Author's note: This interview was originally published in REVelation magazine (#12, Summer, 1995): 30-38. This piece captures a transitional period in world politics that exerts a powerful influence over today's Culture Jammers and anti-globalization activists. Post-NAFTA Americans have became aware of the maquiladora; the Zapatistas seized cyberspace; Jose Ramos-Horta has since been honored with the Nobel Peace Prize; Australia has stepped back from Paul Keating's mid-1990s drive into South-east Asia; Noam Chomsky continues to lecture, teach, and write. The article title, of course, refers to Queensryche's progressive rock album Operation: Mindcrime (1988), one of the finest portrayals of how 'radical' drones can unwittingly become an integral part of the Reaganite entertainment-as-oppression system that they are (supposedly) fighting against.

18 January 1995 was an extraordinary day for Sydney. Pope John Paul II arrived for the beautification of Mary MacKillop and the resulting media circus. Early morning commuters were greeted with an overcast sky and the news of a massive earthquake in Kobe, Japan. Microsoft's Bill Gates unveiled plans to dominate the Internet to business leaders. REM were scheduled to play at the Sydney Entertainment Centre later that evening. Virtually unnoticed, dissident Noam Chonsky slipped into this kaleidoscope for the beginning of a 3 city, 9-day tour. Sponsored by the East Timor Relief Association (ETRA) and the National Council for East Timorese Resistance (CNRM), his tour started low-key, but became increasingly surreal as events unfolded at a fast pace.

Three days before Chomsky arrived, I holed myself up in a hotel room overlooking Hyde Park, attempting to come to grips with the geo-political model described in his book World Orders Old & New (published in the U.S. by Columbia University Press and in the U.K. by Pluto Press, 1994). One point that hits home was his description of the Third World - widely stratified societies of a small rich enclave who rule the poor majority. Chomsky felt that such a model was affecting the West because of international finance policies - such as the fact that in New York over 40% of children live below the poverty line and survive by drug addiction, prostitution and other urban horrors.

That night the King's Cross main strip of strip joints, nightclubs and restaurants proved to be too much. It didn't resemble the "quiet, nondescript residential suburb by day," that the tour brochure described at all. More like an artificial hell, land of broken dreams, whores, junkies worshipping God Smack and Hells Angels. Consumption won't fill their void. The only sane defence against such a primal, predatory atmosphere was to escape to the hotel room, wipe out the minibar's contents, and gleefully watch atrocities on CNN from a distance. When the Kobe disaster happened several days later, I felt sickened by comments from NBC broadcasters proclaiming: "the wonderful unforseen opportunity for U.S. business growth" and "the collapse of Japan's world economic rulership in only nine seconds." Suddenly a New World Order didn't seem so cool anymore.

"If you want to find out the truth about something, first do an intensive study of the public record," Chomsky told me. To understand the complexity of Chomsky's career and the controversy over his political writings, I first created a summary from various reputable sources.

Avram Noam Chomsky was born on December 7th, 1928, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A. During the Depression years his parents both worked as Hebrew school teachers and Chomsky attended a Deweyite progressive school which had not yet internalised the standard competitive classroom model prevalent elsewhere. His first major piece was written at the age of 12, examining the ominous rise of fascism in Europe and the recent fall of Barcelona. Gravitating towards a "libertarian socialist" (anarchist) uncle, he was influenced by literature dealing with the 1936 Spanish Civil War and the brutal crushing of the revolting worker's proposed anarcho-syndicalist society.

His undergraduate years were spent in the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a Ph.D. in linguistics in 1955. Two years later his doctoral dissertation "Transformational Analysis" was published in part as the monograph Syntactic Structures. The latter monograph radically changed the field of linguistics, as Chomsky applied a mathematical model to examine the structure of language and its inherent meaning. His famous sentence "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously," was an example of a grammatically correct statement that meant nothing logically, pre-empting his analysis of Orwellian Doublespeak used by States. He later used his theories of linguistics to challenge the rapidly moulding psychiatric priesthood of Behaviourist B.F. Skinner, arguing that language is an innate skill in a newborn child and not yet subject to Skinner's "stimulus-response" conditioning.

The monograph helped Chomsky win a chair of linguistics at the Massachussett's Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1961. During this time he had taken an interest in the Zionist occupation of Palestine and other geo-political issues, but as a libertarian-socialist he found himself at odds with the Leninist/Trotskyist groups that dominated the Left. In 1964 he engaged in political activism by joining the resistance to the war in Vietnam. in October 1965 on Boston Common he gave his first speech. His 1966 essay The Responsibility of Intellectuals stunned colleagues by attacking widely held assumptions about American policy in Indo-China, and by criticising many intellectuals for failing to challenge the State imposed consensus reality and foreign policy. He was involved with the "Boston Five" trial, and was prominent in the October 19-21 1967 March on the Pentagon. He shared a jail cell with Norman Mailer, who described him in The Armies of the Night (1968) as "a slim sharp-featured man with an ascetic expression, and an air of gentle but moral integrity."

After the publication of his devastating attacks in American Power and the New Mandarins (1969) and At War With Asia (1970), Chomsky found himself on Nixon's White House "enemy list."

His position at MIT became more secure and in 1976 he was appointed Institute Professor of the Modern Languages & Linguistics Department. Early critical respectability in The Nation and The New York Times gave way to a muted silence, yet he became popular with the New Left and on the public lecture circuit. His 1979 collaboration with economist Edward S. Herman on two volumes of The Political Economy of Human Rights in East Timor and Cambodia, labelling him as "a Khmer Rouge apologist."

His 1982 work Towards A New Cold War attacked the Reagan administration and its re-armanent program.

Labelled by Zionists as "a self-hating Jew" after The Fateful Triangle (1984) examined US/Israeli suppression of Palestinians, he received further criticism by defending French academic Professor Robert Faurisson's right to question elements of the Holocaust extermination program.

Chomsky didn't agree with Faurisson's views but was upholding Voltaire's maxim that "Freedom of speech means allowing freedom of views you don't like."

The inclusion of an essay of Chomsky's regarding freedom of speech in Faurisson's court case ignited French intellectuals, who ignored the other 499 signatures on the main civil rights petition, and led to further controversy about State determined historical truths.