Rating: 
Summary: Informative read
Review: To those who spend their post referring to the "Arguably the most important intellectual alive" NY Times quote, you must realize that Chomsky himself, on several occasion, has made the exact point you have about it's misrepresentation which is usually followed by long dissertations about the problems with the media.This book is full of facts and references that are hard to argue. You can certainly disagree with his opinions, if you dare, but to turn a blind eye to the content simply due to an inability to contemplate the conclusion couldn't be a more damaging philosophy for a true, working democracy. His voracious research coupled with his intellect bring him to conclusions that point to vast problems with this country's policies and the global oppression derived thereof and would therefore be remiss to not disclose his thoughts. Hence, this book. He has stated many times that you shouldn't take the word of one man, or even one book, but to research claims to your own satisfaction to form opinion. The same should held in regard to this book. If you disagree with the opinion, you must arm yourself with as much information as possible to argue with, which of course is one of the exercises Chomsky is famous for. This is a great read for those who simply wish to gain more insight into the workings of what is described, in great detail, as a harmful global policy by the greatest power in human history.
Rating: 
Summary: One Third Rehash, One Third New Stuff, One Third Vital
Review:
Yes, Chomsky tends to be repetitive and to rehash old stuff, so take away one-star. However, and I say this as the #1 Amazon reviewer of non-fiction about national security, to suggest that Chomsky is ever anything less than four stars is to betray one's ignorance and bias. He adds new material in this book, and perhaps even more importantly, he delivers this book at a time when America is faced with what may well be its sixth most important turning point in history (after independence, the civil war, two world wars, and the cold war). How America behaves in the 2004 election is going to determine whether the Republic deteriorates into a quasi-totalitarian and bunkered society with a lost middle class and a gated elite, or whether we restore the world's faith in American goodness, moral capitalism, and inclusive democracy.
Chomsky brilliantly brings forth a theme first articulated in recent times by Jonathan Schell ("Unconquerable World") by pointing out that the *only* "superpower" capable of containing the neo-conservative, neo-totalitarian, neo-Nazi militarism and unilateralism of the current Bush Administration is "the planet's public." Chomsky updates his work with both excellent and well-balanced footnotes and an orderly itemization of the arrogance, militarism, contempt for international law, arbitrary aggression, and--Bible thumpers take note--proven track record for supporting dictators, Israeli genocide against Palestinians, and US troop participation in--directly as well as indirectly--what will inevitably be judged by history to be a continuing pattern of war crimes. Chomsky, past master of the topic of "manufacturing consent" now turns his attention to the manner in which the Bush Administration is attempting to establish "new norms" that, if permitted to stand, will reverse 50 years of human progress in seeking the legitimization of governance, respect for human rights, and collective decision-making and security. He is especially strong on documenting the manner in which US aid grows in direct relation to the degree to which the recipient country is guilty of genocidal atrocities, with Colombia and Turkey being prime examples. The case can be made, and Chomsky makes it, that the US arms industry, and US policies on the selling and granting of arms world-wide, are in fact a direct US commitment to repression, genocide, and terrorism sponsored by one big state: the US. He is most interesting when he discusses the new US approach to repression, the privatization of actions against the underclasses of the world. Morality plays big with Chomsky, who brings new ideas in with his discussion of moral asymmetry and the lack of moral integrity in US decision-making. Sadly, the US public is both ignorant and unengaged, and do not realize the crass immorality of all that is being done "in their name." Chomsky reminds us that George Bush the Second pardoned a known international terrorist, Luis Posada Carriles, because of his ties to the extremist Cuban-American community that his brother Jeb Bush is so dependent upon for support. Over the course of the middle of the book Chomsky addresses the competing models for national development, with Cuba prominent as an alternative model that the US has sought to destroy, as the US worked very hard to destroy Catholic "liberation theology" because of its temerity in believing that the poor should be protected against repressive governments and their American corporate paymasters. Chomsky is correct, I believe, when he states and documents that the US model of capitalism has pathologically high rates of inequality and poverty (even CNN has noticed--as I waited for an airplane in Salt Lake City, a bastion of common sense, the lead story was the collapse of the US middle class). Chomsky moves from his discussion of exceptions to US capitalism to a discussion of the importance of regional differentiation, and this is of course in direct competition with the US view that the world should be a homogenized generic variation of the US culture, with one big difference: 80% of the benefits for the US, while the rest of the world shares the left-overs. Chomsky agrees with Dr. Col Max Manwaring and other mainstream strategists (see my review of "The Search for Security" when he identifies the legitimacy of governments, and the sanctity of human and civil rights, as the two litmus tests for determining if balance and fairness exist in a society. By this measure, the US is now failing. The book begins to conclude with a semantic discussion of terrorism, what is terror, who sponsors terror, and here Chomsky draws on both his linguistic and historical background to make the case that the US is the primary sponsor of terrorism in the world (something both the Indonesian and Malaysian leadership would tend to agree with), and he notes that the US, in a bi-partisan manner among the elite, has consistently been hypocritical about terrorism. Nelson Mandela, and his resistance party, were labeled terrorists by the US for many years. Are we in a passing nightmare, or the beginning of a renaissance? The jury is still out. I personally believe that John McCain would have been a vastly superior president that this lightweight bully that we have now, with his out-of-control neo-conservatives, none of whom ever served in uniform and some of whom--as with Dick Cheney--were active draft dodgers. However, I also believe that both John McCain, and Dick Gephardt if he were to be elected, are too close to the "business as usual" crowd of beltway politicians capitalized by beltway bandits. In other words, Howard Dean would not have been possible without the excesses of George Bush Junior. God does indeed work in mysterious ways, and I pray that the American public will both read Chomsky, and understand that they represent the only super-power that can restore legitimacy, sanity, comity, and prosperity to the American Republic. Down with the carpetbaggers--El Pueblo Avansa--EPA!.
Rating: 
Summary: More false ideas and rehashed faiths
Review: Noam Chomsky has now written what must be his millionth book. This new tome stays with his typical argument that everything American is bad and American power is the worst thing the world has ever seen. Mr. Chomsky, ignoring American democracy and women's rights and our essential freedoms, takes America to task for being a 'Hegemon'. Using falsely long words touched with Hubris and tainted by a plethora of superlatives he lays into the 'American Empire' mentality declaring that he is 'challenging the reigning ideological system'. Apparently this ideological system is western civilization and to Chomsky things like allowing women to vote and having free speech and democracy mean nothing, if anything they are an evil appendage that he would like to dismantle in order to build a 'new society' of love and peace. This book and its arguments are as outlandish and off base and unrealistic as most of his volumes. Like 'blowback' and 'towards a new cold war' he believes that by simply arguing that America is evil he can sell copies. Yet his arguments are rehashed and mostly illogical. For instance he wants us to believe that America is the greatest terrorist nation on earth and that we are the greatest sponsor of human rights violations. Well at least in America women can leave the house without permission from a man, unlike Saudi, and at lease in America we get to vote every four years, unlike China. This book is so full of lies and false claims and weak arguments that its almost to difficult to try and explain what exactly the new argument here is. Mostly this new volume is a waste of time as it mirrors previously published Chomsky diatribes.
Rating:
Summary: Same Old Stuff, Packaged A Litle Differently
Review: Noam Chomsky, long-standing activist intellectual and spokesman for the so-called New Left, now graces us with his latest effort in anti-American rhetoric. While many of the issues raised in this book are worthy of an objective investigation and evaluation, the work is hardly objective and, while it may present itself as a scholarly treatise, it rapidly deteriorates into nothing more than a propaganda screed for a narrow, one-sided, and simplistic point of view. Furthermore, Chomsky seems to lack any sense of historical perspective, fails to articulate any coherent political framework, and does not seem to understand the nuances of modern geopolitics.
What seems to be the main idea of the book? In brief, Chomsky apparently thinks that the United States is the most reprehensible of all the major powers in the world and its foreign policy is absolutely pernicious. It has become the most belligerent power in the world. It is the greatest menace to the national self-determination of other countries. It is the greatest threat to world peace and international cooperation. And, finally, the United States is a supporter of and a perpetrator of terrorism on a grand scale against those it perceives as its enemies.
Chomsky claims to base these assertions on "facts." But facts, as any historian or social scientist knows, must be interpreted and placed in a context. It is easy to twist facts, ignore incongruous facts, distort a context, or disregard a context. In the case that Chomsky is trying to make here, it appears that his choices regarding evidence and his analysis of that evidence is dominated by his overwhelming desire to put the worst possible interpretation on the "motives" of America in regard to its participation in world affairs. Political philosopher Hannah Arendt suggested that the great achievement of the 20th-century totalitarians was to turn questions of fact into questions of motive. Then you don't have to answer facts with facts; all you need to do is impugn the motives of the target you have selected for castigation and hurl the most damaging epithets at it. In short, the old pastime of name-calling or, for the more philosophically inclined, the ad hominem argument. One might suggest that it is precisely what the author of this book is doing.
Chomsky's response to the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center is illustrative. He claims that no matter how appalling the terrorists' actions were, the United States had done worse and he attempts to support this judgment with arguments and evidence. But his evidence is highly selective and his arguments suspect. In attempting to justify the attack, he refers, for instance, to the incident in Sudan where a pharmaceutical factory was assaulted by an American missile because the CIA suspected that Iraqi scientists were involved in making chemical or biological weapons. Chomsky fails, however, to note that the missile was fired at night so no workers would be present and that the factory was not located in or near a residential area; innocent lives would not be directly threatened. Whether one agrees or not with then-President Clinton's decision to order the assault, it hardly rises to the level, either in intent or actuality, to the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Moreover, Chomsky apparently judges the morality of actions executed by the United States using a rather direct and simple formula: If an action is right for us, it is right for others; and if it is wrong for others, it is wrong for us. This might be a nice moral principle in the abstract, but it can be dreadfully deceiving when attempting to apply it to the complex world of international politics. Furthermore, Chomsky gives the impression that he wants to apply this moral principle primarily to the actions of the Western liberal democracies, not to others, including the acts committed by the terrorists in September 2001.
Is America really an evil empire, as Chomsky apparently thinks? I think an objective look at the historical record will provide the evidence that America has done more good for more people than any country in the history of the world. The United States rebuilt Europe twice in the 20th century after two world wars. Europe was liberated from the Nazi menace primarily through the intervention of the United States. Eastern Europe was liberated from the tyranny of communism primarily because the United States was willing to take the leadership role in destroying it.
Now, if the United States is and has been such a terrible nation, responsible for the horrible repression that Chomsky alleges, then why, one must ask, is this country the first choice of refugees looking for a new home? Why do most people choose to flee to the United States, rather than from it? Why have so many other nations, many of them apparently admired by Chomsky, been forced to build walls and fences to keep their population captive? Why is Cuba under the Castro government a better place to live or, for that matter, Cambodia under Pol Pot or Vietnam under the current totalitarian regime? And lastly, why do so many other nations look to the United States for help when they need it? This is not to say that the United States is perfect. It is not. But it is definitely not the evil empire that Chomsky asserts.
In summary, I suspect that Chomsky's latest diatribe will have great appeal to his devoted followers. Those who dismiss his interpretations and analyses will simply say it is a repeat of his usual rantings against the United States. Nevertheless, I recommend this book to all readers; it is a good exemplar of pure political propaganda disguised as a serious work. In a different time and place, it would have made Dr. Joseph Goebbels proud. The "New York Times" apparently thinks, in its words, that "Noam Chomsky is arguably the most important intellectual alive." If this is really true, God help us all.
Rating:
Summary: well written global Amercian empire theory
Review: The basic theory of HEGEMONY OR SURVIVAL is found in its subtitle that the United States has and has had (back to at least JFK and perhaps the end of WW II) a goal of America's Quest for Global Dominance (The American Empire Project). Noam Chomsky uses specific examples from the past four decades to defend his argument that owning the world and militarily space have been the real objectives of American foreign and domestic policy. Chomsky also parallels the American global empire building to that of the eighteenth and nineteenth century British Empire where the sun never set until 1942 in North Africa. He insists the current administration is willing to risk human survival to prove they are right. He succinctly and intelligently supports his thesis by tracking the U.S. government's aggressive pursuit of attaining "full spectrum dominance" at any cost. This tome is extremely well written and worth reading as the historical based logic is quite easy to follow and seems so valid that the spin is the USA is the freedom providers and anyone opposing America is a vicious totalitarian. Chomsky's belief that a global empire must fail like the British did, but in this NBC (nuclear, biological and chemical WMDs) age will lead to an orb- wasteland is not as reliable of a conclusion as its defense seems more of a supposition. Still this is an eye opener that will receive praise from the left, condemnation from the right, sadly ignored from the middle, and never reach the global unaligned masses more interested in surviving leaders who know what is best for everyone. Harriet Klausner
Rating:
Summary: A summary of Chomsky's view, backed by current information
Review: During the 1990s, quite a few Chomsky books were compilations of previously-published material. He built books out of transcripts of talks, long interviews, and articles from Z magazine. Those books are all very good, but many of them had a scattered feel to them. In "Hegemony or Survival," he returns to the days when he sits at the typewriter and pounds out a new book. This time, Chomsky sums up over 30 years of research on US foreign policy. He uses the current war in Iraq and the history of our policy toward Cuba as his key cases. That's not to say he leaves out other countries. In fact, this book mentions one country after another in which the US government worked hard to overthrow democracy abroad while covering it up at home. But, by putting emphasis on Cuba and Iraq, Chomsky shows the consistency of US policy --- the methods, the tactics, the justifications, and the effects. It's the wide range of information that makes the book so convincing. Chomsky doesn't write opinion pieces. He presents you with a flood of facts, fully documented, and allows those facts to convince you. As you read, you'll say "Wow. Is that really true?" and flip to the footnotes. You'll find credible sources every time. You'll shake your head, wondering how you could have missed such important information. At some point, you end up reading with a finger wedged in the footnote section, flipping back and forth and making mental notes to double-check some of those sources later. If you haven't read Chomsky before, start with one of the better interview books such as "Understanding Power" and "Chronicles of Dissent." Then read this one. If you want to understand "Why do they hate us?" (and why that isn't even the right question to ask), Chomsky has the answers.
Rating:
Summary: But back on earth...
Review: Chomsky's latest effort is slightly less believable than J.K.Rowling's latest - but much funnier.
Rating:
Summary: alternative to the Masters of War
Review: Noam Chomsky has been a brave voice proclaiming that the Emperor Has No Clothes since the Vietnam War. He is a hero, a veritable prophet, in our dark and disastrous times. The current analysis of course includes Bush and the neoconservative faction, the "pre-emptive doctrine" (actually preventive), the propaganda of the "war on terrorism," and Iraq -- but the Empire is much bigger than the current Gang, and that is the radical strength of Chomsky's critique. "Hegemony or Survival" is published alongside anti-Bush tomes from Al Franken, Michael Moore, Molly Ivins, Jim Hightower, David Corn, and others. But if you could read only one of these worthy books, you should read Chomsky. The focus is on the structure of Empire, rather than the details of the current Emperor. It is easy to become cynical and complacent given the forces of evil that we are up against. Personally, I take more inspiration from the fact that people resist than any theoretical insight. Ordinary people have always resisted Empire. I participated in a weekly peace vigil from October 2002 through the April 2003 war on Iraq. Why? Because I felt I had a moral obligation to take a public stand. Noam Chomsky's writings and talks over the years are a form of resistance that has informed and inspired many of us to continue. Thank you, Noam!
Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant -- but still a portrait in one color
Review: This is a devastating book. Unfortunately, it is also shallow and one-sided. Chomsky is brilliant in summing up the world as it now exists, but he overlooks the questions of "why" as well as the Quislings who empower and enable the overlords of the marketplace. Let's start with the strong points. The book doesn't "expose" a secret cabal, such as the Protocols of Zion or the Trilateral Commission. It's like a good mystery story; Chomsky picks up facts from the public record, puts them together and proclaims in the classic style of a long-forgotten and very apt Doonesbury strip, "Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!" "Guilty!" is certainly a mild term to describe US machinations in dominating the economies and societies of many nations. One of the weakest points is his lack of understanding of the power of Quislings. Canada, for example, once had a strong independent streak -- the 1911 election campaign was won on the issue "No truck or trade with the Yankees." But in World War II, an American-born and educated Liberal member of the government inextricably tied the Canadian war economy to the US in the Ogdensburg Agreement. After the war, this policy was accelerated. Canadians rebelled in 1957 with the election of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker. In response, the Kennedy administration loaned its top political operatives to the Liberals to drive Diefenbaker from power. It worked admirably. Canada is now a one-party country with a branch-plant economy. Liberals have run the national government for all but 18 of the past 70 years, and now control provincial governments covering 80 percent of the people. A similar obsequious servitude is true in many countries. In Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair is America's poodle. In Mexico, President Vicente Fox was American-trained, American-employed and American-owned before being elected and establishing a "special relationship" with President George Bush. He's not even a poodle; he's more like a chihuahuita -- an excitable little bundle of snippy dippy barks. It's how business, religions and other empires are always built. In every society, at least 10 percent of people are chronic kickers who will join any outsider. Empires are built on luring that dissatisfied 10 percent to overturn the old regime. Surely Chomsky has seen this in his own MIT classes -- from teacher's pets to those who are perennial doubters of his wisdom and learning. Except for updating the list of the guilty, his observations are old. In the 1920s, Will Rogers read in the newspapers of US gunboats being sent up the Yangtzee River "to defend American interests." In response, Rogers asked how Americans would feel if China sent its gunboats up the Mississippi to defend the Chinese laundries in St. Louis. Chomsky is simply somewhat more acerbic. There's an old saying that it takes two to make a fight. Well, it takes two to make an empire -- those who want to rule, and those who see great advantage in being ruled by the rich and powerful. It's like the "patrone" society in Latin America; many people see a definite advantage in being subject to a strong dynamic ruler. Okay, so Bush is a chowderhead. Despite that, many foreigners see a definite advantage in being part of a strong dynamic American society. Likewise, Vidkun Quisling thought it was a great advantage to be part of a dynamic Nazi society. In Canada, the sachems of the Liberal Party have long favored economic union with the US. It's the same for Tony Blair, Vicente Fox and dozens of other leaders. There's no end of volunteers who want to serve the rich and powerful. Chomsky does a brilliant job in outlining American complicity in building an empire. But, he also needs to understand the motives of collaborators. He could start with Liberal politicians in Canada, or he could ask why so many French were enthusiastic collaborators with the Germans during World War II. He needs to understand that it takes two to make a hegemony. He is brilliant in painting a portrait in black and white; unfortunately, he limited his palette to one color.
Rating:
Summary: Topsy Turvy And All Too True
Review: To read Chomsky's HEGEMONY OR SURVIVAL is to visit a world turned upside down. A world where the characterization by U.S. elites of the 90s as the "decade of humanitarian intervention" is sharply questioned, it's also a place where interventions in the name of the "war on terror" are shown to be just the latest manifestations of an expansionist U.S. administration determined to hold onto long-range strategic imperatives, to disable rival systems and people that threaten its imperial objectives, and to strictly enforce its true animating principle -- the pro-market, anti-human ethos of the neo-liberal economic system. In other words, it's not the fumigated middle-school version of US foreign policy offered to Americans on TV Readers accustomed to the usual sycophantic justifications of U.S. foreign and policy may have a difficult time with Chomsky's remapping of recent political history. Those on the right will reject it as a Chomskyite confabulation. Moderates will wonder why he seems to hate America so much. Those on the left will be upset that the policies of Democrats are seen as little different from that of Republicans. Chomsky sees the two parties as nearly indistinguishable, calling them the two "business parties, one slightly less reactionary than the other." And here's Chomsky quoting Dewey on the narrow U.S. political spectrum.: "...John Dewey scarcely exaggerated when he described politics as 'the shadow cast on society by big business.' One of his main themes is that the United States, like its imperial predecessor, Great Britain, employs an idealizing and utopian language (the language of democracy and freedom) to justify its opposition to and extirpation of any countervailing force, even those founded upon the democratic or populist impulse, e.g., Nicaragua, Guatemala. This is not, of course, an insight original to Chomsky. But what is so disorienting and unique about Chomsky's renarration of recent events is that he is exquisitely alive to the efforts of those in power to efface the historical record, to enforce forgetfulness and unknowing through a steady diet of fear and triumphalist propaganda. Reinscribing history, he quotes mainstream sources, official records, military and diplomatic experts, many of whom are unsympathetic to his point of view, and builds a compelling case to support his thesis that even the "exceptional" United States unexceptionally behaves like powerful states typically do: enhancing their power through violence, and legitimizing their policies through whatever discourses are available. And while its not original to Chomsky that absolute power corrupts absolutely, what is fine and bracing is the way he marshals legions of facts to show how those in power, unchecked in our "open society," move to stifle or subvert the will of its citizens in favor of the money power it truly serves. One of the more memorable examples he cites in making this case is the special wrath of the present administration for "Old Europe" when it failed to march in lockstep into the war in Iraq. Chomsky notes that, in fact, the leaders of France and Germany by refusing to along were giving voice to and representing their citizens, great majorities of whom were against the war. He notes that the citizens of "New Europe" were even more opposed to the war than citizens of "Old Europe," and futher, notes that public opinion polls in South America showed more opposition than "Old Europe," too. Chomsky does not simply offer a counternarrative of facts in his recovery of the historical record. He offers insightful interpretations of facts to attack that seemingly endless supply of elite apologists who offered cool intellectual frameworks for deciding whether the war in Iraq was "just or unjust," reminding us that their bloodless formulas fail to take into account the experience of people in the "New Europe" and South America who lived through other "just wars" and the installation of "democracy." He suggests that citizens of South America, are just a tad more gun shy than most of "Old Europe" after having experienced liberation at the hands of the United States in the form of secret terroristic training of death squads and the support of military dictators and anti-Castro insurgents during the Kennedy and subsequent administrations. And the citizens of Eastern Europe, having experienced the creative destruction of the free-market system under the Reagan-Bush I and Clinton regimes -- an exercise in freedom which has pauperized them and made them dependent upon the goodwill and largesse of the international bankers -- have seen first hand the discrepancy between the liberatory promise of Western democracy and reality of the neo-liberal economic system, a system which has served to mightily prosper the upper echelons of the ruling class Chomsky does make the case he begins with: that humanity is now situated at the brink of biological destruction, and the survival of the species depends upon worldwide resistance to the U.S. regime. Concentrating on the murderous antics of nation states and their elites, he shows how the U.S. is creating enemies around the world, enemies who, through the example of North Korea, have come to see that states with nuclear weapons need not fear US invasion. He shows how our policies conjure new and more powerful enemies out of the ground, enemies who will perhaps help us achieve the nuclear Armageddon our leaders appear to so badly want for us. Here's Chomsky at his best on the neo-liberal agenda: "We are instructed daily to be firm believers in neoclassical markets, in which isolated individuals are rational wealth maximizers. If distortions are eliminated, the market should respond perfectly to their 'votes,' expressed in dollars or some counterpart. The value of a person's interests is measured in the same way. In particular, the interests of those with no votes are valued at zero: future generations, for example. It is therefore rational to destroy the possiblity 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.'
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