Toward a New Cold War: Essays on the Current Crisis & How We Got There

by Noam Chomsky

Featuring Noam Chomsky’s trademark directness and analytical precision, this is a sobering assessment of American foreign policy from the end of the Vietnam War to the Reagan era “What Chomsky has made vivid is the truth that western political leaders, respectable people whose ‘moderation’ contains not a hint of totalitarianism, can, at great remove in physical and cultural distance, kill and maim people on a scale comparable with the accredited monsters of our time.” —from John Pilger’s foreword to Towards a New Cold War With the same uncompromising style that characterized his breakthrough, Vietnam-era writings, Towards a New Cold War extends Chomsky’s critique of U.S. foreign policy through the early 1970s to Ronald Reagan’s first term. Expanding on themes such as the cozy relationship of intellectuals to the state and American adventurism after World War II, Chomsky goes on to examine the way that U.S. policy makers set about the task of rewriting their horrible history of involvement in Southeast Asia and turned their attention more squarely on the Middle East and Central America. He also assesses U.S. oil strategy and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, dissects the first volume of Henry Kissinger’s memoirs, issues an urgent call to stem the bloodshed in then-unknown East Timor and, in the title essay, marks the increased posture of confrontation and rearmament under presidents Carter and Reagan that signaled the end of détente with the Soviet Union. As the United States adopts this same aggressive posture toward China in a sort of twenty-first-century Cold War, Chomsky’s words are newly relevant.

Genres: Politics, History, Nonfiction

496 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Avram Noam Chomsky is an American professor and public intellectual known for his work in linguistics, political activism, and social criticism. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He is a laureate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona and an institute professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Among the most cited living authors, Chomsky has written more than 150 books on topics such as linguistics, war, and politics. In addition to his work in linguistics, since the 1960s Chomsky has been an influential voice on the American left as a consistent critic of U.S. foreign policy, contemporary capitalism, and corporate influence on political institutions and the media.
Born to Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants (his father was William Chomsky) in Philadelphia, Chomsky developed an early interest in anarchism from alternative bookstores in New York City. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania. During his postgraduate work in the Harvard Society of Fellows, Chomsky developed the theory of transformational grammar for which he earned his doctorate in 1955. That year he began teaching at MIT, and in 1957 emerged as a significant figure in linguistics with his landmark work Syntactic Structures, which played a major role in remodeling the study of language. From 1958 to 1959 Chomsky was a National Science Foundation fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. He created or co-created the universal grammar theory, the generative grammar theory, the Chomsky hierarchy, and the minimalist program. Chomsky also played a pivotal role in the decline of linguistic behaviorism, and was particularly critical of the work of B.F. Skinner.
An outspoken opponent of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, which he saw as an act of American imperialism, in 1967 Chomsky rose to national attention for his anti-war essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals". Becoming associated with the New Left, he was arrested multiple times for his activism and placed on President Richard M. Nixon's list of political opponents. While expanding his work in linguistics over subsequent decades, he also became involved in the linguistics wars. In collaboration with Edward S. Herman, Chomsky later articulated the propaganda model of media criticism in Manufacturing Consent, and worked to expose the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. His defense of unconditional freedom of speech, including that of Holocaust denial, generated significant controversy in the Faurisson affair of the 1980s. Chomsky's commentary on the Cambodian genocide and the Bosnian genocide also generated controversy. Since retiring from active teaching at MIT, he has continued his vocal political activism, including opposing the 2003 invasion of Iraq and supporting the Occupy movement. An anti-Zionist, Chomsky considers Israel's treatment of Palestinians to be worse than South African–style apartheid, and criticizes U.S. support for Israel.
Chomsky is widely recognized as having helped to spark the cognitive revolution in the human sciences, contributing to the development of a new cognitivistic framework for the study of language and the mind. Chomsky remains a leading critic of U.S. foreign policy, contemporary capitalism, U.S. involvement and Israel's role in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and mass media. Chomsky and his ideas are highly influential in the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements. Since 2017, he has been Agnese Helms Haury Chair in the Agnese Nelms Haury Program in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona.

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

Instead of a traditional review, here are ten (10) thoughts that occurred to me as I read Towards a New Cold War by Noam Chomsky.

(1) It's probably a good idea to be skeptical of anyone who seeks power, even- or especially- people we like or agree with.

(2) "If we don't believe in freedom of speech for people we despise", John Pilger quotes Chomsky in the introduction, "we don't believe in it at all." Are there exceptions, like yelling coronavirus in a crowded theater? I guess that's debatable. But Chomsky is intimately familiar with the ways people try to make exceptions in order to silence dissent. Freedom of speech is one thing, but to oppose the war in Vietnam? Well that makes you a Communist, that's a different story. Or freedom of speech is one thing, but to talk about the human rights of Palestinians (not something that most Americans take kindly to)? That makes you anti-Semitic, that's a different story. Or something is "problematic"- a useful term for when you don't want to think further about an issue. Chomsky has been through all that and more, I'm sure.

So to play off of thought (1), it's probably a good idea to be skeptical of any formulation to the effect of "I believe in freedom of speech, but...", even- or especially- when the censorship is directed at people we dislike or disagree with.

(3) The belief that there were only two mutually-exclusive ideas in the world was useful to both the United States and the Soviet Union, during the Cold War. Isn't this belief somewhat mirrored in the U.S. today? Haven't we gotten habituated to thinking that there are only two mutually-exclusive ideas in the country, and that anyone with the opposing idea is a "bad" person, almost less than human, or at least suffering from some pathology?

(4) The Cold War looks very different when you step away from the perspective of eastern Europe.

Why is it, for example, that so many countries in Central and South America, Africa and Southeast Asia, welcomed into the Free World by the United States, became- in the process of achieving that "freedom"- military dictatorships?

Chomsky writes that U.S. foreign policy- not surprisingly- has a lot more to do with the material interests of a relatively small ruling class than it does with any of the moral shibboleths generally invoked by politicians and the media. In other words, according to Chomsky, despite appearances, U.S. support for governments throughout the Third World wasn't necessarily meant to reward murder, torture and repression; it's just that those practices were mostly irrelevant to U.S. interests:

...the correlation between abuse of human rights and U.S. support derives from deeper factors. Each correlate, independently, with a third and critical factor: namely, improvement of the investment climate, as measured by privileges granted foreign capital. The climate for business operations improves as unions and other popular organizations are destroyed, dissidents are tortured or eliminated, real wages are depressed, and the society as a whole is placed in the hands of a collection of thugs who are willing to sell out to the foreigner for a share of the loot...as the climate for business operations improves, the society is welcomed into the Free World and offered the specific "aid" that will further these favorable developments. If the consequences are, for example, that crops are produced for export by wealthy landowners or transnational agribusiness while the population starves, that is simply the price that must be paid for the survival of free institutions.

(5) It's hard to escape the conclusion that the CIA was and probably still is one of the most dangerous terrorist organizations in world history, if not the most dangerous, but something about that still sounds vaguely off- maybe because as a kid I was to some extent indoctrinated, and part of the indoctrination involves instilling the belief that indoctrination is only something other countries do. I'm reminded of the chapter in Victor Klemperer's The Language of the Third Reich where he observed that German kids who had been born during the Nazi era, even after the war, seemed unable to conceptualize the meaning of the word heroisch in any context other than on a field of battle. Klemperer wrote that "cliches take hold of us", but so do associations.

This is not something that Chomsky writes about in this collection explicitly, but rather something that his writing and the implicit worldview behind it got me thinking about. For example, I just did a little experiment- I thought of the word "propaganda", and the first adjective that came to mind- apologies to any Russians out there, but I was free-associating- was "Russian." Perhaps "Chinese" would be the second. "German propaganda" sounds like it could be right, but only within the context of World War II. "Canadian propaganda" on the other hand sounds totally ludicrous (I almost expected spellcheck to put a long red line under both words), but something within me also has a difficult time just looking at the phrases "American propaganda" and "Israeli propaganda", never mind "American terrorism" and "Israeli terrorism", all of which obviously denote things that exist. I guess the point is that in America, by definition, "terrorism" has come to mean what enemy countries do, not what we or our allies (with our financial and military support) ever do, or even could do. Associations take hold of us.

(6a) Speaking of the concept of heroism, a news story emerged, as I was reading this collection, about whether President Trump had privately referred to the Troops (i.e., the U.S. military) of World War I not as heroisch, which would be standard, but as "losers", which in American culture would be like dropping your pants and taking a big shit right there on the flag. I noticed, in my little corner of social media, that a lot of liberals seemed to be cheering this story on, both the story and its (presumed) effect on Trump voters. I posted an article by Glenn Greenwald, in which Glenn pointed out that the Atlantic story relied only on anonymous sources, and that Jeffrey Goldberg, the author of the piece, is basically a flak for the intelligence community, with a history of peddling nonsense like the supposed connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda in 2002; but no one in my corner of social media seemed very interested. If it's bad for Trump (and who knows if it even is- as a matter of fact, I'd be surprised if anyone even remembers this story by the time I post this review), it must be good.

(6b) Greenwald acknowledged that yes, it certainly seems plausible that Trump would have said something like this, especially in light of his remarks about John McCain years ago, but

journalism is not supposed to be grounded in whether something is “believable” or “seems like it could be true.” Its core purpose, the only thing that really makes it matter or have worth, is reporting what is true, or at least what evidence reveals. And that function is completely subverted when news outlets claim that they “confirmed” a previous report when they did nothing more than just talked to the same people who anonymously whispered the same things to them as were whispered to the original outlet.

(6c) Furthermore, what exactly is the point of a story about how politician X may or may not have said some offensive thing a couple of years ago? You might not like it...but it really doesn't impact your life or mine in the slightest, does it? I can't help thinking that the more we pay attention to stories like this, the less we pay attention to stories about, say, what Trump's new ambassador to Afghanistan might be planning, or why we still don't have universal healthcare in this country, even in the midst of a global pandemic, or how the Pentagon was given a billion dollars in March to "build up the country's supplies of medical equipment" but instead spent most of the money on- what else?- military supplies. Maybe that's not a coincidence. And I wonder what really bothers the Troops more- the possibility that a politician may or may not have said something mean about them in private, or the fact that the politicians of both major parties continue to send them into overseas conflicts for no good reason?

(6d) I wonder if "if it's bad for Trump, it must be good" is a mindset that people will be able to just turn off after the election, if in fact Biden wins (a big "if"). When Biden starts a new conflict in the Middle East, or Harris decides it might be a good idea to prosecute the parents of truant kids and that we don't have enough private prisons, or when neither of them do enough to take on the fossil-fuel industry, is the answer to every criticism of their administration going to be, "would you rather have Trump back in office?" It had better not be.

(7) Implicit in Chomsky's worldview, I think, is the deceptively profound idea that there is nothing inherently exceptional or more deserving about the country you grew up in than any other country, and that "our" lives are not any more valuable than the lives of people anywhere else. Chomsky constantly encourages you to imagine the shoe on the other foot. Most people would probably agree with this in principle (at least I hope they would), but in terms of the ways we absorb news and the mental habits formed thereby, Chomsky's distinction between "worthy" and "unworthy" victims still no doubt applies. Every moment of the political spectacle here in the States is analyzed, discussed and obsessed over, but we don't generally hear a lot about what's happening in Yemen.

For decades, we've been habituated to dehumanize and disregard the lives of people in foreign countries who don't happen to be our allies. I have been, too. Drone strikes have increased under Trump, but he didn't invent them, and those "unworthy" deaths in the paper, over the course of decades, seem to partially constitute the natural order of things. Maybe the next logical step is that the citizens of the empire begin to dehumanize each other.

(8) The way we choose collectively to interpret some significant historical event is itself often very significant; and in the days and months and years after such an event, we're in the continual process of interpretation, whether we're conscious of interpreting or not. And naturally there's competition to influence this collective interpretation, although in the era of YouTube algorithms operating on dopamine and advertising money, I wonder if even the notion that there are people out there consciously trying to manipulate us in one way or the other is itself becoming quaint and antiquated.

Chomsky points out that the ideological range of interpretations offered by the media is often artificially narrow. The typical commentator, Chomsky writes,

...may concede the stupidity of American policy, and even its savagery, but not the illegitimacy inherent in the entire enterprise, the fact that this [Vietnam] was a war of aggression waged by the United States. This issue must be excluded from debate over the "lessons of the debacle", because it goes directly to the crucial matter of the resort to force and violence to guarantee a certain vision of global order.

(9) Domestic scandals and Washington infighting are always given more attention than an administration's real crimes- maybe because the real crimes are the general rule. We all remember Nixon as a criminal, but he was a criminal for reasons far more important than Watergate.

...the charges against Nixon were for behavior not too far out of the ordinary, though he erred in choosing his victims among the powerful, a significant deviation from established practice. He was never charged with the serious crimes of his administration, [such as] the "secret bombing" of Cambodia. The issue was raised, but it was the secrecy of the bombing, not the bombing itself, that was held to be the crime.

10) Recently I read an old interview with Clint Eastwood, in which he talks about how he's never been able to play characters who are losers. The reason is that it has always seemed to Clint that the losers of the world enjoy losing, for some strange reason he's never been able to understand. Reading Chomsky is a reminder to not be satisfied with that story.

[Ronald Wise · Rating 4 out of 5]

After hearing Chomsky on my NPR station, KUOW, one afternoon, I went to a used bookstore and bought everything they had by him. This was one of the books. When reading Noam many things seem to make more sense until you start thinking about how his analyses compare with those of the pundits in the mainstream media. You can either think he's crazy, or you can believe that the government and media are working together to keep the public discourse from the real issues. I tend to believe Noam, but then I have fleeting moments where I wonder about my own sanity too. This book focuses a great deal on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which doesn't seem to have changed much since 1982. The discussions of other topics in the book have since become obsolete, but are still full of historical insight.

[Thomas Ray]

E840 C493 2003 Memorial Library

[Michael Guyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chomsky is a treasure trove of information. If there is one takeaway from this collection of essays (and most of his work), it is the following: don't trust US media, particularly when it comes to US foreign policy. The fact that the mainstream media in the US is not officially state-run provides the illusion of it being independent, but time and time again Chomsky demonstrates how it ceaselessly tows the line for US defense interests. The writing is often dry and it took me quite a while to get through this collection; I'd consider giving it a 3.5/5 if possible but for the sheer amount of information alone I've given it 4/5. I do not agree with Chomsky's analysis on all political matters, but when it comes to this particular area i.e. exposing the complicity of the mainstream media in US atrocities committed abroad, Chomsky is at his finest.

[Neel Kuila]

Like always, an in-depth account of numerous short sighted actions in American foreign policy. The lessons of the past are apparently going over US officials heads, as this book is shockingly relevant 20+ years later.

Chomsky pulls apart traditional arguments for intervention and further illustrates how well constructed the media echo chamber functions as a state propaganda system. Publicized good intentions of arming the "right" side can be the sheep's clothing for business interests. The media also has its business interests at heart, and promotes editors who are subservient to the causes of the day and skilled at manufacturing consent. There's a lack of even questioning our right to intervene, then and now. It's a cycle of we made our mess, let's clean it up. You know, classic Chomsky stuff.

Practically speaking: this book is good for someone with a good base of foreign affairs. Not for a beginner. For people knowledgeable about dissent, this is nothing new, just a different skin on the same game as today.

[Mat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best book I have read by Chomsky so far.
I read this when I was holed up in a hospital in Osaka for a month with a broken jaw. Great read. Very well written and there was plenty of information in here which I did not know. Not only is Chomsky a genius linguist (the inventor of generative grammar theory so to speak), but he is also an amazing scholar. I cannot even begin to imagine how many books, newspapers and magazines this guy must read. Where does he find the time!?!?!?!?!?
I preferred this over Manufacturing Consent because there were some chapters in Manufacturing Consent which did not interest me like the chapter on the assassination attempt on the Pope.

[Lysergius · Rating 4 out of 5]

Noam Chomsky is one of the sanest men on the planet. Everything he says makes perfect sense once you accept the basic flaw in our society - that it has two basic motivations, fear and greed. Everything else follows on from that. These essays are illustrative of the reach of Chomsky's thinking.