Professor Naom Chomsky, the greatest criticiser on US

Noam Chomsky (born 1928) is a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian and activist and one of the world's most influential intellectuals. He is an institute professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Over the past five decades, Chomsky has offered a searing critical indictment of US foreign policy and its many military interventions across the globe, pointing out that the US's continued support for undemocratic regimes, and hostility to popular or democratic movements, is at odds with its professed claim to be spreading democracy and freedom and support for tendencies aiming toward that end. Indeed, as Chomsky argues, the current concern from Washington with so-called "Rogue States," as much as the stated goal of aiding democratic movements in other countries, is not supported by successive administrations' support (either direct or indirect) for political and military dictatorships across Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia. As Chomsky stated: "As the most powerful state, the US makes its own laws, using force and conducting economic warfare at will." It also threatens sanctions against countries that do not abide by its conveniently flexible notions of "free trade."

In 1955, Chomsky joined the staff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he still holds a professorship. Two years later, he published his first major book, "Syntactic Structures," which laid the foundation for his highly influential work on linguistics and cognitive psychology, including the concept of "universal grammar". Chomsky has since published more than 100 books. 

In 1969 he published "American Power and the New Mandarins," the first of many books harshly criticising US foreign policy as neo-imperialist and terrorist. Chomsky has described his political views as libertarian socialist and/or anarcho-syndicalist; he regards all forms of power as corrupting and suspect.

In 1988, he published "Manufacturing Consent: The political economy of the mass media" (with Edward Herman), which argues that the US mass media are essentially propaganda organs for government and big business.

The Arts and Humanities Citation Index reported in 1992 that Chomsky was the world's most highly cited living scholar. Only Marx, Lenin, Shakespeare, Aristotle, the Bible, Plato and Freud had been cited more.

In 1993, he published "The Minimalist Program," a major overhaul of his earlier work on linguistics that aims to reveal the inner workings of language as a simple set of general rules.

In 2006, the president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, began an address to the General Assembly of the UN with a recommendation of Chomsky's 2003 book "Hegemony or Survival: America's quest for global dominance," a survey of US foreign policy since the second world war. He went on to describe the US president of the day, George W. Bush, as the devil.

On the role of the mass media, Chomsky argues that the vested corporate interests controlling newspapers, television, and radio, no less than the content of what these outlets offer, form what he and Edward Hermann in their seminal study Manufacturing Consent call a "propaganda model" supine in the service of power.

This year, Chomsky published "The Science of Language," a series of in-depth dialogues with philosopher "James McGilvray" of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, on language, human nature and politics.

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