Noam Chomskys Rogue Empire

NOAM CHOMSKY ‘S ROGUE EMPIRE

Andrew McKillop

MY ENEMY’S ENEMY IS MYSELF

Noam Chomsky, often called the “looking glass intellectual” has carved himself the status of the guru intellectual who hammers nails into the coffin of what he calls the Rogue State or World’s Only Superpower. On a production line basis with his best-seller books and a worldwide speaking tour business Chomsky proves his looking glass credentials. He for example explains that Sept 11, 2001 in no remotely possible way could have involved any covert action or support from the Bush Administration. It could only have been a plot against The Empire. Israel, the self declared anti-Zionist tells us, is “a highly valued military and strategic ally, particularly since 1967, when it performed a great service to the U.S. and its Saudi ally by destroying the Nasserite virus and establishing the “special relationship” with Washington in the form that has persisted since”.

You read that right.

While we perhaps not-so-anxiously await the memoirs of Edward Snowden, almost certainly outstripping Chomsky’s book sales, we can fill up with Chomsky Rogue State-bashing. This operates using the same outdated logic which claims the Snowden affair is “all important”. We are always told to believe the Rogue Empire is “all powerful”. Chomsky tells us the US has global reach, at least with cheap drones, plans everything, not too perfectly, knows everything (ask the NSA and its Boston Bombing failure), and is the unrivaled Imperial Hegemon. To use Chomsky-speak.

Possible reasons for Chomsky’s always strange logic may stem from his own self-description as being a former Zionist who is now anti-Zionist, a continuing anarchist, a trade unionist standing against censorship and for freedom of speech, a lifelong humanist committed to national liberation, a defender of the environment, an anti-intellectual, and a tireless fighter against state capitalism. No doubt he also fights the corrupting role of American junk food and Burger Kings.

Joking apart, Chomsky’s major de facto role in clouding any debate, any topic that even remotely relates to “hegemony and power” – of the American type only – is institutionalized by the USA’s self styled intellectual media.

His role is suspiciously similar to the major role played by Paul Krugman in falsifying any debate or discussion about economic policy. You have to be pro-Krugman or anti-Krugman and to do that, you have to read his repetitious whinings. Chomsky’s strategy is to always cloud where he is coming from and what he might really be doing. This is what he calls his anti-intellectualism. His pitch is that so-called ‘scholarly’ intellectual work is just clerical, like that of a self-elected priesthood. In his words this is “no more challenging than fixing an automobile engine”. Just repetitious.

In a near-Freudian slip, the singer Bono of U2 is cited by Wikipedia as saying Chomsky is: “A rebel without a pause”. Not cause. Whatever cause or causes Chomsky has, they are always clouded. In particular this concerns his strange eulogizing of American foreign policy for the last 35 years.

PLATITUDES AND PLUTONIUM

Most persons would agree with several Chomsky cottage industry book writing themes – for example that the US and Israel are the greatest threats to world peace – but this is only if and when we ignore these two countries could easily be replaced by China and North Korea, Syria and Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan, Russia and India, and plenty of other real threats. More basically, if none of these countries existed, the world could only be more peaceful – but this is no more ‘intellectually valid’ than claiming that if Kentucky Frieds didn’t exist, world health would be better.

Chomsky does not say this. He holds to his only line of business, endlessly saying that everything bad in the world is the fault of the US – because the US is the “Only Hegemon”. Reading his books, we might imagine The Rogue State will wake up one day with a friendly smile on its face, instead of a snarl, and Paradise will descend on Earth. But only thanks to Chomsky!

Chomsky’s platitudes on nuclear war threat – by the US – are antique. They are concentrated into the Kennedy-Khruschev Cuban missile crisis of 50 years ago. This however is one of his best-selling themes, the meat of dozens of articles and talks, even documentary films, about how he saw this crisis. Chomsky’s criticism of Khruschev is at best muted, in fact almost non-existent, but here again if neither the US nor the USSR had existed 50 years ago – and only one of them exists today – the world would certainly not have been “pushed to the brink of atomic holocaust”. Chomsky never suggests that we might be lucky, and not have to wait another 50 years for the US to disappear.

What he says about avoiding nuclear war is always outdated. He says this in a 2012 article about his other main pet theme – Israel and Palestine:

“One sensible way to avoid such dread consequences is to pursue ‘the goal of establishing in the Middle East a zone free from weapons of mass destruction and all missiles for their delivery and the objective of a global ban on chemical weapons’, the wording of Security Council resolution 687 of April 1991, which the U.S. and U.K. invoked in their effort to provide a thin legal cover for their invasion of Iraq 12 years later”. Chomsky goes on:

“This goal has been an Arab-Iranian objective since 1974, regularly re-endorsed, and by now it has near-unanimous global support, at least formally”.

This is fine but firstly we have to note that in the real world, and in the 38 years since 1974 nothing has happened in the way of making the Middle East free of nuclear weapons. This is because – in the real world – things are vastly different from how Chomsky paints them. Not only Iran but also Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Turkey want as many nuclear reactors built as possible, as fast as possible. The Middle East will be “de facto nuclearized” by 2020 at latest.

Lacking bombs, to be sure, this will in no way prevent a hostile power hitting the neighboring enemy country’s giant Dirty Bombs – their “civil” reactors. Yes, we all heard of Chernobyl and Fukushima. They can be hit by missile attack or – why not? – by using the local specialty of djihadist suicide squads. Possibly the aggressor or aggressors might use drones which the US will kindly sell them. Alternately, China might produce and sell them drones. Russia already sells missiles to Iran, so other “arms purveyors” will not be shy when there are petro-dollars to recycle. Everything is possible. Including de facto nuclear war.

The real questions are always, but always avoided by Chomsky. How and in what way might the US Empire of Chomsky prevent nuclear war? Did this “Rogue Empire” prevent India, Pakistan or North Korea producing nuclear weapons? Why did it not prevent Israel from “acquiring” them?

EXCUSE ME WAITER, THERE’S A SPY IN MY SOUP

Chomsky’s own Web site, Chomsky(dot)info supplies chapter and verse on and by the “foremost analyst of American hegemony”, the inventor of Rogue Empire genre material sometimes used by Hollywood, but this genre is now fuzed and twined with Spy in My Soup stories. These are generated by the US NSA and its criminal partners stealing their users’ private data – Google, Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, You Tube, Skype and so on – who do their spying for a fee, paid to them by the NSA using taxpayers’ dollars. In the USA today, you pay to have yourself spied on. Isn’t that noble?

More exactly is that what a genuine all-powerful Empire needs to do?

For Chomsky, almost certainly, wall-to-wall spying is another example of his “Empire” so massively more powerful than any other country or group of nations in all history that America has “changed history”, made history its own plaything. This is Chomsky’s line, but US spy hysteria and its psychotic obsession with internal domestic security – its urge to build a police state on the Stalinist model – are better described, and more easily described with one single word – - degeneracy.

Chomsky is obliged to include the theme of American decline in his potboiler writings and his constant book marketing campaign.

Chomsky pretends the decline is only recent and only concerns some parts and functions of “The Empire”, but we can backdate this decline a lot further than him. I suggest this decline was probably the main reason why the USA did not prevent Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea from developing or acquiring nuclear weapons. It was not able, so it didn’t do it. Chomsky of course does not agree. He cooks up a complex storyline where the US did not stop these countries “going rogue”, like small-scale versions of The Empire, for ultra sophisticated reasons straight out of The Black Prince.

Chomsky gives appallingly little attention to China’s economic expansion causing America’s decline – he quickly wanders away from this reality, does not say why China can easily outstrip the USA, and prefers to waffle about “weapons policy dilemmas” for the US caused by Chinese military expansion. For him, the decline of America is above all evident in Israeli settlement expansion in Palestinian territory – rather than China’s expanding trade surplus! For Chomsky, China is obviously an awful lot too big and much too real, an Inconvenient Truth which does not fit his profitable writing genre.

He stays gaga on Gaza’s atrocious poverty and exclusion and is permanently enraged that Israel can announce new settlements anywhere it likes on the West Bank, but the US government and its citizens almost literally do not care a damn. In fact literally do not give a damn. The government of The Rogue Empire either does not want to – or cannot – do anything about it. Chomsky’s stock in trade of bookworthy obsession with the tawdry Israel/Palestine saga – he never says – only concerns the extremely small state of Israel, and even smaller near-state of Palestine, with a combined population of about one-third New York City. They may have counted, a lot, in the past, to some American “intellectuati”, but on the world stage of today they are bit-part players making too much noise.

Chomsky’s theme of “Declining America” manages to turn upside down what is a straight example of “Returning America”, its shale gas and oil boom. Using freak logic, Chomsky say that growing US energy independence, meaning less dependence on – and interest in – the Middle East and Israel is accompanied by “declining US political appreciation of Israel”.

GRANDSTANDING AND WHINING

The US is rapidly losing interest in Israeli grandstanding and Palestinian whining, and losing its need to do the bidding of the Gulf region’s megalomaniac Petro-princes bloated with petrodollars, but the loss of the “Israel asset” would supposedly, according to Chomsky, spell American decline! We could better and more accurately call the rapid loss of interest in the Middle East a direct product of returning American independence brought on by surging production of domestic shale energy – which Chomsky of course disapproves of. Yoko Ono and ‘Artists Against Fracking’ do not like it.

Chomsky always skates on thin ice, using looking glass logic to pursue Alice in Wonderland theories to their absurd conclusions. His obsession with the Israel-Palestine issue is a classic of the genre, and includes gems such as the following, which only superficially – perhaps – is a critique:

“Articulating a common elite view, President Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes described Jewish colonization of Palestine as an achievement “without comparison in the history of the human race.”

And what about the Crusaders or, for that matter, Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes who certainly kept a “tight lid” on Middle Eastern security for a long while? Longer than the USA, for sure and certain!

Chomsky’s massive book sales can in major part be traced to his ceaseless coverage of the few issues that American elites and would-be elites like to talk about. In other words Israel, Palestine, nuclear weapons, national security, American politics, American decline, and not much else. For his own leftwing “church”, Chomsky preaches human rights, socialism, trade unionism and protection of the climate and environment, always using tortured logic.

Chomsky-logic rapidly ends up either confusing, irritating or absurd. Supposedly, Chomsky is telling us the USA is Superpower No. 1 and has Global Hegemony – but the real world does not in any way confirm that message, in fact less and less, more and more often. What the elite who run the USA should do about their society and politics – are the supposed major themes of Chomsky “from a radical perspective” but the bottom line is always missing. Chomsky always avoids real conclusions – and disappears in a puff of smoke and mirrors like the Cheshire Cat, strewing wilted platitudes behind himself. Why a generation or more of now-ageing American intellectuals would have purchased these platitudes and recycled them as their own “considered opinions” is perhaps the most striking example of American Decline – and also the proof that “The Rogue Empire”, if it ever existed, is no more.