Hopes and Prospects by Noam Chomsky

Have you been slumbering dogmatically?  Then why not wake up with Noam Chomsky?

In Hopes and Prospects, Chomsky analyses U.S. foreign policy from 1776 to 2010, although the majority of the book focuses on the period from the 1980s onwards, and particularly on U.S. involvement in Latin America and the Middle East.  

The picture Chomsky paints is not a pretty one:  the U.S. populace have been made spectators rather than participants in politics; the Democrats and the Republicans represent the political interests of corporations and an economically empowered and tiny minority; successive administrations routinely support repressive regimes and punish or oust popularly elected progressive ones (either overtly or covertly); hundreds of thousands of people in Latin America and the Middle East have died directly and indirectly as a result of U.S. policy and intervention; millions more have become 'unpersons' - without self-determined political representation, suffering dislocation and vastly reduced access to food, water, energy, sanitation and health services; international free-trade policy is promoted by first world countries who have used centuries of self-subsidy and protectionism to give themselves a competitive advantage over the developing nations on whom the policy is detrimentally foisted; all this has occurred with the tacit collusion of the West's mainstream media, who are under-reporting, misrepresenting or ignoring these issues.

Let me be clear: these are my words about my interpretation of Chomsky's message, but I think I have given you the gist of it in the limited space I have chosen to devote to the matter.

Hopes and Prospects is a powerful book with plenty of mind-food; however, it is only a starting point.  The numerous footnotes provide avenues for further research, as do any of the matters raised.  The recent developments in improved self-determination and self-empowerment by certain nations in South America described by Chomsky are encouraging. If such steps can be made in that arena, they may provide a road map for the fractured and tormented Middle East. 

There were two occasions when I thought Chomsky resorted to assertion rather than to a reasoned and documented argument; however, these lapses hardly undermine the analysis and arguments presented in the rest of the book.

Certainly a book for our times, and one I highly recommend.

Hopes and Prospects was first published in 2010.  I read the eBook published by HAMISH HAMILTON.