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Noam Chomsky
A large part of Noam Chomsky's public image as an intellectual is derived not from his role in the field of linguistics, but instead from his having co-authored with Edward Herman
Manufacturing Consent. The first matter to be discussed here will therefore be Chomsky's contribution to that work; and, more broadly, that work's contribution to human understanding - the actual significance of the book.
Chomsky's contribution to that 1988 book was to describe the selling of specifically the wars in Vietnam and in adjoining Indo-chinese nations, according to that book's main author, Herman's, theory. That theory was called the
"Propaganda model of communication". It's the book's theory, or "model," of manufacturing consent for wars. According to their book, the practitioners of this model are the public relations or PR profession that sell, to the domestic American public, invasions and military occupations of foreign lands. This is a specialized field of PR.
Herman's theory (or "model") of political PR (commonly called "propaganda") for the invasion and control of foreign countries, had, itself, actually already been presented 66 years earlier in almost full form in Walter Lippmann's 1922 introduction of that concept, "the manufacture of consent," but Lippmann focused there more broadly, on the selling of
all types of governmental polices, and not only on the selling of invasions and military occupations of foreign lands. Lippmann had introduced this broader concept of "the manufacture of consent," in his 1922 book
Public Opinion.
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