Tomgram: Noam Chomsky, The Challenges of 2016
By Noam Chomsky
Posted on May 8, 2016, Printed on May 8, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176137/ ;
The other day I pulled a tattered copy of The Chomsky Reader off a bookshelf
of mine. Leafing through some of the Vietnam-era essays collected in that
1987 paperback brought to life a young Tom Engelhardt who, in the
mid-to-late 1960s, was undergoing a startling transition: from dreaming of
serving his government to opposing it. Noam Chomskys writings played a
role in that transformation. I stopped at his chilling 1970 essay After
Pinkville, which I remember reading when it came out. (Pinkville,
connoting communist influence, was the military slang for the village where
the infamous My Lai massacre took place.) It was not the first Chomsky
essay I had read. That honor may go to The Responsibility of
Intellectuals, which he wrote in 1966. (It is the responsibility of
intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies. This, at least, may
seem enough of a truism to pass without comment. Not so, however. For the
modern intellectual, it is not at all obvious.)
After Pinkville still remains vividly in my consciousness from that
long-gone moment when a growing sense of horror about a distant American war
that came to feel ever closer and more brutal swept me into antiwar
activism. Its first sentences still cut to the heart of things: It is
important to understand that the massacre of the rural population of Vietnam
and their forced evacuation is not an accidental by-product of the war.
Rather it is of the very essence of American strategy. Before he was done,
Chomsky would put the massacre of almost 500 Vietnamese men, women, and
children into the grim context of the larger crimes of the time: It is
perhaps remarkable that none of this appears to occasion much concern [in
the U.S.]. It is only the acts of a company of half-crazed GIs that are
regarded as a scandal, a disgrace to America. It will, indeed, be a still
greater national scandal -- if we assume that possible -- if they alone are
subjected to criminal prosecution, but not those who have created and
accepted the long-term atrocity to which they contributed one detail --
merely a few hundred more murdered Vietnamese.
So many decades later, something still seems painfully familiar in all of
this. Thanks in part to the nature of our media moment, we remain riveted
by acts of horror committed against Europeans and Americans. Yet concern
over what the U.S. has done in our distant war zones -- from the killing of
civilians at weddings, funerals, and memorial services to the evisceration
of a hospital, to kidnappings, torture, and even the killing of prisoners,
to drone strikes so surgical and precise that hundreds below died even
though only a relatively few individuals were officially targeted -- seems
largely missing in action. Unlike the Vietnam era, in the present moment,
lacking the powerful antiwar movement of the Vietnam era, none of this, to
quote Chomsky, appears to occasion much concern. Indeed.
There are, however, exceptions to this statement and let me mention one of
them. A half-century later, Noam Chomsky is still writing with the same
chilling eloquence about the updated war-on-terror version of this American
nightmare. His concern has not lagged, something that cant be missed in
his new book, Who Rules the World?, which focuses on, among other things,
what in the Vietnam-era might have been called the arrogance of power. At
a moment when the Vietnam bomber of choice, the B-52, is being sent back
into action in the war against the Islamic State, he, too, is back in
action. And so here is the first part of an overview essay from his new
book on American power and the world. (Expect part 2 on Tuesday.) Tom
American Power Under Challenge
Masters of Mankind (Part 1)
By Noam Chomsky
[This piece, the first of two parts, is excerpted from Noam Chomskys new
book, Who Rules the World? (Metropolitan Books). Part 2 will be posted on
Tuesday morning.]
When we ask Who rules the world? we commonly adopt the standard convention
that the actors in world affairs are states, primarily the great powers, and
we consider their decisions and the relations among them. That is not wrong.
But we would do well to keep in mind that this level of abstraction can also
be highly misleading.
States of course have complex internal structures, and the choices and
decisions of the political leadership are heavily influenced by internal
concentrations of power, while the general population is often marginalized.
That is true even for the more democratic societies, and obviously for
others. We cannot gain a realistic understanding of who rules the world
while ignoring the masters of mankind, as Adam Smith called them: in his
day, the merchants and manufacturers of England; in ours, multinational
conglomerates, huge financial institutions, retail empires, and the like.
Still following Smith, it is also wise to attend to the vile maxim to
which the masters of mankind are dedicated: All for ourselves and nothing
for other people -- a doctrine known otherwise as bitter and incessant
class war, often one-sided, much to the detriment of the people of the home
country and the world.
In the contemporary global order, the institutions of the masters hold
enormous power, not only in the international arena but also within their
home states, on which they rely to protect their power and to provide
economic support by a wide variety of means. When we consider the role of
the masters of mankind, we turn to such state policy priorities of the
moment as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, one of the investor-rights
agreements mislabeled free-trade agreements in propaganda and commentary.
They are negotiated in secret, apart from the hundreds of corporate lawyers
and lobbyists writing the crucial details. The intention is to have them
adopted in good Stalinist style with fast track procedures designed to
block discussion and allow only the choice of yes or no (hence yes). The
designers regularly do quite well, not surprisingly. People are incidental,
with the consequences one might anticipate.
The Second Superpower
The neoliberal programs of the past generation have concentrated wealth and
power in far fewer hands while undermining functioning democracy, but they
have aroused opposition as well, most prominently in Latin America but also
in the centers of global power. The European Union (EU), one of the more
promising developments of the post-World War II period, has been tottering
because of the harsh effect of the policies of austerity during recession,
condemned even by the economists of the International Monetary Fund (if not
the IMFs political actors). Democracy has been undermined as decision
making shifted to the Brussels bureaucracy, with the northern banks casting
their shadow over their proceedings.
Mainstream parties have been rapidly losing members to left and to right.
The executive director of the Paris-based research group EuropaNova
attributes the general disenchantment to a mood of angry impotence as the
real power to shape events largely shifted from national political leaders
[who, in principle at least, are subject to democratic politics] to the
market, the institutions of the European Union and corporations, quite in
accord with neoliberal doctrine. Very similar processes are under way in the
United States, for somewhat similar reasons, a matter of significance and
concern not just for the country but, because of U.S. power, for the world.
The rising opposition to the neoliberal assault highlights another crucial
aspect of the standard convention: it sets aside the public, which often
fails to accept the approved role of spectators (rather than
participants) assigned to it in liberal democratic theory. Such
disobedience has always been of concern to the dominant classes. Just
keeping to American history, George Washington regarded the common people
who formed the militias that he was to command as an exceedingly dirty and
nasty people [evincing] an unaccountable kind of stupidity in the lower
class of these people.
In Violent Politics, his masterful review of insurgencies from the American
insurgency to contemporary Afghanistan and Iraq, William Polk concludes
that General Washington was so anxious to sideline [the fighters he
despised] that he came close to losing the Revolution. Indeed, he might
have actually done so had France not massively intervened and saved the
Revolution, which until then had been won by guerrillas -- whom we would
now call terrorists -- while Washingtons British-style army was defeated
time after time and almost lost the war.
A common feature of successful insurgencies, Polk records, is that once
popular support dissolves after victory, the leadership suppresses the
dirty and nasty people who actually won the war with guerrilla tactics and
terror, for fear that they might challenge class privilege. The elites
contempt for the lower class of these people has taken various forms
throughout the years. In recent times one expression of this contempt is the
call for passivity and obedience (moderation in democracy) by liberal
internationalists reacting to the dangerous democratizing effects of the
popular movements of the 1960s.
Sometimes states do choose to follow public opinion, eliciting much fury in
centers of power. One dramatic case was in 2003, when the Bush
administration called on Turkey to join its invasion of Iraq. Ninety-five
percent of Turks opposed that course of action and, to the amazement and
horror of Washington, the Turkish government adhered to their views. Turkey
was bitterly condemned for this departure from responsible behavior. Deputy
Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, designated by the press as the
idealist-in-chief of the administration, berated the Turkish military for
permitting the malfeasance of the government and demanded an apology.
Unperturbed by these and innumerable other illustrations of our fabled
yearning for democracy, respectable commentary continued to laud President
George W. Bush for his dedication to democracy promotion, or sometimes
criticized him for his naïveté in thinking that an outside power could
impose its democratic yearnings on others.
The Turkish public was not alone. Global opposition to U.S.-UK aggression
was overwhelming. Support for Washingtons war plans scarcely reached 10%
almost anywhere, according to international polls. Opposition sparked huge
worldwide protests, in the United States as well, probably the first time in
history that imperial aggression was strongly protested even before it was
officially launched. On the front page of the New York Times, journalist
Patrick Tyler reported that there may still be two superpowers on the
planet: the United States and world public opinion.
Unprecedented protest in the United States was a manifestation of the
opposition to aggression that began decades earlier in the condemnation of
the U.S. wars in Indochina, reaching a scale that was substantial and
influential, even if far too late. By 1967, when the antiwar movement was
becoming a significant force, military historian and Vietnam specialist
Bernard Fall warned that Vietnam as a cultural and historic entity... is
threatened with extinction... [as] the countryside literally dies under the
blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this
size.
But the antiwar movement did become a force that could not be ignored. Nor
could it be ignored when Ronald Reagan came into office determined to launch
an assault on Central America. His administration mimicked closely the steps
John F. Kennedy had taken 20 years earlier in launching the war against
South Vietnam, but had to back off because of the kind of vigorous public
protest that had been lacking in the early 1960s. The assault was awful
enough. The victims have yet to recover. But what happened to South Vietnam
and later all of Indochina, where the second superpower imposed its
impediments only much later in the conflict, was incomparably worse.
It is often argued that the enormous public opposition to the invasion of
Iraq had no effect. That seems incorrect to me. Again, the invasion was
horrifying enough, and its aftermath is utterly grotesque. Nevertheless, it
could have been far worse. Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld, and the rest of Bushs top officials could never even
contemplate the sort of measures that President Kennedy and President Lyndon
Johnson adopted 40 years earlier largely without protest.
Western Power Under Pressure
There is far more to say, of course, about the factors in determining state
policy that are put to the side when we adopt the standard convention that
states are the actors in international affairs. But with such nontrivial
caveats as these, let us nevertheless adopt the convention, at least as a
first approximation to reality. Then the question of who rules the world
leads at once to such concerns as Chinas rise to power and its challenge to
the United States and world order, the new cold war simmering in eastern
Europe, the Global War on Terror, American hegemony and American decline,
and a range of similar considerations.
The challenges faced by Western power at the outset of 2016 are usefully
summarized within the conventional framework by Gideon Rachman, chief
foreign-affairs columnist for the London Financial Times. He begins by
reviewing the Western picture of world order: Ever since the end of the
Cold War, the overwhelming power of the U.S. military has been the central
fact of international politics. This is particularly crucial in three
regions: East Asia, where the U.S. Navy has become used to treating the
Pacific as an American lake; Europe, where NATO -- meaning the United
States, which accounts for a staggering three-quarters of NATOs military
spending -- guarantees the territorial integrity of its member states;
and the Middle East, where giant U.S. naval and air bases exist to reassure
friends and to intimidate rivals.
The problem of world order today, Rachman continues, is that these security
orders are now under challenge in all three regions because of Russian
intervention in Ukraine and Syria, and because of China turning its nearby
seas from an American lake to clearly contested water. The fundamental
question of international relations, then, is whether the United States
should accept that other major powers should have some kind of zone of
influence in their neighborhoods. Rachman thinks it should, for reasons of
diffusion of economic power around the world -- combined with simple common
sense.
There are, to be sure, ways of looking at the world from different
standpoints. But let us keep to these three regions, surely critically
important ones.
The Challenges Today: East Asia
Beginning with the American lake, some eyebrows might be raised over the
report in mid-December 2015 that an American B-52 bomber on a routine
mission over the South China Sea unintentionally flew within two nautical
miles of an artificial island built by China, senior defense officials said,
exacerbating a hotly divisive issue for Washington and Beijing. Those
familiar with the grim record of the 70 years of the nuclear weapons era
will be all too aware that this is the kind of incident that has often come
perilously close to igniting terminal nuclear war. One need not be a
supporter of Chinas provocative and aggressive actions in the South China
Sea to notice that the incident did not involve a Chinese nuclear-capable
bomber in the Caribbean, or off the coast of California, where China has no
pretensions of establishing a Chinese lake. Luckily for the world.
Chinese leaders understand very well that their countrys maritime trade
routes are ringed with hostile powers from Japan through the Malacca Straits
and beyond, backed by overwhelming U.S. military force. Accordingly, China
is proceeding to expand westward with extensive investments and careful
moves toward integration. In part, these developments are within the
framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which includes the
Central Asian states and Russia, and soon India and Pakistan with Iran as
one of the observers -- a status that was denied to the United States, which
was also called on to close all military bases in the region. China is
constructing a modernized version of the old silk roads, with the intent not
only of integrating the region under Chinese influence, but also of reaching
Europe and the Middle Eastern oil-producing regions. It is pouring huge sums
into creating an integrated Asian energy and commercial system, with
extensive high-speed rail lines and pipelines.
One element of the program is a highway through some of the worlds tallest
mountains to the new Chinese-developed port of Gwadar in Pakistan, which
will protect oil shipments from potential U.S. interference. The program may
also, China and Pakistan hope, spur industrial development in Pakistan,
which the United States has not undertaken despite massive military aid, and
might also provide an incentive for Pakistan to clamp down on domestic
terrorism, a serious issue for China in western Xinjiang Province. Gwadar
will be part of Chinas string of pearls, bases being constructed in the
Indian Ocean for commercial purposes but potentially also for military use,
with the expectation that China might someday be able to project power as
far as the Persian Gulf for the first time in the modern era.
All of these moves remain immune to Washingtons overwhelming military
power, short of annihilation by nuclear war, which would destroy the United
States as well.
In 2015, China also established the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank
(AIIB), with itself as the main shareholder. Fifty-six nations participated
in the opening in Beijing in June, including U.S. allies Australia, Britain,
and others which joined in defiance of Washingtons wishes. The United
States and Japan were absent. Some analysts believe that the new bank might
turn out to be a competitor to the Bretton Woods institutions (the IMF and
the World Bank), in which the United States holds veto power. There are also
some expectations that the SCO might eventually become a counterpart to
NATO.
The Challenges Today: Eastern Europe
Turning to the second region, Eastern Europe, there is a crisis brewing at
the NATO-Russian border. It is no small matter. In his illuminating and
judicious scholarly study of the region, Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the
Borderlands, Richard Sakwa writes -- all too plausibly -- that the
Russo-Georgian war of August 2008 was in effect the first of the wars to
stop NATO enlargement; the Ukraine crisis of 2014 is the second. It is not
clear whether humanity would survive a third.
The West sees NATO enlargement as benign. Not surprisingly, Russia, along
with much of the Global South, has a different opinion, as do some prominent
Western voices. George Kennan warned early on that NATO enlargement is a
tragic mistake, and he was joined by senior American statesmen in an open
letter to the White House describing it as a policy error of historic
proportions.
The present crisis has its origins in 1991, with the end of the Cold War and
the collapse of the Soviet Union. There were then two contrasting visions of
a new security system and political economy in Eurasia. In Sakwas words,
one vision was of a Wider Europe, with the EU at its heart but
increasingly coterminous with the Euro-Atlantic security and political
community; and on the other side there [was] the idea of Greater Europe, a
vision of a continental Europe, stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok, that
has multiple centers, including Brussels, Moscow and Ankara, but with a
common purpose in overcoming the divisions that have traditionally plagued
the continent.
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was the major proponent of Greater Europe, a
concept that also had European roots in Gaullism and other initiatives.
However, as Russia collapsed under the devastating market reforms of the
1990s, the vision faded, only to be renewed as Russia began to recover and
seek a place on the world stage under Vladimir Putin who, along with his
associate Dmitry Medvedev, has repeatedly called for the geopolitical
unification of all of Greater Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok, to create
a genuine strategic partnership.
These initiatives were greeted with polite contempt, Sakwa writes,
regarded as little more than a cover for the establishment of a Greater
Russia by stealth and an effort to drive a wedge between North America
and Western Europe. Such concerns trace back to earlier Cold War fears that
Europe might become a third force independent of both the great and minor
superpowers and moving toward closer links to the latter (as can be seen in
Willy Brandts Ostpolitik and other initiatives).
The Western response to Russias collapse was triumphalist. It was hailed as
signaling the end of history, the final victory of Western capitalist
democracy, almost as if Russia were being instructed to revert to its
pre-World War I status as a virtual economic colony of the West. NATO
enlargement began at once, in violation of verbal assurances to Gorbachev
that NATO forces would not move one inch to the east after he agreed that
a unified Germany could become a NATO member -- a remarkable concession, in
the light of history. That discussion kept to East Germany. The possibility
that NATO might expand beyond Germany was not discussed with Gorbachev, even
if privately considered.
Soon, NATO did begin to move beyond, right to the borders of Russia. The
general mission of NATO was officially changed to a mandate to protect
crucial infrastructure of the global energy system, sea lanes and
pipelines, giving it a global area of operations. Furthermore, under a
crucial Western revision of the now widely heralded doctrine of
responsibility to protect, sharply different from the official U.N.
version, NATO may now also serve as an intervention force under U.S.
command.
Of particular concern to Russia are plans to expand NATO to Ukraine. These
plans were articulated explicitly at the Bucharest NATO summit of April
2008, when Georgia and Ukraine were promised eventual membership in NATO.
The wording was unambiguous: NATO welcomes Ukraines and Georgias
Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these
countries will become members of NATO. With the Orange Revolution victory
of pro-Western candidates in Ukraine in 2004, State Department
representative Daniel Fried rushed there and emphasized U.S. support for
Ukraines NATO and Euro-Atlantic aspirations, as a WikiLeaks report
revealed.
Russias concerns are easily understandable. They are outlined by
international relations scholar John Mearsheimer in the leading U.S.
establishment journal, Foreign Affairs. He writes that the taproot of the
current crisis [over Ukraine] is NATO expansion and Washingtons commitment
to move Ukraine out of Moscows orbit and integrate it into the West, which
Putin viewed as a direct threat to Russias core interests.
Who can blame him? Mearsheimer asks, pointing out that Washington may not
like Moscows position, but it should understand the logic behind it. That
should not be too difficult. After all, as everyone knows, The United
States does not tolerate distant great powers deploying military forces
anywhere in the Western hemisphere, much less on its borders.
In fact, the U.S. stand is far stronger. It does not tolerate what is
officially called successful defiance of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823,
which declared (but could not yet implement) U.S. control of the hemisphere.
And a small country that carries out such successful defiance may be
subjected to the terrors of the earth and a crushing embargo -- as
happened to Cuba. We need not ask how the United States would have reacted
had the countries of Latin America joined the Warsaw Pact, with plans for
Mexico and Canada to join as well. The merest hint of the first tentative
steps in that direction would have been terminated with extreme prejudice,
to adopt CIA lingo.
As in the case of China, one does not have to regard Putins moves and
motives favorably to understand the logic behind them, nor to grasp the
importance of understanding that logic instead of issuing imprecations
against it. As in the case of China, a great deal is at stake, reaching as
far -- literally -- as questions of survival.
The Challenges Today: The Islamic World
Let us turn to the third region of major concern, the (largely) Islamic
world, also the scene of the Global War on Terror (GWOT) that George W. Bush
declared in 2001 after the 9/11 terrorist attack. To be more accurate,
re-declared. The GWOT was declared by the Reagan administration when it took
office, with fevered rhetoric about a plague spread by depraved opponents
of civilization itself (as Reagan put it) and a return to barbarism in the
modern age (the words of George Shultz, his secretary of state). The
original GWOT has been quietly removed from history. It very quickly turned
into a murderous and destructive terrorist war afflicting Central America,
southern Africa, and the Middle East, with grim repercussions to the
present, even leading to condemnation of the United States by the World
Court (which Washington dismissed). In any event, it is not the right story
for history, so it is gone.
The success of the Bush-Obama version of GWOT can readily be evaluated on
direct inspection. When the war was declared, the terrorist targets were
confined to a small corner of tribal Afghanistan. They were protected by
Afghans, who mostly disliked or despised them, under the tribal code of
hospitality -- which baffled Americans when poor peasants refused to turn
over Osama bin Laden for the, to them, astronomical sum of $25 million.
There are good reasons to believe that a well-constructed police action, or
even serious diplomatic negotiations with the Taliban, might have placed
those suspected of the 9/11 crimes in American hands for trial and
sentencing. But such options were off the table. Instead, the reflexive
choice was large-scale violence -- not with the goal of overthrowing the
Taliban (that came later) but to make clear U.S. contempt for tentative
Taliban offers of the possible extradition of bin Laden. How serious these
offers were we do not know, since the possibility of exploring them was
never entertained. Or perhaps the United States was just intent on trying
to show its muscle, score a victory and scare everyone in the world. They
dont care about the suffering of the Afghans or how many people we will
lose.
That was the judgment of the highly respected anti-Taliban leader Abdul Haq,
one of the many oppositionists who condemned the American bombing campaign
launched in October 2001 as "a big setback" for their efforts to overthrow
the Taliban from within, a goal they considered within their reach. His
judgment is confirmed by Richard A. Clarke, who was chairman of the
Counterterrorism Security Group at the White House under President George W.
Bush when the plans to attack Afghanistan were made. As Clarke describes the
meeting, when informed that the attack would violate international law, "the
President yelled in the narrow conference room, I dont care what the
international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.'" The attack was
also bitterly opposed by the major aid organizations working in Afghanistan,
who warned that millions were on the verge of starvation and that the
consequences might be horrendous.
The consequences for poor Afghanistan years later need hardly be reviewed.
The next target of the sledgehammer was Iraq. The U.S.-UK invasion, utterly
without credible pretext, is the major crime of the twenty-first century.
The invasion led to the death of hundreds of thousands of people in a
country where the civilian society had already been devastated by American
and British sanctions that were regarded as genocidal by the two
distinguished international diplomats who administered them, and resigned in
protest for this reason. The invasion also generated millions of refugees,
largely destroyed the country, and instigated a sectarian conflict that is
now tearing apart Iraq and the entire region. It is an astonishing fact
about our intellectual and moral culture that in informed and enlightened
circles it can be called, blandly, the liberation of Iraq.
Pentagon and British Ministry of Defense polls found that only 3% of Iraqis
regarded the U.S. security role in their neighborhood as legitimate, less
than 1% believed that coalition (U.S.-UK) forces were good for their
security, 80% opposed the presence of coalition forces in the country, and a
majority supported attacks on coalition troops. Afghanistan has been
destroyed beyond the possibility of reliable polling, but there are
indications that something similar may be true there as well. Particularly
in Iraq the United States suffered a severe defeat, abandoning its official
war aims, and leaving the country under the influence of the sole victor,
Iran.
The sledgehammer was also wielded elsewhere, notably in Libya, where the
three traditional imperial powers (Britain, France, and the United States)
procured Security Council resolution 1973 and instantly violated it,
becoming the air force of the rebels. The effect was to undercut the
possibility of a peaceful, negotiated settlement; sharply increase
casualties (by at least a factor of 10, according to political scientist
Alan Kuperman); leave Libya in ruins, in the hands of warring militias; and,
more recently, to provide the Islamic State with a base that it can use to
spread terror beyond. Quite sensible diplomatic proposals by the African
Union, accepted in principle by Libyas Muammar Qaddafi, were ignored by the
imperial triumvirate, as Africa specialist Alex de Waal reviews. A huge flow
of weapons and jihadis has spread terror and violence from West Africa (now
the champion for terrorist murders) to the Levant, while the NATO attack
also sent a flood of refugees from Africa to Europe.
Yet another triumph of humanitarian intervention, and, as the long and
often ghastly record reveals, not an unusual one, going back to its modern
origins four centuries ago.
Noam Chomsky is institute professor emeritus in the Department of
Linguistics and Philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A
TomDispatch regular, among his recent books are Hegemony or Survival and
Failed States. This essay, the first of two parts, is excerpted from his new
book, Who Rules the World? (Metropolitan Books, the American Empire Project,
2016). His website is www.chomsky.info.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turses Next Time Theyll Come to Count the Dead, and
Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars,
and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 Noam Chomsky
© 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176137
Tomgram: Noam Chomsky, The Challenges of 2016
By Noam Chomsky
Posted on May 8, 2016, Printed on May 8, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176137/ ;
[Note to TomDispatch Readers: The remarkable Noam Chomsky has a new book
out: Who Rules the World? Its almost too obvious to say, but its a
must-read! Im particularly pleased that TomDispatch is excerpting the
book's final, monumental essay, Masters of Mankind, as a two-parter, the
first of which appears this morning. Let me just remind TomDispatch readers
who use Amazon that if you go to that site to buy the Chomsky volume (or
anything else under the sun, including Nick Turses new Dispatch Book) via a
TD book link like the ones above (or the cover image embedded in any TD
piece), we get a tiny cut of your purchase at no cost to you. Its a small
way to contribute to the site. Otherwise, go to your local bookstore and
grab a copy of Who Rules the World? Whatever you do, dont miss it! Tom]
The other day I pulled a tattered copy of The Chomsky Reader off a bookshelf
of mine. Leafing through some of the Vietnam-era essays collected in that
1987 paperback brought to life a young Tom Engelhardt who, in the
mid-to-late 1960s, was undergoing a startling transition: from dreaming of
serving his government to opposing it. Noam Chomskys writings played a role
in that transformation. I stopped at his chilling 1970 essay After
Pinkville, which I remember reading when it came out. (Pinkville,
connoting communist influence, was the military slang for the village where
the infamous My Lai massacre took place.) It was not the first Chomsky essay
I had read. That honor may go to The Responsibility of Intellectuals,
which he wrote in 1966. (It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak
the truth and to expose lies. This, at least, may seem enough of a truism to
pass without comment. Not so, however. For the modern intellectual, it is
not at all obvious.)
After Pinkville still remains vividly in my consciousness from that
long-gone moment when a growing sense of horror about a distant American war
that came to feel ever closer and more brutal swept me into antiwar
activism. Its first sentences still cut to the heart of things: It is
important to understand that the massacre of the rural population of Vietnam
and their forced evacuation is not an accidental by-product of the war.
Rather it is of the very essence of American strategy. Before he was done,
Chomsky would put the massacre of almost 500 Vietnamese men, women, and
children into the grim context of the larger crimes of the time: It is
perhaps remarkable that none of this appears to occasion much concern [in
the U.S.]. It is only the acts of a company of half-crazed GIs that are
regarded as a scandal, a disgrace to America. It will, indeed, be a still
greater national scandal -- if we assume that possible -- if they alone are
subjected to criminal prosecution, but not those who have created and
accepted the long-term atrocity to which they contributed one detail --
merely a few hundred more murdered Vietnamese.
So many decades later, something still seems painfully familiar in all of
this. Thanks in part to the nature of our media moment, we remain riveted by
acts of horror committed against Europeans and Americans. Yet concern over
what the U.S. has done in our distant war zones -- from the killing of
civilians at weddings, funerals, and memorial services to the evisceration
of a hospital, to kidnappings, torture, and even the killing of prisoners,
to drone strikes so surgical and precise that hundreds below died even
though only a relatively few individuals were officially targeted -- seems
largely missing in action. Unlike the Vietnam era, in the present moment,
lacking the powerful antiwar movement of the Vietnam era, none of this, to
quote Chomsky, appears to occasion much concern. Indeed.
There are, however, exceptions to this statement and let me mention one of
them. A half-century later, Noam Chomsky is still writing with the same
chilling eloquence about the updated war-on-terror version of this American
nightmare. His concern has not lagged, something that cant be missed in
his new book, Who Rules the World?, which focuses on, among other things,
what in the Vietnam-era might have been called the arrogance of power. At
a moment when the Vietnam bomber of choice, the B-52, is being sent back
into action in the war against the Islamic State, he, too, is back in
action. And so here is the first part of an overview essay from his new book
on American power and the world. (Expect part 2 on Tuesday.) Tom
American Power Under Challenge
Masters of Mankind (Part 1)
By Noam Chomsky
[This piece, the first of two parts, is excerpted from Noam Chomskys new
book, Who Rules the World? (Metropolitan Books). Part 2 will be posted on
Tuesday morning.]
When we ask Who rules the world? we commonly adopt the standard convention
that the actors in world affairs are states, primarily the great powers, and
we consider their decisions and the relations among them. That is not wrong.
But we would do well to keep in mind that this level of abstraction can also
be highly misleading.
States of course have complex internal structures, and the choices and
decisions of the political leadership are heavily influenced by internal
concentrations of power, while the general population is often marginalized.
That is true even for the more democratic societies, and obviously for
others. We cannot gain a realistic understanding of who rules the world
while ignoring the masters of mankind, as Adam Smith called them: in his
day, the merchants and manufacturers of England; in ours, multinational
conglomerates, huge financial institutions, retail empires, and the like.
Still following Smith, it is also wise to attend to the vile maxim to
which the masters of mankind are dedicated: All for ourselves and nothing
for other people -- a doctrine known otherwise as bitter and incessant
class war, often one-sided, much to the detriment of the people of the home
country and the world.
In the contemporary global order, the institutions of the masters hold
enormous power, not only in the international arena but also within their
home states, on which they rely to protect their power and to provide
economic support by a wide variety of means. When we consider the role of
the masters of mankind, we turn to such state policy priorities of the
moment as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, one of the investor-rights
agreements mislabeled free-trade agreements in propaganda and commentary.
They are negotiated in secret, apart from the hundreds of corporate lawyers
and lobbyists writing the crucial details. The intention is to have them
adopted in good Stalinist style with fast track procedures designed to
block discussion and allow only the choice of yes or no (hence yes). The
designers regularly do quite well, not surprisingly. People are incidental,
with the consequences one might anticipate.
The Second Superpower
The neoliberal programs of the past generation have concentrated wealth and
power in far fewer hands while undermining functioning democracy, but they
have aroused opposition as well, most prominently in Latin America but also
in the centers of global power. The European Union (EU), one of the more
promising developments of the post-World War II period, has been tottering
because of the harsh effect of the policies of austerity during recession,
condemned even by the economists of the International Monetary Fund (if not
the IMFs political actors). Democracy has been undermined as decision
making shifted to the Brussels bureaucracy, with the northern banks casting
their shadow over their proceedings.
Mainstream parties have been rapidly losing members to left and to right.
The executive director of the Paris-based research group EuropaNova
attributes the general disenchantment to a mood of angry impotence as the
real power to shape events largely shifted from national political leaders
[who, in principle at least, are subject to democratic politics] to the
market, the institutions of the European Union and corporations, quite in
accord with neoliberal doctrine. Very similar processes are under way in the
United States, for somewhat similar reasons, a matter of significance and
concern not just for the country but, because of U.S. power, for the world.
The rising opposition to the neoliberal assault highlights another crucial
aspect of the standard convention: it sets aside the public, which often
fails to accept the approved role of spectators (rather than
participants) assigned to it in liberal democratic theory. Such
disobedience has always been of concern to the dominant classes. Just
keeping to American history, George Washington regarded the common people
who formed the militias that he was to command as an exceedingly dirty and
nasty people [evincing] an unaccountable kind of stupidity in the lower
class of these people.
In Violent Politics, his masterful review of insurgencies from the American
insurgency to contemporary Afghanistan and Iraq, William Polk concludes
that General Washington was so anxious to sideline [the fighters he
despised] that he came close to losing the Revolution. Indeed, he might
have actually done so had France not massively intervened and saved the
Revolution, which until then had been won by guerrillas -- whom we would
now call terrorists -- while Washingtons British-style army was defeated
time after time and almost lost the war.
A common feature of successful insurgencies, Polk records, is that once
popular support dissolves after victory, the leadership suppresses the
dirty and nasty people who actually won the war with guerrilla tactics and
terror, for fear that they might challenge class privilege. The elites
contempt for the lower class of these people has taken various forms
throughout the years. In recent times one expression of this contempt is the
call for passivity and obedience (moderation in democracy) by liberal
internationalists reacting to the dangerous democratizing effects of the
popular movements of the 1960s.
Sometimes states do choose to follow public opinion, eliciting much fury in
centers of power. One dramatic case was in 2003, when the Bush
administration called on Turkey to join its invasion of Iraq. Ninety-five
percent of Turks opposed that course of action and, to the amazement and
horror of Washington, the Turkish government adhered to their views. Turkey
was bitterly condemned for this departure from responsible behavior. Deputy
Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, designated by the press as the
idealist-in-chief of the administration, berated the Turkish military for
permitting the malfeasance of the government and demanded an apology.
Unperturbed by these and innumerable other illustrations of our fabled
yearning for democracy, respectable commentary continued to laud President
George W. Bush for his dedication to democracy promotion, or sometimes
criticized him for his naïveté in thinking that an outside power could
impose its democratic yearnings on others.
The Turkish public was not alone. Global opposition to U.S.-UK aggression
was overwhelming. Support for Washingtons war plans scarcely reached 10%
almost anywhere, according to international polls. Opposition sparked huge
worldwide protests, in the United States as well, probably the first time in
history that imperial aggression was strongly protested even before it was
officially launched. On the front page of the New York Times, journalist
Patrick Tyler reported that there may still be two superpowers on the
planet: the United States and world public opinion.
Unprecedented protest in the United States was a manifestation of the
opposition to aggression that began decades earlier in the condemnation of
the U.S. wars in Indochina, reaching a scale that was substantial and
influential, even if far too late. By 1967, when the antiwar movement was
becoming a significant force, military historian and Vietnam specialist
Bernard Fall warned that Vietnam as a cultural and historic entity... is
threatened with extinction... [as] the countryside literally dies under the
blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this
size.
But the antiwar movement did become a force that could not be ignored. Nor
could it be ignored when Ronald Reagan came into office determined to launch
an assault on Central America. His administration mimicked closely the steps
John F. Kennedy had taken 20 years earlier in launching the war against
South Vietnam, but had to back off because of the kind of vigorous public
protest that had been lacking in the early 1960s. The assault was awful
enough. The victims have yet to recover. But what happened to South Vietnam
and later all of Indochina, where the second superpower imposed its
impediments only much later in the conflict, was incomparably worse.
It is often argued that the enormous public opposition to the invasion of
Iraq had no effect. That seems incorrect to me. Again, the invasion was
horrifying enough, and its aftermath is utterly grotesque. Nevertheless, it
could have been far worse. Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld, and the rest of Bushs top officials could never even
contemplate the sort of measures that President Kennedy and President Lyndon
Johnson adopted 40 years earlier largely without protest.
Western Power Under Pressure
There is far more to say, of course, about the factors in determining state
policy that are put to the side when we adopt the standard convention that
states are the actors in international affairs. But with such nontrivial
caveats as these, let us nevertheless adopt the convention, at least as a
first approximation to reality. Then the question of who rules the world
leads at once to such concerns as Chinas rise to power and its challenge to
the United States and world order, the new cold war simmering in eastern
Europe, the Global War on Terror, American hegemony and American decline,
and a range of similar considerations.
The challenges faced by Western power at the outset of 2016 are usefully
summarized within the conventional framework by Gideon Rachman, chief
foreign-affairs columnist for the London Financial Times. He begins by
reviewing the Western picture of world order: Ever since the end of the
Cold War, the overwhelming power of the U.S. military has been the central
fact of international politics. This is particularly crucial in three
regions: East Asia, where the U.S. Navy has become used to treating the
Pacific as an American lake; Europe, where NATO -- meaning the United
States, which accounts for a staggering three-quarters of NATOs military
spending -- guarantees the territorial integrity of its member states;
and the Middle East, where giant U.S. naval and air bases exist to reassure
friends and to intimidate rivals.
The problem of world order today, Rachman continues, is that these security
orders are now under challenge in all three regions because of Russian
intervention in Ukraine and Syria, and because of China turning its nearby
seas from an American lake to clearly contested water. The fundamental
question of international relations, then, is whether the United States
should accept that other major powers should have some kind of zone of
influence in their neighborhoods. Rachman thinks it should, for reasons of
diffusion of economic power around the world -- combined with simple common
sense.
There are, to be sure, ways of looking at the world from different
standpoints. But let us keep to these three regions, surely critically
important ones.
The Challenges Today: East Asia
Beginning with the American lake, some eyebrows might be raised over the
report in mid-December 2015 that an American B-52 bomber on a routine
mission over the South China Sea unintentionally flew within two nautical
miles of an artificial island built by China, senior defense officials said,
exacerbating a hotly divisive issue for Washington and Beijing. Those
familiar with the grim record of the 70 years of the nuclear weapons era
will be all too aware that this is the kind of incident that has often come
perilously close to igniting terminal nuclear war. One need not be a
supporter of Chinas provocative and aggressive actions in the South China
Sea to notice that the incident did not involve a Chinese nuclear-capable
bomber in the Caribbean, or off the coast of California, where China has no
pretensions of establishing a Chinese lake. Luckily for the world.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/162779381X/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/162779381X/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20Chinese
leaders understand very well that their countrys maritime trade routes are
ringed with hostile powers from Japan through the Malacca Straits and
beyond, backed by overwhelming U.S. military force. Accordingly, China is
proceeding to expand westward with extensive investments and careful moves
toward integration. In part, these developments are within the framework of
the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which includes the Central
Asian states and Russia, and soon India and Pakistan with Iran as one of the
observers -- a status that was denied to the United States, which was also
called on to close all military bases in the region. China is constructing a
modernized version of the old silk roads, with the intent not only of
integrating the region under Chinese influence, but also of reaching Europe
and the Middle Eastern oil-producing regions. It is pouring huge sums into
creating an integrated Asian energy and commercial system, with extensive
high-speed rail lines and pipelines.
One element of the program is a highway through some of the worlds tallest
mountains to the new Chinese-developed port of Gwadar in Pakistan, which
will protect oil shipments from potential U.S. interference. The program may
also, China and Pakistan hope, spur industrial development in Pakistan,
which the United States has not undertaken despite massive military aid, and
might also provide an incentive for Pakistan to clamp down on domestic
terrorism, a serious issue for China in western Xinjiang Province. Gwadar
will be part of Chinas string of pearls, bases being constructed in the
Indian Ocean for commercial purposes but potentially also for military use,
with the expectation that China might someday be able to project power as
far as the Persian Gulf for the first time in the modern era.
All of these moves remain immune to Washingtons overwhelming military
power, short of annihilation by nuclear war, which would destroy the United
States as well.
In 2015, China also established the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank
(AIIB), with itself as the main shareholder. Fifty-six nations participated
in the opening in Beijing in June, including U.S. allies Australia, Britain,
and others which joined in defiance of Washingtons wishes. The United
States and Japan were absent. Some analysts believe that the new bank might
turn out to be a competitor to the Bretton Woods institutions (the IMF and
the World Bank), in which the United States holds veto power. There are also
some expectations that the SCO might eventually become a counterpart to
NATO.
The Challenges Today: Eastern Europe
Turning to the second region, Eastern Europe, there is a crisis brewing at
the NATO-Russian border. It is no small matter. In his illuminating and
judicious scholarly study of the region, Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the
Borderlands, Richard Sakwa writes -- all too plausibly -- that the
Russo-Georgian war of August 2008 was in effect the first of the wars to
stop NATO enlargement; the Ukraine crisis of 2014 is the second. It is not
clear whether humanity would survive a third.
The West sees NATO enlargement as benign. Not surprisingly, Russia, along
with much of the Global South, has a different opinion, as do some prominent
Western voices. George Kennan warned early on that NATO enlargement is a
tragic mistake, and he was joined by senior American statesmen in an open
letter to the White House describing it as a policy error of historic
proportions.
The present crisis has its origins in 1991, with the end of the Cold War and
the collapse of the Soviet Union. There were then two contrasting visions of
a new security system and political economy in Eurasia. In Sakwas words,
one vision was of a Wider Europe, with the EU at its heart but
increasingly coterminous with the Euro-Atlantic security and political
community; and on the other side there [was] the idea of Greater Europe, a
vision of a continental Europe, stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok, that
has multiple centers, including Brussels, Moscow and Ankara, but with a
common purpose in overcoming the divisions that have traditionally plagued
the continent.
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was the major proponent of Greater Europe, a
concept that also had European roots in Gaullism and other initiatives.
However, as Russia collapsed under the devastating market reforms of the
1990s, the vision faded, only to be renewed as Russia began to recover and
seek a place on the world stage under Vladimir Putin who, along with his
associate Dmitry Medvedev, has repeatedly called for the geopolitical
unification of all of Greater Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok, to create
a genuine strategic partnership.
These initiatives were greeted with polite contempt, Sakwa writes,
regarded as little more than a cover for the establishment of a Greater
Russia by stealth and an effort to drive a wedge between North America
and Western Europe. Such concerns trace back to earlier Cold War fears that
Europe might become a third force independent of both the great and minor
superpowers and moving toward closer links to the latter (as can be seen in
Willy Brandts Ostpolitik and other initiatives).
The Western response to Russias collapse was triumphalist. It was hailed as
signaling the end of history, the final victory of Western capitalist
democracy, almost as if Russia were being instructed to revert to its
pre-World War I status as a virtual economic colony of the West. NATO
enlargement began at once, in violation of verbal assurances to Gorbachev
that NATO forces would not move one inch to the east after he agreed that
a unified Germany could become a NATO member -- a remarkable concession, in
the light of history. That discussion kept to East Germany. The possibility
that NATO might expand beyond Germany was not discussed with Gorbachev, even
if privately considered.
Soon, NATO did begin to move beyond, right to the borders of Russia. The
general mission of NATO was officially changed to a mandate to protect
crucial infrastructure of the global energy system, sea lanes and
pipelines, giving it a global area of operations. Furthermore, under a
crucial Western revision of the now widely heralded doctrine of
responsibility to protect, sharply different from the official U.N.
version, NATO may now also serve as an intervention force under U.S.
command.
Of particular concern to Russia are plans to expand NATO to Ukraine. These
plans were articulated explicitly at the Bucharest NATO summit of April
2008, when Georgia and Ukraine were promised eventual membership in NATO.
The wording was unambiguous: NATO welcomes Ukraines and Georgias
Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these
countries will become members of NATO. With the Orange Revolution victory
of pro-Western candidates in Ukraine in 2004, State Department
representative Daniel Fried rushed there and emphasized U.S. support for
Ukraines NATO and Euro-Atlantic aspirations, as a WikiLeaks report
revealed.
Russias concerns are easily understandable. They are outlined by
international relations scholar John Mearsheimer in the leading U.S.
establishment journal, Foreign Affairs. He writes that the taproot of the
current crisis [over Ukraine] is NATO expansion and Washingtons commitment
to move Ukraine out of Moscows orbit and integrate it into the West, which
Putin viewed as a direct threat to Russias core interests.
Who can blame him? Mearsheimer asks, pointing out that Washington may not
like Moscows position, but it should understand the logic behind it. That
should not be too difficult. After all, as everyone knows, The United
States does not tolerate distant great powers deploying military forces
anywhere in the Western hemisphere, much less on its borders.
In fact, the U.S. stand is far stronger. It does not tolerate what is
officially called successful defiance of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823,
which declared (but could not yet implement) U.S. control of the hemisphere.
And a small country that carries out such successful defiance may be
subjected to the terrors of the earth and a crushing embargo -- as
happened to Cuba. We need not ask how the United States would have reacted
had the countries of Latin America joined the Warsaw Pact, with plans for
Mexico and Canada to join as well. The merest hint of the first tentative
steps in that direction would have been terminated with extreme prejudice,
to adopt CIA lingo.
As in the case of China, one does not have to regard Putins moves and
motives favorably to understand the logic behind them, nor to grasp the
importance of understanding that logic instead of issuing imprecations
against it. As in the case of China, a great deal is at stake, reaching as
far -- literally -- as questions of survival.
The Challenges Today: The Islamic World
Let us turn to the third region of major concern, the (largely) Islamic
world, also the scene of the Global War on Terror (GWOT) that George W. Bush
declared in 2001 after the 9/11 terrorist attack. To be more accurate,
re-declared. The GWOT was declared by the Reagan administration when it took
office, with fevered rhetoric about a plague spread by depraved opponents
of civilization itself (as Reagan put it) and a return to barbarism in the
modern age (the words of George Shultz, his secretary of state). The
original GWOT has been quietly removed from history. It very quickly turned
into a murderous and destructive terrorist war afflicting Central America,
southern Africa, and the Middle East, with grim repercussions to the
present, even leading to condemnation of the United States by the World
Court (which Washington dismissed). In any event, it is not the right story
for history, so it is gone.
The success of the Bush-Obama version of GWOT can readily be evaluated on
direct inspection. When the war was declared, the terrorist targets were
confined to a small corner of tribal Afghanistan. They were protected by
Afghans, who mostly disliked or despised them, under the tribal code of
hospitality -- which baffled Americans when poor peasants refused to turn
over Osama bin Laden for the, to them, astronomical sum of $25 million.
There are good reasons to believe that a well-constructed police action, or
even serious diplomatic negotiations with the Taliban, might have placed
those suspected of the 9/11 crimes in American hands for trial and
sentencing. But such options were off the table. Instead, the reflexive
choice was large-scale violence -- not with the goal of overthrowing the
Taliban (that came later) but to make clear U.S. contempt for tentative
Taliban offers of the possible extradition of bin Laden. How serious these
offers were we do not know, since the possibility of exploring them was
never entertained. Or perhaps the United States was just intent on trying
to show its muscle, score a victory and scare everyone in the world. They
dont care about the suffering of the Afghans or how many people we will
lose.
That was the judgment of the highly respected anti-Taliban leader Abdul Haq,
one of the many oppositionists who condemned the American bombing campaign
launched in October 2001 as "a big setback" for their efforts to overthrow
the Taliban from within, a goal they considered within their reach. His
judgment is confirmed by Richard A. Clarke, who was chairman of the
Counterterrorism Security Group at the White House under President George W.
Bush when the plans to attack Afghanistan were made. As Clarke describes the
meeting, when informed that the attack would violate international law, "the
President yelled in the narrow conference room, I dont care what the
international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.'" The attack was
also bitterly opposed by the major aid organizations working in Afghanistan,
who warned that millions were on the verge of starvation and that the
consequences might be horrendous.
The consequences for poor Afghanistan years later need hardly be reviewed.
The next target of the sledgehammer was Iraq. The U.S.-UK invasion, utterly
without credible pretext, is the major crime of the twenty-first century.
The invasion led to the death of hundreds of thousands of people in a
country where the civilian society had already been devastated by American
and British sanctions that were regarded as genocidal by the two
distinguished international diplomats who administered them, and resigned in
protest for this reason. The invasion also generated millions of refugees,
largely destroyed the country, and instigated a sectarian conflict that is
now tearing apart Iraq and the entire region. It is an astonishing fact
about our intellectual and moral culture that in informed and enlightened
circles it can be called, blandly, the liberation of Iraq.
Pentagon and British Ministry of Defense polls found that only 3% of Iraqis
regarded the U.S. security role in their neighborhood as legitimate, less
than 1% believed that coalition (U.S.-UK) forces were good for their
security, 80% opposed the presence of coalition forces in the country, and a
majority supported attacks on coalition troops. Afghanistan has been
destroyed beyond the possibility of reliable polling, but there are
indications that something similar may be true there as well. Particularly
in Iraq the United States suffered a severe defeat, abandoning its official
war aims, and leaving the country under the influence of the sole victor,
Iran.
The sledgehammer was also wielded elsewhere, notably in Libya, where the
three traditional imperial powers (Britain, France, and the United States)
procured Security Council resolution 1973 and instantly violated it,
becoming the air force of the rebels. The effect was to undercut the
possibility of a peaceful, negotiated settlement; sharply increase
casualties (by at least a factor of 10, according to political scientist
Alan Kuperman); leave Libya in ruins, in the hands of warring militias; and,
more recently, to provide the Islamic State with a base that it can use to
spread terror beyond. Quite sensible diplomatic proposals by the African
Union, accepted in principle by Libyas Muammar Qaddafi, were ignored by the
imperial triumvirate, as Africa specialist Alex de Waal reviews. A huge flow
of weapons and jihadis has spread terror and violence from West Africa (now
the champion for terrorist murders) to the Levant, while the NATO attack
also sent a flood of refugees from Africa to Europe.
Yet another triumph of humanitarian intervention, and, as the long and
often ghastly record reveals, not an unusual one, going back to its modern
origins four centuries ago.
Noam Chomsky is institute professor emeritus in the Department of
Linguistics and Philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A
TomDispatch regular, among his recent books are Hegemony or Survival and
Failed States. This essay, the first of two parts, is excerpted from his new
book, Who Rules the World? (Metropolitan Books, the American Empire Project,
2016). His website is www.chomsky.info.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
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Copyright 2016 Noam Chomsky
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