February 1, 2004

Noam Chomsky is a phenomenal intellectual and educator of our times. He is the conscience of the silent majority around the world. His latest classic Hegemony or Survival is the primer for understanding the process of brutal empire building by the United States’ mighty military power. Chomsky is a linguist par excellence, with a logician’s pen. He uses his mind and writes with a passionate and aching heart, worried about the survival of our planet, facing the hegemonic agenda of his own country. It had held great promise for humanity but is now turning into a nightmare for people on this planet. His adversaries, knowing the power of his pen, have labelled him the professional provocateur. But the fact is that he has no hidden agenda except the love for humanity.

In September 2002 the present Bush administration announced its imperial grand strategy of claiming the right to resort to force to eliminate any perceived challenge to US global hegemony. The September 2001 New York tragedy is being utilized to assert the grand design of conquest not only of this earth, but also beyond. The space is also the target of its terrifying ballistic-missile defence programme. The American empire will militarize space, so all living creatures will be threatened by nuclear terror.

It is this scary future for humankind that Chomsky is concerned about. He has undertaken this project for which the mandarins of the empire have taunted him. Prior to the Iraqi invasion, there were protests of millions around the world. In February 2003, the New York Times reported:

“There may still be two superpowers on the planet — the United States and world public opinion”.

The United States claims to be a democracy but is afraid of people’s power. At best, it is a ‘polyarchy’ in which privileged elites are making decisions. This coterie of elite makes decisions by manoeuvring the system and manufacturing fear in the general population. There are academic theoreticians who articulate the imperialist ideology of democracy, rationalizing domination by the few with the help of empire’s gladiators.

There are two avenues of control of the general population. From the seventeenth century onwards, when the masses became conscious of their own power against the mighty king and his entourage, the first grand theoretician Hobbes talked about the Leviathan controlling the beastly nature of ordinary people. Students and media are nurtured with the philosophy of controlling the herd by a small number of well-informed and good natured core men. This legacy has been added with Machiavellian theorem of divide and rule with foxy politics.

The contemporary public intellectuals, like Walter Lippmann writing on the practice of democracy advocated manufacturing consent, so that a ‘specialized class’ could manage the ‘common interests’. The decision makers must live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd. These ‘ignorant and meddlesome outsiders’ should be spectators and not ‘participants’.

Political theoreticians, Harold Lasswell, Edward Bernays and Samuel Huntington all endorsed the ‘crisis of democracy’ to discipline the institutions responsible for “the indoctrination” of the young, schools, universities, churches, and perhaps even through government control of the media, if self-censorship does not suffice.

The second avenue of control comes through the creation of public institutions for disseminating propaganda. Britain pioneered with its Ministry of Information, which was ‘to direct the thought of most of the world’. The Ministry and other state organs guide the BBC, for its world news broadcast, seemingly neutral. President Woodrow Wilson created his Committee on Public Information. Lippman and Bernays were the key members of the Wilson Committee, who propagated ‘the engineering of consent... the very essence of the democratic process.”

Chomsky quotes Randal Marlin from the history of propaganda, learnt from the pioneers, there was “widespread imitation by Nazi Germany, South Africa, the USSR, and the US Pentagon.” The Reagan administration established an Office of Public Diplomacy to manufacture consent for its murderous policies in Central America. Then there is the Operation Truth to cow down the civilian population within the country in a military fashion of twisting arms by psychological tortures for the truth.

With this double talk of fear and discipline in democracy, George Orwell is alive in the capitalist hegemonic power, although it has been assumed that he was only writing about Stalinist Russia and other perverse totalitarian regimes.

There are two key chapters in the book: “The Imperial Grand Strategy” and “The Iraq Connection”. Although the grand strategy was announced in September 2002, the roots go back to the Reagan-Bush era when economic crisis created panic in the post Vietnam era.

It was with the re-emergence of assertive conservatives, commonly called the neo-imperialist conservatives with Thatcher in Britain, rolling back the welfare state, and Reagan’s diversion to foreign adventures to hide the crisis in capitalism, that the process of brutal empire building commenced. Under these circumstances, to maintain political power, fear for foreign devils and the slogan of the ‘axis of evil’ had to be invented to line up public support.

The Soviet Union became the target being dubbed the ‘evil empire’. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the cold warrior secretly planned ‘to draw the Russians into the Afghan trap”. When the Soviet Union intervened because of the internal struggles within Afghanistan, the United States and its allies had their long wish in place.

Bush (Senior) was defeated by Bill Clinton in 1992 with the slogan “it is the economy stupid’. For eight years, the neo-conservatives kept pressure on Clinton, demonizing him, and by 2001 they were back in power by manoeuvring the election process. The hegemonic agenda returned on the table under Bush Junior.

The invasion of Iraq was the outcome of preventive, not pre-emptive war. Even some of the critiques of Chomsky had to agree that the present US ruling junta has annoyed the closest of friends when:

“We rebuff the complaints of foreigners about the 650 people who remain holed in Guantanamo kennels, denied access to lawyers and family members, with not even their names released.”

For those who talk of the good deeds of the United States in providing foreign aid and fighting for human rights around the world, Chomsky has countless examples. He has demonstrated that the US aid grows in direct proportion to the degree to which the recipient country’s rulers are guilty of genocidal atrocities.

Finally, Chomsky is really worried about the survival of this planet with the reckless policies of the United States in environment and the accumulation of weapons of mass destruction in its domestic arsenals and exporting it to the dangerous regimes who brutalize their own people and claim to be pro-American. He has written the book with great passion and collected all the evidence meticulously and presented the case with a clear mind.

Hegemony or Survival — America’s Quest for Global Dominance
By Noam Chomsky
Metropolitan Books, New York
ISBN 0805074007
278pp. $22

Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window)