Noam on the Range

Toward the third hour of the hagiographic documentary about Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, a moment of truth emerges. Chomsky is lecturing at the University of Wyoming. He has just finished his familiar stump speech: fifty reasons why we live in a totalitarian society. Striving to revive the old thesis about American society as a form of “soft totalitarianism,” Chomsky argues that in the totalitarian societies of old, the state routinely used force to keep the public ...