AMY GOODMAN: You’re listening to Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman.

Twenty-five years ago yesterday, on April 30th, 1975, the Vietnam War ended with the fall of Saigon. That day, several tanks smashed through the gates of what was then known as Independence Palace, and soldiers hoisted their flag atop the building. The fall of Saigon was the last act of a tragic drama which saw two halves of the country, South and North Vietnam, locked in combat and the unleashing of American war technology on a rural society. Millions of Vietnamese civilians and almost 60,000 American soldiers died in that war.

Vietnam celebrated the 25th anniversary of its victory over the United States yesterday with several parades and by freeing more than 12,000 prisoners nationwide in the biggest amnesty of its history.

In the United States, there were teach-ins around the country. Today, we’re going to hear from a Vietnam veteran, from the Vietnamese ambassador to the United Nations and from professor Noam Chomsky. They were all at a teach-in in New York called “The 25th Anniversary of the Victory in Peace in Vietnam.” Noam Chomsky, we’ll begin with, professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author of many books, including Profit Over People, At War with Asia, Manufacturing Consent. Chomsky was one of the few Americans who visited North Vietnam during the war and was arrested during that time. He spoke yesterday at Stephen Wise Free Synagogue.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Part of the reluctance is that, like everyone else on the panel, I find it very hard to talk about topics of this significance and range and horror in a few minutes, but we have to. The other reason for reluctance is that although I’d like to join in a celebration of a victory for peace, or what it says up there, I’ve never felt that that was possible, and I don’t think it’s possible today. And I don’t want to put a damper on the occasion, but I can only tell you what I think.

Like Ben, I remember very well the moment at which the end of the war was announced. Actually, it was, for me, a moment very much like this. It was a teach-in, in the middle of a teach-in, in Boston, and somebody ran down the corridor screaming words over. Howard Zinn was talking at the time. And there was — which was also not unusual. And there was a lot of celebration. But, as Ben said, the celebration was bittersweet. We knew what had happened, and those of us with eyes open could see pretty well what was going to happen. And it wasn’t pretty in the past, and it was not going to be pretty in the future.

It makes a good deal of sense to ask the question that’s raised for today’s panel: What’s different? What’s the same? But before addressing that question, we should be clear about what was, what did happen. There has been a major effort for — well, actually, goes back half a century, but there’s been a major effort since 1975 to erase the truth of what happened. What actually did happen is forbidden turf, and there are good reasons for that, because when we look at what did happen, we draw — we discover truths that are significant and that have great implications for the future, but that anyone with power and privilege doesn’t want the rest of the world to know, certainly not the rest of the American population. And it’s kind of interesting to see what the effects of this massive propaganda campaign have been over the years. We actually know a fair amount about it, and I’ll say a couple of words about it.

Just in the last couple of days, there’s been a flood of articles, which I’m sure you’ve all seen, all over the press, about the end of the war. And there’s a spectrum of opinion that’s expressed. It’s not uniform. They vary between what are called hawks and doves. The hawks say that the war was a noble cause, and we could have won, if we weren’t — and then comes stab in the back or, you know, the peace movement or something. The doves, on the contrary, say it was a noble cause, and we should have won, but we couldn’t have won for one or another reason.

At the extreme dissident end, at the time and today — say, this morning — 30 years ago, Anthony Lewis, at the very dissident end of discussion, in 1969, said that the war began with blundering efforts to do good, but we misunderstood the situation. We didn’t realize that it was a — we were fighting a nationalist movement. And finally, by 1969, it became clear that we could not win at a cost — we could not win at a price that was not too costly for ourselves. That’s the extreme dovish position. This morning, you can read David Halberstam saying virtually the same words. The tragedy of Vietnam was that U.S. force was not applicable properly, because we misunderstood the situation. We didn’t know it was a nationalist war. So, that’s the tragedy.

Why, incidentally, 1969? Well, the reason was that that was a year and a half after the business world had turned against the war and essentially ordered Washington to wind it down, because it was becoming too costly for ourselves. So, after that, the doves were allowed to say things like I just quoted. And they’re still saying them. That’s the spectrum.

The spectrum doesn’t include everybody, of course. Rather strikingly, it doesn’t include about 70% of the American population, which is interesting and important and something we ought to pay attention to. In fact, it’s not given much prominence, for not surprising reasons. But this is a very heavily polled society. The business world wants to know what people think. That’s the way you organize your advertising. And the doctrinal managers, you know, in the universities and the press and everywhere, they want to know what people think, because that’s how you design the doctrinal messages. So we know a lot about what people think.

One question that’s asked regularly on polls about international affairs — and they’re careful, good polls — is: What do you think about the war in Vietnam? And for the past 30 years — the most recent one was just a year ago — roughly 70% of the population has said the war was fundamentally wrong and immoral, not a mistake. Now, that’s a remarkable figure. For one thing, you never get high figures in a poll with an open question. For another thing, each of those — almost every one of those people who said that made it up for themselves. They didn’t hear it. They didn’t read it, certainly. Among educated sectors, you’re not supposed to believe that. In fact, at the peak of opposition to the war, around 1970, the number of elite intellectuals who felt that, believed that, was, you know, almost statistical error, maybe 2% or 3%. We also know that from detailed studies.

So there happens to be an extremely sharp gulf, not only on this issue. It’s on many, many issues, international economic issues, for example, what are called trade agreements and so on. On many issues, there’s a tremendous gulf between the population and the educated, privileged sectors, the ones who write the articles, you know, make up history and try to create it, and so on and so forth. The difference is that the educated sectors are overwhelmingly within the hawk-dove spectrum, if you can tell the differences, and the rest of the population is somewhere else. And they’re somewhere else on their own. If there was ever any open and free discussion about these issues, it wouldn’t be 70%; it would probably be 99% or something like that. That’s important, and it’s very important for the people who want to change the world to pay attention to.

How much people actually know about the war is another story. I hear there are some really horrifying figures. So, there have been studies that asked — in which people were asked how many Vietnamese they thought died during the war. And the average figure is about 100,000. Now, that’s as if you took polls in Germany today and asked how many people died during the Holocaust, and the average figure was 200,000. If that happened, we’d think there’s something really sick about German intellectual and moral culture. And it’s not different here. Fortunately, hopefully, what’s sick is highly concentrated, concentrated in sectors of privilege and power. And that’s important.

I won’t review what did happen, because you know. But briefly, very briefly, for about — since the early 1950s, the U.S. blocked every effort at negotiated peaceful settlement. That went until 1975. That included disruption of the Paris Accords of '73. It instituted a standard Latin American-style terror state in the South in the 1950s, which killed about 70,000 people in the 1950s, aroused resistance. When the resistance couldn't be contained, John F. Kennedy invaded South Vietnam. A little hidden secret about the war is it wasn’t — it was a U.S. war against South Vietnam, straight out. If anybody else had done it, that’s the way we’d describe it. It was as much a war against South Vietnam as the Russian invasion of Afghanistan was an invasion of Afghanistan. South Vietnam was always the major target of attack. That remained through right 'til the end. It was devastated. The end result of the war is that three countries were devastated, but the one that was hardest hit was South Vietnam, which was the primary target of the U.S. assault throughout. That's the brief story. There’s a lot more, and it’s a lot worse.

Well, this 70% of the population, who sort of is out of control, they — there’s a name for their feeling. It’s called the Vietnam syndrome. And it’s kind of interesting to see the way that’s interpreted. So, for example, when these polls are taken, like last year, when the last major poll was taken, it was — it’s in a academic study, and the commentator, a reasonable analyst, says — here’s the way he interprets it. Seventy percent of the population — happened to be maybe roughly 70% of the population says the war is fundamentally wrong and immoral, not a mistake. And the interpretation is the American people are unwilling to accept the burdens of responsibility for international intervention. No, that’s not what they’re saying. They’re saying, “You guys are criminals, and we don’t want to take part in your war crimes.” But you can’t hear that. What you have to hear is the American people don’t want to accept the burdens of intervention. So, then you develop, you invent the Vietnam syndrome and, you know, some fantasy about casualties, and so on and so forth. Actually, what the polls are saying is extremely clear. The topic has never been investigated in any depth. And I think the reason is because nobody in privilege wants to discover what they’re going to find out.

Well, it is understood internally. One of the most interesting parts of the Pentagon Papers, hence never mentioned, is the very end, after the Tet Offensive in early 1968. The Tet Offensive is what turned the business world against the war. It was clear that it was going to be too costly. Right after the Tet Offensive, January '68, President Johnson wanted the Pentagon to send 200,000 more troops to Vietnam, to South Vietnam, to escalate the war against South Vietnam. The Pentagon refused. And the reasons were interesting. The reasons were that they said they're going to need those troops in the United States for civil disorder control, because if the war continues, they said, the population is just out of control. And they said, you know, it’s youth, women, minorities, I mean, all kind of groups that are supposed to be passive and quiet and obedient, are getting out of control. Now, we just — we feel we’re going to need those troops here.

That remained — that understanding remained, despite the massive effort since to erase history. By around 1980, it was assumed that things were back under control. And Ronald Reagan in — you know, people around Reagan, probably didn’t know what was going on himself — but the Reaganites decided to follow their model. Their model was John F. Kennedy. They greatly admired him, and they were going to try to follow in Central America the model that he carried out in South Vietnam — namely, fraudulent white paper about how the communists are taking over the world, and then we send the Marines, and you bomb and — you know, and so on. And they started. They had the white paper. The press played the role it’s supposed to do — you know, great terror about the communists taking over the world. But then the next step didn’t happen. Why? Because there was just too much unanticipated popular resistance all over the country, in places where nobody expected it, you know, Midwest, in churches, in all kind of places that are not supposed to exist. There was a lot of protest against this effort to redo what they had done in South Vietnam in the early '60s. The Reagan administration backed off. They were afraid that the protest would harm their other programs, to which they were much more committed, like the massive militarization and so on. So they essentially told the press to cool it. They said, “Forget about the white paper.” And yeah, about six months later, the white paper was exposed as a total fraud, as of course it was, first in The Wall Street Journal and then elsewhere. New York Times never came around. But they backed off, and instead of fighting a — instead of a direct invasion of Central America, they fought what's called a clandestine war. A clandestine war means everybody knows about it, except the American public. And the press certainly knows about it, but they don’t talk about it.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky. We’ll come back to him in just a minute, on this 25th anniversary of the end of the war in Vietnam with the fall of Saigon. Professor Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was speaking at a teach-in in New York. You’re listening to Pacific Radio’s Democracy Now! We’ll come back to him in a minute.

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AMY GOODMAN: You’re listening to Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now!, on this 25th anniversary of the end of the war in Vietnam. We’ll be hearing from a Vietnam veteran, as well as the Vietnamese ambassador to the United Nations. But now we continue with the speech given yesterday by professor Noam Chomsky. He’s a professor of linguistics at MIT in Massachusetts. He also was an active antiwar leader who was one of the few Americans who went to North Vietnam during the war.

NOAM CHOMSKY: The U.S. is not a minor terrorist power. You know, it’s not Libya. If Libya wants to carry out terrorist acts, it hires private terrorists. The U.S. is a major power. It hires terrorist states. So, the clandestine war, so-called, in Central America was fought by Taiwan, Israel, Britain, Saudi Arabia and Argentina — as long as it was under the control of neo-Nazis, then they had to give them up. And they fought a massive war, which was extremely destructive — hundreds of thousands of people killed, millions of refugees, orphans and so on. But it’s not the same as B-52 bombardment, as, you know, say, saturation bombing of the Mekong Delta. It’s not like that. So, bad as Central America is, and parts of it may not even survive, it’s nothing like the war against South Vietnam, and later the rest of Indochina.

And that was understood. The Reagan administration established what they called an Office of Public Diplomacy, a propaganda agency to try to propagandize the domestic population. That happens to be illegal, and it was finally exposed later. And when it was exposed, they described, frankly, what they were doing. They said we have to — we’re carrying out the kind of activities in the United States that you carry out in enemy territory, namely — and they recognize that the American population is enemy territory. You have to somehow propagandize them. Later, at the beginning of the Bush administration, there was a leaked document, a high-level intelligence assessment of policy, right at the beginning of the Bush administration, and it talked about intervention. It said, when the United States carries out military actions against much weaker enemies — which is, of course, the only kind you ever attack. So, when we carry out actions against much weaker enemies, we must win decisively and rapidly, because anything else will undermine domestic support, not because the population doesn’t want to accept the burdens of intervention — if it was World War II, they’d accept the burdens — but because they don’t want to fight in your criminal war. So, therefore, get it over fast and quietly and make sure nobody knows about it and so on.

And this extends to other areas, too. Let’s turn to the domain of international economic arrangements, what are very misleadingly called free trade agreements. The leadership knows that the population is opposed. They can’t fail to know that. They read the polls, too, just like you and I can do. And therefore, they have to do it in secret. So, almost every one, whether it’s NAFTA or the multilateral agreement on investments or whatever — pick it — always done in secret, as much as they can. If the truth ever leaks through, they’re in trouble, and very quickly in trouble, because popular resistance develops, and they have to back down. And they understand it. The Wall Street Journal, after the fast-track legislation had to be withdrawn because of popular opposition, said that the problem is — they said everybody’s in favor of it, the whole business world, you know, the media, intellectuals. Everyone who counts is in favor. But they said the trouble is the people who are opposed have what they called an ultimate weapon. The ultimate weapon is the population’s against it. And unless you can keep the population ignorant and passive and looking at television and buying sneakers and so on and so forth, then you’re going to be in trouble, you know, because as soon as people find out about it, you’re in trouble. The ultimate weapon is still there. And the real victory in the Vietnam War, in fact, in the 1960s altogether, the whole ferment of the '60s that led to all sorts of things, the feminist movement, the environmental movement, you know, massive things — the real victory is the population's out of control and remains out of control, despite the tremendous efforts to put them back in their box.

Well, the retrospectives are, in the last couple of — week or so, are unanimous on one thing, and I think we ought to be cautious about that. The peace movement agrees, and I think it’s a mistake. They’re unanimous in claiming that the U.S. lost the war. And I don’t think that’s true. That is, the question of whether the U.S. lost the war is not a question of fact. The idea that it lost the war is an expression of imperial arrogance. And I think we should understand that. It’s true that the United States did not achieve — Washington, this is — did not achieve its maximal objectives. That is, it didn’t turn Indochina into El Salvador, which is the maximal objective. So they lost in that sense. But they won their major — they achieved their major objectives.

And we know what the major objectives are. And that’s very important for the future. In fact, the major objectives, you can tell from the, by now, declassified internal record, were the same as they always are. Nothing to do with the Cold War. That’s mostly a pretext for the last half-century. The major objectives in Vietnam are pretty much what they were in Cuba, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Congo, all around the world. They were afraid that Vietnam was going to undergo successful internal development, successful social and economic development. And as it’s put in high places, the rot might spread. The rot might spread to others. It might lead to ideological victories for the mode of socioeconomic development they’re pursuing. The virus might infect others, as Kissinger put it with regard to Chile. And you have to make sure that that doesn’t happen.

They were afraid that the virus might spread to Thailand and Malaysia and on to Indonesia, which is a major prize, and maybe even affect Japan. Japan might have to accommodate to an East Asian region which was independent and developing, and Japan would then become its industrial center. And that would mean the United States had lost the Second World War, which they were not prepared to do in the late 1940s. The Second World War in the Pacific was fought to prevent Japan from being the industrial heartland of an Asian system that it would dominate. Now, the United States was perfectly happy to let that happen — in fact, insisted that that happen after the war, except for the dominate part. So, the U.S. plans for Japan and Asia after the Second World War were that Japan’s empire should be restored to it. Actually, it was put that way by George Kennan, one of the major planners. We have to return Japan’s empire to it, but under our control — crucial difference. And if the rot spread from Vietnam throughout the region, Indonesia, and Japan accommodated, to China, then, yeah, Japan would have its empire back, but not under our control. And that’s the crucial difference. And that goes right up until today, to the East Asian financial crisis, when the U.S. blocked Japanese efforts to set up a $100 billion fund to bail out the countries, because it might have gotten out of control. We’re right in the middle of that today, hasn’t changed much.

That was the major goal, prevent that from happening. And the U.S. won that. Vietnam is not going to be a model for anybody. It’ll be lucky if it survives. It’s certainly not going to be a model of social and economic development. And if you look around the world at the other interventions, that’s what you find consistently. You’re going to find it right — you’re finding it right now in Colombia and everywhere else you look. That’s a kind of a constant that runs through imperial history. And as the U.S. takes it over, as Phyllis pointed out, we just pick up the standard procedure. It’s a global empire. You want to make sure that the rot doesn’t spread. And it’s not. Well, when you have a virus, what do you do with it? You kill the virus, and you inoculate the potential victims. And that’s what happened. Indochina was killed. You know, it’s not going to — you know, maybe it’ll survive, but it’s not going to be a model for anything. And the surrounding region was inoculated. In the ’60s and early ’70s, the U.S. succeeded in installing brutal and vicious military dictators in every country, and that stopped the — prevented the rot from spreading.

The most important victory, in fact, was in Indonesia, where, in 1965, as you know, there was a military coup, which instantly carried out a Rwanda-style slaughter — and that’s not an exaggeration — a Rwanda-style slaughter which wiped out the only mass-based political organization, killed mostly landless peasants and instituted a brutal and murderous regime. There was total euphoria in the United States, so happy, they couldn’t contain it. When you read the press, it was just, you know, ecstatic. It’s kind of suppressed now, because it doesn’t look pretty in retrospect, but it was understood. Years later, McGeorge Bundy, who was the national security adviser, recognized that, he said — and I think he’s right — the U.S. should have stopped the war in Vietnam in 1965, because we had basically won. By 1965, South Vietnam was largely destroyed. Most of the rest was going to quickly be destroyed. And we had saved the major prize: Indonesia. The rot wasn’t going to spread to Indonesia after this delightful Rwanda-style slaughter. That’s not a defeat. It’s a partial victory. And it was understood. The international business community understood it by the early '70s. They said, “You guys are crazy for going on with the war. What's the point?”

Well, after 1975 comes the need to erase the memories, because the memory — and as I pointed out, among educated circles, it wasn’t very hard, because they never had the memories. They never saw what was going on. They wouldn’t allow themselves to. Population saw. And it’s intriguing to see how it’s done. There’s, of course, no war crimes trials. Major, you know, huge war crimes. No trials, no reparations, no apology, nothing.

Robert McNamara wrote a book a couple years ago, which was described as an apology. The reaction was interesting. He was attacked by the hawks for treachery. And shockingly, he was welcomed by the doves for having finally come around to their side. Let me stress “shockingly,” because what McNamara in fact said was, “Yes, there was a crime. We couldn’t win.” And his crime, he said, is “I didn’t tell people quickly enough that we couldn’t win.” And he did make an apology to the American people for having caused them problems, not to the victims, not to those 4 to 5 million people who are dead and the others who are dying right now from chemical warfare and so on and so forth. No apology to them, and certainly nothing new to help them. But that’s considered an apology. Well, you know, in a way, he went beyond others.

President Carter, his position was different. His position was — I’m quoting — “We owe Vietnam no debt, because the destruction was mutual.” To check that out, all you have to do is take a walk around Westchester County and Quang Ngai province — perfectly obvious. What’s remarkable about that statement is that it elicited no comment — I mean, not a murmur of protest, except among, you know, the usual scoundrels, like folks here. But no comment to say that there’s — “We owe them no debt, because the destruction was mutual.”

George. Bush came along, and he actually picked the anniversary of Kennedy’s invasion of South Vietnam to intervene to prevent the European Union and Japan from their efforts to end the Vietnam embargo, which was part of punishing them for daring to stand up to the master. So he blocked that. But he was nice about it. He told the Vietnamese, he said, “Look, you have to understand, we do not threaten retribution. We only want an honest accounting of the crimes that you committed against us. That’s all.” Again, no comment.

Well, you know, there’s a pretty tough competition for depravity, but maybe the peak, at least to me, was just a couple of days ago — which perhaps you saw — when Secretary of Defense William Cohen was in Vietnam to explain to them that we’re not demanding retribution and so on. He said that he would not dwell upon the past. But he departed from that on one occasion and did dwell upon the past. And it was described, graphically, in The Washington Post. He and 250 women dwelt upon the past. He watched while 250 women were carrying out — they were on their 15th day of an excavation, in which they were sifting through pieces of mud and putting whatever they found on wire mesh to see if they could find a fragment of something that might be identified as a piece of a jet plane, which was shot down, we’re supposed to believe, while it was over Main Street, Iowa, or something. And if they could find maybe a piece of a jet plane, maybe they could identify the bones of, you know, the remains of some pilot. Well, you know, that’s proper. But here’s 250 women. The only thing they have to do is sift through the mud for 15 days while William Cohen watches them.

That means you don’t just win a war. You have to degrade and humiliate the victims. That’s extremely important. In fact, there’s a name for it in international strategic theory. It’s called credibility, establishing credibility. You have to — that’s why you bomb Yugoslavia. That’s why you kill hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq. You must establish credibility. Now, that’s a constant. People have to be afraid of you. You want to understand why? Just ask your favorite Mafia don. He’ll explain. If somebody gets out of line, you don’t just take the money from them they’re supposed to pay. You beat them to a pulp. Then everybody else gets the idea. That’s a leading principle of world affairs, and it remains so.

Well, there are heartening aspects to all of this, and let me mention them. And again, it’s what I said. The worst rot — and it is a very profound rot — is concentrated in privileged, educated sectors. A good deal of the rest of the population really is out of control. That’s the real achievement of the 1960s and everything that followed, and it’s the real hope for the future.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Noam Chomsky, speaking yesterday at the 25th anniversary commemoration of the end of the war in Vietnam, the day Saigon fell. You are listening to Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now! If you’d like to order a cassette copy of today’s program, you can call 1-800-735-0230. That’s 1-800-735-0230. When we come back, we’ll hear from a Vietnam veteran and the Vietnamese ambassador to the United Nations. Stay with us.