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Title: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (Political Economy of Human Rights, Vol 1) by Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman ISBN: 0-89608-090-0 Publisher: South End Press Pub. Date: May, 1980 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (5 reviews)
Rating: 1
Summary: Totalitarian Apologetics
Comment: The pseudo-scholarly appearance of this book - replete with quotations and footnotes - should fool no-one: this is a work of propaganda, in which American allies are furiously attacked and communist dictatorships relentlessly excused. Perhaps its most noteworthy feature is the assertion that "Washington has become the torture and political murder capital of the world" (p16), although not one of the reactionary crimes cited by the authors amounts to even a microscopic fraction of the tens of millions who had just been slaughtered in the People's Republic of China or the millions who were dying at that very moment at the hands of communist butchers in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, let alone the countless victims of genocidal Soviet client regimes, from Ethiopia and Uganda to Angola and Mozambique.
Needless to say, this book flatly denies the post-war atrocities in Vietnam, congratulating the communist dictatorship on its "miracle of reconciliation and restraint" (p28) and concluding that there has been "no bloodbath, so far as is known; nothing like what happened in France" after the Second World War (pp79-80). The statement is remarkable, both for its denial of crimes against humanity and for its suggestion that had such crimes taken place, the victims would have deserved no more sympathy than Nazi collaborators. Needless to say, the authors do not cite any of the abundant contemporary accounts of repression and brutality (e.g. Doan Van Toai, "The Vietnamese Gulag"), nor have they updated this book to refer to the studies documenting the massacre of 100,000 civilians (Jacqueline Desbarats, "Repression in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam," online) - with victims beheaded, disembowelled or buried alive (Wall Street Journal, April 22, 1985) - or the death of 165,000 in concentration camps (Orange County Register, April 29, 2001) or the drowning of 500,000 boat people during communist expulsions (Louis Wiesner, "Victims and Survivors: Displaced Persons and Other War Victims in Vietnam, 1954-1975," p344). Could any reader, no matter how diligent, guess the truth from these pages?
Hardly less shameful is the whitewashing of massive communist atrocities during the war, such as the claim that Viet Cong success was based on "understanding and trying to meet the needs of the masses" (p340), or the suggestion that the terrorists are "not likely to resort to bloodbaths" because they seek the support of the peasants (p341). The reader is not told that Viet Cong death squads butchered 27,500 civilians during 1957-67, or that the victims - typically doctors, teachers, social workers and their families - died after sadistic torture and mutilation: sometimes the Viet Cong "chop off a finger or a hand" as a warning, while in other cases "they disembowel a man or impale him alive" (Newsweek, May 15, 1967). The reader is not told of North Vietnamese war crimes such as the mass murder of up to 155,000 refugees on the road to Tuy-Hoa in March 1975 (Wiesner, pp318-9). Omissions such as these would make Orwell cringe.
Having denied these atrocities - surely some of the most hideous crimes in living memory - the book turns to "the two most important mythical bloodbaths," namely the North Vietnamese land reform and the Viet Cong massacres at Hue (p341). On the pre-war genocide in North Vietnam, the authors rely on a long-refuted piece of communist agitprop by Gareth Porter, who fabricated mistranslations of sources, smeared witnesses as CIA agents, treated North Vietnamese official statistics as gospel truth and would later argue that Cambodia's killing fields did not exist - the evidence being that the Khmer Rouge said so (Robert F. Turner, "Expert Punctures 'No Bloodbath' Myth: Gareth Porter Refuted," Human Events, November 11, 1972; Stephen J. Morris, "Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot and Cornell," The National Interest, Summer 1989). By contrast, the authors completely ignore the numerous sources demonstrating that 50,000-100,000 were massacred and 300,000-500,000 starved to death (Robert F. Turner, "Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development," pp142-4).
On the massacre at Hue, the authors quote from a captured document in which the Viet Cong boast of having "eliminated" thousands of people, but they dismiss the evidence because "nowhere in the document is it claimed or even suggested that any civilians had been executed" (p348). So "eliminated" does not mean "executed." No satirist could invent such an argument. They do not mention the many other Viet Cong documents proving the massacres (Stephen T. Hosmer, "Viet Cong Repression and its Implications for the Future," pp72-8), such as the report boasting that they had "annihilated members of various reactionary political parties, henchmen, and wicked tyrants" in Hue (ibid., p73). Nor do they disclose that North Vietnam also admitted communist responsibility for the bloodbath, gloating at "the hooligan lackeys who had owed blood debts to the Tri-Thien Hue compatriots and who were annihilated" in the Tet Offensive (Radio Hanoi, April 27, 1969).
Quite simply, there is no limit to the absurdity of the denials in this book: we are even told that "the apparent absence of retributory killings in post-war Vietnam" proves that there was no massacre at Hue (p353). Applying this logic elsewhere, perhaps we can imagine some neo-Nazi tract which defends the claim that the Kristallnacht pogrom was a hoax with the assertion that the Holocaust never happened. Note that such analogies are rather generous to the work under review, since the atrocities which the authors deny are far less widely known than their Nazi equivalents, therefore much more easily concealed.
Like all sophisticated propaganda, this book contains particles of truth. The authors are right to condemn Indonesian atrocities in East Timor. But can we take their indignation seriously, when they zealously defend communist butchers in Vietnam? Is anyone impressed by double standards on genocide?
Rating: 4
Summary: A discussion of American involvement in the Third World
Comment: Volume 1 of Political Economy of Human Rights is a journal of American Imperialism in the contemporary context of the Third World.
At over 350 pages, and replete with another 70 pages of notes and references, this tome is no less a scholarly endeavour than the other works of the authors and consequently provides for an informative look at US activity in most of the Third World. The book considers most countries in separate sections, provides background and historical reference and examines cause and effect.
One common motif of the book is 'stability' as coveted above all by American interests and how different overt and covert means are imposed upon different countries to achieve it.
The Washington Connection... is a brilliant foray into parts seldom travelled by popular media and recommended.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Devastating Indictment of U.S. Imperialism
Comment: Writing in 1979, using Church sources, reports from human rights groups, non-american and occasionally mainstream American news sources, and other means to document, the authors show that the regimes in the third world which the United States has provided heavy support, have often been incomparably worse that any Soviet sattelite or client in the post-Stalin era. Paraguay under Stroessner, Bolivia under Banzer, Brazil, Argentina and Guatemala under military rule, Nicaragua under Somoza, South Vietnam under Diem and Theiu, are among the regimes examined. The role of the mainstream U.S. media in covering up this support is demonstrated. There is an in-depth examination of Indonesia's invasion and subsequent genocide in East Timor, which had heavy U.S. support from its inception.
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Title: After the Cataclysm, Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology by Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman ISBN: 0896081001 Publisher: South End Press Pub. Date: October, 1979 List Price(USD): $23.75 |
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Title: Manufacturing Consent : The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman ISBN: 0375714499 Publisher: Pantheon Books Pub. Date: 15 January, 2002 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance (The American Empire Project) by Noam Chomsky ISBN: 0805074007 Publisher: Metropolitan Books Pub. Date: 04 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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Title: For Reasons of State by Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy ISBN: 1565847946 Publisher: New Press Pub. Date: 15 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title:Noam Chomsky - Distorted Morality: America's War on Terror? ASIN: B00008AOW1 Publisher: Koch Vision Entertai Pub. Date: 25 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $7.98 Comparison N/A, buy it from Amazon for $7.98 |
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