Language English Media type Print Genre Politics | Publication date 1973 Originally published 1973 Country United States of America | |
Publisher Warner Modular Publications, Inc. Similar Noam Chomsky books, Foreign relations of the United States books, Other books | ||
Counter-Revolutionary Violence – Bloodbaths in Fact & Propaganda is a 1973 book by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, with a preface by Richard A. Falk. It offers a critique of United States foreign policy in Indochina.
Contents
Contents
Chomsky and Herman's book offers a critique of United States foreign policy in Indochina, with significant focus on the Vietnam War. It includes sections on the My Lai Massacre, Operation Speedy Express, and the Phoenix Program.
Publishing history
The work was published by Warner Modular Publications, a subsidiary of Warner Communications in 1973. The head of Warner Communications attempted to have the publication of the book stopped.
Warner Modular Publications initially agreed to print 20,000 copies of the book. According to the head publisher of Warner Modular, Claude McCaleb, in a letter to Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman quoted in Ben Bagdikian's The Media Monopoly, on August 27, 1973, the chief of book operations at Warner Communications, William Sarnoff, called McCaleb's office in Andover, Massachusetts and wanted to find out if the book would embarrass the parent company. Two hours later, Sarnoff called again and asked McCaleb to fly that night and bring an advance copy of the book to his office in New York City. In the morning McCaleb dropped off the book at Sarnoff's office. Within a few hours, Sarnoff asked McCaleb to come back to his office. McCaleb is quoted as saying:
"Sarnoff immediately launched into a violent verbal attack on me for having published CRV [Counter-Revolutionary Violence] saying, among other things, that it was a pack of lies, a scurrilous attack on respected Americans, undocumented, a publication unworthy of a serious publisher."He is quoted saying, furthermore, that:
"He [Sarnoff] then announced that he had ordered the printer not to release a single copy to me and the book would not be published."The work is the foundation of the authors' much expanded two-volume The Political Economy of Human Rights, published in 1979.