New Chomsky Book Calls U.S. "Rogue State"

by Kenneth Rapoza

There's new material here for the Chomsky reader. "Rogue States" is a collection of Chomsky's latest speeches and articles published in law journals in the United States and Europe.

It is a look at the key ways in which the West dominates world socio-economics today by using "friendly" force. Chomsky's critique is supported by revealing documents from the United Nations and the U.S. military.

After the USSR collapsed, U.S. leaders needed new enemies on which to center public fears. The emphasis on ghetto drug dealers and Latin American smugglers in the 1980s, for example, even prompted the U.S. National Criminal Justice Commission to note that the focus on crime was "exploiting latent racial tension for political purposes" and "has little or nothing to do with crime itself."

Other scapegoats included the Arab nations and Muslim fundamentalists in the Middle East.

They were called "rogue nations" -- capable of dropping bombs and terrorizing happy Westerners on vacation.

Chomsky writes that the so-called rogue state is not simply a criminal state. It is a sovereign nation willing to defy powerful Western countries, which can -- and do -- deploy their high-tech militaries to punish those who fail to toe the line.

Chomsky argues that the real rogue states are the United States and its Western European allies. He notes that the recent UN commission on war crimes in Guatemala attributes nearly all of the atrocities committed during that civil war to the U.S. government.

In presenting the report, the chair of the commission emphasized that the U.S. government and private companies "exercised pressure to maintain the country's archaic and unjust socio-economic structure."

Washington called it unfair. Chomsky said it was far too polite.

Chomsky casts the Cold War as a propaganda tool that helped secure U.S. public support for policies that ignored international law in order to save the world from the horrors of anti-Christian, anti-democratic, anti-American Soviets and their European friends.

Later, new ways to dominate Latin America without the use of bloody military intervention are revealed through what Archbishop Oscar Andrˇs Rodriguez Maradiaga of Tegucigalpa, Honduras recently termed "the tombstone of debt."

Latin American leadership is not spared here. Its leaders, says Chomsky quoting World Bank economists, are driven by a hefty desires to material goods, hence the frequency of stories such as that of Brazilian judge Nicolau dos Santos Neto who has been reported to own an $800,000 apartment in downtown Miami, and to have amassed $2 million in Miami banks and another estimated $4 million in Swiss bank accounts.

Europe is considered the grandfather of rogues, however. The book's best chapter, "The Legacy of War," looks at the savagery of European warfare and the poverty Europe has bequeathed its former colonies. He compares it unfavorably with the Japanese empire, which tried to keep its colonies socio-economically on a par with Japan.

The only European colony to escape devastation -- even while causing it among Native peoples -- was the United States, the book says, and that was because England was busy fighting France and India during the U.S. Revolutionary War.

With its global vision, "Rogue States" is a must-read for international lawyers and all those concerned with how the policies of a new U.S. president will affect the world.

"U.S. policies are of enormous importance to the world," Chomsky told IPS recently. "In other domains, particularly military, the U.S. has overwhelming dominance.

"In the absence of any credible deterrent, it is able to use its power more freely than before, with less concern for reactions elsewhere, and particularly, for the interests of 'the South,'" he said. "The space for non-alignment has disappeared."

Chomsky does not blame capitalism for the political hypocrisy of the U.S.-led world powers. In the chapter "What Can Be (Un)Done?" Chomsky writes: "We're functioning on principles of violence and force."

If we were functioning on standard capitalist principles, Third World debt would be the risk of the lenders, not common citizens, he points out.

In the United States, the income gap is widening, Chomsky says. Fewer U.S. citizens have health insurance, and in economic centers like Boston, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, the middle classes have moved hours away from the inner cities, leaving deteriorating public services in their wake.

The new goal of the powerful, according to diplomats quoted in the book, is to do more deals in secret.

Elsewhere, democracy is subdued by terror or the "tombstone of debt," trapping millions in a starkly unjust socio-economic order. It is only to be expected that private power should seek to ensure that others can do no more than "keep trying although they know it is in vain."

But Chomsky concludes on an optimistic note: "There has been substantial improvement in many aspects of human life and consciousness, extending an earlier history of progress, agonizingly slow, often reversing, but nonetheless real."