Leftist Noam Chomsky had some extra-nasty things to say during the Covid freak out, as Leftist did. However, sometimes he says things that hit the mark. He recently pointed out that at present there are less freedoms in many respects, such as accessing information about the Russian position on the present Ukrainian conflict, then were existing during the USSR regime. I would not want to exactly see the US as worse that the USSR, but it is certainly moving down that road disturbingly fast.
“America is now subjected to a culture of totalitarianism worse than the former Soviet Union, according to liberal linguistics professor Noam Chomsky.
Chomsky argued that the U.S. is experiencing a form of information warfare and censorship that’s much more radical and oppressive than what the Soviets inflicted upon their people at the height of the Cold War.
“Take the United States today. It is living under a kind of totalitarian culture which has never existed in my lifetime, and is much worse in many ways than the Soviet Union before Gorbachev,” Chomsky said Friday on “Under the Skin with Russell Brand.”
“Go back to the 1970s, people in Soviet Russia could access BBC, Voice of America, German television if they wanted to find out the news.”
Chomsky went on to argue that the ongoing Ukraine conflict has prompted the Western governments and tech companies to engage in unprecedented censorship, preventing the American people from hearing information from Russia’s point of view.
“If today, in the United States, you want to find out what [Foreign Minister Sergei] Lavrov of Russia is saying, can’t do it. It’s barred. Americans are not permitted to hear what Russians are saying. Can’t get Russian television, can’t access Russian sources,” Chomsky said, adding that also includes “fine American journalists” who happen to do business with Russian media.
“You want to find out what the adversary is saying, which is of the utmost importance, you can maybe tune into Indian state television and find it out, or you can read it on Al-Jazeera,” he said.
“But the United States has imposed constraints on freedom of access to information which are astonishing, which in fact go beyond what was the case in post-Stalin Soviet Russia,” Chomsky added.
Shortly after Russia launched its military operation in Ukraine in February, Big Tech barred Russian state media like RT and Sputnik from disseminating across platforms like Facebook and YouTube in the name of fighting “disinformation.”
Twitter also censored Russia’s Foreign Ministry from appearing in its search results, prompting Russia to call on the social media platform to “revise their policy that limits the audience’s right to access to information and to renounce the use of anti-democratic tools of unfair competition between American mainstream news outlets and alternative media sources.”
Independent journalist Glenn Greenwald noted that defending free speech used to be a “central” virtue of the left before it became radicalized by its “authoritarian wing.”
“This is how the American Left used to think before its authoritarian wing that supports censorship, Big Tech control of political discourse, and the US security state and its various narratives about Russia became dominant,” he wrote on Twitter.
“Chomsky, like everyone, has had some bad moments, including his call for the unvaccinated to be housed in camps and his Vote Dem mania. But he has never wavered an inch in his unyielding defense of free speech and contempt for censorship. That value was once central to leftists,” Greenwald added.
Naturally, Chomsky was immediately chastised by the left for criticizing U.S. censorship.