What Uncle Same Really Wants

by Noam Chomsky

'Chomsky's work is neither theoretical, nor ideological: it is passionate and righteous. It has some of the qualities of Revelations, the Old Testament prophets and Blake' Ken Jowitt, TLSA brilliant... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1878825011
• ISBN13: 9781878825018
• Release Date: July 2002
• Publisher: Odonian Press
• Length: 111 Pages
• Weight: 0.28 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 4.2" x 7.0"

Customer Reviews

Through a Glass Clearly

The publishing date is 1992, but the material hasn't dated at all. Fifteen intervening years have merely augmented Chomsky's thesis. Within its farflung empire, the US continues to intervene where and when it wants, public be darned. Iraq, of course, is just the latest chapter in that expanding volume of imperial adventures. This is a slender primer, yet chock-full of the kind of doors that still remain closed to a general public. It never ceases to amaze me how Chomsky assembles his material, not from dusty esoteric volumes, but from an easily accessed public record. Such is the wisdom of empire management here at home, not to suppress all dissent like the clumsy Soviets. Instead, embarrassing facts are marginalized by a vigilant retail media and a legion of spin doctors. I'm still awaiting a Chomsky interview on even C-Span, long after that "public service" channel has exhausted its dismal list of Repubocrat think tanks. Such, again, is the wisdom of empire management, Wall St.-Washington style. Anyway, the prose may be undemanding, but the facts are challenging. Put together in the usually lucid Chomsky manner, they're precisely the window public-spirited citizens need for understanding why so many others see us as they do.

Free. Read this great book

Want to bypass these arbitrary reviews? Read the book for yourself right here online. Heres the link http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/sam/sam-contents.html

"War Is Peace"...? all US citizens should read this

It can be daunting to try to understand the big picture. Chomsky has done a lot of work to get us started on the road toward being informed citizens, gathering an astounding body of evidence indicting 'state capitalism', as practiced predominantly by the United States. His presentation is concise and down-to-earth. Being a distillation of his other books, this booklet borrows their formidable scholarship, which draws largely upon publicly available references (e.g., those released under the Freedom of Information Act). The basic premise is that the US government has engaged since WWII in a coldly calculated campaign of maintaining its position as the preeminent economic power in the world. To do so, it has supported murderous, repressive regimes and/or actively encouraged chaos in order to destroy any successful examples of socialism in the Third World. Examples in the book include Chile, Indonesia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Panama, Grenada, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, among many others. It then describes propaganda campaigns waged to keep US citizens uninformed and accepting. It is a classic political maneuver to invoke a foreign threat to consolidate power at home and deflect attention from the real issues. According to the book, the government did this in invoking the "Evil Empire" and declaring a "War on Drugs". The bitter irony, of course, is that our own empire-building has been at least as evil (in terms of violence against citizens and repression of human rights) as the Soviet Union's, and that we are the world's largest exporter of addictive drugs (our tobacco has killed tens of millions worldwide), while abetting known drug dealers as long as they help us maintain regional control. "What Uncle Sam Really Wants" might change your understanding of what the power brokers in our society mean when they deploy terms such as 'democracy', 'socialism', 'communism', 'free enterprise', et cetera. The book should not be dismissed as simplistic just because of its abbreviated format. Especially if you haven't encountered Chomsky before, this quick little read might well significantly alter your worldview. Chomsky concludes the book with the hope that it will engage you further in the struggle to maintain a democracy guided at least as much by ethics as it is by economics.

Introduces Chomsky's critique of foreign affairs

This little book, published in 1992, is one hundred and one pages and is of small dimensions, phamphlet like, and is of the type that can be read pretty quickly, and intends to introduce the critique of foreign affairs (and society in general) of the leading dissident left wing intellectual Noam Chomsky. Taken from excerpts from Chomsky's writings and speeches, Chomsky presents his analysis, more or less of the cold war, how U.S. planners during and after World War Two basically decided that the United States owned the world, and that the economic and political system of the world should cater to the needs of American capitalism. The Soviet Union gobbled up East Europe, the original third world, long exploited by the West, one of main reasons of the cold war, which had nothing to do with Stalinist totalitarianism. One of the original goals of the cold war was also to carry over the massive government involvement in the economy from World War two, that is massive government subsidy to private corporations, especially through the Pentagon system, and later NASA, the energy department,commerce department etc. a system which is mainly responsible today for the success of the computer industry and the internet(not Bill Gates), electronics, pharmaceuticals, and just about every other viable sector of the economy. The taxpayers fund the research and development, corporations reap the profit if there is any to be made.Chomsky says that the primary concern of U.S. elites in their policy towards the third world was not really economic, such as securing cheap access to raw materials and labor, or at least it was not their primary concern. Their primary concern was that certain third world nations would take primary control of their own resources, and direct what wealth they had towards the benefit of their people and not transnational corporations and investors, and most importantly serve as an example for other poor nations to follow. Nicaragua, Chile, Vietnam, Grenada, etc. could all disapear off the face of the earth tommorow, and U.S. corporations and investors would probably not be too disturbed; it is the example that they set for other nations that provoked (and provokes) U.S. hostility. U.S. leaders have at various times called this "the domino theory," the targeted third world nations have been described as "viruses" or "rotten apples" that will "infect" their other countries. U.S. leaders ingrained in their own minds that any change of the status quo, no matter how mild, wheather it be secular or religous, right wing or left wing, for the direct benefit of the general population of a third world country is by definition a movement being sponsored by the Soviet Union to overthrow human civilization, and so on, no matter how lacking the evidence is for this thesis.Chomsky gives several examples. One is the case of the Jacabo Arebenz government in Guatemala which the U.S. overthrew in 1954. Arbenz was no more a communist than Franklin Roosevelt was,

An extremely powerful case against America

There is no question that if Noam Chomsky was a Russian writing about Russia in this way he'd spend his life in the Gulag. Few countries would allow him to continue lecturing and publishing.Chomsky is no crackpot. He's a brilliant intellectual and a passionately ethical human being. If he is complaining about something, we'd better listen.I'll give you a little taste of this book. These are some of the lies that we are told by our media:1. That America wants to support democracy and human rights around the world. 2. That America opposes terrorism. 3. That America opposes international drug trafficking. 4. That Noriega was ousted from Panama because of drugs. 5. That the Vietnam War was fought to halt the spread of communism. 6. That America was ever afraid of Soviet military power.If you are willing to re-evaluate every single thing you have come to believe about your country, pick up this little book. It gets right to the point and is extremely readable.