Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

Well, you know, people who care about their money and their property and so on realized that this war was just money going down the drain—it was going to take a huge effort to crush this revolution. And by that point, the U.S. economy was actually beginning to suffer. That’s the great achievement of the peace movement, in fact: it harmed the American economy. And that’s not a joke. The peace movement made it impossible to declare a national mobilization around the war—there was just too much dissidence and disruption, they couldn’t do what was done during the Second World War, for example, when the whole population was mobilized around the war. See, if they could have gotten the population mobilized like that, then the Vietnam War would have been very good for the economy, like the Second World War was during the Forties, a real shot in the arm. But they couldn’t, they had to fight a deficit-spending war, what’s called a “guns-and-butter” war. And the result was that we got the beginnings of stagflation [inflation without a concurrent expansion of the economy], and weakening of the U.S. dollar, and our main economic competitors, Europe and Japan, began raking off huge profits as offshore producers for the war—in short, the war changed the economic balance of power between the U.S. and its major industrial rivals. Well, American business could understand that, they saw what was happening, and when the Tet Offensive came along and it was clear that there was going to be a bi...