I have finished Noam Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for World Dominance. It was fascinating, both because of the usual footnoted criticism and acuity he brings, but also because of the change in tone I 'heard' in this book from his previous writing (examples of which I've cited later).
☆☆☆☆☆ out of ☆☆☆☆☆.
Begun 2010.12.05; noted 2011.03.25.
I have festooned it with stickies on sections I want to review and/or refer back to, but I have resolved to restrain myself. So, because of my interest in the economic delusion masking itself as acumen, I've decided to cite an interesting example of a high ranking American hegemon being honest about America's role in disseminating economic democracy in the world. And no, it isn't what you read in the papers.
From Chapter 9, "A Passing Nightmare?"
After discussing America's long and continued refusal to join the rest of the world in declaring space a peace only place, Chomsky adds:The need for [America's] full-spectrum dominance [in space] will increase as a result of the "globalization of the world economy," the Space Command explains. The reason is that "globalization" is expected to bring about "a widening between 'haves' and 'have-nots.' " Like the National Intelligence Council,32 military planners recognize that the "widening economic divide" that they too anticipate, with its "deepening economic stagnation, political instability, and cultural alienation," will lead to unrest and violence among the "have-nots," much of it directed against the US. That provides a further rationale for expanding offensive military capacities into space. Monopolizing this domain of warfare, the US must be ready to control disorder by "using space systems and planning for precision strike from space [as a][sic] counter to the worldwide proliferation of WMD" by unruly elements, a likely consequence of the recommended programs, just as the "widening divide" is an anticipated consequence of the preferred form of "globalization."
The Space Command could have usefully extended its analogy to the military forces of earlier years. These have played a prominent role in technological and industrial development throughout the modern era. That includes major advances in metallurgy, electronics, machine tools, and manufacturing processes, including the American system of mass production that astounded nineteenth-century competitors and set the stage for the automotive industry and other manufacturing achievements, based on many years of investment, R&D, and experience in weapons production within US Army arsenals. There was a qualitative leap forward after World War II, this time primarily in the US, as the military provided a cover for creation of the core of the modern high-tech economy: computers and electronics generally, telecommunications and the Internet, automation, lasers, the commercial aviation industry, and much else, now extending to nanotechnology, biotechnology, neuroengineering, and other new frontiers. Economic historians have pointed out that the technical problems of naval armament a century ago were roughly comparable to manufacture of space vehicles, and the enormous impact on the civilian economy might be duplicated as well, enhanced by the space militarization projects.
One effect of incorporating national security exemptions in the mislabeled "free trade agreements" is that the leading industrial societies, primarily the US, can maintain the state sector on which the economy substantially relies to socialize cost and risk while privatizing profit.
Others understand this as well. Retreating from his earlier critical stance regarding BMD, German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder observed that Germany has a "vital economic interest" in developing missile defense technology, and must be sure it is "not excluded" from technological and scientific work in the field. Participation in BMD programs is expected to strengthen the domestic industrial base generally in Europe. Similarly, the US BMD Organization advised Japanese officials in 1995 that Theater Missile Defense is "the last military business opportunity for this century." Japan is being drawn in not only to exploit its manufacturing expertise but also to deepen the commitment of the industrial world to the militarization of space, "locking the programs in," to borrow a standard phrase of policy-makers and analysts.33
Throughout history it has been recognized that such steps are dangerous. By now the danger has reached the level of a threat to human survival. But as observed earlier, it is rational to proceed nonetheless on the assumptions of the prevailing value system, which are deeply rooted in existing institutions. The basic principle is that hegemony is more important than survival. Hardly novel, the principle has been amply illustrated in the past half-century.
For such reasons, the US has refused to join the rest of the world in reaffirming and strengthening the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 to (230-232).
I feel the need to summarize: the reason America has refused to sign a space treaty to keep weapons from space is because their economic policies in the world will, properly, continue to create increased poverty and concentrated wealth. Furthermore, that increased poverty gap will certainly encourage social stresses that will need to be managed by military action, with the best of those actions coming from space.
This blatant, but absolutely not reported or aggressively made public re-statement of the truth behind American foreign policy got me thinking about the growing gap between the wealthy and the poor within the U.S.A. itself. Is there an un-public policy statement that confirms that the steady and accelerating impoverishment of the general American population, and near eradication of the middle class, is deliberate and planned? And to that all I can say is that if that has not been planned — which is possible even though highly improbable — then the level of economic incompetence displayed by the highest levels of government and business is astounding.
I am not sure which thought I hold to be more distressing: that incompetence masking behind ideology is bankrupting the society or that societal impoverishment is planned behind a mask of economic democracy.
As an example of that thought, I ask myself whether or not the expanding bankruptcy of what were once viable public school systems is an accident due to incompetency and delusion, or part of the concomitantly expanding corporate and wealthy tax 'breaks' that have been successfully enriching the wealthy and, with the delusion of Wal-mart wealth, impoverishing everyone else? I am siding on the planned side, because under funding public schools would help impoverish the poor and enrich the people who run the country by contributing to one of the biggest growth industries in the USA — the expanding prison system.
And this is an efficient method, because not only do the corporations get reduced taxes, but they have the opportunity to receive government funding for the contracts to build and run the prisons. And expanding ignorance and bankrupting schools will also help ensure a steady clientele for those prisons. This has the hallmarks of a perfect net transfer of wealth from the poor to the wealthy, and all done in the name of keeping America safe, the very same argument that the media and politicians used to justify and fund war.
Hmmm. Is that idea that far fetched? I wonder.
Chomsky frequently cites the Trilateral Commission's publication, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies because the authors were concerned that the democratic movements in the 60s and early 70s were impeding the proper functioning of democracy — the population was too involved in trying to manage their country, and needed to be made more passive so as to allow the real leaders get on with the business of running things. (That's my paraphrase, of course.) Here's how Chomsky paraphrased the commission's perception of democracy's crisis in Chronicles of Dissent:The "crisis of democracy," which is not my term, happens to be the title of an important book published by the Trilateral Commission in 1975, their one major book-length publication. The Trilateral Commission was established by David Rockerfeller. It includes the more or less liberal elite elements from the three major centres of industrial capitalism, the United States, Japan, and Western Europe. Hence Trilateral Commission. This book reflects the result of an extensive study they did of the phenomenon that they referred to as the crisis of democracy. The crisis, as they outline it, has to do with the fact that during the 1960s and the early '70s substantial sectors of the population which are usually apathetic and passive became organized and began to enter the political arena and began to press for their own interests and concerns. That created a crisis because that's not the way democracy is supposed to work. The chief American contributor, Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, stated that, back in the days of Truman, before the crisis of democracy, policy could be executed simply by a handful of Wall Street lawyers and financiers. That's a bit of an exaggeration, but it expresses the conception of the Commission as to the way democracy ought to function.
That was threatened in the 1960s as minorities, youth, women, aged people, all sorts of groups began to be organized and enter into the political system. That world-wide crisis, the participants agreed, had to be overcome, and the population had to be returned to its proper state of apathy and ignorance, returned to its task. Namely, that of ratifying decisions made by elites (78-9)."
notes
32.
National Intelligence Council (NIC),
Global Trends 2015 (December 2000).
33. Thomas Valesek,
CDI Defence Monitor 30, no. 3 (March 2001). Mitchell,
Fletcher and Forum, winter 2001.
Has Chomsky lost some of his past optimism and feeling a bit desperate?
A couple of times I thought that I detected a bitterness, and not just frustration and anger, in
Hegemony. I interpret that feeling of bitterness with despair. For example:
In the worst of the two terrorist atrocities that passed through the doctrinal filters, a crippled American Jew, Leon Klinghoffer, was brutally murdered during the hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship in October 1985 by a Palestinian terrorist group led by Abu Abbas. The murder "seemed to set a standard for remorselessness among terrorists," New York Times correspondent John Burns wrote. Burns described Abu Abbas as the "has-been monster" who may "finally have to face a day of reckoning with American Justice" for his role in the crime. One of the heralded achievements of the invasion of Iraq was the capture of Abu Abbas a few months later.
The Klinghoffer murder remains the most vivid and lasting symbol of the ineradicable evil of Arab terrorism and the unanswerable proof that there can be no negotiating with these vermin. The atrocity was very real, and is in no way mitigated by the terrorists' plea that the hijacking was in retaliation for the far more murderous US-backed Israeli terrorist attack on Tunis a week earlier. But the bombing of Tunis does not enter the canon of terrorism because it is subject to the wrong-agent fallacy. It remained unmentioned when Abu Abbas was captured. There would of course be no difficulty in apprehending the "monsters" Shimon Peres and George Shultz, who are far from "has beens," and bringing them to "a day of reckoning with American justice." But that is beyond unthinkable.
Also efficiently "disappeared" are recent events that bear more than a superficial similarity to the Klinghoffer murder. The reaction was silence when British reporters found "the flattened remains of a wheelchair" in the remnants of the Jenin refugee camp after Sharon's spring 2002 offensive. "It had been utterly crushed, ironed flat as if in a cartoon," they reported: "In the middle of the debris lay a broken white flag." A crippled Palestinian, Kemal Zughayer, "was shot dead as he tried to wheel himself up the road. The Israeli tanks must have driven over the body, because when [a friend] found it, one leg and both arms were missing, and the face, he said, had been ripped in two."16 If even reported in the US, this would have been dismissed as an inadvertent error in the course of justified retaliation. Kemal Zughayer does not deserve to enter the annals of terrorism along with Leon Klinghoffer. His murder was not under the command of a "monster" but a "man of peace," who enjoys a soulful relation with the "man of vision" in the White House (195-6).
The line 'soulful relation' strikes me as being just a wee bit too shrill, and a sign of despair. What do you think? These kinds of lines don't happen often, but they are here whereas at one time they were not.
notes
16. Justin Huggler and Phil Reeves, [
Once upon a time in Jenin]
Independent 25 April 2002.
For additional information on the unreported American backed Israeli massacre in Jenin, see
Jenin Massacre.
