01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

A Modern-Day Soothsayer Chomsky was by now a famous, but marginalized (by the mainstream press) critic of American policy. As always, he challenged mainstream organs to justify their methods of presenting facts, but with limited success: scarcely any of his letters to the editor, for example, were ever published. The exceptions were often those missives authored by others that he cosigned, such as one to the editor of the New York Times, dated 16 February 1972, in which he, along with Mark Sacharoff, Robert Jay Lifton, and Fred Branfman expressed the following opinion: "No doubt, the destruction of Indochina by the U.S. passed [the point of atrocity] long ago. Nevertheless, another intense and highly visible outbreak of deranged obliteration, concentrated into a few weeks and conducted brazenly before the eyes of the world, would add a new dimension of repellent conduct to our shameful record in Southeast Asia." So Chomsky continued to write, march, and collaborate with a range of groups and individuals in pursuit of well-established goals. In 1973, for example, Chomsky, Dellinger, Hentoff, Spock, Boyle, Ginsberg, Macdonald, and Day headed a committee to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the War Resisters' League. From the hundreds of articles and rebuttals that he wrote during this period concerning Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, emerges an image of Chomsky as a kind of modern-day soothsayer. Unlike many leftists of his generation, Chomsky never flirted with movements or organizations that were later revealed to be totalitarian, oppressive, exclusionary, antirevolutionary, or elitist. Leninism, Stalinism, Trotskyism, and Maoism offered to many of Chomsky's disillusioned contemporaries an alternative to what they saw as blatantly exclusionary American-style capitalism. When reports about what had actually occurred in the former Soviet Union and China began to filter through, many felt betrayed. We now hear a lot about how the left has been discredited, the hopelessness of utopian thinking, the futility of activist struggle, but little about the libertarian options that Chomsky and others have so consistently presented. The type of dismay that has permeated contemporary intellectual circles has not touched Chomsky. He has very little to regret. His work, in fact, contains some of the most accurate analyses of this century. And yet, most of his criticisms of American policy, past and present, are seldom mentioned in the mainstream press or by the instructors and professors who teach history or politics. Political science departments rarely use his material on Vietnam, the Cold War, Central America, or Israel. Commenting on this with regard to Vietnam, Chomsky says: "I think you'll find virtually no one anywhere near the mainstream who is even familiar with, let alone admits, any aspect of my criticism of the war. That extends to the left. Thus on the left, who described, or now describes, the war as a U.S. war against South Vietnam, which the U.S. had largely won by the early 1970s?" (31 Mar. 1995). The prevailing critical viewpoint on the bombardment and destruction of Vietnam Chomsky summarizes this way: "At the critical end of the mainstream spectrum, the war began with `blundering efforts to do good' and ended as a `disaster' because the costs were too high. Dissent, which supported the U.S. attack in 1964 (calling it `defense') concluded after the war that its position had been right all along. On the left, the standard view is that the Vietnamese won and the U.S. lost." And again he stresses his exclusion: "My own view, shared with Edward Herman, is virtually non-existent in the debate, and our (together and separately) detailed documentation of what in fact happened in crucial periods, from the beginning through the 1973 peace accords, is unknown" (31 Mar. 1995). Of course, in the first days of opposition to American policies on Vietnam, Chomsky and those sympathetic to his views were even more severely marginalized. He foresaw the government ensuring that Indochinese-style invasions launched to protect domestic interests would become the norm (think of El Salvador, Nicaragua, Tripoli, the Gulf War). Most of the reevaluation of the Vietnam War concerns the mistakes, generally tactical mistakes, that the American government made. These assessments are often considered radical; their acceptance by policy makers is also taken to be an indication that the American political system is working.... after all, it has the capacity to admit its own errors. But this is a long way from Chomsky's view: I never criticized United States planners for mistakes in Vietnam. True, they made some mistakes, but my criticism was always aimed at what they aimed to do and largely achieved. The Russians doubtless made mistakes in Afghanistan, but my condemnation of their aggression and atrocities never mentioned those mistakes, which are irrelevant to the matter-- though not for the commissars. Within our ideological system, it is impossible to perceive that anyone might criticize anything but "mistakes" (I suspect that totalitarian Russia was more open in that regard). (31 Mar. 1995) Even when opponents of Chomsky's position came around to questioning American involvement in Vietnam (still a long way from questioning the fundamentally immoral objectives that the United States had for Indochina), they found ways to overlook the underlying message of his work in favor of tangentially related matters. For example, the author of a generally positive review of For Reasons of State and The Backroom Boys, published in the 21 December 1973 edition of the Times Literary Supplement, objects to the fact that the material was written some time before it was published (even though it was based on documentation that appeared just as the book did ­ notably the Pentagon Papers); that it was brought out as two books rather than one (the publisher's decision); and that Chomsky did not revise the text more completely. In another review of The Backroom Boys, this time in the 5 April 1974 edition of the Times Higher Education Supplement, Nigel Young also takes on Chomsky's style; though it resembles scholarship, he maintains, Chomsky's book is polemical. And, much later, in a Times Literary Supplement review of The Chomsky Reader, Charles Townshend indulges in a long tirade on Chomsky's style; he condemns the fevered pace, the overabundance of reference and detail, and the way that the reader is hit over the head at the beginning of a piece, before the argument is brought to a climax. This obsession with issues of style or genre seems to serve as a means of avoiding the essential arguments in Chomsky's work, and may therefore lend, further credibility to his claim that the intelligentsia cannot resist conforming to official doctrine. The author of the 21 December 1973 TLS review does recall, near the end of the piece, that Chomsky lays bare America's real interests in Indochina and reveals the ways in which consecutive American administrations have played God in Asia. The reviewer also condones Chomsky's decision to expose the deliberateness and the ferocity of those administrations' attacks against Asia's rural communities. But this review does not accurately reflect its subject, because it seems to suggest that there are less arrogant and more imaginative ways to slaughter people; it also ignores Chomsky's (and Herman's) view that the price America has paid is negligible in light of the fact that it largely achieved its goals in Indochina (just as it did in the long Cold War; although the exercise may have appeared pointless, it ultimately allowed America to divide up the world according to its interests and to subsidize its industries for defense purposes). What distinguishes Chomsky's work (and these books are good examples) from the work of the muckrakers who might have said similar things is the degree to which he has consistently described the kind of thinking that brought on the Vietnam War as endemic to the system. No official is likely to have learned anything that could prevent future regimes from committing such atrocities; humanistic approaches and lessons have been banned from playing a part in imperialist power struggles. All these officials have proven themselves capable of learning is how to make fewer tactical errors and, therefore, how to be more murderous. Chomsky's reviewers have, almost universally, failed to mention this. The 1973 TLS reviewer was no exception, and actually ended by suggesting that the end of imperialism was nigh.