Ever since American Power and the New Mandarins (1969), Chomsky has been obsessed with uncovering the pernicious relationships between state power, intellectuals, and the media (especially print). In this collection of 13 previously published essays—plus a new introduction and two new afterwords—he is still on the scent. Loosely grouped, eight of the selections deal with the Cold War, four with the Middle East, and one with East Timor. In Chomsky's view of the world, there is the truth, which he culls from a stupefying amount of news and documentary material; and then there is propaganda and falsehood, which amounts to most of what everyone else has to say about the truth that Chomsky knows. Much of what he contends makes a good deal of sense, but it gets twisted through the vehemence with which he says it. For example, he rails against American indifference to the Indonesian invastion of East Timor (and subsequent massacres), rightly pointing out that the Indonesians are supplied with American weapons and would be susceptible to American pressure: the US could mitigate the suffering. By contrast, the American media have made a great deal of events in Cambodia, a situation similar to that in East Timor—which, however, the US cannot influence, because Washington refuses to enter into diplomatic relations with Hanoi. Thus Chomsky concludes that there's a virtual conspiracy of silence in the media over East Timor and a highly effective propaganda campaign to exploit the situation in Vietnam. Given the blinkered approach of the American press to world events, US involvement in Southeast Asia goes a long way to explain why the media pay attention to any "good story" there; but Chomsky gets so exercised that he winds up pushing "his" national tragedy over the official one: forget about Cambodia, what about Timor? Sometimes, true, Chomsky's stridency is almost justified—Henry Kissinger's memoirs are "vacuous," Guenther Lewy's pseudo-scholarly whitewash of American actions in Vietnam is a "squalid tract"—but overall it undercuts his arguments. In essence, Chomsky is an anti-statist, and his enemies are his fellow-intellectuals who fail to see the catastrophic effects of state power and who, knowingly or not, aid and abet the interests represented by the state. His first book of political essays was an important assault on those foes, but the subsequent ones have grown increasingly high-strung, which helps neither Chomsky nor his cause.
Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1981
ISBN: 1565848594
Page Count: 539
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1981
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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