Background Info
This book is
not exactly current. Originally published in 1970, this book is probably more “classic
Chomsky”, (as compared to the much more recent writings of Chomsky). The events it comments on are from more than 40
years ago, although the lessons it draws are still relevant today—lessons on
the nature of power and imperialism, and the contrast between the benevolent
self-image the United States
has of itself, and the brutal violence it perpetrates around the world.
This was
Noam Chomsky’s second political book after American Power and the New Mandarins, 1969 (A), and along with that book it established his reputation
as one of the prominent voices on the Left.
The book is
primarily a reprint of articles which appeared in The New York Review of Books between 1969 and 1970: After Pinkville ,
Cambodia , Laos , and North Vietnam
All 4 of
these articles are currently available on-line:
After Pinkville [HERE]
As the
articles are expanded on and revised for the book, they appear in somewhat
different form in the book than at the links above, but they’re similar enough
that you can get the idea from reading the articles.
The book
also has an introductory chapter called Indochina and the American Crisis. and a reprint of Noam Chomsky’s
forward for the Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunal [also online: LINK HERE].
The name of
the book comes from a quotation by John K. Fairbank, which he made (with
astonishing perception) all the way back in 1947. As Chomsky quotes Fairbank;
“Our fear of Communism, partly as an
expression of our general fear of the future, will continue to inspire us to aggressive
anti-Communist policies in Asia and elsewhere, [and] the American people will
be led to think and may honestly believe that the support of anti-Communist
governments in Asia will somehow defend the
American way of life. This line of American policy will lead to American aid to
establish regimes which attempt to suppress the popular movements in Indonesia,
Indochina, the Philippines, and China….Thus, after setting out to fight
Communism in Asia, the American people will be obliged to fight the peoples of
Asia” (Fairbank in Chomsky p. 1).
The chapter
After Pinkville refers to the My Lai
Massacre (W). Pinkville, so
named because it was perceived to be sympathetic to the Communists, was the
name the American army used to refer to the whole region in which the village of My Lai My
Lai is often referred to as Song My, the Vietnamese name and which
was apparently the more common name for the media to use back in 1969. But I’ll use My Lai here because that is the more well-known name
today.).
The chapter
on Cambodia was written just
after the US invasion of Cambodia .
The
chapters on Laos and North Vietnam
contain all of Chomsky’s usual meticulous research, but are also partly based
on Chomsky’s personal experiences and observations after Chomsky’s trips to
these regions. Chomsky and others were
invited to North Vietnam in
March 1970 by the Committee for Solidarity with the American People of the
Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and his time in North Vietnam makes up much of the
basis for that article. Because of an
unexpected plane delay, he also spent a week in Vientiane
in Laos , and this forms the
basis for the article on Laos .
Why I Read This Book
Like a lot of people, these days I
primarily read Noam Chomsky article’s on-line.
And since I read so much Noam Chomsky on-line, I don’t always feel the
need to read his books.
In fact, I
had already read many of the articles that make up this book (and sometimes linked to them on this blog).
However,
like a lot of the stuff I “read” on-line, I don’t always read it as carefully
or as thoroughly as I should. And so,
when I saw this book, I decided it would be good for me to sit down with it and
try and carefully read through it. My
interest was increased by the fact that I’m currently living and travelling in
South East Asia, and so personally seeing some of the places Chomsky describes
in the book like Cambodia and North Vietnam.
The Review
Chomsky’s writings and speeches during
the Vietnam War represent perhaps his greatest work. I’m not sure any of his publications since
have matched the eloquence of his early books.
But that
being said, over the years he’s maintained much the same writing style, and
most of the things that can be said about Chomsky’s style generally also apply
to this book.
Like any of
Chomsky’s political works, it is emotionally draining to read. At least for me. As Chomsky lists horrifying fact after
horrifying fact, my blood races. I feel
twice outraged by everything he writes: first of all, I’m outraged by the fact
that it happened in the first place, and secondly I’m outraged that I’d never
been told this before. My brain kicks
into overdrive, and I think to myself how I need to devote the rest of my life
to publicizing these facts. People must
know what really happened! After about
10 pages, I have to put the book away because I can’t sit still and read it any
longer.
For
example: “The Pentagon will gladly
supply, on request, such information as the quantity of ordnance expended in Indochina . From 1965 through 1969 this amounts to about
4.5 million tons by aerial bombardment. This is nine times the tonnage of
bombing in the entire Pacific theater in World War II, including Hiroshima and
Nagasaki—“over 70 tons of bombs for every square mile of Vietnam, North and
South…about 500 pounds of bombs for every man, woman and child in Vietnam.” The
total of “ordnance expended” is more than doubled when ground and naval attacks
are taken into account. With no further
information than this, a person who has not lost his senses must realize that
the war is an overwhelming atrocity.” (p. 225)
Or: “In Laos
alone, today, the equivalent of several Hiroshima
Or, another
example:
The methods of “urbanization” by which we
have so advanced the modernization of Vietnam
“We both spent several weeks in
Quang Ngai some six months before the [Song My] incident. We flew daily with the
F.A.C’s (Forward Air Control). What we saw was a province utterly destroyed. In
August 1967, during Operation Benton
Only now peasants were not warned
before an air-strike was called in on their village. They were killed in their
villages because there was no room for them in the swamped pacification camps.
The usual warning by helicopter loudspeaker or air dropped leaflets were
stopped. Every civilian on the ground was assumed to be enemy by the pilots by
nature of living in Quangngai, which was largely a free-fire-zone.
Pilots, servicemen not unlike Calley
and Mitchell, continued to carry out their orders. Village after village was
destroyed from air as a matter of de facto policy. Air-strikes on civilians
became a matter of routine. It was under these circumstances of official
acquiescence to the destruction of the countryside and its people that the
massacre of Song My occurred.
Such atrocities were and are the
logical consequences of a war directed against an enemy indistinguishable from
the people.” (Orville and Jonathon
Schell in Chomsky 225-226).
Or when
writing about the American invasion of Cambodia :
Peter Arnett reports that the American troops
are facing a “political problem.” American foot soldiers are forced to operate
in the midst of the civilian population in Cambodia
So, the Vietnamese story is being renewed. The
tactic of scorched earth leads the Americans to set fire to houses because they
may be used by the communists. Cattle
are killed for the same reason. Spirals of smoke rose on Sunday above the area.
Groups of houses were transformed to reddening embers.
Arnett quotes an American commander
who says, “My orders are to burn everything,” and reports that air raids have
partially destroyed the town of Memot
Or when
writing about the American bombardment in Laos : The bombardment was said to include guided missiles that could dive
into a cave, as well as high explosives and antipersonnel weapons. The people
came out only at dusk and dawn to try to farm, but the planes attacked any
visible target, even trails and cultivated fields (p. 178).
Quotations
Actually, if you read some of the
quotes I’ve lifted above, a lot of them are not so much Chomsky originals as
they are Chomsky quoting from someone else.
And much of
the book is like that. On re-reading
these articles, I was surprised at how many of the most memorable quotations,
that I had mis-remembered as Chomsky’s, were actually quotations from other
people found in Chomsky’s writing.
I suppose
this shouldn’t surprise. Chomsky is an
academic, not a reporter on the ground.
Instead he is reading widely on the subject, and drawing quotations and
facts from a variety of sources. And
there is of course value in a writer who can pull all these facts and
quotations together to make a devastating argument.
Still, lest
some of us praise Chomsky too highly, it’s worth remembering that he doesn’t
work in a vacuum. He is borrowing
heavily from other writers who wrote about the atrocities in Southeast
Asia before him.
Now that
Chomsky is into his 80s, this is an important reminder for people inclined tothink that he is irreplaceable.
He never was a one man machine, but his work is only possible because so
many others are doing the first hand documentation work.
Tone
Part of what makes Chomsky so emotionally
exhausting to read is the dispassionate tone in which he recounts all these
atrocities. It’s not completely clinical—his
writing is often dripping with sarcasm—but he never appears to give into rage,
or outwardly emote sadness about the atrocities. He just records everything and analyzes it.
This has
the effect of putting all the outrage and heartbreak squarely on the
reader.
If the author
lets his outrage show in his prose, I think this has a cathartic effect on the
reader. You no longer feel the need to
be personally outraged, because you are comforted that someone else is feeling
this anger for you.
With
Chomsky’s writing, there is no emotion, and consequently no catharsis. All of the emotion for the atrocities must be
absorbed by the reader.
This is
what makes a recent Salon.com article, so
interesting: When Chomsky wept.
I’ve linked to this article before, but it really should be read as a companion
piece to At War With Asia since it
gives the background for the Chomsky’s chapter on Laos.
In the
Salon.com article, Chomsky’s travelling companion reveals that Chomsky was
human after all, and could allow himself to become overcome by emotion when
confronted face-to-face with the stories of the Laotian refugees:
I was thus stunned when, as I was translating Noam’s questions and the refugees’ answers, I suddenly saw him break down and begin weeping. I was struck not only that most of the others I had taken out to the camps had been so defended against what was, after all, this most natural, human response. It was that Noam himself had seemed so intellectual to me, to so live in a world of ideas, words and concepts, had so rarely expressed any feelings about anything. I realized at that moment that I was seeing into his soul.
Rebuttals
Another one of Chomsky’s favorite
techniques is to quote at length a government official, or someone from the
mainstream media, and then show what these attitudes say about our
society. (This was a technique he also
used quite extensively in his first book
American Power and the New Mandarins.).
In this
book, Chomsky uses this technique on Professor Samuel Huntington (Chairman of
the Department of Government of Harvard
University ) who has written in such clinical
and dispassionate terms about the need to eliminate the peasants in South Vietnam . Or Professor Ithiel Pool (Chairman of the
Department of Political Science at MIT) who writes in clinical and
dispassionate terms that large scale atrocities like the bombing of Hanoi can
be accomplished without provoking dissension back home, but only if it is
accomplished quickly.
But perhaps
the most striking example is Chomsky’s rebuttal of Townsend Hoopes.
Hoopes,
although he is somewhat forgotten nowadays, was a well-known figure during the
Vietnam War (Wikipedia article HERE, New York Times Obituary HERE). After having been in support of the war as
Under-Secretary of the Air Force, Hoopes then became one of the most prominent
critics of the Vietnam War, arguing that the cost in lives was not worth the
effort.
Although
Chomsky and Hoopes are both critics of the same war, Chomsky is appalled by
Hoopes attitudes, which Chomsky believes is indicative of how little distance
actually separates the hawks from the doves in mainstream American commentary.
Below is
the section of Chomsky quoting Hoopes, and then responding to it. (Quotations of Hoopes are in red, Chomsky’s
responses are in black)
Our early strategy, as Hoopes describes it,
was to kill as many Viet Cong as possible with artillery and air strikes:
As late as the fall of
1966…a certain aura of optimism surrounded this strategy. Some were ready to
believe that, in its unprecedented mobility and massive firepower, American forces
had discovered the military answer to endless Asian manpower and Oriental
indifference to death. For a few weeks there hung in the expectant Washington
air the exhilarating possibility that the most modern, mobile, professional
American field force in the nation’s history was going to lay to rest the
time-honored superstition, the gnawing unease of military planners, that a
major land war against Asian hordes is by definition a disastrous plunge into
quicksand for any Western army
But this glorious hope
was dashed. The endless manpower of Vietnam North Vietnam
We believe the enemy
can be forced to be “reasonable,” i.e., to compromise or even capitulate,
because we assume he wants to avoid pain, death, and material destruction. We
assume that if these are inflicted on him with increasing severity, then at
some point in the process he will want to stop the suffering. Ours is a
plausible strategy—for those who are rich, who love life and fear pain. But
happiness, wealth, and power are expectations that constitute a dimension far
beyond the experience, and probably beyond the emotional comprehension, of the
Asian poor.
Hoopes does not tell
us how he knows that the Asian poor do not love life or fear pain, or that
happiness is probably beyond their emotional comprehension. But he goes on to
explain how “idealogues in Asia ”
make use of these characteristics of Asian hordes. Their strategy is to convert “Asia ’s capacity for endurance in suffering into an
instrument for exploiting a basic vulnerability of the Christian West.” They do
this by inviting the West to “to carry its strategic logic to the
final conclusion, which is genocide.” The Asians thus “defy us by
a readiness to struggle, suffer and die on a scale that seems to us beyond the
bounds of humanity….At that point we hesitate, for, remembering Hitler and
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we realize anew that genocide is a terrible burden to
bear.”
Thus, by their willingness to die,
the Asian hordes, who do not love life, who fear no pain and cannot conceive of
happiness, exploit our basic weakness—our Christian values which make us
reluctant to bear the burden of genocide, the final conclusion of our strategic
logic. Is it really possible to read
these passages without being stunned by their crudity and callousness?
(p. 229-230)
The Vietnam War: Then
and Now
I think a popular perception is
that only with the passage of time can we clearly recognize the faults of
history. For decades the nation was not able to get a clear moral perspective
on the genocide of the Native Americans, slavery, and legal segregation. However, with the passage of time, we can now
obtain moral clarity on these issues, and repent our actions.
It’s always
somewhat surprising to me, then, to read Chomsky, or his contemporaries, from
the Vietnam War era, and discover that people back in the 1960s and 1970s were
actually more aware of the atrocities
committed in Southeast Asia than my generation is. Chomsky (and other contemporary writers)
understood very clearly what was happening in Vietnam at the time.
For those
of us born after the Vietnam War, however, the version of the Vietnam War that
we have been taught has been very sanitized.
It’s still regarded as a strategic error, but the benevolent intentions
of the US
government are never questioned, and the full scale of the atrocity of the war has been largely erased from history.
Although
this it is not taught in schools, the simple fact is the Vietnam War was an
atrocity unparalleled in history. Never
before in history was any country so destroyed by bombing on such a massive
scale. Not even Japan and Germany
combined was bombed as much as Vietnam . One does not even have to be a polemicist to
arrive at this conclusion—simply by the numbers, the fact is inarguable.
When one
considers that all of these bombs were dropped on a third world country with a
largely peasant population, you get an even greater sense of how brutal the War
was.
And this
massive destruction of an entire country and peasant population by a bombing
campaign unprecedented in history is now completely absent from our history
books.
Personal Experiences
Since I visited Hanoi two years ago myself, it was
interesting to read Chomsky’s description of the city, and compare it with my
own experiences. Even though Chomsky and
I were visiting the city 40 years apart, there were still some things that
haven’t changed.
Chomsky
talks about how beautiful the city of Hanoi
is, with its many lakes and parks. (Or
more precisely, he says: “Someday, if the
war ends, Hanoi Hanoi .
And from
page 205:
The Vietnamese see their history as an
unending series of struggles of resistance against aggression, by the Chinese,
the Mongols, the Japanese, the French and now the Americans. Over and over this
history was recounted to us. A dozen times we were told how the Chinese had
been beaten back, how the Mongols, who conquered most of Asia and Europe, were
unable to cross the Annam Mountains into Vietnam because of the fierce
resistance of the Vietnamese peasants, unified, even in feudal times, in
opposition to the aggressor. As the director of the Historical Museum Military Museum
This sounds
very like the exhibits in the Museums I saw in Hanoi myself.
Footnotes
I complained about the footnotes in a previous book review, so I suppose to be consistent I should
complain about them here as well.
Chomsky’s
text is overloaded with footnotes (or more correctly, endnotes, since instead
of being on the bottom of the page, you have to flip to the back of the chapter
to follow the note.)
The impulse
of course is just to skip over the endnotes, rather than having to interrupt
your reading every couple sentences to turn to the back of the book.
Unfortunately,
however, a lot of the key information, explanations and expansions of various
points are hidden away in the endnotes, so you do miss a lot if you don’t
follow them.
Worse yet,
several pages later Chomsky will then references in his main text information
that he had hidden away in his endnotes, under the assumption that you had been
following his endnotes all along.
Certainly
Chomsky is not the only author guilty of this, but I really wish he had
incorporated all his information into his main text, instead of hiding much of
it in the endnotes. Or, at the very least,
used footnotes at the bottom of the page for any information he thought was
important enough to reference later in the main text.
Quotes, Quotes,
Quotes
As I read this book I kept a pen
handy and underlined any passages I thought were particularly important,
shocking, or needed to be communicated to a wider audience.
By the time
I was done, I had just about underlined the whole book.
I am
tempted to reproduce here all of the
passages that resonated with me, but that would be impossible. Furthermore, it would be unnecessary, because
all of these articles are available online, and so don’t particularly need to
be reproduced on this blog to reach a wider audience.
Nonetheless,
for the sake of self-indulgence, I’ll still copy out a few of the passages that
really struck me. even if I can’t quote everything that struck me.
From page
230-231
James Thomson, East Asian specialist at the
Department of State and the White House between 1961 and 1966 has written
an unprovable factor that relates to
bureaucratic detachment: the ingredient of cryptoracism. I do not mean to imply
any conscious contempt for Asian loss of life on the part of Washington
(James Thompson quoted in
Chomsky, p. 230-231)
***********************************************
From Page
61:
[In
response to an early antiwar demonstration in Boston , 1965]Richard Nixon wrote, in a letter to The New York Times, October 29
[1965] that “victory for the VietCong…would
mean ultimately the destruction of speech for all men for all time not only in
Asia but in the United States as well”—nothing less.
This is
typical of how every foreign war the United States ever fights is
supposedly fought to protect freedom of speech.
A few years
back, during the Iraq War, a relative sent me a popular forwarded
e-mail containing an apocryphal story in which an old lady puts a young
anti-war woman in her place by telling the young woman that all the old lady’s
relatives died in foreign wars so that the young woman could enjoy freedom of
speech. [The popular forwarded e-mail
HERE on snopes.com]
**********************************************************
Speaking of
the Iraq War, Chomsky’s description of Nixon’s failure to find the COSVN
in Cambodia is reminiscent
of George Bush’s failure to find WMDs in Iraq . (COSVN was the acronym for
Central Office for South Vietnam—a mythical command center for the VietCong
supposedly located in Cambodia, which was the raison d’etre for
the US invasion of Cambodia).
From page
125:
So far, the only failure [of the
invasion of Cambodia ]
has been the inability to discover any of
the main targets. The original goal of the American invasion, as President
Nixon grandly announced at the outset, was to destroy the legendary COSVN, the
Communist Pentagon, to which he pointed on the map as he spoke. References to COSVN have now disappeared from
briefings. “Despite periodic reports to the contrary, knowledgeable military
sources say that no part of COSVN has been captured.” A writer for the Far
Eastern Economic Review defines COSVN as a “hypothetical structure in the minds
of frustrated American military planners in Saigon .”
**********************************************
From page 226:
…Orville Schell quotes a Newsweek correspondent
returning from Quang Ngai Province :
“Having had experience in Europe during World War II, he said what he had seen
was ‘much worse than what the Nazis had done to Europe .’”
Schell adds, “Had he written about it in these terms? No.”
****************************************************
From page 33:
The American War in Indochina has been based
on two principles: physical destruction in areas that are beyond the reach of
American troops, and the use of what are euphemistically called “population
control measures” in areas that can be occupied by American forces or the forces
that they train, supply, advise, and provide with air and artillery support.
Since 1959 forced relocation has been undertaken to concentrate the population.
Population removal through defoliation began in 1961, according to one
Vietnamese witness. Long reports that “It proved easier to order fliers to
spray crops from the air than to send in ground troops to force the people out
by setting fire to their fields and houses.” Later, population removal was
carried out largely by air and artillery bombardment, particularly after the
establishment of vast free-fire zones. To put the matter in the simplest, most
dispassionate terms, massacre and forced evacuation of the peasantry, combined
with rigorous control over those forced under American rule, is the essence of
American strategy in Vietnam
***********************************************
On page 72,
Chomsky quotes from Japanese reporter Katsuichi Honda of the Asashi Shimbun
(one of two major newspapers in Japan ).
He [Honda] describes for example the
incessant attacks on undefended villages by [American] gunboats in the Mekong
River
They seemed to fire whimsically and
in passing even though they were not being shot at from the ground nor could
they identify the people as NLF. They did it impulsively for fun, using the
farmers for targets as if in a hunting mood. They are hunting Asians….This
whimsical firing would explain the reason why the surgical wards in every
hospital in the Mekong Delta were full of
wounded
He is speaking,
notice, of the Mekong Delta, where few North Vietnamese soldiers were
identified until several months after the Tet offensive, where, according to
American intelligence, there were 800 North Vietnamese before last summer; and,
which contained some 40 percent of the population of South Vietnam prior to the
American assault.
********************************************
When
describing the desolation in South
Vietnam :
“In some cases the years of day-and-night
bombing have changed the contours of the land and little streams form into
lakes as they fill up mile after square mile of craters. Above this desolation and along and just
across the Cambodian frontier, the American helicopters and planes whirr
continually, firing their guns and cannon, dropping their bombs.”
(T.D.
Allman, quoted in Chomsky, p. 96)
*******************************************
From page 69:
American reporters have told us the same
thing so often that is almost superfluous to quote. Tom Buckley—to mention only
the most recent—describes the delta and the central lowlands:
“…bomb craters beyond counting, the
dead gray and black fields, forests that have been defoliated and scorched by
napalm, land that has been plowed flat to destroy Vietcong hiding places. And everywhere
can be seen the piles of ashes forming the outlines of huts and houses, to show
where hamlets once stood.”
The truth about
defoliants is only beginning to emerge, with the discovery that one of the two
primary agents used is “potentially dangerous, but needing further study” while
the other causes cancer and birth defects, and probably mental retardation.
Both will continue to be used in Vietnam
Of course it may be argued that the
American government did not know, in 1961, that these agents were so dangerous.
That is true. It was merely an experiment. Virtually nothing was known about
what the effects might be. Perhaps there would be no ill effects, or perhaps—at
the other extreme—Vietnam
****************************************************
From page 93:
The Cambodian Government White Paper of
January 1970…covers events up until May 1969. Since then, there have been many
further incidents. The American biologist Arthur Westing, who was investigating
American defoliation in Cambodia United States United States
From page 94:
The American military does not recognize the
right of others to defend their own territory from American attack or overflight,
or to interfere with American plans by inhabiting areas that the United States United
States Cambodia
*******************************
There’s a
lot more in this book that I want to quote, but at some point I have to
restrain myself. So I’ll stop here.
Digression on My Lai
This last
point is a digression which is unrelated to Chomsky’s book, but on the subject
of the My Lai Massacre. (But since
Chomsky writes in his book about the My Lai/Song My massacre, I’m justifying
this digression).
PBS American Experience did an excellent
documentary on My Lai a couple years ago,
which you can see on youtube HERE.
It’s a well
done documentary, and well worth watching.
One of the
more haunting things I learned from that documentary is that the army had an
official photographer who travelled along with them, so photos of the massacre
were actually taken as it happened, including a photo of some old Vietnamese
woman trying to shield their children, seconds before they were all massacred
by US soldiers.
See 34:20 on the video below for a description of how he took the photo.
It’s a
haunting photo. I think the reason it
haunts me is because it illustrates how only a few seconds can separate
life from death. You can see the faces
of the children in the photo are terrified, but they are also clearly
alive. Only seconds later, everyone in
this photo was massacred.
Propaganda Terms in the Media and What They Mean
and Noam Chomsky: America hates its poor: Linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky on our country's brutal class warfare -- and why it's ultimately so one-sided
No comments:
Post a Comment