Who Rules the World?

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And the spectators must not be allowed to see too much. President Obama has set new standards in safeguarding this principle. He has, in fact, punished more whistle-blowers than all previous presidents combined, a real achievement for an administration that came to office promising transparency.” which hopefully will guide the choices as to how our 'rulers' should respond to the challenges ahead. Noam Chomsky was a name I kept running across in my reading over the years, and I had long intended to take the plunge and read one of his books. A giant in the field of linguistics, Chomsky has had a storied and prolific career as an MIT professor, philosopher, activist, writer and more. Chomsky’s book is . . . a polemic designed to awaken Americans from complacency. America, in his view, must be reined in, and he makes the case with verve. . . . We should understand it as a plea to end American hypocrisy, to introduce a more consistently principled dimension to American relations with the world, and, instead of assuming American benevolence, to scrutinize critically how the US government actually exercises its still-unmatched power." —The New York Review of Books

In 2015, China also established the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), with itself as the main shareholder. Fifty-six nations participated in the opening in Beijing in June, including US allies Australia, Britain and others which joined in defiance of Washington’s wishes. The US and Japan were absent. In recent times one expression of this contempt is the call for passivity and obedience (“moderation in democracy”) by liberal internationalists reacting to the dangerous democratizing effects of the popular movements of the 1960s. Mr. Chomsky keeps giving the readers so many examples of the atrocities committed by “the world”. Some of them I knew about and others I had no idea about. An example, three Israelis get killed in Cyprus. Israel retaliates by bombing Tunis. Israel conceded that the killers had nothing to do with Tunis. But because Tunis is a more preferable target as it is defenseless and because of the extra benefit that it has more exiled Palestinians who could be killed there! The readers new to Chomsky have a comprehensive source list that they can use if they want to delve into the topics under discussion further.

I won’t continue, but if anyone is interested in other cases mentioned, I’ll be glad to consider them. By 1967, when the antiwar movement was becoming a significant force, military historian and Vietnam specialist Bernard Fall warned that “Vietnam as a cultural and historic entity … is threatened with extinction … [as] the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size”. Sometimes states do choose to follow public opinion, eliciting much fury in centers of power. One dramatic case was in 2003, when the Bush administration called on Turkey to join its invasion of Iraq. Very similar processes are under way in the United States, for somewhat similar reasons, a matter of significance and concern not just for the country but, because of US power, for the world.

Si bien Estados Unidos puede tolerar la desobediencia de Turquía —aunque con disgusto—, China es más difícil de pasar por alto. La prensa advierte que «los inversores y comerciantes de China están ahora llenando un vacío en Irán en un momento en el que empresas de otras muchas naciones, sobre todo de Europa, se retiran» y, en particular, que China está expandiendo su papel dominante en las industrias de energía de Irán.19 Washington está reaccionando con un punto de desesperación. El Departamento de Estado advirtió a China que si quiere ser aceptada en la «comunidad internacional» —un término técnico para referirse a Estados Unidos y quien esté de acuerdo con él— no debe «esquivar y evadir las responsabilidades internacionales, [que] son claras», a saber: seguir las órdenes de Estados Unidos.20 Es poco probable que eso impresione mucho a China. También” It's a testament to the professor that despite having a chapter in this book titled One Day in the Life of a Reader of The New York Times - a systematic annihilation of the hypocrisy of what is put out in just one single day of a mainstream paper - he can still yet provide an answer like the above one. An answer that very much suggests that despite understanding how the world is run , Chomsky is someone who stills believes in taking in all sources available on current affairs. Even the mainstream ones. ii] Pankaj Mishra, “Why do white people like what I write?, London Review of Books, Vol. 40, No. 4, February 22, 2018, https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n04/pankaj-mishra/why-do-white-people-like-what-i-write, accessed July 23, 2019. This is a very good/gentle introduction for people who have not read Chomsky's more technical political philosophy and may find themselves overwhelmed plodding through 10 different analyses of the same argument. This is particularly crucial in three regions: east Asia, where “the US navy has become used to treating the Pacific as an ‘American lake’”; Europe, where Nato – meaning the United States, which “accounts for a staggering three-quarters of Nato’s military spending” – “guarantees the territorial integrity of its member states”; and the Middle East, where giant US naval and air bases “exist to reassure friends and to intimidate rivals”.However, Chomsky closes his deliberations with the powerful alternative question to the opening one - i.e. "What principles and values rule the world?' In the 1950s, President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles explained quite clearly the dilemma that the United States faced. They complained that the Communists had an unfair advantage: they were able to "appeal directly to the masses" and "get control of mass movements, something we have no capacity to duplicate. The poor people are the ones they appeal to and they have always wanted to plunder the rich." The effect was to undercut the possibility of a peaceful, negotiated settlement; sharply increase casualties (by at least a factor of 10, according to political scientist Alan Kuperman); leave Libya in ruins, in the hands of warring militias; and, more recently, to provide the Islamic State with a base that it can use to spread terror beyond. There are, to be sure, ways of looking at the world from different standpoints. But let us keep to these three regions, surely critically important ones. The challenges today: east Asia