Chomsky Catalogs US Aggressions Since Eisenhower

The list of aggressions Chomsky attributes to US presidents

Noam Chomsky argues that no US president since Eisenhower has left office without ordering an aggression. This compilation is presented as a closed inventory, with no exceptions or nuances. That is where the problem begins: once on the table, the list triggers three distinct reactions. Some add missing chapters, others flip the script, and a third group rejects the author.

The review covers interventions attributed to the White House from the mid-20th century, presenting them as a structural constant rather than isolated episodes. That is the thesis. What is debated afterward is the scope: where the count begins and who is excluded.

What is missing from the list: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Truman era

The first criticism does not deny anything; it adds. If the series starts with Eisenhower, what one participant calls the most severe act of all remains out of frame: the two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The objection is formulated in two steps: first, the gap is pointed out; then, the responsible party, the Truman Administration, which preceded the covered period, is identified.

This type of correction disorients any inventory. A list of aggressions starting after 1945 carries a hole the size of two cities. It is not a minor detail for those who defend the pattern as systemic: if it is, the chronological cut-off is arbitrary.

"If it starts with Eisenhower, then the most horrific one is missing", summarizes one of the most repeated interventions in the exchange.

The opposing inventory: The USSR and 20th-century guerrillas

The second response does not correct Chomsky; it pairs him. Against the US catalog, a participant deploys another: the Soviet Union as a supporter of left-wing groups between 1940 and 1992, guerrillas in Latin America, decolonizing Africa, and Asia, repression in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, the invasion of Afghanistan, and a confrontation that nearly escalated into open war with China.

Proper names are added to this list: Saddam Hussein's rise to power, funding for the Polisario, and support attributed to ETA and GRAPO. None of these accusations come with documentation in the exchange. They function as argumentative symmetry, not as an archive.

The challenge has its logic: if the criterion is that everything bad comes from Washington, the same yardstick forces looking at the other bloc. The discussion becomes a contest of accounting, and each side displays its own record of damages.

From Wilson to the Federal Reserve: The genealogy slipping into the discussion

When the exchange leaves the Cold War behind, it goes back half a century. Woodrow Wilson appears, re-elected in 1916 with slogans "He kept us out of war" and "Peace without victory," and his Creel Commission, credited with turning a population opposed to intervention into a bellicose public opinion in six months. From there, it jumps to the anti-Spanish press campaign and the Black Legend narrative.

The next jump leads to money. A quote attributed to James Warburg, financial advisor to Franklin D. Roosevelt, before the Senate in 1950 is cited: "We will have a world government whether you like it or not." The chain woven around it positions the United States as a fascist-socialist system established by Roosevelt, the same architecture that, according to this reading, Chomsky would want to extend to the rest of the planet.

It is worth being explicit: the banking trail and mentions of the Federal Reserve circulating in this part rely on second-hand quotes, without documentary verification. They are reproduced as debate arguments, not as proven facts.

Why Chomsky is also unpopular with his own audience

The third reaction is the most uncomfortable. It does not discuss the list; it discusses the author. He is accused of aligning with the official version of 9/11, denying geoengineering, and defending vaccination, plus an alleged proposal to intern those who did not get vaccinated. He is also accused of contributing to the degradation of education.

All these reproaches circulate without supporting documents. Theses on geoengineering and 9/11 lack technical backing, and the accusation regarding internments comes with no citation. They are recorded as what they are: argumentative ammunition against an inconvenient reference.

The result is paradoxical. An author famous for denouncing the manufacturing of consent ends up being himself the object of a smear campaign on his own turf.

From the figure to NATO, the euro, and liquefied gas

From there, the conversation detaches from the figure. The focus shifts to NATO, credited with a dual role: extending pharmaceutical interests and dismantling Europe economically. There is talk of the cost of US liquefied gas, a weakened euro, and buying European industry at bargain prices.

The anchor of this thesis is a statement attributed to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2014, about replacing Europe's energy dependence on Russia with dependence on the United States. Read with the perspective time provides, the idea sounds less like prophecy and more like a script.

A comment summarizes the turn with more wit than argument: vocabulary matters, and whoever writes "LATAM" instead of Latin America reveals themselves. The discussion about Chomsky has, de facto, ended elsewhere.

What remains is a map of three layers: the US aggression Chomsky documents, the Soviet aggression his critics put forward, and the suspicion that the accuser himself is part of the mechanism. None of this is resolved. The predictable outcome is that any future compilation will face the same double standard: the signer will be measured more than the facts. Unless someone decides, for once, to count both columns at the same time.