Starts off with a bang, denouncing the US foreign policy after WW2 that goes on the present day but it does get a little repetitive - this actually being four books compiled into one probably helps as well. Because the USSR used to support governments and political movements the US was trying to destroy, there was a danger that US intervention in the Third World might explode into a nuclear war.

Ya karena aku sudah sering mendengar rumor-rumor tentang apa yang sebenarnya terjadi di balik semua kekacauan dan peperangan di dunia ini. Throughout history, the structures of government have tended to coalesce around other forms of power - in modern times primarily around economic power.The US has always tried to establish relations with the military in foreign countries because that's one of the ways to overthrow a government that has gotten out of hand. Originally published as four short books in the famous Real Story series— What Uncle Sam Really Wants; The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many; Secrets, Lies and Democracy; and The Common Good—they’ve collectively sold almost 600,000 copies. For example, Chomsky repeatedly points out newsworthy events that were conspicuously absent from the Western media, but effectively assumes that the reader will be familiar with anything that was reported in the media. The executive branch tries to follow policies of plausible deniability, which means that messages are given to the CIA to do things but without a paper trial, without a record. Chomsky has a wonderful way of explaining very complicated, very unfamiliar concepts in plain English that anyone can understand.

With the Soviet deterrent gone, the US is much more free to use violence around the world, a fact that has been recognized with much satisfaction by the US policy analysts in the past several years. And they continue to sell year after year after year because Chomsky’s ideas become, if anything, more relevant as time goes by. And while that has always been true in a technical sense (The Electoral College and US Senate were, from the beginning, designed to be barriers to allowing the populace to control its own destiny. More importantly he demonstrates that this is no accident; and he identifies a clear and publicly available documentary trail of the public policy decisions that explicitly set this corrupt system in place and maintains it today. His naturalistic approach to the study of language has affected the philosophy of language and mind.Nama Chomsky sebenarnya sudah tidak terlalu asing ditelingaku, namun baru kali ini aku memberanikan diri untuk membacanya. He suggests that the only near comparisons are with some Muslim countries, such as Iran, though even then the comparison is not entirely favourable to the Americans. He quotes the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London as concluding that, “while the US pays lip service to democracy, the real commitment is to ‘private, capitalist enterprise. Since the 1970, the US has vetoed far more Security Council resolutions than any other country (Britain is second, France a distinct third and Soviet Union fourth).