Product Description

A brilliant distillation of the real motivations behind U.S. foreign policy, compiled from talks and interviews completed between 1986 and 1991, with particular attention to Central America.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #88094 in Books
• Published on: 2002-07-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 112 pages

Review
"Highly recommended." -- Booklist

About the Author
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is the author of many books on U.S. foreign policy.

Customer Reviews

A Chomsky Primer
A Chomsky Primer

As other reviewers have noted, this is a good introduction to Chomsky. The topics and themes of this summary are fully expanded in other works. While his critics can be numerous and often vicious, he is nevertheless a necessary voice in the dialog of democracy.

Chomsky's assertion that corporations drive American policy is one of the most common threads running throughout his works. Aided by their favorite tool, the media, corporations guide domestic and foreign policy deftly through the three branches of government. Another war critic, the late USMC Major General Smedley Butler, reflecting on his long military career said:

"I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket." - from "War is a Racket" (1935)

Chomsky makes a compelling case that indeed we have used our military to gain hegemony throughout the world in order to maintain our economic system. Consider that we have over a hundred military bases around the world for starters. Why would a democratic, peace-loving nation need such a presence? I think it would be more appropriate, however painful some might find this, to call the U.S. an empire.

In Latin America, the CIA and our military have repeatedly strong-armed progressive governments that want to restore assets to the lower classes. Whether it is sugar, fruit, oil, or banking interests, progressive governments are undermined and a more U.S.-friendly, conservative power is installed - often in the form of a dictatorship. When that government starts straying from the script, as in the case of Noriega in Panama, the U.S. intervenes to repair the situation.

If our enemy isn't the Cold War, it is such demonized leaders as Saddam Hussein. The Pentagon cycle of arms building, war, and arms research boosts corporate profits and continues the march to hegemony. Have you seen the photograph of Donald Rumsfeld gleefully shaking Saddam's hands while on a visit to Iraq in 183 by the way? I guess our "friend" turned into a foe down the road. He started playing by his own rules and brought down the wrath of the U.S. upon him.

Even though the book is fairly short, it is a great summary of Chomsky's beliefs. It is impossible to convey all of the subjects and events touched in a single review. Whether or not you agree with his point of view, Chomsky is well worth reading. He provides a perspective on the world not often expressed in the corporate media.

An extremely powerful case against America
There is no question that if Noam Chomsky was a Russian writing about Russia in this way he'd spend his life in the Gulag. Few countries would allow him to continue lecturing and publishing.

Chomsky is no crackpot. He's a brilliant intellectual and a passionately ethical human being. If he is complaining about something, we'd better listen.

I'll give you a little taste of this book. These are some of the lies that we are told by our media:

1. That America wants to support democracy and human rights around the world. 2. That America opposes terrorism. 3. That America opposes international drug trafficking. 4. That Noriega was ousted from Panama because of drugs. 5. That the Vietnam War was fought to halt the spread of communism. 6. That America was ever afraid of Soviet military power.

If you are willing to re-evaluate every single thing you have come to believe about your country, pick up this little book. It gets right to the point and is extremely readable.

Introduces Chomsky's critique of foreign affairs
This little book, published in 1992, is one hundred and one pages and is of small dimensions, phamphlet like, and is of the type that can be read pretty quickly, and intends to introduce the critique of foreign affairs (and society in general) of the leading dissident left wing intellectual Noam Chomsky. Taken from excerpts from Chomsky's writings and speeches, Chomsky presents his analysis, more or less of the cold war, how U.S. planners during and after World War Two basically decided that the United States owned the world, and that the economic and political system of the world should cater to the needs of American capitalism. The Soviet Union gobbled up East Europe, the original third world, long exploited by the West, one of main reasons of the cold war, which had nothing to do with Stalinist totalitarianism. One of the original goals of the cold war was also to carry over the massive government involvement in the economy from World War two, that is massive government subsidy to private corporations, especially through the Pentagon system, and later NASA, the energy department,commerce department etc. a system which is mainly responsible today for the success of the computer industry and the internet(not Bill Gates), electronics, pharmaceuticals, and just about every other viable sector of the economy. The taxpayers fund the research and development, corporations reap the profit if there is any to be made.

Chomsky says that the primary concern of U.S. elites in their policy towards the third world was not really economic, such as securing cheap access to raw materials and labor, or at least it was not their primary concern. Their primary concern was that certain third world nations would take primary control of their own resources, and direct what wealth they had towards the benefit of their people and not transnational corporations and investors, and most importantly serve as an example for other poor nations to follow. Nicaragua, Chile, Vietnam, Grenada, etc. could all disapear off the face of the earth tommorow, and U.S. corporations and investors would probably not be too disturbed; it is the example that they set for other nations that provoked (and provokes) U.S. hostility.

U.S. leaders have at various times called this "the domino theory," the targeted third world nations have been described as "viruses" or "rotten apples" that will "infect" their other countries. U.S. leaders ingrained in their own minds that any change of the status quo, no matter how mild, wheather it be secular or religous, right wing or left wing, for the direct benefit of the general population of a third world country is by definition a movement being sponsored by the Soviet Union to overthrow human civilization, and so on, no matter how lacking the evidence is for this thesis.

Chomsky gives several examples. One is the case of the Jacabo Arebenz government in Guatemala which the U.S. overthrew in 1954. Arbenz was no more a communist than Franklin Roosevelt was, but his fight against the power of the United Fruit corporation in his country, to go along with his succesful land redistribution program in this desperately poor country, made him a threatening "good example" to the other miserable countries of the region, and that made him an agent of Moscow in the eyes of the U.S. government. The morons in the CIA also had additional evidence that Arbenz government. His government had allegedly given three hundred thousand dollars to Costa Rican president Jose Figueres. Figueres, was a great friend of U.S. corporations and suppressed union activity and was much admired by the George Kennan-Arthur Schlesinger Jr. type liberals, but he had also instituted an extensive social welfare program for Costa Rica and had an independent streak, a real no-no for a third world leader, so that made him a communist, of course. And so if Arbenz, a communist was (allegedly) giving money to Figueres, a communist too, then that meant it was all part of a plot by Moscow to cooridinate subversion in the hemisphere, or something like that, quite standard reasoning for U.S. policy makers. So Arbenz was overthrown and at least 160,000 people have since been killed by the various tin-pot Hitlers, like Rios Montt and Lucas Garcia, that the United States has heavily supported to make sure that populist forces in Guatemala are beaten back sufficiently.

A similar situation existed in El Salvador, Chomsky says, in the late 1970's, when led by the Catholic church, pesant self-help organizations and unions began to work towards gaining a voice for the poor majority. The response was a decade of sadistic terror in which perhaps 60,000 people perished, begun in the Carter administration (which also supported Somoza to his bloody end, contrary to much illusion) and extended by the Reaganites, on the excuse that the guerillas were being directed by the Soviets and Cubans, and so on.

Then there are other odd cases like Manuel Noriega. He was on the payroll of the CIA for years. He stole an election with great fraud and violence in 1984, but was praised extravegently by the Reagan administration for bringing about a triumph of Jeffersonian democracy, and George Schultz went down to attend the inaguration of Noriega's man, Nicos Barletta. As the years went by though, Noriega developed an independent streak, he became lukewarm about the U.S. war against Nicaragua. He started to fight with Panama's business elites, thus threatening the "stability" which the U.S. government cherishes. So he had to go. The U.S. government suddenly discovered that Noriega was a thug and a drug dealer. He was indicted in Miami in 1988. All but one of the charges against him were for actions before 1984, when he was a U.S. friend. So the U.S. invaded and killed perhaps thousands of civilians and installed a regime of even worse drug dealers who made sure that the Panama canal would be in good hands once the U.S. had to give it up.

Or there is the case of East Timor. In 1965, the excessively nationalist president Sukarno of Indonesia was overthrown with U.S. support, initiating a bloodbath that killed hundreds of thousands of landless peasants and destroyed the party that most of them supported the communist PKI. General Suharto took over, to the great jubilation of the New York Times liberals, and proceeded to blunder the country in cooperation with multinational corporations. In December 1975, Indonesia invaded East Timor and began conducting the worst genocide relative to population since the holocaust using mostly U.S. arms and with such diplomatic support as provided by the great liberal Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in December 1975 the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, who related with great pride in his 1978 memoir how he had helped block effective international action to counter Indonesia's aggression...