Due primarily to the outstanding contributions of Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell, the concept of anarchism is much described, discussed, and debated on this website. But there are others abroad in this jejune land of the free and the home of the brave supposedly marching under the unfurled black banner of anti-statism, most notably the viciously anti-Rothbardian linguistic theorist Noam Chomsky.  While earnestly proclaiming his long-standing anarcho-syndicalist bona fides, Chomsky has repeatedly embraced the expansion of state power which he rationalizes as “widening the floors of the cage of coercive institutions” against the predatory corporatists at the helm of the state. Murray and Lew don’t want to widen the cage, they want to smash its bars and liberate those imprisoned and shackled within. Chomsky, described simultaneously as “America’s leading dissident” and an academic gatekeeper of the establishment for forbidden topics inconvenient to the power elite such as the November 1963 coup d’état by Lyndon Johnson and the top echelon of the National Security State, or of the seminal role of the Fed in enabling the welfare-warfare State.  Nevertheless, as an often perceptive critic of US imperial foreign policy, Chomsky has some interesting observations today on the role of nuclear weapons in sustaining the hegemony of the American State since August of 1945.

The Best of Charles Burris