Educational Media Reviews Online

Noam Chomsky is a linguistics professor at MIT, but he has become famous (or notorious) over the past several decades for his scathing critiques of American foreign policy. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 have not diminished his voice, and he continues to address controversial issues on the lecture circuit. Power and Terror captures Chomsky during lectures he gave in the first half of 2002, and also includes new interview footage.

Much of the material concerns terrorism, but the focus is on what Chomsky sees as terrorist acts committed by the United States and its allies. In fact, Chomsky says, the phrase “war on terrorism” should always be placed in quotation marks because the campaign is lead by “one of the worst terrorist states in the world” and “the only state in the world that’s been condemned by the highest international authorities for international terrorism, namely the World Court and the Security Council.” The 9/11 attacks were “a historic event,” says Chomsky, “not because of the scale or the nature of the atrocity, but because of who the victims were,” and adds, “That’s the way the imperial powers have treated the rest of the world for hundreds of years.”

Hypocrisy best describes U.S. behavior in international relations, Chomsky says. At the Nuremberg war crimes trials after World War II, bombing of urban concentrations was not considered a war crime because the Allied powers did more of it than the Germans. The opening of dikes in Holland by the Germans was condemned as a war crime, but when the U.S. bombed dikes during the Korean War, the American military congratulated itself on a spectacular success.

Bringing the discussion to more recent times, Chomsky proclaims, “If you take a poll among U.S. intellectuals, support for bombing Afghanistan is just overwhelming. But how many of them think that you should bomb Washington because of the U.S. war against Nicaragua, let’s say, or Cuba or Turkey or anyone else. Now if anyone were to suggest this, they’d be considered insane. But why? If one is right, why is the other wrong?”

These are provocative statements, to say the least, but it’s the ideas expressed that make the video worth watching. The filmmaking technique is elementary. The majority of Power and Terror consists of scenes showing Chomsky lecturing or speaking in his office. (There are a few post-lecture scenes.) After Chomsky makes a point, there is a fade to black, sometimes accompanied by a Chomsky sound bite relating to the next point. There are no cutaways to other scenes (other than audience shots) while Chomsky is speaking. A 1992 documentary on Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, did intercut archival footage or scenes staged by the filmmakers. Admittedly, these editing techniques sometimes became a smart-alecky distraction, but a little visual variety could have helped Power and Terror.

This video was produced by a Japanese company and uses the Japanese language in some unexpected areas. Places are identified in both English and Japanese, and three Japanese songs are heard. The first is used at the opening, while quotes about Chomsky appear on the screen. The lyrics are not translated, and a non-Japanese-speaking viewer is left to wonder about this rather jarring beginning.

A second song, heard in the middle of the video, is accompanied at first by more quotes on the screen, and then is translated in subtitles as New York City street scenes are shown. The subtitles don’t provide a powerful enough point (at least to this English-speaking viewer) to justify the song or the footage. The final song, used at the end of the video, as Chomsky is seen leaving a lecture and over the credits, is again untranslated, and provides a final distraction, rather than a fitting ending.

Despite the drawbacks, the video is recommended for its display of Chomsky’s contrarian arguments in a post-9/11 world. There’s little biographical information and no rebuttal to Chomsky’s views, so Manufacturing Consent is a better video introduction to Chomsky. But Power and Terror is useful as a supplement.