newberry wrote:As I was saying, if anyone has any specific quotes from Chomsky that they take issue with, I'd be curious to hear them. His views on the Khmer Rouge were brought up, but I didn't see any quotes from Chomsky on that topic (but I may have missed them)--I saw direct quotes from a Chomsky critic.
Chomsky and Herman wrote [in the article
Distortions at Fourth Hand]:
"The response to the three books under review [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] nicely illustrates this selection process. Hildebrand and Porter present a carefully documented study of the destructive American impact on Cambodia and the success of the Cambodian revolutionaries in overcoming it, giving a very favorable picture of their programs and policies, based on a wide range of sources. Published last year, and well received by the journal of the Asia Society (Asia, March-April 1977), it has not been reviewed in the Times, New York Review or any mass-media publication, nor used as the basis for editorial comment, with one exception. The Wall Street Journal acknowledged its existence in an editorial entitled 'Cambodia Good Guys' (November 22, 1976), which dismissed contemptuously the very idea that the Khmer Rouge could play a constructive role, as well as the notion that the United States had a major hand in the destruction, death and turmoil of wartime and postwar Cambodia."
What a joke, and someone suggested Chomsky was an historian. No historian worth their salt would say such things even in a book review. This is empty rhetoric, not history or even accurate political analysis; in fact it doesn't even qualify as journalism. It's careless and irresponsible writing.
Chomsky and Herman wrote [in
Distortions...]:
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. These reports also emphasize both the extraordinary brutality on both sides during the civil war (provoked by the American attack) and repeated discoveries that massacre reports were false. They also testify to the extreme unreliability of refugee reports.
Not true. These unnamed 'specialists' took their information from 'official' KR reports and documents only and the refugee accounts were remarkably accurate as it turns out. Chomsky tactic here is similar to arguments put forward by Holocaust deniers (of which one of the most prominent Chomsky openly supports) by attacking the first hand accounts, in this case Cambodian refugees. If he'd have said we should treat all accounts with caution, it might have been acceptable but to treat them all as extremely unreliable highlights his narrow agenda driven mentality.
Oh and before any Chomskyites say "oh but poor Noam was speaking up in defense of freedom of speech". Yes, but Chomsky's defenders continually ignore Chomsky in support of Faurisson's 'credentials' and 'findings' that there were no gas chambers.
Chomsky says:
Dr. Faurisson has served as a respected professor of twentieth-century French literature and document criticism for over four years at the University of Lyon 2 in France. Since 1974 he has been conducting extensive independent historical research into the "Holocaust" question. Since he began making his findings public, Professor Faurisson has been subject to a vicious campaign of harassment, intimidation, slander, and physical violence in a crude attempt to silence him. Fearful officials have even tried to stop him from further research by denying him access to public libraries and archives.
Chomsky is not just supporting freedom of speech. Faurisson was never denied access to libraries etc. Chomsky is a liar and like those he supports is a "falsifier of history". CRAP
Vidal-Naquet said:
The simple truth, Noam Chomsky, is that you were unable to abide by the ethical maxim you had imposed. You had the right to say: my worst enemy has the right to be free, on condition that he not ask for my death or that of my brothers. You did not have the right to say: my worst enemy is a comrade, or a "relatively apolitical sort of liberal." You did not have the right to take a falsifier of history and to recast him in the colors of truth.
http://www.anti-rev.org/textes/VidalNaquet81b/