Class Warfare: Interviews with David Barsamian
by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

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Book Reviews of Class Warfare: Interviews with David Barsamian

Book Review: Unreferenced claims and unreliable judgements
Summary: 1 Stars

Unfortunately, that particular factoid is by no means atypical of the book, which is generally unreliable in fact and interpretation. In the interview entitled `Rollback', Chomsky complains that "The very fact that the concept `anti-American' can exist - forget the way it's used - exhibits a totalitarian streak that's pretty dramatic." Think about that for a moment. Leave aside the consideration that the term `anti-American' has a recognisable and precise meaning - reflexive and prejudiced opposition to anything and everything that the United States might do in order to preserve its interests, such as protecting her citizens from terrorism - and consider the cognitive aspect of Chomsky's remark. Surely, the reader will ask, Chomsky cannot be saying that merely thinking about an abstract quality is totalitarian; yet I cannot think of any other way to interpret this extraordinary remark, especially given that Chomsky explicitly enjoins us to ignore practical applications

A diffuse interview follows on "History and Memory", a title that apparently alludes to what Chomsky can recall from some decades back. Evidently his recall is uncertain, for he states that "my impression is that the Nagasaki bomb was basically an experiment". Again, think about that. Chomsky is here going way beyond the thesis, long debunked, of Gar Alperovitz that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were intended as a political signal to deter the Soviet Union. He is claiming far more than the case expounded by revisionist historians that Harry Truman dropped the bomb without compelling military reason (though in fact the military arguments were strong and Truman's decision was eminently defensible to prevent mass killings of both Japanese civilians and American troops - see A.L. Hamby's biography of Truman, "Man of the People"). He is asserting that the US killed Japanese civilians on a whim. Chomsky states, as well he might, that "somebody ought to check this out, I'm not certain"; the critical reader might reasonably feel that to charge democratic leaders with crimes comparable to those of Josef Mengele but on a vaster scale requires a rather high degree of evidence. He will not find it here, and Chomsky allocates to others the task of assembling it.

So it goes on, with allegations and claims surprising only for their passionate intensity rather than their predictable content. Chomsky denounces Elia Kazan for his truthful testimony against Communist subterfuge in the film industry, and hails Lillian Hellman, whose account of Communist resistance to Nazism, dramatised in the film "Julia", has been shown to be untruthful (see William Wright's biography, "Lillian Hellman: The Image, The Woman"). In an interview on the Federal Reserve, Chomsky declares that the US economy conforms to Keynes's well-known warning about a country's capital development becoming "the by-product of a casino". Chomsky has unfortunately misunderstood this passage of "The General Theory". Keynes was concerned specifically about the sources of fixed capital investment; yet in advanced capitalist economies such as the US and the UK, it is very rare for to companies to finance their fixed capital investment from the capital markets. (The single exception to this rule is investment in premises, where the scarcity of land places a lower limit on the capital losses that may be sustained by a company.) Rather, they almost invariably finance it from shareholders' reserves. In the final interview, Chomsky turns his attention to his prolonged campaign against Israel. He asserts that, owing to supposed Israeli aggrandisement, "the issue of two states [i.e. a Palestinian state alongside Israel] is dead". Well, indeed it is dead, but its death has nothing to do with Israeli policy, which at Camp David and Taba offered the Palestine Authority a state with Jerusalem as its capital. As the world knows, Yasser Arafat responded with a campaign of violence and demagoguery - which is why we are where we are.

I am a charitable reviewer, but I am hard-pressed to find redeeming features of this book. It contains no references and scant substantiation for judgements that are at best questionable. I cannot recommend it.

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