"Captures the man in a vital moment. Forceful, original thinking. It is refreshing
to hear an alternative voice, whether you agree with it or not." - Eric Monder, Film Journal

poster for film directed by John Junkerman
Power and Terror
Noam Chomsky in Our Times

Whether Noam Chomsky, the MIT linguist and political philosopher, is "the most important intellectual alive," as the New York Times famously called him, is perhaps for each individual reader and viewer to decide. But without a doubt, Chomsky is one of the most straight-talking, committed, and hard-working dissidents of our time. U2's Bono has called him "the rebel without a pause." A quiet but steadfast critic of United States foreign policy for decades, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, his profile took a quantum leap as he provided much-demanded analysis and historical perspective to concerned citizens throughout the world. In the months that followed, he gave dozens of talks on four continents, conducted scores of interviews, and published a book 9-11 that was published in 22 countries and became a surprise bestseller in many of them, including Japan, where Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times was produced.

Despite his nearly complete marginalization by the mainstream American media, Chomsky, now 74, draws standing-room-only crowds wherever he goes. He has achieved a kind of celebrity that is rare for intellectuals, but he is surprisingly, perhaps pointedly, uncharismatic. Shy, soft-spoken, sometimes halting in his delivery as he works his way through carefully constructed and far-reaching analyses of the way the world works, his impact is that of a slow, steady burn. A consummate teacher, he draws lessons from the historical record that lead the audience to draw their own, often startling and unsettling conclusions about the American exercise of power and its consequences.

Power and Terror chronicles a series of talks that Chomsky gave in California and New York in the spring of 2002, combined with a long interview at his office in Cambridge. As he has done countless times since 9.11, he places the terrorist attacks in the context of American foreign intervention throughout the postwar decades, in Vietnam, Central America, the Middle East, and elsewhere. Beginning with the fundamental principle that the exercise of violence against civilian populations is terror, regardless of whether the perpetrator is a well-organized band of Muslim extremists or the most powerful state in the world, Chomsky, in stark and uncompromising terms, challenges the United States to apply to its own actions the moral standards it demands of others.

Chomsky reviews the history of war crimes and delivers his now-famous analysis of the double-standards and hypocrisy of Western media and intellectuals, but he arrives at a surprisingly optimistic conclusion. Seen from the perspective of his four decades of political activism, the world is a far more civilized place than it was in the past, largely through the dedicated, painstaking, often unacknowledged but brave participation of ordinary citizens. It is perhaps this optimism that sustains his life-long mission: to bring the facts to the public, in the faith that, armed with knowledge, they will not fail to act.


Power and Terror is a First Run Features release:
First Run Features • 153 Waverly Place • New York, NY 10014
(800) 229-8575 • Fax: (212) 989-7649 • info@firstrunfeatures.com

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