A collection of conversations with David Barsamian touching on such diverse topics as the American war machine, civil disobedience, the importance of memory and remembering history and the role of artists - from Langston Hughes to Dalton Trumbo to Bob Dylan- in relation to social change. It's Zinn at his irrespressible best, the acute perception of a scholar whose impressive knowledge and probing intellect make history immediate and relevant for us all.

Like an influential literary salon captured between covers, Louder Than Bombs brings together over twenty interviews with cultural and political luminaries such as Tariq Ali, Edwidge Danticat, Angela Davis, Eduardo Galeano, Danny Glover, Ralph Nader, John Pilger, Amartya Sen, Vandana Shiva, and Haunani-Kay Trask.. David Barsamian's insightful questions and captivating manner draw out these celebrities' personal perspectives on work and art, and their visions for a fundamentally more equitable society. The lively conversations highlight the power of dialog to inform and inspire. Also includes Arundhati Roy, Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, and Kurt Vonnegut, among others.

A collaborative project between South End Press and The Progressive.

Reviews of Imperial Ambitions

Review in South China Morning Post, October 30, 2005

A reviewer for London's The Daily Telegraph wrote in 2001 that if Noam Chomsky didn't exist "it would be necessary to invent him - the one thing that his polemics are guaranteed to do is make you think". Imperial Ambitions is a collection of interviews by David Barsamian, whose dialogues with liberal intellectuals are syndicated on US radio. He first worked with Chomsky in 1986 and, in this collection, he leads the MIT professor of linguistics and left-wing polemicist through a series of discussions, spanning March 2003 to February this year, about the US and the potential global ramifications of its policies. Barsamian says the essence of Chomsky is that understanding the truth or knowing how to act is "not so complicated". Those who have tackled Chomsky's latest book, Hegemony or Survival, may be excused for thinking otherwise, but Barsamian's skilful editing makes accessible Chomsky on such topics as the distortion of history and memory, and, in "Another World is Possible", a discussion of fundamentalism and the American right.

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Chomsky's New Book
By David Swanson

Source: Political Affairs Magazine, 9-29-05

Imagine you could take years and years to carefully study political history, that you could read numerous sources of political news from around the world, that you could do your own research into declassified government documents and little known areas of information, and that you could travel extensively so that you might compare various societies and governments in the current day.

If you can get someone to pay you or feed you while you do all of that, then by all means do it. Otherwise, your second best option is to listen to Noam Chomsky. Chomsky knows an incredible amount of information and is brilliant at analyzing it. He does so without any theory or pretense, using a vocabulary that any high school graduate has mastered.

Sitting down and talking to Noam Chomsky at length about current affairs has to be one of the most illuminating experiences going. But, what if you got the chance to do that and couldn't always think of the best questions or cite the best examples for Noam to comment on?

Not to worry: David Barsamian has conducted a series of interviews with Chomsky between March 2003 and February 2005, and has consistently asked penetrating and provocative questions. These interviews have just been published as "Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World." You can buy the book here or the audio compact disc here and I highly recommend doing so.

If you're familiar with Chomsky, he will still manage to surprise you with analyses of recent events that you've never imagined before. If you're not familiar with Chomsky, this book is probably an ideal place to start. Chomsky is one of the most quoted writers ever and is extremely well known in many countries around the world. He appears on mainstream media in many countries as well, just not his own, the United States. Some years back, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting ran a headline: "Chomsky Appears on PBS, Western Civilization Survives." But that was Chomsky's one and only appearance on airwaves that clearly have a lot of space for intensely boring pundits predictably mouthing the same corporate-corrupted logic.

To find out why the US corporate media is horrified of Chomsky, you need only listen to him for a little while. He compares accepted United States' actions to identical but reviled actions by other states. He pulls out quotes from the past articulating almost the exact same position that the US media has just announced as a new breakthrough in human civilization. He points out areas in which the United States is unique among industrialized countries and questions whether they are desirable or necessary: such as our uniquely high level of fear and insecurity or our uniquely high level of religiosity. Chomsky is not out to soothe our souls and comfort our cherished misconceptions. He wants us to see the world differently and to act to change it, but to drop the also uniquely American idea that political change can be fast and easy: one demonstration or election means little, he warns us; we need long-term tedious activism.

Chomsky is well known as a linguist, and his philosophy of language is quite platonic and mystical in the traditional scientistic manner that sees itself as following the Enlightenment away from magical thinking. And Chomsky's belief in science has led him to make various denunciations of postmodern thought in which he tosses out the good and creative along with the silly and pretentious. But when Chomsky turns to politics he forswears not only pretentious language but also metaphysical theories of history. He is completely down to earth and pragmatic. If living a double-life as a philosopher could get every political writer to speak as plainly and powerfully as Chomsky, I'd be all for it. This current book contains none of Chomsky the philosopher. It's purely the political activist.

I'd love to quote a dozen examples from the book, but they're not really aphoristic. You need to read a few paragraphs in most cases to get the point. But part of what makes Chomsky's arguments so powerful is the historical cases he pulls out of his memory. I'll offer one example. Chomsky sees the recent US attack on Iraq as having been contingent on Iraq offering absolutely no threat to the United States (exactly the opposite of what Bush alleged). Chomsky offers another example of this pattern:

"President Kennedy was trying to organize the hemisphere to support his terrorist attacks against Cuba, which were very severe. Generally, other countries in the Western Hemisphere just have to do what they're told by the United States, or they're in bad trouble. But Mexico refused to go along with the campaign against Cuba. And the Mexican ambassador said, 'If we publicly declare that Cuba is a threat to our security, forty million Mexicans will die laughing.' "

The danger in reading Chomsky is that millions of Americans will die laughing every time they turn on their televisions.

David Swanson is creator of MeetWithCindy.org, co-founder of the AfterDowningStreet.org coalition, a writer and activist, and the Washington Director of Democrats.com. He is a board member of Progressive Democrats of America, and serves on the Executive Council of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild, TNG-CWA. His website is http://www.davidswanson.org.

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Literary Review

CULTURAL POLITICS

America unplugged

RUMINA SETHI
The Hindu, Feb, 5 2006

David Barsamian deserves credit for exposing the kind of culture that is emerging in the West as a result of the "war against terror."

Speaking of Empire and Resistance: Conversations with Tariq Ali, Tariq Ali and David Barsamian, The New Press, 2005, p.234, £8.99.

IN today's globalised climate, the former colonies have ended up as the neo-colonial empire of the United States, complicit in global give and take, economic hegemony, and the rise of a new kind of diasporic, neo-national identity, all of which makes it necessary to interrogate the growing power of the U.S. The "doctrine of preventive war" that allows the U.S. to arbitrate between good and evil and tame "uncivilised" nations goes against all international agreements of the past. Assisted by a propagandistic mass media, it allows the U.S. alone to have unchallenged power in the new world.

Contemporary relevance

In such a political environment, the conversations between Tariq Ali and David Barsamian gain relevance. The subject matter of this book ranges from imperialism to globalisation along with acidic comments on the players and villains, namely the U.S., and Britain thrown in for good measure. The six interviews and one radio broadcast focus on debates concerning the practices and policies of Western super powers and their neo-colonial tendencies in the "Third World". A Pakistani exile in London for the last four decades, Tariq Ali — iconoclast, rebel, revolutionary and anti-war intellectual — has eloquently and persuasively spoken against religious bigotry, military dictatorship and American hegemony.

The themes relating to increasing U.S. intervention in West Asia and the "Third World" that were treated in Ali's earlier books, The Clash of Fundamentalisms and Bush in Babylon, also find a place here although the genre is different. Speaking of Empire is a provocative study of "Third World" cultural politics that calls for understanding different histories located at a period of vast global restructuring when the market forces released by uninhibited trade have made nations/nationality obsolete and residual. Within this complicated space-place dialectic, Ali speaks of the possibility of the variegated terrain of anti-capitalist struggles and political upsurges in the Afro-Asian and Latin American world, emphasising post-colonial protest and resistance.

Global reach

Ali's politics is radical enough to induce a desire for the denazification of American "fascism" which has global economics at its base. The U.S. arsenal includes the holy trinity of the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank, which is accountable for ecological degradation, the spread of HIV and food insecurities, the lack of funding for schooling and the contamination of water, among other disasters. African countries, for instance, are pressured into fencing off their own institutions against their own people on the advice of the World Bank. Streams of water become unavailable when Pepsi or Coke decides to set up factory. In Argentina, the very idea of democracy is threatened when the IMF rejects requests for loan on the pretext that it should decrease social spending and introduce further privatisation. By far, the greatest abuse of the powers of globalisation is biopiracy, the ownership of intellectual rights by superpowers of the products grown indigenously by those over whom monopoly is exercised by the powerful. Seed giants and agro chemical industries regularly indulge in seed tampering and patenting and affect natural farming all across the developing world.

Ali, as ever, is full of insights for which the evidence is marshalled from diverse fields such as discourse analysis, cultural studies, and literary and political theory. His ideas and arguments are by now pretty familiar from our readings of other prophets of similar anti-American commitments such as Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Howard Zinn, Ed Herman, Amy Goodman, Michael Albert, Chalmers Johnson, William Blum and Anthony Arnove. Despite these commonly held anti-imperialist views, Ali gives us facts and figures which are chilling, such as the collaborative intent of the American State and its handful Iraqi allies over the number of anticipated deaths during the Iraq crisis that could be deemed acceptable. While America finds 3, 000 American dead to be an intolerable figure spurring Bush to bomb indiscriminately, the expected death toll of 2,50,000 in Iraq would be conveniently attributed to "collateral damage".

Incisive wit

Although most times Ali's scourge of the U.S. sounds like a diatribe, or even an obsession, his incisive wit and hard-hitting animus against Western ideology keeps alive a steady interest. Mark what he says about Tony Blair: "He's nothing more than a second rate actor with a third rate mind"; or Hamid Karzai, the puppet leader put into power, who "does little more than wear his lovely shawls about — I'm sure he would much rather be modelling them in Paris or New York than running Afghanistan."

Tariq Ali is among the few blithe-spirited people who will always have ideas and themes that have, to quote Naomi Klein, "a tendency... to flow through fences, and flee out open windows", making it impossible to forget history. David Barsamian deserves credit for putting together narratives that expose the kind of culture that is emerging in the West as a result of the "war against terror".

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Link to article at The Hindu website