RE: Chomsky: A man of great integrity?
I checked one item in this post against the text (which is here: http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/articles/7706-distortions.html The slaughter by the Khmer Rouge is a Moss-New York Times creation. The context for the statement is not, as is implied by the extract above, a general denial of mass murder, but a specific claim which NC claims is not adequately documented. Most of the article is in a similar vein -- noting the lack of evidence presented in news accounts. SD does nothing to rebut his argument. Noting that genocide took place is not a rebuttal. NC's conclusion, along similar lines: We do not pretend to know where the truth lies amidst these sharply conflicting assessments; rather, we again want to emphasize some crucial points. What filters through to the American public is a seriously distorted version of the evidence available, emphasizing alleged Khmer Rouge atrocities and downplaying or ignoring the crucial U.S. role, direct and indirect, in the torment that Cambodia has suffered. Evidence that focuses on the American role, like the Hildebrand and Porter volume, is ignored, not on the basis of truthfulness or scholarship but because the message is unpalatable. My conclusion: One should not judge the morality of NC's statements at the time by how well they accord with what is known retrospectively, in light of the reality that the sources on genocide were not trustworthy. Untrustworthy sources can be right on occasion, but it is not smart to depend on them. You would have to show the availability of a fount of information from unbiased sources to conclude that NC ignored evidence he ought not to have ignored. SD's post is unfair. mbs
RE: RE: Chomsky: A man of great integrity?
Title: RE: [PEN-L:32730] RE: Chomsky: A man of great integrity? MS concludes: One should not judge the morality of NC's statements at the time by how well they accord with what is known retrospectively, in light of the reality that the sources on genocide were not trustworthy. Untrustworthy sources can be right on occasion, but it is not smart to depend on them. You would have to show the availability of a fount of information from unbiased sources to conclude that NC ignored evidence he ought not to have ignored. SD's post is unfair. If you read their book, it's very clear that Chomsky Herman are almost entirely focussed on the official Western press (the NY TIMES, etc.) Their main point is that the official press damns the bad killings (e.g., the Khmer Rouge) while downplaying the good ones (e.g., in Indonesia), where it is the US State Department that decides what bad and good are. If a group is seen as bad by State, the official press rushes to condemn it, while the truth about the good massacres come out later, sometimes several years later. As one who leans toward anarchism, NC is no apologist for the KR, a horribly statist organization. (BTW, given the chaos created by (in rough order of importance) the US bombings and invasions, the Vietnamese use of the territory as a staging ground, and the precipitous collapse of the Lon Nol government, the Hobbesian nasty, brutish, and short nightmare threatened. So a cynic might say that the KR was exactly the Leviathan that Dr. Hobbes ordered, forcibly creating lawnorder. But the victory of the KR was not inevitable.) JD
Re: RE: Chomsky: A man of great integrity?
Max, As you note, Chomsky and Herman admit there were sharply conflicting assessments at the time. The question is why they chose to disparage those assessments that suggested a genocide was underway. I would suggest it is because doing so was consistent with their politics - which still today in the case of Chomsky consist of an approach that states that the enemy of my enemy is my friend when it does not slide all the way over into political support and admiration for authoritarian left regimes. The remarkable thing is how exactly this mirrors the approach of the U.S. Government when it chooses facts to fits its politics - as it so shamefully did in the case of Rwanda. (By the way I can find nothing that suggests that Chomsky ever stated that he was wrong in 1977.) The failure of the left to establish a credible independent foreign policy opposed to the politics of both the U.S. government and those of regimes like Hussein's, Castro's, Lee Kuan Yew's, and Kim il Jung's is a tragedy marked by the swing of erstwhile colleagues such as Christopher Hitchens to an open alliance with the U.S. government. As an antidote to this kind of thinking I would highly recommend the work of E.P. Thompson including any of the material that he and others produced during the European Nuclear Disarmament movement of theh 1980s and his collection of essays The Poverty of Theory. Stephen F. Diamond
Re: Re: RE: Chomsky: A man of great integrity?
On 4/12/2002 11:53 AM, Steve Diamond [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The remarkable thing is how exactly this mirrors the approach of the U.S. Government when it chooses facts to fits its politics - as it so shamefully did in the case of Rwanda. (By the way I can find nothing that suggests that Chomsky ever stated that he was wrong in 1977.) The failure of the left to establish a credible independent foreign policy opposed to the politics of both the U.S. government and those of regimes like Hussein's, Castro's, Lee Kuan Yew's, and Kim il Jung's is a tragedy marked by the swing of erstwhile colleagues such as Christopher Hitchens to an open alliance with the U.S. government. What madness! This is utter falsification: it is either lazy or irresponsible. Who in the left supports Hussein (!), Lee Kuan Yew (?!?) and Kim il Jung, let alone their foreign policies? Maybe the Stalinists that Chomsky has consistently denounced since the very first thing he ever published, an article about the spanish civil war back in 1936. As I understand it, since Chomsky's central point has been, since 1977, that the US press treates 'approved' genocides with the full aparatus of shock and horror whilst eliding genocides not endorsed by the Dept. of State, he has absolutely nothing to retract. He has been right all along - whatever the facts may have been in Cambodia. Thiago - This mail sent through IMP: www-mail.usyd.edu.au
Re: Re: RE: Chomsky: A man of great integrity?
Stephen Diamond: that Chomsky ever stated that he was wrong in 1977.) The failure of the left to establish a credible independent foreign policy opposed to the politics of both the U.S. government and those of regimes like Hussein's, Castro's, Lee Kuan Yew's, and Kim il Jung's is a tragedy marked by the swing of erstwhile colleagues such as Christopher Hitchens to an open alliance with the U.S. government. Interesting how some countries have governments and other countries have regimes. When was the last time the NY Times referred to the regime in Washington? Hmmm. Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
