Noam Chomsky/Hanoi Chomsky

Hanoi Chomsky: Noam Chomsky, Viet Cong Cheerleader

By Tim Starr, 2002 [1] [2]

“ Yesterday and today, my friends and I visited Tanh Hoa province. There we were able to see at first hand the constructive work of the social revolution of the Vietnamese people. We saw luxurious fields and lovely countryside. We saw brave men and women who know how to defend their country from brutal aggression, but also to work with pride and with dignity to build a society of material prosperity, social justice, and cultural progress. I would like to express the great joy that we feel in your accomplishments.

We also saw the ruins of dwellings and hospitals, villages mutilated by savage bombardments, craters disfiguring the peaceful countryside. In the midst of the creative achievements of the Vietnamese people, we came face to face with the savagery of a technological monster controlled by a social class, the rulers of the American empire, that has no place in the 20th century, that has only the capacity to repress and murder and destroy.

We also saw the (Ham Ranh) Bridge, standing proud and defiant, and carved on the bills above we read the words, ’determined to win.’ The people of Vietnam will win, they must win, because your cause is the cause of humanity as it moves forward toward liberty and justice, toward the socialist society in which free, creative men control their own destiny.

This is my first visit to Vietnam. Nevertheless, since the moment when we arrived at the airport at Hanoi, I’ve had a remarkable and very satisfying feeling of being entirely at home. It is as if we are renewing old friendships rather than meeting new friends. It is as if we are returning to places that have a deep and personal meaning.

In part, this is because of the warmth and the kindness with which we have been received, wherever we have gone. In part, it is because for many years we have wished all our strength and will to stand beside you in your struggle. We are deeply grateful to you that you permit us to be part of your brave and historical struggle. We hope that there will continue to be strong bonds of comradeship between the people of Vietnam and the many Americans who wish you success and who detest with all of their being the hateful activities of the American government.

Those bonds of friendship are woven of many strands. From our point of view there is first of all the deep sympathy that we felt for the suffering of the Vietnamese people, which persists and increases in the southern part of your country, where the American aggression continues in full force.

There is, furthermore, a feeling of regret and shame that we must feel because we have not been able to stop the American war machine. More important still is our admiration for the people of Vietnam who have been able to defend themselves against the ferocious attack, and at the same time take great strides forward toward the socialist society.

But, above all, I think, is the feeling of pride. Your heroism reveals the capabilities of the human spirit and human will. Decent people throughout the world see in your struggle a model for themselves. They are in your debt, everlastingly, because you were in the forefront of the struggle to create a world in which the chains of oppression have been broken and replaced by social bonds among free men working in true solidarity and cooperation.

"Your courage and your achievements teach us that we too must be determined to win—not only to win the battle against American aggression in Southeast Asia, but also the battle against exploitation and racism in our own country.

I believe that in the United States there will be some day a social revolution that will be of great significance to us and to all of mankind, and if this hope is to be proven correct, it will be in large part because the people of Vietnam have shown us the way.

While in Hanoi I have had the opportunity to read the recent and very important book by Le Duan on the problems and tasks of the Vietnamese revolution. In it, he says that the fundamental interests of the proletariat of the people of all the world consists in at the same time in safeguarding world peace and moving the revolution forward in all countries. This is our common goal. We only hope that we can build upon your historic achievements. Thank you.

— Noam Chomsky, originally delivered on April 13, 1970 in Hanoi while he was visiting North Vietnam with a group of anti-war activists. Broadcast by Radio Hanoi on April 14, and published in the _Asia-Pacific Daily Report_ of the U.S. government’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service, April 16, 1970, pages K2-K3.

I first came across a quote from this speech in the book “DESTRUCTIVE GENERATION: Second Thoughts About the Sixties”, by Peter Collier & David Horowitz. I had read the book several years before, & was reminded of it during a debate I was having with some Chomsky fans (on the Usenet newsgroups alt.politics.libertarian, alt.fan.noam-chomsky, etc.) about Chomsky’s cover-up of the crimes of the Khmer Rouge. Re-reading “DESTRUCTIVE GENERATION” reminded me that he’d also made a speech cheering for the Viet Cong from Hanoi during the Vietnam War. This was additional evidence of Chomsky’s Commie sympathies, so I quoted the bit from his speech which had made it into “DESTRUCTIVE GENERATION” in my Usenet debate.

One of my opponents, a Chomsky defender & self-described “anarchist” of the anti-capitalist variety, Dan Clore, immediately denied that Chomsky had ever made any such speech, & called David Horowitz a “notorious liar”. He also accused Horowitz of using a fabricated quote from the socialist historian Ronald Radosh about Chomsky’s alleged policy of keeping quiet about the negative aspects of North Vietnam that Chomsky had seen on his tour of the country. Unfortunately, Collier & Horowitz didn’t indicate what their source for Chomsky’s Hanoi speech was, so I kept looking. I found the primary source in the book “POLITICAL PILGRIMS: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society”, by Paul Hollander. Then, with the irreplaceable help of Stephen Denney, an archivist with the UC Berkeley Indochina Center, I was able to obtain a transcript of the entire speech, which I have provided above.

Hanoi Chomsky II

By Tim Starr, July 22, 2002 [3][4][5][6]

It seems that the report of Noam Chomsky’s cheerleading speech for the Viet Cong in this blog provoked some discussion amongst left-anarchists.

Just as when they’ve been confronted with it before, they’ve first responded with denial that good ol’ Noam could’ve ever said any such thing, then with defenses of his saying all of those things, just like the neo-Nazis who deny the Holocaust then claim that the Jews would’ve only gotten what was coming to them, anyways, if the Nazis had actually tried to exterminate them.

First, the sources: I got it from Stephen Denney, who was at the time running the UC Berkeley Indochina Center. He got it from the U.S. Foreign Broadcast Information Service, which is praised by historians as a source of foreign broadcasts and has never been accused of fraud as far as I know. Chomsky’s own personal reply to the question about whether he gave the speech confirms that he did say and write such things at the time: “The passage quoted is reminiscent of things I actually wrote at the time, touching on the very same topics...” Chomsky then launches into an ad hominem attack against those who criticize him for supporting totalitarians by calling them totalitarians, which is both an ad hominem and a non-sequitur.

Second, the defenses: that Chomsky only praises the “Vietnamese people,” not their State. This is not persuasive, as it is a common totalitarian euphemism to refer to “The People” when one is actually referring to the State which rules them. How, for example, would we view praise of the German people during WWII by Lord Haw-Haw, the Brit who became one of the most infamous radio propagandists for Nazi Germany? Then we have the claim that Chomsky actually was defending the North Vietnamese State, & that he was right to do so because it and its allies were superior to South Vietnam and its allies. This view has it that the totalitarian regimes of North Vietnam, Maoist China, and the Soviet Union, were less imperialist and oppressive than South Vietnam, the USA, and the rest of its allies. However, South Vietnam wasn’t totalitarian, it was only authoritarian. Peaceful political opposition was allowed, multiple parties were allowed, and there was freedom of religion, although Catholicism did enjoy unjust privileges. Still, that makes it compare quite favorably with North Vietnam, where peaceful political opponents were imprisoned or executed, where there was only the one Party, and instead of freedom of religion there were compulsory “re-education” camps for anyone who believed in any religion at all. Political opponents and religious believers are still locked up and persecuted in Communist Vietnam.

As for the USA being more imperialist, the Viet Cong were trying to overthrow the governments of South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, so they could set up puppet regimes in all of those countries in an Indochina Federation along the lines Ho Chi Minh got from Stalin (who had similar plans for the Balkans which Tito thankfully didn’t go along with), his old boss when Ho was a Comintern agent. The Viet Cong did this with the help of China, which intervened directly in Tibet and North Korea, repeatedly threatened Taiwan, and supported guerillas all over the Third World, and the Soviet Union, which invaded & occupied Eastern Europe at the end of WWII then puppetized all those countries and never withdrew the Red Army until 1989. In contrast, the USA tried to save South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from North Vietnamese imperialism, as it had saved South Korea and Taiwan from North Korean and Chinese imperialism, and as it had saved Western Europe from the Nazis and Japan from the Militarists.

As for the 3 million deaths attributed to the USA, about 2 million of those were murders committed by the Khmer Rouge, which was created and helped into power by the Viet Cong, and supported by China, North Vietnam, and the Soviet Union until 1979, when North Vietnam invaded because Pol Pot was insufficiently obedient to Hanoi and the Soviet Union followed suit. The rest wouldn’t have happened if the Viet Cong hadn’t committed aggression against 3 out of 4 of its neighbors. Even if we accept all 3 million as being the responsibility of the U.S. for the sake of argument, that number is literally dwarfed by the number of those mass-murdered by North Vietnam, China, and the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union mass-murdered about 20 million in the collectivization of agriculture and the Gulag, according to the Black Book of Communism, while Maoist China mass-murdered about 60 million in the Chinese Civil War, Great Leap Famine, and the Cultural Revolution. That makes for a total of 80 million, without even including North Vietnam - more than 20 times the number attributed to the US even if we include the Khmer Rouge’s democide count, 80 times the number resulting from subtraction of the Khmer Rouge’s democide. As for the Viet Cong, they started murdering their political opponents, actual and potential, starting in 1945, after that great “anti-imperialist” was put into power in North Vietnam by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. They collectivized agriculture in North Vietnam during the late 1950s, following Chinese advice, killing an estimated 100,000 of their own people in the process. About 900,000 of their own people chose to flee to South Vietnam during that same time period. When the Viet Cong captured the city of Hue during the Tet Offensive of 1968, they murdered about 3,000 people, marching them out of town, forcing them to dig their own graves, binding their hands behind their backs with wire, kneeling them in front of their graves, then shooting them in the back of the head for such crimes as being street vendors who sold hand-made jewelry. When the final invasion came, the South Vietnamese people didn’t welcome the Viet Cong as liberators, they fled from them as if they were flesh-eating zombies, fleeing the country in anything that could float by the hundreds of thousands. Those who made it were the lucky ones, those who were left behind to starve after the collectivization of South Vietnamese agriculture by the Viet Cong were the worst victims.

As for the attempt to make the Viet Cong look better by claiming that they invaded Cambodia & overthrew the Khmer Rouge for “humanitarian” reasons, that’s simply not why the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia. Vietnam invaded Cambodia for imperialist reasons, not humanitarian ones, as all historians who aren’t Soviet-line apologists will confirm - like Henry Kamm, just to name one example. Somehow, I doubt these defenders of democidal Commies would say that the US overthrew the Taliban for humanitarian reasons.

Chomsky chose to go to North Vietnam and praise the regime there as the one that came closer to his ideal social system than South Vietnam or the USA, just as his defenders do today. That gives us a pretty good idea of what they mean when they advocate “anarchy.”