American Power and the New Mandarins: Historical and Political Essays

This is a collection of essays from 1966 through 1968, Noam Chomsky's first political book, published in 1969 when he was fourty years old, after he had established himself as the Einstein of linguistics. Of course, it's a little bit dated but it's remarkable how little Chomsky's critique has changed, how cogent it was from its very beginning. Many of the thoughts in this book, certainly on resistance to the state, have great pertinancy today.His target was the liberal intelligensia, the "best and the brightest." These brethren (Douglas Pike, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Samuel Huntington, Walt Rostow, Dean Rusk, New York Times correspondent Neal Sheehan et. al), Chomsky shows quite compellingly, helped engineer and/or provided intellectual rationalization for one of the most barbaric wars in human history. These rationalizations were quite openly expressed in the newspapers, journals of opinion, congressional testimony, U.S. AID reports, and so on. They went something like this: We are fighting against the National Liberation Front, the so-called Viet Cong which enjoys great support amongst the South Vietnamese population and has received little aid from the North. The fact that it is to a large extent supported by the population is irrelevant. The NLF threaten our security. No indiginous force in South Vietnam, with the exception of the Buddhists, has any remotely comparable level of support. Therefore, since we can't compete in the political field, in 1954 we violated the Geneva agreements and set up a terror and torture regime in South Vietnam, with large numbers of American "advisors" helping, that used extreme violence to help compensate for its lack of political support. We made sure that the seventeenth parallel, intended in the Geneva accords as only a temporary demarcation line, was made permanent and sabotoged efforts to hold the elections in 1956 for national reunification called for in the accords. We're weak politically but we are unrivaled militarily and in the other resources of violence at our disposal. In the late 50's our response began to elicit a violent reaction from the NLF, the main target of our repression. Our allies are almost always the most feudal, reactionary and brutal elements of South Vietnam, who can never elicit any support amongst the general population. So we have to destroy the NLF, which means to "dislodge it from its constituency" which means we have to destroy its supporters and all of their homes, villages, natural environment, and so on, which means we have to take actions that will perhaps exterminate those supporters, the rural population of South Vietnam. We, who believe in behaviorist psychology, don't see anything wrong with what we are doing and believe it is fundamentally just and in the best interests of the people of South Vietnam who are perhaps somewhat unfit for self-government. We held "free and fair" elections that excluded any "neutralist," communist, socialist, NLF sympathizers and other such rascals from taking part.The debate in the mainsteam on this issue was between people on the one hand like Joe Alsop on the right, who argued that if America just kept applying more and more military force i.e. tried to wipe Vietnam off the planet it could eventually prevail and on the other hand people on the "left" like Schlesinger Jr. who prayed that this policy would work yet thought it would be too costly in the long run. Chomsky expresses thoughts that would come to any remotely civilized human being upon viewing this spectacle.Chomsky also devotes an iconoclastic, though at times somewhat ponderously written chapter to the Spanish civil war, a very good chapter on the background to Japan's role in World War Two and demolishes the establishment myths about the Cold War. He urges intellectuals to be iconoclasts, to serve truth and justice, not power and privillege.Also of some interest is a paraphrase of a quote from Harry Truman by James Warburg that Chomsky quotes. In the first edition Chomsky attributed the quote exclusively to Truman; it was corrected and attributed to Warburg, very similar to Truman's original quote, in the second edition of the book published shortly after. If one reads any serious journal of the Social Sciences or other such fields one often finds a list of errors at the end of even favorable reviews. But the commissars jumped on it and it has been the subject of dozens of articles and hundreds of references over the years. Schlesinger in "Cycles Of American History" declared that Chomsky had fabricated the quote. It is a tribute to Chomsky that they were quite unable to address his main arguments and chose to endlessly quible over the trivial quote (one of the lesser canards about him, behind the one about his support for the Khmer Rouge and the one about his support for Robert Faurisson).

Excellent book. A must read for the serious Noam Chomsky enthusiast. Sheds light on the real American Power and politics.

the order which i received has very much met and indeed exceeded expectations! the copy was in very good condition

American Power and the New Mandarins is, on the surface, about the Vietnam War. And its value to the modern reader (who is too young to remember the Vietnam era) includes learning more about the Vietnam War and the domestic resistance to it. But I think the timeless value of this book is the dissection of ideology and how the modern-day technical intelligentsia (social scientists, political scientists, engineers, etc) have come into political power and manipulate public (and their own) thought through doublethink (not exactly Chomsky's phrasing). Chomsky dissects the "liberal scholarship" that supports jingoist fantasies that echo the worst of the fascists, and calls them as "moderate." It's easy to see the right-wing as raging madmen who just want war. But the liberals pose as reasonable and simply come up with rationalizations for behaving the same way as the right. How Chomsky shows this is the real value of this book, and there are entire passages where "Vietnam" can be replaced with "Middle East."Also included is the beautiful essay, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals."

Chomsky's first political book, _American Power_ is a devastating critique for the U.S. foray into Southeast Asia, which Chomsky considers to be little more than modified imperialism. The book starts somewhat slowly, first with an extended essay focusing largely on the Spanish Civil War, which though interesting, seems like a strange place to begin the discussion. The second essay focuses on the decision of drop nuclear weapons during World War II, and the absence of "war guilt" in the U.S. over that action. The second essay, like the first, is interesting, though not seemingly directly related to Chomsky's Vietnam critique. The remainder of work focuses quite squarely on Vietnam, and offers the sort of moral outrage that Chomsky contends was conspicuously lacking from the liberal academics of the time. The entire underpinning of Chomsky's premise has to do with the morality of U.S. action, rather than the pragmatism that he chides others for basing their positions on.The book is quite powerful in many of its conclusions. A few criticisms: there is extensive use of irony throughout the work, occasionally to the point of excess; while Chomsky eviscerates a half dozen of the "liberal intelligensia", it's difficult for me, as someone who was not alive to witness the war, to know if these voices typify the liberal objections to the war, or if Chomsky has cherry-picked these individuals (obviously Schlesinger was a major voice, but I'm not familiar with the others); if you don't have some conception of the forces behind the Spanish Civil War, the first essay will be somewhat confusing. It was for me, anyway.Altogether though, particularly in light the U.S. invasion of Iraq, many of Chomsky's ideas have taken on a new urgency. The comparision between Vietnam and Iraq will come very naturally as you read _American Power_. It is well worth our time to make this comparison. Chomsky's thesis is as valid now as it was in 1969.

'American Power and the New Mandarins', Chomsky's first political book, is an excellent forerunner for the eye-opening works that were to come. His intellect is piercing, and his knowledge seemingly knows no bounds.At least two things where slightly disappointing, however. Like most of Chomsky's books, this is not a 'book', so much as it is a collection of essays upon similar themes, and thus his points about the role of the intellectual in the governmental regime is subject to a degree of repetition that may potentially irk the more discerning reader.Secondly, I was mildly disappointed in the fact that Chomsky at no point in this book elucidates the full range of reasons for his fundamental opposition to the Vietnam War - he takes his opposition to the war to be self-explanatory, and then proceeds to carve out his niche subject (the role of the aforementioned 'New Mandarins').In summary, minor qualms aside, this is a book that is just as relevant - perhaps even more relevant - to the 21st century than it was to the 1960s, given the growing power of the 'technocrat' in Western politics, especially within the field of economics and political 'science'. Thoroughly recommendable to anyone with an interest in this subject.

この方の本を，読んで裏切られたことがない。知識人は，テロに無関心でいいのか。アメリカこそ正義押し付けているのでは，ないか。アマゾンからのＤＭで読んだのだが，読んだ日にどうしてこんなに事件起きるの。アメリカで閣僚二人首切られたでしょう。話が，それたが，この人の本読むと，自分が、つくずくバカであるとかんじられる。単なる武力行使論者必読。