BOOK REVIEW A case against
self-annihilation Hegemony or
Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance
by Noam Chomsky
Reviewed by Piyush Mathur
Keep your critic close to you - s/he
beautifies your yard; without water or soap, s/he
cleanses you! - Kabeer Das
In a spot-on
essay titled "The Loneliness of Noam Chomsky", Arundhati
Roy dared to state the obvious: Noam Chomsky, the
globally celebrated pro-democracy activist and
intellectual from the United States, remains isolated at
home even as the nation continues to tout its democratic
traditions (The Hindu, August 24, 2003). As if in a
compensatory gesture of superlative recognition from the
rest of the globe, Roy noted, "When the sun sets on the
American empire, as it will, as it must, Noam Chomsky's
work will survive."
Roy's conviction aside, the
posterity of Chomsky's work - its future survival - is
as open a question as the end of US hegemony; Chomsky's
isolation in the Anglo world, on the other hand,
received fresh certification in the early reviews of
Hegemony or Survival.
For instance, Nick
Cohen of The Observer (UK) spent more than half of his
review on a vague diatribe against "the Left" and
chastised Chomsky for being "the master of looking-glass
politics" (December 14, 2003). Samantha Power, writing
for the New York Times, was hardly charitable (January
4, 2004).
"But for all that is wrong with
Hegemony or Survival," Power conceded only "two
reasons" for "reading Chomsky today": one, the fact that
"his critiques have come to influence and reflect
mainstream opinion elsewhere in the world", and two, the
catastrophe that "the radicalism of the Bush
administration has laid bare many of the structural
defects in American foreign policy, defects that Chomsky
has long assailed".
Cohen's venomous and
thoroughly convoluted vagueness is thus matched by
Power's peculiar specificity: She narrowly frames
Hegemony or Survival as a critique of US
President George W Bush's foreign policy - and
rationalizes Chomsky's significance in terms of his
global popularity or diplomatic image-value for the US
(rather than truth-value, ethics, or genuine national
introspection). Either way, a strangely defensive and
rather parochial posture vis-a-vis Chomsky is on display
on the part of both Cohen and Power - even though it is
entirely in line with the reception Chomsky has
generally been accorded in the Anglo-American world.
Beyond parochialism In approaching the
generality of Hegemony or Survival one should not
- contra Cohen and Power - be blinded by the specificity
of the subtitle America's Quest for Global
Dominance. I say that despite the public knowledge
that Chomsky is a long-term critic of US foreign policy,
a role that this book only reaffirms. I say that also
while being in receipt of an e-mail message by Chomsky
(dated February 25, 2004) in which he underlined that
"one theme of the book, stressed from the outset, is
that the basic Bush Doctrines are not at all new, and in
fact trace right back to the earliest days when the US
began to be a global power, under FDR [president
Franklin D Roosevelt], before US entry into [World War]
II".
The reasons why the book definitively goes
beyond its central theme are as follows.
There
is something in the sheer spirit of genuine
self-criticism that allows the critic - Chomsky the US
citizen, in this case - to transcend her object and
local context of critique and to show absolutely
everyone else a way beyond parochialism. Chomsky's
criticism of US foreign policy is therefore his way of
providing a proper audit of global politics as a whole:
no responsible thinking mind could continue to work
merely with nationalistic or ethnocentric categories of
policy analysis past reading Chomsky.
Second,
the general thrust of the book's title is only
qualified, not canceled, by the specificity of the
subtitle: and so the reader is licensed to think through
the book about the choice between hegemony and survival
as a matter of human interest - cutting across
governments and communities worldwide. So, even as
Hegemony or Survival mainly provides a
contemptuous lowdown on the hegemonic priorities of US
foreign policy, its critical comments on repressive
regimes around the world need not be ignored, nor should
its criticism of the European role in world politics be
slighted.
Third, Chomsky explicitly frames the
whole issue of US foreign policy - policing? - as
already a matter of broad evolutionary concern at the
planetary level. As such, it is significant for a book
in political critique to begin with a discussion of the
biologist Ernst Mayr's observation that "the human form
of intellectual organization may not be favored by
selection" (page 1) and to end with a note on the
connection between the global grassroots movements -
"the emerging global bonds of sympathy and solidarity" -
and "the future of our endangered species" (page 236).
Onset of global terror or ...
Written against the backdrop of the Bush
administration's response to the attacks of September
11, 2001 (including the Iraq war), Hegemony or
Survival traces the penchant for supremacy and
control as an element historically central to the US
polity. This penchant has typically pushed US
governments domestically to support "polyarchy" - "a
system of elite decision-making and public ratification"
- and to intervene globally to install regimes
reflective of US interests (page 5). The US polity has
thus twice betrayed its self-professed ideal of
democracy.
On the surface it may seem that
Chomsky is out to expose US political hypocrisy - the
gap between its stated ideals and actual policy. What he
delivers, however, is a chilling expose of the
connectivity between America's governmental rhetoric of
hegemonic control and implemental reality especially
through World War II (but in fact going way back to the
colonization of North America by European settlers).
In the latter instance, his critique of rather
contemporary US interventions - such as the war on Iraq
- merges with a well-illustrated denunciation of Western
colonization and imperialism.
On the whole,
then, the book foregrounds the continuum not only
between US domestic politics and foreign policy,
political rhetoric and action, but also between the old
European imperialism and the global US domination past
World War II. The US comes off here as the new leader of
the older practice of imperialism - now overlaid with a
great deal more moralizing and political evangelism than
ever before: "An era of enlightenment and benevolence
was upon us, in which the civilized nations, led by the
US, then 'at the height of its glory', acted out of
altruism and 'moral fervor' in pursuit of exalted
ideals" (page 51).
Armed interventions:
'Failed' and 'successful' Chomsky debunks the
idea that such a pursuit has succeeded; in fact, and as
if by way of contrast, he reminds the reader that since
World War II, "there have been two major examples of
resort to force that really did put an end to terrible
crimes, in both cases arguably in self-defense: India's
invasion of East Pakistan in 1971, ending a mass
slaughter and other horrors, and Vietnam's invasion of
Cambodia in December 1978, terminating Pol Pot's
atrocities as they were picking up through 1978. Nothing
remotely comparable took place under the Western aegis
in the 1990s" (page 22).
Elsewhere, he points
out that "when a US-backed South African invasion came
close to conquering newly independent Angola, Cuba sent
troops on its own initiative, scarcely even notifying
Russia, and beat back the invaders" (page 94). In a
rather significant political compliment, he declares:
"The defense of Angola was one of Cuba's most
significant contributions to the liberation of Africa"
(page 94).
As for the Anglo-American
intervention in World War II, Chomsky emphasizes that
"the US and British governments, the business world, and
a good deal of elite opinion" had generally harbored a
favorable view of fascism for long (page 67). "By 1943,"
he reminds us, "the US and Britain had begun their
efforts, which intensified after the war, to dismantle
the anti-fascist resistance worldwide and restore
something like the traditional order, often rewarding
some of the worst war criminals with prominent roles"
(page 69).
The highlights The above
details apart, most of the book comprises winding,
original discussions of key events in the history of US
foreign policy past World War II. These discussions
expose many political and diplomatic myths
opportunistically popularized by several quarters,
especially the American state, establishment
intelligentsia, and corporate media.
One such
myth, for example, is that capitalism has clearly
succeeded over communism as a system. Comparing them
both as systems of domination - and keeping in mind that
colonization and slavery provided the bedrock for the
rise of Western capitalism - Chomsky concludes that
"communism's ruins have many advantages over the regions
that have been under unbroken Western domination for
centuries" (page 146).
Akin to the above
educative insight are illuminating analyses of the
character and outcomes of the US interventions in the
Philippines, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Colombia,
East Timor, Turkey, Indonesia, the former Yugoslavia,
Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, Vietnam, Indonesia, Angola,
Nicaragua - and Iraq. Overall, a rather disturbing
picture emerges in which the US appears constantly
striving to perpetuate what Chomsky calls its "imperial
grand strategy" (page 12).
Central to that
strategy is the drive for "global management" - whose
"basic missions ... endured from the early postwar
period [include]: containing other centers of global
power within the 'overall framework of order' managed by
the US; maintaining control of the world's energy
supplies; barring unacceptable forms of independent
nationalism; and overcoming 'crises of democracy' within
domestic enemy territory" (page 16). Chomsky undertakes
to unmask precisely that imperial grand strategy,
peppering it with facts presumably uncomfortable to the
US political establishment.
Those facts include,
for example, Bob Dole's visit and assurance to Saddam
Hussein in April 1990 that "a commentator on Voice of
America who had been critical of him had been removed"
(page 112). Also included are many eye-opening accounts
of dictators intimately supported by several US
governments.
Interspersed with wry humor and
sarcasm, Chomsky's narrative successfully shows that the
American emperor, while preaching modesty to the rest,
himself struts about rather ostentatiously. Central to
that narrative are the following themes: America's
self-exclusion from many key global treatises; the
embrace of preventive (rather than preemptive) war; the
use of foreign aid as a way to manipulate the domestic
politics of other nations; America's refusal to pay
reparations to Nicaragua as ordered by the World Court
and endorsed by the UN Security Council (the US veto
notwithstanding); the US establishment's prioritization
of its own international credibility over the
consideration for casualties from the use of military
force in the foreign lands; the exercise of democracy by
many nations against US pressure; and the consistent
refusal of the US establishment to learn the right and
honest lessons from the nation's history.
Protecting America from itself, preserving
humanity A diehard rationalist, Chomsky views the
American state, a superpower, as an institutionalized
irrationality that needs to be prevented from both
self-destruction and world destruction - through
strategic recourse by all thinking minds to the "second
superpower": "world public opinion" (pages 253, 10). He
backs up even this philosophical-sounding claim by
invoking the massive empirical evidence of global
opinion polls that have typically cast a thoroughly
negative light on the actions of the US government.
Chomsky deems US polity destructive because its
"basic principle is that hegemony is more important than
survival" (page 231). As such, he views the peculiar
framework of the economic globalization of the 1990s,
orchestrated to a great extent by the US ruling elite,
as yet another step toward self-destruction - especially
because it equates the economic structure of the
neoclassical market with the political structure of
democracy.
In this setting, "the interests of
those with no votes are valued at zero: future
generations, for example. It is therefore rational,"
Chomsky argues, "to destroy the possibility for decent
survival for our grandchildren, if by so doing we can
maximize our own 'wealth' - which means a particular
perception of self-interest constructed by vast
industries devoted to implanting and reinforcing it"
(pages 233-234). "The threats to survival," he goes on
to underline, "are currently being enhanced by dedicated
efforts not only to weaken the institutional structures
that have been developed to mitigate the harsh
consequences of market fundamentalism, but also to
undermine the culture of sympathy and solidarity that
sustains these institutions" (page 235).
In
words reminiscent of Rajni Kothari, Chomsky sums up by
arguing that there are "two trajectories in current
history: one aiming toward hegemony, acting rationally
within a lunatic doctrinal framework as it threatens
survival; the other dedicated to the belief that
'another world is possible', in the words that animate
the World Social Forum ..." (page 236).
Going by
Chomsky's vote - for the latter of the above two - the
world should gear up to save the Unites States from
itself in order to save itself from the United States.
President Bush's fervent appeals for international help
through his rather intractable Iraqi crisis suggest that
Chomsky may just have a point.
Conclusion Chomsky's critics tend to accuse him of
simplification, cynicism, overly idealistic reasoning
(amounting to anarchic irrationality), and even
anti-Americanism. As far as the accusation of
anti-Americanism or lack of patriotism is concerned, I
only need to urge those critics to pull themselves out
of their parochial slumber and cultivate the maturity
necessary to appreciate genuine criticism. If those
critics succeed in accomplishing the above, they might
just be able to figure out how Chomsky's reflexive
criticism more than qualifies to command global
significance as an intellectual and humanitarian
achievement.
In relation to the other charges,
it is painful to come to terms with Power's usage of
words such as "raging" and "seethes" to characterize the
expression of Hegemony or Survival, a book
written in patently non-sentimental register (admittedly
sprinkled with sardonic humor). Equally painful is the
import of simplistic reductionisms into, and their
imposition upon, Chomsky's highly nuanced analysis - by
both Power and Cohen.
Nothing short of
ideological or personal bias or lack of reading skills
could lead Power to suggest, blandly, that for Chomsky
"the world is divided into oppressor and oppressed", and
that he considers it "easy to get the balance right
between liberty and security, or democracy and equality
- or to figure out what the hell to do about Pakistan".
Power also actively misrepresents Chomsky in
suggesting that he can't distinguish between US air
strikes in Serbia from the September 11 attacks, and in
intuiting that he thinks "that individuals within the
American government are not thinking seriously about the
costs of alliances with repressive regimes".
There is no evidence in this book to validate
the foregoing claims about Chomsky by Power; outside
this book, if Chomsky were to choose the path of
analytical simplicity, he would not have spent his
lifetime attempting to challenge conventional
explanations offered by US state agencies, mainstream
media, or, for that matter, by the global ruling elite.
For all that, and contra Power, Chomsky is
anything but "accustomed to preaching to an uncritical
choir".
Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest
for Global Dominance by Noam Chomsky. Metropolitan
Books, Henry Holt and Company: New York, 2003; 278
pages. Price: US $22 (hardcover).
Piyush
Mathur, PhD, an alumnus of Jawaharlal Nehru
University, New Delhi, and Virginia Tech, USA, is an
independent observer of world affairs, the environment,
science and technology policy, and literature.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
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Jul 10, 2004
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Central, Hong Kong
2003). As if in a
compensatory gesture of superlative recognition from the
rest of the globe, Roy noted, "When the sun sets on the
American empire, as it will, as it must, Noam Chomsky's
work will survive." 
