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Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy | 
 enlarge | Author: Noam Chomsky
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
Category: Book
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Rating:  97 reviews
Sales Rank: 20108
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1st
Pages: 320
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Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.4 x 1
ISBN: 0805082840
Dewey Decimal Number: 327.730090511
EAN: 9780805082845
ASIN: 0805082840
Publication Date: April 3, 2007
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Product Description
“It’s hard to imagine any American reading this book and not seeing his country in a new, and deeply troubling, light.”—The New York Times Book Review
The United States has repeatedly asserted its right to intervene militarily against “failed states” around the globe. In this much-anticipated follow-up to his international bestseller Hegemony or Survival, Noam Chomsky turns the tables, showing how the United States itself shares features with other failed states—suffering from a severe “democratic deficit,” eschewing domestic and international law, and adopting policies that increasingly endanger its own citizens and the world. Exploring the latest developments in U.S. foreign and domestic policy, Chomsky reveals Washington’s plans to further militarize the planet, greatly increasing the risks of nuclear war. He also assesses the dangerous consequences of the occupation of Iraq; documents Washington’s self-exemption from international norms, including the Geneva conventions and the Kyoto Protocol; and examines how the U.S. electoral system is designed to eliminate genuine political alternatives, impeding any meaningful democracy.
Forceful, lucid, and meticulously documented, Failed States offers a comprehensive analysis of a global superpower that has long claimed the right to reshape other nations while its own democratic institutions are in severe crisis. Systematically dismantling the United States’ pretense of being the world’s arbiter of democracy, Failed States is Chomsky’s most focused—and urgent—critique to date.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 92 more reviews...
Preventive Wars Don't Work; Democracy Deficit in USA May 2, 2006
Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States)
364 out of 416 found this review helpful
Within the 900+ non-fiction books about information, intelligence, emerging threats, and national security that I have reviewed for Amazon, I count many of Noam Chomsky's books. As with others, there is some repetition here, and he could have done a better job of reviewing the function and purpose of the state before labeling the U.S. a failed state. I will say, before my concluding comment, that all of my reading bears out Chomsky's inherent correctness.
Among the points that earned a note on my flyleaf:
* US began with the genocide of the Indians, moved on to slavery, and now condones genocide across Africa and elsewhere.
* Quotes CIA Bin Laden analyst with appreciation in noting that all the US has to do to stop the problems in the Middle East is wean itself from dictators and cheap oil, remove its forces from the Muslim lands, and stop predatory capitalism. Hmmmm. There just might be a moral point in there someplace!
* Chomsky asserts that history documents that preventive wars usually bring about the outcomes they ostensibly seek to stop, and does very very well in detailing how the US invasion allowed hundreds of missile and weapons sites to be looted, moving many of the components of weapons of mass destruction into unfriendly insurgent hands--precisely what we allegedly sought to prevent.
* The author recounts the varied facts that have emerged on how the US specifically sought regime change, the British (at least those with integrity like the Foreign Minister who quit) refused to go along with that, so Blair and Bush together concocted pretexts.
* Chomsky confirms in this book what I have seen myself, which is that the only part of the US Government that is "at war" is the U.S. Army and select portions of the U.S. Air Force. The rest of the government is NOT at war, and simply pursuing business as usual. Our war on terrorism is ineffective in the sense of capturing specific terrorists, and counter-productive in the sense of producing tens of thousands more--as Chomsky recounts in the book citing RAND and other studies, 85% of the "foreign fighters" in Iraq were mobilized and radicalized by the US invasion of Iraq.
* Chomsky is provocatively on target when he anticipates the emergence of a Shiite regional power based on Iran that includes the Shiite controlled regions of Iraq and Saudi Arabia--and in the latter, that happens to include the most productive oil fields--in short, the extremist Republicans' worst nightmare.
* Chomsky harps, no doubt with reason, on the long record that the US has in sponsoring crimes against humanity including regime changes that are against democracy (Iran, Chile, Guatemala, Haiti, the list goes on) and in favor of dictators who will protect US private investment as the expense of the public interest in their own countries.
* Chomsky focuses a portion of the book on the crimes by Israel against the Palestinians, although he does not appear to balance this by noting how ill-treated the Palestinians have been by all the Arab nations. He emphatically and deliberately identifies Bush with Hitler in that the two share a strain of "demonic messiaism" and rely on "the big lie" that (if repeated often enough) will fool the people. Goebbels would be proud of his kin in the White House, Karl Rove.
* Chomsky concludes the book by discussing the "democratic deficit" in the USA, and while he is very much on point, he wanders somewhat. For a better appreciation of why we allowed the extreme right to take over and ruin the country, I recommend Jacob Hacker's OFF CENTER: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy as well as other books on my democracy list. As a moderate Republican, I can certify that the Republican party today is run by thieves, lunatics, extremists, and -- in the case of John McCain -- born again Bushophiles.
This book is, like, most of his books, a very long Op-Ed but with good footnotes. We need to move toward more analysis and toward finding solutions. Inspired by Chomsky and others, I am in the process of developing a monograph that takes the top ten threats to global and national security identified by the High-Level threat panel of the United Nations (with LtGen Dr. Brent Scowcroft as the US representative), and showing that 80% of the information we need to understand and address those threats is open source information (OSIF), not secret information, on which we spend $60 billion a year. At the same time, we are spending $500 billion a year on a heavy-metal military and missile defense, when in fact inter-state conflict is only one of the ten threats, or 10%. We are not, as a nation, trained, equipped, nor organized to do poverty, infectious disease, environmental collapse, civil war, terrorism, or translational crime. America is in effect, two Americas: a nation of sheep living for their next six pack, and a very small exclusive group of perhaps 10,000 really rich people dominating Wall Street, the energy companies, and a handful of other major corporate networks. They are busy looting the Republic on the false assumption that they will be able to retire to gated enclaves. They simply do not understand that within twenty years there will be no place for them or their heirs to hide, and this will all come back to haunt them.
I would also say that I am more optimistic than Chomsky. Collective Intelligence and a Citizens Party (as a second home party, non-rival) are emergent, and technologies are coming out that will help eliminate poverty and infectious disease while stabilizing the environment and population. What we lack right now is moral strategic leadership. It is my hope that Bush-Cheney have radicalized enough of the world so that we might thank them in 2008 for making possible the return of balanced centrist coalition leadership.
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin
Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth'
Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System
The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World
Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
War Is a Racket: The Anti-War Classic by America's Most Decorated General, Two Other Anti=Interventionist Tracts, and Photographs from the Horror of It
Encourages a successful state (of mind) April 25, 2006
Dr. Lee D. Carlson (Saint Louis, Missouri USA)
106 out of 156 found this review helpful
The obtaining of information is not a problem at all these days, but being able to interpret this information and judge its reliability can be difficult. This is particularly true for information about governments and their activities. Being intrinsically guarded about their information, governments seek to mask their activities through propaganda and hype, and therefore the imputation of certain intents and goals to the members of these governments frequently occurs. The lack of reliable or accurate information coming from governmental institutions provokes in the extreme case various conspiracy theories or elaborate generalizations. The author of this book does this to a certain degree, but he also offers an alternative viewpoint that at first glance may seem radical or cynical by some. This book, one of many by the author, is valuable because it helps to maintain an extreme skepticism about the activities of governments. Such a degree of skepticism is justified, given the horrendous acts that have been perpetrated by governments throughout the ages. It should be held as an axiom that governments cannot be trusted, that they lie more often than telling the truth, and that their goal is to mislead and manipulate the citizens they govern. To not hold to this extreme skepticism is to be vulnerable to government manipulation and propaganda, and susceptible to its possible tyrannies, to be in a failed state of mind.
The author is the guru of the political left, but since he has a scientific background he has attracted the attention of many readers who view themselves as being in the center of the political spectrum. He therefore has a wide audience, which would be even larger if he would not place so much trust in mainstream newspaper publications. The author incessantly speaks of the press as being the tool of the elite and as being an ally to government propaganda. However he references their articles without restraint, as if they were an authority on the events that they presume to cover. It is quite easy, even fashionable, to sit in an armchair and summarize what has been written in popular newspapers. It is quite another thing to get information from other sources that can act as a balance and countercheck. This is extremely difficult to do, even if you are "on the ground" in the geographical area of interest. In addition, the author should remember that he too is a member of society, and therefore is subject to the same biases and media pressures that everyone else is. He does not have an apodictic certainty about the events and history that he writes about. To refer to the "populace" as being something outside of oneself, and subjected to misleading doctrines beyond their control, is not justified or even fruitful for objective analysis.
The main goal of this book of course is to elaborate on the notion of a failed state, which as the author remarks, is a state that as a first requirement must be a potential threat to the security of the United States. Another requirement is that a failed state have a "deficit in democracy'. Still another is that it views itself as being outside the constraints of international law. And the author claims, perhaps without surprise, that the United States satisfies these requirements. This is a deep irony indeed, if one holds that the majority of Americans do in fact believe that they are "above it all" and are incapable of engaging in self-criticism.
The author asks the reader to look in the mirror and honestly assess whether the United States is approaching the status of a failed state. He offers a lot of evidence supporting this view throughout the book. But he also imputes intentions to government officials that would be difficult to verify. This mistake is a consequence of some of the vague, floating abstractions that sometimes arise in the book. The problem with abstraction and generalization is that it can sometimes lead to conceptual tyranny: it does not allow the classification of events or individuals outside of its borders, or even sometimes insists there are no borders. A good example of this is the author's insistence that moral truth must conform to the `principle of universality'. This he accepts without critical analysis, possibly because the abandoning of it would weaken his case on the inherent hypocrisy of American society. Indeed, abandoning this principle would allow the view of American culture as having some kind of "special status" and would leave open the possibility of its citizens being allowed to do as they please to other peoples of the world.
In general though the book is interesting reading and thought provoking, and encourages the reader to seek out more information on a particular topic. This is particularly true in the author's discussion on Israel, which is a country that is typically viewed by many in the Unites States as being benign or even heroic. The author though presents a view of Israel that is certainly a strong intellectual perturbation to this generally received view. His view of Israel is not a popular one, and if one repeats it in certain circles it will certainly raise an eyebrow, or even instigate retaliation and violence.
American society is deeply introspective but not self-critical. If this book can induce more healthy criticism it has done its job. If it merely preaches to the choir it has failed. It would be wrong to characterize American society as a failed state due to the actions of its government therefore. A good state is one where its citizens concern themselves with what is right and just, and act accordingly. A failed state is one whose citizens are pliant and easily manipulated. American society seems to be struggling with the idea of freedom and democracy, which is a supreme irony considering its history. The pragmatism of its citizens will no doubt win over the immoralities and criminal acts of its government.
 Pessimist's view April 8, 2006
Irene Adler (San Diego, California)
72 out of 85 found this review helpful
Most people who see the danger and evil of the course that the United States has taken under Bush II imagine that it is an anomaly in United States history. With brutal efficiency and undeniable facts and logic, Chomsky's latest book destroys that illusion, and by so doing snuffs out the last faint glimmerings of hope that the trend might be easily reversed. It is concentrated reality in a single dimension. Don't read it if you are unwilling to have your world view changed.
If you are like me you will find Chomsky's message difficult to accept emotionally, but impossible to deny intellectually.
 Failed Chumpsky November 14, 2006
Yah Wright (Meinzers' Quarry in Rocklin California)
56 out of 187 found this review helpful
A Tour de Failure by Noam "the Chump" Chomsky on so many levels -- historical, logical, legal, moral. Instead of trying to break the failures out by category, why don't we just get right down to it and list them in the order they appear. NOTE: this is a radically abbreviated list.
* The three characteristics of a failed state supposedly are (1) inability to protect its citizens from violence, (2) feeling to be beyond the reach of international law and (3) lack of true democracy (pp 1-2, 109). That's an extremely unusual definition of "failed state." Besides going against the traditional definition of a state as territorial integrity and monopoly of violence (Weber, "Politics As a Vocation"), it leads to absurd results, for example, under this classification the soon-to-be superpower China would be classified as a failed state. So right off the bat Chumpsky's whole premise falls apart. One could also point to immigration flows and appropriately ask: if the U.S. is such a failed state, why do so many people want to go there? Are the same number of people flocking to Somalia?
* The U.S. is "hegemonic" and the world's "dominant power" (pp 3, 116). I could make a detailed argument the U.S. is not, but can demonstrate Chumpsky's false statement more simply: if what Chumpsky says is true, then how come we can't get the world to do what we want?
* The doctrine of preemption a.k.a. "anticipatory self-defense" has "unstated bounds" (p 3). False. The bounds were described in Bush 43's 2003 State of the Union speech: "If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late." In other words, preemption is a valid form of self-defense after a threat has actually been identified but before it is imminent.
* Why does Chumpsky believe a bedrock moral is "we must apply to ourselves the same standards we do to others" (pp 3, 81)? Who is he to tell anyone what a state's morality is or should be, and besides, isn't he just unconsciously parroting the Christians' Golden Rule (p 4)?
* Chumpsky confuses Christian charity with government coercion. Increasing government-sponsored foreign aid is not a different manifestation of Christian charity, as Chumpsky implies by juxtaposition of the two (p 4). Foreign aid comes from government revenues, which arise from taxes, which people pay at the implied point of a gun. Taxes are not freewill gifts. C.f. 1 Kings 12:4-11 and Mark 12:42-44.
* Chumpsky is one of those "who believe that the International Court of Justice" had standing to pass judgment on the U.S.' actions in Nicaragua. Yes, Mr. Chumpsky, it is a question of your belief -- your faith -- isn't it? What is it with you and Nicaragua, anyway?
* The refusal of the U.S. to extradite Luis Posada (a Cuban purported by Castro to have bombed an airliner in the 1970s) to Venezuela was "in violation of a U.S.-Venezuelan extradition treaty" (pp 5-6). That may be true as far as it goes, but what Chumpsky doesn't tell you is that the extradition was refused because to have released Posada to the tender mercies of the Venezuelan police would have violated the Convention Against Torture, known affectionately by those in the biz as the "CAT." Of course, Chumpsky's Flavor-Aid crew probably argues that the U.S. only obeys the CAT when it's convenient, but if the U.S. *had* sent Posada to Venezuela, don't you think they would have argued that the CAT should have controlled and therefore the U.S. violated the CAT?
Further note: Mr. Posada was not freed by the U.S. as Chumpsky idiotically implies (p 35). He's currently in a detention center in Texas.
* Chumpsky approvingly quotes Robert McNamara saying that U.S. nuclear policy is "illegal" and "immoral" (pp 8-9). In response, first note who Chumpsky has to turn to to buttress his morality. Robert McNamara? The architect of perhaps a million lost Vietnamese lives and 58,000 of our own? That's some moral compass. But enough ad hominem. I have a two word response for McNamara's/Chumpsky's conclusions: says who? Who says it's immoral? Who says it's illegal? And why? We know your conclusions Chumpsky -- now tell us how you got there.
* "China has led efforts...to preserve outer space for peaceful purposes" (p 11). Like shooting lasers at satellites ("China Jamming Test Sparks U.S. Satellite Concerns," USA Today, Oct. 5, 2006)? What a wonderful judge of national character Chumpsky is.
* Throughout the book Chumpsky offers up a conclusion followed by a quote that seems to support the conclusion but doesn't. For example, he writes: "[t]he Bush Administration...has blurred the line between conventional and nuclear weapons" (p 11) then follows this with a quote from an analyst who states there is a now-heightened risk of use of nuclear weapons, when the quote doesn't actually say Bush has in fact blurred any line, let alone how it was blurred. Nice rhetoric and sleight of hand, but hardly convincing to anyone other than Chumpsky's Flavor-Aid crew.
* Chumpsky also consistently confuses correlation with causality. For example: the "hundreds of US bases placed all over the world" are to "ensure global domination" (p 11). First off, I point out again, if the U.S. is so dominant, how come the world's not doing what it wants? Second, in terms of logic, if B exists only if A exists, the mere existence of A does not necessarily imply B. In this context, if U.S. global domination existed, admittedly one would probably need hundreds of bases to ensure such domination. However, the mere existence of these bases does not prove the U.S. is ensuring its domination, any more than the existence of hundreds of U.S. consulates "proves" the U.S. is dominant. The bases may be used for in extremis defense or for passive intelligence gathering, or for many other non-"domination" purposes.
* Chumpsky also consistently engages in ad hoc ergo propter hoc, the fallacy of assuming A caused B because A came before B. He claims, for example, that the April 2004 murders of the contractors in Fallujah was caused by Israel's assassination of Sheikh Yassin the month before (p 23). There is absolutely no evidence for that (and Chumpsky cites no source to back up his wild claim), other than the fact the contractors were killed after the sheikh.
* As you could imagine, Chumpsky also consistently engages in slanting, the logical fallacy of exaggerating evidence for one's own side of an argument while downplaying or ignoring contrary evidence. Case in point: describing how America's war on Islamofascism has stirred up terrorists (pp 18-23) without detailing any evidence that such a result, while perhaps true, may be justified by U.S. long-term security objectives.
* Bush said that WMDs were the "single question" to justify invading Iraq (pp 24, 130, 132). That's false. The "single question" Bush referred to in his pre-war press conference regards adherence to Resolution 1441, not WMDs specifically. Chumpsky's use of that quote is a distortion at best, a lie at worst. Besides relinquishing the WMDs themselves, Resolution 1441 required a certain level of disclosure that even Chumpsky's Flavor-Aid crew would agree it did not meet.
* "The Reagan administration also cheerfully tolerated Pakistan's slide toward radical Islamist extremism..." (p 16) Wait a second. Isn't it reasonable to infer from the above quote that Chumpsky would prefer that the U.S. government had leaned on Pakistan to stop the slide towards extremism? Isn't that the kind of meddling that Chumpsky supposedly abhors? Chumpsky accuses the U.S. of being hegemonic (p 3), then accuses the U.S. of not acting hegemonic.
* "[N]o traces were found" of WMDs in Iraq (p 28). Oh? How about 500 chemical weapons as of early 2006, according to the National Ground Intelligence Center, the successor to the Iraq Survey Group. Now, Chumpsky could argue that the weapons were old or degraded, but he sure can't argue "no traces" of them were found.
* "Tax cuts for the rich rank far higher as a priority than protection of the population from terror" (p 32). Assuming that statement is completely true, can we not also say then that funding for PBS, NPR and NEH likewise rank far higher as a priority than protection of the population from terror? Is Chumpsky saying we should defund those institutions in favor of protecting ourselves? Chumpsky, you got my vote!
* Chumpsky also systematically places endnote references in a mendacious way. For example, he refers to an article by Michael Lind regarding the U.N. definition of terrorism (p 36) then goes on to state that the U.S. has exempted itself from the most elementary of moral principles, the principle of universality. After this he provides an endnote reference to the Lind article, creating the illusion that Lind discusses both the definition of terrorism and U.S. exemption from the principle of universality. But the actual Lind article only discusses the definition of terrorism, and says nothing about universality. So Chumpsky gets away with appearing to have sourced a statement when in fact he's done nothing of the kind.
* The Geneva Conventions were "expanded through a number of protocols, most notably in 1949 and 1977" (p 39). Oh? That's news to me. The 1977 protocols, a case study in left wing liberationist idiocy, were never ratified. And exactly why does Chumpsky seem to think they're now part of an "international norm"?
* The German attack on Norway was "preemptive" (p 40). Oh please. Could Chumpsky possibly be more obvious -- and stupid?
* Alberto Gonzales thought certain provisions of the Geneva Conventions were "quaint" and "obsolete" (p 40). That's technically true, but what Chumpsky doesn't care to tell you is that the provisions Gonzales cited as examples were requirements to provide advances of monthly pay, athletic uniforms, and scientific instruments. See Gonzalez memo of Jan. 25, 2002. I'll leave it to you to decide whether the requirement to give Khalid Sheikh Mohammed his microscope back is a quaint notion or not.
* The Green Line is "the international border recognized by the entire world, with the exception of Israel and the United States" (pp 45-46). Rejoice everyone! The Muslim states finally recognize Israel! Peace is at hand!
* More Chumpsky morality: "[u]nless people are at least given the opportunity to overthrow a tyrannical regime, no outside power has the right to carry out the task..." (pp 57-58). So under Chumpsky's morals the Allies had no right to overthrow the Vichy regime because the Vichy had crushed internal dissent? What kind of moronic morality is this?
* $20 billion in the oil-for-food scam "may have been pocketed by the Iraqis" (p 58). Well, one Iraqi at least. What delightful vagueness from America's top linguist.
* Chumpsky boo-hoos over the U.S. reservation to the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations as it relates to Mexican murderers in the U.S. (p 67). Tell you what, Chumpsky. Let the Mexicans start permitting extraditions of murderers back to the U.S. as they are required to do under the U.S.-Mexican extradition treaty, then we'll talk about how the U.S. isn't honoring the Vienna Convention vis a vis Mexico.
* "India's determination to develop a nuclear deterrent was `hardened' by the Persian Gulf War of 1991 and the bombing of Serbia in 1999" (p 75). India exploded its bomb in 1998, nearly a year before Serbia was bombed. What a moronic, obvious mistake.
* The Bush administration has the "worst record" on nuclear arms reductions (pp 75-76), even though it is the administration that has entered into a treaty to eliminate more of them -- two-thirds of existing stockpiles -- than any other administration in history.
* The U.S. is to blame for the East Timor invasion and genocide (p 87) and the Darfur genocide (p 230). Question for Chumpsky: is there anything bad that's happened in the last 60 years where the U.S. *isn't* to blame?
* "When an assertion of such obvious importance is adopted with near unanimity, a sensible reaction is to investigate the evidence produced both for and against the thesis" (p 102). Sensible advice indeed, if only Chumpsky himself would take it. For example, permeating his book is the notion that "international law" (whatever that is) should trump our security needs and even our constitution. Question: why? Who says this should be so? A bunch of pointy-headed French and German jurists? Excuse me for stating the obvious, but the French (Dreyfus Affair; Vichy; Algeria) and Germans (Bismarck; Kaiser; Hitler) probably shouldn't be the ones to turn to for instruction on morality and interstate conduct.
* Chile is "Latin America's oldest...democracy" (p 111). Stupid mistake. Columbia is Latin America's oldest democracy. If you don't believe me, believe Che Guevara, who wrote that in "Motorcycle Diaries."
* Haiti became "the first free country in the hemisphere in 1804" (p 114). What was the U.S. in 1783? Chopped liver?
* Bush "supported a military coup to overthrow...Hugo Chavez" (p 136). Says who? The endnote provided by Chumpsky is a classic example of his misdirection with endnotes, referring to an article in the Miami Herald that does not even discuss the coup.
* When the U.S. kicked al-Jazeera out of Iraq before the Iraqi elections, it demonstrated that in Iraq "no media can be tolerated that are not under US control" (p 161). Is the BBC under U.S. control?
* Chumpsky approvingly cites a middle east scholar who failed to find evidence of Hezbollah terrorism in the decade preceding 2005 (p 168). Do you think after Hezbollah fired over a thousand rockets into Israeli population centers in August 2006 that the scholar would be able to find the evidence now?
* A glaring absence in all of Chumpsky's Israel-bashing (pp 166-204) is any reference to 1948. Care to guess why? It wouldn't have to do anything with the fact that the Israeli state had been blessed by Chumpsky's beloved U.N. would it? Does the U.N. confer legitimacy in Chumpsky's world or not?
* "A terrorist wishing to enter Israel will find a way to do so..." (p 192). How is it then that the suicide bombing have been reduced by 90% since the security barrier was established?
* Chumpsky worries about "Christian fascism" along Nazi lines in the U.S. (p 224). Chumpsky, square that with the U.S.' unwavering support for Israel, as you note yourself in pp 166-204. Moron.
* Israel's bombing of Iraq's nuclear reactor at Osirak "appears to have initiated Saddam's nuclear weapons program" (p 253). Am I missing something? If you've got a nuclear reactor to produce plutonium, doesn't that mean you've already got a nuclear weapons program?
* Iran "appears to be largely conforming" with the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (p 254). Chumpsky, can I interest you in a bridge I have for sale?
the simple truth April 12, 2006
R. Hutchinson (a world ruled by fossil fuels and fossil minds)
51 out of 61 found this review helpful
Noam Chomsky's writings are the real "No Spin Zone." Most all other commentators are either blatantly serving the Powers That Be, or else spinning some sort of lesser-of-two-evils compromise. By simply telling the truth for 40 years, Noam Chomsky has become the closest thing we have to an Old Testament prophet, speaking truth to power with no holds barred. "Oh God, pride of man, broken in the dust again..." This latest installment of Chomsky's patient and relentless skewering of imperial propaganda of course has plenty of material to work with since his last in 2003 (HEGEMONY OR SURVIVAL) -- the preventive war doctrine, the illegal prisons and torture scandal, and all the other accumulating crimes of the Cheney/Bush Faction.
And since reading is not enough, we should do our best to force the Senate to produce the follow-up report on the Iraq invasion intelligence, the report that they promised before the election, the one that exposes the lies and distortions the government used to justify the war. That, of course, is a high crime if there ever was one.
Now, on top of everything else, Cheney/Bush is threatening to attack Iran with nuclear weapons. Chomsky is obviously more relevant than ever. The Empire is moving to secure control of the oil, and truth and morality are minor obstacles in its path.
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