Power Systems
By Noam Chomsky
The book is collection of conversations conducted from 2010 to 2012.
The New American Imperialism
On The Saltwater Fallacy
This is the idea that it is only Imperialism if it crosses saltwater.
If the Mississippi river had been as wide as the Irish Sea, then it would have been imperialism but, since it’s narrower, it’s not called imperialism. But the people who carried out the conquest had no such illusions. They understood it to be imperialism whether it crossed salt water or not and they were very proud of the imperial achievement in establishing the national territory. By the end of the century, they were facing salt water and they expanded to conquer Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and so on, and went on to conquer the Philippines killing hundreds of thousands of people, but always with the most benevolent of intentions. It was just pure altruism.
Chomsky was asked “To what extent does the propaganda system induce docility and passivity in the citizenry in the United States”.
“The major propaganda systems that we face now were developed quite consciously about a century ago in the freest countries in the world, in Britain and the United States, because of a very clear and articulated recognition that People gad gained so many rights that it was hard to suppress them by force. So you had to try to control their attitudes and beliefs or divert them somehow.
As the economist Paul Nystrom argued you have to try to fabricate consumers and create wants so people will be trapped….It was used by the slave owners. For example, when Britain abolished slavery, it had plantations using slaves through the West Indies. With official slavery gone, there were big debates about how to sustain the same regime. What would stop a former slave from going up into the hills, where there was plenty of land, and just living happily there? They hit on the same method that everyone hits on: try to capture them with consumer goods. So they offered teasers and then when people got trapped into wanting consumer goods and started getting into debt at company stores, pretty soon you had a restoration of something similar to slavery.
Does the United States still have the same level of control over the energy resources of the region (middle east) as it once had?
Chomsky writes that the major energy-producing countries are still firmly under the control of Western-backed dictatorships and so the Arab spring’s impact is limited.
However, the structure of Western-controlled dictatorships is eroding. Chomsky describes how the US is still trying to reverse the nationalisation of energy resources which happened 50 years ago. He goes on to write about how “it was pretty obvious that we invaded Iraq not because of our love of democracy but because it’s maybe the second- or third-largest source of oil in the world and is right in the middle of the major energy-producing region’. He goes on to say that the US was defeated by Iraq nationalism and not insurgents. “The United States could kill the insurgents, but it couldn’t deal with half a million people demonstrating in the streets.”.
