Thanks in part to the nature of our media moment, we remain riveted by acts of horror committed against Europeans and Americans.

So many decades later, something still seems painfully familiar in all of this. It will, indeed, be a still greater national scandal - if we assume that possible - if they alone are subjected to criminal prosecution, but not those who have created and accepted the long-term atrocity to which they contributed one detail - merely a few hundred more murdered Vietnamese.” It is only the acts of a company of half-crazed GIs that are regarded as a scandal, a disgrace to America. Rather it is of the very essence of American strategy.” Before he was done, Chomsky would put the massacre of almost 500 Vietnamese men, women, and children into the grim context of the larger crimes of the time: “It is perhaps remarkable that none of this appears to occasion much concern. Its first sentences still cut to the heart of things: “It is important to understand that the massacre of the rural population of Vietnam and their forced evacuation is not an accidental by-product of the war. “After Pinkville” still remains vividly in my consciousness from that long-gone moment when a growing sense of horror about a distant American war that came to feel ever closer and more brutal swept me into antiwar activism. For the modern intellectual, it is not at all obvious.”) This, at least, may seem enough of a truism to pass without comment. (“It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies. That honor may go to “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” which he wrote in 1966.

(“Pinkville,” connoting communist influence, was the military slang for the village where the infamous My Lai massacre took place.) It was not the first Chomsky essay I had read. I stopped at his chilling 1970 essay “ After Pinkville,” which I remember reading when it came out. Noam Chomsky’s writings played a role in that transformation. Leafing through some of the Vietnam-era essays collected in that 1987 paperback brought to life a young Tom Engelhardt who, in the mid-to-late 1960s, was undergoing a startling transition: from dreaming of serving his government to opposing it. The other day I pulled a tattered copy of The Chomsky Reader off a bookshelf of mine. Today's TomDispatch is the first of two parts of a remarkable Chomsky essay that caps his new book, Who Rules the World? Part 2 of the piece will appear at TD on Tuesday morning! This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.

Who rules the world chomsky