Volume 9, Number 2 · August 3, 1967
Good Man
By John Thompson
Like a Conquered Province
by Paul Goodman
Random House, 142 pp., $4.95
Five Years
by Paul Goodman
Brussel & Brussel, 257 pp., $5.00
This is a time when we ask, 'What must a man do?' and nobody knows the answer. Every day our war against Vietnam gets worse. The readers of this journal know perfectly well that more than 10,000 American men have been killed there, that the casualty rates are rising fast, that we are doing our best to destroy South Vietnam by uprooting provinces, defoliating forests, poisoning rice paddies, bombing with napalm and with the ingenious new multiple canisters that seem to be so effective against villagers. It is said (Wall Street Journal, June 27, 1967) that we have killed 200,000 'Reds' so far; I don't know if that includes women and children. In North Vietnam, our enormous bombing attacks destroy and redestroy the few 'targets' available. The fact that villages are also destroyed made a few headlines when Harrison Salisbury reported it, and then it was forgotten. The excuses our government has offered for all these onslaughts have been exposed again and again as lies. Our government's claims that it seeks peace have been exposed as lies. These exposures seem to do no good. The truth does no good. Thus, when Noam Chomsky rigorously accomplished what he said was the responsibility of intellectuals, 'to speak the truth and to expose lies,' about Vietnam, in The New York Review, February 23, 1967, his truths and his exposures brought only the response, 'But what must we really do?' To do the job of the intellectual no longer seems like doing anything.
Review, 2678 words
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