Comment by lionhearted | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lionhearted | Hacker News Reader

> Noam Chomsky is America’s greatest intellectual. His massive body of work, which includes nearly 100 books, has for decades deflated and exposed the lies of the power elite and the myths they perpetrate.

Should I keep reading?

See, I've actually read some of Chomsky's political work where he's defending the Soviet Union, North Vietnam, and Khmer Rouge. "There's no concentration camps in Cambodia, that's made up propaganda" type stuff.

Despite the fact that we now know that 2 million people - one third of the Cambodian population - was brutally murdered by the Khmer Rouge, he's never retracted that or apologized. He did some interesting work in linguistics, but his political theories are whacked. Mind you, I'm not left or right, I try to be a pragmatist. But this guy is not a pragmatist, he's someone who doesn't understand the real world and has defended and apologized for and lionized almost all of the most murderous regimes since the Axis powers fell. And then he wags a finger at the United States, which for all its faults, is still one of the freest countries in the world. His points of view are bankrupt and not to be taken seriously on politics.

When has Chomsky said that there were no concentration camps in Cambodia? What book was that?

(I mean these as serious questions.)

Just replied to another comment, but I'll post it again:

"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." - Noah Chomsky

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Noam_Chomsky#Posit...

I just read the article the quote comes from (http://www.chomsky.info/articles/19770625.htm). I think you're exaggerating the point to some degree by saying "there's no concentration camps in Cambodia", but I think you're generally right.

Later in the article, the source Chomsky gives for the number of "thousands" is a statistician working for the Cambodian government. That's not convincing.

> I think you're exaggerating the point to some degree by saying "there's no concentration camps in Cambodia", but I think you're generally right.

"...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"

He says they were:

1. In areas not under the control of the Khmer Rouge (false)

2. Manages to somehow blame the United States for the few killings he does admit happened.

A lot of people don't realize that if the United States and South Vietnamese had won the war, the massacres in Cambodia don't happen. Cambodia would've been next.

American Withdrawl: 15 May 1975

Fall of Saigon: 30 April 1975

Khmer Rouge Genocide: 1975 to 1979

Wikipedia: "The Killing Fields were a number of sites in Cambodia where large numbers of people were killed and buried by the Khmer Rouge regime, during its rule of the country from 1975 to 1979, immediately after the end of the Vietnam War." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killing_Fields (emphasis mine)

That wouldn't have happened with a stable joint American/South Vietnamese presence next door. Couldn't have happened, the USA wouldn't have allowed massacre on that scale the way the communist powers did. At the risk of getting into political territory, I think people like Noah Chomsky and Jane Fonda have a lot more blood on their hands than any of the military commanders they like to criticize.

Ok, why don't you tell me exactly where this quote comes from? It won't be hard, because you have read it.

Here you go:

"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." - Noah Chomsky, "Distortions at Fourth Hand", 1977

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Noam_Chomsky#Posit...

This quote is quite different than what you originally quoted. Here Chomsky cites research from others on the evidence available at the time, and does not say whether there were concentration camps in Cambodia or not.

And since you did read the actual article (and not the Wikipedia treatment), you should have noticed the conclusion:

"We do not pretend to know where the truth lies amidst these sharply conflicting assessments; rather, we again want to emphasize some crucial points. What filters through to the American public is a seriously distorted version of the evidence available, emphasizing alleged Khmer Rouge atrocities and downplaying or ignoring the crucial U.S. role, direct and indirect, in the torment that Cambodia has suffered. Evidence that focuses on the American role, like the Hildebrand and Porter volume, is ignored, not on the basis of truthfulness or scholarship but because the message is unpalatable. "

Thus, Chomsky never made the statement on whether there were concentrations camps in Cambodia or not, but wanted to provide a level headed review of the available evidence. When the Khmer Rouge was finally defeated (by the North Vietnamese, by the way) hard evidence of the concentration camps became available and Chomsky never disputed it.

Go read the original piece for context. Here's a quote that I think is his thesis statement of the piece:

"Nor is there any discussion in the Times of the "case of the missing bloodbath," although forecasts of a holocaust were urged by the U.S. leadership, official experts and the mass media over the entire course of the war in justifying our continued military presence."

He's saying that there was no holocaust/bloodbath, and that it was a bad reason to justify American involvement in the region. He was wrong, there was a massive bloodbath. He and people like him argued against the American presence in the war and argued that it was a mostly peaceful local movement and that the Americans were the aggressors, and the Khmer Rouge and North Vietnamese were liberators.

He was wrong, and millions of people died as a result of people like Chomsky and Jane Fonda and anti-war protestors. I'm in Vietnam now and was in Cambodia a few months ago. These places are still less prosperous than they were before the war, everything is dirty, run down, broken, no safety, minimal infrastructure, and there's not much rule of law. Vietnam will recover eventually. Cambodia probably never will.

Had the United States and South Vietnam won, or at least fought to a standstill, South Vietnam would be more like South Korea today, and less like North Korea. Cambodia would be more like South Korea and less like North Korea. Chomsky, Fonda, and the protestors against the war did a massive disservice to the people of Southeast Asia. Millions dead as a result of their incorrect, ignorant moralizing. The United States and South Vietnam were winning militarily, and lost public opinion. Without people like Fonda and Chomsky to turn the tide, millions more survive and live in prosperity instead of horror and poverty and bloodshed.

I have read the article. The reference to the missing bloodbath was about Vietnam and not about Cambodia. Chomsky was right there. The missing bloodbath was in reference to the reasoning a lot of people in the US used to prolong the war. The theory was that if the US leaves everyone in the south would be massacred, so we must stay for humanitarian reasons. That was wrong, the North Vietnamese did not massacre civilians after they won. Again this has nothing to do with Cambodia.

The other stuff you have written there is just silly. Were you in Vietnam before the war? Can you really make the comparison? Are you sure that as a French colony, when most Vietnamese were either peasants or more or less slaves working on French rubber plantations, Vietnam was more prosperous than it is now? Or do you mean to say that it was just dirty and relatively poor when you saw it and therefore made you feel superior enough to dream up various theories about how it might have been so much better if they let us bomb them a little more.

A lot of that poverty is the result of the war, and I really doubt it would have been much better if the war lasted longer.

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