Who Rules the World? Reframings

by Noam Chomsky

Furthermore, the commonly drawn corollary—that power will shift to China and India—is highly dubious.

Bear in mind that the North Korean leadership is likely to have read the public military journals of this superpower at that time explaining that since everything in North Korea had been destroyed, the air force was then sent to destroy North Korea’s dams, huge dams that controlled the nation’s water supply—a war crime, by the way, for which people had been hanged in Nuremberg.

In the past decade, 95 percent of growth has gone into the pockets of 1 percent of the population—mostly a fraction of these.9 Median real income is below its level of twenty-five years ago. For males, median real income is below what it was in 1968.10

Workers were striking not just for bread but for roses, to borrow the traditional labor slogan.

He reports the thinking of skilled workers in New York 170 years ago, who repeated the common view that a daily wage is a form of slavery and warned perceptively that a day might come when wage slaves “will so far forget what is due to manhood as to glory in a system forced on them by their necessity and in opposition to their feelings of independence and self-respect.”17

There are a number of ways to evaluate this doctrine. One obvious question to ask is: What happened when the Russian threat disappeared in 1989? The answer: everything continued much as before.

Gorbachev was naturally outraged, but when he complained, he was instructed by Washington that this had only been a verbal promise, a gentleman’s agreement, hence without force.5 If he was naïve enough to accept the word of American leaders, it was his problem.

As U.S. policy analysts added, “Latin Americans are convinced that the first beneficiaries of the development of a country’s resources should be the people of that country.”8 That, of course, will not do. Washington understands that the “first beneficiaries” should be U.S. investors, while Latin America fulfills its service function.

The United States somehow finds it difficult to appeal to the poor with its doctrine that the rich should plunder the poor.

Henry Kissinger caught the essence of the real foreign policy of the United States when he termed independent nationalism a “virus” that might “spread contagion.”

In May 2014, for example, the United States agreed to support a UN Security Council resolution calling on the International Criminal Court to investigate war crimes in Syria, but with a proviso: there could be no inquiry into possible war crimes by Israel.19

“The architects of power in the United States must create a force that can be felt but not seen. Power remains strong when it remains in the dark; exposed to the sunlight it begins to evaporate.”21

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. A high-level government panel then discovered that there was actually only one case: someone had sent $8,500 to Somalia.

There is now much exuberance in the United States about “a hundred years of energy independence” as we become “the Saudi Arabia of the next century”—perhaps the final century of human civilization if current policies persist.

For the past fourteen years, the norm has been that Israel kills more than two Palestinian children a week.

The Israeli media constantly intoned that Hamas was dedicated to the destruction of the country. In reality, Hamas’s leaders have repeatedly made it clear that they would accept a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus that has been blocked by the United States and Israel for forty years.

“The precise location of the Jabalia Elementary Girls School and the fact that it was housing thousands of internally displaced people was communicated to the Israeli army seventeen times, to ensure its protection,”

In that case it might be possible to move toward the “enduring solution” in Gaza that Secretary of State John Kerry called for, eliciting hysterical condemnation in Israel because the phrase could be interpreted as calling for an end to Israel’s siege and regular attacks and—horror of horrors—the phrase might even be interpreted as calling for implementation of international law in the rest of the Occupied Territories.

Whatever happens, we have got The Atom Bomb, and they have not.

The reason has to do with the concept “living memory,” a category carefully constructed to include their crimes against us while scrupulously excluding our crimes against them—the latter not crimes but a noble defense of the highest values, sometimes inadvertently flawed.

Contrary to the eloquent pronouncements, it is not the case that “terrorism is terrorism. There’s no two ways about it.” There definitely are two ways about it: theirs versus ours. And not just when it comes to terrorism.

“Well, we had all those planes sitting around and couldn’t just let them stay there with nothing to do.”5

It is important to bear in mind that the Republicans long ago abandoned the pretense of functioning as a normal parliamentary party. They have, as respected conservative political commentator Norman Ornstein of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute observed, become a “radical insurgency” that scarcely seeks to participate in normal congressional politics.

Since the days of President Ronald Reagan, the party leadership has plunged so far into the pockets of the very rich and the corporate sector that they can attract votes only by mobilizing parts of the population that have not previously been an organized political force.

Former Clinton and Obama Middle East negotiator Dennis Ross typically recommends that “Iran must have no doubts that if we see it moving towards a weapon, that would trigger the use of force” even after the termination of the deal, when Iran is free to do what it wants. 8

According to the leading Western polling agencies (WIN/Gallup International), the prize for “greatest threat” is won by the United States, which the world regards as the gravest threat to world peace by a large margin. In second place, far below, is Pakistan, its ranking probably inflated by the Indian vote. Iran is ranked below those two, along with China, Israel, North Korea, and Afghanistan.12

To be sure, Israel faces the “existential threat” of Iranian pronouncements: Supreme Leader Khamenei and former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad famously threatened it with destruction. Except that they didn’t—and if they had, it would have been of little moment.18 They predicted that “under God’s grace [the Zionist regime] will be wiped off the map” (according to another translation, Ahmadinejad says Israel “must vanish from the page of time,” citing a statement by the Ayatollah Khomeini during the period when Israel and Iran were tacitly allied). In other words, they hope that regime change will someday take place.

No serious analyst believes that Iran would ever use, or even threaten to use, a nuclear weapon if it had one, and thereby face instant destruction. There is, however, real concern that a nuclear weapon might fall into jihadi hands—not from Iran, where the threat is minuscule, but from U.S. ally Pakistan, where it is very real.

“Because of the United States.” More precisely, because of the Republican Party, which by now is becoming a real danger to decent human survival.

Mainstream Democrats are now pretty much what used to be called

“moderate Republicans.” Meanwhile, the Republican Party has largely drifted off the spectrum, becoming what respected conservative political analyst Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein call a “radical insurgency” that has virtually abandoned normal parliamentary politics.

We now know that the world was saved from likely nuclear destruction in those frightening days by the decision of a Russian officer, Stanislav Petrov, not to transmit to higher authorities the report of automated detection systems that the USSR was under missile attack.

One prominent British Ukraine scholar poses what he calls a “fateful geographical paradox”: that NATO “exists to manage the risks created by its existence.”18

There were then two contrasting visions of a new security system and political economy in Eurasia. In Sakwa’s words, one vision was of a “ ‘Wider Europe,’ with the EU at its heart but increasingly coterminous with the Euro-Atlantic security and political community; and on the other side there [was] the idea of ‘Greater Europe,’ a vision of a continental Europe, stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok, that has multiple centers, including Brussels, Moscow and Ankara, but with a common purpose in overcoming the divisions that have traditionally plagued the continent.” Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was the major proponent of Greater Europe, a concept that also had European roots in Gaullism and other initiatives.

A look at the minimum wage in the United States illustrates what has been happening. Through the periods of high growth in the 1950s and ’60s, the minimum wage—which sets a baseline for other wages—tracked productivity. That ended with the onset of neoliberal doctrine. Since then, the minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, has actually fallen.

It is the government, for instance, that gets blamed for the highly protectionist corporate/investor rights agreements,

uniformly misdescribed as “free trade agreements” in commentary and the media.

To mention only one (quite unfortunate) illustration, one of the difficulties in arousing American concern about global warming is that some 40 percent of the country’s population believes that Jesus Christ will probably or definitely return to Earth by 2050, so they do not see the very severe threats of climate disaster in future decades as a problem. A similar percentage believes that our planet was created just a few thousand years ago.10

The “political revolution” that Bernie Sanders quite rightly called for would not have greatly surprised Dwight Eisenhower. Today’s Republicans, meanwhile, have moved so far right in their dedication to the wealthy and the corporate sector that they cannot hope to get votes on their actual programs. Instead, they have turned to mobilizing sectors of the population that have always been there, just not as an organized political force: evangelicals, nativists, racists, and the victims of the forms of globalization designed to set working people around the world in competition with one another while protecting the privileged.

A look at the polls in Austria and Germany cannot fail to provoke alarm for anyone familiar with the 1930s, and especially for those who witnessed that decade, as I did as a child. I can still recall listening to Hitler’s speeches, not understanding the words but finding the tone and audience reaction chilling enough. The first article that I remember writing was in February 1939, after the fall of Barcelona, on the seemingly inexorable spread of the fascist plague. And by a strange coincidence, it was in Barcelona that my wife and I watched the 2016 election returns.