Sunday, November 09, 2025

At War With Asia by Noam Chomsky: Book Review


This is part of my so-called "Scripted Review" series, in which I make a Youtube video based on an old blogpost.  For more information on what this is and why I'm doing it, see HERE:

The first 10 minutes are just me talking about Noam Chomsky in general.  I don't actually start talking about this book until about 10:00


As I mentioned in the video, the articles which make up this book can be found here: https://chomsky.info/articles/



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2 comments:

Futami-chan said...

Think of the famous name Nguyen whenever you pronounce anything with "ng-".

Let me retract or at least add more to the pile of the answer to the old question "How come Vietnamese don't hate Americans":
- "thượng đội hạ đạp" mindset: superior = worship, inferior = hate
- not everyone lives in Quang Ngai or similar bombed provinces
- there are endless things in life to care for
- you can't bite the hand that feed you
Besides, these days I doubt anybody would want to see some random international herobragging or international hatred e.g. from any country at all towards Japan. Pretty sure Japan was evil but can't I just slobber my fictional girls in peace? Not hating ppl a good call.

I started seeing mentions of Chomsky constantly after Trump's first election - that's how I started reading about him (and eventually found this blog through the Linguistics War review). Some brought up his name explicitly and uncalled during Russia vs Ukraine. He's not gonna stop being known soon.

Futami-chan said...

Of course 2nd passage is unrelated to the video, but the same can be said about the concern of the entire comment: I have nothing to say about Chomsky. Frankly speaking I find him polemical and thus have never really been able to digest his political works, especially At War with Asia. He's more relevant to Americans than people from other countries. Secondary works on him or people quoting from him are more engrossing. He's surely a fascinating figure.