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Rating: 
Summary: Totalitarian Apologetics
Review: The pseudo-scholarly appearance of this book - replete with quotations and footnotes - should fool no-one: this is a work of propaganda, in which American allies are furiously attacked and communist dictatorships relentlessly excused. Perhaps its most noteworthy feature is the assertion that "Washington has become the torture and political murder capital of the world" (p16), although not one of the reactionary crimes cited by the authors amounts to even a microscopic fraction of the tens of millions who had just been slaughtered in the People's Republic of China or the millions who were dying at that very moment at the hands of communist butchers in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, let alone the countless victims of genocidal Soviet client regimes, from Ethiopia and Uganda to Angola and Mozambique. Needless to say, this book flatly denies the post-war atrocities in Vietnam, congratulating the communist dictatorship on its "miracle of reconciliation and restraint" (p28) and concluding that there has been "no bloodbath, so far as is known; nothing like what happened in France" after the Second World War (pp79-80). The statement is remarkable, both for its denial of crimes against humanity and for its suggestion that had such crimes taken place, the victims would have deserved no more sympathy than Nazi collaborators. Needless to say, the authors do not cite any of the abundant contemporary accounts of repression and brutality (e.g. Doan Van Toai, "The Vietnamese Gulag"), nor have they updated this book to refer to the studies documenting the massacre of 100,000 civilians (Jacqueline Desbarats, "Repression in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam," online) - with victims beheaded, disembowelled or buried alive (Wall Street Journal, April 22, 1985) - or the death of 165,000 in concentration camps (Orange County Register, April 29, 2001) or the drowning of 500,000 boat people during communist expulsions (Louis Wiesner, "Victims and Survivors: Displaced Persons and Other War Victims in Vietnam, 1954-1975," p344). Could any reader, no matter how diligent, guess the truth from these pages? Hardly less shameful is the whitewashing of massive communist atrocities during the war, such as the claim that Viet Cong success was based on "understanding and trying to meet the needs of the masses" (p340), or the suggestion that the terrorists are "not likely to resort to bloodbaths" because they seek the support of the peasants (p341). The reader is not told that Viet Cong death squads butchered 27,500 civilians during 1957-67, or that the victims - typically doctors, teachers, social workers and their families - died after sadistic torture and mutilation: sometimes the Viet Cong "chop off a finger or a hand" as a warning, while in other cases "they disembowel a man or impale him alive" (Newsweek, May 15, 1967). The reader is not told of North Vietnamese war crimes such as the mass murder of up to 155,000 refugees on the road to Tuy-Hoa in March 1975 (Wiesner, pp318-9). Omissions such as these would make Orwell cringe. Having denied these atrocities - surely some of the most hideous crimes in living memory - the book turns to "the two most important mythical bloodbaths," namely the North Vietnamese land reform and the Viet Cong massacres at Hue (p341). On the pre-war genocide in North Vietnam, the authors rely on a long-refuted piece of communist agitprop by Gareth Porter, who fabricated mistranslations of sources, smeared witnesses as CIA agents, treated North Vietnamese official statistics as gospel truth and would later argue that Cambodia's killing fields did not exist - the evidence being that the Khmer Rouge said so (Robert F. Turner, "Expert Punctures 'No Bloodbath' Myth: Gareth Porter Refuted," Human Events, November 11, 1972; Stephen J. Morris, "Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot and Cornell," The National Interest, Summer 1989). By contrast, the authors completely ignore the numerous sources demonstrating that 50,000-100,000 were massacred and 300,000-500,000 starved to death (Robert F. Turner, "Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development," pp142-4). On the massacre at Hue, the authors quote from a captured document in which the Viet Cong boast of having "eliminated" thousands of people, but they dismiss the evidence because "nowhere in the document is it claimed or even suggested that any civilians had been executed" (p348). So "eliminated" does not mean "executed." No satirist could invent such an argument. They do not mention the many other Viet Cong documents proving the massacres (Stephen T. Hosmer, "Viet Cong Repression and its Implications for the Future," pp72-8), such as the report boasting that they had "annihilated members of various reactionary political parties, henchmen, and wicked tyrants" in Hue (ibid., p73). Nor do they disclose that North Vietnam also admitted communist responsibility for the bloodbath, gloating at "the hooligan lackeys who had owed blood debts to the Tri-Thien Hue compatriots and who were annihilated" in the Tet Offensive (Radio Hanoi, April 27, 1969). Quite simply, there is no limit to the absurdity of the denials in this book: we are even told that "the apparent absence of retributory killings in post-war Vietnam" proves that there was no massacre at Hue (p353). Applying this logic elsewhere, perhaps we can imagine some neo-Nazi tract which defends the claim that the Kristallnacht pogrom was a hoax with the assertion that the Holocaust never happened. Note that such analogies are rather generous to the work under review, since the atrocities which the authors deny are far less widely known than their Nazi equivalents, therefore much more easily concealed. Like all sophisticated propaganda, this book contains particles of truth. The authors are right to condemn Indonesian atrocities in East Timor. But can we take their indignation seriously, when they zealously defend communist butchers in Vietnam? Is anyone impressed by double standards on genocide?
Rating: 
Summary: Why don't we just leave people alone?
Review: This is a good book that explains in great detail how the U.S. has been involved in the oppression of alot of the third world in order to open up countries to be exploited and controlled by the American business establishment, which also controls the government and the media. Opening up other countries resources and trying to create a huge export economy for American investors was the main reason of our support of brutal sub-fascist regimes in which thousands upon thousands of people were killed, imprisoned and tortured by military and police forces trained and aided by the U.S. Many of these brutal murderers and torturers were trained at the schools of the americas in the Panama canal zone and in Miami for "counter-revolutionary" objectives to the south of this great power. There were no Soviets down there but we were in danger of the domino effects of communism. 'Communism' was just an evil word that was used to scare people into a jingoist frenzy, kinda like the word 'liberal' today. We were always much stronger than them with our state monitored and controlled form of capitalism. Yet these small countries in Central & South America were grave threats to American power in the region. Chomsky points out that the word communism as used by the government and media in U.S. terms really just meant, in many cases, an effort on the part of other countries at sovereignty and independence from the U.S. If they tried to use their natural resources and land for themselves and were not willing to share it with the U.S. business community, then they were met with extreme hostitity by the U.S. These things seem like common sense to me. During the 1950's the U.S. had a latin-american style terror regime in place being traind by U.S. advisors. A popular revolt overthrew it and then we escalated our involvement to a direct attack on South Vietnam which later expanded to N. Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Who knows how many bombs we dropped, how many people were killed, or how many died from the chemical warfare of "agent orange"? And for what? Because they wanted independence from the French and then the U.S. We were defending South Vietnam from South Vietnam people and supporting the terrorist U.S. backed regime in Saigon that tortured and murdered people. None of this surpises me, these are things that great powers do and always have done throughout history, but are rarely commented on until that power is no longer in power. I am proud to have Americans like Chomsky who go all out to reasearch and inform the American people about what is really going on and how and why we do the things that we do around the world. Chomsky always just tries to provide facts and doesn't really say his opinions about whether its right or wrong or what we could do differently. His point is more about how American power works and leaves it up to you to decide if the repercussions are worth it or not. I personally think that bottom line profits for the minority rich at the top of our society is not worth directly and indirectly violating human rights and democracy around the world.
Rating: 
Summary: A discussion of American involvement in the Third World
Review: Volume 1 of Political Economy of Human Rights is a journal of American Imperialism in the contemporary context of the Third World.
At over 350 pages, and replete with another 70 pages of notes and references, this tome is no less a scholarly endeavour than the other works of the authors and consequently provides for an informative look at US activity in most of the Third World. The book considers most countries in separate sections, provides background and historical reference and examines cause and effect. One common motif of the book is 'stability' as coveted above all by American interests and how different overt and covert means are imposed upon different countries to achieve it. The Washington Connection... is a brilliant foray into parts seldom travelled by popular media and recommended.
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