Mr. Book just finished The Myth Of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers The World, by Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson.

This book was published in October 2024.

The authors summed up the problem of American policy when he wrote, “We might also think about this violence prerogative as the “Fifth Freedom,” the one Franklin D. Roosevelt forgot to mention when he laid out his famous Four Freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. The United States has always claimed a fundamental additional freedom underlying the others: crudely speaking, the freedom to dominate, to undertake any course of action to ensure that existing privilege is protected and advanced. Maintenance of this freedom is the operative principle that accounts for a substantial part of what the U.S. government does in the world. When the Four Freedoms are perceived to be incompatible with the Fifth (which occurs regularly), they are set aside with little notice or concern.”

This book discusses so many of the atrocities of the US policy over the years, including Vietnam, Indonesia, Latin America, both Iraq wars, the actions of Israel—which the US is complicit in, nuclear weapons and climate change.

I give this book an A+ and inducted it into the Hall of Fame.

Goodreads requires grades on a 1-5 star system. In my personal conversion system, an A+ equates to 5 stars. (A or A+: 5 stars, B+: 4 stars, B: 3 stars, C: 2 stars, D or F: 1 star).

This review has been posted at my blog, Mr. Book’s Book Reviews, and Goodreads.

Mr. Book finished reading this on November 27, 2024.