In August 2022, Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg were interviewed together by Paul Jay for his podcast at theAnalysis.news. An excerpt follows from their conversation.
ELLSBERG: I’m sending stuff to my archives at UMass-Amherst, and I came across in my files this terrific paper by Noam Chomsky, U.S. Involvement in Vietnam, written just after the war had ended, finally in 1975. You probably don’t remember this paper, but I can recommend it to you.
Of course, it reminded me we had been in ’75, you and I, on the same side for eight years, since about ’67, when I came back from Vietnam, working together. With the greatest respect, you’d been on the right side much longer than that, all your life, as far as I know. Before those eight years, I had been participating as part of the wrong side. Anyway, we’ve been in for more than half a century working on this. I have not learned more from any person on Earth. From you, Noam. No one has contributed more.
Just going back to ’67 when I read your book on the American Mandarins and whatnot. The sentence in it was actually just indirect. It said the U.S. acted as if it had a right to do these things, to be demolishing Vietnam and threatening the world. I, as somebody who worked for the government for more than a decade, thought to myself, ‘a new idea’. I had never heard it discussed. Never heard the thought. ‘Do you have a right to do this, or not a right to do that?’ That was a very seminal thought as far as I was concerned. It helped change my life. So thank you.
CHOMSKY: Let me just add that the fact that Dan was right at the heart of it for many years has been an extraordinary value. More than anyone else, he’s been able to bring us an understanding of how things work on the inside: what the planning is like, what the thinking is like, and how to understand what’s happening now because nothing much has changed. It’s an invaluable contribution. Quite apart from his 50 years of direct engagement, courageous, significant engagement with all the material he has brought forth. Now, on the background of nuclear planning, first, on the background of the Vietnam War, it’s been an incomparable contribution to moving forward to try to achieve some measure of peace and justice in the world.
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