2011; 314 pages. New Author? : Yes. Interviewer: David Barsamian. Editor: Arthur Naiman. Genres : Political Science; History; Democracy;
Interviews. Overall Rating : 7½*/10.
The United States of
America. Land of the free, Home of the
brave. A shining example of a successful
democracy, although some nitpickers will tell you that we’re technically a
republic.
We've been taught that our purpose in life is to show
the rest of the world that they too can be as wonderful as we are. With liberty for all, and the freedom to
choose whatever leaders they think will best govern their nation. Ok, brave new world, that has such a nation
as the USA in it!
But what if the stuff we were
taught in our US History and High School Civics classes is a bunch of hooey? What if we actually live in a country where a powerful
few control the government and its policies, and what we think of as a free
election is really just a choice between two candidates both of whom will do whatever those powerful few tell them to and the heck with the opinions of the rest of us?
Nah, that’s silly. That’s something only the wacko conspiracy
nuts would dream up. We’d surely know if
we, “the 98%”, were being duped, right?
Noam Chomsky begs to
differ. He says we’re being brainwashed. And that we don’t have any idea of how the world
works.
What’s To Like...
How The World
Works is a 2011 compilation of four of Noam Chomsky’s earlier “short political
books”. They are:
What
Uncle Sam Really Wants (1992)
The
Prosperous Few and the Restless Many
(1993)
Secrets,
Lies and Democracy (1994)
The
Common Good (1998)
The text of How The World
Works is only 314 pages long, which gives you some idea of how short those four individual books are.
Noam Chomsky identifies
himself as an “anarcho-syndicalist”
and a “libertarian-socialist”. Wikipedia has pages for both those labels, the links are here and here. I found his views to be a curious
mix of both left-wing and right-wing radical politics.
On one hand, he’s convinced the world is
being run by the IMF (International Monetary
Fund), which has been a far-right pet theme since way back in their "John Birch" era. Chomsky also has low
opinions of both John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton, much preferring the politics
of Ross Perot. On the other hand, he’s a staunch
supporter of labor unions, the working class, and the Third World, and is unabashedly anti-imperialist. These are all left-leaning positions.
The text is mostly taken from
a series of interviews done in the 1990’s (plus
several of essays, I gather), which were then edited, abridged, and
clarified to make them more reader-friendly. “Clarified” doesn’t mean “altered”; it means
things like when the text reads “President Bush”,
it gets changed to “[first] President Bush]”. Some of the questions sound like Noam
Chomsky penned them beforehand and gave them to the interviewer, but that’s okay.
Some of the topics are unavoidably
a bit outdated at times – things like Nicaragua, Chile, the Cold War. Even "SNCC", an acronym that anyone under
the age of 50 probably won’t recognize, gets a brief mention. I was surprised to see that the PBS
channel gets criticized by the author, but delighted to “meet” Amilcar
Cabral, a Guinean anti-colonialist with (essentially) the same name as this
blog’s writer.
I didn’t agree with all of
Noam Chomsky’s opinions, such as his take on the Gulf War precipitated by
Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.
He’s also very much anti-Israel when it comes to the issue of Palestine. I am not pro-Israel either, but Chomsky’s
view makes it a black-or-white issue, and the Middle East situation is
certainly a lot more complex than that.
Still, it was fun to fact-check
him via Wikipedia, and without a doubt, this book will give any reader a lot to
think about. There are enough historical
examples of the US allying with despots to quell freedom movements (Vietnam, Chile, Nicaragua), to prove that the
“American history” we are fed in school has been thoroughly
whitewashed.
Ratings…
Amazon:
4.5/5
based on 604 ratings.
Goodreads: 4.15/5 based on 3,209
ratings and 274 reviews
Excerpts...
As far as American business is concerned, Nicaragua
could disappear and nobody would notice.
The same is true of El Salvador.
But both have been subjected to murderous assaults by the US, at a cost
of hundreds of thousands of lives and many billions of dollars.
There’s a reason for that. The weaker and poorer a country is, the more
dangerous it is as an example. If
a tiny, poor country like Grenada can succeed in bringing about a better life
for its people, some other place that has more resources will ask, “Why not
us?” (loc. 400)
Statistics about things like the quality of
life, infant mortality, life expectancy, etc. are usually broken down by
race. It always turns out that blacks
have horrible statistics as compared with whites.
But an interesting study was done by
Vicente Navarro, a professor at Johns Hopkins who works on public health
issues. He decided to reanalyze the
statistics, separating out the factors of race and class. For example, he looked at white workers and
black workers versus white executives and black executives. He discovered that much of the difference
between blacks and whites was actually a class difference. If you look at poor white workers and white
executives, the gap between them is enormous. (loc. 2146)
The problem with
real democracies is that they’re likely to fall prey to the heresy that
government should respond to the needs of their own population, instead of
those of US investors. (loc.
370)
There are some quibbles. From least important to most:
There’s a 20-page Index in the
back of the e-book, which would be really handy if you wanted to revisit a
topic and/or quote from the book.
Unfortunately, there are no page numbers listed, and no links, rendering it essentially useless.
There’s a lot of repetition and
overlap. But that’s to be expected since
How The World Works is really just a four earlier books by the author squashed together.
What Noam Chomsky has to say about, say, China in a 1992 interview is
not going change much when he's asked about it in a 1993 interview.
Similarly, there’s not a lot
of actual facts and references to substantiate the author’s claims of skullduggery. He’ll mention that he read some book at some point in the past, which supports the point he’s trying to make, but he provides no direct quotes from it. However, since most of
the text is from an interview he's giving, that’s not surprising. I expect someone writing a book to back up
his allegations with hard facts, but I don’t expect someone giving a speech or
an interview to do so.
Overall, How The World
Works gave me lots to think about but not much documentation to support
its controversial assertions. Perhaps
some of Noam Chomsky’s other political science books do. He’s written and published about a hundred such tomes.
7½ Stars. Noam Chomsky has also written 50+ books on Linguistics, several of which reside on my Kindle. I'm leaning towards tackling one of those next.
