Understanding Power: The Indispensible Chomsky

The hijackers, Democrats and Republicans alike, have acted as if the idea that self-government depends on people being able to count on independent providers of information is a quaint relic and that the new media channels present new opportunities that creative political operatives must seize.

perspective in Asia, arguing that certain transcendent movements (the Islamic revolution in Iran and Maoism, like Solidarity in Poland) were as important to the unraveling of the Cold War as any other development in the West.

Protest is one of the basic acts of citizenship, and in some contexts (for example, the civil rights movement) it’s an expression of faith in the power of democratic institutions to bring change—the vigilance of a free press, the impartiality of the law, the conscience or self-interest of elected officials, the movability of public opinion. But the

radicalism that draws its terms from the System’s violence in Vietnam, then claims to be driven to revolutionary violence of its own, and, as an act of revolution, turns upon the liberal universities has an inauthentic ring, a ring of sublimation, theater.