Hegemony or Survival (which held ground for weeks on the New York Times bestseller list after Hugo Chávez praised it during a speech before the United Nations in 2006), Failed States and Perilous Power (with Gilbert Achcar and Stephen Shalom), all of which discuss many of the ideas contained in Interventions in greater detail.

In composing op-eds, Chomsky is taking advantage of the fact that our society is still perhaps the freest in the world: openings still exist to challenge the White House, the Pentagon, and the corporations enriched by them. Chomsky believes that the freedom to challenge power is not just an opportunity, it’s a responsibility, and he takes advantage of the op-ed form to do just that. These brief, fiercely–argued essays were written in order to reach readers in the popular, shared space of their daily newspapers, and Chomsky demonstrates that he can just as persuasively strike at the heart of today’s political contradictions, deceptions, and hidden horrors with a few hundred words as he can with a few hundred pages.

Despite the profound inequities in this country and the nightmare of being a nation at war, Chomsky reminds us that ordinary people still have power to drive change. “One of the clearest lessons of history,” he writes, “including recent history, is that rights are not granted; they are won.” The purpose of the Open Media Series, and of Chomsky’s work, is to encourage readers to use their rights for creating greater justice, human rights, democracy, and to insist on a media system which supports them.