Why did most of the American mainstream liberal intelligensia remain silent while atrocities were being committed in Vietnam? Chomsky's answer is that they not only participated, but provided the ideas that fuelled the war: that the Vietnamese peasantry needed to be pacified, that Vietnam was under the influence of Moscow and/or China, that America had an unfettered right to intervene, in Asia or anywhere. Chomsky argues that scholarly elites in newfound positions of influence used the mask of objectivity to promote self-serving ideas that proved disastrous to millions of Southeast Asians.

Author Biography

Noam Chomsky is the Institute Professor and a professor of linguistics, emeritus, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A world-renowned linguist and political activist, he is the author of numerous books, including On Language: Chomsky's Classic Works Language and Responsibility and Reflections on Language; Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, edited by Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel; American Power and the New Mandarins; For Reasons of State; Problems of Knowledge and Freedom; Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship; Towards a New Cold War: U.S. Foreign Policy from Vietnam to Reagan; The Essential Chomsky, edited by Anthony Arnove; and On Anarchism, and a co-author (with Ira Katznelson, R.C. Lewontin, David Montgomery, Laura Nader, Richard Ohmann, Ray Siever, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Howard Zinn) of The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years and (with Michel Foucault) of The Chomsky-Foucault Debate, all published by The New Press. He lives in Lexington, Massachusetts.