Author|: Noam Chomsky as interviewed by David Barsamian

ISBN: 080507967X

The following review was contributed by: John Walsh: CLICK TO VIEW John Walsh's Reviews

How has the USA accumulated an empire? Why does it have an empire and what does it plan to do with it? These questions are at the heart of this penetrating and important collection of interviews with Noam Chomsky, one of the clearest-thinking American intellectuals. The answers to the questions are derived from carefully analysed events, speeches and historical trends. Chomsky’s method is derived from his academic work which has made him perhaps the most significant scholar of linguistics in the western world. What he has to say, therefore, is generally worth listening to with some interest.  

One of Chomsky’s main contentions is that threats are continually manufactured by the ruling elite to enable them to continue to restrict the privileges and rights of the majority. In this, they are assisted by the thread of fearfulness that, he believes, has run through American society from its very beginning. Constantly, Americans have been led to believe that they were under immediate threat from native Indians who must be exterminated, Mexico, Spain, disease, illness, drugs and welfare queens and no end of other supposed enemies. As a result, it has been possible not just to demonise those enemies but to persuade the American people they have the right and indeed the duty to suppress the enemy. This is part of the inherent racism of empire, in which the imperial power persuades itself and its people that the reason they dominate is not through greed and personal aggrandizement but because the dominated are evil, morally defective or in some other way incapable of ruling themselves. This pattern has been seen in empires from the Roman to the British. It is easy to recognise the language of ‘failed states’ from this method of thinking. Iraq, therefore, once the obvious lies about weapons of mass destruction had been disproved, had to be characterised as a dangerous threat to the world –false associations linking Saddam Hussein and the country with the 9/11 attacks had been made by the Bush administration since they occurred. This was used to justify the assault: “The United States is invading Iraq. It’s as open an act of aggression as there has been in modern history, a major war crime. This is the crime for which the Nazis were hanged, the act of aggression. Everything else secondary. And here’s a clear and open example. The pretenses for the invasion are no more convincing that Hitler’s” (p.35). So why was it important to invade an almost defenceless country at the cost of thousands of lives? To control the oil through opening military bases of more or less permanent duration – “Not because the United States wants the actual oil – it’s going to get oil one way or another on the market – but because it wants to control the oil, which is a totally different matter. It has been understood since the 1940s that control of the oil is a lever against your enemies. And the US enemies are Europe and [north-east] Asia. Those are the regions of the world that could move toward independence. One of the way to prevent that is to keep your hand on the spigot” (p.112).

Provocative. Persuasive. Recommended.

John Walsh, Shinawatra University, October 2005