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Summary: Wonderful Primer On Bush Administration's Global Ambitions!
Review: Whatever one may say about famed linguist Noam Chomsky regarding his provocative political views, it seems difficult to seriously doubt either his intellect or his integrity. While he may sometimes seem didactic or repetitive in his exhortations against the evils manifesting themselves in contemporary America, he always views the circumstances with insight, sophistication, and verve. In this offering, Chomsky faces off brilliantly with a superb broadside against the emerging unilateral imperialism represented by the Bush administration's foreign policy, and presents us with what he sees as a most fateful fork in the republic's future polity; with one road leading to a corporate-driven totalitarian society organized and conducted for the exclusive benefit of the rich and well-placed, or, on the other hand, a road leading toward a renewed commitment to America's more traditional values of moral leadership, a more constrained and human-oriented capitalism, and a turn toward greater inclusiveness within our own borders. Chomsky's argument finds its emotional traction by focusing on the nascent rise of what he views as a neo-conservative regime as represented by the Bush administration, one capable of becoming a fascistic totalitarian entity capable of attempting to recreate the world in its image, and willing to use the military in a no-holds barred attempt to unilaterally remake the world in a fashion more consonant to our tastes and sensibilities. Indeed, he fear that with the thrust of current policy, only a combined effort uniting what he refers to as the 'planet's public' can succeed in turning the momentum toward such a kinder and gentler fascism from permanently taking root in this country. After all, as he argues, once such a crypto-fascist regime takes power, they are hardly likely to relinquish it willingly. As in his previous works, Chomsky quickly disabuses readers of any lingering notions regarding the nature of the current polity by walking us through the litany of sins it is guilty of, from its contempt for tradition and international law to its arrogance in dealing with other nations, from its blatant militarism and saber-rattling to its consistent disregard for existing international agreements, and from its somewhat arbitrary attitude toward aggression of other sovereign states to its alarming support of anti-democratic and totalitarian regimes. He also decries American support of Israeli excesses toward the Palestinians, and suggests that American troops are becoming consistently involved in activities that can only be fairly described as constituting crimes against humanity and/or war crimes. All of this is, as usual, impeccably documented, and it is hard to ague with the amassed citations or the logic employed. He is particularly convincing in assailing the Bush record of active attempts to reverse tradition norms and attitudes toward freedom and civil liberties, such that, left unchecked, could conceivably deflate a half-century of tradition in terms of American respect for law, human rights, and international cooperation. He is at his most provocative here in citing the evidence of a deliberate American support for world-wide repression through surrogate client states such as Turkey, Pakistan, and Columbia, in which both American arms and generous foreign aid in what Chomsky argues is in direct proportion to their level of terror they visit upon their domestic populations. He notes that given current levels of citizen ignorance and apathy domestically, American policy is likely to continue along its current path without some intervention by concerned citizens. He concludes with a quite convincing demonstration of the many ways in which American policy has directly contributed to and sponsored the growth of international terrorism, and shows how our current policies of disregard for international law and the need for cooperation with our fellow nations leads to a geometric increase in the numbers of terrorist organizations and groups actively working against the USA. Needless to say, the book has a number of provocative threads running through it, and is definitely not for the feint of heart. But nowhere will you find a book that so intelligently and carefully documents all the reasons citizens have to become more concerned and more involved in the actions of their government and all the horror that the current administration is doing in the people's name. I highly recommend this book. Enjoy!
Rating: 
Summary: Chomsky needs fact-checking
Review: If I were an alien who read his book, I would think that Communists were peaceful people and America is the evil one that provoked all those global conflicts alone. But as a Chinese who understand a bit Communism, my perspective is totally different. It is very sad to see that such a world class linguistic scholar as Chomsky manipulated history to serve his political standpoint. He needs to do some fact checking. The following are a few examples: He said the Soviet Union did not threaten Turkey. Indeed, in 1945-46 Russians demanded Turkey to grant it a base in the Turkish strait; the Soviet Union also threatened Turkish neighboring counties such as Greece and Iran. In 1952 Turkey joined NATO due to the fear of Soviet aggression. Chomsky said CIA made a trap to attract Russians invade Afghanistan and the subsequent suffering in Afghanistan is caused by Americans! He also condemned NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999; he said that actually more Kosova Muslims killed Serbians than Serbians killed Kosova Muslims! His theme is: whatever America did, it is wrong and evil. Whatever Communists and Muslim extremeists did, they just reacted to American aggression. Professor Chomsky, please respect history, and please do not try to speak for those who suffer Communist oppression. Without American help, Taiwan and South Korea had ceased to exist long time ago, and millions of people had joined the fate of South Vietnam boat people.
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Summary: Chomsky is a sell-out
Review: Noam Chomsky is a brilliant in the field of linguistics, but he doesn't have the faintest clue about foreign affairs. He is a knee-jerk leftist who blames the US and Israel for everything that is wrong in the world. Palestinian suicide bombers are never criticized, nor is al-Qaeda's mass murdering of thousands of innocent civilians. Likewise, the millions murdered by Communist regimes are never mentioned, although the US is blamed for civilian casualties in defeating those regimes.
It's not so much that the facts presented by Chomsky are lies, its the fact that he uses them without putting them into any sort of context to bake his thesis.
I don't know him, but I'd be willing to bet the reason he hates Israel and sees them as a terrorist state is because he hates his father and is a self-loathing Jew.
Finally, Chomsky is all description and blame, but no proscriptions are offered. How would he have handled Saddam Hussein (leave him in power another 10 yrs?) What would he have done to destroy the al-Qaeda terrorist network in Afghanistan (would he have tried to negotiate with the Taliban for bin Laden's head?)
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Summary: Chumpski
Review: This is a review of "Hegemony" by Nick Cohen published in British Observer December 14, 2003 -- not exactly your anti-Left publication. "The Left, which has been formally committed to the Enlightenment ideal of universal freedom for two centuries, couldn't bring itself to be as honest. Instead millions abandoned their comrades in Iraq and engaged in mass evasion. [...] For the first time in its history the Left has nothing to say to the victims of fascism. The contortions are almost funny. In the Eighties, when the US and Europe were the de facto allies of Saddam, the Left wept rivers for his Kurdish and Arab victims. The concern dimmed when Saddam spoilt everything by invading Kuwait and turning himself into America's enemy. In the Nineties, the tyrant of Iraq was no longer responsible for conditions in the tyranny of Iraq. Its suffering was the fault of UN sanctions. By the spring of this year, evasion had reached outright denial as the reflection in the looking glass completed its about turn and opposed the only means of overthrowing Saddam. Noam Chomsky is the master of looking-glass politics. His writing exemplifies the ability of the Western Left to criticise everything from the West - except itself. He is immensely popular; but his popularity is mystifying on the first reading. His work is dense and filled with non sequiturs (here he seeks to use the Cuban missile crisis to explain the Iraq war, which is a little like using the first Moon landing to explain the dotcom boom). He claims to confront the comfortable with uncomfortable facts they don't want to face. Yet his audience is primarily a comfortable Western audience. The appeal lies in the simple argument that underlies the convoluted prose. Capitalism, particularly American capitalism, is responsible for the world's problems, it runs. Resistance, however perverted, is inevitable. If the resistance is barbaric the barbarism is the fault of capitalism. [...] In his younger and better days [Chomsky] condemned the dishonesty of intellectuals who went along with America's crimes in Indochina and South America. It would be heartening if he could apply the same standards to himself. Just before the war, Jose Ramos-Horta, one of the leaders of the struggle for independence of East Timor, looked on the anti-war protesters and asked: 'Why did I not see one single banner or hear one speech calling for the end of human rights abuses in Iraq, the removal of the dictator and freedom for the Iraqis and the Kurdish people?' Perhaps Professor Chomsky would like to carry on his campaign against hypocrisy by answering him." What can I add? How bad is one star? There are no no-star books on Amazon. Chumpski is a vicious hypocrite and liar.
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Summary: Dear "A reader from Los Angeles"
Review: Please read the book before reviewing it. One of Chomsky's main points in here is that U.S. sanctions have forced the general populations of other nations in many situations to have to rely upon despots, which then allows for the U.S. to come in and pretend to be heros and "save the day" with bombs. If you want to review a book and refute it in any form, you should state an argument refuting what is actually in the book, and not a general formulaic conclusion based on your own previous beliefs. This book is highly documented, well written, and does a great deal of explaining its points one by one, also following a logical path to prove its thesis. Civil rights and liberties are a cornerstone to all of Chomsky's political writings, thus simply stating that he does not focus on them properly is an injustice. If he were to retrace steps by explicitly stating definitions of civil rights and liberties, the criticism would become based upon assumed redundancy, which actually is a critique that many have already used against this book. My advice is to examine this from a political science perspective, as it is quite scientific in its analysis and examination of its thesis. No literary or psuedo-literary critique can suffice without examining this book from a scientific perspective, which I would love to do, but my main point in this review is to rebut a review that no one should take seriously. Fortunately, you have the right to review as you wish according to the 1st Amendment, but if you "court ingnorance," free speech could very well be the next thing on the chopping block.
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Summary: A ChomskySpeak primer
Review: In Chomsky's universe, all nations are created equal and are endowed with the same inalienable rights. Whether this extends to individuals, we don't know since Chomsky seems to set aside the concepts of civil liberties and individual rights. ...If such "internal affairs" are ignored, Chomsky is certainly right to equate Nazi war crimes with Allied atrocities (see page 13). He's also right to condemn the US bombing of North Korean dams fifty years ago, causing devastation to the rice harvest, and totally ignore the many more "internal" deaths due to perpetual famine induced by the Kim regime (page 182). In his view, all opposition to such regimes must be passive. As for the people that suffer under despotic rule -- too bad, keep your battles internal. Military assistance from the outside is a definite no-no. Even in this regard, Chomsky cannot remain consistent. All governments are created equal, but all despotic regimes are not. Those that are/were allied with the US are universally bad (e.g., South Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Israel, pre-Gulf war Iraq), while those that opposed the US (e.g., North Vietnam, Soviet Union, Cuba, Palestine, post-Gulf War Iraq) are immune from criticism. Witness Chomsky's routine condemnation of the US alliance with Saddam during the Iran-Iraq War, but nary a word about the US alliance with Stalin against Hitler. Only this sort of mindset can blame the Allies for the division of post-war Germany, and give Stalin a pass (page 223). As for Chomsky's canard about the US being the "invader" in Vietnam, such a view can only be held by someone who has never visited Ho Chi Minh City (as I have) and spoken to the South Vietnamese themselves (pages 100-101). In ChomskySpeak, violence and aggression is to be universally opposed on the international stage, and ignored in the domestic realm. If this makes sense to you, this book will safely leave your assumptions unchallenged.
Rating: 
Summary: A Step to the Left
Review: Alan Watts once used walking as a metaphor for philosophical progression. In walking one must take alternating steps, neither towards the destination, in different directions in order to stay on a straight path. In a media environment that has warmed to post-9/11 nationalist tendencies at the price of objectivity, we've been fed alot of steps to the right. This is a comprehensive counterbalancing step to the left. Yes, Chomsky is selective with his sources. Yes, Chomsky's views, quickly surmisable, are very opposed to American international policies. The title is apropriate, hegemony or survival. Which of these motives drives our policies abroad? His answer is hegemony, and this is as valid a view as the overwhelmingly popular idea that we are merely trying to survive and provide others with democracy and freedom. This book is meant to counterbalance a shockingly subjective media that has overlooked alot of negative aspects of American action overseas - action committed not by American citizens, but by politicians and corporations. Some false conclusions I've read in other reviews are, first, that Chomsky is anti-American. This is a popular idea, and if it intends to mean that Chomsky is very opposed to the way things are running in American government, it is true. However, if meant to imply that he has any contempt for American liberty or citizenry, it's pure slander. Several times in the book, he reminds Americans of their incredible freedoms and their ability to effect the government by using their unprecidented public voice. He never claims that Americans are repressed, the American repression he refers to is our actions overseas. American citizens, he says, are free to read any of the sources he quotes, which are many, and that we are merely misguided by a powerful information machine promoting uninformed political action if promoting action at all. He supports American freedoms like voting, if anything, as evident in other of his books and speeches, he want us to use our freedoms more. Some other reviewers suggested that he slants the context and sources he presents. At the same time, many of these reviewers failed to present a proper context for people unfamiliar with Chomsky. He's a libertarian, if anything he wants us to have more freedom. To suggest otherwise is to misunderstand his overwhelmingly negative tone, which as I said seems intent on counterbalancing a severely slanted media. He's also socialist, so of course he presents (in theme if not uotright stated) a desire for political and financial reform of one kind or another. He's a linguist that reads alot of political sources, commentaries, and even legal documents and statements released by our government and others. He makes no pretenses about being a political expert or having flawless political ideologies. He is a cognitive scientist attempting to read everything he can on political powers that be, logically analyze this information, and present what he believes to be the ethical solution. This book is well quoted, presents avenues for further reading in the form of a good notes and references section, and uses those references to present the viewpoint of a well-read libertarian socialist cognitive scientist. That is its face value, and taken as that, it is as fair and as academic a read as anything else on the shelves today. It's true that there is little new in this book. If you are a Chomsky reader, he rehashes old ideas and brings them into the modern context. There is new commentary on 9/11, and he writes for the first time with a retrospective (or at least interum) viewpoint of the iraq war (as opposed to all but predicting it in earlier texts). All else is historical review, which in my opinion, is always a pleasant refresher. For people that haven't read Chomsky before, he's a linguist, language is his profession. This is not light reading. It is however a great introduction to Chomsky as it seems to be a culmination of his previous works, which I would highly recommend as comparable steps to the left. He's one of today's great minds and, like him or not, he's a necessary read.
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Summary: Always interesting, but where is our current reality?
Review: As much as Professor Chomsky is one of the few real American intellectuals left who has a wide audience, I find much of what he says here to be repetitive. . . He sees more or less the same bad guys he would have seen in 1952 (Truman after all who was also one of our most Liberal Presidents), in 1962 (JFK), and even in 1980 under Carter. The problem has always been the National Security State and the crimes perpetrated in its name or rather in the pursuit of empire. . . but does it then follow that the rise of "Reaganism" is simply more of the same, the latest version of something that was rotten from the beginning? I reject this view. Reaganism is the name I use to refer to the confused ideology that hides under the label of "conservative" or "Repubilican" today. It is btw neither in any real sense of either word. This is where Chomsky's argument falls flat imo, in his failure to see and gauge the radical and "fascistic nature" of Reaganism for what it is. Finally it would be nice for Professor Chomsky to break loose from his past and give his readers something more beyond the same old "evil American Empire" song and dance . . . If Hunter S. Thompson can do it then so can Chomsky. Anyway I don't buy his story, think it far more complex than
that, think that we have turned a corner since 2000 with Reaganism and that our noble experiment is in danger of being destroyed for good. . .
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Summary: See you in Hell, Norm
Review: What can you say? I don't care how well written the book is, it is a bunch of BS. He's simple Anti-American, and no one should support this book.
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Summary: Hard Truth Always Hurts
Review: People like those who have given 1 star to this book are the main reason these books are written. Sure Chomsky never talks about civil liberties, women's issues, etc. But he does it because those can be thought as being internal affairs. He does not and never has writen about domestic policy (except for propaganda and education). His is scale is FAR larger than what many critics credit him for. His vision is truly global and not boxed-in.
Additionally, it's precisely that ethnocentric attitude that has the U.S. in such a disfavored view around the world. The majority of people here see the U.S. as self-sufficient and could happily live forever in isolation. Could not be more wrong! We're SO intertwined with the rest of the world that is actually OUR duty to be fair and ethical. It's just as when people tell me "the French are rude, because they don't speak English." In this book Chomsky poses one VERY important question: Is human race headed for self-destruction? And I think that though seeming contradictory, the question is un-answerable. It's a great book and I find it actually a departure from classical Chomskian argumentation. The book has a more humanistic side to it than Chomsky's other volumes. Very good and important read. Highly recommend.
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