American Power and the New Mandarins

American Power and the New Mandarins is a 1969 book by the US academic Noam Chomsky. It was his first political book and sets out in detail his opposition to the Vietnam War. He develops the arguments, laid out in The Responsibility of Intellectuals, that the American intellectual and technical class, in Universities and in government (the New Mandarins) bear major responsibility for the atrocities perpetrated by the United States in Vietnam. He ... more

American Power and the New Mandarins is a 1969 book by the US academic Noam Chomsky. It was his first political book and sets out in detail his opposition to the Vietnam War. He develops the arguments, laid out in The Responsibility of Intellectuals, that the American intellectual and technical class, in Universities and in government (the New Mandarins) bear major responsibility for the atrocities perpetrated by the United States in Vietnam. He also argues that US policy in Vietnam was largely successful. In Chomsky's view US policy was to destroy the nationalist movements in the South Vietnamese peasantry rather than to defend South Vietnam from North Vietnamese aggression. He holds that the former was accomplished rather successfully even if at the expense of the latter. The book was reprinted by New Press in 2002 and contains a new foreword by Howard Zinn, an American historian and the author of A People's History of the United States. Several chapters of this book are available... less