Year 501: The Conquest Continues

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.

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. ai

america wants to be the "Global Policeman". What are we trying to police? Many of his conclusions are really no-brainers for anyone who understands that capitalism and democracy are not the same thing, and that when the two collide (and they have collided often in poor countries where resouces are sucked out by transnational corperations) the U$A always suports the side that pays- evan at the cost of really unspeakable crime against humanity. The devil is in the details and chomskys books are like windows thruogh which you'll stare that devil in the face. Many people cann't bare to look and many others don't want you to.