[Peace-discuss] American prophet

[C. G. Estabrook]

[It has been observed that a prophet is not without honor, except in his 
own country.  That surely applies to Noam Chomsky, honored outside the 
US as its most astute political commentator, even as he's ignored by the 
US media.  Here's a serious comment on his new book, typically from a 
British paper.  --CGE]

Books
The Scotsman Sat 8 Jul 2006
Review by JONATHAN FREEDLAND

FAILED STATES: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy

By Noam Chomsky

Hamish Hamilton, 320pp, £16.99

THIS LATEST PHILIPPIC FROM NOAM Chomsky sets out to overturn every 
belief about their country Americans hold dear. The self-image of the 
United States as a beacon of freedom and democracy, lighting the way for 
the rest of the world, is a lie, Chomsky says, and it always has been.

At its centre is the avowed American mission to spread democracy 
throughout the world. Chomsky concedes that, rhetorically at least, this 
has been the nation's goal since Woodrow Wilson, but he insists the 
words are utterly at odds with American deeds. In its many foreign 
interventions, Washington has acted to frustrate the will of the people, 
often by supporting those engaged in the most chilling violence. The US 
has overthrown democratic governments in Iran, Chile, Guatemala "and a 
long list of others". Elsewhere, it has paid lip service to procedural 
democracy while doing all it could to rig the outcome. There is, Chomsky 
says, a "rational consistency" to this inconsistency between words and 
actions. The record shows the US does back democracy abroad - "if and 
only if it is consistent with strategic and economic interests".

These are not, Chomsky insists, the interests of the American people, 
but of the corporate elite that dominates the country and its 
policy-making. For, he says, the US is not a democracy, if that word is 
reserved for a society where the people's will is done.

Take healthcare. Chomsky has the data to show that the American system 
is economically inefficient, much costlier than more socialised models 
in Europe and deeply unpopular with a majority of Americans, who are 
ready to pay for increased government intervention even if that means 
higher taxes. That democratic majority remains unheard, however, because 
"the pharmaceutical and financial industries and other private powers 
are strongly opposed". That is why the mainstream news media, a 
perennial Chomsky target, say publicly funded healthcare lacks political 
support: the majority might back it, but not the people who count.

Chomsky employs the same linguistic deconstruction for media definitions 
of prosperity. The experts may say the economy is healthy, as it is for 
the top one per cent, whose wealth rose by 42 per cent from 1983 to 
1998. But it is not healthy for the majority, whose wages have stagnated 
or declined in real terms, nor for those going hungry in America because 
they cannot afford to buy food.

Much of this will be familiar to veteran Chomsky readers, but in this 
book he supplies a new twist. What, he asks, is a failed state? It is 
one that fails "to provide security for the population, to guarantee 
rights at home or abroad, or to maintain functioning (not merely formal) 
democratic institutions". On that definition, Chomsky argues, the US is 
the world's biggest failed state. This sounds like a hyperbolic charge, 
ludicrously overblown - but he goes far toward substantiating it. He is 
especially strong on flagging up Washington's woeful efforts to protect 
Americans from terror attacks, for example, lavishing more resources on 
the imaginary threat from Cuba than on the all-too-real menace of al-Qaeda.

And if a rogue state is defined by its defiance of international law 
then the US, Chomsky says, has long been the rogues' rogue. It has 
ignored the Geneva Conventions by its treatment of prisoners at 
Guantanamo and of Iraqi civilians in Fallujah; violated the Nuclear 
Nonproliferation Treaty by its development of new weapons when it should 
be making good-faith efforts to get rid of the old ones; flouted the 
United Nations Charter, which allows the use of force only when the 
"necessity of self-defence" is "instant" and "overwhelming," standards 
hardly met by the 2003 invasion of Iraq; and defied the World Court, 
which in the 1980s held Washington guilty of "unlawful use of force" 
against Nicaragua, a ruling that the US simply rejected. Scholars like 
to speak of American exceptionalism, but with Chomsky the phrase takes 
on new meaning: America exempts itself from the rules it demands for 
everyone else. This is not a double standard, but flows from what 
Chomsky, quoting Adam Smith, calls the single standard: the "vile maxim 
of the masters of mankind: . . . All for ourselves, and nothing for 
other people."

Throughout Failed States, Chomsky writes in this vein of fierce 
excoriation. No-one is exempt. The whole system is rotten, including 
traditional liberal heroes. Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John 
Kennedy are all faulted for their pursuit of international dominance, 
from Roosevelt's plans to firebomb Japanese cities more than a year 
before Pearl Harbor to Kennedy's war in Vietnam. Even the framers of the 
Constitution are condemned. Chomsky disapprovingly quotes James 
Madison's insistence that the new republic should "protect the minority 
of the opulent against the majority".

If there is a crumb of comfort for his readers, it is this: Americans 
are not a uniquely evil people. On the contrary, imperialists throughout 
history have behaved in the same way, from the Greeks to the British, 
always telling themselves they were driven by noble purpose - even as 
their elites wreaked havoc on others for their own material gain.

There are flaws in this book. It is dense, with almost every paragraph 
broken up by extensive quotations. And it is unrelenting, the invective 
interrupted only by the occasional flash of bitter wit. Like any 
polemicist, Chomsky is selective in his material: for example, he cites 
rulings by the Israeli Supreme Court that have injured Palestinians 
rights, but ignores those that have respected them.

Too often Chomsky fails to cast those outside the US as active moral 
agents in their own right. He argues, with justification, that the 
American invasion of Iraq has unleashed a wave of terrorism in that 
country - but he has little interest in the bombers and beheaders 
themselves. Their actions are merely the inevitable products of 
decisions taken in Washington. He is also too airily dismissive of 
liberal interventionists, those who would like to see American power 
deployed to thwart genocide; in Chomsky's eyes, they are mere patsies 
for imperialism.

Similarly, his view of politics can be too mechanistic; sometimes he 
writes as if whole national debates are mere staged distractions, 
planned by the powers that be. And while he spends 260-odd pages 
presenting his critique, he offers only two paragraphs of solutions (an 
imbalance, it should be said, he is aware of).

Still, maybe it's sufficient for a prophet to tell the people they are 
in a wilderness; he shouldn't be expected to point the exact way out. 
Chomsky's ambitions, after all, are high enough. It's hard to imagine 
any American reading this book and not seeing his country in a new, and 
deeply troubling, light.

This article: http://living.scotsman.com/books.cfm?id=994842006

Last updated: 07-Jul-06 00:14 BST