Free Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky by Noam Chomsky, John Schoeffel, Peter R. Mitchell

comes the conclusion. The conclusion is, we’ve got to escalate the war, we have to wipe the N.L.F. out.   75 And the reason is essentially the same as what’s argued by people like Walter Lippmann and the whole rest of this main tradition of “democratic” thinkers in the West—that democracy requires a class of elites to manage decision-making and “manufacture” the general population’s consent for policies that are supposedly beyond their capacity to develop and decide on themselves.   76
    So for Vann, the thinking was, these stupid Vietnamese peasants are making a mistake—it’s us smart guys who are the ones who can run the social revolution for them. They think the N.L.F. can run it, these people running around villages organizing them, but we’re really the only ones who can run it. And out of our duty to the poor people of the world, we can’t let them have their own way, because it’ll just be a stupid error on their part. So what we have to do is wipe out the N.L.F., win the war, smash up Vietnam, and then we’ll run the social revolution for them—like we’ve always done in history, you know. That’s basically Vann’s line, and that’s also the message of Neil Sheehan’s book. That’s what made Vann a hero.
    Or just take a look at the guy who was certainly the most critical columnist at the Times , Anthony Lewis. I mean, if you look at Anthony Lewis’s record during the war, you’ll really learn something about the peace movement, about ourselves—because we actually regarded Anthony Lewis as an ally . Let’s remember what happened. The hard work in the peace movement was from 1964 through ’67. By February 1968, corporate America had turned against the war—and the reason was, the Tet Offensive had taken place in late January. In late January 1968, there was this huge popular uprising in every city in South Vietnam; it was all South Vietnamese, remember, it wasn’t the North Vietnamese who were doing it. And by early February 1968, it was obvious to anybody with their head screwed on that this was just a massive popular movement. I mean, the American forces in Saigon were never even informed that Viet Cong troops were infiltrating into the city—nobody told them. And it was simultaneous, and coordinated, it was just a huge popular uprising—there’s nothing like it in history.
    Well, you know, people who care about their money and their property and so on realized that this war was just money going down the drain—it was going to take a huge effort to crush this revolution. And by that point, the U.S. economy was actually beginning to suffer. That’s the great achievement of the peace movement, in fact: it harmed the American economy. And that’s not a joke. The peace movement made it impossible to declare a national mobilization around the war—there was just too much dissidence and disruption, they couldn’t do what was done during the Second World War, for example, when the whole population was mobilized around the war. See, if they could have gotten the population mobilized like that, then the Vietnam War would have been very good for the economy, like the Second World War was during the Forties, a real shot in the arm. But they couldn’t, they had to fight a deficit-spending war, what’s called a “guns-and-butter” war. And the result was that we got the beginnings of stagflation [inflation without a concurrent expansion of the economy], and weakening of the U.S. dollar, and our main economic competitors, Europe and Japan, began raking off huge profits as offshore producers for the war—in short, the war changed the economic balance of power between the U.S. and its major industrial rivals. Well, American business could understand that, they saw what was happening, and when the Tet Offensive came along and it was clear that there was going to be a big problem putting down this revolution, corporate America turned against the war.
    Also, they were worried about