Photograph Source: Andrea Womack – Public Domain

“A man of stupendous brilliance.”
– Norman Finkelstein

“A gargantuan influence.”
– Chris Hedges

“ . . . brilliant . . . unswerving . . . relentless . . . heroic.”
– Arundhati Roy

“Preposterously thorough.”
– Edward Said

“[A] fierce talent.”
– Eduardo Galeano

“An intellectual cannon.”
– Israel Shamir

“A lighthouse over a sea of hogwash.”
– Kathleen Cleaver

He had a disarming frankness, a toothy grin, a dazzling mind that never rested.

He always felt completely out of tune with the world. At ten, he published his first article (in the school paper) – a lament on the fall of Barcelona to Franco. At thirteen, he was haunting anarchist bookstores in New York City and working a newsstand with his uncle, eagerly soaking up everything a brilliant mix of immigrant minds had to offer, by far the richest intellectual environment he was ever to encounter. At sixteen, he went off by himself at the news of Hiroshima, unable to comprehend anyone else’s reaction to the horror. At twenty-four, he abandoned a Harvard fellowship to live on a kibbutz, returning only by chance to fulfill an academic career. At twenty-eight, he revolutionized the field of linguistics with his book, Syntactic Structures. At twenty-nine, he became associate professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (and full professor three years later), though his competence with technology was limited to the tape recorder. At thirty-five, he threw himself into anti-war protest, giving talks, writing letters and articles, promoting teach-ins, and helping to organize student demonstrations and draft resistance against the Vietnam War. At thirty-eight, he risked a five-year jail term protesting at the Pentagon, spending the night in jail alongside Norman Mailer, who described him in Armies of the Night as “a slim sharp-featured man with an ascetic expression, and an air of gentle but absolute moral integrity.”[1]At forty, he was the only white face in the crowd at Fred Hampton’s funeral, after the young Black Panther leader was gunned down by the FBI in a Gestapo-style raid.[2]

Such was the early life of America’s greatest dissident intellectual, raised in a deeply anti-Semitic German-Irish neighborhood in Quaker Philadelphia, later awarded an elite linguistics professorship at the center of the Pentagon system at MIT.

Fulfilling a brilliant academic career at the pinnacle of the Ivory Tower, Chomsky railed against his fellow intellectuals’ subservience to power, dismissing pious declarations of Washington’s alleged commitment to freedom, equality, and democracy with abundant demonstrations of its actual values – greed, domination, and deceit. He forensically examined the claim that the establishment media operate as an objective check on the excesses of the powerful, marshalling overwhelming evidence showing that in fact they are a propaganda service working on their behalf. Laboriously debunking the flood of lies and distortions targeting mass audiences, he transformed dangerous misperceptions of U.S. benevolence into insightful comprehension of imperial reality.

Thus we learned that the Vietnam War was not a noble quest to defend freedom, but a quasi-genocidal assault on a former French colony designed to subjugate a defenseless peasantry; that Israel was not a glorious example of uniquely decent democratic socialism, but a modern Sparta on a path to self-destruction; that the Cold War was not a contest between freedom and slavery, but a shared opposition to independent nationalism, in which a galaxy of neo-Nazi U.S. client states masqueraded as the “Free World.”[3]

Such insights were anathema in academia, and Chomsky quickly earned a reputation as a political crank among his more subservient colleagues (the vast majority), even as he gained considerable stature as a public intellectual in American society at large and internationally. These contrasting perceptions of his credibility made for a striking schizophrenia in how he was evaluated: dismissed as a lunatic by pundits and professors, Chomsky’s political lectures were sold out years in advance to overflow general audiences throughout the world.

Elite commentators who wrote him off as a novice for his lack of credentials in political science contradicted themselves by recognizing him as a genius for his linguistics work, though he had no formal credentials in that field either. Nevertheless, they were right about his........

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