Chomsky on Anarchism.pdf - Zine Library

CHOMSKY ON ANARCHISM
Vietcong.... Our operations have been designed to make the first choice
impossible, the second attractive, and to reduce the likelihood of anyone
choosing the third to zero."24 The benefits accruing to the newly urbanized
elements have also been amply described in the press, for example, by James
Doyle of the Globe, February 22, 1968: Saigon "is a rich city, the bar owners,
B-girls, money changers and black marketeers all making their fo rtunes while
it lasts. It is a poor city, with hundreds of thousands of refugees crammed into
thatched hurs and tin-roofed shacks, more than two million people shoehorned
inro 21 square miles." Or Neil Sheehan, in a classic and olten-quoted
article (New York Times. October 9. 1966):
A drive through Saigon demonstrates another fashion in which
the social system works. Virtually all the new construction consists
of luxury apartments, hotels and office buildings financed
by Chinese businessmen or affiuenr Vietnamese with rdatives or
connections within the regime. The buildings are destined to be
rented to Americans. Saigon's workers live, as they always have,
in fetid slums on the city's outskirrs .... Bars and bordellos, thousands
of young Vietnamese women degrading themselves as bar
girls and prostitutes, gangs of hoodlums and beggars and children
selling their older sisters and picking pockets have become
ubiquitous features of urban life.
Many have remarked on the striking difference between the way in which the
press and rhe visiting scholar describe what they see in Vietnam. It should
occasion no surprise. Each is pursuing his own craft. The reporter's job is to
describe what he sees before his eyes; many have done so with courage and
even brilliance. The colonial administrator, on rhe other hand, is concerned to
justifY what he has done and what he hopes to do, and-if an "expert" as
well-to construct an appropriate ideological cover, to show (hat we are just
and righteous in what we do, and to pur nagging doubts to rest. One sees
moral degradation and fetid slums; the other, prosperity and well-being-and
if kindly old Uncle Sam occasionally flicks his ashes on someone by mistake,
that is surely no reason fo r tantrums.
Returning to the collection of scholarly and objective studies in Asian
Survey, the first, by Kenneth Young. president of the Asia Society, describes our
difficulties in "transferring innovations and institutions to the Vietnamese"
and calls for the assistance of social scientists in overcoming these difficulties.
Social scientists should, he feels, study "the intricacies that effectively inhibit
or transfer what the Americans, either by government policy or by rhe technician's
action, want to introduce into the mind of a Vietnamese or into a
Vietnamese organization." The problem, in short, is one of communication.
For this objective scholar, there is no question of our right to "transfer innovations
and institutions to the Vietnamese," by fo rce if necessary, or of our superior
insight into the needed innovations or appropriate institutions. In JUSt the
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