Noam Chomsky is widely considered one of the most important thinkers of our time. Over the past three decades, his lectures on the past, present and future of power politics have affected an audience among the most heterogeneous. For those who want to listen to this voice, which is new to the thought Chomsky or who wants to know it in its entirety, "Understanding Power" collects for the first time its key interventions. The topics range from U.S. foreign policy crisis of the welfare state in the Clinton administration. Draw a map of illuminating connections between the imperialist drive to the rest of the world and the impact on American society. Touched on issues of political activism and the role of the media. Are transformed into concrete action proposals for a renewal of society and for the solution of crucial international issues, such as the crisis in the Middle East, control of energy resources in Afghanistan and former Soviet republics, the emergence of new powers such as China and India. -Taken from the back cover
After reading the first 40 pages of this book, I stopped a moment to reflect and I realized one thing: I understood more about global geopolitical situation in the last 30 minutes in 30 years of television news and print media. I'm not exaggerating.
As a child, watching on TV the news about the situation in the Middle East, I could never follow the thread of events. I thought "stuff is too complicated, I can not hope to understand it." But it was just a child. Now I'm 30, I had the good fortune to study and get a degree, but the situation has not changed. I look bursts of news on the attacks in Israel / Palestine but I still do not understand what is happening. But now I can no longer hide behind a "stuff is too complicated." If I could pass the examination at the Polytechnic of Physics II (for a nap, I admit), I refuse to believe that the reasons for conflict, however complex, are beyond my understanding.
But then there is only one other plausible explanation. Someone does not want people to understand what is really going on. Call me paranoid, but I see it. And after reading this book, I realized I was not alone.
Chomsky has, in my view, two extraordinary abilities. First has an impressive amount of information , resulting from the constant monitoring of international and American press, as well as documents are declassified by the U.S. government regularly.
The other ability is to be able to identify without fail in this ocean of information printed that really count, and drawing conclusions and relating them with a simple set of arguments "within the capacity of fifteen, as he himself he says. The fact is that I get by with such a natural that, after having heard / read, it is inevitable to think "but it's so obvious, as I did not understand it myself?".
Much of Chomsky's thesis I sound familiar, I had already at least guessed, almost unconscious level. But I was never able to put all the pieces together, to rebuild the "bigger picture". From this viewpoint, this book helped me a lot.
If what I wrote on this page sounds familiar, this is the book for you.
You see, as long as there is private control of the economy, forms of government do not matter, because governments are powerless.
The fact is that power is always somewhere else.
[The secrecy imposed by the government] is not imposed for safety reasons, but only to ensure that the population may not know what's going on.
Every government needs to scare his people, and a way to do this is to cover the mystery of its business.
The press has a duty: to prevent people from understanding the world and indoctrination.
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