Hegemony or Survival

Scholarly polemicist Noam Chomsky's latest book Hegemony or Survival argues that America's strategy for the future is nothing less than the maintenance of American hegemony through the use or threat of military force--a strategy that threatens to leave the world a more dangerous and divided place. He goes on to claim that the only other world superpower with any chance whatever of curbing America's ideologically driven quest for global dominance is World Public Opinion. Recent books on American involvement in Middle East affairs, books such as Dilip Hiro's Iraq, Rampton and Stauber's Weapons of Mass Deception, and, more recently, The Guardian sponsored The War We Could Not Stop have also drawn attention to the propaganda war waged upon the American public by the Bush administration. For Chomsky this is by no means a new development. He sees American foreign policy historically showing a remarkably pattern of hypocrisy, racism, exploitation, and cynical manipulation of public opinion by successive US administrations. What is new and disturbing about the events leading up to the invasion of Iraq, he says, is the precedent America and Britain have set for establishing new norms of international law. The concept of "preventative war" must have its victims and those victims must be weak, yet important enough to be worth the trouble. Any country that is opposed to US interests but is capable of defending itself--i.e., those with nuclear capabilities--will be left alone. He leaves us with the terrifying assessment that the clear and catastrophic message to opponents of American hegemony is to get nuclear--quick. It's the only way to keep the bully off our backs.

One of Chomsky's special talent remains his ability to undermine comforting platitudes--such as the idea that we Westerners have become more "humanitarian" over the last few decades or that we have been making steady moral progress. As with Greg Palast's The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival is relentlessly damning of the American political and economic elite and highly sceptical of the idea that virtue is to be found there. But if you're looking for a more balanced and hopeful examination of America's excursion into modern empire building and the problems it poses try Michael Ignatieff's Empire Lite. --Larry Brown

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Chomsky up to his usual mischief - Rated
Few contemporary intellectuals divide opinion quite like Chomsky. To his defenders, he sets out an irrefutable case that US history is dominated by an underlying imperialistic aim that is self-serving, hypocritical and essentially malign. To his detractors, his argument often boils down to "US capitalism is responsible for the world's problems, violent resistance to its proliferation is inevitable, therefore that too is the fault of capitalism."

In truth, I've yet to be wholly convinced by Chomsky's argument, but I've also yet to be convinced that he is anything like the apologist for tyrants as claimed by many of his critics, or that the facts and analysis he presents are so wide of the mark as to be of little value. Undoubtedly he is a brilliant polemicist and an important 'rogue'. It's just that US foreign policy and motivation is, I suspect, rather more complex than his writing ever suggests - sometimes benign, sometimes far from it - and I wish he would acknowledge that ambiguity a little more often.

Nevertheless, in Hegemony or Survival he ably challenges many of the commonly-accepted truths of recent years: that the appalling humanitarian crisis in Iraq accompanying the sanctions regime was all Saddam's fault... that while the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, the Afghanistan military campaign was justified... that unlike 'Old Europe', New Europe backed Washington's decision to invade Iraq... that "9-11 changed everything"... and so on.

One big niggle. It's frustrating that, as a professor of linguistics, Chomsky's writing style remains so convoluted. It's not that you need to google every other sentence to understand it - rather, it's the whole '5 words when 1 will do' syndrome. What hampers this further is his decision to weave direct quotes into almost every other sentence - admirable from a sourcing point of view, but less than ideal when it interrupts the flow of text so recurrently. I don't object to academic or challenging prose per se, but the best academics write in a clear accessible way, and it's a simple matter of fact that his dense writing style will continue to limit the reach of his argument.

People rarely approach Chomsky expecting balance, and this book is no exception. His fans will no doubt approve, his critics will probably pass it up. Either way, he remains an important counterweight to the safe, sanitized and sensationalized mainstream news, and it's worth persisting with the book - dense text and all - to hear a valuable alternative point of view.

A bit like running through treacle... - Rated
Don't get me wrong, I am a BIG fan of Chomsky. I think he is one of the most important intellectuals in the world.

But I don't have a PhD and sometimes find his work really quite hard going. Trying to pick up what the argument that he is trying to put across is sometimes difficult amonst the meticulously referenced blizard of examples.

As a lay-person I struggled to keep going through this.

The points it makes are good points but I'm sure he could have made it simpler for the public at large (myself included) to read.

Truly the majority of intellectuals are not the people who need convincing of his arguments, or being made aware of the reality of America's imperialist endeavours.

The public at large (as his book itself makes out as being the only real counter weight (superpower) to the other superpower (the US)) really need to be made aware of the arguments in this book.

The verdict is interesting, but tough to read

Hegemony or Survival - Rated
As a linguist, Mr. Chomsky has an amazing way with words which makes this book well worth a read. He describes events very well, and has an extraordinary way of explaining the hypocrisies of political propaganda and the use of words in the American political machinery.
The book thus gives a different insight into the American "empire-building" agenda than what is common, and knowing Mr. Chomsky's previous work, it is bound to be controversial, and even when you largely disagree with him, it is well-worth a read.
While it is well argued, my overall problem with Mr. Chomsky's theories on American empire building and hegemony, is his almost conspirational assumptions about the US attempts at seizing and keeping its empire. By doing this, I feel he gives a lot of credit to many US leaders who have in many cases been, at best, incompetent, and undermining of the programme. While propaganda is surely used and misused to form opinion, in a society like the US, this is not a one-sided process: there is debate, things change quickly, and I feel that Mr. Chomsky largely avoids to view the US as anything but a closed black box. Furthermore, and more strange, Mr. Chomsky largely downgrades other countries and governments as passive world actors, doing the dirty job for the US. This ignores the maze of interests and clever political skills of many political leaders, using the US to their advantage.
The world is not as black-and-white as Mr. Chomsky portrays, but his book is still well worth to read.

Hegemony or Survival - Rated
This is another eye opening book from Chomsky about American foreign and domestic policy. It covers the period from the end of the second world war, and focuses (as expected) on Iraq. It has some fascinating and shocking information (although a lot of it has been said elsewhere by various people, including Chomsky) and I would say this is a good starting place for those new to American foreign policy and practise. Sadly, considering Chomsky is a linguistics professor, this book isn't too clear at times. I found that for many pages the prose flowed coherently and put across the points extremely well, only to be followed by a couple of pages that were unfocused and hard to decipher at first read, and I've read many Chomsky and political books. This is the only reason this book got four stars from me. Overall, an insightful, fascinating, if slightly scary and depressing read. If this whets your appetite, try 'One No, many yeses' By Paul Kingsnorth for one portrayal of an alternative world view.

The truth behind the spin - Rated
I give this book four stars because of the importance of its subject matter: a high profile intellectual encouraging us to think for ourselves and not be led by the right wing, corporate backed media. The more you think about it, the more chilling it is that significantly large swathes of the world's most influential people (Chomsky's 'Second Superpower') have been effectively programmed to not question the actions of the United States government, so that you are now viewed as almost sacrilegious if you dare to suggest that any of the US administration's motives might not be entirely altruistic.
A case in point is the recent proposal by Tom Hickey, the Brighton University Philosophy lecturer, who has had the 'temerity' to propose a boycott of Israeli Universities by British academics in protest at mistreatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories. He appeared on Channel 4 News to defend his proposal against Professor Alan Dershowitz of the Harvard law School, who opposes the boycott. Now, the significant thing here was not the fact that Dershowitz was disagreeing with Hickey, but that he was professing to be outraged that Hickey could even have considered such a boycott. If you watch the footage, Dershowitz gets himself wound up into a state of indignant fury, and berates Hickey for 'ignoring' human rights violations by China, Cuba, etc. He effectively accuses Hickey of being anti-semitic by 'picking on' Israel. The point, of course, is that Israel is a 'client state' of the US, and has enjoyed unprecedented backing by that country, and as such is beyond criticism, because to criticise Israel is to criticise the US administration. Human rights violations in China, Cuba and other 'non-friendly' countries have received a disproportionate amount of coverage in the Western media; we see virtually nothing of Israeli atrocities in Palestine, but do you really believe they don't happen? All people like Hickey are trying to do is redress the balance. Dershowitz's show of indignant anger and accusations of anti-semitism are pure bluff: he knows that his philosophy has the upper hand in this unequal struggle. Don't be fooled!
Chomsky's writing holds the attention; OK, he can be a little heavy on the irony, and his structures can be a little convoluted, but what he is saying is true and very important. Don't just take his word for it: think for yourself, widen your reading, but check your sources. But most of all, try and take national and political bias out of the equation.