Who Rules the World? Reframings

by Noam Chomsky

American political system: the total absence of a socialist or laborite mass party as an organized competitor in the electoral market,”

“treat our generals as idiots, our social institutions as absurd and our traditions as unhealthy.”1

Intellectual

Nelson Mandela, who was only removed from the official State Department terrorist list in 2008,

historian of imperialism Bernard Porter calls “the saltwater fallacy,” the idea that conquest only becomes imperialism when it crosses salt water.

The peak of U.S. power was after World War II, when it had literally half the world’s wealth.

By the early 1970s, the U.S. share of global wealth had fallen to about 25 percent,

The costs of the Bush-Obama wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are now estimated to run as high as $4.4 trillion—a

When the war ended, eight horrendous years later, mainstream opinion was divided between those who described the war as a “noble cause” that could have been won with more dedication and, at the opposite extreme, the critics, for whom it was “a mistake” that proved too costly.

Vietnam War

MENA countries—Middle East/North Africa—which have been regarded by planners since the 1940s as “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.”

President Obama has set new standards in safeguarding this principle. He has, in fact, punished more whistle-blowers than all previous presidents combined,

until a Supreme Court decision of 1975, women did not even have a legal right to serve on juries.

In India, it’s a major war over direct environmental destruction, with tribal societies trying to resist resource-extraction operations that are extremely harmful locally but also in their general consequences.

Ecuador, which also has a large indigenous population, is the only oil exporter I know of whose government is seeking aid to help keep that oil in the ground instead of producing and exporting it—and the ground is where it ought to be.

Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968 while supporting a strike of public-sector workers in Memphis, Tennessee.

there is even congressional legislation authorizing the president to use armed force to “rescue” any American brought to the Hague for trial—the “Netherlands Invasion Act,” as it is sometimes called in Europe.

When the NSA’s surveillance program was exposed by Edward Snowden’s revelations, high officials claimed that it had prevented fifty-four terrorist acts. On inquiry, that was whittled down to a dozen.

Five Latin American states—Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, and Peru—withdrew their ambassadors from Israel, following the course of Bolivia and Venezuela, which had broken relations in reaction

By the opening of the new era, the United States possessed about half of total world wealth

1945

These escalations are often called “mowing the lawn” in Israeli parlance, though the 2014 Israeli operation was more accurately described by an appalled senior U.S. military officer as “removing the topsoil.”

In January 2006, the Palestinians committed a serious crime. They voted “the wrong way” in carefully monitored free elections, placing the parliament in the hands of Hamas.

With the rightward drift, the Republican Party’s dedication to wealth and privilege has become so extreme that its actual policies could not attract voters, so it has had to seek a new popular base,

One can imagine how the United States would react if the Warsaw Pact were still alive, most of Latin America had joined, and now Mexico and Canada were applying for membership.

who rules the world while ignoring the “masters of mankind,” as Adam Smith called them: in his day, the merchants and manufacturers of England; in ours, multinational conglomerates, huge financial institutions, retail empires, and the like.

East Asia, where “the U.S. Navy has become used to treating the Pacific as an ‘American lake’ ”;

new Chinese-developed port of Gwadar in Pakistan,

There are also some expectations that the SCO might eventually become a counterpart to NATO.

Shanghai co-op org

NATO enlargement began at once, in violation of verbal assurances to Gorbachev that NATO forces would not move “one inch to the east” after he agreed that a unified Germany could become a NATO member—a

Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which declared (but could not yet implement) U.S. control of the hemisphere. And a small country that carries out such successful defiance may be subjected to “the terrors of the earth” and a crushing embargo—as happened to Cuba.

Obama’s global drone assassination campaign, a remarkable innovation in global terrorism, exhibits the same patterns. By most accounts, it is generating terrorists more rapidly than it is murdering those suspected of someday intending to harm us—an impressive contribution by a constitutional lawyer on the eight hundredth anniversary of Magna Carta, which established the basis for the principle of presumption of innocence that is the foundation of civilized law.

Germany has emerged as the conscience of Europe, at first (but no longer) admitting almost one million refugees—in

Lebanon has absorbed an estimated 1.5 million Syrian refugees, now a quarter of its population, on top of half a million Palestinian refugees registered with the UN refugee agency UNRWA,

Studies show that doctrines of white supremacy have an extraordinarily powerful grip on culture in the United States—even more so than in South Africa,