Noam Chomsky: U.S. Censorship “Worse Than In Soviet Russia”
29.07.2022
Editor’s office of the Russkiy Mir Portal
Photo: screenshot
"It's official! The American mainstream media censors more than Soviet Russia! Who said that? You’re not going to believe it- Noam Chomsky!" Russell Brand, the popular British stand-up comedian and media personality, pulled no punches opening a program on his Youtube channel.
In case there is someone unaware, Noam Chomsky is a world-renowned scholar, a distinguished linguist, and one of the most influential thinkers of the past 50 years.
Professor Chomsky has been known for his active public position, his left-wing views, and criticism of aggressive U.S. foreign policy from the days of the Vietnam War. Today, he is indignant at the absolute absence of freedom and the actual prohibition to show any other viewpoint on Russian policy and the causes of the Ukrainian crisis in the U.S. media.
“The US is living under a totalitarian culture.” (Noam Chomsky)
Noam Chomsky's words address the significance of freedom of expression in society. According to him, it is vitally important for the United States these days because censorship completely silences any other point of view.
“The United States is living under a kind of totalitarian culture, which has never existed in my lifetime, Professor Chomsky says. “And it’s much worse in many ways than the Soviet Union before Gorbachev. Go back to the 1970s. The People in Soviet Russia could access BBC, Voice of America, and German television if they wanted to find out the news. If today in the United States, you want to find out what Foreign Minister of Russia Lavrov is saying (N. Chomsky mistakenly referred to Lavrov as Russia's Prime Minister - ed.), you can’t do it. It’s worrying.
Americans are not permitted to hear what Russians are saying. You can’t get Russian television. You can’t access Russian sources. That means also that fine American journalists, like Chris Hedges (Pulitzer Prize winner 2002. – ed.), one of the best, are cut out from Americans because he happens to have a program running on RT, Russian television. You want to find out what the adversary is saying, which is of utmost importance, you can maybe tune into Indian State television and find it out. You can read it on Al Jazeera. But the United States Has imposed constraints on freedom of access to information, which are astonishing and which, in fact, go beyond what was the case in post-Stalin Soviet Russia.
That’s just a remarkable fact. Anyone who dares to break the party line on the dominant issue of today, Ukraine, is simply demonized, vilified, and can be sent to Gulag. It’s a free country still but you can barely talk. And that has very dangerous implications for the current situation and beyond.”
“It is a free country still, but you can barely talk.” (Noam Chomsky)
Russell Brand also agrees with Chomsky. «You can't talk about the war in Ukraine without censorship... Why is that? Why are people afraid of having an honest and open conversation? When people say disinformation, I think what they mean is, “Shut up! We only want one perspective.” I believe you are capable of taking on more than one point of view. I believe that you are capable of understanding a wide set of facts, a broad scope of data, and forming your own opinion. We’re not children. We’re not idiots. They are trying to infantilize and disempower us, and they have been doing it for too long,” he says.
Brand's YouTube channel has 5.79 million subscribers. The video has got 52,000 likes and over 12,000 comments. Being a famous celebrity, Brand is known for his erratic path, however, in this case, the discussion is serious. It seems that nowadays, only Titans like Chomsky, as well as such outstanding hell-raisers, would not face "cancellation” when they openly express their views that are inconvenient to the mainstream in the West.
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