Review

Empire and Resistance
M R Rajagopalan

Chomsky is a brilliant writer. Because of his forthright and frank statement - such as—calling the United States the global hegemon, he is largely disregarded by the main-stream press in the US. Nonetheless, the New York Times published his writings. The *book under review is a collection of more than fifty articles of Chomsky published in the Editorial Page (Op-ed) of the New York Times between April, 2007 and October, 2011. As the back cover of the book says "Chomsky's essays present a powerful counter-narrative to official accounts of the major political events of the past four years; the world financial crisis; the Occupy movement; climate change; the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: presidential politics; the ascendancy of China; Latin America's leftword turn; the threat of nuclear proliferation in Iran and North Korea; Israel - Palestine and the impact of the Arab Spring. Laced throughout his critiques are expression of commitment to democracy and the power of popular struggles.

These articles on wide ranging topics, were written over a period of four and a half years. The contents, the depth and perspective of Chomsky's writing are captivating; Every piece looks important and worth quoting.

Authorities from the US establishment have often made forthright statements about the US empire. This quote is from the statement of the senior adviser to President Bush made in October 17, 2004.

"We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that is how things will work out. We are history's actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Chomsky quotes Nir Rosen, a journalist on Iraqi war:
"Iraq has been killed, never to rise again," "The American occupation has been more disastrous than that of the Mongols, who sacked Baghdad in the thirteenth century"... "Only fools talk of 'solutions' now. There is no solution."

Chomsky makes an interesting comment on the Durand Line drawn by a British colonial officer in 1893 in the North West India to define British India's border with Afghanistan—which the latter never accepted.

"Presently: the Great Game continues in Afghanistan—Pakistan—Afpak as it is now called. The term makes sense for the region on either side of the faint porous Durand Line, which the population never accepted and the state of Afghanistan, when it was still functioning, consistently opposed.

One indelible historical marker is that the Afghans have vigorously fought of all invaders.

Afghanistan continues to be a geostrategic prize in the Great Game. President Obama has proceeded, in accord with his campaign promises, to step up the war considerably, carrying forward the British administrations pattern of escalation."

"Currently Afghanistan is occupied by the United States and its Nato allies. The outsiders' military presence only arouses confrontation, whereas what is needed is a common effort among concerned regional powers—including China, India, Iran, Pakistan and Russia —that would help Afghans face their internal problems peacefully, as many believe they can."

WikiLeaks on Afghanistan
WikiLeaks documents a grim struggle becoming grimmer, from the US perspective. And for the Afghans, a mounting horror. The CIA memorandum should remind one that states have an internal enemy, their own population, which must be controlled when State policy is opposed by the public.

Democratic societies rely not on force but on propaganda, engineering consent by "necessary illusion" and "emotionally potent over—simplification", to quote the recommendations of Obama's favourite philosopher Rheinhold Niebuhr.

Perhaps the most remarkable Wiki-Leaks revelations have to do with Pakistan. The cables reveal that the US embassy is well aware that Washington's war in Afghanistan and Pakistan not only intensifies rampant anti-Americanism but also "risks destabilizing the Pakistani state" and even raises a threat of the ultimate nightmare: that nuclear weapons might fall into the hands of Islamic terrorists.

Osama Bin Laden
There was no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim and could have been done by the seventy-nine commandos facing almost no opposition.

Even according to some US officials Bin Laden's killing was a planned assassination.

He had long been a fading presence, and in the past few months was eclipsed by the Arab Spring.

General perception of the Arab world: The execution of bin Laden was "a settling of accounts between killers".

Because this happened in Pakistan territory Pakistanis are angry that the US invaded its territory to carry out a political assassination.
Pakistan is the most dangerous country on Earth with the fastest growing nuclear arsenal. The revenge killing on Pakistani soil only stoked anti-American fervor that has long been building.

The primary threat is leakage of fissile materials to jihadi hands being a horrendous eventuality.

Presidential ‘‘Peace keeping’’ in Latin America
Chomsky describes how four US Presidents viz., Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter and Barrack Obama kept the tradition of peace keeping so long as it serves US interests.

Roosevelt’s conquest of Mexico saying "it was inevitable and in the highest degree desirable for the good of humanity at large, that the American people should ultimately crowd out the Mexicans using gun boat diplomacy to steal Panama from Colombia to build the canal was also a gift to humanity."

Wilson's invasion of Haiti in 1915 killed thousands, restored virtual slavery, the worst for Latin America.

Demonstrating his love of democracy, Wilson ordered his Marines to disband the Haitian Parliament at gun point for failing to pass "progressive" legislation that allowed US corporations to buy up the country.

Carter's policy towards Nicaragua supporting the dictator Anastasio Somoza—his brutality—killing of some forty thousand people—all in the name of human rights and democracy.

Obama's support for the military coup in Honduras which threw out a democratically elected President Manual Zalaya.

The United States reigns supreme in one dimension—means of violence, in which it spends roughly as much as the rest of the world combined, and is technologically far more advanced. But in other respects the world is becoming more diverse and complex.

The two traditional modes of US control are violence and economic strangulation. They may be losing their efficacy, but by no means have they been abandoned.

A quotable quote from Ernst Mayr : "...the higher intelligence is,an evolutionary error, incapable of survival for more than a passing moment of evolutionary time".

Cold warriors
Nonetheless, a new cold war seems unlikely. To evaluate the prospect, America should begin by clarity about the old cold war. Fevered rhetoric aside, in practice the cold war was a tacit compact in which each of the contestant was largely free to resort to violence and subversion to control its domains: for Russia its eastern neighbours: for the global superpower; most of the world. Human society need not endure —and might not survive—a resurrection of anything like that.

Financial crisis of 2008
The immediate origins of the current melt down lies in the collapse of the housing bubble supervised by Federal Reserve Chairman Alen Greenspan, which sustained the struggling economy through the Bush years by debt-based consumer spending along with borrowing from abroad.

But the roots are deeper. In part, they lie in the triumph of financial liberalization in the past thirty years—that is freeing the markets as much as possible from government regulation. These steps predictably increased the frequency and depth of severe reversals, which now threatens to bring about the worst crisis since the Great Depression.

Investors and lenders can "vote" by capital flight, attacks on currencies and other devices offered by financial liberalization. That is one reason why the United States and Britain after World War II regulated currencies and permitted capital controls.

John Maynard Keynes, the British negotiator, considered the most important achievement of Bretton woods to be establishment of the right of governments to restrict capital movement: In contrast, in the liberalization regime the US Treasury now regards free capital mobility as a "fundamental right"... After dismantling the postwar system in the 1970s, democracy is restricted..

"Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business," concluded John Dewey, and will remain so as long as it remains in "business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda."

The United States has one party systems and business party, with two factions, Republicans and Democrats.

Labour Policy
The labour policy of the US and other developed nations is assailed as "The International Assault on Labour".

In most of the world, May Day is an international worker's holiday, bound up with the bitter nineteenth century struggle of American workers for an eight hour working day. The May Day just past leads to somber reflection.

A decade ago radical Italian labour coined a word "precarity", it referred at first to the increasingly precarious existence of working people "at the margins" —women, youth, migrants. Then it expanded to apply to the growing precariat "suffering from the programs of deunionization, flexibilization and deregulation that are part of the assault on labour throughout the world.

The ferocity of the assault against labour by the US business class is illustrated by Washington's failure, for sixty years, to ratify the core principle of international labour law which guarantees freedom of association. Legal analyst Steve Charnovitz calls it "the untouchable treaty in American politics" and observes that there has never been any debate about the matter.

Washington's dismissal of some conventions supported by the International Labour Organizations contrasts sharply with its dedication to enforcement of monopoly - pricing rights for corporations disguised under the mantle of "free trade" in one of the Contemporary Orwellisms.

The Occupy Movement
The Occupy movement is an international protest movement against social and economic inequality, its primary goal being to make the economic structure and power relations in society fairer. Local groups often have different foci, but among the movement's prime concerns is the claim that large corporations and the global financial system control the world in a way that disproportionately benefits a minority, undermines democracy and is unstable.

The first Occupy protest to receive wide coverage was Occupy Wall Street in New York City's Zuccotti Park, which began on 17 September 2011. By 9 October, Occupy protests had taken place or were ongoing in over 95 cities across 82 countries, and over 600 communities in the United States.

Here are some excerpts from Chomsky's talk at the occupy Boston encampment on October 22, 2011 : Today, if you are a worker in manufacturing with real unemployment practically at Depression levels, you know that those jobs may be gone forever if current policies persist.

Major changes in social order since 1970s—one was a sharp reversal as several countries of industrialization turned to de-industrialization. Of course manufacturing continued, but overseas —very profitable, though harmful to the workforce.

Today, for the one tenth of one percent of the population who benefited most from these decades of greed and deceit, everything is fine, while for most of the population, real income has almost stagnated or sometimes declined for thirty years.

Two dangerous developments in the international arena overshadow everything else:
For the first time in human history, there are real threats to the survival of the human species. And policies of the Obama administration and its allies are encouraging escalation of weapons race including nuclear arms race.

The other threat, of course, is environmental catastrophe! Practically every country in the world is taking at least halting steps to do something about it. The United States is taking steps backward.

To sum up, this book is an excellent read—a recapitulation of important international events during the period from April 2007 to October, 2011. ooo

by Noam Chomsky, Published by City Light Books, Sanfransisco.

Frontier
Vol. 45, No. 31, February 10-16, 2013

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