What We Say Goes: Conversations on U.S. Power in a Changing World

What We Say Goes: Conversations on U.S. Power in a Changing World | Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian | A very impressive presentation

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What We Say Goes: ...

	What We Say Goes: Conversations on U.S. Power in a Changing World Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian Metropolitan Books, 2007 - 240 pages average customer review:based on 20 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Solid collection of interviews

This is a solid collection of interviews. Chomsky is as sharp as ever, his independent analysis is still indispensable. It is amazing how much knowledge he has of events that he does not specialize in. For example he discusses the Chilean economy and oppression of the Pinochet regime with the detail of a Chilean historian (not simply the specifics about US involvement in the 73 coup--his specialty, US foreign policy). He successfully challenged the myth of the Chilean economic miracle under Pinochet by pointing out that under the "Chicago boys" the economy had one of the biggest if not the worst economic collapse in the nation's history in 1982 (something forgotten) by advocates and apologists of neoliberalism and Pinochet. Furthermore, then Pinochet and "the Chicago boys" adopted state intervention in the economy, Chomsky's sarcasm is also great, he points out how "the Chicago boys went socialist" (or how Reagan was fighting the Gospels in the 1980 against liberation theology--this type of sarcasm is much more appreciated when you hear the interview itself).
He also does a great job at making the "9/11 truth" movement look like a bunch of IDIOTS. As he explains with his cleaver wit, these 911 conspiracy theorists believe that you can get an engineering degree in an hour and a half by surfing the net. If this were the case, we should shut down the engineering departments at MIT, Cal Tech and so on. Furthermore, scientists always conduct CONTROLLED experiments, and even in CONTROLLED experiments you have a number of outcomes that cannot be explained, coincidences, etc. So in a live experiment of course you are going to have a bunch of events that you can't easily explain, there is a plethora of variables at work. Chomsky goes on about this, successfully challenging the 'Evangelical' or 'fanatical' "truth movement" a breath of fresh air. He also goes over the Israel Lobby, discusses the war in Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Darfur, and the Israel Lobby. Great collention of lectures.

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A very impressive presentation

Over 4 million Iraqis are internal and external refugees, malaria ravages the population, access to electricity is rare , malnutrition is getting worse, interior ministry death squads torture and kill their opponents and the ethnic groups have used the surge to completely cleanse rival groups out of each other's neighborhoods. Meanwhile Israel continues its genocidal strangulation of Gaza while our politicians climb over themselves to support it. A ray of light in this epoch of imbecility and cruelty is Noam Chomsky.

Chomsky cites a poll that 70 percent of Iraqis want the U.S. out within a year. But the wishes of Iraqis are irrelevant to Democrats and Republicans. He notes that the Baker-Hamilton report took note of such feelings of Iraqis but they determined that the goal was not to withdraw the troops completely and eliminate plans to build "semi-permanent" bases but to engage in propaganda to make Iraqis think the U.S. isn't an occupying army.

A big part of Chomsky's general critique is the ability of American ideologues not to see when the U.S. government commits the same crimes that are denounced when official enemies commit them. He observes that there was no comment when documents released on the Cambodian bombing revealed that the level of bombs dropped was five times what was originally thought. Nor was their comments when the documents revealed Nixon's order of bombing "anything that moves" in Cambodia. The level of bombing by the U.S. makes Cambodia the most bombed country in history.. These massively destructive war crimes, of course, helped increase peasant acquiescence to the Khmer Rouge.

He notes that Israel has longed dreamt of installing a pliable regime in Lebanon since before 1948. Its murderous 1982 war had nothing to do with PLO cross border attacks as was recognized in the Israeli press; indeed as Chomsky as shown elsewhere Israel was trying to elicit PLO terrorism in order to have an excuse to invade Lebanon and crush the Palestinian national movement. For years the United States blocked Arab efforts to achieve a two state settlement. Instead it has provided the aid necessary for Israel to squeeze Palestinians into isolated population centers while Israeli settlers take all the resources and best land. Hamas, whatever one thinks of them, had been observing a cease fire for a year and a half before June 2006 in spite of Israeli "targeted assassinations", letting people die at checkpoints and other killing of civilians, and the economic strangulation of the territories intensified by Israel and aided by the U.S. But Israel has been allowed to kidnap Palestinian civilians at will as they did on June 24th 2006, the day before corporal Shilat was abducted. Similarly Israel is allowed by the U.S. to hold Lebanese civilians hostage within Israel as it has been doing for years and illegally flying over Lebanese air space and launching sonic booms. Hezbollah had since 2000 only fired rockets at Israel once, in late May 2006 after Israel launched an attack on Lebanese territory. The 06' war destroyed large parts of Lebanon, killed perhaps close to 1000 civilians and created an environmental catastrophe as oil storage facilities were bombed and their toxic contents released into the water supply, air and shorelines.

Chomsky notes that the very self-confident and exuberant but exceedingly dense bigshot media commentator Thomas Friedman declared that Hugo Chavez was eventually going to run Venezuela's economy into the ground. Of course, the economies in the world who have followed the economic policies Friedman advocates have all themselves been run into the ground. Chomsky notes the example of India where the very advanced computer labs of Hyberbad get Friedman very excitedly aroused. Well, Chomsky notes that not far from those labs, there have been very alarming levels of peasants committing suicide because of the effects of free market policies. In the state of Utter Pradesh, the condition of women is probably worse than in Afghanistan under the Taliban, Chomsky says. But Chomsky does concede the India has some genuine economic growth; like China, it has violated some of the prime tenants of the Milton Friedman philosophy, including controls on capital flows in and out of the country. Another case of a third world capitalist success story lauded by conventional thinkers is Chile under Pinochet. However Chomsky notes that the economy under the direction of the "Chicago Boys" collapsed completely by 1982 and the government was forced to nationalize a larger section of the Chilean economy than Allende ever did. A big part of the Chilean economy has been the government run copper company CODELCO which was created during Allende's term and never privatized by Pinochet. Meanwhile a country like Mexico implementing NAFTA has seen millions of peasants thrown off the land and fleeing to the U.S., a phenomenon which was met in 1994 by Clinton beginning the militarization of the border.

Other matters that Chomsky discusses include U.S., Russia and the broken promise made not to expand NATO to Russia's borders; U.S. stance toward Iran, India, Israel, Pakistan and nuclear proliferation; U.S. provocations of Iran; Paul Wolfowitz and Indonesia; Nicaragua, Costa Rica and access to energy; why he believes Mearshimer and Walt define the "Jewish lobby" in too narrow terms; why the U.S. war on Afghanistan was a major crime; the 1907 massacre of starving miners in Iquique, Chile; and Jimmy Carter's book on Israeli apartheid. In contrast to accusations that Hugo Chavez interferes in the elections of other nations, he notes that the U.S. does exactly this through such outfits as the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute, etc. Indeed the U.S. has been funding the upper class opposition groups to Chavez which consists of a lot of the people who took part in and supported the 2002 failed coup attempt (which RCTV supported). Though conventional wisdom posits that Chavez is "authoritarian" or worse, he does not arrest such persons.

This book, I think, has better info than the previous collection of Barsamian-Chomsky interviews.

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Another Gem

Barsimian is an excellent interviewer because he can poke further into Chomsky's insights and they have a long history together. It's always nice to read Chomsky's up-to-date analyses. I couldn't reccommend this book anymore--just buy it.

An Updated Series Of Interviews With Noam Chomsky 2006-2007

What We Say Goes is a new and up-to-date collection of interviews with Noam Chomsky - the leading thinker of our times and the author of books such as Hegemony Or Survival and Manufacturing Consent - by David Barsamian of Alternative Radio. Published by the American Empire Project, which has issued many works by Alfred McCoy and Chalmers Johnson among others in the past, the book follows the format of Chomsky's 9-11 compilation of interviews and delves into topics like the war of terror, attack on Iraq, the demonization of Iran, the events of September 11, 2001, Central and South America as well as analyses on the occupied territories and Israel's bombing of Lebanon.

Fully engaged and armed with the latest facts and data, Noam Chomsky presents an alternative view of the events unfolding around us, which the corporate media distorts and misrepresents. The wide-ranging discussion clarifies issues in an easy to understand and read format without the disadvantage of a corporate distortion lens.

What We Say Goes, a direct quotation from a Papa Bush speech in 1991, paints a horrendous picture of America and its centres of power as sources of violence and ruin while maintaining Professor Chomsky's endless optimism and focus on resolution. For an update on Chomsky's thoughts or as an introduction to what is wrong in much of the world or for those who have not had a chance to know Chomsky this book is well worth a read.

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reviews: 1, 2, page 3, 4

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