Vietnam: 50th anniversary of the US invasion

This year is the 50^th anniversary of the US invasion of South Vietnam: the worst atrocity in the post war period. It killed millions of people and destroyed four countries. There is hardly a word about it in the media. It's like it didn’t happen. To explain why this 50^th anniversary is so important, here is an extract from Afghanistan and South Vietnam, a 1984 essay by Noam Chomsky (quoted in The Chomsky Reader, p224). Chomsky contrasts the way that mainstream history recognises that the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1980, but does not recognise that the US ever invaded South Vietnam, in the one case rejecting, and in the other case allowing the excuse that the invaders were invited in by the government of their client regime.
In 1962, the US attacked South Vietnam. In that year, President Kennedy sent the US Air Force to attack rural South Vietnam, where more than 80 percent of the population lived, as part of a program intended to drive several million people to concentration camps (called “strategic hamlets”), where they would be surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards and “protected” from the guerrillas who, we conceded, they were willingly supporting. … In the following years, the US continued to resist every attempt at peaceful settlement and in 1964 began to plan the ground invasion of South Vietnam which took place in early 1965, accompanied by bombing of North Vietnam and an intensification of the bombing of the South, at triple the level of the more publicized bombing of the North. The US also extended the war to Laos, then Cambodia. ...

For the past twenty-two years, I have been searching to find some reference in mainstream journalism or scholarship to an American invasion of South Vietnam in 1962 (or ever), or an American attack against South Vietnam, or American aggression in Indochina – without success. There is no such event in history. Rather, there is an American defense of South Vietnam against terrorists supported from outside (namely, from Vietnam), a defense that was unwise, the doves maintain.

(extract from Afghanistan and South Vietnam, 1984, The Chomsky Reader, p224)

Chomsky and Trotsky

Trotsky was the one who laboured to destroy and undermine the popular organizations of workers in the Soviet Union, the factory councils and soviets, [and he was the one] who wanted to subordinate the working class to the will of the maximum leader and to institute a program of militarization of labor in the totalitarian society that he and Lenin were constructing. That was the real Trotsky – not only the Trotsky who sent his troops to Kronstadt and wiped out Makhno’s peasant forces once they were no longer needed to fend off the Whites, but the Trotsky who, from the very first moment of access to power, moved to undermine popular organizations and to institute highly coercive structures in which he and his associates would have absolute authority, with absolute submission of the working population to these leaders. That was the essential doctrine of Trotskyism in power, whatever he may have said before or after.
- from interview in The Chomsky Reader, p41, Pantheon Books 1987.

PS Most of my life I’ve seen Trotsky as the revolutionary hero of the 1917 revolution contrasted with the betrayer and villain, Stalin. No doubt this mainly derives from Animal Farm. Chomsky's pithy critique changes my view. 

Short story in six words

Ernest Hemingway's friends made a $10 bet with him in the 1920s that he couldn’t write a complete story in just six words. His story was:
For sale:  baby shoes, never worn.
It has the key element of a good story, the desire to know more, and Hemmingway’s friends paid the bet. Hemingway is said to have considered it his best work.

The Enemy of Nature by Joel Kovel

The Enemy of Nature by Joel Kovel, Zed Books, £17.99
'The Enemy of Nature brilliantly lays out the current ecological crisis in all of its dimensions. Kovel reveals the real "inconvenient truth" surrounding climate change: that capitalism is responsible, and the only way to solve the problem is to get rid of it.' - from review in Socialist Review by Alison Smith, January 2008

Sustainable Energy – without the hot air

"Sustainable Energy – without the hot air" www.withouthotair.com/synopsis10.pdf
Here are some quotes from this book, which debunks several myths about energy consumption and energy production.

For example, “leaving mobile phone chargers plugged in” is often held up as an example of a behavioural ecocrime, with people who switch their chargers off being praised for “doing their bit.” The truth is that a typical mobile phone charger consumes just 0.01 kWh per day. The amount of energy saved by switching off the phone charger, 0.01 kWh, is exactly the same as the energy used by driving an average car for one second. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t switch phone chargers off. But don’t be duped by the mantra “every little helps.” Obsessively switching off the phone-charger is like bailing the Titanic with a teaspoon. Do switch it off, but please be aware how tiny a gesture it is.

 On energy production: ... for any renewable facility to make an appreciable contribution – a contribution at all comparable to our current consumption – it has to be country-sized. To provide 4% of our current energy consumption from wave power would require 500 km of Atlantic coastline to be completely filled with wave farms. Someone who wants to live on renewable energy, but expects the infrastructure associated with that renewable not to be large or intrusive, is deluding himself.

If economic constraints and public objections are set aside, it would be possible for the average European energy consumption of 125 kWh/d per person to be provided from these country-sized renewable sources. The two hugest contributors would be photovoltaic panels, which, covering 5% or 10% of the country, would provide 50 kWh/d per person; and offshore wind farms, which, filling a sea-area twice the size of Wales, would provide another 50 kWh/d per person on average. Such an immense panelling of the countryside and filling of British seas with wind machines (having a capacity five times greater than all the wind turbines in the world today) may be possible according to the laws of physics, but would the public accept and pay for such extreme arrangements?
If we answer no, we are forced to conclude that current consumption will never be met by British renewables. We require either a radical reduction in consumption, or significant additional sources of energy – or, of course, both.

Sustainable Energy – without the hot air "For anyone with influence on energy policy, whether in government, business or a campaign group, this book should be compulsory reading." Tony Juniper, Former Executive Director, Friends of the Earth

the invisible hand of Adam Smith

Chomsky takes apart the notion so loved by neo-con/neo-liberal/neo-classical economics of the invisible hand of the market coined by the economist Adam Smith. Smith used the exact phrase just three times in his writings and in The Wealth of Nations in 1776 he thought the interests of merchants and manufacturers were fundamentally opposed to those of society in general, and that they had an inherent tendency to deceive and oppress society while pursuing their own interests. Quite the opposite of what Smith is usually thought to argue, ie that the result of everyone pursuing their own interests will be the maximization of the interests of society. Many people, although Smith did not, draw a moral corollary from this argument, and use it to defend the moral acceptability of pursuing one's own self-interest.

Watch Noam Chomsky on Adam Smith and the "invisible hand" - extra scene from the 2008 documentary "American Feud: A History of Conservatives and Liberals" at  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaZORYaygo0

Palestinian 'unpeople'

Letter to Evening Standard, 19oct2011 - Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier who has just been released from detention by Hamas, merits a front-page photo and ten mentions of his name in yesterday’s Standard. Yet not a single Palestinian, among the hundreds released by the Israelis, seems to deserve a mention by name. Your lopsided reporting reminds me how, as Noam Chomsky puts it, the Palestinians are treated in the papers as “unpeople”.