Noam Chomsky is a fool

[Magda Hassan]

Yes, and so did the US. When the socialist state of Vietnam intervened to protect people they were condemned by the US (and probably Chomsky) Pol Pot wasn't a communist any more than Jim Jones is a Christian.

[Jim DiEugenio]

Magda,
[URL="https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups#!msg/alt.fan.noam-chomsky/cUNCYhjhHik/aiiWc0boLXMJ"]
[/URL]What else does one call Pol Pot? He sure as heck was not an anarchist.

He was an extreme communist who wanted to forge a Marxist state overnight.

Everyone needs to read Distortions at Fourth Hand to see how Chomsky defended him.

(BTW, here is the link to that piece: http://www.chomsky.info/articles/19770625.htm. It still is kind of shocking to read.)

Chomsky also went to Hanoi and praised "socialism" there also.

He then attacked George Kennan for proposing to attack communist states in the Far East, when in fact, he was actually saying the opposite: that the US should not fight wars against communist states there since they posed no real danger to America. Kennan was one of the first Americans to understand that the Domino Theory was a bunch of crap. And that the Cold Warriors under Truman had completely distorted his Long Telegram.

Noam Chomsky is not an anarchist at all. And he is not an anti communist in any particular case. He and Cockburn went out of their way to defend any communist regime anywhere no matter how bad they were.

[Phil Dragoo]

We do not pretend to know where the truth lies amidst these sharply conflicting assessments

http://www.cambodia.org/khmer_rouge/

By 1973, secret U.S. bombings of Cambodian territory controlled by the Vietnamese Communists forced the Vietnamese out of the country, creating a power vacuum that was soon filled by Pol Pot's rapidly growing Khmer Rouge movement. In April 1975, the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, overthrew the pro-U.S. regime, and established a new government, the Kampuchean People's Republic.



As the new ruler of Cambodia, Pol Pot set about transforming the country into his vision of an agrarian utopia. The cities were evacuated, factories and schools were closed, and currency and private property was abolished. Anyone believed to be an intellectual, such as someone who spoke a foreign language, was immediately killed. Skilled workers were also killed, in addition to anyone caught in possession of eyeglasses, a wristwatch, or any other modern technology. In forced marches punctuated with atrocities from the Khmer Rouge, the millions who failed to escape Cambodia were herded onto rural collective farms.



Between 1975 and 1978, an estimated two million Cambodians died by execution, forced labor, and famine. In 1978, Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia, capturing Phnom Penh in early 1979. A moderate Communist government was established, and Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge retreated back into the jungle.



In 1985, Pol Pot officially retired but remained the effective head of the Khmer Rouge, which continued its guerrilla actions against the government in Phnom Penh. In 1997, however, he was put on trial by the organization after an internal power struggle ousted him from his leadership position. Sentenced to life imprisonment by a "people's tribunal," which critics derided as a show trial, Pol Pot later declared in an interview, "My conscience is clear." Much of the international community hoped that his captors would extradite him to stand trial for his crimes against humanity, but he died of apparently natural causes while under house arrest in 1998.

~~~

A Great Leap Forward, A Cultural Revolution, a pyramid of skulls

Vietnam intervened.

Chomsky is in denial:



We do not pretend to know where the truth lies amidst these sharply conflicting assessments



He presents the equivalent of Walter Duranty finding rosy-cheeked children rather than an engineered famine with ten million victims


Vietnam intervened; and, Chomsky is in denial.

[Phil Dragoo]

http://www.ctka.net/2011/batey_article.html

Wherein we see Chomsky as a structuralist deeming those succeeding each other in power as fundamentally the same.

Telling two researchers he'd read the entire declassified record and found no evidence of conspiracy in the death of JFK--

--an echo of Dan Rather's message through an aide to Tom Wilson waiting in the CBS lobby: "absolutely no evidence of conspiracy"

Chomsky defending a Holocaust denier, not for academic principle, but on the basis of personal relationship and scholarly collaboration.

Chomsky denying the genocide of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge so horrific Vietnam had to intercede.

This is no anarchist.

Mark the 1971 assertion by Bill Ayers it would be necessary to eliminate 25 million resisting the revolution.

The bombs built at Ayers' instigation were forty years ago but Chomsky destroys much more than "Camelot" with his black propaganda.

John Kennedy steered a clean path to peace between the twin shoals of Khrushchev's reckless gambit and the Pentagon's barely restrained response.

Now comes the character assassin willing to inter the good done by the peacemaker while sanctifying the mass murderer.

No, not an anarchist in any manner but protective covering.

A cheerleader for Eastasia--in the manner of an inner party O'Brien for one of the identical totalitarian states.

As guilty of perpetuating the business model as the Cold Warrior or Terror Warrior.

[Jim DiEugenio]

Good one Phil.

Actually two.

In his Nation article, he said that the Ponchaud book, Cambodia Year Zero had an "anti-communist bias and message". See, how could an anti-communist write something like that?

And never forget, Chomsky was wrong here! And even when he had two years to sift through even more evidence of the atrocities by Pol Pot, he still went after the Ponchaud book--even though he was dead wrong and Ponchaud was dead right!

He finally tried to diminish his shocking defense of a Marxist totalitarian regime that killed hundreds of thousands--not by finally admitting he was wrong; but by concentrating on the East Timor slaughter and saying it was worse than Cambodia! And by the way, this was also false. Chomsky used indefensible figures that have since been exposed as being vastly underestimated in order to juggle the figures to rig the game.

THis is what I mean. The guy is not an historian. And his work cannot be trusted or used in any real scholarly way. Because like any polemicist, he reasons not from the evidence and data, but from a predetermined conclusion.

In this particular essay I critiqued, the predetermined conclusion is that the USA was somehow "trying for hegemony" in the Missile Crisis. Which is nutty. The Russians were trying for hegemony and Kennedy was trying to get a first strike capability out of Cuba, where it would be extremely effective since the travel time of the missiles and bombers would be minimal. But this is the kind of nonsense one gets into when one argues history with a polemicist.

Chomsky should retire and go fishing. His work never had any real historical value, and its now been impacted I think by his old age.

[Phil Dragoo]

The following essay makes clear the horror of Pol Pot, and the obscene outrage of Chomsky's approval:

The Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot's Regime
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~amamendo/KhmerRouge.html


On April 17, 1975, Pol Pot led the Communist forces of the Khmer Rouge into the capital city of Phnom Penh, beginning a vicious four-year regime in Cambodia. Approximately one million people were killed, or one-seventh of Cambodia's population according to conservative estimates, in a country no bigger than the state of Missouri. Most died from starvation, malnutrition and mistreated or misdiagnosed illness. Another 200,000 were executed as enemies of the state. How did this happen?

Background

In November 1954, Cambodia received full independence after being a French protectorate since 1863. This marked the beginning of a 16-year rule under Prince Norodom Sihanouk. Prince Sihanouk terminated a U.S.-run aid program in 1963 and relations between Cambodia and the U.S. were severed completely in May 1965.

In the meantime, a man named Saloth Sar returned to Cambodia after becoming absorbed in Marxism during his studies abroad. He took the pseudonym Pol Pot and joined the underground communist movement. By 1962, Pol Pot was leading the Cambodian Communist Party, which had fled to the jungle in order to escape the wrath of Norodom Sihanouk. While in the jungle, Pol Pot organized armed forces known as the Khmer Rouge and began waging guerilla war as opposition to Sihanouk's government.

In 1970, Prince Sihanouk was ousted by U.S.-backed right wing military forces and retaliated by joining with Pol Pot to resist the new military government. This same year, the U.S. invaded Cambodia looking to drive out the North Vietnamese from their military camps along the border. This just drove the Vietnamese deeper into Cambodia where they united themselves with the Khmer Rouge.

The United States erratically bombed North Vietnamese shelters in eastern Cambodia from 1969 until 1973, resulting in the deaths of up to 150,000 Cambodian peasants. Because of this threat, hundreds of thousands of peasants left the countryside to settle in Cambodia's capital city, Phnom Penh.
The combination of these events resulted in the economic and military regression in Cambodia and led to a swell of popular support for Pol Pot.


The Beginning of the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea

The U.S. had pulled its troops from Vietnam by 1975 and Cambodia's government lost its American military support. Pol Pot took advantage of this opportunity and led his Khmer Rouge army, consisting primarily of teenage peasant guerrillas, into Phnom Penh. On April 17, the Khmer Rouge successfully seized control of Cambodia.

Pol Pot, inspired by Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution of communist China, then attempted to build his own agrarian utopia in Cambodia, which he renamed the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea.

Pol Pot declared the year zero and began to "purify" society. In support of an extreme form of peasant communism, western influences such as capitalism and city life were expelled. Religion and all foreigners were to be extinguished. Embassies were shut down, and the use of foreign languages was banned. Sources of media and news were no longer allowed and communication through mail or phone was limited. All businesses were closed, education stopped, health care disappeared, and parental authority annulled. Any foreign economic or medical assistance was rejected. Thus, Cambodia became sealed off from the outside world.

Every city in Cambodia was forcibly evacuated. Two million people in Phnom Penh had to leave the city on foot for the countryside at gunpoint. It is estimated that around 20,000 died along the way.

Millions of Cambodian city dwellers were now forced into manual slave work in rural areas. Since they were only fed a tin of rice (180 grams) every two days, they quickly began to die from disease, being overworked and undernourished. This is how the "killing fields" came to be known.

"What is rotten must be removed."

Throughout Cambodia, deadly cleansings were performed to abolish all that was left of the "old society." People were executed because they were educated or wealthy and based on their occupation, such as police, doctors, lawyers, teachers, and former government officials. Ex-soldiers were killed along with their wives and children. Anyone suspected of disloyalty to Pol Pot, which eventually included many Khmer Rouge leaders, was killed.

The three largest minorities - the Vietnamese, Chinese, and Cham Muslims - were attacked as well as twenty other smaller groups. Of the 425,000 Chinese living in Cambodia in 1975, half of them were killed. The Khmer Rouge carried out many atrocities against these minority groups, including forcing Muslims to eat pork and shooting those who refused.

Why?

The Khmer Rouge saw cities as the heart of capitalism and therefore they had to be eliminated. Khmer Rouge soldiers referred to Phnom Penh as "the great prostitute of the Mekong." (Chandler, The Tragedy of Cambodian History, 247). Ordinary citizens were moved out of the cities to live and work in the countryside as peasants in order to create the ideal communist society. The goal of converting everyone to peasants was due to the fact that this class of people was believed to be "simple, uneducated, hard-working and not prone to exploiting others." They had lived that way for years and always managed to get by. For this reason, the Khmer Rouge called the peasants "old people" and considered them as the ideal communists for the new Cambodian state.

Those who lived in the cities were seen as "new people" and were considered "the root of all capitalist evil" by the Khmer Rouge. New people were the quintessence of capitalism and therefore the opponent of communism. No matter what their profession was - teacher, tailor, civil servant or monk - it was irrelevant. According to the Khmer Rouge, the new people had made the decision to live in the cities, proving their loyalty to capitalism. Because of this, hundreds of thousands of Cambodians were automatically branded enemies of the new communist state and were killed.

When Pol Pot's plan didn't work out, he refused to blame himself, his peers or the plan itself. He decided there were enemies amongst him as well as what he perceived to be an emerging pro-Vietnamese faction inside the Cambodian Communist party. Another part of the blame went to the upper class of society, who still lingered from the prior regime. Consequently, he rid his party of pro-Vietnamese members by sentencing them to death, including some of his oldest colleagues. Pol Pot became more paranoid than ever and was convinced that he was surrounded by enemies as Cambodia began to fall apart. This increased the number of murders and arrests and transformed the party into a terrifying reign of brutality that went on until the Vietnamese invasion in January 1979.


~~~

Think now of Kennedy rejecting Lemnitzer's Northwoodnow take the airliner of innocents and multiply it by ten thousandyet Chomsky faults Kennedy and holds Pol Pot harmless.

QED Chomsky is mad.

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

I liked Jim's article and just posted it everywhere, with a few caveats.

In attacking left-gatekeeper #1 one has to understand that Chomsky is not just wrong he is wrong for structural reasons.

His job is to get the left to suck up the bait planted by the right to throw the left off the trail.

Now initially this was done with the emergency-nuke threat-linked to -Castro Russians did it graft- on that worked so well on Earl Warren (eventually) and Carry McWilliams ofThe OSS alumni.... I mean The Nation (immediately).

The left is exactly who should have picked up the football and ran with it in the correct direction> i.e. that 11/22 was a right wing coup and it leads to today's corporate fascism. [note I am not saying they are the ONLY ones who should have been important] But they should have been loudest even though JFK was not a leftist. He was a real liberal, a species that no longer exists.

The genius of the CIA media op was to make bashing JFK as the "litmus test" of being a "goooooood leftists here's a biskit" Hence they created a firewall btw. left liberal and further left that has widened as foundation funded left-gatekeepers have widened the firewall until left-liberals have become an extinct species. Note that during the 1960s this bait was not sucked up because there was not enough time for Left-gatekeepers to erase history. They would have been called out, and in some cases were.

So the question then becomes how does one counter this gatekeeping function of Chomsky? IMO, the key point to remember is that Chomsky is not real issue, but rather the key point is to show that Chomsky helps the right not the left, and that Chomsky is not even a real leftists, just a marketed McLeftist.

Now IMO, this is not done by using the word Marxist on him. I mean that word is way too general and all kinds of hypocrites have used it just like the word Democratic was used in totalitarian East Germany. Now Cambodia... are we going to blame that on Karl too? Maybe SOME of it is a legitimate critique but the point about Vietnam , a communist country too, invading it to put a stop to the genocide seems relevant here.

The whole Cambodia think is IMO counterproductive to bring up again here , for a couple of reasons. One , Chomsky has written tons trying to clear up his position on this (practically the entire volume two of After the Cataclysm... the Cataclysm being the Vietnam War, not his views on Cambodia) Look I read it so long ago I just don't care anymore, and imo it is COUNTERPRODUCTIVE to bring it up in this JFK related thing. Why? Because AT FIRST GLANCE to the young and easily influenced Chomsky readers reading Guru Chomsky for the first time it will SEEM like it is rightist criticism of Chomsky and hence buttress him in a juvenile way as a Real Leftist ™ . Now one might very legitimately reply "fuck it with left , right, what about truth". I agree. Except that is not how left-gatekeeping works, and so , that is not how to counter it.

Again, the key point about Chomsky is not his own point on the spectrum but in how he CASTS those who talk about the JFK assassination as INHERENTLY NOT OF INTEREST TO THE LEFT. This is just not so. In fact it is the opposite of the truth. So all of this old Chomsky BS, as ridiculous as it is, should not be brought up again FOR this purpose because it will only be used as a dismissal mechanism to ignore the clear fact that Chomsky has been incredibly useful to cover up a right wing coup detat . Left-Gatekeeping is not just about the left. For their judgements about JFK are THE ONLY LEFT ideas that are picked up by the whole spectrum. Form NYT to Bill O'Reilly. Unless this left-gatekeeping is directly and mindfully confronted we have no chance. It is not just about the left.

[Jim DiEugenio]

That is a good point Nathaniel.

How Chomsky and Cockburn get picked up by the right because of their writings on the JFK case and how their followers dismiss people like us as not being proper leftists.

I was not writing about that phenomenon. I was just trying to show how wrong Chomsky was here, so wrong that it could not be done by accident. So wrong--about both Vietnam and the Missile Crisis-- that it should be enough to discredit him.

Maybe you would like to write an appendix to this about that?

[Phil Dragoo]

Nathaniel

Your left-right analysis is dizzying.

Chomsky faults John F. Kennedy for a hawk on Cuba and Vietnam, yet holds Pol Pot harmless for a Jim Jones-meets-Mao mass murder.

Love-and-marriage, horse-and-carriage:

Chomsky is perfectly willing to turn the world on its head with a bayonet to its throat in his murder of the truth.

All men (right, left, ambidextrous, adextrous) ought to love truth and freedom and peace, and abhor lies and oppression and war.

Chomsky doesn't serve the left or the right; he serves a grinning reaper of insatiable, unspeakable appetite.

[Jim DiEugenio]

There is some truth to this.

Cockburn got picked up by the LA times as a columnist after JFK.

Bugliosi--who is not a conservative, but who's book is wacky--used Chomsky's Vietnam stuff to critique Stone. And there is little doubt that their followers, at places like Counter Punch and Zee magazine--a community that is much smaller today thank GOd--do not consider JFK pure enough.

But what I tried to do in the article was to show just how agenda driven and wrong on the facts Chomsky is. In other words to discredit him as a scholar and show how he is just so twisted on the topic of JFK that he is useless. BTW, in AFter the Cataclysm, I don't recall him taking back what he said about Pol Pot.

Again, I invite Nathaniel to write an appendix to the piece and submit it to ctka.