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American Power and the New Mandarins: Historical and Political Essays
American Power and the New Mandarins is Noam Chomsky’s first political book, widely considered to be among the most cogent and powerful statements against the American war in Vietnam. Long out of print, this collection of early, seminal essays helped to establish Chomsky as a leading critic of United States foreign policy. These pages mount a scathing critique of the contradictions of the war, and an indictment of the mainstream, liberal intellectuals—the “new mandarins”—who furnished what Chomsky argued was the necessary ideological cover for the horrors visited on the Vietnamese people.
As America’s foreign entanglements deepen by the month, Chomsky’s lucid analysis is a sobering reminder of the perils of imperial diplomacy. With a new foreword by Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States, American Power and the New Mandarins is a renewed call for independent analysis of America’s role in the world.
As America’s foreign entanglements deepen by the month, Chomsky’s lucid analysis is a sobering reminder of the perils of imperial diplomacy. With a new foreword by Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States, American Power and the New Mandarins is a renewed call for independent analysis of America’s role in the world.
432 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1967
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1622 people want to read
About the author
Noam Chomsky
978 books17.4k followersAvram Noam Chomsky is an American professor and public intellectual known for his work in linguistics, political activism, and social criticism. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He is a laureate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona and an institute professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Among the most cited living authors, Chomsky has written more than 150 books on topics such as linguistics, war, and politics. In addition to his work in linguistics, since the 1960s Chomsky has been an influential voice on the American left as a consistent critic of U.S. foreign policy, contemporary capitalism, and corporate influence on political institutions and the media.
Born to Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants (his father was William Chomsky) in Philadelphia, Chomsky developed an early interest in anarchism from alternative bookstores in New York City. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania. During his postgraduate work in the Harvard Society of Fellows, Chomsky developed the theory of transformational grammar for which he earned his doctorate in 1955. That year he began teaching at MIT, and in 1957 emerged as a significant figure in linguistics with his landmark work Syntactic Structures, which played a major role in remodeling the study of language. From 1958 to 1959 Chomsky was a National Science Foundation fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. He created or co-created the universal grammar theory, the generative grammar theory, the Chomsky hierarchy, and the minimalist program. Chomsky also played a pivotal role in the decline of linguistic behaviorism, and was particularly critical of the work of B.F. Skinner.
An outspoken opponent of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, which he saw as an act of American imperialism, in 1967 Chomsky rose to national attention for his anti-war essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals". Becoming associated with the New Left, he was arrested multiple times for his activism and placed on President Richard M. Nixon's list of political opponents. While expanding his work in linguistics over subsequent decades, he also became involved in the linguistics wars. In collaboration with Edward S. Herman, Chomsky later articulated the propaganda model of media criticism in Manufacturing Consent, and worked to expose the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. His defense of unconditional freedom of speech, including that of Holocaust denial, generated significant controversy in the Faurisson affair of the 1980s. Chomsky's commentary on the Cambodian genocide and the Bosnian genocide also generated controversy. Since retiring from active teaching at MIT, he has continued his vocal political activism, including opposing the 2003 invasion of Iraq and supporting the Occupy movement. An anti-Zionist, Chomsky considers Israel's treatment of Palestinians to be worse than South African–style apartheid, and criticizes U.S. support for Israel.
Chomsky is widely recognized as having helped to spark the cognitive revolution in the human sciences, contributing to the development of a new cognitivistic framework for the study of language and the mind. Chomsky remains a leading critic of U.S. foreign policy, contemporary capitalism, U.S. involvement and Israel's role in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and mass media. Chomsky and his ideas are highly influential in the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements. Since 2017, he has been Agnese Helms Haury Chair in the Agnese Nelms Haury Program in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona.
Born to Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants (his father was William Chomsky) in Philadelphia, Chomsky developed an early interest in anarchism from alternative bookstores in New York City. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania. During his postgraduate work in the Harvard Society of Fellows, Chomsky developed the theory of transformational grammar for which he earned his doctorate in 1955. That year he began teaching at MIT, and in 1957 emerged as a significant figure in linguistics with his landmark work Syntactic Structures, which played a major role in remodeling the study of language. From 1958 to 1959 Chomsky was a National Science Foundation fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. He created or co-created the universal grammar theory, the generative grammar theory, the Chomsky hierarchy, and the minimalist program. Chomsky also played a pivotal role in the decline of linguistic behaviorism, and was particularly critical of the work of B.F. Skinner.
An outspoken opponent of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, which he saw as an act of American imperialism, in 1967 Chomsky rose to national attention for his anti-war essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals". Becoming associated with the New Left, he was arrested multiple times for his activism and placed on President Richard M. Nixon's list of political opponents. While expanding his work in linguistics over subsequent decades, he also became involved in the linguistics wars. In collaboration with Edward S. Herman, Chomsky later articulated the propaganda model of media criticism in Manufacturing Consent, and worked to expose the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. His defense of unconditional freedom of speech, including that of Holocaust denial, generated significant controversy in the Faurisson affair of the 1980s. Chomsky's commentary on the Cambodian genocide and the Bosnian genocide also generated controversy. Since retiring from active teaching at MIT, he has continued his vocal political activism, including opposing the 2003 invasion of Iraq and supporting the Occupy movement. An anti-Zionist, Chomsky considers Israel's treatment of Palestinians to be worse than South African–style apartheid, and criticizes U.S. support for Israel.
Chomsky is widely recognized as having helped to spark the cognitive revolution in the human sciences, contributing to the development of a new cognitivistic framework for the study of language and the mind. Chomsky remains a leading critic of U.S. foreign policy, contemporary capitalism, U.S. involvement and Israel's role in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and mass media. Chomsky and his ideas are highly influential in the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements. Since 2017, he has been Agnese Helms Haury Chair in the Agnese Nelms Haury Program in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona.
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December 7, 2022
This book is a collection of essays by the linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky, in which he expands on the issues of American foreign policy in the sixties and seventies, and most importantly, on the Vietnam conflict.
Knowing that Chomsky is a respected scholar, I had high expectations for his work. However, his thoughts, if they can be called thoughts at all as they are mostly comments on quotes written by other people, such as Adam Ulam, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and others, are shallow, unremarkable, and heavily partial to Communism.
For instance, on page 32 of the edition that I read, he calls Mao Zedong a romantic who refused to accept bureaucracy. I had to check the meaning of this word to make sure that I understand what Chomsky meant because I could not believe that someone would characterize Mao as a person with romantic, idealistic beliefs. Mao was the greatest mass murderer of the last century. Lying about grain production, farming methods, and the distribution of food, he caused a famine that killed about forty million people. He declared the Cultural Revolution, which wiped out China's intellectuals, whom he hated. He was cruel in a calculated way. There was nothing idealistic about his view of the world. What is Chomsky even talking about?
As if this was not enough, he also accuses the American policy-makers of getting involved in the Vietnam conflict to stop Mao Zedong, when, according to him, Mao had nothing to do with the Vietnamese and their resistance to the Americans. I completely agree that the American government should not have sent anyone to die and kill in Vietnam, but to suggest that China, and the Soviet Union, did not help the Communists in Vietnam is to distort facts.
Chomsky does not even try to hide his pro-Communist sympathies. On page 48, he argues that the Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang, the nationalist party of Vietnam, whose members fought for their country's freedom from French colonial rule in the first two decades of the century, "never was a mass political party," and was not particularly strong or popular, and that it and the other nationalist organizations did not leave much of an impact. This is not precisely correct. The nationalist movement in Vietnam developed impressively well in those years because of the efforts of these nationalists. The reason why their activism did not have as much of an impact as the Communist party, which was founded in the second half of the twenties, is the fact that the Communists did their best to destroy the nationalists by betraying them to the French colonial government. Having got rid of competition for the people's loyalty, the Communists then went on to found their party. Chomsky does not mention this, and neither does he quote anyone who does.
About the necessity of withdrawal from Vietnam he speaks forcefully and convincingly, but not thoughtfully, as his words echo those of American reporters. His essay reads like a long news article, which enumerates facts without going deeper into the subject of discussion as a scholarly work should. For instance, he takes the claim of a retired professor from Saigon that everyone in South Vietnam knew and admired Ho Chi Minh at face value. Many people in South Vietnam disliked Ho and the Communists because the National Liberation Front terrorized the countryside just like the Americans did and because the forces of North Vietnam were cruel on many occasions, such as when they invaded Hue in 1968 and killed thousands of civilians.
AMERICAN POWER AND THE NEW MANDARINS is a waste of time. There are so many scholars and activists who have written about the Vietnam conflict and the protest movement, and Chomsky's essays sound like leftist propaganda when compared to them. This book probably appealed to the student radicals of the sixties and seventies.
Knowing that Chomsky is a respected scholar, I had high expectations for his work. However, his thoughts, if they can be called thoughts at all as they are mostly comments on quotes written by other people, such as Adam Ulam, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and others, are shallow, unremarkable, and heavily partial to Communism.
For instance, on page 32 of the edition that I read, he calls Mao Zedong a romantic who refused to accept bureaucracy. I had to check the meaning of this word to make sure that I understand what Chomsky meant because I could not believe that someone would characterize Mao as a person with romantic, idealistic beliefs. Mao was the greatest mass murderer of the last century. Lying about grain production, farming methods, and the distribution of food, he caused a famine that killed about forty million people. He declared the Cultural Revolution, which wiped out China's intellectuals, whom he hated. He was cruel in a calculated way. There was nothing idealistic about his view of the world. What is Chomsky even talking about?
As if this was not enough, he also accuses the American policy-makers of getting involved in the Vietnam conflict to stop Mao Zedong, when, according to him, Mao had nothing to do with the Vietnamese and their resistance to the Americans. I completely agree that the American government should not have sent anyone to die and kill in Vietnam, but to suggest that China, and the Soviet Union, did not help the Communists in Vietnam is to distort facts.
Chomsky does not even try to hide his pro-Communist sympathies. On page 48, he argues that the Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang, the nationalist party of Vietnam, whose members fought for their country's freedom from French colonial rule in the first two decades of the century, "never was a mass political party," and was not particularly strong or popular, and that it and the other nationalist organizations did not leave much of an impact. This is not precisely correct. The nationalist movement in Vietnam developed impressively well in those years because of the efforts of these nationalists. The reason why their activism did not have as much of an impact as the Communist party, which was founded in the second half of the twenties, is the fact that the Communists did their best to destroy the nationalists by betraying them to the French colonial government. Having got rid of competition for the people's loyalty, the Communists then went on to found their party. Chomsky does not mention this, and neither does he quote anyone who does.
About the necessity of withdrawal from Vietnam he speaks forcefully and convincingly, but not thoughtfully, as his words echo those of American reporters. His essay reads like a long news article, which enumerates facts without going deeper into the subject of discussion as a scholarly work should. For instance, he takes the claim of a retired professor from Saigon that everyone in South Vietnam knew and admired Ho Chi Minh at face value. Many people in South Vietnam disliked Ho and the Communists because the National Liberation Front terrorized the countryside just like the Americans did and because the forces of North Vietnam were cruel on many occasions, such as when they invaded Hue in 1968 and killed thousands of civilians.
AMERICAN POWER AND THE NEW MANDARINS is a waste of time. There are so many scholars and activists who have written about the Vietnam conflict and the protest movement, and Chomsky's essays sound like leftist propaganda when compared to them. This book probably appealed to the student radicals of the sixties and seventies.
February 27, 2016
This was Chomsky's first book of political writings, originally released in 1969 during the United States' war against Vietnam. It was reissued by The New Press in 2002 as the Bush administration was attempting to take advantage of the anger over the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 to initiate military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I read some of the more substantial pieces here ("Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship" and "The Responsibility of Intellectuals") around twenty years ago when I introduced myself to his political writings through James Peck's 1987 collection entitled 'The Chomsky Reader.' It was good to revisit these writings again.
Having read much of the work he has done since, I'm amazed at how stylistically and logically consistent he has been over the years. Some people use this consistency to criticize Chomsky as strident and unwilling to change his mind when circumstances change. Especially after September 11, some claimed that his once fresh and incisive views had ossified into a broken-record attack on the United States as responsible for everything evil that happens everywhere. Many who were receptive to his anti-authoritarian analysis when he targeted the increasingly unpopular Vietnam situation (during the 1960s and 1970s) recoiled when a similar analysis of U.S. foreign policy was presented during times when the stakes for average Americans were not so high (for example, during the 1980s and 1990s).
Chomsky's most important assertion here is that imperialist activities will always be presented by imperialists as beneficial and well-intentioned. This is just as true for the United States as it was for Japan, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain. The reason why Chomsky's analysis hasn't changed is because the circumstances have actually not changed. The United States remains an overwhelmingly powerful player in the world with a reach that is no longer impeded by an empire with a competitive ideology (e.g., USSR) and comparable resources. The anti-communist ideology of the American imperialists discussed in these pages has been replaced by others since the Cold War ended in 1989. During the 1990s, imperialists struggled to find justifications for interventions that would be plausible to the American population. In this way, the terrorist attacks of September 11 and the subsequent mobilization of radical Islamist forces was a great gift to American imperialists as anti-terrorism may have an even longer shelf life than anti-communism.
I read some of the more substantial pieces here ("Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship" and "The Responsibility of Intellectuals") around twenty years ago when I introduced myself to his political writings through James Peck's 1987 collection entitled 'The Chomsky Reader.' It was good to revisit these writings again.
Having read much of the work he has done since, I'm amazed at how stylistically and logically consistent he has been over the years. Some people use this consistency to criticize Chomsky as strident and unwilling to change his mind when circumstances change. Especially after September 11, some claimed that his once fresh and incisive views had ossified into a broken-record attack on the United States as responsible for everything evil that happens everywhere. Many who were receptive to his anti-authoritarian analysis when he targeted the increasingly unpopular Vietnam situation (during the 1960s and 1970s) recoiled when a similar analysis of U.S. foreign policy was presented during times when the stakes for average Americans were not so high (for example, during the 1980s and 1990s).
Chomsky's most important assertion here is that imperialist activities will always be presented by imperialists as beneficial and well-intentioned. This is just as true for the United States as it was for Japan, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain. The reason why Chomsky's analysis hasn't changed is because the circumstances have actually not changed. The United States remains an overwhelmingly powerful player in the world with a reach that is no longer impeded by an empire with a competitive ideology (e.g., USSR) and comparable resources. The anti-communist ideology of the American imperialists discussed in these pages has been replaced by others since the Cold War ended in 1989. During the 1990s, imperialists struggled to find justifications for interventions that would be plausible to the American population. In this way, the terrorist attacks of September 11 and the subsequent mobilization of radical Islamist forces was a great gift to American imperialists as anti-terrorism may have an even longer shelf life than anti-communism.
October 20, 2008
A really nice look at intellectual responsibility during times of aggression--in this case, Vietnam. I was concerned about the length of the book as Chomsky can be pretty long-winded / academic when he wants to be but the essays contained in this volume were concise, moving, and very accessible.
July 19, 2019
A moderately interesting book, but easy to see why it was out of print for so long. Chomsky offers a notably anarchist critique of the Vietnam war, but his thought and understanding are both slightly unsophisticated and subject to a lot of confirmation bias, and it makes the book more of a snapshot into certain left-wing critiques of the Vietnam war whilst it was still being undertaken, rather than a a valuable piece to read decades after the war has finished.
perhaps-i-will-read-hard-to-say
July 31, 2017I have a note to myself to read the chapter "Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship." Apparently recommended by Rosalind E. Krauss in Passages in Modern Sculpture, but I can't remember why specifically she was recommending it.
May 30, 2014
Chomsky cuts through the bullshit to expose the hypocritical moral authority our country uses to justify acts of terror and aggression, specifically calling out the complicity of the intellectual community. Though written in 1968, the lessons of this book are vital today, and for the citizens of any large, powerful democracy.
August 3, 2013
Chomsky takes apart the idea that the USA is the greatest country in the world - and makes us all better off for having him there to stick a pin in our fantasies about America's influence in the world.
Want to read
October 29, 2007i started this now i can't find my copy - did i lend this to you?
November 2, 2008
Chomsky demolishes liberal intellectuals' pretensions of moral superiority and honest scholarship.
November 20, 2024
I'm going to review this book (which is great, I recommend it) by engaging with its substance in a way that is at least as much in depth as is the average review of a Chomsky book on this website.
My engagement with the substance takes the form of responding to a hypothetical review of the book written by a hypothetical reviewer (HR). Imagine that in our hypothetical world, HR:s bitterly critical review got by far the largest number of likes as it was posted to a hypothetical book review website similar to this one. Imagine further that HR conveniently refuses a general right to post replies to their allegations.
HR lambastes the book as “shallow and unremarkable”. Their own review, however, doesn't come close to reaching the level of shallow and unremarkable but is simply an uninterrupted series of lies and distortions. Let's run through them one by one.
Noam Chomsky (NC) doesn't describe Mao as a “romantic”, as HR falsely asserts. What he did was paraphrase a document that he is critically analyzing, signed by 14 leading academics. The document tries to make the case that Chinese power has to be restrained by the U.S. to avoid a major war in Asia. One of the alleged dangers of China, according to the document, is, in NC's accurate paraphrase, Mao's “romantic efforts to undermine the party apparatus”. Their view, not his. After this falsification is corrected, we can see the utter irrelevance, in this context, of HR triumphantly treating us to the earth-shattering discovery that there were many atrocities in Maoist China. You don't say, Sherlock!
What does NC actually say about Maoist China in this book? In fact he condemns the state as ”authoritarian and repressive” perhaps to the point of meriting ”outrage” (page 267).
This fact alone makes nonsense of HR:s accusation that the book is ”heavily partial to Communism”. This conclusion is further reinforced by the fact that a major theme of the book is the presentation of a left-anarchist critique of Marxist-Leninist (a.k.a. “Communist”) ideology, as a minimally attentive reader could not have failed to notice (see the essay “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship” which HR alludes to a couple of times). Nowhere in the book is there any expression of support for the political programs of the NLF or North Vietnam.
What about HR:s claim that NC “argues” that the VNQDD "never was a mass political party" in what HR purports to be a quote from NC. This is a misrepresentation. In fact, in the course of a critical discussion of what passes for ”scholarly and objective” studies about U.S. Vietnam policy, NC analyzes an essay by Milton Sacks. According to Sacks, the Americans ought to be trying to secure the victory of the “nationalists” over the “Communists”, overcoming the problem of what Sacks concedes to be the political weakness of the “nationalists”. One of the main elements of the “nationalists”, according to Sacks, is the VNQDD. NC observes that we can gain further insight into the nature of the “nationalist” forces by turning to the book “Viet Cong” by the hysterically anti-Communist U.S. government scholar (as he is rightly described), Douglas Pike.
NC then quotes Pike writing that “The VNQDD never was a mass political party in the Western sense.” Pike's claim, not NC's, as HR falsely asserts. NC's totally accurate point, ignored by HR, is: The fact that you can unquestioningly advocate forcibly intervening in a foreign country on the other side of the world with the aim of ensuring the victory of such elements, and still be regarded as an objective social scientist, is totally perverse.
What about HR:s allegation, for which no source is suggested, that the VNQDD politically failed because Communists betrayed them to the French. Even if correct, which it is not*, this would be totally irrelevant to NC's point, so it is pure obfuscation to bring it up in such a context.
What about HR's accusation that NC denies that the Vietnamese resistance, under U.S. attack, received “help” from big powers like China? The accusation is bizarre and unfounded. Of course no sane person would deny the fact. For example, at the beginning of the essay “The Logic of Withdrawal”, the one part of the book that HR even pretends to address, NC notes that American “escalation” in Vietnam would possibly entail a “confrontation with China”, clearly implying a Chinese role in the conflict, again a completely uncontroversial fact. What NC does address is an entirely different question: Were the Vietnamese Communists mere puppets of their great power backers or did they act independently in accordance with their own interests? Obviously the latter, as richly documented in the book and elsewhere, and uncontested by HR.
What about HR's accusation that ”[NC] takes the claim of a retired professor from Saigon that everyone in South Vietnam knew and admired Ho Chi Minh at face value” thereby allegedly seeking to deny widespread “dislike” of the Communists among South Vietnamese? Let us unravel this bit of deceit. In fact, in the course an updated version of a 1967 review-essay marked by plenty of instances of “going deeper into the subject of discussion as a scholarly work should” (as HR incorrectly accuses him of not doing), NC presents a torrent of data points, by no means all drawn from press reports, of how the U.S. government and other establishment sources—not NC and not “a retired professor from Saigon”—regards the Saigon government as being very politically weak at the time, an uncontroversial conclusion then and in retrospect, and uncontested by HR. In this context, NC does quote from a Christian Science Monitor interview with a retired professor, who, the CSM claims, is ”somewhat to the right of the spectrum of Saigon intellectuals”. According to this man, as quoted by NC, the problem is that " 'at this point the only intellectuals of character who have committed themselves are on the other side.' Ho Chi Minh retains his popularity, because 'he bridged the gap between Vietnam and the modern world.' 'Everyone knows and admires Ho.' The only hope, as the professor sees it, is for the United States to put aside pretense and to appoint a new 'governor or proconsul for Vietnam.' ” Admiring Ho and supporting (or “not disliking”) his Communist movement are evidently two entirely different things. For example, a strongly anti-capitalist person might admire Gandhi as the national father of India, while strongly disliking the course of brutal capitalist development he initiated. The Saigon man, as quoted, very obviously hates the Communists as is very clearly implied by his advocacy of American colonization of his country to wipe them out! Nor is he quoted as suggesting that South Vietnamese in general don't “dislike” the Communists. Neither with this quote nor anywhere else does NC advance (or accept at “face value”) anything remotely close to the position HR attributes to him. HR's accusation in this regard can be characterized, at best, as hopelessly confused.
That exhausts the list of substantive claims in the hypothetical review, in other words, the list of lies. Putting aside the lying, an obvious question arises: If the book's thoughts are so “shallow and unremarkable” (even to the point of not deserving to be labeled “thoughts”, as HR contemptuously writes) then why does HR demonstrate a total inability to comprehend, let alone critically challenge, a single one of them? What makes the performance so bizarre, in our hypothetical universe, is that HR is a person of evident brilliance who, furthermore, expresses views that happen to be identical to those of NC: opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam and opposition to Marxism-Leninism. Why does HR hate NC so much if HR agrees with him?
What I suspect to be a colossal "waste of time" is me going to the trouble of debunking this hypothetical review.
*I looked into this claim out of curiosity: In the section of Pike's expert study dealing with the VNQDD and other “nationalist” elements, Pike concludes “The VNQDD's failure was due chiefly to its lack of organization and its leaders' lack of organizational talent.” Pike writes that the VNQDD was all but destroyed by the French and then was “revived by the Chinese Nationalists in 1942” and was “purged by the Vietminh” in mid-1946. What caused the original virtual destruction of the VNQDD at the hands of the French? Pike does not list purported Communist betrayal as a factor, but he does write that the VNQDD being “betrayed by a Hanoi businessman, a victim of VNQDD blackmail” precipitated this outcome. In sum, the claim would appear baseless (unless we assume that the businessman was a “Communist”, which Pike does not suggest). In any event it has zero bearing on evaluating NC's book. It should also be noted here that HR can only be regarded as a less than fully reliable commentator on the subject of the VNQDD, because HR happens to be embarrassingly ignorant on the subject they learnedly pontificates on. Consider HR:s claim that its members fought the French “in the first two decades of the century”. In fact, the VNQDD was not formed until 1927 (see Pike). Maybe, out of charity, I should assume that HR meant to say that, after its formation, its members consisted of people who had fought the French during the first two decades of the century. This claim too would be inaccurate. In fact, “few” among its “early members” were over 30, Pike reports, and he does not suggest that they fought the French while toddlers.
My engagement with the substance takes the form of responding to a hypothetical review of the book written by a hypothetical reviewer (HR). Imagine that in our hypothetical world, HR:s bitterly critical review got by far the largest number of likes as it was posted to a hypothetical book review website similar to this one. Imagine further that HR conveniently refuses a general right to post replies to their allegations.
HR lambastes the book as “shallow and unremarkable”. Their own review, however, doesn't come close to reaching the level of shallow and unremarkable but is simply an uninterrupted series of lies and distortions. Let's run through them one by one.
Noam Chomsky (NC) doesn't describe Mao as a “romantic”, as HR falsely asserts. What he did was paraphrase a document that he is critically analyzing, signed by 14 leading academics. The document tries to make the case that Chinese power has to be restrained by the U.S. to avoid a major war in Asia. One of the alleged dangers of China, according to the document, is, in NC's accurate paraphrase, Mao's “romantic efforts to undermine the party apparatus”. Their view, not his. After this falsification is corrected, we can see the utter irrelevance, in this context, of HR triumphantly treating us to the earth-shattering discovery that there were many atrocities in Maoist China. You don't say, Sherlock!
What does NC actually say about Maoist China in this book? In fact he condemns the state as ”authoritarian and repressive” perhaps to the point of meriting ”outrage” (page 267).
This fact alone makes nonsense of HR:s accusation that the book is ”heavily partial to Communism”. This conclusion is further reinforced by the fact that a major theme of the book is the presentation of a left-anarchist critique of Marxist-Leninist (a.k.a. “Communist”) ideology, as a minimally attentive reader could not have failed to notice (see the essay “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship” which HR alludes to a couple of times). Nowhere in the book is there any expression of support for the political programs of the NLF or North Vietnam.
What about HR:s claim that NC “argues” that the VNQDD "never was a mass political party" in what HR purports to be a quote from NC. This is a misrepresentation. In fact, in the course of a critical discussion of what passes for ”scholarly and objective” studies about U.S. Vietnam policy, NC analyzes an essay by Milton Sacks. According to Sacks, the Americans ought to be trying to secure the victory of the “nationalists” over the “Communists”, overcoming the problem of what Sacks concedes to be the political weakness of the “nationalists”. One of the main elements of the “nationalists”, according to Sacks, is the VNQDD. NC observes that we can gain further insight into the nature of the “nationalist” forces by turning to the book “Viet Cong” by the hysterically anti-Communist U.S. government scholar (as he is rightly described), Douglas Pike.
NC then quotes Pike writing that “The VNQDD never was a mass political party in the Western sense.” Pike's claim, not NC's, as HR falsely asserts. NC's totally accurate point, ignored by HR, is: The fact that you can unquestioningly advocate forcibly intervening in a foreign country on the other side of the world with the aim of ensuring the victory of such elements, and still be regarded as an objective social scientist, is totally perverse.
What about HR:s allegation, for which no source is suggested, that the VNQDD politically failed because Communists betrayed them to the French. Even if correct, which it is not*, this would be totally irrelevant to NC's point, so it is pure obfuscation to bring it up in such a context.
What about HR's accusation that NC denies that the Vietnamese resistance, under U.S. attack, received “help” from big powers like China? The accusation is bizarre and unfounded. Of course no sane person would deny the fact. For example, at the beginning of the essay “The Logic of Withdrawal”, the one part of the book that HR even pretends to address, NC notes that American “escalation” in Vietnam would possibly entail a “confrontation with China”, clearly implying a Chinese role in the conflict, again a completely uncontroversial fact. What NC does address is an entirely different question: Were the Vietnamese Communists mere puppets of their great power backers or did they act independently in accordance with their own interests? Obviously the latter, as richly documented in the book and elsewhere, and uncontested by HR.
What about HR's accusation that ”[NC] takes the claim of a retired professor from Saigon that everyone in South Vietnam knew and admired Ho Chi Minh at face value” thereby allegedly seeking to deny widespread “dislike” of the Communists among South Vietnamese? Let us unravel this bit of deceit. In fact, in the course an updated version of a 1967 review-essay marked by plenty of instances of “going deeper into the subject of discussion as a scholarly work should” (as HR incorrectly accuses him of not doing), NC presents a torrent of data points, by no means all drawn from press reports, of how the U.S. government and other establishment sources—not NC and not “a retired professor from Saigon”—regards the Saigon government as being very politically weak at the time, an uncontroversial conclusion then and in retrospect, and uncontested by HR. In this context, NC does quote from a Christian Science Monitor interview with a retired professor, who, the CSM claims, is ”somewhat to the right of the spectrum of Saigon intellectuals”. According to this man, as quoted by NC, the problem is that " 'at this point the only intellectuals of character who have committed themselves are on the other side.' Ho Chi Minh retains his popularity, because 'he bridged the gap between Vietnam and the modern world.' 'Everyone knows and admires Ho.' The only hope, as the professor sees it, is for the United States to put aside pretense and to appoint a new 'governor or proconsul for Vietnam.' ” Admiring Ho and supporting (or “not disliking”) his Communist movement are evidently two entirely different things. For example, a strongly anti-capitalist person might admire Gandhi as the national father of India, while strongly disliking the course of brutal capitalist development he initiated. The Saigon man, as quoted, very obviously hates the Communists as is very clearly implied by his advocacy of American colonization of his country to wipe them out! Nor is he quoted as suggesting that South Vietnamese in general don't “dislike” the Communists. Neither with this quote nor anywhere else does NC advance (or accept at “face value”) anything remotely close to the position HR attributes to him. HR's accusation in this regard can be characterized, at best, as hopelessly confused.
That exhausts the list of substantive claims in the hypothetical review, in other words, the list of lies. Putting aside the lying, an obvious question arises: If the book's thoughts are so “shallow and unremarkable” (even to the point of not deserving to be labeled “thoughts”, as HR contemptuously writes) then why does HR demonstrate a total inability to comprehend, let alone critically challenge, a single one of them? What makes the performance so bizarre, in our hypothetical universe, is that HR is a person of evident brilliance who, furthermore, expresses views that happen to be identical to those of NC: opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam and opposition to Marxism-Leninism. Why does HR hate NC so much if HR agrees with him?
What I suspect to be a colossal "waste of time" is me going to the trouble of debunking this hypothetical review.
*I looked into this claim out of curiosity: In the section of Pike's expert study dealing with the VNQDD and other “nationalist” elements, Pike concludes “The VNQDD's failure was due chiefly to its lack of organization and its leaders' lack of organizational talent.” Pike writes that the VNQDD was all but destroyed by the French and then was “revived by the Chinese Nationalists in 1942” and was “purged by the Vietminh” in mid-1946. What caused the original virtual destruction of the VNQDD at the hands of the French? Pike does not list purported Communist betrayal as a factor, but he does write that the VNQDD being “betrayed by a Hanoi businessman, a victim of VNQDD blackmail” precipitated this outcome. In sum, the claim would appear baseless (unless we assume that the businessman was a “Communist”, which Pike does not suggest). In any event it has zero bearing on evaluating NC's book. It should also be noted here that HR can only be regarded as a less than fully reliable commentator on the subject of the VNQDD, because HR happens to be embarrassingly ignorant on the subject they learnedly pontificates on. Consider HR:s claim that its members fought the French “in the first two decades of the century”. In fact, the VNQDD was not formed until 1927 (see Pike). Maybe, out of charity, I should assume that HR meant to say that, after its formation, its members consisted of people who had fought the French during the first two decades of the century. This claim too would be inaccurate. In fact, “few” among its “early members” were over 30, Pike reports, and he does not suggest that they fought the French while toddlers.
December 19, 2024
“Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship”
Chomsky seems to wrap both a distinct idea and his primary theses about leftism in the context of the Vietnam War into this essay–which ostensibly is about the faultiness of objectivity (a tenant of critical theory) but is really an introduction to his broad arguments about the direction in which society is moving.
I’ll tackle the first, since I think it’s relatively simple and narrower in implications. Split into two parts, Chomsky first attacks and deconstructs the objectivity of these so-called “New Mandarins” before deconstructing liberal historians’ narratives regarding the Spanish Civil War. The former is interesting because Chomsky is insightful and the Spanish Civil War is inherently interesting, although I think it requires some work on the part of the reader to make it more broadly applicable and relevant. Chomsky illustrates the ways in which the truly revolutionary aspects of the Civil War were squashed by the Soviets, on the Republic side, and the Italians and Germans, on the Fascist side. He painstakingly reconstructs instance after instance in which this critical fact–that there was a true, successful popular revolution–is passed over in liberal (i.e., pro-Republic) texts. He also deconstructs a popular narrative about Western democracies’ so-called neutrality and the true implication of this section becomes clear. The Spanish Civil War is often thought to predict what would happen in WWII; this is true, but it was also tremendously predictive of what would happen in the Cold War. The Western democracies, in the 1930s, saw Communism as a greater threat than the fascists; hence Munich and their reconciliatory approach towards Hitler. Thus, in Spain, when the USSR became involved on the Republic’s side together with the genuine popular revolution of the early 1930’s, the western democracies were content to let the fascists lead the anti-Communism vanguard; after WWII and the conquest over the fascists, however, the democracies would have to take on the role that the fascists played in Spain, and so they did. It should be pointed out that Franco is more of the stock of typical US-supported Cold War Dictators than Hitler, and after his ascension to Spain’s leadership he was embraced by the US.
The first half of the essay fits more into Chomsky’s larger argument about the new mandarins; he argues that the role of money in politics had been in decline in terms of influence, replaced by ‘expertise’ and ‘specialization’; and that the increasing power of technocrats in the US government would do nothing but further consolidate the state constructed to perpetrate violence and imperialism. He then applies this to the security state that prosecuted the Vietnam War, all of the senior economists at the RAND corporation (we don’t claim them), the Harvard government professors, pointing out their supposed expertise as nothing but blatant western imperialist expertise.
Chomsky’s argument about the new mandarins feels outdated in the era of RFK jr. and vaccine denialism; the mandarins running public health agencies aren’t perfect, but I think any reasonable person would argue we need food regulators, medicinal oversight agencies, and the like. Instead, I’ll interpret Chomsky’s argument the way I understood he intended it, as to relate to security bureaucrats. The security bureaucrats and intelligence officials who operated large swathes of foreign policy, insulated from public opinion, for the Cold War and the War on Terror. I think we have strong evidence these mandarins are currently in retreat; Biden’s ending of the drone war and withdrawal from Afghanistan were powerful indicators as such, although the steadfast refusal to support the Palestinian cause betrays the sort of inhuman, lack of objectivity, and realist point of view Chomsky rightly points out in the ‘experts’ running the show in the Vietnam War. This line of argument is very compelling; why should we trust ‘experts’ when children are dying? What good is a strategy that results in countless deaths and the mass violation of human rights? The unfeeling mandarins have angled the US state to thrive off war, perhaps, but I also wonder how true this is in the post-War on Terror era.
“The Revolutionary Pacificism of A.J. Muste: On the Backgrounds of the Pacific War”
I’ll start by saying I didn’t know who A.J. Muste was before cracking open this essay, (here’s a good summary), which is an embarrassing but true admission. In this essay, Chomsky doesn’t really devote much space to Muste’s thinking, but instead wonders how inevitable World War II really was.
I’ll start by saying that Chomsky’s choice of World War II is two-fold; first, it’s critical because this is where the myth of US might-is-right was born, a myth that only really died (if it died at all) in Iraq this century. One of the bitter ironies in history is that this war, perhaps one of the instances where we should have been more readily involved with the strength of arms, was the last time the US exhibited any kind of hesitancy to get military involved in a conflict happening elsewhere for 20 years, until the abject failure of the Vietnam War. Chomsky naturally focuses on the build-up to the war in the Pacific, since that’s what drove the US into war (there’s some kind of alternate history where we don’t fight the Nazis at all; after all, they declared war on us before we declared war on them).
There’s a lot I endorse in Chomsky’s approach here; I do agree that the US’s main concern in Asia was hardly the self-determination of the people of Southeast Asia, which the US and its allies have been doing for decades, or the subjugation of Korea, which Japan had been doing for decades, but instead the threatening pose of Japan towards China and the possibility that the US would see its markets cut off there. I agree that the US could’ve done much to de-escalate prior to Pearl Harbor, but I bristle slightly at Chomsky’s portrayal of Japan and Manchuria specifically. I think there is a larger flaw to his works, which is his willingness to take leftist accounts at their word, and some of his commentary about Manchuria, specifically the satellite state the Japanese set up there Manchukuo, has aged quite poorly.
One of the things about reading Chomsky is accepting that his primary critique and point re: imperialism will mostly be about criticizing American imperialism and American power. This is something particularly clear after reading “The Responsibility of Intellectuals”; Chomsky took his privileges as an American intellectual (doubly privileged in this respect, as he refers to himself multiple times) seriously and it feels he always responded to this privilege by aiming at American power first and foremost; I’m not sure how much credence, then, I would give some points of his writing which appear to be apologia for some rather nasty anti-American anti-imperialist historical actors.
Overall Thoughts: One mantra of the 2024 election was how it bore resemblance to 1968. There were student protests over the US involvement in a deeply unjust foreign war (albeit the role of US culpability remains wildly different between the Vietnam War and Israel’s genocide in Gaza), a Robert Kennedy running for President, the return of a “disgraced” national Republican figure that reviled and attacked the press, the stepping down of a President whose domestic agenda would go down as lost in the blood of children on the other side of the world, and the foisting of the Democrat mantel on their rushed and hemmed-in Vice President.
I’ve thought about this metaphor and I’ve decided I don’t like it; Gaza isn’t Vietnam, from the standpoint of US culpability. It has split a cleavage down the middle of American society, but in a different way; the US has no troops on the ground in Ukraine or Gaza, seeming to usher in a different type of US involvement. In Ukraine, the US is on the side of the anti-colonialists, while in Gaza the US is helping to prop a vestige of post-war western imperialism. The main argument about Vietnam was that the US needed a deep re-evaluation of its use of its seemingly limitless power, a re-evaluation that really only occurred post-Iraq (or perhaps only post-Afghanistan or perhaps, the likeliest, has never happened). The main argument about Israel feels less structural; this doesn’t feel like a war waged by the whole of the Military-Industrial Complex, or the abuse of American power; instead, it feels like a willful ignorance on the part of the whole American population, which has manifested itself in the ignorance and indifference of the vast majority of our policymakers towards human suffering if it is by a non-white person. Unlike Vietnam, the American population isn’t being spoon-fed lies by the US government and a whole class of mandarins and intellectuals; now, every American can pick up their phone and see what’s happening in Gaza. And They still don’t care.
The failure of the US to support Palestine will be remembered, like Vietnam, as an indictment of our moral character. Chomsky argues there needs to be some sort of cultivation of Americans to achieve a conscience of justice after Vietnam; I think the bipartisan embrace of Israel in the wake of its genocide has demonstrated that no such cultivation has occurred, and that this is the same US that was in Vietnam.
Chomsky seems to wrap both a distinct idea and his primary theses about leftism in the context of the Vietnam War into this essay–which ostensibly is about the faultiness of objectivity (a tenant of critical theory) but is really an introduction to his broad arguments about the direction in which society is moving.
I’ll tackle the first, since I think it’s relatively simple and narrower in implications. Split into two parts, Chomsky first attacks and deconstructs the objectivity of these so-called “New Mandarins” before deconstructing liberal historians’ narratives regarding the Spanish Civil War. The former is interesting because Chomsky is insightful and the Spanish Civil War is inherently interesting, although I think it requires some work on the part of the reader to make it more broadly applicable and relevant. Chomsky illustrates the ways in which the truly revolutionary aspects of the Civil War were squashed by the Soviets, on the Republic side, and the Italians and Germans, on the Fascist side. He painstakingly reconstructs instance after instance in which this critical fact–that there was a true, successful popular revolution–is passed over in liberal (i.e., pro-Republic) texts. He also deconstructs a popular narrative about Western democracies’ so-called neutrality and the true implication of this section becomes clear. The Spanish Civil War is often thought to predict what would happen in WWII; this is true, but it was also tremendously predictive of what would happen in the Cold War. The Western democracies, in the 1930s, saw Communism as a greater threat than the fascists; hence Munich and their reconciliatory approach towards Hitler. Thus, in Spain, when the USSR became involved on the Republic’s side together with the genuine popular revolution of the early 1930’s, the western democracies were content to let the fascists lead the anti-Communism vanguard; after WWII and the conquest over the fascists, however, the democracies would have to take on the role that the fascists played in Spain, and so they did. It should be pointed out that Franco is more of the stock of typical US-supported Cold War Dictators than Hitler, and after his ascension to Spain’s leadership he was embraced by the US.
The first half of the essay fits more into Chomsky’s larger argument about the new mandarins; he argues that the role of money in politics had been in decline in terms of influence, replaced by ‘expertise’ and ‘specialization’; and that the increasing power of technocrats in the US government would do nothing but further consolidate the state constructed to perpetrate violence and imperialism. He then applies this to the security state that prosecuted the Vietnam War, all of the senior economists at the RAND corporation (we don’t claim them), the Harvard government professors, pointing out their supposed expertise as nothing but blatant western imperialist expertise.
Chomsky’s argument about the new mandarins feels outdated in the era of RFK jr. and vaccine denialism; the mandarins running public health agencies aren’t perfect, but I think any reasonable person would argue we need food regulators, medicinal oversight agencies, and the like. Instead, I’ll interpret Chomsky’s argument the way I understood he intended it, as to relate to security bureaucrats. The security bureaucrats and intelligence officials who operated large swathes of foreign policy, insulated from public opinion, for the Cold War and the War on Terror. I think we have strong evidence these mandarins are currently in retreat; Biden’s ending of the drone war and withdrawal from Afghanistan were powerful indicators as such, although the steadfast refusal to support the Palestinian cause betrays the sort of inhuman, lack of objectivity, and realist point of view Chomsky rightly points out in the ‘experts’ running the show in the Vietnam War. This line of argument is very compelling; why should we trust ‘experts’ when children are dying? What good is a strategy that results in countless deaths and the mass violation of human rights? The unfeeling mandarins have angled the US state to thrive off war, perhaps, but I also wonder how true this is in the post-War on Terror era.
“The Revolutionary Pacificism of A.J. Muste: On the Backgrounds of the Pacific War”
I’ll start by saying I didn’t know who A.J. Muste was before cracking open this essay, (here’s a good summary), which is an embarrassing but true admission. In this essay, Chomsky doesn’t really devote much space to Muste’s thinking, but instead wonders how inevitable World War II really was.
I’ll start by saying that Chomsky’s choice of World War II is two-fold; first, it’s critical because this is where the myth of US might-is-right was born, a myth that only really died (if it died at all) in Iraq this century. One of the bitter ironies in history is that this war, perhaps one of the instances where we should have been more readily involved with the strength of arms, was the last time the US exhibited any kind of hesitancy to get military involved in a conflict happening elsewhere for 20 years, until the abject failure of the Vietnam War. Chomsky naturally focuses on the build-up to the war in the Pacific, since that’s what drove the US into war (there’s some kind of alternate history where we don’t fight the Nazis at all; after all, they declared war on us before we declared war on them).
There’s a lot I endorse in Chomsky’s approach here; I do agree that the US’s main concern in Asia was hardly the self-determination of the people of Southeast Asia, which the US and its allies have been doing for decades, or the subjugation of Korea, which Japan had been doing for decades, but instead the threatening pose of Japan towards China and the possibility that the US would see its markets cut off there. I agree that the US could’ve done much to de-escalate prior to Pearl Harbor, but I bristle slightly at Chomsky’s portrayal of Japan and Manchuria specifically. I think there is a larger flaw to his works, which is his willingness to take leftist accounts at their word, and some of his commentary about Manchuria, specifically the satellite state the Japanese set up there Manchukuo, has aged quite poorly.
One of the things about reading Chomsky is accepting that his primary critique and point re: imperialism will mostly be about criticizing American imperialism and American power. This is something particularly clear after reading “The Responsibility of Intellectuals”; Chomsky took his privileges as an American intellectual (doubly privileged in this respect, as he refers to himself multiple times) seriously and it feels he always responded to this privilege by aiming at American power first and foremost; I’m not sure how much credence, then, I would give some points of his writing which appear to be apologia for some rather nasty anti-American anti-imperialist historical actors.
Overall Thoughts: One mantra of the 2024 election was how it bore resemblance to 1968. There were student protests over the US involvement in a deeply unjust foreign war (albeit the role of US culpability remains wildly different between the Vietnam War and Israel’s genocide in Gaza), a Robert Kennedy running for President, the return of a “disgraced” national Republican figure that reviled and attacked the press, the stepping down of a President whose domestic agenda would go down as lost in the blood of children on the other side of the world, and the foisting of the Democrat mantel on their rushed and hemmed-in Vice President.
I’ve thought about this metaphor and I’ve decided I don’t like it; Gaza isn’t Vietnam, from the standpoint of US culpability. It has split a cleavage down the middle of American society, but in a different way; the US has no troops on the ground in Ukraine or Gaza, seeming to usher in a different type of US involvement. In Ukraine, the US is on the side of the anti-colonialists, while in Gaza the US is helping to prop a vestige of post-war western imperialism. The main argument about Vietnam was that the US needed a deep re-evaluation of its use of its seemingly limitless power, a re-evaluation that really only occurred post-Iraq (or perhaps only post-Afghanistan or perhaps, the likeliest, has never happened). The main argument about Israel feels less structural; this doesn’t feel like a war waged by the whole of the Military-Industrial Complex, or the abuse of American power; instead, it feels like a willful ignorance on the part of the whole American population, which has manifested itself in the ignorance and indifference of the vast majority of our policymakers towards human suffering if it is by a non-white person. Unlike Vietnam, the American population isn’t being spoon-fed lies by the US government and a whole class of mandarins and intellectuals; now, every American can pick up their phone and see what’s happening in Gaza. And They still don’t care.
The failure of the US to support Palestine will be remembered, like Vietnam, as an indictment of our moral character. Chomsky argues there needs to be some sort of cultivation of Americans to achieve a conscience of justice after Vietnam; I think the bipartisan embrace of Israel in the wake of its genocide has demonstrated that no such cultivation has occurred, and that this is the same US that was in Vietnam.
November 14, 2020
Beginning before my birth with support for the French recolonization of Indochina after the war, US military involvement in Southeast Asia formed a significant portion of the backdrop of my youth. First, there was the Laotian adventure of the Kennedy administration, then the public introduction of armed "advisors" to support CIA-led efforts against Vietnam. Well indoctrinated, I'd supported these things, even writing a research paper on the subject during the first year at high school, until the invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965 under the Johnson administration and subsequent arguments with my father and grandfather turned my head. By the middle of high school I'd become a member of the Students for a Democratic Society, an anti-imperialist with subscriptions to 'The New Republic', 'Harpers', 'The Atlantic Monthly', 'Liberation', 'Ramparts' and 'The Guardian'.
The SDS was a part of the New Left, a third force critical of both the Soviet and the American blocks. As such, it distanced itself from the prevailing "liberal" power centers in the USA, which, it will be recalled, had been governing the country since 1933 except for Eisenhower's administration. This liberal establishment had grown out of the depression, governed through the victorious WWII alliance of the United Nations, established NATO, SEATO, the Marshall Plan, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and made progressive steps to integrate American society--all in competition with the Soviets, their allies and dependents. Having gained global economic predominance at war's end, liberals maintained power through an alliance of big capital and the unions, which funded Democratic campaigns, and the working classes, which voted for them. The alliance held so long as the domestic economy grew: a rising tide raising all ships which lasted until 1972.
The tide, however, was a localized one. While America and its closest partners prospered, the Third World did not. Indeed, our prosperity was substantially predicated on their relative poverty. Despite palliative aid and much propaganda, the poor rose against the rich, our clients, in country after country, while the Soviets, the Chinese and other states relatively independent of Western capitalism served as examples of alternative forms of more equitable social development and, sometimes, gave actual material support.
Noam Chomsky's first collection of political essays is about US involvement in Indochina, particularly Vietnam, and about how it came to pass that professed progressives of the liberal establishment could countenance illegal invasions and the murder of millions.
Chomsky's political writings evince two primary concerns. First, he delights in confounding hypocrisy with facts. Second, and most importantly, he is a profoundly moral person. While liberal progressives espoused the extension of rights and benefits to citizens of the United States and its closest allies and clients, they did so at the expense of the great mass of the world's population. Chomsky, however, is universalistic in his ethics: everyone counts equally for him, everyone has an equal right to seek their own well-being so long as by so doing they do not disable others in their pursuits.
Chomsky's work, I think, depends too much on the faith that people, if aware of the facts, will be charitable, or at least fair. This may work for some, but the example of "National Socialism" in Germany suggests that few will care much about the distant interests of distant people. I would like to know whether Chomsky has ever attempted to base his ethics on arguments which go further than a suspect, albeit charming, theory of human nature.
The SDS was a part of the New Left, a third force critical of both the Soviet and the American blocks. As such, it distanced itself from the prevailing "liberal" power centers in the USA, which, it will be recalled, had been governing the country since 1933 except for Eisenhower's administration. This liberal establishment had grown out of the depression, governed through the victorious WWII alliance of the United Nations, established NATO, SEATO, the Marshall Plan, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and made progressive steps to integrate American society--all in competition with the Soviets, their allies and dependents. Having gained global economic predominance at war's end, liberals maintained power through an alliance of big capital and the unions, which funded Democratic campaigns, and the working classes, which voted for them. The alliance held so long as the domestic economy grew: a rising tide raising all ships which lasted until 1972.
The tide, however, was a localized one. While America and its closest partners prospered, the Third World did not. Indeed, our prosperity was substantially predicated on their relative poverty. Despite palliative aid and much propaganda, the poor rose against the rich, our clients, in country after country, while the Soviets, the Chinese and other states relatively independent of Western capitalism served as examples of alternative forms of more equitable social development and, sometimes, gave actual material support.
Noam Chomsky's first collection of political essays is about US involvement in Indochina, particularly Vietnam, and about how it came to pass that professed progressives of the liberal establishment could countenance illegal invasions and the murder of millions.
Chomsky's political writings evince two primary concerns. First, he delights in confounding hypocrisy with facts. Second, and most importantly, he is a profoundly moral person. While liberal progressives espoused the extension of rights and benefits to citizens of the United States and its closest allies and clients, they did so at the expense of the great mass of the world's population. Chomsky, however, is universalistic in his ethics: everyone counts equally for him, everyone has an equal right to seek their own well-being so long as by so doing they do not disable others in their pursuits.
Chomsky's work, I think, depends too much on the faith that people, if aware of the facts, will be charitable, or at least fair. This may work for some, but the example of "National Socialism" in Germany suggests that few will care much about the distant interests of distant people. I would like to know whether Chomsky has ever attempted to base his ethics on arguments which go further than a suspect, albeit charming, theory of human nature.
February 20, 2014
Noam Chomsky's first political book is a collection of essays dealing mostly with US aggression in foreign countries, focusing primarily on Vietnam. In addition, Chomsky discusses the important role that scholars (the "new" mandarins) play in this aggression and the view of the public in regards to the war. It's quite remarkable to see that Chomsky has been consistent in his argument for over 50 years.
American Power and the New Mandarins argues that American policy in foreign countries is consistent with what the intellectuals and scholars have been proposing: that the US should have a role of influence in Asia because it should be the one to bring justice and democracy to the third world, as long as this "democracy" is consistent with American interest. This poses quite a problem for foreign countries as their interests (whether it be for self-sufficience, or communism, or influence) fall second to US economic interests. Chomsky quotes several scholars on the subject and their arguments appears biased to American greatness (such as Arthur Schlesinger's) or against truly revolutionary movements (as the section on the anarchist element of the Spanish Civil shows). If this is so, how are any of us supposed to make educated objective decisions? What chance does the third world have when an entire government and its academic system is contrary to their well being? Doesn't the US see that alienation and abuse of the rest of he world is contrary to its own self-interests?
As such an influential and powerful country, would would think that true American greatness would mean the US would take on a different role, one which promotes freedom and reduce suffering throughout the world. It certainly has the resources for it. Instead, Chomsky poses the compelling argument that the US's obsession with its greatness is used as justification for its oppressive actions. Its even more compelling how little things have changed.
American Power and the New Mandarins argues that American policy in foreign countries is consistent with what the intellectuals and scholars have been proposing: that the US should have a role of influence in Asia because it should be the one to bring justice and democracy to the third world, as long as this "democracy" is consistent with American interest. This poses quite a problem for foreign countries as their interests (whether it be for self-sufficience, or communism, or influence) fall second to US economic interests. Chomsky quotes several scholars on the subject and their arguments appears biased to American greatness (such as Arthur Schlesinger's) or against truly revolutionary movements (as the section on the anarchist element of the Spanish Civil shows). If this is so, how are any of us supposed to make educated objective decisions? What chance does the third world have when an entire government and its academic system is contrary to their well being? Doesn't the US see that alienation and abuse of the rest of he world is contrary to its own self-interests?
As such an influential and powerful country, would would think that true American greatness would mean the US would take on a different role, one which promotes freedom and reduce suffering throughout the world. It certainly has the resources for it. Instead, Chomsky poses the compelling argument that the US's obsession with its greatness is used as justification for its oppressive actions. Its even more compelling how little things have changed.
January 3, 2013
This collection of essays is fascinating because they were written in the midst of the war. Some later analyses may be more complete, but the truth and sense of urgency in Chomsky's prose can't be beat. I would recommend selecting a few essays of the bunch to read first, rather than plowing through the whole volume in one go.
February 5, 2017
Very Interesting book about vietnam war but isnt a masterpiece from chomsky, i really was expecting more (i know it's an old book, but still).
December 6, 2020
Non c'è niente da fare, Chomsky è geniale. È straordinariamente divertente vedere come cita le affermazioni dei "liberali", li prende in giro con una sorta di discorso indiretto libero fingendo di immedesimarsi nelle loro argomentazioni come se fossero le uniche ragionevoli, e le porta alle loro estreme contraddizioni, perdipiú mostrando i paralleli coi discorsi imperialisti giapponesi e tedeschi e prima ancora inglesi. E in questo modo svela del tutto gli scopi e i metodi della guerra in Vietnam e in generale dell'imperialismo statunitense (terribile la teoria dell'urbanizzazione forzata!), in modo tale che nessuna persona dotata di ragione può non ammettere che è stato semplicemente un massacro incivile. Ma la cosa piú importante è che riesce a inserire tutto ciò in un discorso piú generale, che è appunto quello della presa di potere da parte dei nuovi mandarini disumani, cioè della tecnica fine a sé stessa: e in questo ci sono degli interessanti rapporti con "Psiche e techne" di Umberto Galimberti. E poi propone anche una via d'uscita, degli esempi (A. J. Muste) e delle tecniche di resistenza, colla consueta umiltà. Un vero piacere intellettuale. Questa edizione della Net sembra una ristampa anastatica dell'Einaudi: nelle note si parla come se fossimo nel 1968 (o giú di lí), si parla di libri di prossima pubblicazione (nel 1969, credo) ecc.; e poi ci sono parecchi refusi. Ma insomma, non c'è proprio nessun motivo per cui un libro simile debba essere smaltito fra le seconde scelte e magari andare al macero, per quanto comprarlo a metà prezzo (o anche meno) sia egoisticamente piacevole. Grazie a Marco Tropea per la ristampa, continuate cosí! Vedi anche http://it.wikiquote.org/wiki/Noam_Cho...
October 4, 2020
Chomsky underestimates the crimes of America's enemies. He uses apocalyptic language (with justification) to describe USAs actions in Indochina and yet brushes the Holocaust in China as mere "authoritarianism".
He gives very little argumentation behind his core moral beliefs why it is not in our right to extirpate the bolsheviks in Vietnam even if it involves forcing our form of government on them. We did this with the Nazis in Germany why would it be wrong here? I believe the war in Indochina was indeed imperialism but he ignores the gigantic elephant in the room of potential international holocaust. Our worst fears were realized under Polpot.
To Chomsky preventing such holocaust is not on the table if it involves forcing any people to do anything. The British banned ritual suicide of widows in India. This is good. Yes we forced them to do it but it's good. It's not bigotry. I would be in favour of the vegetarian Hindus coming to America and forcing Americans to stop the holocaust of factory farms.
He gives very little argumentation behind his core moral beliefs why it is not in our right to extirpate the bolsheviks in Vietnam even if it involves forcing our form of government on them. We did this with the Nazis in Germany why would it be wrong here? I believe the war in Indochina was indeed imperialism but he ignores the gigantic elephant in the room of potential international holocaust. Our worst fears were realized under Polpot.
To Chomsky preventing such holocaust is not on the table if it involves forcing any people to do anything. The British banned ritual suicide of widows in India. This is good. Yes we forced them to do it but it's good. It's not bigotry. I would be in favour of the vegetarian Hindus coming to America and forcing Americans to stop the holocaust of factory farms.
January 12, 2025
Chomsky's critical examination of intellectual complicity in American foreign policy during the Vietnam War captures the book's core insight - that expertise can serve to legitimize power rather than challenge it. Yet, today's information landscape is more complex, with social media and alternative information sources challenging traditional authority structures in ways Chomsky couldn't have anticipated. Modern critiques of expertise must also contend with anti-intellectual populism and misinformation, adding nuance to Chomsky's original argument. The challenge today isn't just about questioning institutional authority but also maintaining space for legitimate expertise while remaining critical of how it's wielded.
April 5, 2025
A little uneven, tendency to hit on familiar bugbears (evils of behaviorism, Soviet Union bad, crying about Catalonia) with questionable relevance to the subject at hand, not as much Vietnam talk as I would’ve liked. The supplement to the last essay is pretty bad and rationalizes his distaste for certain tactics on the grounds that they’re ineffective (which I always hate - just say you think they are bad! He tacitly acknowledges he is engaged in this though so whatever) to the point that he seems to imply some German general getting assassinated led to the final solution. I still liked it but I think I’ve just watched the Bill Buckley debate so many times very little in here that was good surprised me.
February 5, 2023
In-depth writing style and abundance of in-text citations make this an excellent read that makes it really easy for you to go to primary sources. It's digestible and doesn't come across as so academic.
August 23, 2021
As always, Chomsky is thorough and thoroughly persuasive... almost to his detriment. There's just so much.
March 6, 2023
Chomsky snapped when he set the record on the legitimacy of Japanese Manchuko
January 4, 2026
Re-read
January 3, 2026
Intellectuals
are responsible for war.
What is it good for?
are responsible for war.
What is it good for?
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