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

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    My Lai, they did—but first of all, note the timing: it’s a year and a half after it happened, a year and a half after corporate America turned against the war. And the reporting was falsified. See, My Lai was presented as if it was a bunch of crazy grunts who got out of control because they were being directed by this Lieutenant Galley, who was kind of a madman. That you can handle. But that’s not what My Lai was about. My Lai was a footnote, My Lai was an uninteresting footnote to a military operation called Operation WHEELER WALLAWA—which was a huge mass-murder operation, in which B-52 raids were targeted right on villages. That wasn’t Lieutenant Calley, that was a guy in Washington plotting out coordinates. You know what a B-52 raid is? That means wipe out everything—and it was targeted right on villages. In comparison to that, My Lai doesn’t exist.
    In fact, there was a military commission that reviewed My Lai, the Piers Commission, and their most dramatic finding was that there were massacres like My Lai all over the place. For instance, they found another massacre in My Khe, which is about four kilometers down the road—everywhere they looked they found another massacre.   81 Well, what does that tell you? What does that suggest to you, if everywhere you look you find a My Lai? Well, it suggests something, but what it suggests was never brought out in the media.
    W OMAN : You mentioned that we had a citizens’ army in Vietnam. Do we still have a citizens’ army?
    No, now it’s a professional army.
    W OMAN : I know, that’s what’s scary .
    Exactly.
    W OMAN : Ironically, not having a draft …
    It’s not ironic. I think the peace movement made a mistake there. I mean, personally I was never in favor of ending the draft, although I was all involved in resistance activities: when it turned to anti-draft activities, I pulled out of them.
    W OMAN : Me too .
    Look, there is no such thing as a “volunteer army”: a “volunteer army” is a mercenary army of the poor. Take a look at the Marines—what you see is black faces, from the ghettos.
    W OMAN : And the officers are white .
    Yeah, and the officers are white, of course. That’s like South Africa: the officers are white, the grunts who actually carry out most of the atrocities in places like Namibia are black.   82 That’s the way empires have always been run. And sometime in the Seventies, the American army shifted to a traditional mercenary army of the poor, which they call a “volunteer army.” People in power learn, you know. They’re sophisticated, and they’re organized, and they have continuity—and they realize that they made a mistake in Vietnam. They don’t want to make that same mistake again.
    And as for the New York Times being anti-war—well, we thought of it as anti-war at the time, but that was because our standard was so low. Nowadays we would consider that same sort of “criticism” to be pro-war. And that’s just another reflection of the increase in political consciousness and sophistication in the general population over the last twenty years. If you look back at the Times in those days, that’s what you’ll find I think.

2
    Teach-In: Over Coffee
    Based primarily on discussions at Rowe, Massachusetts, April 15–16, 1989 .
    “Containing” the Soviet Union in the Cold War
    W OMAN : Dr. Chomsky, it seems the terms of political discourse themselves are a tool for propagandizing the population. How is language used to prevent us from understanding and to disempower us?
    Well, the terminology we use is heavily ideologically laden, always. Pick your term: if it’s a term that has any significance whatsoever—like, not “and” or “or”—it typically has two meanings, a dictionary meaning and a meaning that’s used for ideological warfare. So, “terrorism” is only what other people do. What’s called “Communism” is supposed to be “the far left”: in my view, it’s the far right ,