Making the Future

Occupations, Interventions, Empire and Resistance

Noam Chomsky

• Publisher: City Lights Publishers
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780872865372
• eBook ISBN: 9780872865594
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Taken together, Chomsky's essays present a powerful counter-narrative to official accounts of the major political events of the past four years: the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. presidential race, the ascendancy of China, Latin America's leftward turn, the threat of nuclear proliferation in Iran and North Korea, Israel's invasion of Gaza and expansion of settlements in Jerusalem and the West Bank, developments in climate change, the world financial crisis, the Arab Spring, the assassination of Osama bin Laden and the Occupy protests. Laced throughout his critiques are expressions of commitment to democracy and the power of popular struggles. "Progressive legislation and social welfare, " writes Chomsky, "have been won by popular struggles, not gifts from above. Those struggles follow a cycle of success and setback. They must be waged every day, not just once every four years, always with the goal of creating a genuinely responsive democratic society, from the voting booth to the workplace."

Making the Future is a follow-up to Interventions, published by City Lights in 2007 and banned from Guantánamo Bay by U.S. military censors. Both books are drawn from articles Chomsky has been writing regularly for the New York Times Syndicate, but which go largely ignored by newspapers in the United States. Making the Future offers fierce, accessible, timely, gloves-off political writing by one of America's foremost intellectual and political dissidents.

Making the Future presents more than fifty concise and persuasively argued commentaries on U.S. politics and policies, written between 2007 and 2011.

Noam Chomsky is a world-renowned author, linguist and advocate for democracy. He is the critically acclaimed author of many books, including Hegemony or Survival, Imperial Ambitions, Failed States, Manufacturing Consent and Media Control. He lives in Massachusetts where he is Institute Professor Emeritus in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT.

Table of contents

• Foreword: Remaking the Future
• Threats, Talks and a Hoped-for Accord with North Korea
• Tortilla Wars
• We Own the World
• Gaza and the Future of a Palestinian-Israeli Peace
• Containing Iran
• Hypocrisies and Hopes in Annapolis
• The Somalia Syndrome
• “Good News” from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan
• In the Campaign, the Unspeakable War
• Would a Democrat Change U.S. Middle East Policy?
• Delaying Doomsday: This Century’s Challenges
• Middle East Road Trip
• Iraq Oil: A Deal With The Devil
• Nuclear Threats: All Options Are on the Table
• Georgia and the Neo-con Cold Warriors
• The Campaign and the Financial Crisis
• Challenges for Barack Obama: Part 1 The Election and the Economy
• Challenges for Barack Obama: Part 2 Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan
• Nightmare in Gaza
• Barack Obama and Israel-Palestine
• Latin America, Defiant
• Down with the Durand Line!
• A Tradition of Torture
• Barack Obama and Israel-Palestine
• A Season of Travesties
• Making War to Bring “Peace”
• Militarizing Latin America
• War, Peace and Obama’s Nobel
• The Legacy of 1989 in Two Hemispheres
• Presidential “Peacekeeping” in Latin America
• The Corporate Takeover of U.S. Democracy
• The Unelected “Architects of Policy”
• A “Regrettable” Event in East Jerusalem
• Rust Belt Rage
• The Real Threat Aboard the Freedom Flotilla
• Storm Clouds over Iran
• The War in Afghanistan: Echoes of Vietnam
• China and the New World Order, Part 1
• China and the New World Order, Part 2
• The U.S. Elections: Outrage, Misguided
• The Charade of Israeli-Palestinian Talks
• Breaking the Israel-Palestine Deadlock
• The Arab Word Is on Fire
• The Cairo-Madison Connection
• Libya and the World of Oil
• The International Assault on Labor
• The Revenge Killing of Osama Bin Laden
• In Israel, a Tsunami Warning
• America in Decline
• After 9/11, Was War the Only Option?
• The Threat of Warships on an “Island of World Peace”
• Occupy the Future
• Index