Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky had both established their dissent to the war in Vietnam when they decided to work together, and the result was Counter-Revolutionary Violence: Bloodbaths in Fact and Propaganda (CRV), which is a similar title to Ed’s Atrocities in Vietnam: Myths and Realities. It is the first time that Ed critiqued the media that I know of, and it was a relatively terse critique, which only mentioned the New York Times a few times. Ed’s bloodbath framework was presented for the first time in CRV.
I don’t need to go into detail on what happened next, as I have a chapter of Ed’s bio devoted to it, which is the most thorough account on the Internet that I know of. Warner Communications actually killed off its own subsidiary to prevent the publication of Noam and Ed’s book, for one of the most outrageous instances of Western censorship in the last half of the 20th century.
Their first joint work that was not censored was published in 1974, and my guess is that Ed came up with the title, “Saigon’s Corruption Crisis: The Search for an Honest Quisling.” That was typical of Ed’s wit, which is part of what attracted me to his work. In 1977, Noam and Ed published their first uncensored critique of the media in the Nation. The article took the media to task for its poorly sourced reporting on postwar Cambodia, and here is an important aspect of Noam and Ed’s work on the media. Noam and Ed did not try to determine the reality of post-war Cambodia, but critiqued the propagandistic treatment by the American media. They argued that the media was not doing its job to determine the truth and report it, but instead their reporting was propaganda that took liberties with the facts and ignored a great deal of contrary evidence. But that article began a propaganda campaign to portray Noam and Ed as apologists for Pol Pot. There was never any credible evidence for that assertion, but the propaganda continues to this day, and Ed’s Wikipedia bio is a good example of it.
I wrote at length on Philip Cross’s dishonest account of CRV’s censorship in Ed’s Wikipedia bio, and Cross’s treatment stands at Wikipedia to this day, and all attempts to correct it have been defeated by Wikipedia’s editors and admins. I was able to help make the account of the censorship of CRV accurate in Wikipedia’s article on CRV, and I was also able to introduce the bloodbath framework there, which is forbidden in Ed’s bio. If that framework was allowed in Ed’s bio, it would expose the ideological nature of Ed’s bio, as Ed is mainly attacked over three “nefarious” bloodbaths, in Cambodia, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda. Propagandists do not appreciate it when their lies are exposed, especially for nefarious bloodbaths.
Ed’s focus on nations in which the USA intervened was always on the USA’s actions and the media’s reporting on it, which was the basis of his bloodbath framework. Postwar Cambodia was a “nefarious” bloodbath, as the USA had already engaged in genocidal bombing of Cambodia in its “secret” war, and here are connections to Brian O’Leary and Dennis Lee. Brian’s first White House protest came a week after the Kent State shootings, which was triggered by student protests after Nixon finally disclosed the war in Cambodia. Dennis was inducted into a Special Forces mission to clean up a CIA mission gone bad in Cambodia, to help keep the secret war secret. It was no secret to Cambodians, but it was secret from the American people, with great media complicity. It would be as if the German people had no idea that the Nazis had invaded Poland.
What the USA did in Indochina was the greatest international crime since the Nazis. Ed and Noam’s calling that out was dishonestly transformed into their being supporters for the programs of the USA’s victims.
It took another six years before Noam and Ed’s work in CRV got published without being censored, in their 1979 two-volume work on the wars in Indochina, which was five times as big as CRV. One might notice that Noam and Ed were not publishing anything in the mainstream back then. Their two-volume work was published by the founders of Z Magazine, Ed published a number of books at their publishing house, and Ed had an article a month in Z for over 20 years, until his health failed at his life’s end. I eagerly looked forward to his Z articles each month.
In their first book of that two-volume work, The Washington Connection, Noam and Ed called out the USA’s imperial behavior, such as overthrowing Latin American governments, its support for torture, the CIA’s activities, there was the first inkling of Ed’s Propaganda Model in it, and their emphasis was not on Cambodian bloodshed, but comparing it to comparable bloodshed in East Timor that was committed by an American client regime in Indonesia, so it was a benign bloodbath (and the CIA-enabled coup in Indonesia in the 1960s was a “constructive” bloodbath). While postwar Cambodia was prominent news in the mainstream media, there was complete silence on Indonesia’s genocide in East Timor. That was the point of their reporting on postwar Cambodia, not who the good guys and bad guys were in Indochina, other than the USA’s role.
In the first half of the 1970s, a great deal of corruption in the USA was exposed and discussed. That climate led to CRV, even though it was censored. Nixon resigned over the Watergate Scandal, the Church Committee investigated the CIA, and a new investigation was opened into the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr. The official investigations were all compromised and barely scratched the surface, and the second volume of Noam and Ed’s two-volume work was about how the USA went about reconstructing its imperial ideology after the Indochina wars. American propagandists transformed the Nazi-like crime of invading Indochina into the USA’s somehow having clean hands, after their noble “mistake” in Indochina, and the USA could moralize about the failures of the postwar regimes in Indochina, both real and imagined.
In that work, After the Cataclysm, Noam and Ed analyzed the media much more than in The Washington Connection, and concluded that the American propaganda campaign had succeeded brilliantly in reconstructing the USA’s imperial ideology. That book became the basis of a propaganda campaign that lasts to this day to portray Noam, and to a lesser extent Ed, as Pol Pot supporters. There is not a shred of evidence for that claim, and it is at odds with the body of work that Noam and Ed produced, which was always primarily about the USA’s behavior, which they saw as their moral duty as Americans. Time magazine unsuccessfully tried to bait Noam into eliciting support for Pol Pot, and Noam responded with a list of media fabrications about Cambodia, including Time’s. Noam later said about the media and Cambodia that deliberately lying about something and being right by accident is not the same thing as pursuing the truth.
In just about every attack that I have seen on Ed and Noam’s work, the distinction is ignored that they are focusing on the USA’s behaviors, not those of our victims, as they are dishonestly portrayed as supporters for the programs of our victims. It is a false dichotomy that Noam and Ed often remarked on. Later, in Manufacturing Consent, Ed and Noam summarized the decade of catastrophe in Cambodia and the American media’s treatment of it, as Cambodians transformed from unworthy to worthy victims, depending on whether we were bombing them or not.
Ed and Noam’s most famous collaboration was ahead of them, but that came after a great deal of other writing by Ed, as he became a prolific writer whose focus was always on the media. That will be the subject of the next post.