Noam Chomsky -
A reviewer of Townsend Hoopes' book in the New York Times describes it as the most persuasive presentation of the case for American withdrawal from Vietnam. It is instructive to compare his position with that of the ‘hawks’ on the one hand, and that of the Tribunal, on the other. Such a comparison shows how narrow is the gap between the ‘hawks’ and the ‘doves’, and how far removed the dove-hawk position still remains from the consciousness that Russell hoped would be aroused by the factual record and historical and legal argument of the Tribunal. I want to stress that Hoopes’s is one of the most humane and enlightened voices to be heard within the mainstream of American opinion today, surely among those who have had any significant role in the formation and implementation of policy. For this reason, his views are important and deserve careful consideration.
America’s early strategy, as Hoopes describes it, was to kill as many VC as possible with artillery and air strikes:
As late as the fall of 1966... a certain aura of optimism surrounded this strategy. Some were ready to believe that, in its unprecedented mobility and massive firepower, American forces had discovered the military answer to endless Asian manpower and Oriental indifference to death. For a few weeks there hung in the expectant Washington air the exhilarating possibility that the most modern, mobile, professional American field force in the nation’s history was going to lay to rest the time-honoured superstition, the gnawing unease of military planners, that a major land war against Asian hordes is by definition a disastrous plunge into quicksand for any Western army.
But this glorious hope was dashed. The endless manpower of Vietnam, the Asian hordes with their Oriental indifference to death, confounded our strategy. And our bombing of North Vietnam also availed us little, given the nature of the enemy. As Hoopes explains, quoting a senior US Army officer: ‘Caucasians cannot really imagine what ant labour can do.’ In short, our strategy was rational, but it presupposed civilized Western values:
We believe the enemy can be forced to be ‘reasonable’, i.e. to compromise or even capitulate, because we assume he wants to avoid pain, death, and material destruction. We assume that if these are inflicted on him with increasing severity, then at some point in the process he will want to stop the suffering. Ours is a plausible strategy - for those who are rich, who love life and fear pain. But happiness, wealth, and {16} power are expectations that constitute a dimension far beyond the experience, and probably beyond the emotional comprehension, of the Asian poor.
Hoopes does not tell us how he knows that the Asian poor do not love life or fear pain, or that happiness is probably beyond their emotional comprehension.10 But he does go on to explain how ‘ideologues in Asia’ make use of these characteristics of the Asian hordes. Their strategy is to convert ‘Asia’s capacity for endurance in suffering into an instrument for exploiting a basic vulnerability of the Christian West’. They do this by inviting the West ‘to carry its strategic logic to the final conclusion, which is genocide’. The Asians thus ‘defy us by a readiness to struggle, suffer, and die on a scale that seems to us beyond the bounds of humanity.... At that point we hesitate, for, remembering Hitler and Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we realize anew that genocide is a terrible burden to bear.’
Thus by their willingness to die, the Asian hordes, who do not love life, who fear no pain and cannot conceive of happiness, exploit our basic weakness, our Christian values which make us reluctant to bear the burden of genocide, the final conclusion of our strategic logic. Is it really possible that one can read these passages without being stunned by the crudity and callousness?
infotrad.clara.co.uk |
