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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (39670)	4/15/2004 7:21:08 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793859

Let's dig a little deeper into history, shall we? When the Khmer Rouge came to power, Chomsky hailed them as liberators. You could put this down to misplaced idealism. Then, as reports of the Cambodian Holocaust of the Year Zero began to trickle out, Chomsky wrote a big article in The Nation ("Distortions at Fourth Hand") decrying the critics as imperalist lackeys and denying the massacres: ...there are many other sources on recent events in Cambodia that have not been brought to the attention of the American reading public. Space limitations preclude a comprehensive review, but such journals as the Far Eastern Economic Review, the London Economist, the Melbourne Journal of Politics, and others elsewhere, have provided analyses by highly qualified specialists who have studied the full range of evidence available, and who concluded that executions have numbered at most in the thousands; that these were localized in areas of limited Khmer Rouge influence and unusual peasant discontent, where brutal revenge killings were aggravated by the threat of starvation resulting from the American destruction and killing. Critics have noted that of the articles refered to, the Economist article does not in fact exist (Chomsky may have been referring to some letter to the editor), and the London Economist, far from saying that deaths were "at most" in the thousands, said they were in the thousands and did not claim any knowlege of a maximum number. Then in 1979 in After the Cataclysm, Chomsky wrote: If a serious study…is someday undertaken, it may well be discovered…that the Khmer Rouge programs elicited a positive response…because they dealt with fundamental problems rooted in the feudal past and exacerbated by the imperial system.… Such a study, however, has yet to be undertaken. That was written a full three years after the Year Zero, when the extent of the massacres was already widely known. Much of Chomsky's apologia was wrapped in the guise of attacking the bias of the press or attacking the credibility of any who reported the massacres, thus giving him "deniability" on his positions which he has since taken full advantage of. Here is a full and interesting treatment of American Academic's romance with the Khmer Rouge, with Chomsky and Herman leading the pack The Khmer Rouge Canon 1975-1979: The Standard Total Academic View on Cambodia jim.com