Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

the result of all of this is that it’s a very effective system of ideological control—much more effective than Soviet totalitarianism ever was. In fact, if you look at the entire range of media in the Soviet Union that people were actually exposed to, they had much more dissidence in the 1980s than we do, overtly, and people were in fact reading a much broader range of press, listening to foreign broadcasts, and so on—which is pretty much unheard of in the U.S.16 Or just to give one other example, during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, there was even a newscaster [Vladimir Danchev] who made broadcasts over Moscow radio for five successive nights back in 1983, denouncing the Russian invasion of Afghanistan—he actually called it an “invasion”—and calling on the Afghans to resist, before he was finally taken off the air.17 That’s unimaginable in the United States. I mean, can you imagine Dan Rather or anybody else getting on the radio and denouncing the U.S. “invasion” of South Vietnam, and calling on the Vietnamese to resist?