This is not an isolated incident, unfortunately. He also praised Mao’s policies shortly after they caused the worst famine in human history.
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2003/5/the-hypocrisy-of-noam...
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2003/5/the-hypocrisy-of-noam...
The butchering of the second quote is is even worse, omitting the line "But, as I said before, I don’t think it was the use of terror that led to the successes that were achieved."
The article later moves on to defend the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory bombing, which is fittingly right after discussing Cambodia.
Let me say where I am coming from here. The Khemer Rouge and Mao had in common certain ideas. They were for socialism, and they were for achieving it through violent revolution. They believed in the Leninist ideas of vanguardism and party centralization. And they believed that it was possible to take a preindustrial country directly to industrialization and then anarchistic socialism without first having to go through a liberal, capitalist phase.
I think these ideas are mistaken, and whenever they have been tried the result has been a horror. And it is for that reason the Pol Pot and Maoist regimes were so brutal. So my question to you is, what do you think of these ideas?
One reason I think it is important to stress this is that defenders of Marxism-Leninism say that regimes like this went bad because they fell away from Marxist-Leninist values, which implies it could have gone better, but I say the ideology always leads to that result.
So let me ask you, do you disagree? Do you think it is possible for a Marxist-Leninist regime to turn out good?
But when that failed to happen Lenin switched to the idea of revolution in preindustrial nations, which would lack that military strength. He predicted this would be safe for Russia because imperialism had run out of options and would collapse in the great war, and then revolution in the advanced nations would take place and protect Russia. And then when that failed to happen he was stuck with socialism in one country, but decided to go ahead anyway, with the predictable result that it came under military threat first from the fascists and then the capitalist countries.
In the case of China and Cambodia, military threat was predictable from the beginning.
So what is your scenario? Is it to wait around for the revolution to finally takes place in the advanced nations? And what about Trotsky's argument that Democratic centralism inevitably leads to dictatorship?
Also, since you defended Chomsky, does he ever directly discuss Marxism-Leninism? My impression is that he is not one, and if that is the case why did he think that M-L regimes might turn out good?
With Russia, within roughly a year every major player involved in WWI had declared war on the Reds. Threats from the facists came much later, when I'd argue the entire revolution was over.
In general though, Lenin's personal ambition had seemed to be his driving force for most of his revolutionary career, which is why I'm skeptical of it's ideal outcome as well.
>In the case of China and Cambodia, military threat was predictable from the beginning
I agree, but I think the hostility from capitalist countries has an overbearing influence on the kind of atrocity filled resulting states.
>Is it to wait around for the revolution to finally takes place in the advanced nations?
I don't really support a violent revolution anywhere, and have moved into the "slow change" side of revolution.
As for the rest, I also suspect that Democratic centralism is a flawed premise, and view Lenin's disbanding of the soviets as proof he was aiming for a dictatorship. As for Chomsky, I don't think he is one. This discussion was how he doesn't think the revolution was wholly bad, as the propaganda makes it out to be, but he was hardly praising it either. I'm not really sure why you started this conversation about Marxism-Leninism if I'm honest.
I think this is part of a much larger problem. I think everyone should have an understanding of Marxism-Leninism and what is right or wrong about it. One of many reasons everyone needs to understand Marxism-Leninism is that China continues to be considerably influenced by it.
I am in my 70's, and it used to be a fair amount of the population had this understanding, but nowadays very few people do. This has happened partly because the left, both pro-and anti-communist, has basically stopped explaining it to people. One consequence is mistakenly defending people like Chomsky when they go wrong due to poor ideological understanding.
I think there are various reasons the left has stopped explaining Marxism-Leninism, but I think it is very unfortunate and am angry at them for this, and I take every opportunity to explain it, and in fact I am planning on someday writing an article on it.
Let me add it's nice to talk to someone who understands these issues far better than most people do.
From Chomsky's viewpoint, the drop in population had two likely causes. Cambodian atrocities, or the lingering effect from the known US atrocities/possibly still ongoing ones. When the only reports pinning it on Cambodia comes through refugee statements made to the US, Chomsky thought independent verification was necessary.
As for the rest of your post, I've made myself clear that I'm not a proponent of Leninism. That said, Marxism-Leninism never had the strong or lasting influence you claim. It was used to foster the revolution, and then pulled out for various political uses.
Any violence inherent in the ideology is shared by most revolutionary creeds. During the nineteenth century, it was assumed that any "liberal" revolution would also inevitably turn brutal as well.
And as for wanting the "left" to explain Marxism-Leninism, most of the left experience the same twelve years of propaganda on the subject as the right. I don't see this drastic difference between the sides.
Let me see if I understand what you are saying. First of all, I get the impression you are a democratic socialist. Is that right? And I take it part of the reason is that you see violent revolution as at least very often leading to oppressive regimes. On that I agree.
Ok, now that being the case, I say Chomsky should have predicted this for Cambodia, but he didn't. And that would seem to indicate that he disagreed with people like you on the idea that violent revolution leads to oppression.
And if that is true, then I think people on the democratic left who respond to Chomsky ought to make clear that he was wrong on the question of violent revolution and oppression. But I have read lots of things by leftists about Chomsky, and I don't think I have ever seen one that said that.
Maybe they are out there, but the left is sure not communicating this idea to people in the public who don't read leftist literature, but do run across lots of things by leftists in forums that reach a larger public.
So first let me ask you, am I right that Chomsky apparently disagrees with you on the strong connection between violent revolution and political oppression?
And if I am, would agree you that when the democratic left is communicating with the larger public about Chomsky, one of the things they should do is make clear that he is wrong about this? And if you disagree, then why not?
On Chomsky, no matter how certain you are that violent revolution will lead to oppression, you need sufficient proof that it is happening before you condemn the government. Chomsky had, in my mind, legitimate reason to doubt the evidence coming through the US, and wanted independent verification. I doubt he thought Cambodia would never do such things.
Even when a state is run by a terrible tyrant, that does not mean they are guilty of every crime imaginable. Wanting sufficient proof of their misdeeds before any potential punishment is sane. Waiting may cause more oppression, but brazenly punishing may hurt more people overall.
To me, the Iraq War largely proves Chomsky's point. Hussein was a tyrant, and as he had used weapons of mass destruction in the past there was plenty of reason to suspect he had them. He did not have them though, and the Iraq War has ruined millions of lives.
Ok, with respect to your views, I think I can narrow it down to a single question. I said that Marxism-Leninism has goals that can be achieved only through a great deal of violence against the population, and as a consequence whenever Marxist-Leninists come to power, this is what they practice.
That means that even if a Marxist-Leninist party came to power that was headed by a basically good person, and was not threatened externally, it would still behave quite oppressively toward its population.
My question is, do you agree that due to the nature of its basic goals, Marxist-Leninist regimes must be so oppressive?
>The problem is that invariably a large portion of the population is opposed to this, to the bottom of their souls.
I don't agree with this. The bourgeoisie would be opposed to it, but they can't be described as a large portion of the population. Ideally, everybody else benefits from the change, they have no reason to oppose what's going on and there should be no reason to opress them.
So yes, any such revolution must involve some manner of getting rid of the bourgeoisie. They would likely feel oppressed, though they would just be losing privileges unique to them. They would also likely turn to violence, but wide scale lasting oppression you describe.
I strongly disagree that only the bourgeoisie would be opposed. Leninist revolutions take place in preindustrialized societies. That is because Lenin believed that peasants were naturally cooperative and so would eagerly adopt socialism (he got this from the Russian philosophy of narodnikism).
But that is simply mistaken. Peasants are deeply conservative and traditional, including being completely embedded in extended kinship networks, raised to value life as a farmer, and extremely religious.
Communism in a preindustrial society means tearing that whole culture completely apart, and that requires enormous state violence. Yes, a lot of them got fooled by propaganda for a while, especially before the revolution was over, but many more in Russia were never won over, and many of the ones who had supported it changed their minds once they saw it in practice.
And in fact I have read that once the Communists came to power in Russia, Lenin regularly denounced, in private, the peasants for their resistance.
So what I am saying is that leninists are generally well-meaning, intelligent people who sincerely believe it will lead to a socialist paradise, but leninism's ideas, when you try to put them in practice in a preindustrial society invariably lead to massive state violence.
I made myself very clear that I was not discussing a Leninist system. As I said, that system prioritizes obtaining power over the wellbeing of the people.
Many Leninists thought their seizure of power could then be used to help the people, but prioritizing anything over the wellbeing of the people is going to end in some form of oppression. Plenty of Russian Socialists agreed with this take, it was at least part of the reason for the Bolshevik/Menshevik split.
I don't understand what conversation you're trying to have. You've abandoned your attempted condemnation of Chomsky, and seem to be trying to get me to defend an ideology I oppose.
Let me say some about where I am coming from. I have been interested in these issues since the late 1950's. At the time the left was split over Stalin and the Soviet Union. Many of them said they were wonderful. Many others said they were terrible, and this was the inevitable result of leninist philosophy.
Later like with Solzinitzen, it became impossible to defend Stalin. So many on the left switched to arguing that leninism could turn out fine, and it had gone badly in this case because the leaders had fallen away from good communist principles. It seems to me that this is Chomsky's position, and many on the left who defend him.
But you seem to be a lot more familiar with Chomsky than I am. So let me ask you, what is his position on leninism?
>Leninist doctrine holds that a vanguard Party should assume state power and drive the population to economic development, and, by some miracle that is unexplained, to freedom and justice. It is an ideology that naturally appeals greatly to the radical intelligentsia, to whom it affords a justification for their role as state managers. I can't see any reason -- either in logic or history -- to take it seriously. Libertarian socialism (including a substantial mainstream of Marxism) dismissed all of this with contempt, quite rightly
https://web.archive.org/web/20070205081148/http://www.zmag.o...
As I've said, Chomsky's defense of Cambodia was based on a distrust of the US controlled sources.
Thank you very much, that's just what I was looking for.
So here is how I look at things To start out, dictatorships vary greatly in how cruel and oppressive they are. And how oppressive they are is greatly determined by whether or not they are ideological. The non-ideological dictatorships are often less violent, while the ones that are ideologically revolutionary invariably are very oppressive.
The reason is they have different sorts of goals. Non-ideological dictators just want to stay in power and make use of the state for their own benefit. To achieve this they only need to eliminate and suppress any political opposition, through means such as jail, execution, and controlling the media. The rest of the society they leave as it is.
On the other hand, revolutionary ideological dictatorships want to radically change the whole culture and society, top to bottom. The problem is that invariably a large portion of the population is opposed to this, to the bottom of their souls.
So the regime has to resort to extreme measures, like endless propaganda, and violence such as execution, imprisonment, labor camps, and starvation, and aimed at large portions of the public. The idea is to eliminate opponents (Stalin: "Man is a problem. No man, no problem") and terrorizing everyone else.
Now Marxism-Leninism is such a radical philosophy, and so whenever Marxist-Leninists come to power, they invariably resort to all these extreme measures. Yes it matters that they come to power generally through violent revolution. And yes it matters that they face military threats. But the heart of the matter is that they have ideological goals that can only be achieved by great violence against their people.
And this means that the personality of the leader, like Lenin's ambition, is not what is key here. A leader who was basically a good person but believed in Marxism-Leninism would still have to follow similar policies. Most radical Islamic terrorists for instance, sincerely want to do what they think is good for the world, the problem is their ideology and what it clearly requires.
One more point. Marxist-Leninist regimes differ in how extreme their ideologies are, and that considerably effects how violent they are.
Now I apply all that to the case of the Pol Pot regime, and it was Marxist-Leninist, and so I think one could have predicted with certainty from the begining that it would be violent. And it had an extreme form of Marxism-Leninism, so one would expect it to be very high in violence.
End part 1
PDF document. About Chomsky himself.
The document is 505kb strong/large, if that matters.