Author Media type Paperback ISBN 0-87286-483-9 | Publication date May, 2007 Pages 232 | |
Publisher City Lights Books (US)
Hamish Hamilton (UK) | ||
Interventions is a book by Noam Chomsky, an American linguist, MIT professor, and political activist. Published in May 2007, Interventions is a collection of 44 op-ed articles, post-9/11, from September 2002, through March 2007. The book's subjects span from 9/11 and the Iraq war to social security and intelligent design, South America and Asia, the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the election of Hamas, Hurricane Katrina, and the US concept of "just war". The Pentagon banned the book from its Guantanamo Bay prison because it might negatively “impact... good order and discipline.” Chomsky replied that, “This happens sometimes in totalitarian regimes.”
Background
Noam Chomsky (1928–) was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Becoming academically involved in the field of linguistics, Chomsky eventually secured a job as Professor of Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the field of linguistics, he is credited as the creator or co-creator of the Chomsky hierarchy, the universal grammar theory, and the Chomsky–Schützenberger theorems. Politically, Chomsky had held radical leftist views since childhood, identifying himself with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism. He was particularly known for his critiques of U.S. foreign policy and contemporary state capitalism, and he has been described as a prominent cultural figure.
Chomsky was first approached to write an op-ed column for the New York Times Syndicate on the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the basis of his highly influential volume 9/11 (2001). The international attention garnered by the subsequent column, entitled 9-11: Lessons Unlearned, convinced the publishers to commission Chomsky to write roughly 1000-words a month which they would then distribute as op-ed pieces. These are widely picked up overseas, but rarely in the United States and The New York Times itself never published them to its own readers. Internationally, the op-eds have appeared in the mainstream European press including The International Herald Tribune, The Guardian, and The Independent. Regional newspapers in the US that did pick up the op-eds were The Register Guard, The Dayton Daily News, and The Knoxville Voice. A second volume of these, collecting columns from April 2, 2007 to October 31, 2011, was published as Making the Future (2012).