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
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics,...
A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.
Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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