Noam Chomsky Quotes About Vietnam War

• One of the questions asked in that study was, How many Vietnamese casualties would you estimate that there were during the Vietnam war? The average response on the part of Americans today is about 100,000. The official figure is about two million. The actual figure is probably three to four million. The people who conducted the study raised an appropriate question: What would we think about German political culture if, when you asked people today how many Jews died in the Holocaust, they estimated about 300,000? What would that tell us about German political culture?

  Noam Chomsky

  War, Thinking, Average

  "Media Control". Book by Noam Chomsky, 1991.

• You might recall, perhaps, that we were probably the only commentators to rely on the most knowledgeable source, State Department intelligence.

  Noam Chomsky

  War, Might, States

• The atrocities in Cambodia are a direct and understandable response to the violence of the imperial system.

  Noam Chomsky

  War, Atrocities, Violence

• What can one say about a country where a museum of science in a great city can feature an exhibit in which people fire machine guns from a helicopter at Vietnamese huts, with a light flashing when a hit is scored? What can one say about a country where such an idea can even be considered? You have to weep for this country.

  Noam Chomsky

  Country, War, Gun

  Institute Professor Department of Linguistics and Philosophy Noam Chomsky, Noam Chomsky (2010). “American Power and the New Mandarins”, p.28, ReadHowYouWant.com

• Barron and Paul...rely on 'specialists' at the State and Defense Departments...Elsewhere in the media, similiar figures are bandied about, with equal credibility.

  Noam Chomsky

  War, Media, Defense

• If you look back to the anti-intervention movements, what were they? Let's take the Vietnam War - the biggest crime since the Second World War. You couldn't be opposed to the war for years. The mainstream liberal intellectuals were enthusiastically in support of the war. In Boston, a liberal city where I was, we literally couldn't have a public demonstration without it being violently broken up, with the liberal press applauding, until late 1966.

  Noam Chomsky

  War, Boston, Years

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

• In fact, it's pretty dramatic when you get to 1975, very revealing, the [Vietnam] war ends. Everybody had to write something about the war, what it meant. You also had polls of public opinion, and they're dramatically different.

  Noam Chomsky

  War, Writing, Public Opinion

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

• Why did the people think [Vietnam war] was fundamentally wrong and immoral? The guys who ran the polls, John E. Rielly, a professor at the University of Chicago, a liberal professor, he said what that means is that people thought too many Americans had being killed. Another possibility is they didn't like the fact that we were carrying out the worst crime since the Second World War. But that's so inconceivable that wasn't even offered as a possible reason.

  Noam Chomsky

  War, Mean, Thinking

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

• Say the Pentagon Papers, - that material went much deeper. It went into internal government planning back for twenty - five years. Those are things that the public should have known about. In a democracy they should have known what leaders thinking and planning about major enterprises like the Vietnam war. It was kept secret from them.

  Noam Chomsky

  War, Thinking, Government

  Interview with Jegan Vincent de Paul, chomsky.info. August 15, 2012.

• So if you look at the writings of intellectuals, there are two kinds. One said, l"Look, if we fought harder we could have won.But the others, who were way at the left, people like Anthony Lewis of the New York Times, way out in left stream, his view in 1975 was the Vietnam war began with blundering efforts to do good. But by 1969, it was clear that it was a disaster, that was too costly to us.

  Noam Chomsky

  New York, War, Writing

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

• Take a look at public opinion. About 70 percent of the population, in the polls, said the [Vietnam ] war was fundamentally wrong and immoral, not a mistake. And that attitude lasted as long as polls were taken in the early '80s.

  Noam Chomsky

  Attitude, War, Mistake

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

• When people denounced [former Iranian president Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad for rejecting and criminalizing homosexuality, it should be remembered that was true of the United States until very recently. Women's rights were unheard of. Civil rights proponents were horribly treated, not just in the South. It was awful there, but pretty bad here. Environmental issues did not exist. Opposition to aggression was virtually zero. In fact, so little, that to this day, even scholarship mentions the Vietnam War as beginning in 1965.

  Noam Chomsky

  Zero, War, Rights

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• By that time [1966], we did begin to get some protests [against Vietnam War]. But not from liberal intellectuals; they never opposed the war.

  Noam Chomsky

  War, Vietnam, Vietnam War

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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