Noam Chomsky, widely considered the most important living intellectual, talks with BBC’s Francine Stock at London’s St Paul’s Cathedral, December 2002 (23:28 min). Chomsky has been a critic of American political establishment for 4 decades and many of his arguments are now coming to light and echoed by a new generation.

Francine Stock: Since you first started in political activism in the sixties, do you feel that you have made a great deal of headway?

Noam Chomsky: I think the country has made a great deal of headway and I’m happy to participate in it, but it’s not traceable to individuals….If you go back to the sixties… there was no feminist movement, no Third World solidarity movements, no substantial anti-nuclear movement, no global justice movements. These are all developments of the last twenty or thirty years and they come from all over the place. For example, the solidarity movements… are quite unique - there’s never been a time when people from the aggressor country went to the victims and lived with them to try to protect them. That happened in the eighties - tens of thousands of Americans did it and they came from conservative circles. A lot of it was church based. And it came from Main Street in the United States, and now it’s all over the world.

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