Further Update : Chomsky on Cambodia (II), January 19, 2010.
Update : It’s perhaps not that strange that Caldwell had neglected to read Ponchaud, given that he had already dismissed the Frenchman’s credibility in print. He based his damning opinion on a brief extract of Year Zero which the Guardian had published and a critique of the book by the American academic, Noam Chomsky. An icon of radical dissent who continues to command a fanatical following, Chomsky had questioned the legitimacy of refugee testimony that provided much of Ponchaud’s research. Chomsky believed that their stories were exaggerations or fabrications, designed for a western media involved in a “vast and unprecedented propaganda campaign” against the Khmer Rouge government, “including systematic distortion of the truth”.
He compared Ponchaud’s work unfavourably with another book, Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, written by George Hildebrand and Gareth Porter, which cravenly rehashed the Khmer Rouge’s most outlandish lies to produce a picture of a kind of radical bucolic idyll. At the same time Chomsky excoriated a book entitled Murder of A Gentle Land, by two Reader’s Digest writers, John Barron and Anthony Paul, which was a flawed but nonetheless accurate documentation of the genocide taking place.
We can never know if Caldwell would have taken Ponchaud more seriously had Chomsky not been so sceptical, but it’s reasonable to surmise that the Scotsman, who greatly admired Chomsky, was reassured by the American’s contempt. In any case, the 47-year-old Caldwell arrived in Cambodia untroubled by the story that Ponchaud and others had to tell. In fact, he had just completed a book himself that would be posthumously published as Kampuchea: A Rationale for a Rural Policy, in which he wrote that the Khmer Rouge revolution “opens vistas of hope not only for the people of Cambodia but also for the peoples of all other poor third world countries”.
~ Lost in Cambodia, Andrew Anthony, The Observer, January 10, 2010. (Wave of hammer and sickle: Bob.)
Prompted by a bloke called Bob — he’s from Barcelona Brockley — I’ve been doing a little reading on Chomsky on Cambodia.
In summary, a number of Chomsky’s critics accuse him (and occasionally his partner-in-crime Edward Herman) of being apologists for the Khmer Rouge (‘Red Khmer’). Often, Chomsky’s critics assert that this gross failing (and occasionally that of his partner-in-crime Edward Herman) is a product of his (and occasionally his partner-in-crime Edward Herman’s) general moral and political degeneracy and/or a myopic ‘anti-Americanism’. According to Leonard Zeskind, for example: “For two decades, Chomsky has repeatedly sung one analytical note. Sometimes he hits the right target. Other times he has been remarkably tone deaf. One note. One idea.”
For
Against
For more, see : Shubel Morgan “another proud Maoist descendant of the now closed It’s Right to Rebel! Forum”. Also : On crackpots engaged in pigwork (January 10, 2009).
The Khmer Rouge, under the leadership of Pol Pot (aka Saloth Sar: 1928(?)–1998) ruled Cambodia (aka the ‘Democratic Republic of Kampuchea’) between the years 1975–1979. During this period, the regime engaged in what French writer Jean Lacoutre termed ‘autogenocide’: a deliberate policy of mass extermination, the number of victims of which has been estimated as being in the vicinity of 1.7 million people. Thus, according to Yale University’s Cambodian Genocide Program:
The Cambodian genocide of 1975-1979, in which approximately 1.7 million people lost their lives (21% of the country’s population), was one of the worst human tragedies of the last century. As in the Ottoman Empire during the Armenian genocide, in Nazi Germany, and more recently in East Timor, Guatemala, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda, the Khmer Rouge regime headed by Pol Pot combined extremist ideology with ethnic animosity and a diabolical disregard for human life to produce repression, misery, and murder on a massive scale. On July 18, 2007, Cambodian and international co-prosecutors at the newly established mixed UN/Cambodian tribunal in Phnom Penh found evidence of “crimes against humanity, genocide, grave breaches of the Geneva Convention, homicide, torture and religious persecution.”
In brief, Bob identifies a number of key texts which chart Chomsky (and Herman’s) views on Pol Pot’s rule.
First, ‘Distortions at Fourth Hand’, Noam Chomsky & Edward S. Herman, The Nation, June 6, 1977, “a key text because it was here that they launched their assault on Ponchaud’s Cambodge année zéro [Cambodia: Year Zero], the book that more than any other really alerted the West to the Khmer Rouge crimes”.
- Note: Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia is the title of a 1979 documentary film by John Pilger. Pilger also produced Cambodia: The Betrayal (1990), “An examination of the continued secret support given by Western governments to the Khmer Rouge”. See also : Thirty years on, the holocaust in Cambodia and its aftermath is remembered, October 29, 2009. “Today, Pol Pot is dead and several of his elderly henchmen are on trial in a UN/Cambodian court for crimes against humanity. Henry Kissinger, whose bombing opened the door to the nightmare of Year Zero, is still at large. Cambodians remain desperately poor, dependent on an often seedy tourism and sweated labour.”
Secondly, The Political Economy of Human Rights, Volume II: After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology (South End Press, 1979), also written by Noam Chomsky & Edward S. Herman (and a companion volume to The Political Economy of Human Rights, Volume I: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (South End Press, 1979)).
Thirdly, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (Noam Chomsky & Edward S. Herman, Pantheon, 1988).
