"What I object to is the lack of background, to the lack of context. In telling the history of the Cold War as it really happened--even in ten pages--there has to be a place for Stalin, an inquiry into the character of the regimes that Stalin sponsored, and an assessment of Stalinist plans and expectations. But Chomsky ruthlessly suppresses half the story of the Cold War--the story of the other side of the Iron Curtain."(posted 8758 days ago)You must not have read "Deterring Democracy" (this book gives a good treatment of the Cold War's REAL context) nor "Washington and the Third World Connection." These works are a much, much more lengthy treatise than the intro-pop of "What Uncle Sam Really Wants." For that matter, Chomsky despised the Soviet regime but to quite a lesser extent considering that it was the US military that ringed the world with bases (395 US to 78 Soviet) and historically bombed and/or invaded far more many countries than did the Soviets. One reason I suspect for his lesser treatment of the communists is that they lacked the military mobility and direct global influence of the USA (considering its rhetoric about "freedom and democracy" which the Soviets never pretended).
Actually, one basic wisdom of NSC 68 called for a military industrial state. And that's pretty much what we endure today. There are billions upon billions to give the Pentagon so that it may pay $600,000 for a fax machine worth maybe $900 or pay $1,500 for a wrench worth a few dollars or give in to Reaganite deceit such as when that era saw the deliberate distortion of the Soviet "T-80" tank in order to channel more taxpayer funds to General Dynamics (to create the unneeded M-1 Abrams tank). Basically, Chomsky (among other alert peers of his) does a credible job identifying the process by which the Pentagon is a welfare funnel for high-tech industry and defense contractors. There was and is always money for the Pentagon to waste ($92 billion of it identified as waste during the early Reagan years by the Peter Grace Commission in 1982) but no money for schools, public housing, children's meals and the like.
The elites who actually governed policy or had influence turned out rhetoric for our consumption and then did something else quite entirely. The Nazi-collaborator Henry Ford once said there was "plenty of work" to be had for the "common man" though he was not inclined to hard work. A few weeks later, Ford discarded thousands of jobs. What matters most, as Chomsky espouses, it what the elites said to each other behind closed doors, not what they tell us in public.
I do not expect Noam Chomsky to perfectly explain everything about the world, but considering the denials and phobias from centrists and rightists as well as mainstream orthodoxy, he does a very credible job of exposing what is not meant for us to know. Compared to the evasionist, mealy-mouthed pundits like William Buckley, George Will, Thomas Friedman, Charles Krauthammer...........Noam Chomsky does a good job destroying their assumptions and distortions.
item: We might wonder why the Pentagon still commands close to $291 billion dollars a year while there is no Soviet Union. The US institutional need to define "enemies" is the underlying reason. The US has used military violence on Latin American nations and the Philippines long before there was ever a Soviet Union and the US military will still constantly maintain a WW III state well after it passed away; we may note the Chinese, North Koreans and Cubans have never invaded US soil while the converse did happen.
item: We might wonder why US orthodoxy assures us there is no collusion of interests at the highest levels. That Anaconda Copper and ITT actually persuaded and gave money to the Criminal Intelligence Agency to work on ousting Salvador Allende from Chile reveals otherwise.
item: The CIA really did assassinate or drive off democratically-elected leaders such as Mossadegh in Iran, Arbenz in Guatemala, and replace them with far worse, brutally-repressive police states just because these leaders had the temerity to lean towards their own people's concerns and not that of American oil cartels and fruit moguls. US global capitalism works much more efficiently with military fascists running Third World nations rich in resources than with populists and reformists who care about their people more. The Soviet domination theory was alway weak considering no Soviet Spetsnaz nor airborne division bases could ever be identified in Southeast Asia or the Americas.
item: People in Cuba, Russia, Poland, and such lived far better under repressive communism (with basic health care, education, food, guaranteed jobs) than do the people in capitalist outhouses for US economic exploitation like Guatemala, the Philippines, Thailand, El Salvador and the like (countries that use death squads and torturers that made contemporary post-Stalinist countries look gentle). Now that the people of Eastern Europe now are returned to their Third World status (as favored by Western policy craftsmen), they actually now favor the "old system". Long lines for bread under communism were far better than no bread under IMF-structured capitalism. Communist countries
No. The great sins of the communists were not their "dream of world-wide conquest" nor their "repression of human rights" that riled right-wing apologists and US policy makers, but rather they were anchored by a great power that shut out oil men, sugar daddies, investors, bankers and other exploitative ilk. US policy men never cared that Cubans suffered worse under Batista or Nicaraguans under the Somozas for they opened their countries to exploitative capitalist interests. Only when the Castros and Ortegas took power was when the USA pretented to care about "oppressed peoples" (who mostly actually preferred the communists to the right-wing butchers anyway).
Without the Noam Chomskys, the Michael Parentis, or Ed Hermans, ignorant people like me may never get to familiarize ourselves with reality and its many items.