This time, Chomsky sums up over 30 years of research on US foreign policy. He uses the current war in Iraq and the history of our policy toward Cuba as his key cases. That's not to say he leaves out other countries. In fact, this book mentions one country after another in which the US government worked hard to overthrow democracy abroad while covering it up at home. But, by putting emphasis on Cuba and Iraq, Chomsky shows the consistency of US policy --- the methods, the tactics, the justifications, and the effects.

It's the wide range of information that makes the book so convincing. Chomsky doesn't write opinion pieces. He presents you with a flood of facts, fully documented, and allows those facts to convince you. As you read, you'll say "Wow. Is that really true?" and flip to the footnotes. You'll find credible sources every time. You'll shake your head, wondering how you could have missed such important information. At some point, you end up reading with a finger wedged in the footnote section, flipping back and forth and making mental notes to double-check some of those sources later.

If you haven't read Chomsky before, start with one of the better interview books such as "Understanding Power" and "Chronicles of Dissent." Then read this one. If you want to understand "Why do they hate us?" (and why that isn't even the right question to ask), Chomsky has the answers.

86 of 97 found the following review helpful:

All that school and the media never told you . . .  Sep 23, 2006
By D. Bursch
...about what our government has brazenly done in our name, without ever actually consulting with us or getting our consent based on the facts. I just finished reading this the day this became so talked about because of Chavez. I couldn't believe it. I don't care how this gets popular but it has to become generally understood: we are largely unwitting dupes of an agenda that is so cynically anti-human, anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic and anti-american (in the real sense of that buzzword)that I am filled with shame for what we stand for in the world (from THEIR point of view, not what we like to think).

But don't take my word for it (as Chomsky would say), learn the facts for yourself as he did: by going to the declassified original documents and little known articles. Chomsky is nothing if not a thorough and responsible academic mind who starts all his research with a healthy scepticism.

Yes he has a point of view and a philosophy, like everyone else. He is not some cookie cutter leftist, though, or radical extremist who enjoys finding critical things to say about his homeland. He just wants, as many naturally do, to have a society in which all people have the opportunity for living informed, creative lives with a big say in how government is run and organized.

He does an excellent job outlining the big and largely invisible agenda that actually manipulates our consent on things we would never agree to had we known the facts. The rise of multinational corporations to hegemonic power and the rich elites that both serve and comprise them, are the elephants in the room we can feel but dare not discuss or describe. If you think we live in a democracy, you are blind.

These are big statements. Please read this for yourself and see if alot of apparently unrelated things start making sense. It's not a conspiracy of a few "number ones"; more insidiously, it is a culture of dogged pursuit of wealth and self-aggrandizement for the few at the expense of everyone else. It is the world's biggest pyriamid scheme and we are all watching the house of cards before the fall. Time to change. Time to take responsibility rather than blaming others. This is a work of insightful courage.

800 of 945 found the following review helpful:

Watch out for the facts, they may change your mind.  Jan 18, 2004

I shall not repeat what several other reviewers have said, but here is a personal reactive view.

I have read a fair amount of modern history, and was only vaguely aware (like most Americans) of the many of Chomsky's facts and assertions. Some were so startling that I felt I needed to verify. After researching four and finding them unassailable, I stopped trying to fault the facts. The indictment of US foreign policy that Chomsky devolves from these facts is at such variance with our view of ourselves that one is inclined to look for an explanation. If the facts are not false, then perhaps the interpretation is the problem, so I examined the logic by re-reading the book with careful attention to the relationship between facts and conclusion. There are weaknesses in some places where an argument depends on "respected commentator" or some other unsupported assertion. However, even if one throws out all of the marginal cases, he is still left with a great deal for which to account--a paradigm changer for the honest and open minded, and something to be reviled and suppressed for those determined to believe that Americans are the good guys who go around the world altruistically stamping out evil.

Chomsky stops short of a monolithic conspiracy theory, but the pattern of behavior of the US over the last 60 years that is painted by this book is remarkably consistent and disturbing.

112 of 129 found the following review helpful:

Superb Scholarship, Impeccable Research  Nov 21, 2003

Noam Chomsky has done it again. With his latest book, "Hegemony or Survival, America's Quest for Global Dominance," Chomsky presents a thorough, meticulously-researched indictment of prevailing American foreign policy - a policy which, as Chomsky correctly observes, is sure to lead to disaster for not only the United States, but ultimately, the entire world. Chomsky vividly illustrates the great alarm that is now pervasive even among the American foreign policy establishment as it struggles to come to terms with an administration that has so recklessly endangered American national security through its single-minded focus on securing a global "Pax Americana." As far-fetched as these claims may sound to many, Chomsky's documentation is irrefutable, and his research impeccable. Chomsky provides an even-headed critique of our current course through a rational examination of the frightening consequences that are sure to follow.

While his detractors are sure to resort to their usual accusations of virulent, knee-jerk anti-Americanism, asking any of them to substantiate their utterly baseless (and woefully ignorant) allegations through actually refuting the vast amounts of factual evidence Chomsky cites in his endnotes will prove to be nothing more than an exercise in futility - Chomsky's analysis is formidable, and it rests on a remarkable synthesis of practically-undeniable evidence.

I'd recomend this book highly for anyone seeking to put the policies of the second Bush administration into a more fitting historical context. It is only through analyzing our current course in a post-September 11th world through this wider historical context that we find ourselves properly equipped to dissect the mindset of the current administration's foreign policy apparatus and the inevitable implications of its unabashed quest for global domination.

122 of 143 found the following review helpful:

Topsy Turvy And All Too True  Oct 28, 2003
By Panopticonman "panopticonman"
To read Chomsky's HEGEMONY OR SURVIVAL is to visit a world turned upside down. A world where the characterization by U.S. elites of the 90s as the "decade of humanitarian intervention" is sharply questioned, it's also a place where interventions in the name of the "war on terror" are shown to be just the latest manifestations of an expansionist U.S. administration determined to hold onto long-range strategic imperatives, to disable rival systems and people that threaten its imperial objectives, and to strictly enforce its true animating principle -- the pro-market, anti-human ethos of the neo-liberal economic system. In other words, it's not the fumigated middle-school version of US foreign policy offered to Americans on TV

Readers accustomed to the usual sycophantic justifications of U.S. foreign and policy may have a difficult time with Chomsky's remapping of recent political history. Those on the right will reject it as a Chomskyite confabulation. Moderates will wonder why he seems to hate America so much. Those on the left will be upset that the policies of Democrats are seen as little different from that of Republicans. Chomsky sees the two parties as nearly indistinguishable, calling them the two "business parties, one slightly less reactionary than the other." And here's Chomsky quoting Dewey on the narrow U.S. political spectrum.: "...John Dewey scarcely exaggerated when he described politics as 'the shadow cast on society by big business.'

One of his main themes is that the United States, like its imperial predecessor, Great Britain, employs an idealizing and utopian language (the language of democracy and freedom) to justify its opposition to and extirpation of any countervailing force, even those founded upon the democratic or populist impulse, e.g., Nicaragua, Guatemala. This is not, of course, an insight original to Chomsky. But what is so disorienting and unique about Chomsky's renarration of recent events is that he is exquisitely alive to the efforts of those in power to efface the historical record, to enforce forgetfulness and unknowing through a steady diet of fear and triumphalist propaganda. Reinscribing history, he quotes mainstream sources, official records, military and diplomatic experts, many of whom are unsympathetic to his point of view, and builds a compelling case to support his thesis that even the "exceptional" United States unexceptionally behaves like powerful states typically do: enhancing their power through violence, and legitimizing their policies through whatever discourses are available. And while its not original to Chomsky that absolute power corrupts absolutely, what is fine and bracing is the way he marshals legions of facts to show how those in power, unchecked in our "open society," move to stifle or subvert the will of its citizens in favor of the money power it truly serves.

One of the more memorable examples he cites in making this case is the special wrath of the present administration for "Old Europe" when it failed to march in lockstep into the war in Iraq. Chomsky notes that, in fact, the leaders of France and Germany by refusing to along were giving voice to and representing their citizens, great majorities of whom were against the war. He notes that the citizens of "New Europe" were even more opposed to the war than citizens of "Old Europe," and futher, notes that public opinion polls in South America showed more opposition than "Old Europe," too.

Chomsky does not simply offer a counternarrative of facts in his recovery of the historical record. He offers insightful interpretations of facts to attack that seemingly endless supply of elite apologists who offered cool intellectual frameworks for deciding whether the war in Iraq was "just or unjust," reminding us that their bloodless formulas fail to take into account the experience of people in the "New Europe" and South America who lived through other "just wars" and the installation of "democracy." He suggests that citizens of South America, are just a tad more gun shy than most of "Old Europe" after having experienced liberation at the hands of the United States in the form of secret terroristic training of death squads and the support of military dictators and anti-Castro insurgents during the Kennedy and subsequent administrations. And the citizens of Eastern Europe, having experienced the creative destruction of the free-market system under the Reagan-Bush I and Clinton regimes -- an exercise in freedom which has pauperized them and made them dependent upon the goodwill and largesse of the international bankers -- have seen first hand the discrepancy between the liberatory promise of Western democracy and reality of the neo-liberal economic system, a system which has served to mightily prosper the upper echelons of the ruling class

Chomsky does make the case he begins with: that humanity is now situated at the brink of biological destruction, and the survival of the species depends upon worldwide resistance to the U.S. regime. Concentrating on the murderous antics of nation states and their elites, he shows how the U.S. is creating enemies around the world, enemies who, through the example of North Korea, have come to see that states with nuclear weapons need not fear US invasion. He shows how our policies conjure new and more powerful enemies out of the ground, enemies who will perhaps help us achieve the nuclear Armageddon our leaders appear to so badly want for us.

Here's Chomsky at his best on the neo-liberal agenda: "We are instructed daily to be firm believers in neoclassical markets, in which isolated individuals are rational wealth maximizers. If distortions are eliminated, the market should respond perfectly to their 'votes,' expressed in dollars or some counterpart. The value of a person's interests is measured in the same way. In particular, the interests of those with no votes are valued at zero: future generations, for example. It is therefore rational to destroy the possiblity for decent survival for our grandchildren, if by so doing we can maximize our own 'wealth' -- which means a particular perception of self-interest constructed by vast industries devoted to implanting and reinforcing it.'

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