Rogue States

by Noam Chomsky

  107. Wronka, “Human Rights Postscript.”

  108. See Harry Kalven, A Worthy Tradition: Freedom of Speech in America (Harper & Row, 1988).

  109. . HRW World Report 1997 (Human Rights Watch, 1997).

  11. The Legacy of War

  This is an edited and updated version of an address given on April 13, 1997, as part of the 14th annual Hanna Lectures on Philosophy at Hamline University.

  1. Peter Waldman, “In Vietnam, the Agony of Birth Defects Calls an Old War to Mind,” WSJ, Feb. 18, 1997.

  2. Barbara Crosseue, NYT, Aug. 18, 1992, Science section.

  3. NYT, Oct. 24, 1992.

  12. Millennium Greetings

  Portions of this article originally appeared as a ZNet commentary, Jan. 12, 2000.

  1. Alan Ryan, “The Evil Empire,” NYT Book Review, Jan. 2, 2000.

  2. For a sample of the highly revealing material that is standardly—perhaps invariably—ignored, see my Deterring Democracy, chap. 1.

  3. Michael Wines, NYT Week in Review, lead story, June 19, 1999.

  4. John Burns, “Methods of the Great Leader,” NYT Book Review, Feb. 6, 2000. See Letters, NYT Book Review, Feb. 27, 2000.

  5. Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, Hunger and Public Action (Oxford, 1989), chap. 11 . They estimate famine deaths at 16.5 million to 29.5 million. See also Sen, “Indian Development: Lessons and Non-Lessons,” Daedalus 118 (1989).

  6. Drèze and Sen, Hunger and Public Action.

  7. Sen, op. cit.

  8. Drèze and Sen, Hunger and Public Action.

  9. Amartya Sen, “Women’s Survival as a Development Problem,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Nov. 1989); Drèze and Sen, Hunger and Public Action.

  10. Sen, “Women’s Survival”; Drèze and Sen, Hunger and Public Action.

  11. Sen, “Women’s Survival.”

  12. Sen, “Indian Development.”

  13. Quoted by Joseph Stiglitz, recently resigned chief economist of the World Bank, “Who Will Guard the Guardians?,” Challenge (Nov-Dec. 1999).

  14. “We had all seen the broken eggs, but nobody had ever seen the omelet,” Ryan observes, expanding his apparent conclusion that conditions in Russia in 1989 were as bad as or worse than before World War I; “Mao broke an awful lot of eggs to make his omelet” (Burns, “Methods of a Great Leader”).

  15. Ryan, “Evil Empire.” For review, see “The Victors,” in my Deterring Democracy; and “The Colossus of the South,” in my Year 501.

  16. See chaps. 7 and 8, in this volume. The term reform is also an ideological construction. One does not refer to Pol Pot’s measures as reforms—only those measures that are by definition “good” because they conform to the demands of Western power.

  17. Brooke Schoepf, Claude Schoepf, and Joyce Millen,”Theoretical Therapies, Remote Remedies: SAPs and the Political Ecology of Poverty and Health in Africa,” in Kim et al., Dying for Growth.

  18. For a sample, see my The New Military Humanism.

  19. Whitney, “The No-Man’s-Land in the Fight for Human Rights,” NYT, Week in Review, Dec. 12, 1999.

  20. It might perhaps be added that the horrifying photographs of the remnants of devastated Grozny immediately brought to mind what I saw in Thanh Hoa province near Hanoi in 1970, including the provincial capital. The destruction was vastly worse farther south, below the 20th parallel, and in South Vietnam; and in all of the countries subjected to murderous US aggression, it was the rural areas that suffered most.

  21. “Clinton’s Words to Press,” NYT, Dec. 9, 1999; excerpts from news conference of Dec. 8, 1999.

  22. “UN Rebuffs US Again on Cuba,” Reuters, International Herald Tribune, Nov. 11, 1999; six lines. The vote was taken on Nov. 9, 1999.

  23. Someshwar Singh, “Half the World Hit by US Unilateral Sanctions,” Third World Economics (Jan. 16-31, 2000). See also W. Bowman Cutter, Joan Spero, and Laura D’Andrea Tyson, Foreign Affairs (March-April 2000). The authors note that “during the last several years, America has imposed some form of unilateral economic sanctions against . . . half the world’s population,” and object to them because the sanctions “have not achieved their goals” and “often harm exactly those they seek to help”; the latter objective is axiomatic, requiring no evidence, and remaining axiomatic in the face of overwhelming evidence that the sanctions harm the alleged beneficiaries but not the official target, as in the notorious case of Iraq.

  24. Singh, “Half the World Hit.” On the Cuba sanctions, their background, their motivations, and their effects, see “The Passion for Free Markets,” in my Profit Over People. See chaps. 6, 8, and 10, in this volume.

  25. “UN Condemns US Embargo Against Cuba for Eighth Year,” AFP, Nov. 10, 1999. Separately, the 21 Ibero-American nations called on the US to terminate the Helms-Burton Act, again declaring it to be in violation of UN resolutions. Malaysia condemned the embargo for having “caused enormous economic damage and untold suffering to Cubans,” as well as violating trade regulations. Patricia Grogg, InterPress Service, Nov. 9, 1999; Bernama, Malaysian national news agency, Nov. 10, 1999. The embargo has been condemned as being in violation of international law by virtually every relevant body.

  26. Michael Jordan, CSM, Dec. 13, 1999—fairly typical.

  27. “Tudjman Is Dead: Croat Led Country Out of Yugoslavia,” NYT, Dec. 11, 1999. See also Zoran Radosavljevic, BG, Dec. 24, 1999, noting the criticisms of Tudjman for supporting Bosnian Croat separatists and reviving symbols of Croatia’s pro-Nazi past, but not for ethnic cleansing and other atrocities.

  28. “Report of the Secretary-General Pursuant to General Assembly Resolution 53/55, The Fall of Srebrenica,” Nov. 15, 1999, pp. 95ff. Christopher, Tim Judah, The Serbs (Yale Univ. Press, 1997), 301. David Binder, “The Role of the United States in the Krajina Issue,” Mediterranean Quarterly (1997).

  29. Binder, “Role of US in Krajina Issue.”

  30. Ray Bonner, NYT, March 21, 1999.

  31 . Tom Walker, Sunday Times (London), Oct. 10, 1999.

  32. John Sweeney and Jens Holsoe, “Kosovo ‘Disaster Response Service’ Stands Accused of Murder and Torture,” Observer (London), March 12, 2000.

  33. Walker, Sunday Times.

  34. Stephen Kinzer, NYT, Dec. 9, 1999.

  35. Kinzer, NYT, Nov. 20, 1999.

  36. Louis Meixler,”Turkey, Israel Join in Show of Might,” AP, BG, Dec. 16, 1999.

  37. Steven Erlanger, “Snubbed by the West, Tudjman Receives a Posthumous Rebuke,” Dec. 14, 1999.

  38. See chap. 4, in this volume, and references cited.

  39. Historian David Fromkin, Kosovo Crossing (Free Press, 1999).

  40. See chap. 3, in this volume, and references cited.

  41. Alan Little, “How Nato Was Sucked into Kosovo Conflict,” Sunday Telegraph (London), Feb. 27, 2000; Tom Walker and Aidan Laverty, “CIA Aided Kosovo Guerrilla Army,” Sunday Times (London), March 12, 2000; Alan Little, Moral Combat: NATO at War, BBC documentary, March 12, 2000.

  42. See chap. 3, in this volume.

  43. Jonathan Steele, “US Refuses to Remove Cluster Bombs in Kosovo, Death Lurks in the Fields,” Guardian (London), March 14, 2000.

  13. Power in the Domestic Arena

  This is excerpted from the 2nd Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust Memorial Lecture given May 5, 1998, at the Institute of Education, London. A much longer version originally appeared in New Left Review 230 (July-Aug. 1998).

  1. Gerald Haines, The Americanization of Brazil (Scholarly Resources, 1989).

  2. See chap. 14, p. 263 and note l4, in this volume.

  3. See chap. 14, p. 262 and note 13, in this volume.

  4. See Michael Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent (Harvard Univ. Press, 1996).

  5. David Sanger, “America Is Prosperous and Smug, Like Japan Was,” NYT, Week in Review, April 12, 1998; Gerald Baker, “Is This Great, Or What?,” FT, March 31, 1998.

  6. Sylvia Nasar, “Unlearning the Lessons of Econ 101,” NYT, Week in Review, May 3, 1998.
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  7. “The Problem Now: What to Do With All That Cash,” BW, Dec. 12, 1994; “An Enormous Temptation to Waste,” BW, Feb. 10, 1997.

  8. BW, March 23, 1994.

  9. Louis Uchitelle, “America’s Treadmill Economy: Going Nowhere Fast,” NYT, Money and Business section, March 8, 1998.

  10. Alan Greenspan, testimony before the Senate Banking Committee, Feb. 1997: the “sustainable economic expansion” was thanks to “atypical restraint on compensation increases [which] appears to be mainly the consequence of greater worker insecurity.”

  11. “Economic Report of the President,” Feb. 1997. Both this and the foregoing Greenspan quotation are cited in “Editorial,” Multinational Monitor, March 1997.

  12. “Remarks by Alan Greenspan, Chairman, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, at the Annual Convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Washington, DC,” April 2, 1998.

  13. Cited in “Microsoft Researches Its Future,” Science, Feb. 27, 1998.

  14. Thomas Misa, “The Development of the Transistor,” in Merritt Roe Smith, ed., Military Enterprise and Technological Change: Perspectives on the American Experience (MIT Press, 1985).

  15. See my Powers and Prospects, chap. 5.

  16. See William Hartung and Jennifer Washburn, “Lockheed Martin: From Warfare to Welfare,” Nation, March 2, 1998. Gerard Baker, FT, March 11, 1998.

  17. Timothy Egan, “As Idaho Prospers, Prisons Fill Up While Spending on the Poor Lags,” NYT, April 16, 1998.

  18. Inside INEEL (Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory), Sept. 1997.

  19. Bob Davis, “In Effect, ITC’s Steep Tariffs on Japan Protect US Makers of Supercomputers,” WSJ, Sept. 29, 1997; David Sanger, NYT, Oct. 12, 1996.

  20. Cited in Frank Kofsky, Harry Truman and the War Scare of 1948 (St. Martin’s, 1993). For the business press generally on military vs. social spending, see my Turning the Tide: and my Deterring Democracy, 49.

  21. Tom Schlesinger, “Labor, Automation, and Regional Development,” in John Tirman, ed., The Militarization of High Technology (MIT Press, 1984); James Cypher, “Military Spending, Technical Change, and Economic Growth: A Disguised Form of Industrial Policy?,” Journal of Economic issues 21:1 (March 1987).

  22. See David Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (Oxford Univ. Press, 1986).

  23. Elizabeth Corcoran, Science, April 2, 1993. For general background, see my World Orders Old and New, chap. 2.

  14. Socioeconomic Sovereignty

  This is excerpted from an address given in Albuquerque, NM, on Feb. 26, 2000, on the 20th anniversary of the Interhemispheric Resource Center.

  1. See my Deterring Democracy, chap. 12.

  2. Madison, see my Powers and Prospects, chap. 5; for further discussion, see my “‘Consent Without Consent’: Reflections on the Theory and Practice of Democracy,” Cleveland State Law Review 44.4 (1996). Jay, Frank Monaghan, John Jay (Bobbs-Merrill, 1935), 323.

  3. Walter Lippmann. For more extensive discussion, see my Towards a New Cold War, chaps. 1 and 2; Necessary Illusions, chap. I; Deterring Democracy, chap. 12. For general background, see the pioneering work of Alex Carey, essays reprinted in Taking the Risk Out of Democracy (Univ. of Illinois Press, 1997).

  4. See my Powers and Prospects. chap. 4.

  5. Bernays, see chap. 9, p. 152 and note 28, in this volume. Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness (McGraw-Hill, 1976).

  6. World Bank, World Development Report, 1995. Cited with discussion by Jerome Levinson, ‘The International Financial System: A Flawed Architecture,” Fletcher Forum 23:1 (Winter-Spring 1999).

  7. See chap. 8, in this volume.

  8. Carothers, “The Reagan Years,” in Abraham Lowenthal, ed., Exporting Democracy (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1991 ); In the Name of Democracy (Univ. of California Press, 1991); “Dithering in Central America,” NYT Book Review, Nov. 15, 1998.

  9. Condemned to Repetition (Princeton, 1987).

  10. See chap. 9, p. 141 , in this volume.

  11. See my Turning the Tide, chap. 2; and Year 501, chap. 2.

  12. See my Profit Over People, chap. 4; see chap. 7, in this volume, note 11 and text.

  13. Cited in Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Cornell, 1991).

  14. Cited in Martin Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890-1916 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), 413-14.

  15. Shawn Crispin, “Global Trade: New World Disorder,” Far Eastern Economic Review (Bangkok), Feb. 17, 2000.

  16. Montreal Meeting (First Extraordinary Meeting of the Conference of Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity to Finalize and Adopt a Protocol on Biosafety—Resumed Session) (2000), Andrew Pollack, “130 Nations Agree on Safety Rules for Biotech Food,” NYT, Jan. 30, 2000; Pollack, “Talks on Biotech Food Turn on a Safety Principle,” NYT, Jan. 28, 2000.

  17. Edward Herman, “Corporate Junk Science in the Media,” Z magazine, Jan. and Feb. 1999.

  18. World Bank economist Branko Milanovic, cited in Doug Henwood, Left Business Observer 93, Feb. 2000.

  About the Author

  © Don Usner

  Noam Chomsky is widely regarded as one of the foremost critics of US foreign policy in the world. He has published numerous groundbreaking books, articles, and essays on global politics, history, and linguistics. Among his recent books are Masters of Mankind and Hopes and Prospects. This book is part of a collection of twelve new editions from Haymarket Books of Chomsky’s classic works.