Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [302]
4. Ibid., pp. 102ff.
5. Ibid., pp. 14–15, for further discussion of the alleged Soviet motive.
6. Ibid., chapter 5.
7. Ibid., pp. 139–41, for an analysis of Sterling’s signaling theory.
APPENDIX 3
1. Pentagon Papers, Senator Gravel edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), IV, 548–49; see p. 210, above. As to what Schakne actually said, we cannot be sure, since Braestrup presents only a few scattered phrases embedded in his own highly unreliable paraphrases, unsubstantiated by any text.
2. Gareth Porter, “Who Lost Vietnam?” Inquiry, February 20, 1978; see references of chapter 5, note 119; also Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, Political Economy of Human Rights (Boston: South End Press, 1979), I, 5.2.3. Lengel, Big Story, I, 269; see pp. 194–95, above.
3. As revealed, no doubt, by his book Viet Cong (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969), where he contrasts our side, which sympathizes with “the usual revolutionary stirrings . . . around the world,” with the backers of revolutionary guerrilla warfare, which “opposes the aspirations of people while apparently furthering them,” and expresses his contempt for the “gullible, misled people” who were “turning the countryside into a bedlam, toppling one Saigon government after another, confounding the Americans,” etc. The fact that Pike was an employee of the U.S. government and an “admirer” and avid defender of its policies does not suggest to Braestrup that he might be something other than “independent-minded”; only Porter’s alleged political preference is relevant to “Freedom House objectivity.”
4. Big Story, I, xxviii; the same is true of Don Oberdorfer’s Tet! (New York: Doubleday, 1971) and Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam: A History (New York: Viking, 1983), among others.
5. Seymour Hersh. My Lai Four (New York: Random House, 1970), pp. 139–40.
6. Recall that “whatever losses the DRV/VC forces did suffer in the initial assaults were largely offset by the unimpeded recruiting that they conducted in the rural areas in the weeks that followed” (Wallace J. Thies, When Governments Collide: Coercion and Diplomacy in the Vietnam Conflict, 1964–1968 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980], p. 201); see p. 200, above, and General Wheeler’s comments, cited above, pp. 209–10.
7. See the reviews cited in chapter 5, note 1, for many further examples.
8. Elsewhere (Big Story, I, 159), the same quote is attributed to Frank McGee.
9. Douglas Kinnard, The War Managers (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1977), pp. 75, 47. In fact, the “body count” was unknown, since much of the air and artillery barrage was directed against targets where casualties could never be counted or even guessed at, as Kinnard and many other sources confirm. Westmoreland’s subsequent writings show that reporters would have been quite justified to treat his reports with skepticism. See George M. Kahin, Intervention: How America Became Involved in Vietnam (New York: Knopf, 1986), p. 536, on his falsification of the record concerning the suppression of the Buddhist movement in Danang and Hué in 1966.
10. For evidence from the Pentagon Papers, see Noam Chomsky, For Reasons of State (New York: Pantheon, 1973), pp. 86ff.
About the Authors
Edward S. Herman is Professor of Finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Among his books are Corporate Control, Corporate Power (Cambridge University Press); The Real Terror Network: Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda (South End Press); Demonstration Elections: U.S.-Staged Elections in the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, and El Salvador (with Frank Brodhead) (South End Press); The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection (with Frank Brodhead) (Sheridan Square Publications).
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of The Chomsky Reader, Towards a New Cold War, Reflections