Imperial Presidency - Noam Chomsky

[illbill]

http://www.realopinion.com/realboards/showthread.php?t=1459

<snip>It goes without saying that what happens in the US has an enormous impact on the rest of the world – and conversely: what happens in the rest of the world cannot fail to have an impact on the US, in several ways.<snip>

http://www.realopinion.com/realboards/showthread.php?t=1459

[theresistance]

1. Chomsky's books should be required reading

in all schools. People's minds would be changed straight away if they read his stuff...

[Name removed]

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[theresistance]

3. Wait a minute. I won't stand

for your "ramblings" I'm sorry. I am talking about the loads of books that I have and that I've read, that give the best arguments against US policies etc...I'm sorry but I don't buy what you're trying to say. Sure there are some things he says that I don't fully agree with, but your bashing of the best mind around at the moment is unbelievable.

[LoZoccolo]

5. I gotta step in here and say...

...I really haven't read much of what he's written, but what I have, I do get the sense that it wouldn't be unusual for him not to be prescriptive as far as what we could have done in a given situation. He criticizes, but that's easy to do if you're not trying to lay what you think should have happened down next to what happened. And I do find that disappointing about him.

You have to admit, you didn't really respond to what the poster said, too.

[theresistance]

6. I didn't respond to what the poster said?

Even you admit you haven't read much of what he's written! I suggest you do. Starters: http://www.chomsky.info/

I repeat that he is one of the top minds around discussing American foreign policy over the past 40 years.

"Personality disorder...its all about him...fame...attention...people lacking skill and maturity will confuse his ramblings with reality..."

I don't want to waste too much time on these "ramblings".

[LoZoccolo]

9. No, you didn't.

one example. Noam concedes, as he must, "the terrible crimes of Saddam Hussein"

He then offers not a single word about what we should have done about such (do not read this as my endorsement of the war, as committed). He never has and never will. He just changes and says the current trial won't be of whoever supported Saddam 25 years ago. And...?

That part you didn't respond to. You knew that though, so you're on your third chance already.

[theresistance]

11. My post #6 stands

And that's my final word on this. Chomsky has done more for documenting the truth about American imperialism over the decades than any ramblings about "personality disorders" or whatever here. I'm getting back to opposing Chimpenstein...

[Name removed]

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[Sterling]

60. It looks like with good reason since the post got wipped.

lol

[Donailin]

65. That's not so,

Chomsky constantly emphasizes the power of the people to effect change.

And he certainly says plenty about what we shouldn't be doing. "If we want to minimize terror, we ought to stop participating in it"

He is way ahead of the game in terms of figuring out the logical conclusion of any given action, Gore Vidal as well. But both of them do what they do best, they mobilize themselves and others.

[Name removed]

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[aneerkoinos]

7. Personality disorders

Enlightened beings are very few, nearly everybody has a personalty disorder called "ego". Thus character assassination of questionable motives works allways, sort of, if that is the mode of discussion one wishes to engage.

I'm old enough and skilled enough to know what kind of personality disorder needs to engage in character assassination to protect and preserve a world view: the most dishonest, the most power hungry one.

[SweetLeftFoot]

8. Chomsky

people tend to forget his assertions about the Khmer Rouge's genocide in Kampuchea too.

[eridani]

61. Which were about what the MSM chose to emphasize--

--out of several different estimates available at the time.

[mulethree]

10. Yes, Frustrating

He tends to shine light into hidden cubbies with nasty stuff in them. Then he'll go off like "But, big deal, not so different than xxxx in 19yy and not really worse than yyyy in 19zz". And it gets you all 'WTF! it's not the first time?' 'How come my 10th grade teacher never mentioned it? It surely would have been in that history 102 class from college!'

So you go to the library or on the web, determined that he's just blowing smoke, and you end up reading stuff for hours that disrupts your sleep for days.

And having given you headaches and under-eye bags for a week with that damn spotlight, he doesn't even have the decency to tell you what to think or give you the answer!! Bastard forces you to take what you learned and think up your own answers!!

It's even worse if you do the research on the web. Every site you find, with info from a Chomsky-initiated inquiry, tends to have a dozen or more compelling links to yet more cubby holes! One friggin Chomsky article can take a month from question to formulation of an answer and spawns a dozen more questions.

[LibertyorDeath]

20. LOL! The Bastard

"Bastard forces you to take what you learned and think up your own answers!!"

Good God you don't mean he expects people to think for themselves and arrive at their own conclusions.

No wonder the rightards hate him.

[eridani]

12. It's up to us to do something?

That's odd, we never felt we had to do anything about Duvalier or any of the other psychopaths we've backed over the years in our own hemisphere, other than continue to support them.

Guess what? Lots of people have demonstrated the ability to get rid of dictators--Ceausescu, Marcos, the Shah of Iran, and others. The Iraqis were in the middle of getting rid of Saddam in 1991 when we intervened directly on his side.

Saudis and other neighbors were trying to arrange an exile for him right before the invasion, as they didn't want the instability that they knew was sure to follow. The Spoiled Brat in Chief promptly announced that it didn't matter if Saddam left--the invasion was on anyway, no matter what he or anyone in Iraq did.

[mirror wall]

14. Post #12 is entirely correct.

I would respond to this:

one example. Noam concedes, as he must, "the terrible crimes of Saddam Hussein"

He then offers not a single word about what we should have done about such (do not read this as my endorsement of the war, as committed). He never has and never will. He just changes and says the current trial won't be of whoever supported Saddam 25 years ago. And...?

by saying, uh, yes he did offer what "we" (we being the US) -could- have done to facilitate (or at the least not impede) the removal of Saddam prior to the current cluster **** we're currently embroiled in over there.

Let's go from the begining:

1. The US shouldn't have supported Saddam "25 years ago".

2. We shouldn't have intervened in the popular uprising that was going on against him in the late 80s and early 90s.

3. After the first gulf war, we ought not to have imposed the harsh economic sanctions we did. They only served to impoverish the population and entrench Saddam further (since he did make some effort to keep the people under his power from starving). Chomsky theorized in Hegemony or Survival that if the US and other countries responsible for the impostion of sanctions had instead funded groups such as the Kurdish resistance and sent general humanitarian aid to the rest of the populace, they would have ousted Saddam themselves. Just like the above poster was implying by bringing up the Shah, Ceausescu, Marcos, etc.

Let's flip this around and ask why "we" should treat the Iraqi people like helpless children. Let them solve their problems themselves. Let us not create problems or impediments for them, that is the best we could have done.

I do hope no one here is suffering under the insane delusion that they US actually has the best of intentions regarding the Iraqi people. Our policy toward Iraq over the last, well, forever has proven the contray.

It looks to me as though you need to pay more attention when you're reading.

[Name removed]

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[mirror wall]

22. wait, so you think america is not at all to blame for the atroicites that

it facilitates through its aid to dictators that toe our policy line? ooook. that saying that american is complicit in the crimes of its client states is OMG ANTI 'MERICANISM? well, that's cute. but it's, erm, not very, how shall we say: sane.

I just told you what chomsky has suggested we should have done prior to the current war. you can go and borrow Hegemony or Survival from the library and read for yourself about what he said could have been done to facillitate an end to Saddam's repressive rule. I reccomend (after having just flipped through it after not having read it in a while) pp. 140-143 a section entitled LIBERATION FROM TYRANNY: CONSTRUCTIVE SOLUTIONS. Unless my reading comprehension has suffered a sharp decline in the last few minutes, it looks as though he is providing, well, constructive solutions for the Iraq question.

After glancing over that section, he seems to suggest that the best outcome we could hope for in the present solution would to actually allow the Iraqis to have, you know, a say in what's going on (he gives a few examples of the state of Iraqi state control being, at the time of writing, almost solely in the hands of Americans or their handpicked Iraqi shills). The book was written before the hoopla about the Iraq Vote was being talked up so much, or I'm sure he'd have a scathing condemnation of the fact that only 1% of Iraqis have been registered to vote.

Basically he's insiting that the US make it clear to the Iraqi people that we've ****ed up and are leaving and hoping that they'll be capable of picking up the pieces of their nation.

While I don't suckle at Chomsky's withered man-teat and proclaim him the GOD-EMPEROR of my vision of the world (no one vision is perfect), I think it shows a very basic misunderstanding of his scholarship and message to think he "sucks". I actually haven't kept up with his work over the past few years, and am therefore not in a postion to answer your charges that he commits the greivious crime of not providing you with an instructional insert on what must be done in every single ****ed up situation in the world (e.g. china, iran, etc.). Judging based on what I recall of his writings and the concrete example of prescriptivism I found in the last book of his I read, I'd be willing to go out on a limb and guess that you're wrong about that too.

You know, when I see so-called liberals get a hate-on for Chomsky, I'm most reminded of the right wing replicants who think Michale Moore LIES LIES LIES (and is a fatty LOLZ). It shows a fundamental lack of either familiarity or understanding of the body of work in question.

I encourage you to go back and read some of his stuff with an open mind.

[gottaB]

23. LIBERATION FROM TYRANNY: CONSTRUCTIVE SOLUTIONS

I just read that section. I see historical arguments and criticisms, some of which are useful, but little by way of constructive solutions.

http://www.7nebo.com/chomsky/chapter5e.htm

[Name removed]

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[mirror wall]

49. Wait, let's step back a bit.

Even if Chomsky isn't RIPPING OFF YOUR HEAD AND ****ING FULLY FORMED AND NEATLY FRAMED BLUEPRINTS INTO IT THAT DESCRIBE, IN INTRICATE DETAIL BUT WITHOUT USIN' TOO MANY OF THEM THAR BIG WORDS, WHAT CAN BE DONE 'BOUT EVERYTHING BAD THAT'S GOING RIGHT-THIS-SECOND-OMG, why does that in any way shape or form invalidate his position as an analyzer of past, present, and projected American malfeasance?

Answer that.

Chomsky's work is impeccably researched and annotated. The great majority of his citations come from major sources such as the nty, wsj, fortune, and actual government documents. It's not as though he's a conspirational wackjob that's making stuff up CUZ HE HATS 'MERICA. He simply combs the public record for the interesting tidbits that don't get repeated and drilled into the brains of the population and compliles it into coherent essays and books. His role as an analyzer of how American forieng policy works is invaluable to anyone who has genuine curiosity about the subject.

Even if he never proposed any solutions to anything ever, I don't see how that would open the whole body of his meticulous work up to ridicule and derision. Anyone with any sort of critical thinking ability whatsoever should be able to at the very least draw their own conclusions from Chomsky's distillation of the little-mentioned (albeit entirely public) ugly side of the way things are.

Your weird, paranoid, deliciously fallacious ad-hominem attacks on him are still cute, though.

[rooboy]

13. Wow... another American who hates Chomsky. What a surprise.

would you mind explaining why he should have to expound upon the crimes of Saddam Hussein? They're already documented and well known...what would be the point of him repeating information you already know?

And since when was Noam Chomsky a member of the Democratic Party ???? LOL!!!!

[struggle4progress]

18. About half of the deaths attributed to SH's crimes occurred ...

... incident to the Iran-Iraq war, partly during a period when the Reagan administration had removed Iraq from its list of terrorist states in order to provide support to SH in his war against Iran.

Chomsky's point seems clear enough: it is cowardly and disingenuous to express shock at SH's crimes, and to plan to bring SH to trial, without planning to bring to trial those Reaganites, such as Rumsfeld, who were intimately involved in providing the material support necessary for those crimes.

The question you ask, and accuse Chomsky of side-stepping, namely, "What should we have done about SH's crimes?" has such a simple answer in this context that it is difficult for me to understand how anyone could miss it: WE SHOULD NOT HAVE ENABLED THESE CRIMES.

But enable them we did, and this has required subsequent cover-up. So no one should have been surprised when, two years ago, the Bushistas seized SH's weapons declaration, as it was being provided to the UN, and did not allow the UN member states to whom the declaration had nominally been submitted to see the document before it had been sanitized: the point is, of course, that US business interests earned profits from SH's crimes and that the current President considers it his job to suppress memory of those events.

If you want to complain that Chomsky should have done more on Iraq in the 1980's, I would simply respond that much of Chomsky's writing in the 1980's was devoted to US militarism in Central America; many people found it an invaluable source of information, carefully extracted from the world press. Another topic that Chomsky addressed continually in the 1980's was Indonesia's almost-universally-ignored rape of East Timor, on which topic he seems to have eventually succeeded in swaying world opinion, after crying alone in the wilderness for years.

<edit: format>

[not systems]

21. Thank Jesus right thinking moral people shutdown the rape rooms...

or at least refurbished them with nice white plastic chairs.

Really at this point in time it is hard to believe
people still drag out the Saddam Bogey.

Sure he was a tyrant and a killer but at least it
wasn't my tax dollars and fellow country men raping and
butchering the poor people of Iraq.

Yes, forced enema's are rape and not just a frat prank.

Your words are like gas station coffee old, stale and not that great to start with.

[bpilgrim]

24. 'such a waste of most modest ability'

'he likely has one or more personality disorders'

projecting are we?

He lays out the facts-on-the-ground and doesn't try to minimize the brutal reality of our actions consequences as most other commentators do and that is why he is world renowned.

anonymous INTERNET posters who try to attack him for not providing alternative histories are a dime a dozen.

peace

[whistle]

64. Yes along with Karl Marx and other great social theorists...

...including:

Classical Theorists:
T. Robert Malthus
Fredrick Engles
Max Weber
Emile Durkheim

American Macrosociologists, 1950 - 2005
C. Wright Mills
Robert K. Merton
Harry Braverman
Marvin Harris
Gerhard E. Lenski
George Ritzer
Immanuel Wallerstein

Relgious Socialists
James H. Billington
Nesta Webster
Carroll Quigley
Otto Scott
R. J. Rushdoony

[FDRLincoln]

17. chomsky

I have read most of Chomsky's works. I have even corresponded with him.

He points out a lot of bad things that the US has done, no question. And everyone should read him. But there are times he goes too far...at times I believe he attributes evil motives to what were actually mistakes of good conscience, or mistakes made due to incomplete information.

Chomsky should be required reading. But he is not 100% right, and the hero-worship directed his way goes too far. NO ONE SHOULD RELY ON ANY ONE SOURCE. Read Chomsky, but also read John Lewis Gaddis.

[Name removed]

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[toddzilla]

27. moe, you are unable to comprehend basic english.

for someone who points out other's inability to "answer" your questions, you seem to be exceptionally capable of doing the same thing.


chomsky isn't god, he isn't a democrat, he's just a guy who says what he thinks, and people don't like to be told that they are associated with malignant forces in the world. america is by and large a malignant force in the world, hence you and many other's apprehension to believe him, or reference what he says with mulitides of other sources.

BTW, most governments are pretty much the same as the US, they are just unable to project their power as far and as wide. What business is it of ours to do ANYTHING outside of our borders? who made us in charge of spreading "democracy?"

[Name removed]

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[toddzilla]

31. lol

If you think iraq is having "elections" then you're barking up the wrong tree my friend.


Methinks you read and watch too much mainstream "journalism" to be informed about anything

[struggle4progress]

28. That's a completely ahistorical view of VN. Post WWII, there were ...

... worldwide decolonialization movements, including an indigenous resistance to continued French control in Indochina.

Caught up in the rosy glow that surrounded the US after VJ Day, Ho Chi Minh originally believed the USA would help him cast out the French and bring self-government to VN.

The French eventually decided they couldn't continue to hold the colony, and ultimately a peace deal was brokered, with provisions for elections.

Since red-bashing was all the rage in the US at the time, predictions by impartial observers, that Ho Chi Minh would easily win the elections, resulted in the usual "I'm a bigger badder mofo than my opponent" posturing in US political circles, with ever increasing political pressure to "save VN from communism."

This produced JFK's brutal client state, which proved to be so embarrassing to the USA that the CIA assassinated Diem to limit the public relations damage.

Following JFK's assassination three weeks later, LBJ escalated the war for purely political motives: he was, quite simply, determined that the rightwing not be able to successfully redbait him.

The later release of the Pentagon papers revealed the scale of habitual lying about the war by DC's inner circles.

The war was a tragedy, but it originated in a quite understandable desire in VN to end colonialism.

Kind of a rotten deal for the tens of thousands of kids who died in the jungle in order to neutralize the ability of rightwingers in Congress to attack LBJ politically ...

[Name removed]

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[struggle4progress]

32. "Ho Chi Minh could have just given up."

I guess that tells us exactly where you stand on the general issue of colonies and what your attitude is towards nations that, having just won their own freedom, are suddenly faced with an influx of new foreign soldiers intended to prevent elections.

[Name removed]

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[dummy-du1]

34. Vietnam won its freedom

And like someone recently said: "In the long run, there is no justice without freedom, and there can be no human rights without human liberty."

[struggle4progress]

35. "Theophane Venard and Ho Chi Minh"

By Dorothy Day
The Catholic Worker
May 1954

<snip> Here is a thumbnail sketch of Indo-China which is made up of Tonkin, Annam, Cambodia, Cochin-China and Laos. Tonkin, Annam and Cochin-China are all three together called Viet Nam or French Indo-China. The Wall Street Journal calls it a rich storehouse of rubber, rice, minerals. Local industrial development is forbidden and there is forced labor. All writers--and I have read half dozen books on the subject--agree that the population in this rich country could live on about twenty day’s work a year but the rubber plantations put in by the conquering French, have to be worked and cheap labor is essential. According to an article in the National Geographic in 1935, Saigon was the rubber capital of the world. "The cow submits to milking machines, but the rubber tree does not, and like the cow it must be milked regularly or go dry…Indo-China has not only the proper equatorial rain belt climate, but the workers, each of whom collects the sap from 200-400 trees a day and receives 40 cents for his labor. The best rubber gatherers come from Tonkin…American interests control only three per cent of the plantations, but one-third of the supply goes to Akron, Ohio." <snip>

With the French conquering this country, even such leaders as Ho Chi Minh and Bao Dai went to France to receive their education. Ho Chi Minh was the son of a scholar of peasant stock and he began his revolutionary activities at the age of eight as a courier in the Viet Nam movement. When his family was jailed in 1911 he shipped out as a seaman to France and lived there for the next twelve years. He was the organizer of a group called the Inter Colonial Union, edited a paper called Pariah, and was a founding member of the Communist party; in 1923 he went to Moscow, and in 1924 to Canton and organized the Association of the Suppressed Asian peoples. He was then 34 years old. In 1937 when Japan invaded China, he offered to make common cause with France but France refused and they in turn helped the Japanese fight the guerrillas. During World War II the Japanese took over the country and the French officials remained, part of the Vichy government, and Bao Dai, who had also spent ten years in France studying, and was a descendant of the royal family, was in the palace. At the close of the war when the Japanese surrendered and the French colonials fled, Ho set up the republic of Viet Nam and signed a treaty with France in March 1946 which recognized Viet Nam as a free state within the French Union. <snip>

We are going to be forced sooner or later to be facing the ultimate issues. To recognize that it is not Christianity and freedom we are defending, but our possessions. And in saving our lives, as we think, we are assuredly going to lose them. It is the poor of the world, it is the exploited, it is the dominated, that will conquer.

http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/daytext.cfm?TextID=667&SearchTerm=abortion


Inoculating Southeast Asia
(What Uncle Sam Really Wants Copyright © 1993 by Noam Chomsky)
... By 1948, the State Department recognized quite clearly that the Viet Minh, the anti-French resistance led by Ho Chi Minh, was the national movement of Vietnam. But the Viet Minh did not cede control to the local oligarchy. It favored independent development and ignored the interests of foreign investors. There was fear the Viet Minh might succeed, in which case "the rot would spread" and the "virus" would "infect" the region, to adopt the language the planners used year after year after year ... The Kennedy administration escalated the attack against South Vietnam from massive state terror to outright aggression. Johnson sent a huge expeditionary force to attack South Vietnam and expanded the war to all of Indochina. That destroyed the virus, all right -- Indochina will be lucky if it recovers in a hundred years ...

http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/sam/sam-2-06.html


So let me see if I understand your view. It was perfectly acceptable for the French to exploit Indochina, preventing local development and exporting the countries riches abroad to (say) Akron. But although Ho Chi Minh had already succeeded in negotiating a peace in the late 1940's, the opposition of the corrupt local oligarchy to this peace is not an issue worthy of discussion; the fear of US planners that local control of resources in Indochina would result in a cascade of movements for local control of resources across the region is not an issue worthy of discussion; and the ultimate determination of the JFK/LBJ/RMN administrations to decimate that small nation with bombs and agent orange is not an issue worthy of discussion. No, as VN confronts the continuing legacy of the war, the responsibility for all of this belongs, in your view, to Ho Chi Minh, who you think should have tried to talk his countrymen into accepting indefinite control of their nation by the French or by the Americans.

[Name removed]

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[struggle4progress]

37. So now it is absolutely clear exactly why you dislike Chomsky.

Chomsky's position is that the real objective of the US war in Indochina was to assure that the region did not successfully reorganize its economy for local benefit: while the US would have preferred to maintain Western control of Vietnam, it was willing to accept the instead the destruction of Vietnam to serve as a lesson to others in the region:

Contrary to what virtually everyone -- left or right -- says, the United States achieved its major objectives in Indochina. Vietnam was demolished. There's no danger that successful development there will provide a model for other nations in the region.
http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/sam/sam-2-06.html


Unsurprisingly, it is precisely this use of that you wish to make of the destruction: Vietnam, poster child for what happens to countries that object to Western economic domination of the world. So Chomsky's analysis undermines the propaganda value of Vietnam's "failure."

Unfortunately the evidence, in bombs dropped and poison sprayed, for Chomsky's view, that sadist destruction really was the aim of US policy and that Vietnam's problems have roots in the lingering aftermath of the war, is rather substantial:

Testimony given in Detroit, Michigan, on January 31, 1971, February 1 and 2, 1971
Sponsored by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Inc.
... Whether one looks at the use of biological and chemical means of warfare as Professor Messleman has at Harvard, in terms of the genocide that has taken place; whether we look at the indiscriminate use of napalming, the use of anti-personnel pellet bombing, or whether we take a look at the bomb tonnage that has been dropped in Vietnam during this period, greater than all the bomb tonnage in World War II, an average of bomb tonnage equivalent to nearly three Hiroshima bombs a week in Vietnam. Now I was in Hiroshima and Nagasaki last August and I talked to the survivors and victims of the atomic bomb. I saw and visited the museum at Hiroshima. And yet in Vietnam that means every 2 1/2 days a Hiroshima bomb is dropped. Now why does that take place? Why is the United States doing that? ...
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Winter_Soldier/WS_21_Ourselves.html


... the bomb tonnage the US dropped on the "sanctuary" countries of Laos (2,093,300 tons), Cambodia (539,129 tons), and North Vietnam (539,129 tons) added up to about five times the tonnage that the US dropped on Germany in World War II ...
http://www.clemson.edu/caah/history/FacultyPages/EdMoise/limit7.html


... Nor would this nation, which was ripped asunder, recover easily from the apocalypse. Nor would the Vietnamese, whose land and people were pummeled by three times the bomb tonnage dropped in all of World War II. Finally, in 1975, Congress ended the bloodbath by cutting the war machine's money flow. No money, no bombs, bombers nor any more American cannon fodder for body bags. Shutting off the money ended the Vietnam civil war. And, contrary to White House propaganda. no dominoes fell ...
http://www.hackworth.com/7nov95.html


Agent Orange blights Vietnam
Agent Orange has dramatically changed the Vietnamese landscape
Thursday, December 3, 1998 Published at 22:29 GMT
... Areas once famous for brutal high-tech battles are today a tourist destination. However, one weapon that was used by the Americans is still lethal. New research shows it is still creating environmental chaos, poisoning the food chain and causing serious concern over its effects on human health ...In total, 11m gallons were poured over South Vietnam between 1961 and 71, over 10% of the country - 14% of the area targeted was farmland ... Team member David Levi said: "We should not think of this as a historical problem. This is a present-day contamination issue ...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/227467.stm

Vietnam demands action on Agent Orange
March 6, 2002 Posted: 4:54 AM EST (0954 GMT)
... Although Vietnam has not directly asked for financial compensation, it has repeatedly said that the United States has a moral and ethical responsibility to deal with the "consequences of the war." The U.S. ambassador to Vietnam has labeled the issue "the one significant ghost" remaining from the Vietnam War ... Some of the highest levels -- reaching 206 times greater than average -- were found in people born well after spraying stopped, indicating exposure to persistent dioxin residues in soil and water, the researchers said ...
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/asiapcf/southeast/03/06/vietnam.us.orange/


So the US treated this small, undeveloped nation as if it posed a military threat greater than that posed by the industrialized Axis powers in WWII. The ideas of poor people, speaking a language US policy makers could not understand, somehow justifies a rage that the US did not exhibit even towards the Nazis?

Yet you say this is Ho Chi Minh's fault, and he should not have fought.

I don't know whether you are right or not, but it would be interesting to learn when you think he should have thrown in the towel.

Was it wrong for him to want to end French colonial rule? He does seem to have judged the character of local French oligarchs accurately, because they supported the Japanese conquerers in WWII.

Should he had accepted Japanese conquest? Well, when the Japanese lost, the Free French promptly negotiated the independence of Vietnam with Ho Chi Minh in 1946.

Unfortunately, the local French oligarchs who had been the allies of the Japanese weren't happy and immediately organized against him. In his position, would you have thrown in the towel at that point? He felt he was fighting for control of his own country against foreigners, and he believed world opinion was on his side: in particular, he originally believed that the US would help him.

When the US became involved against Ho Chi Minh, supporting instead thugs like Diem, should Ho Chi Minh have quit? Remember that Diem's regime was so brutal that the US finally had him assassinated to avoid a public relations black eye. So Ho Chi Minh should have thought what? "Aha! Now that we have a really vicious shit trying to lord it over us, it's a really good time to give up!"

Or is it your view that Ho Chi Minh is responsible because he should realized that the United States would throw its industrial might against him? If so, why is he alone responsible for failing to discern the difference between official rhetoric and actual US policy?

Perhaps you need to rethink some issues of moral responsibility here ...

[Name removed]

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[struggle4progress]

44. OK. Your claims, which come without documentation, consist ...

... mostly of name-calling: "Ho Chi Minh was about as thankless a selfish SOB as one could find" is typical. You're certainly welcome to provide evidence for such claims -- or any of your other claims, for that matter; but so far, you haven't. And you're obviously not reading the links I'm providing in response to your assertions.

Chomsky wrote a lovely essay, many years ago, that described how the official anticommunist rhetoric of the Cold War era could be understood as a sort of code for discussing (and opposing) movements for local control of resources in developing countries. I suggest that at some point, when you are ready, you really might find it profitable to dig up that essay and to try to understand what it says about organized interest groups and the possibly cynical motives behind hifalutin political speech.

[Name removed]

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[struggle4progress]

52. You do like changing the subject.

<edit for more detail:>

It certainly is of historical interest to consider various efforts to construct a great necropolis. But your list comes without any evidence whatsoever.

Where in your list is the Pakistani assault on Bangladesh of the early 1970s? Why don't the WWII Japanese appear in your list? Isn't the number of two million Vietnamese dead simply the number of deaths attributable to the short brutal reign of Diem in the south?

[Name removed]

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[Doctor Panacea]

38. Try Free Republic

Quote: You forget it takes two to have a war. Ho Chi Minh could have just given up. Instead, he waged a war which ultimately gained him and Vietnam nothing but millions of dead and wounded.

And Vietnam became united, instead of being divided and having a U.S. puppet in South Vietnam.

Moe, in all seriousness ... I am not sure you are on the right board. You have 40+ posts. (I do not have many more, but I have been here a long time; I just do not post much.) This is a board for progressives and liberals. Are you sure that you would not fit in better over at Free Republic? I mean that seriously. Everything that you say, in your defense of this country's many aggressions and acts of mass slaughter over the last century or so, fits right in with the thinking of Republicans. Think about it, dude.

What Chomsky does in his books is to present the truth about events like the U.S. overthrow of the legitimate government of Guatemala in the early 1950s, so that the United Fruit Company could continue to do business the way it wanted to. He does not provide prescriptions for what to do about people like Saddam Hussein. Maybe the idea is that we do not have to do anything. Many times it is neither our responsibility nor our right to intervene in other countries.

We have already slaughtered probably at least a hundred thousand Iraquis. We have permanently maimed countless others. We have polluted the country with radioactive dust from spent-uranium artillery shells. We have completely disrupted the economy and have destroyed most of the infrastructure. We have lost well over a thousand of our own people (or is it up to two thousand yet?). What we have done in Iraq is a dark moment in the soul of our nation.

So, again, think about http://www.freerepublic.com. You will be preaching to the choir over there. (I think that is the right link; I do not ever go over there myself.)

[Name removed]

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[not systems]

39. The "End of History" ended...

history is now happening again.

It seems that the idea of the self determination of nations
doesn't play a role in your thinking.

In Vietnam as in Iraq people have and will fight to
throw out occupying powers.

Blaming Ho Chi Minh for expressing nationalist will is
a real stretch. You might as well blame George Washington
for fighting the British.

[Name removed]

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[not systems]

46. Ballony...

being ruled by an imperial power is incompatible
with life, liberty and happiness.

The founding fathers knew it and so did Ho.

The rights of the individual can only be protected
by a state that represents the individuals within
it. Hence occupation and imperialism are trespasses
against the rights of man.

Your a real piece of work, you might as well quote
GWB about freedom and liberty.

[Name removed]

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[not systems]

59. Note I didn't...

justify preemptive war or defend intervention in
other nations.

I also didn't justify the genocide of the people
of Vietnam as a small price to pay for world
hegemony of capitalism over all.

Agree with Bush, no not at all.

I might agree with you about some things, but the mission
to civilize the world in the name of universal imperial
capitalism is one place that we will have to differ.

[Martin Eden]

47. Vietnamese Declaration of Independence

Ho Chi Minh delivered this address in 1945:

"All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness"

This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America m 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.

The Declaration of the French Revolution made in 1791 on the Rights of Man and the Citizen also states: "All men are born free and with equal rights, and must always remain free and have equal rights." Those are undeniable truths.

Nevertheless, for more than eighty years, the French imperialists, abusing the standard of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, have violated our Fatherland and oppressed our fellow-citizens. They have acted contrary to the ideals of humanity and justice. In the field of politics, they have deprived our people of every democratic liberty.
full text:
http://coombs.anu.edu.au/~vern/van_kien/declar.html

What you must understand is that first and foremost, the Vietnamese were fighting against imperial agression, for national unity, and for independence. Ho may have been a communist, but he was no stooge of the Russians or Chinese. He compromised in 1954, allowing the country to be divided between North and South, with the understanding that the Geneva Accords for a national unifying election would be held in 1956. When it became apparent that Ho's Viet Minh would win this democratic election, the United States built up the Diem government of the South, which subsequently rejected the elections.

The argument that Ho was just as much at fault as the U.S. for the ensuing war suggests a moral equivalency between foreign imperialists and a nation fighting for its independence after nearly a century of colonial rule. We intervened against democracy and self determination. That we disagreed with their choice of a political/economic system does not give us the right to deny them their self determination.
some history:
http://hubcap.clemson.edu/~eemoise/viet4.html

We lost 58,000 lives, the Vietnamese lost millions, and country was eventually unified under the rule of those we fought.

It is certainly possible to argue that the United States has overall played a more positive role than most nations in major world conflicts -- we were the indispenible nation in defeating fascism and the totalitarianism of the Soviet empire -- but our role has not always been positive, and your arguments are discredited by defending our actions in Vietnam or blaming the Vietnamese who fought us.

[Name removed]

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[not systems]

50. non-sequitur.

"2 million Vietnamese did the dying"

and who did the killing?

That is the part the we must be honest about.

Killing for a lie is no honor.

There is a big difference between going half way around
the world to kill strangers and doing the same to get them
out of your native land.

One is a choice the other is a right granted to all people
by law.

Nice play of the patriot card by the way.

[Name removed]

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[aneerkoinos]

57. Plain wrong

Socialism is not plain wrong. Corporate capitalism is.

Ho Chi Minh didn't force people to die. In times of national struggle against oppression, leaders don't lead, they follow the people and channel their will.

People, just like in Iraq, when they are defending their homes, can and do fight with or without leaders. Only those on the imperialist side are forced to die for the sake of their leader, President-Dictator of United States of Gringolandia.

[Martin Eden]

54. non-sequitur, indeed

definition of non sequitur: a statement (as a response) that does not follow logically from anything previously said

The relevant statement you made was:
"Of course he was--they provided modest support and 2 million Vietnamese did the dying. when you do the dying in a proxy war, you are the stooge"

The next step would have been to produce evidence that Ho's primary allegiance was to Russia or China rather than to the Vietnamese people. Instead, you offered the following:

"it does not logically following that just because the US made grave mistakes in going into and staying in Vietnam that Ho Chi Minh and his cohorts were "good guys.""

If you're thinking in terms of "good guys" and "bad guys" then you may as well subscribe to Bush's manichaen world view. No need for understanding complicated realities.

another non sequitur:
As for this statement, "It is certainly possible to argue" What bullshit. What an insult no hundreds of thousands of American men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice. What have you ever done for anyone

My "certainly possible to argue" phrase was followed by my own argument supporting the positive role of the United States, and was part of a sentence pointing out that it was not possible to successfully argue that our role in Vietnam was positive.

That you characterize this an insult of our troops and turn it into a personal accusation is the last refuge of someone unable or inwilling to put forward a legitimate argument. The B.S. is yours, not mine.

[Name removed]

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[Martin Eden]

58. I proceeded to make that arguement

and stated:
"we were the indispenible nation in defeating fascism and the totalitarianism of the Soviet empire"

That does not demonstrate a "deliberate unwillingness" to praise the U.S. I give praise where it's due, and criticism where it's deserved.

What you demonstrate is a deliberate unwillingness to see things from a different perspective. Imagine you and your countrymen had been fighting an occupying power for 80 years, then actually assisted that power in overthrowing a common enemy in a world war. Imagine that what passed for international law (the Geneva accords) decided there would be a democratic election to unify your country, but then another power that had been supporting the old occupier's attempts to retain its control of your country stepped in and established a proxy government in part of your country to block those elections.

Nothing to fight for, you say?

Some realities are less complicated than others. If you can't see a legitimate reason for Ho and his people to fight, it is a willful blindness.

[Wind Dancer]

19. Thanks for posting!

Excellent article, it's always good to hear his thoughts on the current state of affairs.

[On the Road]

40. Thanks for the Article

I have yet to see a substative criticism of Chomsky's view of US foreign policy. His documentation and reasoning is so thorough, the only recourse is to ignore them and go on the attack.

Thus the really pitiful ad hominem attacks on this thread. Having a clear view interpretation of US actions is absolutely vital to an educated voting public. He only reaches a small portion of American citizens, but that's way better than none.

[frankly_fedup2]

62. Germany refers to Bush as another "Hitler." Now that's scary! (nt)

[Stockholm]

63. Kick!