Noam Chomsky

The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power, from Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad, is an insightful and nuanced analysis of the many failures of US foreign policy over the past half century or so.

In case you missed the subtitle, this is not simply a rehash of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, this is broader and far more about overall policy failure than about one instance in isolation. If you read the introduction, you will understand what the objectives are, show more from the withdrawals mentioned to coup reversals and losing control of events in places the US thought they were in control. In other words, withdrawal in the bigger picture, not a sensationalized account of the most recent episode.

This is taken from many discussions between the authors as well as interviews. While there is a lot that will be familiar to readers of either writer, it isn't about always finding something brand new to say. It is about connecting the dots between previous analyses and more recent events; it is about applying ideas rather than trying to create shiny new ideas for those too lazy to do the work of making connections. Passive readers may well feel like they heard it all before. Active readers will find that what they heard before is just as important to say today as it was yesterday.

I would recommend this to readers who are concerned about what is happening globally as well as within a very polarized US. You don't have to agree with everything, no one is inside your head while you read, so just read to understand what they are saying, then if you disagree with some parts, you will be actually disagreeing, not just repeating the mantra your handlers have driven into your mind.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. show less

The Occupy movement has been a breath of fresh air in a world that has fallen off the rails. The movement is amazingly elastic; defying attempts to pigeon-hole it. This book follows a similar line: the analysis is almost beyond dispute, and Chomsky, wisely, avoids the temptation to be didactic as to the solutions. Nothing destroys unity quicker than a leadership issuing diktats.

This book may be short on answers, but, it is full of hope: the hope that the 99% will reassert themselves. The show more main problem, which I foresee, is that capitalism has been clever: it is no longer defined by nation states. The big companies are world-wide and, until there is a world government, our chances of catching up are limited.

The prospects of world agreement must be on a par with England winning the next World Cup so, Occupy works from the bottom. There is a logic to the idea that those being disenfranchised by the system should pull together but, sadly, in reality, there are many on the bottom rung who accept what they are told: namely, that this is the only way that things can be. The ruling class have the right to rule. We have moved very little from the time at which the King had divine right upon his side. It is just, that now, those with the divine right operate behind the scenes, leaving politicians to dance to their tune so that the politician may appear to be making decisions.

This book offers hope, but little else. show less

One thing I'll give Dr. Chomsky: combative as he is, he knows how to reach out to the opposition--the linguistic opposition, I mean, not the political opposition, because seriously, fuck those people. He reaches out by presenting generative grammar (I'll say it) 2.0 in a way calculated to disarm and delight the philologers and sociolinguists--as heir to prestructuralist tradition, to Enlightenment and Romantic conceptions of language as groeing in the mind like a fruit, not being acquired in show more a Skinnerian, analogy/repetition sense. Alongside that, he makes the exact point people uncomfortable with the sum effect of his brilliant theory of UG (in whatever form) on modern linguistics need to hear--that generative grammar, the study of universal rules, where language comes from in the mind and the forms it can and cannot take, is not a philosophy--it's a topic. That there is room for the study of internal and external language alongsideeach other.


And then Chomsky proceeds to ignore his own dictum, because for him I-language is the only interesting area of enquiry and all the stunning variety of human speech (and writing, which apparently doesn't even register for him) is just so much morphology, in the biological sense--or not even that, because he seems to think that it's not only not worth studying, it can be actively misleading.


And I get that he has his own concerns, and can't help but see them as more fundamental, but he's been hoisted by his own petard a little, hasn't he? Like, he was so eager to make linguistics as such a cognitive science, rather than just suggest that there are aspects of language production that are best tackled with brainograms and such, that he wrested his tradition and the people working in it over right past his own work into psych and neurology. Yeah--it IS a matter of brainograms, and where does that leave Chomsky and his inductive rationalism? Fundamental but superseded.


Meanwhile, the sociolinguists keep on working with their data-gathering methods, and the more cross-pollination the better, I say. Noam Chomsky: brilliant; seminal; limited; archaic? show less

An absolutely brilliant analysis of the ways in which individuals and organizations of the media are influenced to shape the social agendas of knowledge and, therefore, belief. Contrary to the popular conception of members of the press as hard-bitten realists doggedly pursuing unpopular truths, Herman and Chomsky prove conclusively that the free-market economics model of media leads inevitably to normative and narrow reporting. Whether or not you've seen the eye-opening movie, buy this book, show more and you will be a far more knowledgeable person and much less prone to having your beliefs manipulated as easily as the press. show less