Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky.
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.
New York. Pantheon Books, 2002.
Pages: 480. ISBN: 978-0-375-71449-8.
Note: The cover shown is to the 1988 edition, 412 pages: ISBN 0-679-72034-0.
Begun 2011.04; finished 2011.06.17.
★★★★★
It's been many weeks, now, since I finished Manufacturing and started this review. In that time I have been wrestling with how to verbalize the feelings that this book has evoked. Sadly, the best description I can give is that it is easily and by far the most disturbing book I have ever read. Writing and re-writing that sentence, with its rather flaccid sentiment took me three days. My brain seems to have been hit hard with the breadth and depth of my state sanctioned and media promulgated ignorance and disinformation. But it has been stunned into gibber-jabber at economic actions that can only be called evil but have been either ignored or sanitized by our media.
When I began reading Manufacturing I proceeded with the naïve thought that I'd flag those bits that resonated with me in order to blog at least some of them. And at first that is exactly what did: many of the early pages are purpled with stickies, and it was at that time that it was with excitement, perhaps even zeal, that I blogged those two oh so perfect citations.
But I flagged fewer and fewer pages because I began to realize that what I was reading could not be effectively snipped into even longish quotations. The book is only properly read as a wholeness because every piece of writing supports Herman's and Chomsky's arguments: removing words here and there weakened them because isolated they seem too unbelievable. Before this book I actually thought I understood Chomsky when he's commented that the modern media's need for concision is an extremely effective tool to delimit argument and promote ignorance within the acceptable and the delimited known. And I now understand why he has such vehemence whenever he refutes anyone trying in anyway to mollify in even the tiniest degree the evil that is America's actions in South Vietnam.
Reading Manufacturing created an epiphany. I feel I have been ripped from the flawed world that I thought I had some understanding of and dropped into the fetid mire of an alternative universe.
In response to a comment I made about Manufacturing a co-worker stated the trope about the important role the media played in shortening the Vietnam War. His particular point was of the brutal war photography of a famous photographer (whose name I've now forgotten) who achieved much acclaim for the brutal photographs he took. I found myself unable to even open my mouth to contradict him his belief about the media's role in ending that war. How could I begin to re-articulate the entire text of Manufacturing, which would be the minimum required to exorcise that mystification? It would require both an acceptance of the scale of America's Machiavellian brutality that is all but unimaginable and that that brutality was not only knowingly condoned but significantly abetted by just about all of the news journals and their expert commentators and propagandizing editing and editorializing.
Actually, reading just Manufacturing would likely not be enough, because without additional awareness outside of it and Chomsky Consent is probably unbelievable despite the hundreds of references and extended citations from everyone from Kissenger to President Carter. The scale of the deliberate and utter ruthless annihilation of democracy in Vietnam and Cambodia for the direct and clearly delineated and articulated, but unreported, purposes of American world hegemony is incredulous and sickening. And Vietnam cannot be dismissed as a reporting gaff because the improper reporting of American hegemony continued in South and Latin America. Perhaps most tellingly with how the media reported the rape, murder and mutilation of nine American church women who had left America to provide aide to those being killed by American backed, trained and financed henchmen.
As I mentioned, I was originally going to site lots of things. But after many weeks of struggle, I've decided to focus on why I've used the words 'evil' and 'sickening' to describe the government of America's behaviour in Vietnam and the media's complicity. To set that up, here's an excerpt that perhaps gives a hint of the scale of America's destruction of South Vietnam while they were reportedly 'saving' it:
… [T]here was little [media] reaction when B-52 raids in "the populous [Mekong] delta" were reported in 1965, with unknown numbers of civilian casualties and hordes of refugees fleeing to government-controlled areas "because they could no longer bear the continuous bombings."72 The victims fell under the category of "the unfortunate accidental loss of life incurred by the efforts of American military forces to help the South Vietnamese repel the incursion of North Vietnam and its partisans," as explained by Sidney Hook while condemning Bertrand Russell becauseAs this chapter continues, the destruction of the South Vietnam, which myth has it was being saved by the US from the evils of communism, was just about as destroyed as a land can possibly be destroyed without life there actually being fully exterminated. (I won't elaborate on the US's destruction of Cambodia, which is almost completely unknown and unreported and as extensive.)he "plays up" these meritorious actions "as deliberate American atrocities."73…
Not only was there no reaction to these and subsequent atrocities, but there was also no attempt to place them in the context of what had immediately preceded — that is, to make them intelligible. Indeed, there was little awareness of the background, because the media were so closely wedded to U.S. government goals and perceptions that they never sought to learn the facts. As the war progressed, ample evidence became available from U.S. government sources to explain why the United States had been forced to resort to violence in "the populous delta," as elsewhere, as we described in the preceding section. But such materials, inconsistent with the preferred image of the United States defending South Vietnam from Communist terror and aggression, had little impact on news reporting or commentary, except for occasional illustration of the difficulties faced by the United States in pursuing its noble cause.
The reason for the U.S. resort to violence was overwhelmingly clear by the time of the outright U.S. invasion in 1965, and would have been no less clear before had any serious effort been made to determine the facts. As noted above, the United States was compelled by the political and social successes of the southern Viet Minh (NLF, "Viet Cong") to shift the struggle away from the political arena, where it was weak, to the arena of violence, where it was strong, a typical response to a classic dilemma.
It is in this context that we can understand the resort to B-52 raids in "the populous delta" and elsewhere to destroy the civilian base of the indigenous enemy, expanding the failed efforts of the strategic-hamlet program and earlier terror. The U.S. media continued to report the subsequent atrocities, but from the standpoint of the aggressors. One had to turn to the foreign press to find reports from zones held by the South Vietnamese enemy — for example, those of the pro-Western correspondent Katsuichi Honda, who reported in the Japanese press in the fall of 1967 from the Mekong Delta, describing attacks against undefended villages by gunboats in the Mekong River and helicopter gunships "firing away at random at farmhouses," "using the farmers for targets as if in a hunting mood": "They are hunting Asians. . . . This whimsical firing would explain the reason why the surgical wards in every hospital in the towns of the Mekong delta were full of wounded." His reports were available only to readers of antiwar literature, not the "objective" media, which had no interest in how the war might appear from the standpoint of the Vietnamese victims of the attack by the United States and the local forces it established.74
The media continued to observe and discuss atrocities blandly, not considering them as controversial or as raising any moral issue — in fact, not regarding them as atrocities at all, although we detect no such reserve with regard to the violence of official enemies. The respected columnist Joseph Harsch describes the frustrations of an American pilot dropping bombs "into a leafy jungle" with "no visible result" and without "the satisfaction of knowing what he achieved":A hit on a big hydroelectric dam is another matter. There is a huge explosion visible from anywhere above. The dam can be seen to fall. The water can be seen to pour through the breach and drown out huge areas of farm land, and villages, in its path. The pilot who takes out a hydroelectric dam gets back home with a feeling of accomplishment. Novels are written and films are made of such exploits. . . . The bombing which takes out the dam will flood villages, drown people, destroy crops, and knock out some electric power. . . . Bombing the dam would hurt people.75Nevertheless, it is better to bomb trucks, he concludes, although there would plainly be no moral barrier to the much more satisfying alternative rejected on tactical grounds.
In the South, bombing of dikes and virtually limitless destruction was an uncontroversial tactic, as in the Batangan Peninsula, where 12,000 peasants (including, it appears, the remnants of the My Lai massacre) were forced from their homes in an American ground sweep in January 1969 and shipped off to a waterless camp near Quang Ngai over which floated a banner saying: "We thank you for liberating us from Communist terror." The Times reported that the refugees had lived "in caves and bunkers for many months" because "heavy American bombing and artillery and naval shelling" had destroyed their homes, as well as a dike that was "blasted by American jets to deprive the North Vietnamese [sic] of a food supply." It was left unrepaired, so that two years later "the salt water of the South China Sea continues to submerge the fields where rice once grew." The reason, according to an American official, is that the people "were written off as communists," and for the same reason the region was left in ruins: "the hills that overlook the flooded paddies, once scattered with huts, are ... filled with bomb fragments, mines and unexploded artillery shells," and "B-52 craters nearly 20 feet deep pock the hills."76
Bombing of dikes in the North, occasionally reported,77 was controversial, as was the bombing of North Vietnam generally. The reason is that the cost to the United States might be high because of a potential Chinese or Soviet response, regarded as a serious and dangerous possibility, or because of the impact on international opinion.78 But these questions did not arise in the case of U.S. terror against the South Vietnamese, which therefore proceeded without notable concern or, it seems, much in the way of planning. In the Pentagon Papers, we find extensive discussion and debate over the escalation of the bombing against the North, while there is virtually nothing about the far more destructive bombing, defoliation, destruction of vast areas by Rome plows, etc., in South Vietnam, where we were "saving" the population from "aggression." With regard to South Vietnam, the planning record is limited to the question of deployment of U.S. troops, which again raised potential costs to the United States.79 (194-6)
This history I can take. I can handle this, it is a political-economic choice of enforced hegemony with weaponry and mass death. But what did throw me for a loop was what the USA did following South Vietnam's near annihilation at their hands. So two more clips from Manufacturing:
…The gradual withdrawal of the increasingly demoralized U.S. military forces led to a diminution of visible protest by the early 1970s, but the "Vietnam syndrome" was never cured. As late as 1982, 72 percent of the public (but far fewer "opinion makers" and, to judge by other evidence cited earlier, virtually none of the "American intellectual elite") regarded the Vietnam War as "more than a mistake; it was fundamentally wrong and immoral," a disparity between the public and its "leaders" that persists as of i986.157And:
The primary task facing the ideological institutions in the postwar period was to convince the errant public that the war was "less a moral crime than the thunderously stupid military blunder of throwing half a million ground troops into an unwinnable war," as the respected New York Times war correspondent Homer Bigart explained, while chastising Gloria Emerson for her unwillingness to adopt this properly moderate view.158 The "purpose of the war" must be perceived as "preventing North Vietnam from subjugating South Vietnam" (John Midgley), "the real enemy, of course, [being] North Vietnam, supplied and sustained by the Soviet Union and China" (Drew Middleton)159 — all in defiance of the plain facts. The primary issue was the cost to the United States in its noble endeavour; thus Robert Nisbet describes the "intellectual pleasure" he derived from "a truly distinguished work of history" with a chapter covering the i96os, "with emphasis on the Vietnam War and its devastating impact upon Americans," obviously the only victims worthy of concern.160 To persuade elite opinion was never much of a problem, since these were the reigning conceptions throughout, and clearly privilege, along with media access, accrues to those who follow this path. But the public has nevertheless remained corrupted.
An ancillary task has been to keep the devastation that the United States left as its legacy in Indochina hidden from public view. Indeed, one finds only scattered reference to this not entirely trivial matter in the U.S. media—a remarkable achievement, given the agency of destruction and its scale. Keeping just to Vietnam, the death toll may have passed three million. In an article entitled "Studies Show Vietnam Raids Failed," Charles Mohr observes that the CIA estimated deaths from bombing of the North at well over 30,000 a year by 1967, "heavily weighted with civilians."161 Crop-destruction programs from 1961 had a devastating impact, including aerial destruction by chemicals, ground operations to destroy orchards and dikes, and land clearing by giant tractors (Rome plows) that "obliterated agricultural lands, often including extensive systems of paddy dikes, and entire rural residential areas and farming hamlets," leaving the soil "bare, gray and lifeless," in the words of an official report cited by Arthur Westing, who compares the operations to the "less efficient" destruction of Carthage during the Punic Wars. "The combined ecological, economic, and social consequences of the wartime defoliation operations have been vast and will take several generations to reverse"; in the "empty landscapes" of South Vietnam, recovery will be long delayed, if possible at all, and there is no way to estimate the human effects of the chemical poison dioxin at levels "300 to 400% greater than the average levels obtaining among exposed groups in North America."162
In the South, 9,000 out of 15,000 hamlets were damaged or destroyed, along with some twenty-five million acres of farmland and twelve million acres of forest. One-and-a-half million cattle were killed, and the war left a million widows and some 800,000 orphans. In the North, all six industrial cities were damaged (three razed to the ground) along with twenty-eight of thirty provincial towns (twelve completely destroyed), ninety-six of 116 district towns, and 4,000 of some 5,800 communes. Four hundred thousand cattle were killed and over a million acres of farmland were damaged. Much of the land is a moonscape, where people live on the edge of famine, with rice rations lower than those in Bangladesh. Reviewing the environmental effects, the Swedish peace-research institute SIPRI concludes that "the ecological debilitation from such attack is likely to be of long duration." The respected Swiss-based environmental group IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources) concluded that the ecology is not only refusing to heal but is worsening, so that a "catastrophe" may result unless billions of dollars are spent to "reconstruct" the land that has been destroyed, a "monumental" task that could be addressed only if the United States were to offer substantial reparations, a possibility that cannot be considered in a cultural climate of abysmal ignorance, chauvinism, and the self-righteous pursuit of self-interest. Destruction of forests has increased the frequency of floods and droughts and aggravated the impact of typhoons, and war damage to dikes (some of which, in the South, were completely destroyed by U.S. bombardment) and other agricultural systems has yet to be repaired. The report notes that "humanitarian and conservationist groups, particularly in the United States, have encountered official resistance and red tape when requesting their governments' authorization to send assistance to Vietnam"—naturally enough, since the United States remains committed to ensure that its achievements are not threatened by recovery of the countries it destroyed (my emphasis).163
There is little hint of any of this, or of the similar Carthaginian devastation in Laos and Cambodia, in mainstream U.S. media coverage. Rather, with remarkable uniformity and self-righteousness, the problems of reconstruction, hampered further by the natural catastrophes and continuing war to which the United States has made what contribution it can, are attributed solely to Communist brutality and ineptitude. The sole remaining interest in postwar Vietnam in the U.S. media has been the recovery of remains of U.S. personnel presumed to be killed in action; the Vietnamese preoccupation with other matters serving as further proof of their moral insensitivity.
In one of his sermons on human rights, President Carter explained that we owe Vietnam no debt and have no responsibility to render it any assistance because "the destruction was mutual,"164 a statement that elicited no comment, to our knowledge, apart from our own— a fact that speaks volumes about the prevailing cultural climate. Some feel that there may once have been a debt but that it has been amply repaid. Under the headline "The Debt to the Indochinese Is Becoming a Fiscal Drain," Bernard Gwertzman quotes a State Department official who "said he believed the United States has now paid its moral debt for its involvement on the losing side in Indochina." The remark, which also passed without comment, is illuminating: we owe no debt for mass slaughter and for leaving three countries in ruins, no debt to the millions of maimed and orphaned, to the peasants who still die today from exploding ordnance left from the U.S. assault. Rather, our moral debt results only from the fact that we did not win. By this logic, if the Russians win in Afghanistan, they will have no moral debt at all. Proceeding further, how have we paid our moral debt for failing to win? By resettling Vietnamese refugees fleeing the lands we ravaged, "one of the largest, most dramatic humanitarian efforts in history" according to Roger Winter, director of the U.S. Committee for Refugees. But "despite the pride," Gwertzman continues, "some voices in the Reagan Administration and in Congress are once again asking whether the war debt has now been paid. . . ."165
The media are not satisfied with "mutual destruction" that effaces all responsibility for some of the major war crimes of the modern era. Rather, the perpetrator of the crimes must be seen as the injured party. We find headlines reading: "Vietnam, Trying to Be Nicer, Still Has a Long Way to Go." "It's about time the Vietnamese demonstrated some good will," said Charles Printz, of Human Rights Advocates International, referring to negotiations about the Amerasian children who constitute a tiny fraction of the victims of U.S. aggression in Indochina. Barbara Crossette adds that the Vietnamese have also not been sufficiently forthcoming on the matter of remains of American soldiers, although their behavior may be improving: "There has been progress, albeit slow, on the missing Americans." The unresolved problem of the war is what they did to us. Since we were simply defending ourselves from "internal aggression" in Vietnam, it surely makes sense to consider ourselves the victims of the Vietnamese.
In a derisive account of Vietnamese "laments" over the failure of the United States to improve relations with them, Barbara Crossette reports their "continuing exaggeration of Vietnam's importance to Americans" under the headline: "For Vietnamese, Realism Is in Short Supply." The Vietnamese do not comprehend their "irrelevance," she explains with proper imperial contempt. U.S. interest in Vietnam, she continues, is limited to the natural American outrage over Hanoi's invasion of Cambodia (to overthrow our current ally Pol Pot), and its failure to be sufficiently forthcoming "on the issue of American servicemen missing since the end of the war." She cites a Pentagon statement noting that Vietnam "has agreed to return the remains of 20 more servicemen" and expressing the hope that the Communists will proceed "to resolve this long-standing humanitarian issue." She quotes an "Asian official" as saying that "We all know they have the bones somewhere. ... If Hanoi's leaders are serious about building their country, the Vietnamese will have to deal fairly with the United States." When a Vietnamese official suggested that the U.S. send food aid to regions where starving villagers are being asked to spend their time and energy searching for the remains of American pilots killed while destroying their country. State Department spokeswoman Phyllis Oakley reacted with great anger: "We are outraged at any suggestion of linking food assistance with the return of remains," she declaimed. So profound is the U.S. commitment to humanitarian imperatives and moral values that it cannot permit these lofty ideals to be tainted by associating them with such trivial concerns and indecent requests.166 It is difficult to know how to react to a cultural climate in which such words can be spoken, evoking no reaction.
According to standard state and media doctrine, South Vietnam (i.e., the client regime that we established) lost the war to North Vietnam — the official enemy, since the U.S. attack against the South cannot be conceded. "North Vietnam, not the Vietcong, was always the enemy," John Corry proclaims in reporting the basic message of an NBC white paper on the war,167 a stance that is conventional in the mainstream. Corry is indignant that anyone should question this higher truth … (238-41)
...I don't know why, but the deliberate kicking of the Vietnamese by America's political elite, after their country had been utterly destroyed by American armaments, struck me as far more evil than the decision to destroy them was in the first place. The emotional turmoil that this has evoked in me is still rumbling around my system. I am not sure how, but something changed in me, and I'm at a kind of loss about how to bring that change into my official and proper and comfortable life.
That the United States suffered a "defeat" in Indochina is a natural perception on the part of those of limitless ambition, who understand "defeat" to mean the achievement only of major goals, while certain minor ones remain beyond our grasp. The perception of an unqualified U.S. "defeat" in the media retrospectives and similar commentary is understandable in part in these terms, in part in terms of the alleged goal of "defending freedom" developed in official propaganda and relayed by the ideological institutions.
Postwar U.S. policy has been designed to ensure that the victory is maintained by maximizing suffering and oppression in Indochina, which then evokes further gloating here. Since "the destruction is mutual," as is readily demonstrated by a stroll through New York, Boston, Vinh, Quang Ngai Province, and the Plain of Jars, we are entitled to deny reparations, aid, and trade, and to block development funds. The extent of U.S. sadism is noteworthy, as is the (null) reaction to it. In 1977, when India tried to send a hundred buffalo to Vietnam to replenish the herds destroyed by U.S. violence, the United States threatened to cancel "food-for-peace" aid, while the press featured photographs of peasants in Cambodia pulling plows as proof of Communist barbarity, the photographs in this case were probable fabrications of Thai intelligence, but authentic ones could, no doubt, have been obtained throughout Indochina. The Carter administration even denied rice to Laos (despite a cynical pretense to the contrary), where the agricultural system was destroyed by U.S. terror bombing. Oxfam America was not permitted to send ten solar pumps to Cambodia for irrigation in 1983; in 1981, the U.S. government sought to block a shipment of school supplies and educational kits to Cambodia by the Mennonite Church [my emphasis].184
A tiny report in the Christian Science Monitor observes that the United States is blocking international shipments of food to Vietnam during a postwar famine, using the food weapon "to punish Vietnam for its occupation of Cambodia," according to diplomatic sources. Two days later. Times correspondent Henry Kamm concluded his tour of duty as chief Asian diplomatic correspondent with a long article in which he comments "sadly" on the "considerably reduced quality of life" in Indochina, where in Vietnam "even working animals are rare," for unexplained reasons, in contrast to "the continuing rise, however uneven in many aspects, of the standard of living" elsewhere in the region. In thirty-five paragraphs, he manages to produce not one word on the effects of the U.S. war or the postwar policy of "bleeding Vietnam," as the Far Eastern Economic Review accurately terms it.185 (247-8)
Notes
72. Takashi Oka, Christian Science Monitor, December 4,1965; Bernard Fall, "Vietnam Blitz," New Republic, October 9, 1965.
73. Sidney Hook, "Lord Russell and the War Crimes 'Trial,'" New Leader, October 24, 1966.
74. See Noam Chomsky. At War With Asia. Pantheon Books, 1971, ISBN 9780006326540, pp. 98f.
75. "Truck versus Dam," Christian Science Monitor, September 5, 1967.
76. Henry Kamm, New York Times, November 15,1969; New York Times, April 6, i97i. See Chomsky, For Reasons of State, pp. 225f., for more details.
77. E.g., Amando Doronila, "Hanoi Food Output Held Target of U.S. Bombers," AP, Christian Science Monitor, September 8,1967, three days after Joseph Harsch's philosophical reflections just cited.
78. See George Kahin, Intervention, pp. 338f., 384, 400, on these perceived risks.
79. See Chomsky For Reasons of State, pp. 4f., 70ff., for documentation from the official record (373-4).
…
157. John E. Rielly, Foreign Policy (Spring 1983, Spring 1987). Rielly, ed., American Public Opinion and U.S. Foreign Policy 1987, Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, p. 33. In the 1986 poll, the percentage of the public that regarded the Vietnam War as "fundamentally wrong and immoral" was 66 percent, as compared with 72 percent in 1978 and 1982. Among "leaders" (including representatives of churches, voluntary organizations, and ethnic organizations), the percentage was 44 percent, as compared with 45 percent in 1982 and 50 percent in 1978. The editor takes this to indicate "some waning of the impact of the Vietnam experience with the passage of time"; and, perhaps, some impact of the propaganda system, as memories fade and people are polled who lack direct experience.
158. New Republic, January 22,1977, see Marilyn Young, "Critical Amnesia," The Nation,, April 2,1977, on this and similar reviews of Emerson's Winners and Losers. '
159. John Midgley, New York Times Book Review, June 30,1985; Drew Middleton, New York Times, July 6, 1985.
160. Review of Paul Johnson, Modem Times, in New York Times Book Review, June 26, 1983, p. 15.
161. New York Times, May 28,1984. A CIA analysis of April 1968 estimated that "80,000 enemy troops," overwhelmingly South Vietnamese, were killed during the Tet offensive. See note 44, above.
162. Arthur Westing, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (February 1981); Colin Norman, Science, March 11, 1983, citing the conclusion of an international conference in Ho Chi Minh City; Jim Rogers, Indochina Issues, Center for International Policy (September 1985). On the effects of U.S. chemical and environmental warfare in Vietnam, unprecedented in scale and character, see SIPRI, Ecological Consequences of the Second Indochina War (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1976).
163. Ton That Thien, Pacific Affairs (Winter 1983-84); Chitra Subramaniam, Pacific News Service, November 15, 1985; both writing from Geneva.
164. News conference, March 24, 1977; New York Times, March 25, 1977.
165. Bernard Gwertzman, New York Times, March 3, 1985.
166. Barbara Crossette, New York Times, November 10, 1985, February 28, 1988; AP, April 7, 1988.
167. John Corry, New York Times, April 27, 1985. (p378)
…
184. See our Political Economy of Human Rights: the Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, II, 84, i66ff., 342; Daniel Southerland, "No Pens and Pencils for Cambodia," Christian Science Monitor, December 4, 1981; AP, "U.S. Bars Mennonite School Aid to Cambodia," New York Times, December 8,1981; Joel Charny and John Spragens, Obstacles to Recovery in Vietnam and Kampuchea: U.S. Embargo of Humanitarian Aid (Boston: Oxfam America, 1984), citing many examples of "explicit U.S. policy" under the Reagan administration "to prevent even private humanitarian assistance from reaching the people of Kampuchea and Vietnam."
185. Louis Wiznitzer, Christian Science Monitor, November 6,1981; Kamm, "In Mosaic of Southeast Asia, Capitalist Lands Are Thriving," New York Times, November 8, 1981. (p379)
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