There are a lot of internet sites exploring Chomsky's anti-American propaganda. Here's some info from one re. Chomsky's efforts to cover up the Cambodian genocide:
A peculiar irony is at the heart of this controversy: Noam Chomsky, the man who has spent years analyzing propaganda, is himself a propagandist. Whatever one thinks of Chomsky in general, whatever one thinks of his theories of media manipulation and the mechanisms of state power, Chomsky's work with regard to Cambodia has been marred by omissions, dubious statistics, and, in some cases, outright misrepresentations. On top of this, Chomsky continues to deny that he was wrong about Cambodia. He responds to criticisms by misrepresenting his own positions, misrepresenting his critics' positions, and describing his detractors as morally lower than "neo-Nazis and neo-Stalinists."(2) Consequently, his refusal to reconsider his words has led to continued misinterpretations of what really happened in Cambodia.
.....
The ascendancy of the Khmer Rouge had dire consequences for the Cambodian people. This, however, was not a matter of critical importance for Chomsky. His writings follow a consistent pattern: Chomsky excels at illuminating crimes... but only the crimes of the right villains.
.....
Unlike the crimes of the West, the crimes of the Khmer Rouge were not to be illuminated. They were to be obfuscated.
.....
It is important to understand the nature of Khmer Rouge Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge regime was, without question, one of the most disastrous social experiments of the last century. One could make a persuasive case that it was in fact the single worst government in the modern era, combining mind-numbing brutality with astonishing incompetence. History was to begin anew: the Khmer Rouge declared that henceforth Cambodia was to be known as Democratic Kampuchea, and the beginning of their reign was "Year Zero." Determined to convert Cambodia into an agrarian communist state, the Khmer Rouge upended every institution in Khmer society, exterminating millions in a frenzy of executions and criminal neglect for the welfare of its citizens. Enemies, both real and imagined, were executed. Families were split apart as husbands and wives, brothers and sisters were sent to communal work groups in the countryside. Currency was abolished. Buddhism, the religion of roughly 95% of the population, was for all practical purposes banned. Angkar, "The Organization," assumed control over virtually all aspects of its subjects' lives.(6) (For an overview of Cambodia's history, see The Banyan Tree.)
Much of this was documented in a book by Francois Ponchaud, Cambodge Annee Zero ("Cambodia Year Zero"). Published in France in 1977, and later translated into English, Ponchaud's book was discussed in several major newspapers, including the Christian Science Monitor and the New York Review of Books.
It was at this point that Chomsky began to protest the supposed "bias" of the media's coverage of Cambodia. One of the earliest expressions of this was in an article Chomsky co-wrote, with Edward Herman, for The Nation, entitled "Distortions at Fourth Hand." (7)
Describing the media coverage of Southeast Asia as a "farce," Chomsky and Herman contrasted the grim reports on Vietnam by New York Times reporter Fox Butterfield with the with the much more favorable comments of the members of a handful of non-governmental groups. This, Chomsky and Herman asserted, was evidence of a campaign of disinformation:
"The drab view of contemporary Vietnam provided by Butterfield and the establishment press helps to sustain the desired rewriting of history, asserting as it does the sad results of Communist success and American failure. Well suited for these aims are tales of Communist atrocities, which not only prove the evils of communism but undermine the credibility of those who opposed the war and might interfere with future crusades for freedom."(8)
Seeking to bolster their point, Chomsky and Herman examined three books on Cambodia: Murder of a Gentle Land, by John Barron and Anthony Paul, Ponchaud's Cambodge Annee Zero, and Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, by George Hildebrand and Gareth Porter. Chomsky and Herman write:
.....
Hildebrand and Porter's book deserves examination. One simple fact provides a clue to the authors' sympathies: The book does not contain even a single sentence critical of the Khmer Rouge. Chomsky and Herman make no note of this: Just as Hildebrand and Porter had nothing negative to say about the Khmer Rouge, Chomsky and Herman had nothing negative to say about Hildebrand and Porter.
At only 124 pages, Starvation and Revolution is a slim volume. Describing the reports of atrocities in Cambodia as "systematic process of mythmaking,"(10) Hildebrand and Porter present a glowing depiction of the Khmer Rouge. The authors assert that the charges of starvation in Cambodia are unfounded: "It is the officially inspired propaganda of starvation for which no proof has been produced... Thus the starvation myth has come full circle to haunt its authors."(11) The Khmer Rouge, according to Hildebrand and Porter, were rebuilding the country quite effectively, implementing a "coherent, well-developed plan for developing the economy."(12)
A few of the book's omissions should be noted. The book makes no mention of public executions. It makes no mention of the forcible separation of children from their families, no mention of the separation of husbands and wives, no mention of the repression of ethnic minorities, no mention of restrictions on travel, or the abolition of the mail system. Put simply, the book bears no earthly resemblance to the reality of communist Cambodia.
Hildebrand and Porter's claims regarding the evacuation of Phnom Penh are particularly galling:
"The evacuation of Phnom Penh undoubtedly saved the lives of many thousands of Cambodians... what was portrayed as a destructive, backward-looking policy motivated by doctrinaire hatred was actually a rationally conceived strategy for dealing with the urgent problems that faced postwar Cambodia."(13)
The remark is surely one of the most sordid fabrications within Porter and Hildebrand's work.
.....
Whatever the reason for the exodus, how can its brutal nature be justified? Ben Kiernan, arguably the West's foremost authority on the Khmer Rouge, estimates that 20,000 people died in the evacuation of Phnom Penh.(15) How could evacuating hospitals possibly have saved lives? To quote Ponchaud's eyewitness account: "I shall never forget one cripple who had neither hands nor feet, writhing along the ground like a severed worm, or a weeping father carrying his ten-year old daughter wrapped in a sheet tied around his neck like a sling, or the man with his foot dangling at the end of a leg to which it was attached by nothing but skin."(16)
.....
It is frustrating that Chomsky and Herman do not note the obvious omissions in Hildebrand and Porter's book.
.....
Bearing this in mind, let's examine Chomsky and Herman's reaction to the other two books, both of which described Khmer Rouge atrocities in detail.
With regard to Anthony Paul and John Barron's book Murder of a Gentle Land, Chomsky and Herman are completely dismissive, calling it a "third-rate propaganda tract."(21) They discount Barron and Paul's sources as unreliable, implying that connections to the US government, or the Thai government, or the Malaysian government make them inherently unreliable. (And yet the Khmer Rouge connections of Hildebrand and Porter's sources did not strike them as inappropriate.) With vintage Chomsky disdain, they attempt to discredit the book with the snide remark that Barron and Paul "claim" to have analyzed refugee reports. "Their scholarship," Chomsky and Herman write, "collapses under the barest scrutiny."(22)
Barron and Paul are justly criticized for sloppy and misleading citations of other press accounts. But they are also criticized for ignoring more benign accounts of the Khmer Rouge regime:
"They do not mention the Swedish journalist, Olle Tolgraven, or Richard Boyle of Pacific News Service, the last newsman to leave Cambodia, who denied the existence of wholesale executions; nor do they cite the testimony of Father Jacques Engelmann, a priest with nearly two decades of experience in Cambodia, who was evacuated at the same time and reported that evacuated priests 'were not witness to any cruelties' and that there were deaths, but 'not thousands, as certain newspapers have written' (cited by Hildebrand and Porter)."(23)
The validity of this criticism, however, rests on whether or not Barron and Paul's refugee testimony was accurate. If we wish to dispute the stories told by the refugees, the testimony of "witnesses" who did not see the events described is irrelevant. The accuracy of the refugee accounts, then, is of utmost importance when evaluating the merit of Barron and Paul's book. We will return to the question of the refugees' accuracy later.
Ponchaud fares slightly better than Barron and Paul. Chomsky's supporters often point out that he described Ponchaud's book as "serious and worth reading". They rarely mention his other comments about the book, such as the claim that the book "lacks the documentation provided in Hildebrand and Porter and its veracity is therefore difficult to assess," and that Ponchaud "plays fast and loose with quotes and with numbers." Chomsky and Herman asserted that the book had "an anti-Communist bias"and was "careless, sometimes in rather significant ways." They claimed that Ponchaud's refugee testimonies are "at best second-hand with many of the refugees reporting what they claim to have heard from others."
.....
History has provided a very different judgment. Ponchaud's book has withstood the test of time. The testimony of the refugees, and Ponchaud's analysis of Khmer Rouge policy, were entirely accurate. Even Barron and Paul's flawed, right-wing account depicts Khmer Rouge Cambodia far more accurately than did Hildebrand and Porter. Barron and Paul presented Khmer Rouge Cambodia as a land of slavery, fear, violence, and tyranny. That is accurate.
.....
Still, while professing to be uncertain about the nature of the Khmer Rouge, Chomsky and Herman deemed Cambodia a suitable case study for demonstrating the propaganda mechanisms of the free press. They outlined their position in a book, After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology. The book went to press in 1979, shortly after the Khmer Rouge regime had collapsed under the onslaught of a Vietnamese invasion.
With the fall of the Khmer Rouge, the "bamboo curtain" of secrecy surrounding Cambodia was thrown open. Hundreds of thousands of refugees, freed at last from one of the most totalitarian regimes in history, suddenly poured across the border into Thailand. They brought with them irrefutable proof of the misery of the previous three years. The Vietnamese invasion not only put an end to Pol Pot's regime: it also put an end to attempts to deny the horrors wrought by Cambodia's Communists.
Or, more accurately, it put an end to most attempts. In After the Cataclysm, Chomsky and Herman advanced a lengthier argument of the same charges they had made in The Nation two years earlier.
......
Or were the Khmer really "victims" at all? Chomsky and Herman advance a number of arguments that imply that they weren't.
"...how can it be that that a population so oppressed by a handful of fanatics does not rise up and overthrow them?"(69) It is not unlikely, in Chomsky and Herman's view, that "the regime has a modicum of support among the peasants."(70) Noting that the Khmer Rouge attacked both Thailand and Vietnam, Chomsky and Herman suggest that a regime with no popular support would surely find its army unwilling to fight on behalf of their country.(71) Examining the comments of several "specialists" on the willingness of Cambodians to resist the Vietnamese during outbreaks of fighting in 1977, Chomsky and Herman again raise the same point: "It is noteworthy that in the varied attempts to find a solution to this most difficult question, one conceivable hypothesis does not seem to have been considered, even to be rejected: that there was a significant degree of peasant support for the Khmer Rouge and the measures that they had instituted in the countryside."(72)
These arguments are infuriatingly wrong-headed. Consider the implications of the first question: why didn't the population overthrow their oppressors? If the lack of a successful revolt indicates that a government was not oppressive, we must concede that Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union, and Mao's China were actually benign. After all, their subjects did not rise up and overthrow them.
.....
Chomsky and Herman echo the arguments advanced by Hildebrand and Porter, suggesting that, because of unsanitary conditions and food shortages in the city, the evacuation "may actually have saved lives."(74) As noted above, this claim is contradicted by the evidence.
In any case, according to Chomsky and Herman, "The horrendous situation in Phnom Penh (as elsewhere in Cambodia) as the war drew to an end was a direct and immediate consequence of the U.S. assault..."(75)
A reminder is in order here: the U.S. bombing had ended a year and half earlier. And yet the situation in Phnom Penh is still a "direct and immediate consequence" of the U.S. attack... not, apparently, a consequence of the Communist encirclement, or the blockade of the Mekong, or the daily rocket and artillery attacks launched by the Khmer Rouge. The book's underlying theme surfaces again: whatever happens, the U.S. is entirely to blame.
Regardless of who was to blame for conditions inside the city, there is absolutely no evidence to support the contention that the evacuation was done for humanitarian reasons. William Shawcross, commenting on a five-hour speech by Pol Pot, broadcast on Phnom Penh radio, and in a subsequent press conference in Beijing, noted that:
"Pol Pot made no mention of food shortages or famine as the motive for evacuating Phnom Penh -- his explanation is in fact closer to that of Barron and Paul than to that of Hildebrand and Porter. He said the decision to clear the city was made 'before the victory was won, that is in February 1975, because we knew that before the smashing of all sorts of enemy spy organizations, our strength was not enough to defend the revolutionary regime.'
.....
It is impossible to ignore Chomsky and Herman's double standards on the issue of the evacuation. Consider their reaction to another forced relocation: the U.S. government's "strategic hamlet" program in South Vietnam. Was the Saigon regime lauded for "saving lives" by removing people from combat zones? Of course not: Chomsky and Herman quite rightly labeled the strategic hamlets as "virtual concentration camps," and described the program as "savage."(77) The irony here is that Chomsky and Herman do indeed detect a double standard with the forced relocations instigated by the U.S., and the forced relocations instigated by the Communists... but they detect it only with regard to the West's criticisms of communist Vietnam's relocation of the Montagnards. This, they claim, "exemplifies once again the typical hypocrisy of the media."(78) They do not, however, detect any hypocrisy in their own defense of the far more brutal and far more extensive forced relocations conducted by the Khmer Rouge.
.....
In addition to suggesting that the evacuation saved lives, Chomsky and Herman also suggest that it wasn't really very important to the Cambodians themselves: they quote one of the men who accompanied a Swedish delegation to Cambodia in 1976, Jan Lundvik, who claims that the evacuation of the cities was not "'as noteworthy for the Kampuchean people as had been represented in the West' because Cambodia is an agricultural country."(82)
One wonders whether or not Lundvik himself would have found it "noteworthy" if he had been forcibly evicted from his home and deposited in the middle of a malaria-infested jungle, with the instructions to convert the forest into a rice paddy.
Richard Boyle, another source whom Chomsky and Herman cite in attempting to discredit the common perception of the evacuation as a brutal exercise, claims that the evacuation was "'justified by horrendous conditions in Phnom Penh.'"(83) Among Boyle's other claims: Phnom Penh's water filtration plants and power lines had been destroyed by "'secret police agents'", and "'not one of the 1100 foreign nationals, including about 20 journalists, who left on the two convoys provided by the Khmer Rouge ever witnesses any bodies abandoned on the roadside.'"(84) It is particularly interesting that Chomsky and Herman cite this last claim, since their own book provides evidence that it is untrue: on page 251, they note that Sidney Schanberg in fact did see bodies on the road leading out of Phnom Penh.
.....
Continuing in this same vein, Chomsky and Herman attempt to downplay the significance of child labor by claiming that "vocational training" for twelve-year-old children is "not generally regarded as an atrocity in a poor peasant society."(90) The argument is a waste of ink. No amount of scholarly doublespeak can conceal the fact that child slavery is not "vocational training."
.....
Nonetheless, this argument pales in comparison with some of After the Cataclysm's other misrepresentations. For example, Chomsky and Herman devote three pages to the remarks of Francois Rigaux, a member of a delegation from "the Association Belgique-Kampuchea" in Mid-1978. Supposedly a specialist in "the area of family life," Rigaux claimed that conditions he saw in Cambodia were (in Chomsky and Herman's words) "not unlike that of Western European villages before the industrial revolution, with a strong emphasis on family life. Children over a year of age had collective care during the work day, and he reports efforts to arrange for married couples and families to share related occupations where possible. With the extreme decentralization and local arrangements for personal affairs, bureaucracy appeared to be reduced to a minimum." Chomsky and Herman describe Rigaux's impression of health care in Democratic Kampuchea: "Similarly, medical care is not concentrated in the cities and reserved for the elite but is distributed through the most backward regions with an emphasis on preventative medicine and hygiene."(91)
"'The best propaganda for the new regime,' Rigaux writes, was the attitudes and behavior of the older peasants whom he came upon by chance in his travels. To Rigaux, they appeared to have acquired dignity, serenity, and security after a lifetime of oppression and violence."(92)
Chomsky and Herman also say that:
"Rigaux believes that 'relative to what it was before liberation, or compared to that of the peasants of Bangladesh, India, or Iran..., the condition of the Khmer peasant has improved notably.' For urban or Western elites, the results are 'shocking,' in part because of the deliberate insistence on equality, which requires that all share in 'the conditions of work to which the immense majority of the world's population have been subjected for millennia.' Now everyone faces 'the exalting task of cooperating in the progressive improvement of the conditions of life of the entire population.'"(93)
Rigaux's comments are obscene. A "strong emphasis on family life"? The Khmer Rouge implemented policies deliberately designed to break the allegiance of children to their parents, siblings, other relatives. Among the many ludicrous claims advanced in After the Cataclysm, this is surely one of the most disgraceful, particularly as it was being propagated in 1979, when the camps of the Thai border were rapidly filling with thousands of refugees capable of refuting the claim.
"Medical care"? The Khmer Rouge murdered doctors as a matter of policy. The claim is that medical care was not reserved for the elites is completely wrong. It is a safe guess that Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, and Khieu Samphan were not treated with the same "medicine" as the rest of the population: the grainy dark pellets that refugees commonly described as "rabbit shit."
A "deliberate insistence on equality"? For all of the Khmer Rouge rhetoric about a classless society, their regime was defined by rigid, inflexible classes: the Khmer Rouge themselves, the "old people," and, at the bottom, the "new people."
The "best propaganda for the new regime?" No, that would have been the likes of Rigaux himself. Or, one is tempted to add, Chomsky and Herman.
Other accounts relayed by Chomsky and Herman include the reports of a team of Yugoslav journalists who were given a guided tour of the country in March 1978. Chomsky and Herman seem to accept many of their claims at face value: that the work day was only 9 hours, for example, or the completely wrong claim that there was an "absence, even in mild form, of political indoctrination."(94)
Had they bothered to speak with any of the refugees pouring into Thailand, they could have found ample evidence to the contrary: In most areas, nightly political meetings and "self-criticism" sessions were common, and few Cambodians worked nine-hour days; many, if not most, were often forced to rise before dawn, and worked until well after sundown.
....
mekong.net |
