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February 13, 2006

Hegemony or Survival

Noam Chomsky wrote Hegemony or Survival about the time the US administration was making the case to invade Iraq. In a nutshell he's looking at the push to world dominance by the US state through recent history, and some of the dangers the push has caused and continues to cause for human survival. I listened to the audio book version, which is Brian Jones reading the text.

Chomsky's generally preaching to the converted. His criticisms cannot make it in the mainstream, though if you're flaky enough to hear him out, his criticisms hold together. He's even come up with a plausible explanation of why his stuff won't be able to make it into the mainstream. What he writes ends up being too well thought out and documented to attack frontally, but there are two forms of criticism easily adopted, and that you can recommend to keep everything he says from getting to 99.9% of people.

  1. Attack the character, not the content. Chomsky is a crank from the lunatic fringe.

  2. Ignore what McGeorge Bundy referred to as critical "noises." We don't have time to listen to every sore loser and disgruntled leftist who hates America.

Both of those techniques work well. Consider this interview on America Morning with Chomsky and Bill Bennett. Chomsky takes a rhetorical beating from Bill, who's better at the TV game. (Maybe Bill's book is good, too. I haven't read it.) On TV image is everything, and time is short.

If time isn't too short to listen, you may find Chomsky's perspective entertaining, and occasionally even useful.

He fills some holes left in what I'd learned about history (very little).

He demonstrates rules of thumb for evaluating policies and procedures. Facts and actions speak more clearly than rhetoric and pronouncements, so check what actually happens regardless of what is said. Evaluate your friends using the same yardsticks you use for your enemies. Don't confound the representatives with the represented. History is usually written by the victors. When reading news, recall that the press is privately owned, and the customers are advertisers, not readers. Etc.

His sense of humor is blacker than Kafka and funnier than Dilbert.

The trouble I have with Chomsky and Marx (not with Hahnel or Alpert) is that the well-designed criticism goes on and on, and then the solutions proposed at the end seem wishful and insubstantial, an exercise left entirely to the reader. In the end, maybe that's right, though. After all, both these guys are leading to the conclusion that what we need is all of us getting involved and contributing. If we rely on an elite to decide what's good for us, we'll end up dead. The first step is to take charge of ourselves.

Posted by Mark at February 13, 2006 09:10 PM

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Comments

I haven't looked at the Chomsky links yet, but here is another explanation of the Iraq war that seems to predict an Iran war too. Don't know if Chomsky touches on the same thing or not. This sounds plausible to me, but then again, it could all be made up like a good piece of fiction:

http://www.energybulletin.net/12125.html

I got this from the comments to James Howard Kunstler's blog, where there is always good discussion, some of the most intelligent I've ever seen on the internet:

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2006/02/played.html

Posted by: Andy at February 15, 2006 09:06 AM

Chomsky sets as one of the criteria for attacking a nation that it be unable to defend itself. (Cuba, Granada, Nicaragua, Libya, Panama, Serbia, Sudan, Iraq in 2003, etc.) Therefore although Iran could be a candidate for other reasons, attacking Iran is less likely, rather than more, if it is able to defend itself, especially with nuclear weapons, at least according to Chomsky's theory.

That doesn't mean it won't happen, just that it's less of a pushover, so there needs to be more buildup and "setting expectations."

Since the US attack on Iraq garnished protest even before the war was official, we notice it's getting harder rather than easier to attack if you're likely to get into protracted war. My guess is that negotiations, bombing, and coups d'etat are, as identified under the first link, more feasible options for those in power in the US to attack Iran. Of course I'm no expert at all. The Iranian Oil Bourse denominated in Euros is a pretty serious affront from the point of view of those in power in the US, however. I agree with that.

As for the comments on Kunstler's blog, I should quit reading it only through bloglines.

Posted by: Mark at February 15, 2006 05:59 PM