The harshest critics within the mainstream media, as well as what Corr...
Citations (1)
- Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media whole source · open book
The harshest critics within the mainstream media, as well as what Corry calls “the culture,” held that the war began with “blundering efforts to do good,” although “by 1969” (that is, a year after corporate America had largely concluded that this enterprise should be liquidated) it had become “clear to most of the world—and most Americans—that the intervention had been a disastrous mistake,” and that it was a “delusion” to attempt to build “a nation on the American model in South Vietnam”; the argument against the war “was that the United States had misunderstood the cultural and political forces at work in Indochina—that it was in a position where it could not impose a solution except at a price too costly to itself” (Anthony Lewis).13 Stanley Karnow’s highly praised companion volume to the PBS television series describes the American war as “a failed crusade” undertaken for aims that were “noble” although “illusory” and “motivated by the loftiest intentions”: specifically, the commitment “to defend South Vietnam’s independence.
chapter: 5 The Indochina Wars (I): Vietnam