Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

So for example, reporters would describe how the U.S. forces were wiping out towns in South Vietnam, and they’d say, “This is an unfortunate necessity, but we have to defend these towns from attackers.” Well, there were no attackers except the Americans—there were no Russians, no Chinese, virtually no North Vietnamese, nobody but the American aggressors. 71 But of course, nobody in the press could say that. So, narrowly speaking, the media did an honest job, though always from a perspective very much shaped by U.S. government propaganda. And as to their depicting an enemy defeat as a victory, that’s just totally false: the press was much more optimistic about the outcome of the Tet Offensive than official U.S. intelligence was—and we know that, because the intelligence reports appear in the Pentagon Papers [top-secret Defense Department planning record of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia, leaked to the public in 1971]. 72

  So in reality, what it comes down to is that Freedom House was accusing the media of not being sufficiently upbeat and enthusiastic in their adoption of the government propaganda framework. Well, that’s pure totalitarianism. But the critique of their study disappeared, nobody pays the slightest attention to it. It’s been reprinted a number of times and amplified, it’s all thoroughly documented and supported, but nobody wants to hear it. The media do not want to hear that they did an honest job, but within the framework of state power; they’d much rather hear that they were so subversive they may have even undermined democracy.

  “Fight it Better”: the Media and the Vietnam War

  WOMAN: I had the impression that during the anti-Vietnam War period there was more openness in the media to the progressive movements than there is now, for instance in the New York Times and the Washington Post.

  That’s an illusion people have—actually, there was less openness. Look, I can tell you about that, because I was right in the middle of it, and also I’ve studied it in great detail …

  WOMAN: From reading today’s newspapers, I think there’s been a definite shift to the right.

  See, I don’t agree with that. People do have that illusion, but I think it’s because their perspective has shifted to the left—and that runs across most of the population, actually. So for example, the stance that most movement activists considered an anti-war position in 1969, they would today consider to be a pro-war position—accurately. I mean, in 1969 it was considered anti-war to say we’re not fighting well enough: that was called “anti-war.” So I don’t know you of course, but if you’re like the ordinary movement activist, I would guess that your perspective also has shifted in the last twenty years, and that’s where this impression is coming from.

  As for the New York Times, another of the things Ed Herman and I did in Manufacturing Consent was to spend about 150 pages reviewing mostly the New York Times on the Vietnam War from 1950 to the present—and the fact is, the Times was always to the hawkish side of the population, very far. They were never critical of it. There was never a critical columnist. They consciously suppressed U.S. government actions. When you look back at the reporters we thought of as critical, David Halberstam and others, Neil Sheehan, you’ll discover that what they were criticizing was the failure—they were saying, “Of course it’s a noble cause and we want to win, but you guys are screwing it up. Fight it better.” It was that kind of criticism. 73

  This comes out very clearly in Sheehan’s new book actually, this bestseller that just won the Pulitzer Prize, A Bright Shining Lie. 74 It’s being highly touted everywhere as a big exposé of the Vietnam War, but if you look at it closely, what it’s really exposing is the fact that the things American intelligence experts were saying in the field were not getting communicated back to Washington—that’s the nature of Sheehan’s criticism. And that’s still considered the far-out anti-war position in the mainstream, even today: “You guys screwed it up, you should have fought it better.” Sheehan’s book is sort of a biography of John Paul Vann, who was an extreme hawk [he oversaw “civilian pacification” programs in Vietnam], but perceptive—he understood what was going on, and was on the scene in the field giving young reporters information that said things weren’t going the way Washington said they were going (which was considered totally unpatriotic: how can you say it’s not going the way Washington says?). And he’s Sheehan’s hero of the whole war.

  Well, just take a look at Vann, He leaked some memoranda in 1965 which were used in the peace movement—like, I published them, and Ed Herman published them and so on, but the mainstream media would never publish them, and in fact Sheehan doesn’t even mention them in his book. Basically they said something like this: in South Vietnam, the National Liberation Front—the so-called “Viet Cong”—has won the population over to their side, and they’ve won the population over to their side because they have good political programs. The peasants support them because they’re the right people to support, we ought to be supporting their programs too. There’s a social revolution in progress in South Vietnam, it’s a badly needed social revolution, the N.L.F. is organizing it, and that’s why they have peasant support; there’s nothing we can do about that. Well, then comes the conclusion. The conclusion is, we’ve got to escalate the war, we have to wipe the N.L.F. out. 75 And the reason is essentially the same as what’s argued by people like Walter Lippmann and the whole rest of this main tradition of “democratic” thinkers in the West—that democracy requires a class of elites to manage decision-making and “manufacture” the general population’s consent for policies that are supposedly beyond their capacity to develop and decide on themselves. 76

  So for Vann, the thinking was, these stupid Vietnamese peasants are making a mistake—it’s us smart guys who are the ones who can run the social revolution for them. They think the N.L.F. can run it, these people running around villages organizing them, but we’re really the only ones who can run it. And out of our duty to the poor people of the world, we can’t let them have their own way, because it’ll just be a stupid error on their part. So what we have to do is wipe out the N.L.F., win the war, smash up Vietnam, and then we’ll run the social revolution for them—like we’ve always done in history, you know. That’s basically Vann’s line, and that’s also the message of Neil Sheehan’s book. That’s what made Vann a hero.

  Or just take a look at the guy who was certainly the most critical columnist at the Times, Anthony Lewis. I mean, if you look at Anthony Lewis’s record during the war, you’ll really learn something about the peace movement, about ourselves—because we actually regarded Anthony Lewis as an ally. Let’s remember what happened. The hard work in the peace movement was from 1964 through ’67. By February 1968, corporate America had turned against the war—and the reason was, the Tet Offensive had taken place in late January. In late January 1968, there was this huge popular uprising in every city in South Vietnam; it was all South Vietnamese, remember, it wasn’t the North Vietnamese who were doing it. And by early February 1968, it was obvious to anybody with their head screwed on that this was just a massive popular movement. I mean, the American forces in Saigon were never even informed that Viet Cong troops were infiltrating into the city—nobody told them. And it was simultaneous, and coordinated, it was just a huge popular uprising—there’s nothing like it in history.

  Well, you know, people who care about their money and their property and so on realized that this war was just money going down the drain—it was going to take a huge effort to crush this revolution. And by that point, the U.S. economy was actually beginning to suffer. That’s the great achievement of the peace movement, in fact: it harmed the American economy. And that’s not a joke. The peace movement made it impossible to declare a national mobilization around the war—there was just too much dissidence and disruption, they couldn’t do what was done during the Second World War, for example, when the whole population was mobilized around the war. See, if they could have gotten the population mobilized like that, then the Vietnam War would have been very good for the economy, like the Second World War was during the Forties, a real shot in the
arm. But they couldn’t, they had to fight a deficit-spending war, what’s called a “guns-and-butter” war. And the result was that we got the beginnings of stagflation [inflation without a concurrent expansion of the economy], and weakening of the U.S. dollar, and our main economic competitors, Europe and Japan, began raking off huge profits as offshore producers for the war—in short, the war changed the economic balance of power between the U.S. and its major industrial rivals. Well, American business could understand that, they saw what was happening, and when the Tet Offensive came along and it was clear that there was going to be a big problem putting down this revolution, corporate America turned against the war.

  Also, they were worried about what was happening at home at the time—very worried. See, here we have exposed secret documents, which are extremely enlightening. If you look at the very tail end of the Pentagon Papers, for example, the part that deals with the weeks after the Tet Offensive, the top American military brass said that they were concerned about sending more troops to Vietnam, because they were afraid they wouldn’t have enough troops left over for what they called “civil disorder control” at home—they were afraid of a revolution breaking out if they continued escalating the war. And they referred to the problems: youth, women, ethnic minorities, all these groups were starting to get involved in protest. 77

  And actually, there was also another factor here that I should mention: the American army was falling apart. Remember, this was a citizens’ army, and it was the first time in history that a citizens’ army was being used to fight a colonial war—and that doesn’t work. I mean, you cannot take kids off the street and turn them into professional killers in a couple months—for that you need Nazis like the French Foreign Legion [an army of foreigners used to fight in France’s colonies], or peasants that you mobilize and give guns to and turn into cold-blooded killers, like the contras, say. That’s the way every imperial power in history has run its empire. But the United States tried to do it with a citizens’ army, and by 1968 it was already collapsing: drugs, lack of discipline, shooting your officers. And all of that was also a reflection of the popular movement at home: this is a youth culture, after all, and the guys who were going into the army were not all that different from the ones at home who were getting involved in the various movements. So the American army was falling apart, and the top Pentagon brass didn’t like it: they in fact wanted the army out. 78

  Alright, let’s go back to the New York Times. All this time the New York Times had no criticism of the war: nothing. Anthony Lewis is a bellwether, because he was their most extreme critic. More than a year after the Tet Offensive, in mid-1969, Anthony Lewis was the Times’s Bureau Chief in London, and at that point he was unwilling even to speak to people in the American peace movement. I remember this personally. I was in Oxford in the spring of 1969 as John Locke Lecturer, and I was all over the British media talking about the war. Some of the British anti-war groups tried to get Anthony Lewis just to have a private discussion with me—he wouldn’t do it, said he’s not going to talk to anyone connected with this peace movement. And this wasn’t even in the United States, it was in England, where the pressures and the political climate were different. Finally by late 1969, he did begin to write mildly critical stuff about the war. Then he went to North Vietnam and discovered that bombs actually hurt: you walk through Haiphong, you see a lot of buildings knocked down, people torn apart; big surprise. At that point Anthony Lewis started to write critical material about the war—but bear in mind that that’s about a year and a half after corporate America turned against the war.

  Or take the My Lai massacre [the March 1968 shooting of 504 unarmed Vietnamese civilians by an American Army unit], which became a big issue in the United States. When? My Lai became a big issue in November 1969—that’s a year and a half after the killings took place, and about a year and a half after corporate America had turned against the war. And of course, My Lai was a triviality—it was such a triviality that the peace movement knew about it right away and didn’t even talk about it. Like, the Quakers in Quang Ngai Province where it took place [working with the American Friends Service Committee] didn’t even bother reporting it—because the same sort of thing was happening all over the place. 79

  MAN: Life magazine made My Lai famous. 80

  My Lai, they did—but first of all, note the timing: it’s a year and a half after it happened, a year and a half after corporate America turned against the war. And the reporting was falsified. See, My Lai was presented as if it was a bunch of crazy grunts who got out of control because they were being directed by this Lieutenant Galley, who was kind of a madman. That you can handle. But that’s not what My Lai was about. My Lai was a footnote, My Lai was an uninteresting footnote to a military operation called Operation WHEELER WALLAWA—which was a huge mass-murder operation, in which B-52 raids were targeted right on villages. That wasn’t Lieutenant Calley, that was a guy in Washington plotting out coordinates. You know what a B-52 raid is? That means wipe out everything—and it was targeted right on villages. In comparison to that, My Lai doesn’t exist.

  In fact, there was a military commission that reviewed My Lai, the Piers Commission, and their most dramatic finding was that there were massacres like My Lai all over the place. For instance, they found another massacre in My Khe, which is about four kilometers down the road—everywhere they looked they found another massacre. 81 Well, what does that tell you? What does that suggest to you, if everywhere you look you find a My Lai? Well, it suggests something, but what it suggests was never brought out in the media.

  WOMAN: You mentioned that we had a citizens’ army in Vietnam. Do we still have a citizens’ army?

  No, now it’s a professional army.

  WOMAN: I know, that’s what’s scary.

  Exactly.

  WOMAN: Ironically, not having a draft …

  It’s not ironic. I think the peace movement made a mistake there. I mean, personally I was never in favor of ending the draft, although I was all involved in resistance activities: when it turned to anti-draft activities, I pulled out of them.

  WOMAN: Me too.

  Look, there is no such thing as a “volunteer army”: a “volunteer army” is a mercenary army of the poor. Take a look at the Marines—what you see is black faces, from the ghettos.

  WOMAN: And the officers are white.

  Yeah, and the officers are white, of course. That’s like South Africa: the officers are white, the grunts who actually carry out most of the atrocities in places like Namibia are black. 82 That’s the way empires have always been run. And sometime in the Seventies, the American army shifted to a traditional mercenary army of the poor, which they call a “volunteer army.” People in power learn, you know. They’re sophisticated, and they’re organized, and they have continuity—and they realize that they made a mistake in Vietnam. They don’t want to make that same mistake again.

  And as for the New York Times being anti-war—well, we thought of it as anti-war at the time, but that was because our standard was so low. Nowadays we would consider that same sort of “criticism” to be pro-war. And that’s just another reflection of the increase in political consciousness and sophistication in the general population over the last twenty years. If you look back at the Times in those days, that’s what you’ll find I think.

  2

  Teach-In: Over Coffee

  Based primarily on discussions at Rowe, Massachusetts, April 15–16, 1989.

  “Containing” the Soviet Union in the Cold War

  WOMAN: Dr. Chomsky, it seems the terms of political discourse themselves are a tool for propagandizing the population. How is language used to prevent us from understanding and to disempower us?

  Well, the terminology we use is heavily ideologically laden, always. Pick your term: if it’s a term that has any significance whatsoever—like, not “and” or “or”—it typically has two meanings, a dictionary meaning and a meaning that’s used for ideological warfare. So, “terrorism�
�� is only what other people do. What’s called “Communism” is supposed to be “the far left”: in my view, it’s the far right, basically indistinguishable from fascism. These guys that everybody calls “conservative,” any conservative would turn over in their grave at the sight of them—they’re extreme statists, they’re not “conservative” in any traditional meaning of the word. “Special interests” means labor, women, blacks, the poor, the elderly, the young—in other words, the general population. There’s only one sector of the population that doesn’t ever get mentioned as a “special interest,” and that’s corporations, and business in general—because they’re the “national interest.” Or take “defense”: I have never heard of a state that admits it’s carrying out an aggressive act, they’re always engaged in “defense,” no matter what they’re doing—maybe “preemptive defense” or something.

  Or look at the major theme of modern American history, “containment”—as in, “the United States is containing Soviet expansionism.” Unless you accept that framework of discussion when talking about international affairs in the modern period, you are just not a part of accepted discourse here: everybody has to begin by assuming that for the last half-century the United States has been “containing” the Soviet Union.

  Well, the rhetoric of “containment” begs all questions—once you’ve accepted the rhetoric of “containment” it really doesn’t matter what you say, you’ve already given up everything. Because the fundamental question is, is it true? Has the United States been “containing” the Soviet Union? Well, you know, on the surface it looks a little odd. I mean, maybe you think the Soviet Union is the worst place in history, but they’re conservative—whatever rotten things they’ve done, they’ve been inside the Soviet Union and right around its borders, in Eastern Europe and Afghanistan and so on. They never do anything anywhere else. They don’t have troops stationed anywhere else. They don’t have intervention forces positioned all over the world like we do. 1 So what does it mean to say we’re “containing” them?