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The novel medium of social media—and the novel use of Twitter as the official PR platform for public figures—allows not only for endless amounts of noise and disinformation to permeate our newsfeeds; it also allows readers the opportunity to refute statements in real time. Whether corrections register or simply get drowned in the sea of information is perhaps a question for a 21st century Marshall McLuhan to ponder.

Another prominent theorist of older forms of media, Noam Chomsky, might also have an opinion on the matter. In his 1988 book Manufacturing Consent, written with Edward Herman, Chomsky details the ways in which governments and media collude to deliberately mislead the public and socially engineer support for wars that kill millions and enrich a handful of profiteers.

Moreover, in mass media communications, those wars, invasions, “police actions,” regime changes, etc. get conveniently erased from historical memory by public intellectuals who serve the interests of state power. In one recent example on the social medium of record, Twitter, Richard N. Haas, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, expressed dismay about the disturbingly cozy state of affairs between the U.S. Administration and Putin’s Russia by claiming that “International order for 4 centuries has been based on non-interference in the international affairs of others and respect for sovereignty.”

One recent critique of foreign policy bodies like CFR would beg to differ, as would the history of hundreds of years of colonialism. In a very Chomsky-like rejoinder to Haas, journalist Nick Turse wrote, “This might be news to Iraqis and Afghans and Libyans and Yemenis and Vietnamese and Cambodians and Laotians and Koreans and Iranians and Guatemalans and Chileans and Nicaraguans and Mexicans and Cubans and Dominicans and Haitians and Filipinos and Congolese and Russians and….”

Genuine concerns about Russian election tampering notwithstanding, the list of U.S. interventions in the “affairs of others” could go on and on. Haas’ initial statement offers an almost perfect example of what Chomsky identified in another essay, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” as not only a “lack of concern for truth” but also “a real or feigned naiveté about American actions that reaches startling proportions.”

“It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies,” wrote Chomsky in his 1967 essay. “This, at least, may seem enough of a truism to pass over without comment. Not so, however. For the modern intellectual, it is not at all obvious.” Chomsky proceeds from the pro-Nazi statements of Martin Heidegger to the distortions and outright falsehoods issued routinely by such thinkers and shapers of foreign policy as Arthur Schlesinger, economist Walt Rostow, and Henry Kissinger in their defense of the disastrous Vietnam War.

The background for all of these figures’ distortions of fact, Chomsky argues, is the perpetual presumption of innocence on the part of the U.S., a feature of the doctrine of exceptionalism under which “it is an article of faith that American motives are pure, and not subject to analysis.” We have seen this article of faith invoked in hagiographies of past Administrations whose domestic and international crimes are conveniently forgotten in order to turn them into foils, stock figures for an order to which many would like to return. (As one former Presidential candidate put it, “America is great, because America is good.”)

Chomsky would include the rhetorical appeal to a nobler past in the category of “imperialist apologia”—a presumption of innocence that “becomes increasingly distasteful as the power it serves grows more dominant in world affairs, and more capable, therefore, of the unconstrained viciousness that the mass media present to us each day.”

We are hardly the first power in history to combine material interests, great technological capacity, and an utter disregard for the suffering and misery of the lower orders. The long tradition of naiveté and self-righteousness that disfigures our intellectual history, however, must serve as a warning to the third world, if such a warning is needed, as to how our protestations of sincerity and benign intent are to be interpreted.

For those who well recall the events of even fifteen years ago, when the U.S. government, with the aid of a compliant press, lied its way into the second Iraq war, condoning torture and the “extraordinary rendition” of supposed hostiles to black sites in the name of liberating the Iraqi people, Chomsky’s Vietnam-era critiques may sound just as fresh as they did in the mid-sixties. Are we already in danger of misremembering that recent history? “When we consider the responsibility of intellectuals,” Chomsky writes, the issue at hand is not solely individual morality; “our basic concern must be their role in the creation and analysis of ideology.”

What are the ideological features of U.S. self-understanding that allow it to recreate past errors again and again, then deny that history and sink again into complacency, perpetuating crimes against humanity from the Cambodian bombings and My Lai massacre, to the grotesque scenes at Abu Ghraib and the drone bombings of hospitals and weddings, to supporting mass killings in Yemen and murder of unarmed Palestinian protestors, to the kidnapping and caging of children at the Mexican border?

The current ruling party in the U.S. presents an existential threat, Chomsky recently opined, on a world historical scale, displaying "a level of criminality that is almost hard to find words to describe." It is the responsibility of intellectuals, Chomsky argues in his essay—including journalists, academics, and policy makers and shapers—to tell the truth about events past and present, no matter how inconvenient those truths may be.

Read Chomsky’s full essay, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals," at The New York Review of Books.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness