Comment by mimd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mimd | Hacker News Reader

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You don't think Chomsky has power? Using your influence to cause others to disregard or advocate for actions can lead to as much death as direct influence. He was activity dismissing reports as "misinformation" for ideological reasons at the time and people took his advice. If it caused people to not act, then yes, he's partially responsible.

No, I don't think he's equivalent, but let's not give him a pass here. His ideology lead to excusing and lauding a group of people who wanted to slaughter anyone with education and reduce anyone else to starving farmers. And he didn't do himself any favors afterwards either, sulking and attacking people who pointed out that moral failing, even circa 2000's.

We tend to trash people for that sorta thing, like we do for Kissinger, but since it's Marxism/Communism it's given a pass by media/left groups. Their are still a lot of puff articles for Chomsky/and his similars every year. The imbalance in how we talk about that era in certain circles is a bit nauseating.

Anyway, the Intercept is trying to obscure their favored ideologies excesses, and reassign blame to their ideological opponents. That's why the intercept is specifically titling it "killing fields" to usurp the other known quantity of the Khmer Rouge's massacres, and focusing exclusively on Kissinger. I've heard way too many people blame solely Kissinger as responsible, as if pol pot did not exist, to give the intercept the benefit of the doubt.

Your position is giving very much a free pass to the atrocities the U.S. government was responsible for at the time. Chomsky was one of the few voices that saw it, and denounced it accordingly. His position on Pol Pot has never been fully absolutory, instead he just focused more on the injustices coming from his own camp, where he certainly had more weight to excert. Also, Marxism is a perfectly fine philosophy, and extremely interesting lens through which we can read and understand capitalism and our present. Conflating Marxism/Communism as one thing to reinforce a negative bias against them unfortunately shows a profound misunderstanding of both

I thought about some interesting quips but you kinda just fell on you own sword.

I gave Chomsky benefit of the doubt several years ago about influence and his position on pol pot, but after more dives on the subject, no, he's unrepentant and petulant. Also you're hero worshipping him by assuming he's one of the "few". He's one of the few you know. And Marxism is heavily intertwined with Communism historically. The distinction is academic only and revolutionaries of the 20th century interchanged them so heavily so as to make it nearly indistinguishable. To ignore it's "implementations" is the "no true Scotsman" at it's finest.

What do you think of Chomsky now that he supports Russia in its invasion of Ukraine?

> Conflating Marxism/Communism as one thing

Modern Communism is explicitly Marxist in theoretical line.

> Modern Communism is explicitly Marxist in theoretical line.

Some of it is, much of it isn’t (even some of what claims to be isn’t; despite the Marxist-Leninist branding, Leninism and everything descended from it, including Maoism, starts by rejecting foundational elements of Marxism to derive a short-cut approach in order to bypass capitalist development.)

> Chomsky was one of the few voices that saw it, and denounced it accordingly.

Even if you mean domestic voices, there weren’t exactly few of them. (He may have been one of the more elitely-positioned voices, but that’s a different story.)

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