31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great introduction to Chomsky's Political Thought, March 23, 2003
This review is from: The Chomsky Quartet (The Real Story Series) (Paperback)
Recently, he has published several books concerning the threat of international terrorism and America's various involvements in fighting it. Now more than ever, in this period of increased repression, opions like Chomsky's need to be expressed. Noam Chomsky is arguably one of the most important thinkers of the last 100 years (he was voted 9th all time in a recent poll of college professors and academicians, just behind Aristotle).So why have most Americans never heard of him? Read this set of books and the answer will be quite clear. In Europe practically every educated person knows this American philosopher by name, but here in America the rich and powerful would rather that you did not.
In this selection of four accessible volumes, Chomsky exposes the dark side of American history and the forces most often behind it. Backed with incontrovertible facts and extensive research these books systematically detail the crimes of the corporate/military industrial complex in a way accessible to those not yet familiar with his more complex and expanded works. In these volumes Chomsky provides an overview and analysis of the hidden agendas and backroom dealmaking behind everything from NAFTA, Desert Strom, The War on Drugs, Corporate Media Manipulation, our present situation in the Middle East and much, much more.
These books will fill you with sadness, outrage and even hope. But, after reading them your outlook on America will never be the same. This book is not an attack against America and Americans, it is instead a warning against the hidden powers that are attempting to destroy the most basic ideas of freedom itself. In writing these books, he has both provided some much needed historical balance, and provided some suggestions and ideas concerning how we, the average citizens, can achieve real social change. Chomsky also provides a list of resources and info about getting involved with an exhaustive list of organizations that are "working to make the world a better place". In the end, all these books can do is inform and educate, it is up to each individual to do what they can for real social change; a book is only the beginning.
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1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A mixture of keen analysis and unsubstantiated speculation, July 4, 2006
This review is from: The Chomsky Quartet (The Real Story Series) (Paperback)
To gain accurate information on current or historical events is extremely difficult, but has to rank as one of the most important of all human endeavors. One cannot trust the newspapers to give this kind of information, as they, as the author of these works correctly observes, work under the powerful influence of advertising executives. Even more disconcerting though is that both the educational establishment and the historians that work in it frequently, and with great enthusiasm, present historical events according to a particular political viewpoint. Those who crave an accurate understanding of history are thus left to themselves to obtain the needed information.
When doing this it is easy to fall into the trap of imputing intentions to political leaders when there is in fact no way of verifying these intentions. In fact, such verification is even harder than gaining accurate historical information, and therefore should be avoided in historical analysis. Unfortunately the author of these works does this more often than not, and this detracts from the overall case that he attempts to make. It reduces his analysis to mere opinions, and serves only to either anger those who do not share these opinions or make happy those that do.
As an example of this, the author states that surrounding the Policy Planning Study 23 of George Kennan in 1948 was an attempt to "pacify the public." He does not indicate who "the public" is, but readers are apparently supposed to include themselves (is the author himself part of "the public"?). Another example, and even more unsubstantiated, is the author's claim that the Vietnam War emerged from a need for a "service role", i.e. as a source of raw materials for industrial societies. Where is the evidence for this? The author does not give any, and the obtaining of such evidence would be very difficult, requiring years of intense effort with the gathering of documents and countless interviews with government officials, both in the United States, in France, and in Vietnam.
But there are other places in these works where the author needs to clarify himself or present a lot more evidence than he puts down on paper:
1. The author states that every president since World War II deserves to be impeached. He does not elaborate on his reasons for this, but only says there is a "very solid case" for it. Some of them have been "outright" war criminals, he says, or were involved in "serious" war crimes. It would have been helpful if he had given more evidence for these views, so as to compare or rank these presidents according to the scale of their war crimes. A rudimentary classification according to the number of civilians they were culpable in killing might rank Lyndon Johnson as the worst of the presidents due to his actions in Vietnam. Johnson would be followed by Nixon (Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile); Truman (Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Korea); Bush #1 (Iraq War 1, Panama); Bush #2 (Iraq War 2); Reagan (Nicaragua); Eisenhower (Iran, Guatemala); Ford (East Timor); Kennedy (Cuba).
2. The author claims that since 1970, 200, 000 people in Central America were murdered by US-backed forces. Where does he get this figure? And where is the evidence that these forces were supported by the United States? If this support was done under the auspices of national secrecy, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to obtain this evidence. Along these same lines, where is the evidence that supports the author's claim that about 100, 000 people were murdered in South Korea before the Korean War? And his claim that 30, 000 - 40, 000 were killed by US forces in the suppression of a peasant revolt on Cheju island? Other researchers have quoted a figure as high as 80, 000. This objection of course does not mean historical analysis should be reduced to a numerology game of death, but the degree of evil of a government is directly proportional to the number of civilians it is responsible for murdering. An accurate documentation is therefore important, especially for purposes of international law and for meeting out justice to those individuals responsible for these murders. Apparently, and the author should have shed light on this with reliable references, the U.S. Army Advisory Government was the sole legal authority south of the 38 parallel, and therefore were responsible for the conduct of the south Korean Armed Forces. The US government therefore, at least from the standpoint of international law as applied to occupation, should be held liable for these crimes against the people of Cheju Island. And was the uprising really a "Communist" one as reported at the time? Here again the author needs to elaborate in much more detail.
3. The author states that negotiations for $300, 000,000 in business for US companies occurred "secretly" a few weeks after the massacre in Tiananmen Square. How does he know this, given its supposed secrecy? Why is he privy to so much more information than others are?
Many more examples of this occur in these works, and serve to frustrate readers who demand references to historical documents and comprehensive evidence. Opinions are easy to give, but true knowledge takes a gargantuan amount of effort, more then most historians these days are willing to exercise.
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