The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many

My first Chomsky - but certainly not my last.

Noam Chomsky has an enormous wealth of knowledge. It’s mesmerizing to read him, both because of the depth of his understanding and the connections he draws. The book was published in 1994, but it remains highly relevant today in 2025.

"In a situation of occupation or domination, the occupier, the dominant power, has to justify what it's doing. There is only one way to do it - become a racist. You have to blame the victim. Once you become a raving racist in self-defense, you've lost your capacity to understand what's ahppening." p.48

"When the British first moved to Bengal, it was one of the richest places in the world. The first British merchant warriors described it as a paradise. That area show more is now Bangladesh and Calcutta - the very symbols of despair and hopelessness." p.54

"Naturally, any conqueror is going to play one group again another. For example, I think about 90% of the forces that the British used to control India were Indians." p.75

"That's the traditional pattern. Inavders quite typically use collaborateurs to run things for them. They very naturally play upon any existing rivalries and hostilities to get one group to work them against others." p.58 show less

Grumpy anti-West (with West meaning Europe + America + Canada + Australia) ramblings from CIA operative Noam. He accurately points out / bemoans the "de facto world government" that is being formed (pg. 7), but doesn't seem to realize that globalism is a consequence of the leftism he embraces. He seems sad that Chile's socialist prez Salvador Allende was assassinated by a U.S.-backed military coup (pg. 27), not realizing and/or caring that socialism is what has kept much of Central & South America stuck in near-third-world status for many decades. He bemoans Germany's expulsion of Gypsies ("nobody gives a damn about the Gypsies) (pg. 63) while conveniently omitting mention of the massive amount of crime they commit.
Of interest is the show more passage near the end (pg. 76-77) (yes, it's a short book, thankfully) in which he briefly breaks free of his Marxist identity politics ideology and talks about what later became known as the "knockout game," in which groups of black people "are engaged in a sport that works like this: They walk around and find somebody walking the street. Then one of the teenagers is picked to knock the person down with a single blow. If he fails to do it, the other kids beat the kid who failed." But then he shifts seamlessly back to the key liberal tactic of defending the criminal: "Does that mean they're different genetically? No. There's something about the social conditions in which they're growing up that makes this acceptable behavior, even natural behavior. Anyone who has grown up in an urban area must be aware of this."
The scary thing about people like Noam is that the actual facts he gives are for the most part accurate; it's the way in which they are selected and presented that makes his overall arguments so - for lack of a better term - dangerous, particularly to bleeding heart college-age types who can easily fall under the sway of Chomsky's virulently anti-Western bias. Everyone should read one of his books at some point. The fun part is finding the rare passage in which he "lets the mask slip," such as this one in the "The Roots Of Racism" chapter: "There are plenty of boat people trying to get across the narrow distance between North Africa to Spain - kind of like Haiti and the Dominican Republic. If they make it, the boat people are immediately expelled by the a Spanish police and navy. It's very ugly. There are, of course, reasons why people are going from Africa to Europe and not the other direction. There are five hundred years of reasons for that. But it's happening, and Europe doesn't want it. They want to preserve their wealth and keep the poor people out." (Keep in mind this book is from the early '90s, but that topic has become one of the most talked-about in the world over the past year.) See, what he fails to point out is that Europe has been under attack by Muslim invaders (sorry... migrants) since the birth of Islam 1400 years ago. He doesn't even point out that essentially all North Africans are Muslims who view women and Christians as inferior infidels, and hence generally don't assimilate well once they reach Western countries. (The Crusades were a totally justifiable response to 300+ continuous years of Muslim-on-Europe attacks.) The informed adult should know these things, but the average leftist-indoctrinated college kid has no idea, and will embrace anything someone like Uncle Noam says. Uncle Bernie (Sanders) has recently risen in prominence and stepped into the same cranky liberal father figure role for legions of disenfranchised young adults ("kidults" is a new term for them) of today. show less

A fascinating state-of-the-world report from the man the New York Times called "arguably the most important intellectual alive". Here are a few excerpts:* We now have an international economy and we're moving towards the international state - "creating", to quote the business press, "a new imperial age with a de facto world government".* NAFTA is a secret document whose decisions will override those od Congress, states, localities. It's a real success in the long-term project of depriving democratic structures of any substance.* Biotechnology, genetic engineering, designing animal species, etc. is potentially vastly more important than electronics. In fact, compared to the potential of biotechnology, electronics is sort of a frill.* show more Much of the disparity between blacks and whites is actually a class difference, and the gap between poor and rich whites is also enormous. But you're not allowed to talk about class in the US. As soon as you say the word, everybody falls down dead. show less

These interviews were done in the early nineties and it's amazing how much Chomsky predicts the economic woes of today.