SOURCE: “Don't Look Away,” in New Statesman, March 11, 1988, p. 33.

In the following review, Osborne discusses Chomsky's political activities and offers positive assessment of The Chomsky Reader and The Culture of Terror.

There was much concern among American political scientists in the late 1970s about the spread of something they called “Vietnam Syndrome”. This was not, as might be supposed, anything to do with the US government's apparently incurable tendency to intervene militarily in the internal affairs of foreign states. Rather, it was a condition taken to be affecting the American people themselves: a morbid aversion to the consequences of just such interventions.

If, despite the tactical adjustment represented by the use of proxies in Central America, this syndrome remains at all widespread (and there is evidence to suggest that it does), it is largely thanks to Noam Chomsky and those like him, who have devoted their time and...