Year 501: The Conquest Continues

Rating:
Summary: Makes the "Respectable" Men Squirm
Review: Chomsky's Year 501 is another engrossing work from this erudite and learned treasure and scholar. A good place to start is the concluding chapter as it presents an incredible analysis with an astonishing array of facts and figures relating to the domestic American scene and the conditions that have befallen the average U.S. worker. He brings the same studious approach to this area of inquiry as he's done for the last forty years regarding the international arena and linguistics. Along with Michael Parenti's Democracy For the Few, it's simply some of the best work available on this pressing topic. Deindustrialization, increasing underemployment, rising poverty, the increasing gap between the super rich and middle class, and the business community's relentless assault on unions - Chomsky touches on all these issues. He summarizes these developments by writing that the United States is showing the characteristics of a Third World country by becoming a two-tiered society. That the child poverty rate in New York city is approaching forty percent is just one example of the many nuggets of information a reader can garner from Year 501.

Of course the majority of the book covers an incredible amount of ground pertaining to international politics and economics with particular emphasis on Latin America. As always these passages shine with insight and brilliance while being backed up with rigorous documentation and research. Colonization to neo-imperialism are broached along with the two rip off machines known as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

Since he's always refused to punk out to mainstream corporate opinion Chomsky's a somewhat cruel reminder to the orthodox pundits and intellectuals of what intellectual responsibility is truly about. The New Yorker recently ran a hit piece against him; this of course demonstrates that he's still pontificating and writing truths the black-tie cocktail party set refuse to countenance. Year 501 follows in the tradition of a long line of Chomsky books that make the establishmentarians a bit uncomfortable.

Rating:
Summary: Makes the "Respectable" Men Squirm
Review: Chomsky's Year 501 is another engrossing work from this erudite and learned treasure and scholar. A good place to start is the concluding chapter as it presents an incredible analysis with an astonishing array of facts and figures relating to the domestic American scene and the conditions that have befallen the average U.S. worker. He brings the same studious approach to this area of inquiry as he's done for the last forty years regarding the international arena and linguistics. Along with Michael Parenti's Democracy For the Few, it's simply some of the best work available on this pressing topic. Deindustrialization, increasing underemployment, rising poverty, the increasing gap between the super rich and middle class, and the business community's relentless assault on unions - Chomsky touches on all these issues. He summarizes these developments by writing that the United States is showing the characteristics of a Third World country by becoming a two-tiered society. That the child poverty rate in New York city is approaching forty percent is just one example of the many nuggets of information a reader can garner from Year 501.

Of course the majority of the book covers an incredible amount of ground pertaining to international politics and economics with particular emphasis on Latin America. As always these passages shine with insight and brilliance while being backed up with rigorous documentation and research. Colonization to neo-imperialism are broached along with the two rip off machines known as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

Since he's always refused to punk out to mainstream corporate opinion Chomsky's a somewhat cruel reminder to the orthodox pundits and intellectuals of what intellectual responsibility is truly about. The New Yorker recently ran a hit piece against him; this of course demonstrates that he's still pontificating and writing truths the black-tie cocktail party set refuse to countenance. Year 501 follows in the tradition of a long line of Chomsky books that make the establishmentarians a bit uncomfortable.

Rating:
Summary: !288 pages of heaviness but READ!
Review: Dense like lead is dense next to tin, Chomsky's serial revelations of atrocious U.S.A. histories will leave you burdened to suspend belief. If you can read and you are a citizen you will contend with your complicity of the 'us' in U.S.A. These plotted histories(many times not linear by the way)spill you through hundreds of years of stuff you don't think 'we' could do and up into 1992. Instead of pushing the weary citizen reader to the safety of the beach and THE END you will realize it is 2004 and we, the U.S.A. are the same.

If you cannot suspend belief you will bend over dazed, thoughts spinning like an errant compass, by the time you finish a few decimals of the first chapter, let alone if you can possibly fight through the moral exhaustion to reach 288.

If you have heart you will finish. If this is your first Chomsky, 288 will not be the end as the Notes and Bibliography begin and spider into more places to go. This is the densest calorie of writing as behind each thought and twitch you sense the colossus of study behind that tiny notice called a footnote. You will feel that this word 'footnote' should be dismissed as a derogatory description for these 288 moments - they should be called Massivenotes or something.

This is a sorrowful journey that is impossible for rationals to contend with. All i can do afterward is know 'yes, i am American.' I feel as if orphaned and wanting to know who I-Am-We-Us are. And 501 hasn't left me alone.

Rating:
Summary: Great Book on the History of Americas
Review: Don't let the critics fool you, this is an excellent study on the economic, social and cultural history of the "New World". Year 501 is the essential book for understanding the reasoning and motives behind the annihilation of the indigenous population of America and the countries that were enriched by it. Chomsky's insightful book is a must for anyone who cares about the terrible consquences of imperialist/colonialist culture. A+

Rating:
Summary: I was reading this on Pearl Harbour Day and...
Review: I happened to be reading this on the anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attacks; on the same day my local paper carried a Mallard Fillmore strip which tried to mock the liberal media by having a stereotypical liberal media commentator intoning, "Today the Japanese Attacked Pearl Harbor. Let's examine how we brought this on ourselves." Amongst many other topics, Chomsky actually does show how we brought Pearl Harbor on ourselves. The "Pacific War" as he calls it was not just an unprovoked act of aggression. The Japanese imperialists, even though (as Chomsky points out) they were every bit as brutal as their white rivals, had an arguably legitimate political goal: that is, they wanted Asia to be ruled by Asians rather than by Europeans.

As others have noted, this is a pwerful, angry and wide-ranging book. As you can see just from the title: "Year 501" refers to the 501st anniversary of Columbus's first voyage, but Chomsky's story ranges all over the globe abd all over history.

If you're like me, you know Chomsky's political works primarily from his extensive collaborations with David Barsamian, which are based on speeches and radio interviews. Chomsky voice is much more fiery when, as he is here, he speaks without Barsamian as a moderator.



Rating:
Summary: By Their Fruits Shall You Know Them
Review: The conceit that lies behind the title of this dated polemic is an anthropomorphic fallacy. Chomsky maintains that the essential, unchanging nature of America since 1492 has been that of a rapacious, imperialist and genocidal force in the affairs of that continent and indeed globally. (Year 1, in Chomsky's scheme, was 1492; the development of western civilisation has ever after been a disaster for native peoples.)

Quite apart from the crudely polemical nature of his claims, Chomsky here commits a fundamental methodological error that no serious historian would entertain. As liberal thinkers such as J.S.Mill have maintained, nations are collections of individual historical agents. While it makes sense to talk of the nature of a polity at a particular historical juncture (thus, in the past century the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were totalitarian states, while the present-day United States is a constitutional democracy), it is a logical - and not merely a historical - fallacy to suppose that nations exhibit timeless qualities. Chomsky's invective against the whole of the American historical experience is an error of the type known as 'petitio principii', or 'begging the question': that is, he assumes the truth of his conclusions in his premises.

From this incompetent beginning, Chomsky's entire thesis unravels. As so often in his political writings, he makes dogmatic assertions that are supposed to stand as unquestioned 'facts', yet which merely reveal Chomsky's own consistent biases against liberal democracy and in favour of totalitarianism. My own favourite - if one can use such a word about so intellectually disastrous a technique - among Chomsky's preposterous claims (which apparently are supposed to hold 'a priori', for Chomsky makes scant attempt to substantiate them) is the blithe remark that "Stalin and his successors would have been willing to accept the role of junior managers in the US-dominated world system". How does Chomsky know this? He doesn't say. Why did the US not offer such a role to Stalin? Again, Chomsky gives us no clue. Inconvenient historical data such as Stalin's documented role in launching North Korea's war of aggression against her southern neighbour in 1950 are conveniently deposited down the memory hole.

Chomsky has a small but vocal following among the undergraduate Left, who are drawn, characteristically for religious fundamentalists, to a Manichaean vision of good (Third World totalitarian regimes) and evil (the US, Great Britain and Israel). This vision has the virtue, from a therapeutic point of view, of simplicity, but it has nothing to do with critical inquiry, scholarship or morally informed judgement. Year 501 exemplifies these deficiencies.

Rating:
Summary: Devastating indictment of Western capitalism
Review: This is a book by Chomsky that is probably even more scholarly than usual. At least in the way it is written. Chomsky wrote this book on the 500th anniversary in 1992 of the beginnings of the invasion of much of the world of what Adam Smith refered to, in a rather narrow context as "the savage injustice of the Europeans ("revealing himself to be an early practicioner of the crime of 'political correctness,'"Chomsky comments sardonically)". Chomsky begins his survey by analyzing the policies of the major European powers and the United States as they grew to dominate the world. Such policies., he explains, are not the free market doctrines stressed by right wing talk radio hosts, University of Chicago professors and other such bores and frauds but by massive state subsides, huge tarrifs to block foreign competitors, extreme violence and colonial occupation.

Places like India and Bengal (Bangladesh) which were highly advanced industrial societies by the mid-1700's but all of the industries which were superior to their counterparts in Britain were deliberately undermined or simply forced out of existence by the British colonisers. India and Bangladesh became extremely poor, feudal agricultural countries supplying Britain with raw materials and as a captive market for British goods. The latter is a familiar pattern outlined by Chomsky in this book. The West, since World war II, dominated by the U.S., has always sought any way it could to block advanced economic development in the third world. The exceptions to this that Chomsky points to are Japan and its former colonies in Asia who violated all the laws of the free market to create very dynamic, if, of course, very far from perfect economies. The British, noted Chomsky, started to adopt "free trade" as policy as the United States would do later under similar circumstances, around 1846 when they had no competitors in their field but this changed around 1930 when they, along with the Americans, French and Dutch erected high tarrif walls around Japanese exports to their colonies in Asia with which they could not compete, a major factor in staring Japan's wars of conquest.

He examines the U.S. role in the slaugter of half a million people in Indonesia in 1965 as the independent nationalist Sukarno was overthrown and "a staggering mass slaughter of communists and pro-communits." The U.S. media, rejoyced at the massacre of landless peasants and the destruction of the only mass-based political party the communist PKI. General Suharto took power initiating ongoing plunder and exploitaion of Indonesia's resources by Western corporations while engaging in mass murder in the U.S. backed occupation of East Timor and elsewhere. He examines the media reaction to this slaugter and the reaction back in 1990 when this great event was brought up again by Kathy Kadane.

He examines the showcases of capitalism in the third world like Brazil, whose liberal capitalist president Goulart was overthrown in 1964 with U.S. aid by a group of Neo-nazi generals who compiled over the next few decades a truly horrific human rights record but who were praised for producing an "economic miracle" as the population sunk into quite horrific levels of malnourishment and disease and land became ever more concentrated in fewer hands and millions of street children arose in the big cities. And Nicaragua where the massive terrorism, celebrated by the media liberals that Chomsky quotes, brought to force upon the Nicaraguan people a defeat of the Sandanistas in "democratic election" in 1990 (the 1984 election won by the Sandinstas dissapearing into the memory hole). This has predictably resulted in a terrible rise in starvation and disease and drug running and street children and on.

He continues with an in-depth examination of the woes of Haiti and the American and Western efforts to ravage it since 1804, and particularly since 1915 when the U.S. invaded and reestablished virtual slavery, with a U.S. imposed constitution ratified with five percent of the voting public participainting under the U.S. marine bayonets, reversing the ban on foreign ownership of land.

He compares the podering of the unique evil of Japan in being unable to fully face up to their past crimes and the comparable ignoring of things like the hundreds of thousand of tortured victims of U.S. chemical warfare in South Vietname, which occasionally elicits a comment in the science pages of the newspapers about how we are missing a great opportunity to study the effects of dioxin on a control population

Rating:
Summary: Strong....
Review: This is a powerful book indeed. The facts are there for those willing to check them out. For some people this maybe hard to acknowledge , but Chomsky is writing an account of History that everybody should take a time to read and investigate. In so doing , I am sure that you will have a new understanding of how things are , how the world really works and why.
When you read all those books praising globalization , world free trade and neoliberal economics...take a time and verify...go to the real world...and see what is really happening to the majority of the people...Capitalism is a better system , I'm sure...but some adjustments need to be done to the way the big economies are trying to impose it to the little countries....It is creating more poverty and social unrest..and I am afraid that there will come a time when we are not going to be able to control this...