Noam Chomsky, Ron Paul, and American Hegemony

First edition front cover of Hegemony or Survival (Henry Holt and Company)

For those unaware, I dislike Noam Chomsky very strongly for reasons I covered in my previous article about him. In my first Economics of Action Figures article, my MovieBob Syndrome article, and my most recent article, I brought up Ron Paul in a rather disparaging light.

Let’s examine why that is, shall we?

Ron Paul is that perennial Republican with strong Libertarian (the capitalization is important) leanings. He’s a troll supreme who didn’t get much done in Washington for all the years he spent there, least of which his goal to drastically shrink the size and scope of the federal government. I have no ill will towards the man on his domestic policies, for the most part. It is his foreign policy I take particular issue with. To be brief, Ron Paul’s foreign policy is almost cribbed word for word from Noam Chomsky. The conclusions are the same and the logic is close, but the reasoning to get there is different.

Ron Paul, like Chomsky, believes in American isolationism. What is that, you may be asking. This is the foolish idea that America should essentially disappear from the world stage. Libertarians take particular umbrage at the number of American military bases outside America, usually without realizing the countries we have bases in have little to no standing army of their own, such as some European countries (like the ones we defeated in WWII.) The others have an enemy or enemies with a shared border. Israel and South Korea, for instance.

Ron Paul wants us to spend less money internationally, especially when it comes to the dreaded military industrial complex. While I may agree we don’t need to be fighting most if not all of the wars we’re currently fighting, pure isolationism doesn’t exactly sound like a long-term strategy for success. America is the #1 top dog superpower in the world. Not many countries could even attempt to ring our bell on that score and those that could are deeply unsavory. The power vacuum we’d leave would be filled by somebody, brophalom. I have a feeling Russia doesn’t want to be top dog, as it seems satisfied with being #2. For instance, Russia doesn’t seem to be wholesale stealing American IP like a certain other country. You know, China, which is the obvious threat, along with the various suicidal regimes like Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, and Turkey (not exhaustive.) Might as well throw in the various international or regional terrorist organizations onto the pile, although most are funded by at least one of the countries I’ve mentioned already. Globalism is here to stay in some way because no country can avoid events outside its borders, at least not a country of the size and influence of America. We’d be surrendering the world to horrendous regimes who would run roughshod over our allies and cause unmitigated bloodshed, even if our allies managed to eke out a victory.

Noam Chomsky and the other libertarian socialists (yes, the name intentionally makes no sense by Chomsky’s own design,) on the other hand, take issue primarily with “American hegemony,” a mostly nonsense term. When conservatives mention that certain sectors of the American left despise America, Chomsky’s American hegemony BS is not far behind. The “blame America first” crowd tends to bring up XYZ of Chomsky’s anti-America writings whenever people like me ask why America is at fault for something America isn’t really at fault for. Have we made mistakes on the world stage in the last hundred years? Yes. Are we anywhere near the worst actor? Hell to the no. And Israel isn’t close to the worst either, no matter what anti-Semites and the UN (but I repeat myself) have to say.

But what does “American hegemony” actually mean? It means America’s dominance over the world politically, culturally, militarily, etc. If that doesn’t truly sound like a bad thing, well, you’d mostly be right. The issue being that Chomsky wishes America to retreat from the world stage for a different reason than Ron Paul. If America were to drop in influence, Chomsky argues, communism could take over the world and finally work (in theory!) Chomsky is a foolish man, so I won’t really explain why that’s stupid, but it is. Take my word for it. He hates that America won the Cold War against the USSR and that America may start another Cold War with China. He thinks China becoming more powerful than it already is would be a good thing, somehow. He doesn’t usually have a solid answer as to why that would be a good thing, except for his aforementioned love for the theory of communism. The hundred million plus dead at the feet of communism in the past hundred years doesn’t seem to bother him all that much.

I was already planning to write this article now that I’m back in the swing of things, but Noam Chomsky gave an interview that was published on the day I’m writing this (on Substack,) which has a pull quote where he claims that the Gaza Strip situation (which he blames on Israel, naturally) is somehow worse than what the Chinese government is presently doing to the Uyghurs, the Muslim minority there. As a brief overview, this includes live organ harvesting, slave labor (including factories that work with several American companies,) torture, rape, forced sterilizations, forced abortions, murder, and a whole host of other nasty stuff. It is religiously targeted genocide, plain and simple. “Never again” is supposed to mean something, but the rest of the world is mostly shrugging its shoulders, including several American companies making bank currently off the large Chinese market (the aforementioned slave labor being only one example.)

The Gaza Strip is a humanitarian disaster, but that’s the fault of the terrorist organization that runs its government. Hamas and other terrorist organizations that actively try to destroy Israel get rarely a harsh word from Chomsky. He likes to claim their behavior, which includes nearly weekly if not daily rocket fire into Israel, is rational. Because he’s an anti-Semite. There’s no deeper explanation for that one. The fact that anti-Semitism is one of the only bigotries still allowed in polite society is probably why Noam Chomsky isn’t a deeply hated figure. Thankfully, he’s mostly a fringe figure few know of, but his invidious views of international relations are spoken out of the mouths of quite a few people in media and politics, even if they don’t realize it. And awful regimes the world over, as I mentioned in that first article about him.

Ron Paul and Noam Chomsky do have one other thing in common: Getting absolutely destroyed by William F. Buckley, Jr. on The Firing Line. Brutality. Fatality. Other Mortal Kombat references. The entirety of both interviews can be found on the YouTube page for The Firing Line. I highly recommend them both. WFBJ’s skill at kindly telling someone to pleasure themselves is a rare gift not seen enough in today’s media landscape.