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Vietnam Remembered

Ngo Ving Long Noam Chomsky: April 30, 2005; Running Time: 1:57:25

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

In this bitter commemoration of the end of the Vietnam War, the speakers dispel any comforting notion that Americans have absorbed lessons from that bloody time, much less sought the truth. Ngo Ving Long describes how the United States policy of pacification, starting in the early ‘50s, involved “incredible assassinations of people at the local level.” The U.S. blocked free elections, and helped the Saigon regime annihilate not just Communists, but eventually hundreds of thousands of peasants in the south who took up arms to defend themselves. Long has intimate knowledge. As a teenager, he met some U.S. generals at a club in Saigon. Seeking to travel around his country, Long agreed to make maps of villages for the U.S. military’s anti-malarial disease program, which he quickly learned was a cover for rooting out suspected subversives. “When I protested to higher ups, ‘You’re making people suffer and producing more enemies, more Communists’, I was told, ‘This is how we defeated them in Malaysia and the Philippines.’ It turned out not to be the case.”

Noam Chomsky expands on this grim chronicle, characterizing the slaughter of the civilian population of the south “as one of the worst, if not the worst, war crime of the post-Second World War era.” He says the United States’ “basic war aim was to destroy the country,” out of concern that an independent Vietnam “would undertake a course of development that others might want to follow—it was a virus that might infect others.” Chomsky scoffs at the view, circulated at least among Iraq-focused media, that the public has a Vietnam fixation. “There’s no concern, let alone obsession, about what actually happened in Vietnam,” says Chomsky. “Unless people like us become capable of looking in the mirror honestly, then biology’s only experiment with higher intelligence is likely to prove quite brief.”

Lecture Details

Location: Kresge Auditorium

About the Speakers

Ngo Ving Long

Professor of History, University of Maine

Ngo Ving Long's research has focused on the problems of the peasantry and of rural development in East and Southeast Asia. In 2000, he served as a Fulbright scholar in Vietnam, teaching courses on the post-World War 2 history of economic development and foreign relations in East and Southeast Asia.

Long earned a Ph. D. in East Asian History and Far Eastern Languages from Harvard University in 1978, and joined the University of Maine in 1985. His books include Before the Revolution: The Vietnamese Peasants under the French (MIT Press, 1973); and, as co-editor, Coming to Terms: Indochina, the United States and the War (Westview Press, 1991).

Noam Chomsky

Institute Professor; Professor of Linguistics

Noam Chomsky has written and lectured widely on linguistics, philosophy, intellectual history, international affairs and U.S. foreign policy. A brief sampling of his prolific work includes: The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory; Aspects of the Theory of Syntax; Language and Mind; American Power and the New Mandarins; Reflections on Language; Rules and Representations; Knowledge of Language; The Culture of Terrorism; Manufacturing Consent (with E.S. Herman); Understanding Power; Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance; and most recently, Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World, (with David Barsamian).

Chomsky received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955. He then came to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in 1961 was appointed full professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics. During the years 1958 to 1959 Chomsky was in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. In the spring of 1969 he delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford; in January 1970 he delivered the Bertrand Russell Memorial Lecture at Cambridge University; in 1972, the Nehru Memorial Lecture in New Delhi, and in 1977, the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden, among many others.

Chomsky has received honorary degrees from universities around the world, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Science.

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