Noam Chomsky: Unrepentant Stalinist

By Anders G. Lewis
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 9, 2004

To the American Left in the 1960s, Hanoi was the Eternal City. It was
the place to go to protest America's war in Vietnam and to express
one's solidarity with Ho Chi Minh's Communist regime. In Hanoi one
could find, according to Tom Hayden and Staughton Lynd, a "socialism
of the heart" and a budding "rice-roots democracy." "We suspect,"
they observed, "that colonial American town meetings and current
Vietnamese village meetings, Asian peasants leagues and Black Belt
sharecroppers' unions have much in common…." It was also in Hanoi that
one could, in Ramsey Clark's words, witness "the chief and universal
cause of the revolutionary impulse," namely "the desire for equality."
"You see no internal conflict in this country," Clark happily
reported. At least, he stated, "I've seen none." Finally, it was in
Hanoi that one could, in Susan Sontag's words, visit a place "which,
in many respects, deserves to be idealized," and see a people who
"really do believe in the goodness of man…."[1]

Noam Chomsky was among those on the Left who traveled to Hanoi. In
his At War With Asia (1970), the linguist-turned-activist fondly
recounted how he found a country that was "unified, strong though
poor, and determined to withstand the attack launched against [it] by
the great superpower of the Western world." Everywhere he went,
Chomsky found people "healthy, well-fed, and adequately clothed."
Indeed, he saw great promise in Vietnamese Communism. "My personal
guess is that, unhindered by imperialist intervention, the Vietnamese
would develop a modern industrial society with much popular
participation" and "direct democracy." While in Hanoi, Chomsky
broadcasted a speech of solidarity on behalf of the Communists. He
declared that their heroism revealed "the capabilities of the human
spirit and human will." "Your cause," he continued, "is the cause of
humanity as it moves forward toward liberty and justice, toward the
socialist society in which free, creative men control their own
destiny." Chomsky was so moved by his journey that, at one point, he
proudly "sang songs, patriotic and sentimental, and declaimed poems"
with his hosts. He admitted that some Western observers, those too
encumbered by bourgeois prejudice, might find his actions distasteful.
He was not concerned. "Let the reader think what he may," Chomsky
wrote. "The fact is," the whole experience was "intensely moving."[2]


Noam Chomsky went to Vietnam to protest a war he insisted was "simply
an obscenity, a depraved act by weak and miserable men…."[3] He
opposed the war in word and deed while it was being fought, and he
continues to write against it today. In the 1960s, he aided antiwar
students and participated in one of Boston's first antiwar
demonstrations. He also joined the infamous October 1967 march on the
Pentagon. Chomsky thought it was a glorious affair with "tens of
thousands of young people surrounding what they believed to be - I
must add that I agree - the most hideous institution on this earth."
He helped form the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (CCAS), an
organization that demanded "total, immediate, [and] unilateral
American withdrawal" from Vietnam. And in 1969, Chomsky supported the
October 15 nationwide Moratorium Against the War in Vietnam.[4]



Chomsky has always been celebrated by the Left for his relentless
opposition to the war. In 1969, Robert Sklar wrote a review of
Chomsky's work for The Nation and glowed about his "remarkable
scholarly tenacity and depth" and his "capacity for going beneath
specific political issues to unveil their underlying cultural and
ideological foundations…." A few years later, Simon Head argued that
Chomsky's work on the war was "of great value in making sense of the
present." More recently, radical historian Howard Zinn has called
Chomsky "the leading critic of America's involvement in Vietnam."
Noted anti-free trade activist Arundhati Roy, in a new forward to
Chomsky's For Reasons of State (1972), praises him as "one of the
greatest, most radical public thinkers of our time." Finally, in
2003, Richard Falk argued that Chomsky was right about the Vietnam
War. His judgments, Folk proposed, "stand brilliantly the test of
time."[5]



Chomsky's indictment of the war has not changed since the 1960s. To
understand it, one could read an essay he published in 1968, or one
published in 2003. For almost forty years, he has offered the same
critique. It rests on four related points. First, Chomsky argues that
Communism offered the Vietnamese people the opportunity for a
democratic and prosperous future. Second, he argues that the Communist
Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), was not assisted by the Chinese
or the Soviets. Similarly, he argues that the independent National
Liberation Front (NLF or Vietcong), was a South Vietnamese political
organization that was not controlled by the DRV. Third, Chomsky
provides a Marxist interpretation of the war's origins. The U.S., be
believes, went to Vietnam for economic reasons. Further, the
corporate ruling class determined American foreign policy in Vietnam,
and their major goal was boosting the power and profits of big
business. Fourth, Chomsky argues that the U.S. resorted to Nazi-like
acts of barbarity and repression to accomplish its goals, including
the installment of a lackey government in South Vietnam (the Republic
of Vietnam or RVN).



Chomsky's four point critique is extensive. He offers an epic and
gripping story of American greed, ignorance, and cruelty contrasted
with the grit and solidarity of the Vietnamese Communists. He views
America as an evil colossus, an omnipotent and always unjust force
inflicting its will on the innocent Vietnamese. The story of America
in Vietnam is not, as some liberals might think, a story of a once
noble effort that metamorphosized into a quagmire. Instead, it is the
story of America's willful and intentional criminality – of its
attempt to inflict genocide on the people of Southeast Asia.
Chomsky's work makes for gripping and, if one did not know any better,
disturbing reading. But alas, Chomsky's Vietnam epic is entirely
wrong.



Chomsky's first point is his contention that Communism offered Vietnam
the opportunity for a golden future. He argues that Ho Chi Minh and
his comrades were fighting to bring about a new world of economic
justice and national emancipation. Their goal was to establish a
"good example" of non-capitalist development for other Third World
nations to follow. The society they desired was one that would, as
Chomsky stated while on his tour of Vietnam, enable free and creative
men to control their own destiny. Chomsky also insists that the
Vietnamese people overwhelmingly supported the Communists.



Much of Chomsky's first point rests on his analysis of the DRV's
1953-1956 land reform campaign, and on his dismissal of Communist
atrocities. He believes that the land reform campaign, in which the
Communists took land away from farmers and landlords and gave it to
poor peasants, was an important and necessary achievement. For too
long, Chomsky argues, Vietnamese peasants had suffered from gross
economic inequalities. True, Chomsky concedes, some of the tactics
used to implement the reforms were too aggressive, but the overall
effect of the campaign was positive.



Chomsky propagated this view of the DRV's land reform campaign during
the war and he has clung to it ever since. In 1967, he observed that,
"if it were true that the consequences of not using terror would be
that the peasantry in Vietnam would continue to live in the state of
the peasantry of the Philippines, then I think the use of terror would
be justified."[6] In 1970, he admitted that some people were killed
during the campaign but insisted that this was less important than the
fact that land reform "laid the basis for a new society" that has
"overcome starvation and rural misery and offers the peasants hope for
the future."[7] After the war, in a book that Chomsky co-wrote with
Edward Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism
(1979), he argued again that the reforms were much needed. He also
insisted that they were not intended as political reprisal against
opponents. Moreover, Communist leaders did not condone the violence
associated with the reforms: "There is no evidence that the leadership
ordered or organized mass executions of peasants."[8] Further, they
were "upset by the abuses," and demonstrated a capacity to "keep in
touch with rural interest and needs." Most importantly, the land
reform was an economic success.[9]



Because Chomsky viewed Vietnamese Communism as a viable alternative to
capitalist development, he dismissed the violence associated with land
reform as inconsequential. He dismissed, as well, numerous other
Communist atrocities such as the 1968 massacre at Hue where Communists
killed three thousand civilians. The Hue massacre, he argued, should
be attributed to the U.S.[10]



Chomsky's first point is wrong. His romantic faith that Communism
could work in Vietnam is contradicted by the fact that Communism
simply can not work in any nation. It is an inherently flawed
economic doctrine that inevitably leads to totalitarianism. F.A.
Hayek, the great economic theorist, pointed this out long before the
onset of the Vietnam War. In his Road to Serfdom (1944), Hayek
cogently argued that because modern economies are too complex to be
managed by even the brightest of state bureaucrats, centralized
economic planning and control will destroy economic productivity. It
will also give the state monopolistic control over the most basic
decisions of life. In so doing, Communism will furnish the state
control of the means for all human ends, and "whoever has sole control
of the means must also determine which ends are to be served, which
values are to be rated higher and which lower – in short, what men
should strive for."[11] Communism, Hayek argued, would never work and
the human costs involved in trying to make it work would be terribly
high.



Cold War developments proved Hayek correct. In Eastern Europe, North
Korea, China, and the Soviet Union, Communism was a colossal
nightmare. According to the authors of The Black Book of Communism
(1999), Communism was responsible for the deaths of possibly 100
million people during the course of the 20th century. Communism
killed. It also ruined economies. In the Soviet Union, for example,
Communism produced poverty, food shortages, denial of basic services,
massive pollution, low rates of productivity, terrible health
conditions, corruption, lack of educational opportunities, and high
rates of alcoholism. In the 20th century, as David Horowitz has
argued, history demonstrated Communism's "utter bankruptcy and
historic defeat."[12]



Vietnamese Communism was no exception. Contrary's to Chomsky's
thesis, the Vietnamese Communists were not progressive, popular, or
capable of building a prosperous society. Instead, they were
despotic. Their economic policies, in turn, were disastrous. These
facts are clearly demonstrated by the Communist's political actions
and economic program before, during, and after the Vietnam War.



In 1945, immediately after establishing the DRV, the Communists
dedicated themselves to the elimination of all opposition. They
strove to replicate the horrors of Soviet and Chinese Communism. In a
1951 speech, Ho Chi Minh (who had studied and lived in the Soviet
Union) proudly declared that "Marx, Engles, Lenin, and Stalin are the
common teachers for the world revolution." He also expressed great
confidence in the future because "We have the most clear-sighted and
worthy elder brothers and friends of mankind – comrade Stalin and
comrade Mao Tse-tung."[13] Following his elder brothers, Ho
established a one-party state with a secret police force and numerous
detention camps for dissidents. He strove to liquidate Trotskyites,
political dissidents, and even women who had married Frenchmen. "All
those who do not follow the line which I lay down," he threatened,
"will be broken."[14]



The DRV's land reform campaign was particularly vicious. Contrary to
Chomsky, it did involve mass killings. Its purpose was to destroy
wealthy and middling landowners by stealing their property and giving
it to poor peasants. The result was large scale terror, paranoia,
perhaps 100,000 dead, and many thousands more who were imprisoned.
Moreover, top Party leaders, including Ho Chi Minh, instigated and
directed the campaign. As William Duiker has pointed out in his Ho
Chi Minh (2000), "there is ample evidence that much of the [violence
associated with land reform] was deliberately inspired by Party
leaders responsible for drafting and carrying out the program."[15]
Economically, it was a disaster. By following the model provided by
China and killing thousands of productive and successful land holders,
many of whom owned comparatively small plots of land, the Communists
were insuring the demise of their economic policies. The DRV's land
reform campaign was a monstrous act that paralleled similar efforts in
the Soviet Union and China. As Michael Lind has written in his
Vietnam: The Necessary War (1999), "Communist agriculture could not
produce good harvests – but it repeatedly produced bumper crops of the
dead."[16]



After carrying out their brutal policies in the North, the Communists
sought to extend their power to South Vietnam. In 1957, they launched
a terrorist campaign against supporters of South Vietnamese leader Ngo
Dinh Diem. Over the next several years, Vietcong guerillas
assassinated tens of thousands of individuals and abducted thousands
more. They also killed many thousands of innocent civilians by
shelling towns and cities with rockets and mortars.[17]



The South Vietnamese, moreover, were not devoted to the Vietcong, as
was clearly demonstrated during the 1968 Tet offensive when they
refused to rally to the Communist cause – as the Communists believed
they would. Nor, for that matter, were the North Vietnamese as
supportive of the Communists as Chomsky argues. After the 1954 Geneva
conference, there was a mass exodus of North Vietnamese into South
Vietnam, including as many as one million Catholics. In fact, in the
immediate months after the conference, almost ten times as many
Vietnamese headed South as did those who went North.[18] During the
war, millions of Vietnamese realized that the Communists were
destroying their chances for democracy and economic development. The
war's aftermath confirmed their suspicions and demonstrated what the
true aims of the Communists were. It also proved the complete fallacy
of Chomsky's first point.



In 1975, after taking Saigon, the Communists quickly extended their
Stalinist dictatorship throughout South Vietnam.[19] The new
Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV) was corrupt and tyrannical. Its
Stalinist leaders trampled on individual rights and established a
string of "reeducation camps" for anyone not sufficiently supportive
of the new regime. They forced possibly one million or more people
into these cruel and primitive camps for weeks, months, or years, and
without any legal trials. Camp prisoners suffered from severe
malnutrition, as well as malaria, and dysentery. One journalist who
interviewed former inmates noted that prisoners commonly suffered
"from limb paralysis, vision loss, and infectious skin diseases like
scabies caused by long-term, closely-packed, dark living conditions."
Because of these inhumane conditions, many prisoners killed
themselves.[20] The Communists also eliminated freedom of movement,
requiring all citizens to carry internal passports. They eliminated
all political parties and conducted bogus political elections. They
closed down the free press that had existed in South Vietnam and
created two official papers and one official television channel. They
launched a racist pogrom against Vietnam's ethnic Chinese
citizens.[21] They swept aside all southerners, including almost all
NLF leaders, from positions of power. They also subjected all
citizens to daily education sessions to promote the Party's power and
to celebrate the words of Ho Chi Minh and other great Communist
luminaries, including Stalin.[22] One official poem, written by the
head of the Communist Party Committee of Culture, contained these
moving lines:



Oh, Stalin! Oh, Stalin!

The love I bear my father, my mother, my wife, myself

It's nothing beside the love I bear you.

Oh, Stalin! Oh, Stalin!

What remains of the earth and of the sky!

Now that you are dead.[23]



All of this was deeply discouraging to the people of Vietnam. One
former Communist official, General Pham Xuan An, commented "All that
talk about ‘liberation' twenty, thirty years ago, all the plotting,
all the bodies, produced this, this impoverished, broken-down country
led by a gang of cruel and paternalistic half-educated theorists."[24]



Under Communist rule, Vietnam became a totalitarian hell and an
economic calamity. The workers paradise that Chomsky envisioned never
came. Provided their opportunity to be free of American
"imperialism," the Vietnamese Communists – following the examples
provided by China and the Soviet Union – used the economy to enrich
themselves at the expense of the people they had professed to care so
much for. They proved once again that Communism simply does not work.
Since 1975, corruption has been rife, as has unemployment and poverty.
Vietnam's per capita income and its GDP have remained extremely low.
The peasantry has felt little incentive to work hard and is generally
embittered. In 1988, parts of Vietnam suffered famine, with millions
of people on the brink of death. Vietnam's educational system remains
poor, as does its basic infrastructure. Prostitution, crime, and drug
use plague the country.[25] One can go on and on but the point should
be clear. Contrary to what Chomsky predicted, Vietnamese Communism has
proven to be a total disaster.



The consequence of Communist rule was a mass exodus of as many as two
million Vietnamese who fled Vietnam in small boats and rafts in the
hopes of finding a better life in Indonesia, the Philippines, or the
United States. Eventually, approximately one million Vietnamese came
to the U.S., the nation that Chomsky believes is the enemy of the
Vietnamese people. "There is no way out, no hope," one individual
declared, "….The best way to commit suicide is to take a boat. Either
you go to the bottom of the ocean or to paradise – California."[26]



Chomsky's response to the grim fate that has befallen Vietnam has been
to rally to the SRV's defense and to blame everything on the U.S. In
1975 he celebrated Saigon's collapse.[27] In 1977 he declared that he
would not sign any letter that would be distributed through the
American media that protested human rights violations in Vietnam. In
fact, he disputed claims that any significant violations were taking
place and he reminded people of the "unprecedented savagery" of
America's attack against Vietnam. He did acknowledge the existence of
the reeducation camps, but insisted that some of the individuals in
them deserved their fate. He also attacked the credibility of refugee
reports, while happily using the reports of visitors to Vietnam who
shared his politics. In later years, Chomsky simply argued that any
problem that was occurring in Vietnam was the fault of the United
States. The U.S. war, he insisted, guaranteed that the Communists
would establish a Stalinist state. "Imposing harsh conditions on an
impoverished Third World society," he claimed, "….more or less
compel[s] them to resort to draconian measures."[28] Moreover, the
SRV's reeducation camps were the best that could be expected, and the
level of political repression was typical for a nation recovering
after a war.[29]



Chomsky wants to absolve the Communists of their sins. This will not
do. It was the Communists, not the U.S., that established a Stalinist
state. They built the reeducation camps. They built the cult of
personality around Ho Chi Minh, Stalin, and Mao. They killed,
tortured, and imprisoned their political opponents. And they have
destroyed, for some time to come, the hope that Vietnam could become a
prosperous, productive, and democratic nation. To insist, as Chomsky
does, that the U.S. is to blame for this tragic reality is to resort
to Alice in Wonderland logic. It is to deny that the Communists were
Communists, individuals who were doing nothing more than following the
dictates of their own twisted ideology. These are facts, though for
many on the Left such as Chomsky, they are embarrassing to
acknowledge. As Doan Van Toai, a former Vietnamese revolutionary, has
argued, intellectuals such as Chomsky have chosen to ignore or
rationalize Vietnam's ugly fate. Astutely, Toai observes that such
intellectuals will likely "continue to maintain their silence in order
to avoid the profound disillusionment that accepting the truth about
Vietnam means for them."[30]



Chomsky's second point is his assertion that the DRV was independent
of Soviet and Chinese aid and that the NLF was independent of Hanoi.
Chomsky first advanced this point during the war. In 1972, he argued
that "Administration spokesmen have held to the view that by
destroying Vietnam we are somehow standing firm against Chinese or
Russian aggression….One searches the record in vain for evidence of
this policy."[31] After the war, Chomsky reiterated this view. In
What Uncle Sam Really Wants (1992), he argued that U.S. leaders simply
invented the idea of a great North Vietnamese-Chinese-Soviet axis to
scare Americans into supporting the war. Communism was not some
ominous collection of powerful nations arrayed against the U.S.
Instead, it was the idea that government should take care of its
people, not the needs of an imperial power. This was not an acceptable
idea to American imperialists. In Rethinking Camelot (1993), Chomsky
wrote that "it was Ho Chi Minh's ‘ultranationalism' that made him
unacceptable, not his services to the ‘Kremlin conspiracy' or ‘Soviet
expansion'…."[32] The war, he contends, was an act of aggression
against an independent nation that was unaided by the two great
Communist superpowers. It was also an act of aggression against the
NLF, a popular and nationalistic South Vietnamese organization that
advocated popular economic and social programs. NLF authority,
Chomsky writes approvingly, was "decentralized and placed in the hands
of local people, in contrast to the rule of the U.S. client regime,
perceived as ‘outside forces' by major segments of the local
population." NLF policies, particularly its land reforms, benefited
the great mass of poor peasants. Moreover, Northerners did not
influence the NLF, and did not become directly involved in the
struggle against the United States until after 1965. The war,
according to Chomsky, must be characterized as an "invasion" by the
U.S. into a nation that simply refused to kowtow to American
imperialism.[33]



Chomsky's second point can not be sustained. Scholars who have had
access to Vietnamese, Soviet, and Chinese sources have now firmly
established that both the Soviet Union and China provided the DRV with
substantial military and economic assistance during the war. They have
also established that Hanoi controlled the NLF.[34]



Chinese aid to the Communists was essential in the 1950s and the
1960s. At the 1954 Battle of Dien Bien Phu, Chinese advisers directed
the Communist dominated Viet Minh army. China also furnished the Viet
Minh with food, trucks, oil, canons, guns, artillery shells, and
millions of bullets. Chinese aid enabled the Viet Minh's victory over
the French.[35] From 1953 to 1956, China played a key role in
assisting the North Vietnamese land reform campaign. Chinese
Communists trained many of the campaign's leaders. The DRV official
who directed the program, General Secretary Truong Chinh, was a well
known supporter of Mao and the Marxist idea of class war. The killing
of class enemies, Chinh believed, was a necessary component of the
Vietnamese Revolution.[36] Finally, from 1965 to 1968 - as Qiang Zhai
has pointed out in his recent, China and the Vietnam Wars (2000) - Mao
sent 320,000 support troops to North Vietnam. China also supplied
surface-to-air missiles, artillery, and essential logistical
assistance.[37] The Chinese and the Vietnamese Communists celebrated
their joint efforts and appreciated the bloody results. In one
remarkable conversation that Mao had with North Vietnamese premier
Pham Van Dong, and military leader Le Duc Anh, the Great Helmsman took
particular pleasure in learning what effect Chinese anti-tank weapons
had on American soldiers:




Pham Van Dong: Tanks will melt when they are hit by this weapon.

Le Duc Anh: And the drivers will be burnt to death.

Mao Zedong: Good. Can we produce more of this?[38]



One no longer needs to search in vain for evidence of Chinese support
for the Vietnamese Revolution. Nor does one have to search in vain to
find enough evidence to realize that Soviet assistance was also of
fundamental importance to the DRV. According to the Oxford University
Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War (1998), total Soviet bloc aid from
1955 to 1961 was over $1 billon. The Soviets supplied loans to build
dozens of industrial plants and numerous power stations. By 1971, the
Soviet Union had provided up to $3 billion in economic and military
aid to North Vietnam.[39] Soviet military assistance included T-54
tanks, SA-7 Strela anti-aircraft missiles, and thousands of SA-2
surface-to air–missiles. Soviet aid, moreover, continued long after
the war was over. In 1983, the Soviets were supplying the Vietnamese
up to $4 million a day in economic and military aid.[40]


ENDNOTES:

[1] The reference to Hanoi as the Eternal City is taken from Roger
Kimball. See Roger Kimball, The Long March: How the Cultural
Revolution of the 1960s Changed America (San Francisco: Encounter
Books, 2000), pp.127-144. Hayden and Lynd are quoted in John Patrick
Diggins, The Rise and Fall of the American Left (New York: W.W.
Norton, 1992), pp.240-241, and in Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of
Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1987), p.266. Clark is
quoted in Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: The Travels of Western
Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba (New York: Harper
and Row, 1981), 271. Sontag is quoted in Norman Podhoretz, Why We
Were In Vietnam (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), pp.90-91.

[2] Noam Chomsky, At War With Asia (New York: Vintage Books, 1970),
pp.259-287. The speech Chomsky gave in Hanoi can be found on
Frontpage magazine at: http://frontpagemag.com. In personal
correspondence with me, Chomsky stated he "can't either confirm or
deny" that he gave it. The speech is, however, entirely consistent
with what he wrote in At War With Asia, and with his general stance
towards the war. Chomksy also sought to deny what he wrote. When I
confronted him with the fact that he "sang songs, patriotic and
sentimental, and declaimed poems," with the Communists, he wrote back:
"I'll be interested to see where I produced the ‘words' that you have
just invented and attributed to me….I realize that you feel it is your
right to fabricate arbitrary slanders, but don't you think that this
is going a little too far?" It was a stunning response. Chomsky's
efforts, as well as the efforts of all the other activists who
traveled to Hanoi, were warmly welcomed by the North Vietnamese.
"Visits to Hanoi…" by American antiwar activists, one North Vietnamese
Communist has commented, "gave us confidence that we should hold on in
the face of battlefield reverses." Quoted in Victor Davis Hanson,
Carnage and Cultu Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power
(New York: Anchor, 2001), p.416.

[3] Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins (New York: New
Press, 2002), p.9.

[4] On Chomsky's antiwar activities see Milan Rai, Chomsky's Politics
(London: Verso, 1995); Keith Windschuttle, "The Hypocrisy of Noam
Chomsky," NewCriterion.com, May 2, 2003; The Committee of Concerned
Asian Scholars, The Indochina Story (New York: Bantam, 1970); Harry
Summers Jr., The Vietnam War Almanac (New York: Ballantine Books,
1985), pp.118-119.

[5] Robert Sklar, "The Intellectual Power Elite," The Nation, March
24, 1969. Simon Head, "Story Without End," The New York Review of
Books, August 9, 1973. See Roy's foreword in the new edition of
Chomsky's For Reason of State (New York: The New Press, 2003),
pp.vii-xx. Roy adds a few exciting twists to the Left's attack against
the war by blasting the U.S. for all the "dead birds, the charred
animals, the murdered fish," and yes, the "incinerated insects." See
Roy's foreword in the new edition of Chomsky's For Reason of State
(New York: The New Press, 2003), pp.vii-xx. Zinn's comments are
contained in the New Press edition of American Power and the New
Mandarins, cited above, pp.iii-ix. Falk's comments were posted to the
H-DIPLO website on July 23, 2003. See: http://www.h-net.org/~diplo.

[6] Quoted in Windschuttle, "The Hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky."

[7] Chomsky, At War With Asia, pp.280-281.

[8] Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Washington Connection and
Third World Fascism: The Political Economy of Human Rights, Volume I
(Boston: South End Press, 1979), p.432.

[9] Ibid, pp.342-345.

[10] Chomsky, For Reasons of State, pp.230-232.

[11] F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1944), p.101.

[12] David Horowitz, The Politics of Bad Faith: The Radical Assault on
America's Future (New York: The Free Press, 1998), p.96. Stephane
Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panne, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel
Bartosek, and Jean-Louis Margolin, The Black of Communism: Crimes,
Terror, and Repression (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999),
p.4. Also see Richard Pipes, Communism: A History (New York: Modern
Library, 2001). Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century (New
York: W.W. Norton, 2000).

[13] Quoted in Bernard Fall, Ho Chi Minh on Revolution: Selected
Writings, 1920-1966 (New York: Signet Books, 1967), pp.188-208.

[14] Courtois, et al, The Black of Communism, pp.565-575. Ho Chi Minh
is quoted in Michael Lind, Vietnam: The Necessary War (New York:
Touchstone, 1999), p.241.

[15] William Duiker, Ho Chi Minh: A Life (New York: Hyperion, 2000),
p.475. Also see Courtois, et al, The Black of Communism, p.569.

[16] Courtois, et al, The Black of Communism, pp.569-570. Also see
Lind, Vietnam: The Necessary War, p.151-156. Also see Spencer Tucker
ed., The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War: A Political, Social, and
Military History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp.447-448.

[17] Tucker, ed, The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War, p.448. Guenter
Lewy, America in Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978),
pp.272-274.

[18] See Lind, Vietnam: The Necessary War, p.149.

[19] The Communist victory in Vietnam and the U.S. withdrawal from
Southeast Asia promoted the fall of Laos to the Communist Pathet Lao,
and the Khmer Rouge's genocidal massacre in Cambodia. The dominoes, as
American leaders predicted, did fall. The Communist victory in
Vietnam also encouraged Soviet proxies in Ethiopia, Angola,
Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and elsewhere.

[20] See Tucker, ed., The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War, p.348. Doan
Van Toai and David Chanoff, The Vietnamese Gulag (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1986). For an informative report on Vietnam written three
years after the war see Carl Gershman, "After the Dominoes Fell,"
Commentary, May, 1978.

[21] See Stephen J. Morris, Why Vietnam Invaded America: Political
Culture and the Causes of War (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1999), chapter 7.

[22] See Robert Templer, Shadows and Wind: A View of Modern Vietnam
(New York: Penguin Books, 1998).

[23] Quoted in Podhoretz, Why We Were In Vietnam, p.202

[24] Quoted in Hanson, Carnage and Culture, p.427.

[25] Templer, Shadows and Wind.

[26] Quoted in Henry Kamm, Dragon Ascending: Vietnam and the
Vietnamese (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1996), p.238. George Herring,
America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 3rd ed. (New
York: McGraw Hill, 1996), p.302.

[27] At what Howard Zinn has called the war's last teach-in, Zinn,
Chomsky, and the participants were joyous upon hearing of the fall of
Saigon. "In the midst of the proceedings," Zinn recalls, "a student
came racing down the aisle with a dispatch in his hand, shouting
‘Saigon has fallen. The war is over,' and the auditorium exploded in
cheers." See Zinn's forward in Chomsky, American Power and the New
Mandarins, p.viii.

[28] C.P. Otero ed., Chomsky: Language and Politics (Montreal: Black
Rose Books, 1988), p.560. In 1977, Chomsky stated that he would sign
"an appropriately worded protest" of human rights violations if it
would be released through a country such as Sweden. He refused to
sign any protest through the American mass media because it "supported
the war through its worst atrocities." See C.P. Otero, ed. Noam
Chomsky: Radical Priorities (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1981),
pp.62-80. These statements nicely reflect Chomsky's efforts to avoid
moral responsibility for his positions. He was quite happy to use the
media to attack the war in Vietnam, but he will not use it to call
attention to the SRV's human rights violations. Further, I have found
no evidence that he has ever published any indictment of the SRV,
either in the American or the Swedish media. To this day, he simply
refuses to part ways with his Vietnamese comrades. When I asked him,
in personal correspondence, to cite one book or article he had written
that denounces the SRV, he responded: "Your…question is quite
comical. I'll be glad to answer as soon as you send me the books in
which you have condemned the murderous atrocities for which you share
responsibility….And if you really cannot comprehend why this is the
right answer, I'm afraid you are placing yourself well beyond the
bounds of possible discussion."

[29] Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, After the Cataclysm: Postwar
Indochina & the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology. The Political
Economy of Human Rights: Volume II (Boston: South End Press, 1979),
pp.61-118. Chomsky argues that the U.S. actually won the war because
it accomplished its goal of destroying Vietnam's chance to provide a
"good example" of Third World economic development.

[30] Doan Van Toai, "A Lament for Vietnam," The New York Times, March
19, 1981.

[31] Chomsky, "Vietnam: How Government Became Wolves," The New York
Review of Books, June 15, 1972.

[32] Noam Chomsky, What Uncle Sam Really Wants (Tucson: Odonian Press,
1992), p.10. Noam Chomsky, Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War,
and U.S. Political Culture (Boston: South End Press, 1993), p.22.

[33] Chomsky, Rethinking Camelot, pp.56-63 and pp.90-93. Also see
Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The
Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 1988),
pp.188-190.

[34] See the introduction and chapter 2 in Marc Jason Gilbert ed., Why
The North Won the Vietnam War (New York: Palgrave, 2002). Gilbert
writes that "it was Chinese and Soviet military aid that helped North
Vietnam survive American escalation and eventually win the war."
George Herring, in turn, writes that Soviet and Chinese aid "played a
crucial role in Hanoi's ability to resist U.S. military pressures."

[35] John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp.161-163. Also see Morris, Why
Vietnam Invaded America, p.125.

[36] Duiker, Ho Chi Minh, p.477.

[37] Qiang Zhai, China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950-1975 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2000), p.135. Also see Chen Jian,
Mao's China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2001).

[38] Odd Arne Westad, Chen Jian, Stein Tonnesson, Nguyen Vu Tung, and
James G. Hershberg, "77 Conversations between Chinese and Foreign
Leaders on the Wars in Indochina, 1964-1977," Cold War International
History Project Working Paper No.22 (Washington: Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholars, May 1998).

[39] Tucker ed., The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War, pp.448-449.

[40] Summers, The Vietnam War Almanac, p.316. Also see Ilya Gaiduk,
The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1996).