Counter-Revolutionary Violence – Bloodbaths in Fact & Propaganda

Counter-Revolutionary Violence – Bloodbaths in Fact & Propaganda is a book written by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, with a preface by Richard A. Falk. It is about U.S. state-sponsored terrorism, in countries like Vietnam. It frequently mentioned the My Lai Massacre, devoted one section to Operation Speedy Express, and another to the Phoenix Program. It was to be published by Warner Modular Publications, Inc., a subsidiary of Warner Communications in 1973. Warner Modular Publications was supposed to print 10,000 copies of it. According to the then publisher, 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. In the morning McCaleb dropped off the book at Sarnoff's office. Within a few hours, Sarnoff asked for 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 * "He [Sarnoff] then announced that he had ordered the printer not to release a single copy to me and the book would not be published."