Who Rules the World?

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Noam Chomsky was a name I kept running across in my reading over the years, and I had long intended to take the plunge and read one of his books. A giant in the field of linguistics, Chomsky has had a storied and prolific career as an MIT professor, philosopher, activist, writer and more. Chomsky’s book is . . . a polemic designed to awaken Americans from complacency. America, in his view, must be reined in, and he makes the case with verve. . . . We should understand it as a plea to end American hypocrisy, to introduce a more consistently principled dimension to American relations with the world, and, instead of assuming American benevolence, to scrutinize critically how the US government actually exercises its still-unmatched power." —The New York Review of Books Actually, the whole book talks about hypocrisy and double standards that “the world” has been committing throughout the years. And they are not the opinions of the author. He gives you all the facts clearly for you to see and think about. All the references are there as well if you want to know more about a certain subject. About 90% of the book is about what the United States and Israel did or are still doing. The victims are spread across the globe and their crime is “nationalism”. This is a word according to the author that “the world” hates a lot and does not want to see. “The world” considers independent nationalism a virus that might spread contagion. This virus might cause the creation of a parliamentary path toward some kind of democracy. And “the world” does not want that. Not only that but the author even goes on to say that the US and England before it, are more to support radical fundamentalist Islam (eg. Saudi Arabia) in opposition to secular nationalism which is a posing threat of independence and a huge risk of losing their hegemony over these countries! China might someday be able to project power as far as the Persian Gulf.’ Photograph: Claro Cortes Iv/Reuters The Turkish public was not alone. Global opposition to US-UK aggression was overwhelming. Support for Washington’s 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.

With the “Orange Revolution” victory of pro-western candidates in Ukraine in 2004, State Department representative Daniel Fried rushed there and “emphasized US support for Ukraine’s Nato and Euro-Atlantic aspirations”, as a WikiLeaks report revealed. As in the case of China, one does not have to regard Putin’s moves favorably to understand the logic behind them The world’s leading intellectual offers a probing examination of the waning American Century, the nature of U.S. policies post-9/11, and the perils of valuing power above democracy and human rights 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 US contempt for tentative Taliban offers of the possible extradition of bin Laden.

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The US-UK invasion, utterly without credible pretext, is the major crime of the 21st 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”. Russia’s concerns are easily understandable. They are outlined by international relations scholar John Mearsheimer in the leading US establishment journal, Foreign Affairs. He writes that “the taproot of the current crisis [over Ukraine] is Nato expansion and Washington’s commitment to move Ukraine out of Moscow’s orbit and integrate it into the west”, which Putin viewed as “a direct threat to Russia’s core interests”. 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”.

Chomsky cites the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq, which he says is “a direct outgrowth” of George W. Bush’s invasion. There is no doubt that the invasion and subsequent occupation and dismantling of the state were a disaster that greatly contributed to the rise of ISIS in Iraq, where it now controls the country’s second-largest city, Mosul. But that ascendancy is also the product of many other factors, such as the discriminatory and abusive laws and policies against Sunnis by the government of former prime minister Nouri al-Maliki. Its indiscriminate bombing of Sunni areas and other sectarian abuses after the withdrawal of US troops at the end of 2011, well before the rise of ISIS, led many Sunnis to see ISIS as a lesser evil. I want to take issue with one criticism Roth makes because it actually brings into focus one of Chomsky’s major points about the responsibility of American citizens when it comes to the actions of our government. I won’t continue, but if anyone is interested in other cases mentioned, I’ll be glad to consider them.Fierce, unsparing, and meticulously documented, Who Rules the World? delivers the indispensable understanding of the central issues of our time that we have come to expect from Chomsky. Despite his errant hypocrisies, we need more public intellectual iconoclasts like Chomsky in our society.

i] Amy Goodman and Noam Chomsky, “Chomsky: Occupy Wall Street ‘Has Created Something That Didn’t Really Exist” in U.S.—Solidarity’”, Democracy Now! May 14, 2012 https://www.democracynow.org/2012/5/14/chomsky_occupy_wall_street_has_created, accessed July 14, 2019. 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 US allies Australia, Britain and others which joined in defiance of Washington’s wishes. The US and Japan were absent. It is very easy (and rewarding) for Americans to look with a gimlet eye upon the failings of other nations and political figures, say, for example, to identify the criminality of a dictator like Bashar al-Assad in Syria, as Roth does in his review. Americans who write critically about such individuals can always expect a warm and respectful hearing from the political, journalistic, and intellectual gatekeepers. Chomsky’s point has always been that citizens of any country have a unique responsibility to be critical of their own country’s actions because, depending on the political form prevalent in the country, these citizens have the most influence over (and responsibility for) the actions of their own government.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. He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. The fundamental question of international relations, then, is whether the US 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”. 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”.

His first case charges “sloppiness” in my observation that the Obama administration was considering reviving military commissions while in fact they continued to operate. The observation was accurate: it referred, explicitly, to what the Obama administration was considering in 2009, citing the news reports of May 2009. Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, political activist, author, and lecturer. He is an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Riot police line up outside a closed branch of the National Bank of Greece during a general strike in protest against austerity measures. Photograph: Milos Bicanski/Getty Images