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Title: Power and Terror: Post 9-11 Talks and Interviews by Noam Chomsky, John Junkerman, Takei Masakazu, Takei Masakuzu ISBN: 1-58322-590-0 Publisher: Seven Stories Press Pub. Date: February, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.28 (18 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: A psychic helps the FBI and the Victims Go to the Light -
Comment: If you have ever wondered about people who die quickly - if they "go to the light" or wait around as ghosts for a while, and how we can help them transition, you may want to read Tiffany Snow's Psychic Gifts in the Christian Life - Tools to Connect. She has a personal experience in her book about 9-11, and how she ended up out-of-body to help 5 people on the plane transition successfully. She explains that victims who die quickly are often in shock, and don't really know that they are dead - they think "the angel and relatives that show up to escort them, are the dream, and not the reality." During her time of "reliving and relieving" the last few moments before impact with each of the five, she was able to see the terrorists, what they were wearing and doing, etc, and the next day sent sketches and information to the FBI...and their unexpected, positive response. Much good is in this book about "the other side," and I just wanted to pass on the info, it was interesting to me, and comforting, and especially for the victim's families, might fill in a few of the gaps.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Look From the Other Side
Comment: Noam Chomsky, a well-known political thinker and activist, puts forth his ideas on the problem of terrorism. He doesn't defend the terrorists of 9-11, but he does say that there is cause and effect at work here. According to his belief, he states that the United States has been one of the biggest terror states in it's support of dictators and repressive regimes throughout the world. One such example is Turkey. Turkey is executing a program to destroy the culture of the Kurds. Chomsky insists that this is done with the knowledge and support of the U.S. government. Also he puts forth the repression of the Palestinians in Israel and the farmland destruction in Columbia as other prime cases in which the U.S. in involved in terror.
I thought one of the most interesting points made in this book is that Saddam was made by the Bush family. All throughout the 1980's, Saddam was the U.S. pet to defend against a supposedly dangerous Iran. During this time, he used poison gas on the Kurds. The Republican administration then in power said nothing about it at all. It's so ironic that the current Bush keeps bringing up the point of gas attacks against the Kurds, when it was an American supported and supplied Saddam who did it, and at the time it wasn't considered worth mentioning. It only got brought up after Saddam refused to play the game. It's ironic that our worst enemies are our own creations.
I found this book to be very insightful. As some of the negative reviews have said, this is not really Chomsky's book, but edited together from various speeches and interviews that he has done. Even though this is the case, I think it is very readable, and it contains a lot of information that is useful and thought-provoking. Check it out.
Rating: 1
Summary: Power & Error
Comment: The name Noam Chomsky possesses drawing power, and it is perhaps unsurprising that books that appear under his name are often composites of speeches, interviews and broadcasts that the outspoken MIT linguist has lacked the time to weave together himself into a structured work. Power and Terror is such a book.
Chomsky's argument is simple: September 11 was a horrible atrocity notable only for one fact: that the victims were those of an imperial power. Imperial powers are usually immune - no Chinese terrorists struck Japan while the latter committed atrocities in China in the 1930s, Chomsky reminds us. Pearl Harbor would militate against such a hasty judgement but there is no discussion of it, though Chomsky ranges far and wide in search of US criminality, past and present.
This book does not address - it was never Chomsky's intention that it should - the range of issues arising from September 11. It was first and foremost an act of mass terror in the service of a universal, totalitarian agenda against an ideological enemy. Chomsky discusses this no-where. "Islamism", "Islamist terrorism", "militant Islam" figure nowhere in this book's detailed index.
For comparison, one need only imagine a book on Pearl Harbor that said nothing about Imperial Japan, its ideology or aims, which barely mentioned Japan at all, and which sought to explain the attack solely in terms of America's prior policies and one would have the measure of this work.
Rather than tell us anything about September 11, Chomsky opts for the more congenial task of telling us something he has done in a dozen books: expound his conspiracy theory of international relations.
His argument is thus: great powers always encroach on the weak, no matter their character. Or rather, great powers are always characterised by brutal acquisitiveness. No exceptions to this mechanistic, undemonstrated rule appear permitted.
It follows that international legal norms and bodies are collaborating in the triumph of the strong, except when they don't. Thus, Chomsky has oscillated over the years between describing the UN as a covert American agency when it blesses American efforts and as the font of international morality when it comes up with other ideas.
These beliefs, which Chomsky calls facts, are under-girded by some gossamer social theory: for "almost any crime ...there's usually behind it elements of legitimacy" (p. 15). As more than one authority on terrorist movements has noted, this socio-economic explanation tends to burden victims with the responsibility for the crimes of perpetrators. Readers interested in pursuing the issues Chomsky raises should consult the works of scholarly authorities on terrorism like Paul Wilkinson and Walter Laqueur.
This book does not discuss an in-built deficiency in Chomsky's argument: if the US is the greatest criminal, and if for "almost any crime ...there's usually behind it elements of legitimacy" why is Chomsky uniquely unable to discover elements of legitimacy underlying US actions? His theory demands no less.
Readers who loathe the United States will find congenial Chomsky's emphatic repetition of allusions to the US being Nazi-like. Others will be disconcerted when he goes so far as to compare the US unfavourably to the Nazis in reference to the US bombing of North Korean dams in the Korean War (the Germans "were doing much less than that", p. 22).
Chomsky addresses a question on this subject at one point. Queried that the Nazis were exceptional for pursuing genocide in Europe while America was pursuing no such thing in Vietnam, Chomsky backs off. "I'd never call what happened in Vietnam genocide. That's not the right term for it. I agree, it was totally different. I can't recall anyone suggesting otherwise" (p. 77).
Readers will have to decide if this disclaimer in a book repeatedly asserting identity of acts between the US and the Nazis, whose most distinctive crimes were the Holocaust and other acts of genocide, is persuasive.
Chomsky contends that the only matter of interest in the Israeli-Palestinian equation is that Palestinians are occupied by an Israel intent on removing them and capable of doing so only with US acquiescence. Readers who consult his earlier works will know, however, that Chomsky himself once opposed (1974), then supported (1983) then denounced (1999) steps taken in favour of a two-state solution - which proceeded, incidentally, with enthusiastic US support.
Although his views are wildly popular in some quarters, Chomsky attributes an alleged absence of commentary similar to his own to an "incredible discipline" which he believes a totalitarian state would be unable to achieve (p. 19). But even if his international lecture trips did not win him saturation media attention, it takes little courage to make a career as a "dissident" in a democracy, especially when it propels fame and agreeable notoriety. The courage to speak truth belongs to an Aung San Suu Kyi, not a Noam Chomsky. Far from asking questions people dare not ask, it is these days radical chic to repeat the questions - and answers - Chomsky offers.
Readers would do better to consult works by actual scholars of the Middle East (Bernard Lewis, Fouad Ajami, Daniel Pipes) if they wish to know what produced September 11 and what we might do, as far as possible, to prevent a repetition.
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Title: 9-11 by Noam Chomsky ISBN: 1583224890 Publisher: Seven Stories Press Pub. Date: October, 2001 List Price(USD): $8.95 |
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Title: Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda by Noam Chomsky ISBN: 1583225366 Publisher: Seven Stories Press Pub. Date: December, 2002 List Price(USD): $8.95 |
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Title: Middle East Illusions: Including Peace in the Middle East?: Reflections on Justice and Nationhood by Noam Chomsky ISBN: 0742526992 Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing (via NBN) Pub. Date: March, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky by Noam Chomsky, John Schoeffel, Peter R. Mitchell, Peter Mitchell ISBN: 1565847032 Publisher: New Press Pub. Date: February, 2002 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title:Noam Chomsky - Distorted Morality: America's War on Terror? ASIN: B00008AOW1 Publisher: Koch Vision Entertai Pub. Date: 25 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $7.98 Comparison N/A, buy it from Amazon for $7.98 |
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