Who Rules the World? (American Empire Project)

by Noam Chomsky

One consequence is so-called apathy: not bothering to vote.

It has a significant class correlation.

“class-skewed abstention rates”

virtually restricted to propertied free males.

troika—the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (specifically the IMF’s political actors, not its economists, who have been critical of the destructive policies).

with the masters drawn from the top ranks of increasingly monopolized economies, the gargantuan and often predatory financial institutions, the multinationals protected by state power, and the political figures who largely represent their interests.

ominous scientific discoveries about the pace of environmental destruction.

“the probability of a nuclear calamity [as]

higher today” than during the Cold War,

nuclear shelter underground

the question of who rules the world, how they proceed in their efforts, and where these lead—and how the “underlying populations,” to borrow Thorstein Veblen’s useful phrase, may hope to overcome the power of business and nationalist doctrine and become, in his words, “alive and fit to live.”

is the great good fortune of mankind that there is a substantial correlation between intelligence and morality including good will toward one’s fellows.… Consequently our superiors in ability are on the average our benefactors, and it is often safer to trust our interests to them than to ourselves.

Returning to the two categories of intellectuals, it seems to be close to a

historical universal that conformist intellectuals, the ones who support official aims and ignore or rationalize official crimes, are honored and privileged in their own societies, while the value-oriented are punished in one way or another.

figures who by contemporary standards are dissident intellectuals, called “prophets” in the English

translation. They bitterly angered the establishment with their critical geopolitical analysis, their condemnation of the crimes of the powerful, their calls for justice and concern for the poor and suffering.

The prophets were treated harshly, unlike the flatterers at the court, who would later be condemned as false prophets.

intellectuals are typically privileged; privilege yields opportunity, and opportunity confers responsibilities. An individual then has choices.

which defines “the world” as the political

class in Washington and London (and whoever happens to agree with them on specific matters).

“Araboushim,” the slang counterpart of “kike” or “nigger.”14

Araboushim

two-legged beasts, grasshoppers, and drugged roaches.

murder with intent, accidental killing, and murder with foreknowledge but without specific intent.

United States has a “transcendent purpose”: establishing peace and freedom at home and indeed everywhere,

The Myth of American Exceptionalism,

the United States is “just one great, but imperfect, country among others.”

The American idea is revealed in the country’s birth as a “city on a hill,” an “inspirational notion” that resides “deep in the American psyche,” and by “the distinctive spirit of American individualism and enterprise”

“humanitarian intervention” led to catastrophe for the alleged beneficiaries.

Henry Cabot Lodge in 1898.

lauded our record “of conquest, colonization, and territorial expansion unequalled by any people in the 19th century,”

American imperialism is often traced to the takeover of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii

1898.

what historian of imperialism Bernard Porter calls “the saltwater fallacy,” the idea that conquest only becomes imper...

“the saltwater fallacy,” the idea that conquest only becomes imperialism when...

the next step in the mission assigned by Providence was to confer “the blessings of liberty and civilization upon all the rescued peoples”

to confer “the blessings of liberty and civilization upon all the rescued peoples”

at least those who survived the murderous onslaught and widespread use of torture

murderous onslaught and widespread use of torture and other atrocities that accompanied it.

surveillance, intimidation, and violence.13 Similar models would be adopted in many other areas where the United States imposed brutal national guards and other client forces, with consequences that should be well-known.

“torture paradigm,”

In ordinary American practice, torture was largely farmed out to subsidiaries,

knocks off is that small percentage of torture now done by Americans while retaining the overwhelming bulk of the system’s torture,

which is done by foreigners under US patronage.

Obama did not shut down the practice of torture, Nairn observes, but “merely repositioned it,” restoring it to

the American norm, a matter of indifference to the victims.

Since Vietnam, “the US has mainly seen its torture done for it by proxy—paying, arming, training and...

aid “has tended to flow disproportionately to Latin American governments which torture their citizens

U.S. aid tends to correlate with a favorable climate for business operations,

commonly improved by the murder of labor and peasant organizers and human rights activists and other such actions, yielding a secondary correlation between aid and egregious violation of human rights.

CIA paradigm,