What Uncle Sam Really Wants.
Berkley, CA. The Odonion Press, 1995. ISBN1878825011.
Began 2012.06.23
Finished 2012.07.01
★★★★☆
This book is Chomsky at his most accessible. The publisher claims, on the back of the book, that "political books don't have to be boring." And this one certainly isn't boring because this publisher's need for brevity has forced Chomsky to the bare bones. His sarcasm and irony are very sharp, and his details far more concise than in his full length works.
However, I do not actually recommend this book as an introduction to Chomsky's political writing because that brevity allows more easily for incredulity to become dismissive skepticism. What he writes is so far away from the official historical myths that we believe that after the fourth or fifth debunking claim he makes it becomes increasingly easy to become convinced that he is just some left-wing nut-job with a horribly over-active imagination who hates America. Yes, his claims are referenced in the back of the book. But they are not footnoted in the text, and that lapse more easily gives the cynic the mental elbow room to dismiss Chomksy's arguments and claims.
In a curious irony, and an affirmation of Chomsky's frequent observation that concision is America's most effective and widely practiced form of censorship, this book's brevity also makes it very quotable.
Free trade is fine for economics departments and newspaper editorials, but nobody in the corporate world or the government takes the doctrines too seriously. The parts of the US economy that are able to compete internationally are primarily the state subsidized ones: capital intensive agriculture (agribusiness as it is called), high tech industry, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, etc.Now I think the government and corporate leaders have recently entered the next or 4th degree of delusion — they actual have fallen victim to their own propaganda, and truly believe that the massive subsidies these groups get aren't actually subsidies. What the social critic and comic Bill Maher calls "being in the bubble."
The same is true of other industrial societies. The US government has the public pay for research and development and provides, largely through the military, a state-guaranteed market for waste production. If something is marketable, the private sector takes it over. That system of public subsidy and private profit is what is called free enterprise (p.13).
And on Amercia's support for democracy immediately following the second world war: the CIA's first job was to subvert democracy and help ensure the installation of a fascist dictatorship response to America's business needs:
Restoring the traditional orderHere is another quotable passage:
But far more important was the first area of Europe liberated — southern Italy, where the US, following Churchill's advice, imposed a right-wing dictatorship headed by Fascist war hero Field Marshall Badoglio and the King Victor Emmanuel III,who was also a Fascist collaborator.
US planners recognized that the "threat" in Europe was not Soviet aggression (which serious analysts, like Dwight Eisenhower, did not anticipate) but rather the worker- and peasant- based antifascist resistance with its radical democratic ideals, and the political power and appeal of the local Communist parties.
To prevent an economic collapse that would enhance their influence, and to rebuild Western Europe's state-capitalist economies, the US instituted the Marshall Plan (under which Europe was provided with more than $ 12 billion in loans and grants between 1948 and 1951, funds used to purchase a third of US exports to Europe in the peak year of 1949).
In Italy, a worker- and peasant-based movement, led by the Communist party, had held down six German divisions during the war and liberated northern Italy. As US forces advanced through Italy, they dispersed this antifascist resistance and restored the basic structure of the prewar Fascist regime.
Italy has been one of the main areas of CIA subversion ever since the agency was founded. The CIA was concerned about Communists winning power legally in the crucial Italian elections of 1948. A lot of techniques were used, including restoring the Fascist police, breaking the unions and withholding food. But it wasn't clear that the Communist party could be defeated.
The very first National Security Council memorandum, NSC 1 (1948), specified a number of actions the US would take if the Communists won these elections. One planned response was armed intervention, by means of military aid for underground operations in Italy.
Some people, particularly George Kennan, advocated military action before the elections — he didn't want to take a chance. But others convinced him we could carry it off by subversion, which turned out to be correct.
In Greece, British troops entered after the Nazis had withdrawn. They imposed a corrupt regime that evoked renewed resistance, and Britain, in its postwar decline, was unable to maintain control. In 1947, the United States moved in, supporting a murderous war that resulted in about 160,000 deaths.
This war was complete with torture, political exile for tens of thousands of Greeks, what we called "re-education camps" for tens of thousands of others, and the destruction of unions and of any possibility of independent politics.
It placed Greece firmly in the hands of US investors and local businessmen, while much of the population had to emigrate in order to survive. The beneficiaries included Nazi collaborators, while the primary victims were the workers and the peasants of the Communist-led, anti-Nazi resistance.
Our successful defence of Greece against its own population was the model for the Vietnam War — as Adlai Stevenson explained to the United Nations in 1964. Reagan's advisors used exactly the same model in talking about Central America, and the pattern was followed many other places (15-17).
Broader studies by economist Edward Herman reveal a close correlation worldwide between torture and US aid, and also provide the explanation: both correlate independently with improving the climate for business operations. In comparison with that guiding moral principle, such matters as torture and butchery pale into insignificance (p.29).This book is full of these little gems. However they only have realistic descriptive power if you have already read enough of Chomsky to fully understand that the words 'butchery' and 'torture' are not exaggerations when applied to American foreign policy. Rather they are a kind of ironical whitewash of the breadth and scope and scale of American brutality not infrequently approaching genocidal proportions.
A fun read, but it won't give those people who are familiar with Chomsky anything new — except a source of Chomsky sound bites. And it will likely be seen by people new to Chomsky as confirmation by the skeptical that he is a fruitcake and reduce him to being merely an eloquent conspiratorialist out in the fringes.
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