Only the most zealous American patriots believe that their country’s foreign policy always lives up to its stated aims of promoting freedom and democracy around the world. The more interesting question is whether it sometimes comes close or even really tries. It is possible to attack US interventions overseas as horribly misguided and murderously bungled while recognizing that they contain some kernel of authentic moral aspiration. Many US policymakers in the early part of this decade genuinely felt that liberating Iraq from Saddam Hussein was a noble thing to do.
The more skeptical view is that the US perception of itself as a force for good in the world is a dangerous, irrational delusion. Further down the skeptical spectrum is the view that US political evangelism is a grotesque hypocrisy, cunningly deployed to mask imperialistic ambitions. Further still, off the scale entirely, is Noam Chomsky. Hopes and Prospects is the latest barrage in a lifetime’s assault on US political vanity by the 81-year-old linguistics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky took up a sideline in political writing in opposition to the Vietnam War and has kept anti-Washington cudgels at hand ever since. He has dedicated followers who see him as guru and gadfly, speaking unwanted truth to power. He is the closest thing the intellectual far left has to a rock star.
In that sense, Hopes and Prospects is like one of those live albums that veteran bands release when they’ve stopped producing new singles; slightly different versions of familiar hits bashed out for an easily pleased audience. The book is a compilation of lectures and articles produced over the past few years. There is no single thesis, rather a constant interweaving of favorite Chomskyan themes: the capture of the US state and subordination of democracy to a narrow commercial and financial elite; the media’s complicity; the uniquely high penalty paid by Latin America for the misfortune of being in Washington’s backyard; the function of Israel as America’s military client in the Middle East; the threat of nuclear apocalypse. Throughout, Chomsky sustains caustic disdain for the myths that Western societies tell themselves to justify their savage colonization of planet Earth. He dismisses vast tracts of history in a few splenetic paragraphs, as if no alternative interpretation is worth considering.
The worst catastrophe to befall our species, Chomsky implies, was Columbus’ collision with an uncharted continent in 1492. From there, it is a short step to the genocide of indigenous American people and the formation of a mercantile dictatorship run by white Europeans, consolidated by war and terror. The US imperial model that emerged in the 20th century, Chomsky reminds us, borrowed heavily from the earlier British one. In particular, the younger cousin mimicked the older with its technique of prizing foreign markets open at gunpoint, suppressing local competition until a comfortable monopoly had been secured and then proclaiming support for “free trade” on “a level playing field.”
Chomsky shares with many radical left thinkers a studied reluctance to adopt the mainstream vocabulary of “globalization.” The word implies everyone’s inclusion in a unified economic enterprise. But for Chomsky, the only “global” element in the whole business is the one-size-fits-all policy template, dictated by the West to developing nations with a view to expropriating their resources and assets.
It is a cripplingly bleak philosophy. No one defends Western capitalism on the grounds that it is the perfect system, only that it is the best available. Likewise, the US comes out badly in comparison with an abstract ideal of beneficent global stewardship, but it comes out better in comparison with most available alternatives. Globalization under the Chinese Communist party, anyone? Anti-American exile in Tehran? At least a dissident in the US can sustain an academic career while constantly denouncing his leaders.
Perhaps Chomsky’s analysis of all that is wrong with the West would resonate more if he modulated it with some occasional flicker of admiration for the achievements of Western civilization. His critique would also be strengthened by some recognition of the irony that he owes his considerable success to the system he despises. Does it bother him, perhaps, that he has lived the American dream?
Note: Chomsky is scheduled to give two talks in Taiwan, one at Academia Sinica in Taipei on Aug. 8 and the other on Aug. 9 at National Tsing Hua University (清華大學) in Hsinchu. For more details go to ling.nthu.edu.tw/chomsky2010/timetable.html (Chinese only).
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