REVIEW: NOAM CHOMSKY'S BOOK 9-11

By Stephen Portlock

This is a hastily cobbled together collection of interviews, many with foreign journalists, and often by e-mail, conducted in the month following the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon.

That it is a rush job is therefore plainly undeniable, but it would be almost certainly wrong to see this as a means to a fast buck. Rather Chomsky almost certainly sees this as a curatorial job, a spanner in the works to those attempting to rewrite history. As he notes “These facts have been completely removed from history. One has to practically scream them from the rooftops!”

Given the delays in publishing Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men, it is hardly surprising that this work of the equally revered and reviled anarchist, media analyst and scourge of US foreign policy is published by an obscure company - Seven Seas. However, to those reading the book in this country, the conclusions reached may be less of an eye opener.

Partly this is because Chomsky’s comments are available on such websites as Znet and the surprisingly interesting Chumbawamba website. Additionally, however, the anti-war journalism has been of a surprisingly high quality in papers like The Guardian, The Independent and The Mirror. Indeed Chomsky quotes The Independent’s Robert Fisk on a number of occasions. Nonetheless there are some fresh revelations such as the dismissal of the notion that Bin Laden’s attacks were a reaction against globalization.

This then is a good, readable introduction to this often fascinating theoretician but one that feels, in the UK at least, less subversive than previous works like Manufacturing Consent. However in a spin-obsessed political scene it is worth reading as an anchor to reality.