He [Dr Benjamin Spock] fiercely opposed the Vietnam War and in 1968 he was prosecuted for assisting draft dodgers. Great Thinkers: In Their Own Worlds 1/3 Human, All Too Human, BBC 2011
Hey, hey, LBJ, how may kids did you kill today? 1960s anti-Vietnam-War marching slogan
One, two, three, four, We don’t want your fucking war. 1960s anti-Vietnam-War marching slogan
War Is Good For Business: Invest Your Son. Poster
Why Are Only The Poor Fighting This War? Protest placard
To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe in the face of the evidence the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic if unsatisfactory conclusion. Walter Cronkite, news report
1968: The belief that government was lying … that the government would lie to you blatantly and openly. Christopher Hitchens vs William F Buckley, debate Uncommon Knowledge, July 1998
An imperialist and aggressive and unjust war. ibid.
The official reason given for intervention in Vietnam – well there were several but they kept changing – one of them was to stop Chinese expansionism into the Indo-Chinese peninsula. That’s now considered so ridiculous and it is now so self-evidently untrue. ibid.
So many of the professional foreign policy establishment, and so many of their hangers-on among the lumpen academics and journalists, had become worried by the frenzy and paranoia of the Nixonian Vietnam policy that consensus itself was threatened. Ordinary intra-mural and extra-mural leaking, to such duly constituted bodies as Congress, was getting out of hand. It was Kissinger who inaugurated the second front or home front of the war; illegally wiretapping the telephones even of his own staff and of his journalistic clientele. (I still love to picture the face of Henry Brandon when he found out what his hero had done to his telephone.) This war against the enemy within was the genesis of Watergate; a nexus of high crime and misdemeanour for which Kissinger himself, as Isaacson wittily points out, largely evaded blame by taking to his ‘shuttle’ and staying airborne. Incredibly, he contrived to argue in public with some success that if it were not for democratic distempers like the impeachment process his own selfless, necessary statesmanship would have been easier to carry out. This is true, but not in the way that he got newspapers like Rees-Mogg’s Times to accept. Christopher Hitchens
Having been lied into a war principally by Kennedy … all the way through by Johnson and Nixon the people began to look more sceptically at the government. Christopher Hitchens, with Pat Buchanan, CSpan 1993
In the fall of 1968, an election year, candidate Richard Nixon and three of his senior associates evolved a plan to win the election by sabotaging the official US government negotiating position in Paris … by the simple method of opening an illegal back channel … to the South Vietnamese military junta. Christopher Hitchens, interview TVO April 2001
This president was not telling the truth either. The action in the Gulf of Tonkin was not unprovoked. Bill Moyers, The Secret Government: Constitution in Crisis, 1987
We suffered then the passion of the time that America’s defense and security were at stake in Vietnam. But our obsession was the real threat. Vietnam pushed the Cold War morality to its extreme conclusion: exorbitant means to accomplish limited ends – anything goes. The wounds still run deep. ibid.
In 1964 President Lyndon Johnson falsely claimed that an attack on US gun-ships by North-Vietnamese forces in the Gulf of Tonkin gave him no choice but to escalate the war in Vietnam. War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death, 2007
During the Vietnam War 70% of all casualties were civilians. ibid.
The Vietnam War was never meant to be won. Just sustained. This war for profit resulted in 54,000 American deaths and 3,000,000 dead Vietnamese. Zeitgeist, 2007
How Can Britain Approve A War Like This? Sunday Mirror headline
Vietnam was way American bullshit. Penn & Teller, Bullshit! s3e6: College, Showtime 2005
The continuation of the [Vietnam] policy is to some extent based on the fact of public apathy or public acceptance. Noam Chomsky vs William F Buckley: Firing Line, debate New York 1969
The existence of Vietnam as an entity – as a social and culture entity – I think that’s what’s at stake. ibid.
The war is simply an obscenity, a depraved act by weak and miserable men. ibid. Buckley quotes Chomsky, viz. American Power and the New Mandarins, 1969
There were perhaps 160,000 Vietnamese – if we accept Bernard Fall’s figures again – killed by the Saigon government and the Americans prior to 1965. ibid.
In May 1964 Adlai Stevenson defended US policy … The US was defending a free people against what he called internal aggression. Noam Chomsky, lecture 1985, ‘Lessons of Vietnam’
1962 is the year when the United States began the direct attack against South Vietnam … The US air force began direct bombing ibid.
The United States was then engaged in throughout the world – one of the unpleasant little stories of post-war history which is not often told is that throughout the world from North Africa all the way around to South Korea the United States was engaged in exactly the same project namely destroying and eliminating the anti-fascist resistance and putting into power fascist and Nazi collaborators. ibid.
We can’t concede that we invaded South Vietnam and destroyed it. Noam Chomsky, lecture BMFA 18th February 1993
Corpses, broken bodies, hideously deformed fetuses and hundreds of thousands of other victims of chemical warfare in South Vietnam, destruction on a colossal scale – all caused by an unknown hand ... we contemplate what they have done to us, the agony and injury they have forced on us to endure. Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy
The decision to extend the punishment of Vietnam was the only action commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of John F Kennedy’s escalation of the US war in South Vietnam from murderous terror to outright aggression, as he sent US Air Force units to bombard the countryside and authorized US advisors to take part in combat operations. ibid.
1990: 71%: The public say not ‘a mistake’ but ‘fundamentally wrong and immoral’. Noam Chomsky, lecture 1992 ‘Deterring Democracy’
The United States made a bad mistake in Vietnam: it’s the first time an imperial power tried to fight a colonial war with a citizens’ army. Noam Chomsky, lecture Manchester, ‘Imperial War Strategy’, Youtube 2004
Vietnam: One can look at it as a failed venture, a mistake … We have no idea what the costs were to the Vietnamese. Noam Chomsky, compilation ‘War, State Power, and American Exceptionalism’, Youtube The Essentials 2.43.03
By the late ’60s the population was largely opposed to the [Vietnam] war on moral grounds not on grounds that it was going to fail. By the ’70s with the continued improvement in the cultural climate among the general population those figures went up. By 1982 it was 72% answering you to the war is fundamentally wrong and immoral, not a mistake. Noam Chomsky, The Massey lecture 1988, ‘Necessary Illusions’, Youtube
Contrary to a lot of illusions the Vietnam War was fought primarily to ensure that an independent Vietnam would not develop successfully and become a model for other countries in the region. Noam Chomsky, lecture University of Massachusetts at Amherst 27 September 2012, ‘Who Owns the World? Resistance and Ways Forward’
When they started the programmes of chemical warfare to destroy crops and ground cover they started rounding people up and driving them into what were concentration camps, ultimately millions of people into strategic hamlets and urban slums and authorising napalm – really big attack – and nobody even cared. Noam Chomsky, lecture Back Page Books January 2008, ‘Interventions’, Youtube 1.06.26
They rewrote the memoirs radically revising … the new tale was that Kennedy was a dove, was trying to end the war and so on – assassination prevented this noble effort. Noam Chomsky, lecture Havens Centre 8th April 2010, ‘The Role of the Radical Intellectual’
In 1964 the United States decided to officially declare war on North Vietnam. The war pretext came from the so-called Tonkin Gulf Incident in which North Vietnamese boats were accused of having launched torpedoes against the American Destroyer Maddox. The New American Century, 2007
Seventy million litres of chemical weapons of mass destruction were sprayed over the Vietnamese people, their water and their countryside. The most lethal was Agent Orange which defoliated, killed and contaminated everything in its path like a radioactive atomic bomb. Secret Rulers of the World, Channel 4 2001
The history of conflict among nations does not record another such lengthy and consistent chronicle of error as we have shown in Vietnam. Robert Kennedy