I have transcripted Prof Noam Chomsky below, from his interview with Russel Brand, since I find it of utmost importance and weight. It is slightly adapted for readability, so feel free to listen to the full interview on Youtube if you wish to have it unedited.

Without freedom of speech we have no hope of dealing with any of the problems that concern us. We can see this very clearly today, very dramatically.

To take the United States _{(and European Union – editors notice)} today, it is living under a kind of totalitarian culture which has never existed in my lifetime, and is much worse in many ways than the soviet union before Gorbachev. Go back to the 1970s and people in the soviet russia could access the bbc, voice of america or german television, if they wanted to find out the news.

If today in the United States ^{[the west]} you want to find out what the prime minister of russia is saying, you can’t do it. We are not permitted to hear what the russians are saying. We can’t get russian television. We can’t access russian sources. That means also that fine American journalists like Chris Hedges, one of the best, is cut out, banned from america because he happens to have a program running on RT; Russian television.

If you want to find out what the adversary is saying, which is of utmost importance, you can maybe tune into indian state television and find it out, or you can read it on Al Jazeera, but the United States ^{[and EU]} has imposed constraints on freedom of access to information which are astonishing, and which in fact go beyond what was the case in post stalin and soviet russia.

That’s just a remarkable fact.

It goes well beyond. Anyone who dares to break the party line on the dominant issue of today, i.e Ukraine, is simply demonized and vilified. Can’t be sent to the Gulag – It’s a free country still – but you can barely talk, and that has very dangerous implications for the current situation and beyond.

Noam Chomsky, July 2022

Transcripted from Russell Brands show “Awakening with”, also available on Rumble if you want a sliver of free speech. 🙂