In discussing ideologies, Gramsci pointed out that, “according to Marxism, ideologies are all but arbitrary; they are historical facts that must be fought and unveiled in their character of instruments of domination, not because of ethical reasons, etc., but precisely for reasons of political struggle: in order to render those who are dominated independent from those that dominate them, in order to destroy a type of hegemony and create another one, as a necessary moment in the overturning of praxis.” News reports in the past five years have made it clear to everyone that for all practical purposes the United States has been militarily defeated in Vietnam. What has remained entirely unknown is that, while General Giap has been unleashing Tet offensives in the battle-fields, Viet Cong philosophers have also: been busy waging an ideological battle on the philosophical level. Modern imperialism finds its ideological justification in the now fashionable linguistic philosophy which either regards all meanings as wholly arbitrary (e.g., Quine, White, Goodman, etc.), or reduces them to the facticity of everyday discourse (e.g., Wittgenstein, Austin, etc.). In this fashion, all meanings are either equally unfounded, or they can be founded only in the domain of the given. In either case, imperialism is implicitly justified, for, in the first case it is regarded as at least as rational a system as any other, thus neutralizing any possible rational arguments for its debunking, or else, in the second case, since all meanings reduce to the given and the given is, in fact, imperialist, imperialism itself becomes the criterion of all meaningfulness.

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