Noam Chomsky: Rebel Without a Pause

I have been a reader of Chomsky for years and own several of his books. I also own a couple of his CDs and have other audio on my computer. My point: Chomsky is by no means a stranger to me.

This familiarity made the video bittersweet. The bitter part was that the vast majority of the information was not new to me and I have heard Chomsky say these things in other places before. So as a learning tool, it was more refresher than anything shocking or ground-breaking.

But this sin't to say it was without value. All the stuff he should have been talking about in 2003, he was. He speaks of Saddam Hussein who was our ally, of media controlled by corporations, by the control of the people being by fear (which is, although he never says it, Machiavellian policy).

But this video was also sad, because it showed how truly old and frail Chomsky has become. Still energetic, but he seems to be demanding more interesting sweaters. And at one point it looks like he's addressing the Sun Room of a nursing home (he's not). He is so old, in fact, his wife has grown to look just like him - I would have assumed she was his sister. But the sad reality for me was that someday not long in the future, this man - the most intelligent man alive - will be dead.

Watch this documentary after watching "Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media" (1992 documentary)

After watching Manufacturing Consent "Noam Chomsky: Rebel Without a Pause" (2003 documentary), is a more up-to-date extension. It includes a few more items that you may not have heard of or only saw through a filter.

His description of the Government and a few others reminds me of a magic show; watch this hand and not the other.

The downside of the documentary is it is a handful of mixed soundbites with a focus problem. Just once it would be nice to see a Chomsky speech where the only interruption may be a heckler or two, instead of a bunch of verbalized editing.

Although this film is no masterpiece, Chomsky discusses topics everyone should be thinking about. Filmed just prior to the start of the Iraq war, he describes the mechanism of fear as a means of controlling the masses.

His words are eerily prophetic; "When the fear runs out of Iraq, then it'll be Iran who becomes the imminent threat."

Wow.

Chomsky understands the ways of the world, Republican-style; create fear, disseminate fear, use fear for corporate growth, make fear the ultimate tool of ultimate ignorance. If it were made today, the content could be waved-off as trite, but these are words from 2003!

Chomsky predicts results of events of actions of those days before the Iraq war, and we see those predictions become uncanny reality before our eyes ...sadly, because it reveals the ultimate truth: Americans are cattle.

There are some poor production values in this documentary, but I'm a Chomsky devotee, so it didn't bother me that much.

Chomsky is dazzling as usual, a man of effortless eloquence. Almost everything he says is interesting, well-researched and well-considered.

Chomsky is very persuasive because he so often bases his arguments on government documents and news reports that are already in the public domain. He analyzes them and displays the blatant fallacies behind them. This is one of the principal reasons why he's deemed a 'dangerous' thinker who isn't welcome in the U.S. mainstream media. He USED to be welcome at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), but that once-great public broadcaster has been looted and neutered over the past 15 years or so.

An annoying feature of the DVD extras was that questions from the audience were barely audible, and in some cases INaudible. What it creates are rather silly scenes: Chomsky staring at the camera for 30 seconds or so, listening to a question DVD viewers cannot hear. Then he responds, and we must wait for another 30 seconds before we can understand what question he is responding to.

Still, it doesn't really matter that much. Chomsky can distill 20 years of reading and analysis into five minutes. His mind is brilliantly ordered, and his memory is prodigious.

Chomsky comes across not as a pedant or a shrill master of dogma, but as a quiet voice of radical reason. He reminds me of everyone's favourite grandfather: a kindly, gentle, soft-spoken man who rarely needs to raise his voice. He just tells you what he knows, what he has learned, and you can use this as ammunition for rebellion against the state, or, conversely, you can do nothing. (This has been one of the criticisms levelled against Chomsky by the so-called 'hard' left: that he doesn't vigorously exhort, he merely explains and quietly tells you to resist. In other words, he's not 'explosive' enough.)

He is still a very impressive and persuasive voice of reason. But he's now 80 years old (born in 1928). How much longer can he keep doing this stuff?

This was an eye-opener for me. I just read Noam Chomsky's book about September 11th (called "9-11") and I was really interested in learning more. I saw this film on TV and I was amazed at the man's ability to recall facts and figures from articles, interviews, etc. He really is one of the smartest speakers in the world today. His wife, Carol actually steals the show as she explains what it's like to live with such a mind. Interesting tidbits from Carol was that Noam reads 6 newspapers a day and over 80 journals every year. The fact that he's really into his grandchildren and to meeting with students and talking about the issues made me see him more as a grandfather than a radical intellectual. The reflections and insights from others in the film are equally revealing. It becomes clear that Chomsky has influenced successive generations of people and still exerts enormous influence in the world today. There is so much interesting bits from Chomsky on so many issues I am hoping to either see it on TV again or in the theatres or on video so I can pay more attention to what he's talking about. Try and get it at your local video store that specializes in non-Hollywood blockbuster films and prepare to be challenged by Chomsky and his ideas.