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.)
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.
> Conflating Marxism/Communism as one thing
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.)