{"id":12441,"date":"2010-01-10T20:56:47","date_gmt":"2010-01-10T10:56:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/?p=12441"},"modified":"2010-01-19T12:46:06","modified_gmt":"2010-01-19T02:46:06","slug":"chomsky-on-cambodia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/?p=12441","title":{"rendered":"Chomsky on Cambodia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Further Update<\/strong> : Chomsky on Cambodia (II)<\/a>, January 19, 2010.<\/p>\n

Update<\/strong> : 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<\/em> which the Guardian<\/em> 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”.<\/p>\n

He compared Ponchaud’s work unfavourably with another book, Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution<\/em>, 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<\/em>, by two Reader’s Digest<\/em> writers, John Barron and Anthony Paul, which was a flawed but nonetheless accurate documentation of the genocide taking place.<\/p>\n

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<\/em>, 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”.<\/p>\n

~ Lost in Cambodia<\/a>, Andrew Anthony, The Observer<\/em>, January 10, 2010. (Wave of hammer and sickle: Bob.)<\/p>\n

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Prompted<\/a> by a bloke called Bob<\/a> — he’s from Barcelona<\/strike> Brockley — I’ve been doing a little reading on Chomsky on Cambodia.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, for example<\/a>: “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.”<\/p>\n