He goes on to reject any role for language in propaganda. In fact, in an 800 page book of interviews with Chomsky, titled Language and Politics, Chomsky - ironically - explicitly rejects the idea that language might be implicated in politics. In accruing evidence for the claims for his analysis of the media, Chomsky has never recruited a single concept from linguistics. It gives a central role to discourse as the vehicle of ideology, as the medium for the shaping of public opinion, and as a mechanism for reinforcing the contradictions and inequities of social structure.īut, paradoxically, Chomsky see no role for linguistics in understanding how language can have such power. It gives a central role to propaganda in explaining how it is that the US and her allies have both “might” and “right”.
The argument of the book is very persuasive.
Indeed, the very idea of “American aggression” was completely “unthinkable”.Ĭonsequently, America was represented in the mainstream American media as “defending” rather than “attacking” south Vietnam, despite the large-scale bombardment of the south by the US. Thus, public opinion is “managed”, and the violence by which the US and other Western powers pursue their foreign interests is hidden, validated, normalised.įor instance, the mainstream American press, Herman and Chomsky argued, completely failed to see that the invasion of Vietnam was an act of American aggression.
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