Noam Chomsky (16 page)

She then quotes the ‘total isolation’ Chomsky felt when contemplating, as a sixteen-year-old, the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima, and concludes: ‘That isolation produced one of the greatest, most radical public thinkers of our time. When the sun sets on the American empire, as it will, as it must, Noam Chomsky’s work will survive.’
⁶⁹
This is a fitting tribute.

It remains to examine what Chomsky has written in arguably his most important political book so far,
Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance
(2003), in which he lays bare the circumstances that Roy alludes to above. For an opener Chomsky asks if the human species is likely to outsmart itself in its drive for hegemony: will it win the game of global dominance for a brief moment in time and then self-destruct, or should we be content to be ‘stupid’ and survive on a par with ‘beetles and bacteria’, species that are more successful than the human one. The prospects seem to indicate the former scenario. Chomsky can list an endless litany of events, policies and plans that set us on the way to Armageddon. The erstwhile aim of achieving
US
hegemony, however, can only be accomplished if the ordinary people – the masses, the punters, the workers – are kept out of it. This is the role of all governments, writes Chomsky, and ‘it is far more important in the more free societies, where obedience cannot be maintained by the lash’.
⁷⁰
As we shall examine in more detail in the next chapter, this is achieved through subtle propaganda and self-censorship by the makers of public opinion, the mass media. Chomsky then dissects the ‘imperial grand strategy’ of the
US
economic and political elites. In fact, the very notion of an imperial strategy is that it can change its strategy whenever it likes. When no
WMDS
were found in Iraq after the invasion, the
US
administration simply amended the strategy to attacking anyone who had the intent and ability to develop
WMDS
. ‘Hence’, Chomsky puts it bluntly, ‘the refined version of the grand strategy effectively grants Washington the right of arbitrary aggression.’
⁷¹
The rule of law, internationally and domestically, must also be amended as the need arises. Treaties and
UN
conventions ratified by the
US
count for nothing. All of it must be explained by ‘noble intent’ on the part of the
US
and her fight for freedom – and anyone not with us is against us. Such rhetoric for public consumption is indistinguishable from that of common tyrants who also act on behalf of noble ideals, as did Hitler, as did Hussein. That the war on terror and every other little intervention and invasion (Chomsky reminds us again of East Timor and Kosovo) are morally good and just, as long as they are prosecuted by the ‘enlightened’ states of the free West, is not contestable. Chomsky quotes Tony Blair’s adviser Robert Cooper, who said that ‘the need for colonization is as great as ever’,
⁷²
for the sake of savages who will in time accept with gratitude the benefits of Western rule of law. We are sliding into a neo-feudalist world order whereby the imperialist United States delegates tasks to the ‘alliance of the willing’, while isolating itself from all outside influences. Should any of the client states create trouble, then ‘regime change’ must be instituted. This includes the traditional friends of the us. Chomsky puts Iraq under the spotlight and comes to the conclusion that the Bush administration will take Iraq as a test case to see if it can impose its will in the face of the most bizarre situation played out in Iraq itself. Ready to risk sacrificing thousands of troops, ‘the Bush administration openly declared its intention … to control the world by force’.
⁷³
Not that world domination, once achieved, is an end in itself. As with many empires before, there is the constant battle to intensify the profit margins by monopolizing business and trade. The much vaunted ‘free market’ becomes anything but ‘free’, and corporate oligarchies fight it out amongst themselves, leaving large-scale destruction in their wake. Chomsky demonstrates this in his chapter on ‘dilemmas of dominance’. The tri-polar order of trading blocs –
US
, Europe and Asia – are forever shifting in their cunning and often use crude strategies to gain an economic advantage. Trade wars erupt between the
US
and Europe over subsidies. China–
US
relations swing between enthusiastic trade and accusations of unfair advantages – not to mention the perennial charges of theft of intellectual property. The danger of capitalist wars is on the increase again: the problems are not restricted to successful defiance in the Third World, a major theme of the Cold War years, but reach the industrial heartlands themselves.
⁷⁴

A major theme, as ever, is the ‘cauldron of animosities’ in the Middle East. Israel is armed to the teeth with
WMDS
. Should Israel ever lose control over its neighbours – far and wide – then the ultimate weapons may well be deployed, and with the full sanction of the us: ‘As the official ratio of Palestinians to Israelis killed moved from twenty-to-one to close to three-to-one, attitudes in the
US
changed from inattention to atrocities or support for them to extreme outrage: at the atrocities directed at innocent
US
clients.’
⁷⁵

Since the Bush administration successfully sidelined Arafat, if not contributed to his demise,
US
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has made intensive efforts to bring democracy to Palestine compliant with
US
foreign policy. Premier Sharon’s ‘gift’ to the Palestinians – the selective withdrawal from Gaza – must rate as one of the more cynical attempts to placate any vestiges of popular support for peace in the Middle East.

Chomsky then turns his attention to the ‘war against terror’, the aftermath of 9/11. In the first instance, any
US
or British government-accepted definition of ‘terror’ would rebound on the respective governments and make them liable for the same crimes. Both governments have succeeded in obliterating such crazy ideas from public discourse. Chomsky thus engages in the painful mathematics of terror, setting the 3, 000 victims of 9/11 against the tens of thousands of documented victims that are directly attributable to acts of terror perpetrated by
US
forces. This has outraged the American right wing (as well as many liberals) like nothing else from Chomsky in recent times. Nothing pleases such people more so than when so-called intellectuals from client states chime in. One such example is the Australian academic and publisher Keith Windshuttle, author of ‘The Hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky’ in the magazine
The New Criterion:

Such emotive attacks on Chomsky are ten a penny. And many of the authors are well versed in what Chomsky calls ‘the art of “disappearing” unwanted facts’. What emerges is the main cause of terrorism as we know it: it is the
US
imposing standards that she herself does not abide by. Such hypocrisy stirs extreme antagonism in people with a sense of justice, and those at the receiving end do sometimes resort to counter-terrorism.

In the last chapter of
Hegemony or Survival
Chomsky returns to the question posed in the introduction. Given the stark scenario he has outlined in painstaking detail, is there any hope? Is it, as he puts it ‘a passing nightmare’? To drive home the ‘nightmare’ scenario he adds the real potential of a nuclear conflagration, a fact that has also been written out of the conscience and consciousness of public opinion. Some 40, 000 nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union alone are lurking in deteriorating power centres, while
US
propaganda focuses its sights on the negligible nuclear threat from Iran and North Korea. Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ programme is enthusiastically continued by Bush and Rumsfeld, increasing the danger of an accidental trigger every day. The Cold War axiom of
MAD
(Mutual Assured Destruction) has gone out of the window and the Pentagon is busy modelling pre-emptive nuclear strikes. Will the
US
resort to such measures? Kennedy came close to it during the Cuba crisis. Bush may not have any such lingering scruples. American corporate power may demand no less: after all the same supreme power has demanded that the
US
will not accede to the Kyoto Protocol, a remedy that might save the earth from
MAD
by pollution from suvs alone. The Bush administration continues to oblige. What should we do?

Chomsky has never answered this question for others. He has, however, answered the question for himself, and he is asking us to make up our minds. Now that we know the facts of the matter we must draw a personal conclusion. To act or not to act. If we decide to act, and act in unison with the masses of people who have reached a similar conclusion, then there is no telling what good things could happen. Here Chomsky is the eternal optimist, proclaiming that ‘it would be a great error to conclude that the prospects are uniformly bleak’.
⁷⁷
He lists advances in the development of a human rights culture, in the
US
and elsewhere. He speaks highly of solidarity movements in the Third World. He endorses the global justice movements as expressed in the World Social Forum (
WSF
). He mentions the very phrase that Arundhati Roy used to open the
WSF
in Mumbai, namely that ‘another world is possible’. The choices are ours but there are only two (ever faithful to his biological principle of binary features):

Chomsky in India, 2001.

Since the publication
oí Hegemony or Survival?
in 2003 there have been many other appeals by Chomsky in the same vein. As a tireless campaigner he is not averse to repeating his message again and again. In 2001 he delivered the Lakdawala Memorial Lecture in India. In 2004 and the beginning of 2005 he gave talks in Florence, Thessalonica, Athens, Hungary, London, Oxford, Manchester, Liverpool, Oldenburg, Edinburgh, Berlin, Leipzig, Ljubljana, Novigrad and Bologna – not to mention his frequent engagements in North America. He attended both World Social Forums in Brazil in 2002 and 2003. He was in Istanbul in 2002 supporting a publisher. He also travelled to the Kurdish regions of Turkey and spoke on behalf of the oppressed Kurds. In 2003 he went to Cuba at the invitation of the chair of the Latin American Association of Social Scientists (
CLASCO
). Back home he denounces the
US
embargo of Cuba.

In
Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals
(1999), Neil Smith lists a staggering 46 countries on which Chomsky has written in depth in terms of
US
foreign policy and/or internal conflicts. Since 1999 we can add Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan and many of the post-Soviet states that suffer from perennial conflict. Since 9/11 we can add a whole global dimension.

Many a talk given by Chomsky on politics and current affairs begins with a quotation from the day’s morning newspapers, often confirming the argument he is about to outline. It’s an early breakfast routine, reading four or five different daily newspapers. When at home it’s the ones he subscribes to:
Boston Globe, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times
and
Christian Science Monitor
. He also has a subscription to the
Washington Post Weekly
. When abroad it’s usually a selection of the left-of-centre dailies, as the case may has be. Chomsky has been reading newspapers for as long as he can remember. They featured in his life from an early age – working at the kiosk his uncle ran on Seventy-Second Street in New York: