Customer Reviews

American Power and the New Mandarins: Historical and Political Essays

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

American Power and the New Mandarins, first published in 1967, is a collection of essays by Noam Chomsky about the Vietnam War and related subjects. Originally famous for his contributions to linguistics, Chomsky began writing extensively about U.S. foreign policy during the Vietnam War, and this collection is the first of his many political books. While the subject matter is a bit dated, those who are interested in either the intellectual climate during the Vietnam era or the origins of Chomsky's career as a critic of U.S. policy will find plenty to interest them in this book.

Chomsky's primary goal in American Power and the New Mandarins is not to convince the reader that the Vietnam War was wrong. On this issue, he says that "Anyone who puts a fraction of his mind to the task can construct a case [against the war] that is overwhelming" (9). Rather, his goal is to illustrate the degree to which American intellectuals supported the war, or at least the assumptions behind it. Many people remember the Vietnam War as a time of widespread protest against U.S. policy, with intellectuals and the youth leading the way. Chomsky argues that the war's "opponents" were often not concerned with the moral issues related to the war, but rather with the fact that the war seemed to be unwinnable and was costing too many American lives. The implication is that these intellectuals would not be protesting if the U.S. had crushed the Vietnamese resistance without significant loss of American life (Vietnamese life being irrelevant).

The book is made up of eight essays of varying length, and an introduction and an epilogue.

- In "Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship," Chomsky introduces the concept of the "new mandarins"--those who claim the authority to determine policy based on their allegedly "scientific" understanding of human nature and technology. These "new mandarins" believe that their knowledge gives them the right to restructure society in Vietnam and elsewhere, regardless of the wishes of the local population. In addition, Chomsky argues that many intellectuals tend to accept the status quo and support the basic assumptions of U.S. policy--that Western nations always know best, and force is justified to keep Third World countries from going down the "wrong" path. This essay is not very concise or organized; Chomsky has plenty of evidence to present but it flows out in no particular order. Chomsky devotes nearly 50 pages to criticizing a single historian's book about the Spanish Civil War--an excellent example, in Chomsky's opinion, of "the deep-seated bias of liberal historians," (93) but a cumbersome way to make his point. Still, whatever its organizational shortcomings, this essay presents plenty of evidence to illustrate the biases of liberal intellectuals in favor of American power.

- In "The Revolutionary Pacifism of A. J. Muste: On the Backgrounds of the Pacific War," Chomsky explains the parallels between the Vietnam War and Japanese expansion in China in the 1930's. In both cases, defenders of government policy appealed to "the high moral character of the intervention, the benefits it would bring to the suffering masses" (183). Both America and Japan tried to set up puppet governments to serve their interests, and responded to doubts about their actions by emphasizing the "Communist" threat (196).

- "The Logic of Withdrawal" discusses the political strength of the NLF (Vietcong) and the continuing resistance of the United States to any political settlement that might allow the Vietnamese a fair choice between the NLF and other alternatives. Chomsky ridicules the idea that an NLF political victory could pose any threat to America's survival, comparing this to the Nazis' claim that "a Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy was threatening the survival of Germany" (249).

- "The Bitter Heritage" is Chomsky's review of Arthur Schlesinger's book of the same name. Schlesinger expresses the "liberal" view that the United States had made a tactical error by fighting a costly war, but that American motives were pure. Chomsky argues that this view represents the extreme limit of mainstream opposition to the war in the United States. The view that "the United States has no unilateral right to determine by force the course of development of the nations of the Third World" (297) is not considered to be "responsible criticism" (296).

- In "Some Thoughts on Intellectuals and the Schools" and "The Responsibility of Intellectuals," Chomsky continues his criticism of intellectuals who endorse the irresponsible use of American power.

- "On Resistance" and "Supplement to 'On Resistance'" are Chomsky's statements about how to protest the war. Chomsky argues that resistance should remain nonviolent, not only because of moral considerations, but also because violence "will surely fail, will simply frighten and alienate some who can be reached, and will further encourage the ideologists and administrators of repression" (374-5). Chomsky endorses the refusal to be drafted as an ideal means of resistance, since it directly impedes the government's ability to carry out its policies and can be used to make a visible statement as well.

If you are a Chomsky fan, you will probably enjoy this book; his writing style and basic outlook have remained consistent over the decades. He has written plenty of books and essays about more recent events, however, so if you are interested in American power in general rather than Vietnam in particular, you might want to check the newer ones out first.

This is a collection of essays from 1966 through 1968, Noam Chomsky's first political book, published in 1969 when he was fourty years old, after he had established himself as the Einstein of linguistics. Of course, it's a little bit dated but it's remarkable how little Chomsky's critique has changed, how cogent it was from its very beginning. Many of the thoughts in this book, certainly on resistance to the state, have great pertinancy today.

His target was the liberal intelligensia, the "best and the brightest." These brethren (Douglas Pike, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Samuel Huntington, Walt Rostow, Dean Rusk, New York Times correspondent Neal Sheehan et. al), Chomsky shows quite compellingly, helped engineer and/or provided intellectual rationalization for one of the most barbaric wars in human history. These rationalizations were quite openly expressed in the newspapers, journals of opinion, congressional testimony, U.S. AID reports, and so on. They went something like this: We are fighting against the National Liberation Front, the so-called Viet Cong which enjoys great support amongst the South Vietnamese population and has received little aid from the North. The fact that it is to a large extent supported by the population is irrelevant. The NLF threaten our security. No indiginous force in South Vietnam, with the exception of the Buddhists, has any remotely comparable level of support. Therefore, since we can't compete in the political field, in 1954 we violated the Geneva agreements and set up a terror and torture regime in South Vietnam, with large numbers of American "advisors" helping, that used extreme violence to help compensate for its lack of political support. We made sure that the seventeenth parallel, intended in the Geneva accords as only a temporary demarcation line, was made permanent and sabotoged efforts to hold the elections in 1956 for national reunification called for in the accords. We're weak politically but we are unrivaled militarily and in the other resources of violence at our disposal. In the late 50's our response began to elicit a violent reaction from the NLF, the main target of our repression. Our allies are almost always the most feudal, reactionary and brutal elements of South Vietnam, who can never elicit any support amongst the general population. So we have to destroy the NLF, which means to "dislodge it from its constituency" which means we have to destroy its supporters and all of their homes, villages, natural environment, and so on, which means we have to take actions that will perhaps exterminate those supporters, the rural population of South Vietnam. We, who believe in behaviorist psychology, don't see anything wrong with what we are doing and believe it is fundamentally just and in the best interests of the people of South Vietnam who are perhaps somewhat unfit for self-government. We held "free and fair" elections that excluded any "neutralist," communist, socialist, NLF sympathizers and other such rascals from taking part.

The debate in the mainsteam on this issue was between people on the one hand like Joe Alsop on the right, who argued that if America just kept applying more and more military force i.e. tried to wipe Vietnam off the planet it could eventually prevail and on the other hand people on the "left" like Schlesinger Jr. who prayed that this policy would work yet thought it would be too costly in the long run. Chomsky expresses thoughts that would come to any remotely civilized human being upon viewing this spectacle.

Chomsky also devotes an iconoclastic, though at times somewhat ponderously written chapter to the Spanish civil war, a very good chapter on the background to Japan's role in World War Two and demolishes the establishment myths about the Cold War. He urges intellectuals to be iconoclasts, to serve truth and justice, not power and privillege.

Also of some interest is a paraphrase of a quote from Harry Truman by James Warburg that Chomsky quotes. In the first edition Chomsky attributed the quote exclusively to Truman; it was corrected and attributed to Warburg, very similar to Truman's original quote, in the second edition of the book published shortly after. If one reads any serious journal of the Social Sciences or other such fields one often finds a list of errors at the end of even favorable reviews. But the commissars jumped on it and it has been the subject of dozens of articles and hundreds of references over the years. Schlesinger in "Cycles Of American History" declared that Chomsky had fabricated the quote. It is a tribute to Chomsky that they were quite unable to address his main arguments and chose to endlessly quible over the trivial quote (one of the lesser canards about him, behind the one about his support for the Khmer Rouge and the one about his support for Robert Faurisson).

I recently reread Chomsky's classic. It's very enlightening to see the parallels as well as the differences between the role America's "intelligencia" played during the Vietnam War and the role they are playing now with just another war "won".

During the Vietnam war the United States used its enormous military power to try to install in South Vietnam a minority government of U.S. choice, with its military operations based on the knowledge that the people there were the enemy. This country killed millions and left Vietnam (and the rest of Indochina) devastated. A Wall Street Journal report in 1997 estimated that perhaps 500,000 children in Vietnam suffer from serious birth defects resulting from the U.S. use of chemical weapons there. Seems fairly reasonable to protest against this, surely?... This was and is a groundbreaking book, and ....

Chomsky's first political book, _American Power_ is a devastating critique for the U.S. foray into Southeast Asia, which Chomsky considers to be little more than modified imperialism. The book starts somewhat slowly, first with an extended essay focusing largely on the Spanish Civil War, which though interesting, seems like a strange place to begin the discussion. The second essay focuses on the decision of drop nuclear weapons during World War II, and the absence of "war guilt" in the U.S. over that action. The second essay, like the first, is interesting, though not seemingly directly related to Chomsky's Vietnam critique. The remainder of work focuses quite squarely on Vietnam, and offers the sort of moral outrage that Chomsky contends was conspicuously lacking from the liberal academics of the time. The entire underpinning of Chomsky's premise has to do with the morality of U.S. action, rather than the pragmatism that he chides others for basing their positions on.

The book is quite powerful in many of its conclusions. A few criticisms: there is extensive use of irony throughout the work, occasionally to the point of excess; while Chomsky eviscerates a half dozen of the "liberal intelligensia", it's difficult for me, as someone who was not alive to witness the war, to know if these voices typify the liberal objections to the war, or if Chomsky has cherry-picked these individuals (obviously Schlesinger was a major voice, but I'm not familiar with the others); if you don't have some conception of the forces behind the Spanish Civil War, the first essay will be somewhat confusing. It was for me, anyway.

Altogether though, particularly in light the U.S. invasion of Iraq, many of Chomsky's ideas have taken on a new urgency. The comparision between Vietnam and Iraq will come very naturally as you read _American Power_. It is well worth our time to make this comparison. Chomsky's thesis is as valid now as it was in 1969.

Noam Chomsky's first political work is a first-rate collection of essays critiquing the U.S. war of aggression in Vietnam. Chomsky is more concerned here with the ideological defenses for the war than with the moral implications of the war itself, which are totally transparent at this late date. There are a wide variety of topics discussed in this broad volume, from the origins of the Pacific War to Arthur Schlesinger's liberal apologetics for U.S. imperialism. Chomsky's famous essay 'Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship' is a meandering account of the liberal intelligentsia's understanding of the Spanish Civil War. In it, Chomsky falls into the pitfalls of ultra-leftism, with low quality critiques of Bolshevism and Leninism. He relies on Rosa Luxemburg's fine criticisms of Lenin without examining Luxemburg's own political context in the German SDP, or her own explicit support for forming a revolutionary 'vanguard.' However, there are some fine passages in 'American Power and the New Mandarins,' such as 'The Logic of Withdrawal' or Chomsky's own personal reflections on the demonstrations at the Pentagon. This book will surely remain one of the better examinations of the criminal war in Vietnam for years to come.