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Year 501: The Conquest Continues

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This is a book by Chomsky that is probably even more scholarly than usual. At least in the way it is written. Chomsky wrote this book on the 500th anniversary in 1992 of the beginnings of the invasion of much of the world of what Adam Smith refered to, in a rather narrow context as "the savage injustice of the Europeans ("revealing himself to be an early practicioner of the crime of 'political correctness,'"Chomsky comments sardonically)". Chomsky begins his survey by analyzing the policies of the major European powers and the United States as they grew to dominate the world. Such policies., he explains, are not the free market doctrines stressed by right wing talk radio hosts, University of Chicago professors and other such bores and frauds but by massive state subsides, huge tarrifs to block foreign competitors, extreme violence and colonial occupation.

Places like India and Bengal (Bangladesh) which were highly advanced industrial societies by the mid-1700's but all of the industries which were superior to their counterparts in Britain were deliberately undermined or simply forced out of existence by the British colonisers. India and Bangladesh became extremely poor, feudal agricultural countries supplying Britain with raw materials and as a captive market for British goods. The latter is a familiar pattern outlined by Chomsky in this book. The West, since World war II, dominated by the U.S., has always sought any way it could to block advanced economic development in the third world. The exceptions to this that Chomsky points to are Japan and its former colonies in Asia who violated all the laws of the free market to create very dynamic, if, of course, very far from perfect economies. The British, noted Chomsky, started to adopt "free trade" as policy as the United States would do later under similar circumstances, around 1846 when they had no competitors in their field but this changed around 1930 when they, along with the Americans, French and Dutch erected high tarrif walls around Japanese exports to their colonies in Asia with which they could not compete, a major factor in staring Japan's wars of conquest.

He examines the U.S. role in the slaugter of half a million people in Indonesia in 1965 as the independent nationalist Sukarno was overthrown and "a staggering mass slaughter of communists and pro-communits." The U.S. media, rejoyced at the massacre of landless peasants and the destruction of the only mass-based political party the communist PKI. General Suharto took power initiating ongoing plunder and exploitaion of Indonesia's resources by Western corporations while engaging in mass murder in the U.S. backed occupation of East Timor and elsewhere. He examines the media reaction to this slaugter and the reaction back in 1990 when this great event was brought up again by Kathy Kadane.

He examines the showcases of capitalism in the third world like Brazil, whose liberal capitalist president Goulart was overthrown in 1964 with U.S. aid by a group of Neo-nazi generals who compiled over the next few decades a truly horrific human rights record but who were praised for producing an "economic miracle" as the population sunk into quite horrific levels of malnourishment and disease and land became ever more concentrated in fewer hands and millions of street children arose in the big cities. And Nicaragua where the massive terrorism, celebrated by the media liberals that Chomsky quotes, brought to force upon the Nicaraguan people a defeat of the Sandanistas in "democratic election" in 1990 (the 1984 election won by the Sandinstas dissapearing into the memory hole). This has predictably resulted in a terrible rise in starvation and disease and drug running and street children and on.

He continues with an in-depth examination of the woes of Haiti and the American and Western efforts to ravage it since 1804, and particularly since 1915 when the U.S. invaded and reestablished virtual slavery, with a U.S. imposed constitution ratified with five percent of the voting public participainting under the U.S. marine bayonets, reversing the ban on foreign ownership of land.

He compares the podering of the unique evil of Japan in being unable to fully face up to their past crimes and the comparable ignoring of things like the hundreds of thousand of tortured victims of U.S. chemical warfare in South Vietname, which occasionally elicits a comment in the science pages of the newspapers about how we are missing a great opportunity to study the effects of dioxin on a control population

Don't believe the critics for a second without reading for yourself. As alway, Chomsky states what is unthinkable in standard circles: that the free market is first of all a lie and second of all a disaster for world economies. A lie, because it is hypocritically championed by the US and Europe, who do not practice a 'free market' at all, except when it serves their interests; and a disaster, based on unending research on the real consequences of opening up Third world economies to foreign investment - leading to a near inevitable decline in wages, rise in unemployment, end of free speech, control by foreign interests, and brutal, usually murderous suppression of the vast majority of the population by the "friends of democracy".

Yes, this sounds like a paranoid left-wing conspiracy theory, especially given that the unending stream of facts presented by Chomsky are almost entirely omitted from mainstream discourse, even in such 'left-leaning' forums as the NY Times and the New Republic. Combine that with Chomsky's biting irony, and it is easy to go up in arms against him as a fringe figure with a "breathtaking ignorance of economics" - or at least the orthodox version of economic theory that so selectively pays attention to the most glaring of facts. It is easy to dismiss as "politics more commonly found on bumper stickers". But these reactions are beyond unfair for such comprehensively researched work - and they tell more about the readers and about the pervasiveness of common myths than about Chomsky's positions, which are always irreproachably humane, no matter how critics may try to claim the contrary, utterly without foundation.

Reading Chomsky will either send up walls of defensiveness in you, or else make you see the world in a different way - more accurately. There are no arguments presented in Year 501 that are not virtually common knowledge to the majority of the planet - everywhere but in the privileged sectors of the First world, where people have a gift for selective blindness. But this is essential reading all the same. I give 4 stars instead of 5 because, like other books by Chomsky, Year 501 could be more accessible than it is. Try one of the interview books for an easier read.

I happened to be reading this on the anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attacks; on the same day my local paper carried a Mallard Fillmore strip which tried to mock the liberal media by having a stereotypical liberal media commentator intoning, "Today the Japanese Attacked Pearl Harbor. Let's examine how we brought this on ourselves." Amongst many other topics, Chomsky actually does show how we brought Pearl Harbor on ourselves. The "Pacific War" as he calls it was not just an unprovoked act of aggression. The Japanese imperialists, even though (as Chomsky points out) they were every bit as brutal as their white rivals, had an arguably legitimate political goal: that is, they wanted Asia to be ruled by Asians rather than by Europeans.

As others have noted, this is a pwerful, angry and wide-ranging book. As you can see just from the title: "Year 501" refers to the 501st anniversary of Columbus's first voyage, but Chomsky's story ranges all over the globe abd all over history.

If you're like me, you know Chomsky's political works primarily from his extensive collaborations with David Barsamian, which are based on speeches and radio interviews. Chomsky voice is much more fiery when, as he is here, he speaks without Barsamian as a moderator.

Chomsky's Year 501 is another engrossing work from this erudite and learned treasure and scholar. A good place to start is the concluding chapter as it presents an incredible analysis with an astonishing array of facts and figures relating to the domestic American scene and the conditions that have befallen the average U.S. worker. He brings the same studious approach to this area of inquiry as he's done for the last forty years regarding the international arena and linguistics. Along with Michael Parenti's Democracy For the Few, it's simply some of the best work available on this pressing topic. Deindustrialization, increasing underemployment, rising poverty, the increasing gap between the super rich and middle class, and the business community's relentless assault on unions - Chomsky touches on all these issues. He summarizes these developments by writing that the United States is showing the characteristics of a Third World country by becoming a two-tiered society. That the child poverty rate in New York city is approaching forty percent is just one example of the many nuggets of information a reader can garner from Year 501.

Of course the majority of the book covers an incredible amount of ground pertaining to international politics and economics with particular emphasis on Latin America. As always these passages shine with insight and brilliance while being backed up with rigorous documentation and research. Colonization to neo-imperialism are broached along with the two rip off machines known as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

Since he's always refused to punk out to mainstream corporate opinion Chomsky's a somewhat cruel reminder to the orthodox pundits and intellectuals of what intellectual responsibility is truly about. The New Yorker recently ran a hit piece against him; this of course demonstrates that he's still pontificating and writing truths the black-tie cocktail party set refuse to countenance. Year 501 follows in the tradition of a long line of Chomsky books that make the establishmentarians a bit uncomfortable.

america wants to be the "Global Policeman". What are we trying to police? Many of his conclusions are really no-brainers for anyone who understands that capitalism and democracy are not the same thing, and that when the two collide (and they have collided often in poor countries where resouces are sucked out by transnational corperations) the U$A always suports the side that pays- evan at the cost of really unspeakable crime against humanity. The devil is in the details and chomskys books are like windows thruogh which you'll stare that devil in the face. Many people cann't bare to look and many others don't want you to.

Glancing at the World Bank's top amazon purchases, I see "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations", a psuedo-intellectual rant that claims the poverty of nations is largely a result of cultural failings. Chomsky's 501 is the perfect antidote to such revisionist nonsense, explaining that the real revisionists are those that continuously explain away their atrocities as manifest destiny, the imperative of those called to the 'noble work' of empire building. If the poverty of nations is a result of cultural deficiency, Year 501 makes it amply clear that the 'deficiencies' of the poor are a lack of brutality, manipulativeness and cruelty, a lack of commitment to genocide properly applied. Year 501 demonstrates this reality with ample sources and research. What really upsets his critics, though, is that his sources aren't 'leftist rags' or biased sources, they are the accounts of the conquistadors and the oppressors themselves, right up to the Wall Street Journal of today. Reading this book will give you the tools to unmask the pervasive political double-speak that has always been used by the powerful to justify their grand work of exploitation, not by citing outside sources, but by showing you the hypocrisy of the elite by laying their own works side by side. Chomsky's model of history, which he sets out in Year 501, gives you an analytical framework that can be applied with amazing consistency and accuracy; it would be taught in every high school in the country if the purpose of education were to develop a realistic and useful model for understanding history. An amazing book that should inspire you to act up.

Another entry in the author's voluminous expose' of what amounts to US imperialism, even if that inflammatory word is never used. Chomsky's main focus is on Haiti, though the lens wanders as usual. Haiti offers an especially valuable case study in US-hemispheric relations, since it was the first non-white republic in the western hemisphere, having freed itself from French dominion during the revolution in France. At best, Haiti's is a checkered history, though - as Chomsky shows - these last years of Papa Doc Duvalier's reign of terror and the Aristide reaction have been particularly revealing. How the US has manuevered to keep that impoverished country economically dependent is yet one more dismal chapter in the history of exploitation. The culprits include the usual suspects: hypocritical politicians, greedy business interests, compliant media, and brutal local repression. Once again, Chomsky confronts the official record with the public record and the results are devastating.

I recall once seeing that all-purpose talking head Jeff Greenfield confronted by the unofficial media silencing of America's foremost foreign-policy critic. For a moment he looked puzzled as though only the bad old Soviets made non-persons of eminent critics. Then he responded something about Chomsky sounding like he lives on the planet Venus. That remark reveals a lot about how incestuous mainstream journalism has become and how undigestible the unvarnished facts, such as *the Year 501*, are to their sanitized frame of reference. Apparatchiks in the worst sense, they allow themselves no challenge to the Washinton party line. Truth be told, it is their feet that are firmly planted on the science-fiction soil of a benign and beneficent America, while the MIT professor remains, as ever, unflinchingly earth-bound whatever the cost.

Dense like lead is dense next to tin, Chomsky's serial revelations of atrocious U.S.A. histories will leave you burdened to suspend belief. If you can read and you are a citizen you will contend with your complicity of the 'us' in U.S.A. These plotted histories(many times not linear by the way)spill you through hundreds of years of stuff you don't think 'we' could do and up into 1992. Instead of pushing the weary citizen reader to the safety of the beach and THE END you will realize it is 2004 and we, the U.S.A. are the same.

If you cannot suspend belief you will bend over dazed, thoughts spinning like an errant compass, by the time you finish a few decimals of the first chapter, let alone if you can possibly fight through the moral exhaustion to reach 288.

If you have heart you will finish. If this is your first Chomsky, 288 will not be the end as the Notes and Bibliography begin and spider into more places to go. This is the densest calorie of writing as behind each thought and twitch you sense the colossus of study behind that tiny notice called a footnote. You will feel that this word 'footnote' should be dismissed as a derogatory description for these 288 moments - they should be called Massivenotes or something.

This is a sorrowful journey that is impossible for rationals to contend with. All i can do afterward is know 'yes, i am American.' I feel as if orphaned and wanting to know who I-Am-We-Us are. And 501 hasn't left me alone.

Professor Chomsky does it again. When you live in a third world country like I do, the things he says REALLY make sense. It's also evident that we are not in a situation like this because we are stupid by nature as some respectful scholars say. This Chomsky book reveals every little detail that everybody with just a bit of conscience should know. Like almost all the work of professor Chomsky this is a gem, a masterpiece. Together with Deterring Democracy, they must be read at all costs. Read it, even if you don't agree with his positions.

With his usual style, which includes an endless barrage of irrefutable facts and a flair for analogy, Chomsky spells out the US role in world affairs. Of particular intrest was the sections on Haiti, Brazil, Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua. Chomsky outlines how US dollars, arms and influence have crushed popular movements, aided in state sponsored genocide and maintained a two tier society that leaves the vast majority without representation, hope, or the chance of salvation. This is the perfect book for those with the strength to ask questions about the role of government, and the extent of foreign polocy