ABSTRACT
This chapter recounts a handful of interventions made by intellectuals in journals opposing United States (US) wars fought during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Importantly, in the twentieth century, mass-media institutions and other large political and economic interests muffled the voice of the independent journal. Bourne argued that the American intellectual class had reverted to primitive ways of thinking. Macdonald concedes that common peoples are coming to have less and less control over their governments as they are being more closely identified with them. For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us. For Chomsky, the responsibility of intellectuals is to have a value orientation that challenges the immoral and unethical behavior of the state.
