Quotes from American Power and the New Mandarins, by Noam Chomsky

- ‘If the resistance in Vietnam were to collapse, if the situation were to revert to that of Thailand or Guatemala or Greece, where the forces of order, with our approval and assistance, are exercising a fair degree of control, then this opposition to the Vietnam war would also cease.’ (3)

- ‘If we are forced to liquidate this enterprise – in one of the two possible ways – the liberal ideologists will continue to urge that we organize and control as extensive a dominion as is feasible in what they take to be ‘our national interest’ and in the interest of the elements in other societies that we designate as fit to rule.’ (3-4)

- ‘The war is simply an obscenity, a depraved act by weak and miserable men, including all of us, who have allowed it to go on and on with endless fury and destruction – all of us who would have remained silent had stability and order been secured. It is not pleasant to use such words, but candor permits no less.’ (9)

- ‘There is no doubt that the primary cause for this opposition is that the cost of the war to us is too great, unacceptable.’ (10)

- ‘The health of our system would have been demonstrated by a change of policy caused by a recognition that what we have done in Vietnam is wrong, a criminal act, that an American ‘victory’ would have been a tragedy.’ (11)

- ‘It is doubtful whether there is anything we could do to the people of Vietnam (the Communists, that is) that would cause more than a momentary shudder.’ (12)

- ‘Someday the war in Vietnam will end, and with it the renewed impulse it has given to self-analysis and the search for cures and alternatives. Those who were opposed to the war merely because of its costs or its atrocities will fall away.’ (18)

- ‘In general, one would expect any group with access to power and affluence to construct an ideology that will justify this state of affairs on grounds of the general welfare.’ (27)

- ‘One might anticipate that as power becomes more accessible, the inequities of the society will recede from vision, the status quo will seem less flawed, and the preservation of order will become a matter of transcendent importance.’ (28)

- ‘To further underline this point, they cite as our greatest triumph in Southeast Asia the ‘dramatic changes’ which have taken place in Indonesia – the most dramatic being the massacre of several hundred thousand people.’ (35)

- ‘We must conclude that when these scholars deplore the use of violence to effect change, it is not the violence but rather steps towards social change that they find truly disturbing. Social change that departs from the course we plot is not to be tolerated. The threat to order is too great.’ (35)

- ‘One can, of course, imagine another way in which order can be preserved in all such cases: namely, by meeting the demands, or at the very least by removing the barriers and have been placed, by force which may be latent and disguised, in the way of attempts to satisfy the ‘newly acquired aspirations.’ But this might mean that the wealthy and powerful would have to sacrifice some degree of privilege, and it is therefore excluded as a method for maintenance of order.’ (36)

- ‘The basic differences are that the VC hamlets are well organized, clean, economically, self supporting and have an active defense system. For example, a cottage industry in one hamlet was as large as has been previously witnessed anywhere in Chuong Thien province. New canals are being dug and pineapples are under cultivation.’ 1965 USAID report (39)

- ‘When we strip away the terminology of the behavioral sciences, we see revealed, in such work as this, the mentality of the colonial civil servant, persuaded of the benevolence of the mother country and the correctness of its vision of world order, and convinced that he understands the true interests of the backward peoples whose welfare he is to administer.’ (41)

- ‘The idea that we must choose between the method of ‘winning hearts and minds’ and the method of shaping behavior presumes that we have the right to choose at all. This is to grant us a right that we would surely accord to no other world power. Yet the overwhelming body of American scholarship accords us this right.’ (59)

- ‘According to the theory of Mr. Marx, the people not only must not destroy [the state] but must strengthen it and place it at the complete disposal of their benefactors, guardians, and teachers – the leaders of the Communist party, namely Mr. Marx and his friends, who will proceed to liberate [mankind] in their own way. They will concentrate the reins of government in a strong hand, because the ignorant people require an exceedingly firm guardianship; they will establish a single state bank, concentrating in its hands all commercial, industrial, agricultural and even scientific production, and then divide the masses into two armies – industrial and agricultural – under the direct command of the state engineers, who will constitute a new privileged scientific-political estate.’ Bakunin (72-73)

- ‘The ‘ultra-left’ critic foresaw in these developments a new attack on human freedom and a more efficient system of exploitation. The Western sociologist sees in the rise of intellectuals to effective power the hope for a more humane and smoothly functioning society, in which problems can be solved by ‘piecemeal technology.’ Who has the sharper eye? At least this much is plain: there are dangerous tendencies in the ideology of the welfare state intelligentsia who claim to possess the technique and understanding required to manage our ‘postindustrial society’ and to organize an international society dominated by American superpower.’ (125)

- ‘No doubt McNamara succeeded in doing with utmost efficiency that which should not be done at all. No doubt he has shown an unparalleled mastery of the logistics of coercion and repression, combined with the most astonishing inability to comprehend political and human factors.’ (126)

- ‘So long as we are not dealing honestly and adequately with this ninety percent of our problem, there is something ludicrous, and perhaps hypocritical, about our concern over the ten percent of violence employed by the rebels against oppression.’ A.J. Muste (161)

- ‘Those who can bring themselves to renounce wealth, position and power accruing from a social system based on violence and putting a premium on acquisitiveness, and to identify themselves in some real fashion with the struggle of the masses toward the light, may help in a measure – more, doubtless, by life than by words – to devise a more excellent way, a technique of social progress less crude, brutal, costly and slow than mankind has yet evolved.’ A.J. Muste (161)

- ‘Young men are being faced every day with the questions posed at Nuremberg as their country devotes itself to enforcing the ‘stability’ of the graveyard.’ (162)

- ‘When the enemy is a remote technician programming B-52 raids or ‘pacification,’ there is no possibility for a human confrontation and the psychological basis for nonviolent tactics, whatever it may be, simply evaporates.’ (162-163)

- ‘With this narrowing of the range of the thinkable comes an inability to comprehend how the weak and dispossessed can resist our benevolent manipulation of their lives.’ (163)

- ‘A society that is capable of producing concepts like ‘un-American’ and ‘peacenik’ – of turning ‘peace’ into a dirty word – has advanced a long way towards immunizing the individual against any human appeal.’ (163)

- ‘American society has reached the stage of near total immersion in ideology.’ (163)

- ‘Writing in 1941, Muste saw the war as ‘a conflict between two groups of powers for survival and domination. One set of powers, which includes Britain and the United States, and perhaps ‘free’ France, controls some 70% of the earth’s resources and thirty million square miles of territory. The imperialistic status quo thus to their advantage was achieved by a series of wars including the last one. All they ask now is to be left at peace, and if so they are disposed to make their rule mild though firm….On the other hand stands a group of powers, such as Germany, Italy, Hungary, Japan, controlling about 15% of the earth’s resources and one million square miles of territory, equally determined to alter the situation in their own favor, to impose their ideas of ‘order,’ and armed to the teeth to do that, even if it means plunging the whole world into war.’ ’ (164-165)

- ‘[Muste] foresaw that an Allied victory would yield ‘a new American empire’ incorporating a subservient Britain, ‘that we shall be the next nation to seek world domination – in other words, to do what we condemn Hitler for trying to do.’ ’ (165)

- ‘The situation as of 1936 is summarized as follows by Neumann: ‘When an effort to set a quota on imports of bleached and colored cotton cloths failed, President Roosevelt finally took direct action. In May of 1936 he invoked the flexible provision of the tariff law and ordered an average increase of 42 percent in the duty on these categories of imports. By this date Japan’s cotton goods had begun to suffer from restrictive measures taken by more than half of their other markets. Japanese xenophobia was further stimulated as tariff barriers [rose] against Japanese goods, like earlier barriers against Japanese immigrants, and presented a convincing picture of western encirclement. The most secure markets were those which Japan could control politically; an argument for further political expansion…against an iron ring of tariffs.’ It is hardly astonishing, then, that in 1937 Japan again began to expand at the expense of China.’ (192)

- ‘ ‘The government is of the opinion that any bombardment of an extensive zone containing a sizeable population engaged in their peaceful pursuits is inadmissible and runs counter to the principles of law and humanity.’ Now that these principles have been repealed, it is difficult to recapture the feeling of horror at the events themselves and of contempt for those who had perpetrated them.’ (195)

- ‘The only action on our part that can mitigate the torture, that can avert the still greater catastrophe that lies in wait, is to remove the military force that bears the primary responsibility. Since, happily, this is the one policy that we can successfully implement, there is a feasible alternative to devastation of Vietnam of a global conflict.’ (222)

- ‘If the South Vietnamese forces of Prime Minister Ky are so inadequate in numbers, intelligence, and training that they cannot handle entirely the pacification program in the villages…, then instead of Americans trying to train, indoctrinate, and pacify an alien people, the time is long past due for us to withdraw to our coastal bases and eventually from Vietnam.’ Senator Young (223)

- ‘We can be fairly sure that this latest step will lead to new and glorious reports of success, before the next rude awakening.’ (226)

- ‘Nor is it obscure why the American government continues to use its military force to impose on the people of Vietnam the regime of the most corrupt, most reactionary elements in Vietnamese society. There is simply no one else who will do its bidding, and resist the overwhelming popular sentiment for peace and, no doubt, neutralism.’ (230)

- ‘It seems unlikely that either Saigon or Washington will be trapped into negotiations, so long as the political base of those who collaborate with us in South Vietnam remains as weak as it is today.’ (235)

- There is no aggressor in history who could not have provided a similar ‘justification’ for his actions – and many have offered precisely such justifications. The assumption that we have the right to impose our will on the Vietnamese (in their best interests, of course) is almost unchallenged.’ (247)

- ‘It is the principle that the United States, and the United States alone, may intervene in the internal affairs of other nations to guarantee political stability and even to restructure their society.’ (248)

- ‘There is of course a sense in which the liberal critics are correct when they refer to the Vietnam war as an ‘aberration.’ In Vietnam, we lost control. The Vietnamese refused to play the game the way they were expected to when the war was simulated on the RAND Corporation computers. They did not realize that they were supposed to yield when the pressure reached a certain point. Therefore, we were forced to escalate beyond any reasonable level, to a stage where our economy and society can hardly bear the cost.’ (253)

- ‘The unshakable belief in American goodwill and generosity that persists through each calamity – notably, among the self-styled ‘hardheaded and pragmatic liberals’ – and that stultifies political thinking and debases political discourse.’ (254)

- ‘The ‘international Communist conspiracy’ is a perfect propaganda device to justify actions that reinforce and extend American hegemony, serving our aims just as ‘bourgeois influence and American scheming’ serve those of Russia imperialism. In both cases there is, of course, a background of fact that gives a superficial plausibility to the fabrications of the propagandist.’ (258-259)

- ‘We are confronted with a mysterious but dangerous force, which cannot be located or specified in any concrete terms, but which is there, threatening us.’ (261)

- ‘The unpleasant fact is that if one wishes to pursue the Munich analogy there is only one plausible contender for the role of Hitler.’ (261-262)

- ‘There is surely no greater irony than the demand that to ensure world peace, the United States must develop a strategy for the containment of China. China is surrounded by American missiles and huge military bases supporting an army eight thousand miles from home.’ (262)

- ‘What would be the consequences of a withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam? If past events are any guide, the cessation of aggressive military action by the United States will lead to a disengagement of North Vietnamese units, as happened, apparently, during the bombing pause in January 1966.’ (269)

- ‘A discussion of American schools can hardly avoid noting the fact that these schools are the first training ground for the troops that will enforce the muted, unending terror of the status quo in the coming years of a projected American century.’ (310)

- ‘The civilization and justice of bourgeois order comes out in its lurid light whenever the slaves and drudges of that order rise against their masters; then this civilization and justice stand forth as undisguised savagery and lawless revenge.’ Marx (311)

- ‘Instead of shocked denunciations, we hear and read mock-serious discussions of the rationality of the American attempt to drive the North Vietnamese by force towards the negotiations that they have been demanding; of the sincere American desire to permit the South Vietnamese people to elect freely the government of their choice (now that the domestic opposition has been crushed and all Communist and neutralist candidates excluded); of the ‘great complexity’ of international affairs (which, strangely, did not seem to justify Russian domination of East Europe of the Japanese attempt to impose a new order in Asia); if the judicious restraint of the administration, presumably, in refraining from genocide at a single stroke; and so on.’ (315)

- ‘It is, to be sure, ridiculous to propose that the schools, in any country, deal objectively with contemporary history – they cannot sufficiently free themselves from the pressures of ideology for that. But it is not necessarily absurd to suppose that in Western democracies, at least, it should be possible to study in a fairly objective way the national scandals of the past.’ (315-316)

- ‘No one can fail to see that to the extent that he restricts his protest, to the extent that he rejects actions that are open to him, he accepts complicity in what the government does.’ (368)

- ‘I speak of Senator Mansfield precisely because he is not a breast-beating superpatriot who wants American to rule the world, but is rather an American intellectual in the best sense, a scholarly and reasonable man – the kind of man who is the terror of our age. Perhaps this is merely a personal reaction, but when I look at what is happening to our country, what I find most terrifying is not Curtis LeMay, with his cheerful suggestion that we bomb our ‘enemies’ back into the Stone Age, but rather the calm disquisitions of the political scientists on just how much force will be necessary to achieve our ends, or just what form of government will be acceptable to us in Vietnam. What I find terrifying is the detachment and equanimity with which we view and discuss an unbearable tragedy.’ (371)

- ‘We all know that if Russia or China were guilty of what we have done in Vietnam, we would be exploding with moral indignation at these monstrous crimes.’ (371)

- ‘Soldiers are unwitting instruments of terror; one does not blame or attack the club that is used to bludgeon someone to death. They are also human beings, with sensibilities to which one can perhaps appeal.’ (374)

- ‘There is in fact strong evidence that one soldier, perhaps three or four, refused to obey orders and was placed under arrest. The soldiers, after all, are in much the same position as the draft resisters. If they obey orders, they become brutalized by what they do; if they do not, the personal consequences are severe. It is a situation that deserves compassion, not abuse. But we should retain a sense of proportion in the matter. Everything that I saw or heard indicates that the demonstrators played only a small role in initiating the considerable violence that occurred.’ (374)

- ‘There is a note of shrill desperation in the recent defense of the American war in Vietnam. We hear less about ‘bringing freedom and democracy’ to the South Vietnamese and more about the ‘national interest.’ ’ (376)

- ‘The shift in propaganda makes it much easier for critical analysis to attack the problem of Vietnam at its core, which is in Washington and Boston, not in Saigon and Hanoi. There is something ludicrous, after all, in the close attention that opponents of the war give to the political and social problems of Vietnam.’ (377)

- ‘We can emphasize what must be obvious to a person with a grain of political intelligence: that the present world problem is not ‘containing China’ but containing the United States.’ (378)

- ‘We are, of course, in a domestic political environment very different from that of the citizens of Germany or Japan. Here, is takes no heroism to protest.’ (378)

- ‘Resisters who hope to save the people of Vietnam from destruction must select the issues they confront and the means they employ in such a way as to attract as much popular support as possible for their efforts.’ (379)

- ‘The issue of whether we, alone among the nations of the world, have the authority and the competence to determine the social and political institutions of Vietnam.’ (383)

- ‘Resistance is in part a moral responsibility, in part a tactic to affect government policy.’ (384)

- ‘The purpose of dissent is to mobilize opinion against the use of American force to impose a political solution in Vietnam – to the hideous extent it is used today, to the still more barbaric extent of tomorrow, or in fact, to any extent at all – whatever the costs may be.’ (390)

- ‘Of course, the resister must choose his tactics so as to maximize the probability that the developing opposition will take a civilized form – in the case of Vietnam, withdrawal rather than annihilation – and he must accompany his resistance with the kind of dissent that will seek to raise the general level of political and moral consciousness.’ (391)

- ‘To me is seems that draft resistance meets these conditions.’ (391)

- ‘An attempt to draft students will, if resistance develops, put the government in the position of tolerating an open violation of the law or of carrying out serious punitive acts against the children of the social and economic elite.’ (391)

- ‘It is a remarkable fact that in this democracy, not a single public figure, no segment of the mass media, advocates the position which, according to recent international Gallup polls, is that of the overwhelming majority in most of the ‘free world.’ ’ (392)

- ‘No doubt one of the pressures on the government to end the war is the fear that the troops will be needed to occupy American cities and to enforce the status quo at home.’ (395)

- ‘The real task, for the present, is to organize as large as possible a base for support for resistance – a proliferation of local resistance support groups linked together in a national network, with participation of white and black resisters, with adult middle-class support on and off campus.’ (396)

- ‘In considering some tactic of protest or resistance, we must ask what its consequences are likely to be for the people of Vietnam or of Guatemala or of Harlem.’ (397)

- ‘The goal must be to design and construct alternatives to the present ideology and social institutions that are more compelling on intellectual and moral grounds, and that can draw to them masses of Americans who find that these alternatives satisfy their human needs – including the human need to show compassion, to encourage and to assist those who seek to raise themselves from the misery and degradation that our society has helped to impose and now seeks to perpetuate.’ (398)

- ‘It is quite easy to design tactics that will help to consolidate the latent forces of a potential American fascism. To mention just one obvious example, verbal and physical abuse of the police, however great the provocation, can have only this effect. Such tactics may seem ‘radical’ and, in a narrow sense, justified by the magnitude of the infamy and evil that they seek to overcome. They are not.’ (398)

- ‘By any objective standard, the United States has become the most aggressive power in the world, the greatest threat to peace, to national self-determination, and to international cooperation. At the same time, we enjoy a high degree of internal freedom. We can speak and write and organize. Resisters may be punished severely, but they will not be sent to slave-labor camps or gas chambers. Given these facts, resistance is feasible even for those who are not heroes by nature, and it is an obligation.’ (400)