Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times

"Everyone's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way. Stop participating in it." Yes, the enfant terrible (at a spry 73 years of age) of the American left is back on the warpath, and in filmmaker John Junkerman's compilation of clips taken from Chomsky's cross-country college lecture tour junket (intercut with one new interview), the MIT linguistics professor-cum-American scourge argues that on 9/11 the chickens, as Malcolm X once so infamously said, came home to roost. Embraced by some as the epitome of the clear-eyed, encyclopedic-minded dissident (Chomsky appears to have every dirty little CIA op at the tip of his mental fingertips for illustrating various points) and dismissed by others as the Oliver Stone of the intelligentsia, Chomsky impresses here not with his dates and statistics concerning U.S. meddling in Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia (although there's ample evidence to support most, if not all, of his claims), but rather with the simple, inexorable lure of straightforward logic: while Chomsky makes very clear that he does not think of the U.S. as the "evil empire" (in fact, he carefully avoids the kind of empty, insulting rhetoric favored by George W.), he does argue that being a powerful and rather intrusive player in the arena of world politics can have a boomerang effect (we once supported both Saddam Hussein and the Taliban because of U.S. interests, just as we now hound them because of U.S. interests), and suggests that we cannot hope to understand "why they hate us" until we learn to measure our own actions with the same yardstick we use on our enemies (one of Chomsky's most telling arguments revolves around the nature of war crimes; specifically he makes the point that war crimes are only committed by the losers, never by the victors--although common sense tells us that atrocities are committed by both sides). Unfortunately, fans of Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick's excellent film Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (VL-3/94)--which presents a much more comprehensive and artistic portrait of Chomsky--will be a bit disappointed by this visually lackluster effort (as film, Power and Terror has zero value--it's simply a series of clips, and some of them are downright cinematically ugly). Still, this is a shoe-in for academic collections, and should be very strongly considered by larger public libraries. Recommended. [Note: although I haven't seen it yet, Koch Entertainment is releasing Noam Chomsky: Distorted Morality, a two-hour documentary on DVD featuring two post-9/11 lectures by Chomsky, on March 25 for the comparatively low price of $7.98.] Aud: C, P. (R. Pitman)