The End of Imagination (35 page)

The Second World War, we’re told, was a “war for peace.” The atomic bomb was a “weapon of peace.”

We’re invited to believe that nuclear deterrence prevented World War III. (That was before President George Bush Jr. came up with the “preemptive strike doctrine.”)
13
Was
there an outbreak of peace after the Second World War? Certainly there was (relative) peace in Europe and America—but does that count as world peace? Not unless savage proxy wars fought in lands where the colored races live (chinks, niggers, dinks, wogs, gooks) don’t count as wars at all.

Since the Second World War, the United States has been at war with or has attacked, among other countries, Korea, Guatemala, Cuba, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Grenada, Libya, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan. This list should also include the US government’s covert operations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the coups it has engineered, and the dictators it has armed and supported. It should include Israel’s US-backed war on Lebanon, in which thousands were killed. It should include the key role America has played in the conflict in the Middle East, in which thousands have died fighting Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territory. It should include America’s role in the civil war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, in which more than one million people were killed.
14
It should include the embargos and sanctions that have led directly and indirectly to the death of hundreds of thousands of people, most visibly in Iraq.
15
Put it all together, and it sounds very much as though there has been a World War III, and that the US government was (or is) one of its chief protagonists.

Most of the essays in Chomsky’s
For Reasons of State
are about US aggression in South Vietnam, North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. It was a war that lasted more than twelve years. Fifty-eight thousand Americans and approximately 2 million Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians lost their lives.
16
The US deployed half a million ground troops, dropped more than 6 million tons of bombs.
17
And yet, though you wouldn’t believe it if you watched most Hollywood movies, America lost the war.

The war began in South Vietnam and then spread to North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. After putting in place a client regime in Saigon, the US government invited itself in to fight a communist insurgency—
Vietcong guerrillas who had infiltrated rural regions of South Vietnam where villagers were sheltering them. This was exactly the model that Russia replicated when, in 1979, it invited itself into Afghanistan. Nobody in the “free world” is in any doubt about the fact that Russia invaded Afghanistan. After glasnost,
even a Soviet foreign minister called the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan “illegal and immoral.”
18
But there has been no such introspection in the United States. In 1984, in a stunning revelation, Chomsky wrote:

For the past twenty-two years, I have been searching to find some reference in mainstream journalism or scholarship to an American invasion of South Vietnam in 1962 (or ever), or an American attack against South Vietnam, or American aggression in Indochina—without success. There is no such event in history. Rather, there is an American
defense
of South Vietnam against terrorists supported from the outside (namely from Vietnam).
19

There is no such event in history!

In 1962 the US Air Force began to bomb rural South Vietnam, where 80 percent of the population lived. The bombing lasted for more than a decade. Thousands of people were killed. The idea was to bomb on a scale colossal enough to induce panic migration from villages into cities, where people could be held in refugee camps. Samuel Huntington referred to this as a process of “urbanization.”
20
(I learned about urbanization when I was in architecture school in India. Somehow I don’t remember aerial bombing being part of the syllabus.) Huntington—famous today for his essay “The Clash of Civilizations?”—was at the time Chairman of the Council on Vietnamese Studies of the Southeast Asia Development Advisory Group. Chomsky quotes him describing the Vietcong as “a powerful force which cannot be dislodged from its constituency so long as the constituency continues to exist.”
21
Huntington went on to advise “direct application of mechanical and conventional power”—in other words, to crush a people’s war, eliminate the people.
22
(Or, perhaps, to update the thesis—in order to prevent a clash of civilizations, annihilate a civilization.)

Here’s one observer from the time on the limitations of America’s mechanical power: “The problem is that American machines are not equal to the task of killing communist soldiers except as part of a scorched-earth policy that destroys everything else as well.”
23
That problem has been solved now. Not with less destructive bombs but with more imaginative language. There’s a more elegant way of saying “that destroys everything else as well.” The phrase is “collateral damage.”

And here’s a firsthand account of what America’s “machines” (Huntington called them “modernizing instruments” and staff officers in the Pentagon called them “bomb-o-grams”) can do.
24
This is T. D. Allman flying over the Plain of Jars in Laos:

Even if the war in Laos ended tomorrow, the restoration of its ecological balance might take several years. The reconstruction of the Plain’s totally destroyed towns and villages might take just as long. Even if this was done, the Plain might long prove perilous to human habitation because of the hundreds of thousands of unexploded bombs, mines and booby traps.

A recent flight around the Plain of Jars revealed what less than three years of intensive American bombing can do to a rural area, even after its civilian population has been evacuated. In large areas, the primary tropical colour—bright green—has been replaced by an abstract pattern of black, and bright metallic colours. Much of the remaining foliage is stunted, dulled by defoliants.

Today, black is the dominant colour of the northern and eastern reaches of the Plain. Napalm is dropped regularly to burn off the grass and undergrowth that covers the Plains and fills its many narrow ravines. The fires seem to burn constantly, creating rectangles of black. During the flight, plumes of smoke could be seen rising from freshly bombed areas.

The main routes, coming into the Plain from communist-held territory, are bombed mercilessly, apparently on a non-stop basis. There, and along the rim of the Plain, the dominant colour is yellow. All vegetation has been destroyed. The craters are countless. . . . The area has been bombed so repeatedly that the land resembles the pocked, churned desert in storm-hit areas of the North African desert.

Further to the southeast, Xieng Khouangville—once the most populous town in communist Laos—lies empty, destroyed. To the north of the Plain, the little resort of Khang Khay also has been destroyed.

Around the landing field at the base of King Kong, the main colours are yellow (from upturned soil) and black (from napalm), relieved by patches of bright red and blue: parachutes used to drop supplies.

. . . The last local inhabitants were being carted into air transports. Abandoned vegetable gardens that would never be harvested grew near abandoned houses with plates still on the tables and calendars on the walls.
25

(Never counted in the “costs” of war are the dead birds, the charred animals, the murdered fish, incinerated insects, poisoned water sources, destroyed vegetation. Rarely mentioned is the arrogance of the human race toward other living things with which it shares this planet. All these are forgotten in the fight for markets and ideologies. This arrogance will probably be the ultimate undoing of the human species.)

The centerpiece of
For Reasons of State
is an essay called “The Mentality of the Backroom Boys,” in which Chomsky offers an extraordinarily supple, exhaustive analysis of the Pentagon Papers, which he says “provide documentary evidence of a conspiracy to use force in international affairs in violation of law.”
26
Here, too, Chomsky makes note of the fact that while the bombing of North Vietnam is discussed at some length in the Pentagon Papers, the invasion of South Vietnam barely merits a mention.
27

The Pentagon Papers are mesmerizing, not as documentation of the history of the US war in Indochina but as insight into the minds of the men who planned and executed it. It’s fascinating to be privy to the ideas that were being tossed around, the suggestions that were made, the proposals that were put forward. In a section called “The Asian Mind—the American Mind,” Chomsky examines the discussion of the mentality of the enemy that “stoically accept[s] the destruction of wealth and the loss of lives,” whereas “we want life, happiness, wealth, power,” and for us “death and suffering are irrational choices when alternatives exist.”
28
So we learn that the Asian poor, presumably because they cannot comprehend the meaning of happiness, wealth, and power, invite America to carry this “strategic logic to its conclusion, which is genocide.” But then “we” balk because “genocide is a terrible burden to bear.”
29
(Eventually, of course, “we” went ahead and committed genocide anyway, and then pretended that it never really happened.)

Of course the Pentagon Papers contain some moderate proposals, as well.

Strikes at population targets (per se) are likely not only to create a counterproductive wave of revulsion abroad and at home but also to greatly increase the risk of enlarging the war with China and the Soviet Union. Destruction of locks and dams, however—if handled right—might offer promise. It should be studied. Such destruction does not kill or drown people. By shallow-flooding the rice, it leads after time to widespread starvation (more than a million?) unless food is provided—which we could offer to do “at the conference table.”
30

Layer by layer, Chomsky strips down the process of decision making by US government officials, to reveal at its core the pitiless heart of the American war machine, completely insulated from the realities of war, blinded by ideology, and willing to annihilate millions of human beings, civilians, soldiers, women, children, villages, whole cities, whole ecosystems—with scientifically honed methods of brutality.

Here’s an American pilot talking about the joys of napalm:

We sure are pleased with those backroom boys at Dow. The original product wasn’t so hot—if the gooks were quick they could scrape it off. So the boys started adding polystyrene—now it sticks like shit to a blanket. But then if the gooks jumped under water it stopped burning, so they started adding Willie Peter [white phosphorous] so’s to make it burn better. It’ll even burn under water now. And just one drop is enough, it’ll keep on burning right down to the bone so they die anyway from phosphorous poisoning.
31

So the lucky gooks were annihilated for their own good. Better Dead than Red.

Thanks to the seductive charms of Hollywood and the irresistible appeal of America’s mass media, all these years later, the world views the war as an
American
story. Indochina provided the lush tropical backdrop against which the United States played out its fantasies of violence, tested its latest technology, furthered its ideology, examined its conscience, agonized over its moral dilemmas, and dealt with its guilt (or pretended to). The Vietnamese, the Cambodians, and the Laotians were only script props. Nameless, faceless, slit-eyed humanoids. They were just the people who died. Gooks.

The only real lesson the US government learned from its invasion of Indochina is how to go to war without committing American troops and risking American lives. So now we have wars waged with long-range cruise missiles, Black Hawks, “bunker busters.” Wars in which the “Allies” lose more journalists than soldiers.

As a child growing up in the state of Kerala, in South India—where the first democratically elected communist government in the world came to power in 1959, the year I was born—I worried terribly about being a gook. Kerala was only a few thousand miles west of Vietnam. We had jungles and rivers and rice fields, and communists, too. I kept imagining my mother, my brother, and myself being blown out of the bushes by a grenade, or mowed down, like the gooks in the movies, by an American marine with muscled arms and chewing gum and a loud background score. In my dreams, I was the burning girl in the famous photograph taken on the road from Trang Bang.

As someone who grew up on the cusp of both American and Soviet propaganda (which more or less neutralized each other), when I first read Noam Chomsky, it occurred to me that his marshaling of evidence, the volume of it, the relentlessness of it, was a little—how shall I put it?—insane. Even a quarter of the evidence he had compiled would have been enough to convince me. I used to wonder why he needed to do so much
work
. But now I understand that the magnitude and intensity of Chomsky’s work is a barometer of the magnitude, scope, and relentlessness of the propaganda machine that he’s up against. He’s like the wood-borer who lives inside the third rack of my bookshelf. Day and night, I hear his jaws crunching through the wood, grinding it to a fine dust. It’s as though he disagrees with the literature and wants to destroy the very structure on which it rests. I call him Chompsky.

Being an American working in America, writing to convince Americans of his point of view must really be like having to tunnel through hard wood. Chomsky is one of a small band of individuals fighting a whole industry. And that makes him not only brilliant, but heroic.

Some years ago, in a poignant interview with James Peck, Chomsky spoke about his memory of the day Hiroshima was bombed. He was sixteen years old:

I remember that I literally couldn’t talk to anybody. There was nobody. I just walked off by myself. I was at a summer camp at the time, and I walked off into the woods and stayed alone for a couple of hours when I heard about it. I could never talk to anyone about it and never understood anyone’s reaction. I felt completely isolated.
32

That isolation produced one of the greatest, most radical public thinkers of our time.

When the sun sets on the American empire, as it will, as it must, Noam Chomsky’s work will survive. It will point a cool, incriminating finger at a merciless, Machiavellian empire as cruel, self-righteous, and hypocritical as the ones it has replaced. (The only difference is that it is armed with technology that can visit the kind of devastation on the world that history has never known and the human race cannot begin to imagine.)

As a could’ve been gook, and who knows, perhaps a potential gook, hardly a day goes by when I don’t find myself thinking—for one reason or another—“Chomsky Zindabad.”