Noam Chomsky Quotes
Why was the United States so afraid of an independent South Vietnam? Well, I think the reason again is pretty clear from the internal government documents. Precisely what they were afraid of was that the "takeover" of South Vietnam by nationalist forces would not be brutal. They feared it would be conciliatory and that there would be successful social and economic development - and that the whole region might work.
Chomsky, Noam. Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky. Edited by Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel, The New Press, 2002.
Most Americans had not then realized that American troops had gotten involved in the Vietnamese Civil War. For some this was shocking. Kennedy helped his brother, President Kennedy, arrange for a coup to replace President Ngo Dinh Diem in which the man we pledged to “stand by” was murdered. He turned out to be thoroughly corrupt, and had little if any more respect for democracy and human rights than the North Vietnamese leadership did. Nonetheless we broke a pledge to an ally. This and similar promises that are not kept complicates American diplomacy as there is rarely complete trust in the pledges of American officials.
The occasion was the visit to Washington of French Minister M. Jean Letourneau. The French were fighting the communists in Vietnam and the U. S., not yet in the fight, promised material and political aid, but no military participation. It was almost a decade later that America sent its first military personnel to Vietnam. The West was persuaded that the French could handle the situation. When they were defeated, America and Britain assumed that it was the notorious military incompetence of the French that accounted for the situation rather than the competence and commitment of the Vietnamese Communists and their support of the majority of the people.
sending American troops to Vietnam
This quotation illustrates the derogatory and disrespectful attitude that many high level American officials then had towards Arab leaders. No one objected to or reprimanded Symmes for his use of the word “mongrels”. And he was the State Departments leading expert on the Middle East and Arab Cultures. In the photo, Symmes is the gentlemen on the right.
Ford was then a member of Congress. This was known as the “Domino Theory” and was the strategic reason that sending troops to Vietnam was in America’s vital Interest. However, the Domino Theory was incorrect. Vietnam did fall to the Communists, and yet NONE of the countries became communist. Actually, they became even more democratic.
Most socialists in American and elsewhere initially supported the United States policy of intervention in the Vietnamese civil war. While they disapproved of much of the general economic policy, the Russian, Chinese and other Communist trampling on human rights seemed like a worse alternative.
The “help” was a covert CIA 1954 operation that overthrew the government
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He is Laureate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona and Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and is the author of more than 150 books on topics such as linguistics, war, politics, and mass media. Ideologically, he aligns with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism.
