Noam Chomsky

[Dissident Heart]

The American Empire Project Americans have long believed that the very notion of empire is an offense against our democratic heritage, yet in recent months, these two words -- American empire -- have been on everyone's lips. At this moment of unprecedented economic and military strength, the leaders of the United States have embraced imperial ambitions openly. How did we get to this point? And what lies down the road?To address these questions, Metropolitan Books is launching the American Empire Project. In these short, argument-driven books, our leading writers and thinkers will mount an immodest challenge to the fateful exercise of empire-building and to explore every facet of the developing American imperium, while suggesting alternate ways of thinking about, confronting, and acting in a new American century.The project is being developed by Tom Engelhardt and Steve Fraser, two editors with long and distinguished careers in publishing -- at Pantheon and Basic Books -- who are themselves historians and writers. In future seasons, Chalmers Johnson, who made "blowback" a household word, will take on the far reach of American militarism and what it means to garrison the planet in The Sorrows of Empire. Michael Klare will ask, in Blood and Oil, how American dependency on petroleum drives our strategic planning. And in How to Succeed at Globalization: A Primer for the Roadside Vendor, Mexican cartoonist Rafeal Barajas will depict the world economy from the perspective of the very small businessman.We are proud to inaugurate the project with Hegemony or Survival, a new book by Noam Chomsky, which is a landmark assessment of the implications and risks of America's quest for global dominance. www.americanempireproject...roject.htm

[Dissident Heart]

Question time He's 'The Elvis Of Academia' and 'The Devil's Accountant'. A relentless thorn in America's side, Noam Chomsky has spent 50 years bringing his country's elite to account. Here, he talks to Tim Adams about genocide and genitalia Sunday November 30, 2003The Observer ....I wonder if the professor never finds, in such debates, the responsibility of being 'the conscience of America' an onerous one?He smiles just a little wearily. 'Responsibility I believe accrues through privilege,' he begins. 'People like you and me have an unbelievable amount of privilege and therefore we have a huge amount of responsibility. We live in free societies where we are not afraid of the police, we have extraordinary wealth available to us by global standards. If you have those things then you have the kind of responsibility that a person does not have if he or she is slaving 70 hours a week to put food on the table - a responsibility at the very least to inform yourself about power. Beyond that it is a question of whether you believe in moral certainties or not.'Does he ever give himself time to stop, and, as it were, smell the roses?'I'd like to,' he says, for once without too much conviction. 'My time not working is devoted pretty much to playing with my grandchildren.'Before my time is up, we talk about Bush's visit to Britain, and the suggestion in his book that the new Cold War will not be between America and another superpower, or between America and international terrorism, but between America and informed global public opinion. 'New York is a very insular society, but 11 September came as a wake-up call and many people, it seems, were led to the sudden realisation that they did not know enough about their country's role in the world. Small publishers responded by reissuing some of the books that began to explain the history. People did not necessarily agree with the analysis, but it was clear that they wanted to hear it.' Can he imagine a time when that swell of disquiet is reflected within the US electoral spectrum? 'At the moment that does not seem possible, but there is no doubt that it could become so. It depends,' he says, 'on whether the United States is capable of creating a democracy not reliant on the concentration of capital, or if a popular movement can overcome those restrictions.' It depends, many might say, on how many people read Chomsky.observer.guardian.co.uk/m...08,00.html

[Dissident Heart]

Simon Mars: Do you think control over energy resources was the main reason for the invasion of Iraq?Noam Chomsky: They didn't decide to invade Eastern Congo where there's much worse massacres going on. Of course it was Iraq's energy resources. It's not even a question. Iraq's one of the major oil producers in the world. It has the second largest reserves and it's right in the heart of the Gulf's oil producing region, which US intelligence predicts is going to be two thirds of world resources in coming years.The invasion of Iraq had a number of motives, and one was to illustrate the new National Security Strategy, which declares that the United States will control the world permanently by force if necessary and will eliminate any potential challenge to that domination. It is called pre-emptive war. It is not a new policy, it's just never been announced so brazenly, which is why it caused such uproar, including among the foreign policy elite in the United States. They're appalled by it. But having announced the doctrine, it needed an exemplary action, to show that the United States really meant it. But if the United States is going to attack somebody, the action has to meet several criteria. The first and crucial criterion is that they must be completely defenseless. It's stupid to attack anyone who can shoot back. Anyone knows this. They understood perfectly well that Iraq was completely defenseless, the weakest country in the region. Its military expenditure was about a third of Kuwait, devastated by sanction, held together by Scotch tape. Mostly dis-armed, under complete surveillance, so Iraq met that condition.Second criteria is that the place attacked has to be important enough to matter. There's no point taking over Eastern Congo, which is also defenseless, but Iraq matters. That's where the issue of oil comes up, since the United States will end up with military bases right in the heart of the oil producing region.The third criteria is you have to somehow pretend it's a threat to your existence. While the people of Kuwait and Iran might be delighted to tear Saddam Hussein limb from limb, they still did not regard him as a threat. No-one thought he was a threat. But in the United States the propaganda did succeed in moving the American population, and Congress passed a resolution authorizing the use of force to defend the US against the continuing threat posed by Iraq. No matter what you think, that's just laughable. www.gulf-news.com/Article...eID=104336

[Dissident Heart]

Guerrilla of the WeekEditor's Pick, December 8, 2003 Europeans have philosopher stars. They smoke Gauloises, they cavort with arty fashion models and artists who cut up cows, they wear Armani, they write long, incomprehensible treatises from prison cells about the transcendental apparatus and the dialectic of empire. Here in the U.S. we have one rumpled 74-year-old linguistics professor who looks like your boring uncle who collects model trains. His name is Noam Chomsky, and he's having something of a renaissance, despite the fact the mainstream American media won't touch him a ten-foot mic pole. In some ways, you can't blame the network programmers. Despite his prolific body of work, Chomsky is far from ready-for-primetime, he wears the same blue sweater everyday, he speaks in a barely audible grumble, he insists on packing as much detail and historical context into every answer to make any sort of 10 second soundbite a total impossibility, and most importantly (to his detriment) he holds the media itself as accountable for the crimes of the American empire as the perpetrators themselves. Not exactly the most attractive guest for a morning talk show. But despite the lack of media exposure, Chomsky is at the top of his game. His slim book entitled "9/11" has sold more than half a million copies. He blew away a 30,000 person stadium full of cheering anti-corporate globalization activists at last year's World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Millions of college students revere him as their hero. His new book, "Hegemony and Survival: America's Quest for Global Domination" has just been released, and the response has been heady. The influential New Yorker magazine recently ran a 15 page in-depth profile on his life and ideas, and The New York Times Magazine just ran a controversial interview that among other things insinuated he was a "self-hating Jew." Bono calls him the "Elvis of Academia." He must be doing something right. The foundation of Chomsky's moral universe is the belief that intentions and rhetoric have no meaning outside of actions. In other words, you can talk all the bullshit you want about democracy, but when you're blowing up children, you're a fascist. Chomsky puts special emphasis on the role of the intellectual to hold those in power to the fire. That most western intellectuals fail miserably in this task is not surprising to Chomsky. In fact, little fazes him. Even being called a "terrorist lover."Not long after 9/11, he made the mortal sin of pointing out that in the big scheme of things 3,000 American deaths, while horrible and tragic, was nothing really out of the ordinary when compared to the death and destruction that regularly is inflicted on Third World nations, often by the U.S. itself. This, not surprisingly, didn't go over well. Chomsky was attacked as an "Al Qaeda apologist." The wounds were too raw for that sort of cold historical analysis. That the U.S. invaded Iraq largely on the exploitation of the American public's post-9/11 fears shows those wounds still haven't healed. Having recently returned from Iraq, we headed up to Cambridge to interview the graying anarcho-syndicalist for GNN's upcoming book and film project.The following is an excerpt from that conversation: www.guerrillanews.com/hum...c3566.html

[Chris OConnor]

ShannonYou've done a masterful job of selling me on Chomsky. We've included a Chomsky book in our Jan/Feb 2004 book poll, and I have already cast my vote for it. Thank you for the time and effort you have spent in sharing all of this information with us. I really appreciate when members do their homework and show us why we should read something as opposed to just what we should read. Thank you.Chris "When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward,for there you have been, and there you will always want to be."

[Dissident Heart]

"By the left... about turn" There's a simple argument behind the convoluted prose of Noam Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival, but the reality of Iraq shatters his looking-glass world, says Nick Cohen Sunday December 14, 2003The Observer books.guardian.co.uk/revi...45,00.html

[Dissident Heart]

On Tuesday, The President of the United Nations Society of Writers and Artists Hans Janitschek presented Chomsky with the Award of Excellence at the UN Correspondents Association Club in New York. Chomsky is an institute professor and professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest For Global Dominance, 9-11, Power and Terror and many other books. After the awards ceremony, Chomsky addressed a large crowd talking about US imperialism, Iraq, space travel and more. He then took questions from reporters. www.democracynow.org/arti.../05/177223