- The great Noam Chomsky, now 95 years old, is widely credited with having revolutionised the field of modern linguistics, and is equally renowned for his incisive writings on global affairs and US foreign policy. This new book, written in collaboration with Nathan J. Robinson, co-founder and editor in chief of Current Affairs magazine, re-works some of Chomsky's pieces over the last few decades or so to bring them up to date.
- It is an utterly inspiring book. He brings a razor sharp clarity and perspective to today's substantial issues, and he's as unforgiving of ‘liberals’ as he is of conservatives. It's a critique of American delusion and imperial ambition. The US is a warmongering nation. Every president has committed crime after crime.
- Each chapter addresses a major war or issue over the last seventy years, and America's disastrous response. The US had no legal or moral right to interfere in Vietnam. The wrecking of Afghanistan was just appalling US revenge for 9/11 - the Taliban offered to give bin Laden up, but Bush declined. The war was a major US crime, with no justification whatsoever.
- Similarly the invasion of Iraq was ‘…a criminal act of aggression by a state seeking to exert regional control through the use of violence’.
- If you just want to dip into this book then read first the thoroughly enlightening chapter on Israel/Palestine history. The war is placed into a deep historical perspective, and Chomsky, a Jew himself, does not shy away from condemning Israel's atrocities.
- Then read the chapter on China’s emergence as a ‘threat’. It's full of sense, and is highly critical of Obama, Trump, Biden and other US leaders and politicians. Their demonisation of China is ignorant, America-first hogwash. And they use the so-called defence of Taiwan as cover. He actually praises Paul Keating as one of the only Western leaders to call it right.
- Then there's Ukraine and NATO. He questions the relevance and continued existence of NATO after the end of the Cold War, condemning it for engaging repeatedly in illegal and aggressive warfare. The US should have dropped the goal of NATO membership for Ukraine and persuaded it to become a neutral country.
- Nuclear: the frightening prospect of a nuclear war initiated by the US is real. The US consistently refuses to do anything to help avoid it. It refuses to support any related UN resolutions.
- The current climate disaster? Oh please, ‘US politicians have consistently placed the interests of the fossil fuel industry over the future of humanity’. The Green New Deal (AOC led) was cynically disparaged by senior Democrats, even though it was the right way forward. ‘The green dream, or whatever they call it’ scoffed Nancy Pelosi. Influential media like The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times continue to be abysmal in their coverage.
- ‘In the United States now, there is essentially one political party, with two factions’. The Republicans’ ‘core agenda is to privatise, to deregulate, and to limit government’, and the Democrats ‘have essentially abandoned whatever commitment they had to working people and the poor, becoming a party of affluent professionals and Wall Street donors.’
- The US believes it has an inherent right to dominate the rest of the world. ‘As Harold Pinter argued in his Nobel Literature Prize address: "The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless...The US has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good".
- Chomsky ends with this paragraph: An extraterristrial observer looking at our species would say that our primary trajectory is toward suicide, that we are collectively running toward a cliff. Human civilisation, having started almost ten thousand years ago in the Fertile Crescent, may now be approaching its inglorious end. It may turn out that higher intelligence was a kind of 'evolutionary mistake'. One of the theories put forward for why no intelligent life has so far been discovered elsewhere in the universe - the 'Fermi paradox' - is that intelligent life may be a kind of lethal mutation that annihilates itself whenever it arises.
- Each chapter addresses a major war or issue over the last seventy years, and America's disastrous response. The US had no legal or moral right to interfere in Vietnam. The wrecking of Afghanistan was just appalling US revenge for 9/11 - the Taliban offered to give bin Laden up, but Bush declined. The war was a major US crime, with no justification whatsoever.
- Similarly the invasion of Iraq was ‘…a criminal act of aggression by a state seeking to exert regional control through the use of violence’.
- If you just want to dip into this book then read first the thoroughly enlightening chapter on Israel/Palestine history. The war is placed into a deep historical perspective, and Chomsky, a Jew himself, does not shy away from condemning Israel's atrocities.
- Then read the chapter on China’s emergence as a ‘threat’. It's full of sense, and is highly critical of Obama, Trump, Biden and other US leaders and politicians. Their demonisation of China is ignorant, America-first hogwash. And they use the so-called defence of Taiwan as cover. He actually praises Paul Keating as one of the only Western leaders to call it right.
- Then there's Ukraine and NATO. He questions the relevance and continued existence of NATO after the end of the Cold War, condemning it for engaging repeatedly in illegal and aggressive warfare. The US should have dropped the goal of NATO membership for Ukraine and persuaded it to become a neutral country.
- Nuclear: the frightening prospect of a nuclear war initiated by the US is real. The US consistently refuses to do anything to help avoid it. It refuses to support any related UN resolutions.
- The current climate disaster? Oh please, ‘US politicians have consistently placed the interests of the fossil fuel industry over the future of humanity’. The Green New Deal (AOC led) was cynically disparaged by senior Democrats, even though it was the right way forward. ‘The green dream, or whatever they call it’ scoffed Nancy Pelosi. Influential media like The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times continue to be abysmal in their coverage.
- ‘In the United States now, there is essentially one political party, with two factions’. The Republicans’ ‘core agenda is to privatise, to deregulate, and to limit government’, and the Democrats ‘have essentially abandoned whatever commitment they had to working people and the poor, becoming a party of affluent professionals and Wall Street donors.’
- The US believes it has an inherent right to dominate the rest of the world. ‘As Harold Pinter argued in his Nobel Literature Prize address: "The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless...The US has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good".
- Chomsky ends with this paragraph: An extraterristrial observer looking at our species would say that our primary trajectory is toward suicide, that we are collectively running toward a cliff. Human civilisation, having started almost ten thousand years ago in the Fertile Crescent, may now be approaching its inglorious end. It may turn out that higher intelligence was a kind of 'evolutionary mistake'. One of the theories put forward for why no intelligent life has so far been discovered elsewhere in the universe - the 'Fermi paradox' - is that intelligent life may be a kind of lethal mutation that annihilates itself whenever it arises.
- A brilliant book from one of the best minds of the last hundred years.
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