Power and Terror / editors. John Junkerman and Takei Masakazu.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 137-139) and index.

Summary: Immediately after the terrorist attacks of September 11, Noam Chomsky's always tightly scheduled life ratcheted several levels higher in intensity. In the months that followed, he gave a great many public talks and countless interviews, many of them with the foreign media, who turned to him as one of the small handful of American intellectuals who stood opposed to the Bush administration's aggressive military response to the attacks. With unflagging conviction, Chomsky must have repeated a thousand times his argument that we cannot address terrorism of the weak against the powerful without also confronting "the unmentionable but far more extreme terrorism of the powerful against the weak". The argument, supported with an ever-expanding array of historical case studies, documents, and analyses, fell on deaf ears in Washington and in the mainstream American media, but resonated with large audiences in the United states and abroad who turned once agin to Chomsky for the voice of reason and consience that he has provided for decades. Chomsky's voice also reached Japan, where I live, in the form of a translation of his book 9-11 (subtitled in Japanese, "America Is Not Qualified to Retaliate!"), which was rushed into publication at the end of November. Inspired by the book, a producer at an independent Japanese film company and the author began to make plans to produce a documentary about Chomsky and his perspective on terrorism and American power. This book is an outgrowth of that effort.

Adult