11–20 of 47 posts
Chomsky wrote the foreword to a French book denying the Holocaust and spoke at the headquarters of Hezbollah - an internationally recognized terror group - amoung other asinine things. Why does anyone respect this guy?
Chomsky wrote the foreword to a French book denying the Holocaust and spoke at the headquarters of Hezbollah - an internationally recognized terror group - amoung other asinine things. Why does anyone respect this guy?
Another problem is his position/denial of the Cambodian genocide by Khmer Rouge. What does Chomsky nowadays say on this matter? Does he acknowledge that his judgement was wrong? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial
That sounds pretty balanced to me.
Chomsky wrote the foreword to a French book denying the Holocaust and spoke at the headquarters of Hezbollah - an internationally recognized terror group - amoung other asinine things. Why does anyone respect this guy?
Another problem is his position/denial of the Cambodian genocide by Khmer Rouge. What does Chomsky nowadays say on this matter? Does he acknowledge that his judgement was wrong? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial
Chomsky wrote the foreword to a French book denying the Holocaust and spoke at the headquarters of Hezbollah - an internationally recognized terror group - amoung other asinine things. Why does anyone respect this guy?
Another problem is his position/denial of the Cambodian genocide by Khmer Rouge. What does Chomsky nowadays say on this matter? Does he acknowledge that his judgement was wrong? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial
Of course at this time the US was using its power at the UN to keep the Cambodian UN seat in the hands of the political coalition that the Cambodian communists belonged to.
He also points out the mass murder the US air force carried out in Cambodia, bombing rural peasant villages. That the US media ignored a genocide in East Timor that was happening at the time of the communists taking power in Cambodia.
Insofar as "denial of the Cambodian genocide" by Chomsky - could you give an example of a statement he made about Cambodia which was not true? If you are unable to do that, it is just mud-throwing - in some other thread he's said to be denying Nazi genocide in Europe because he was opposed to the jailing of a French professor accused of being a holocaust denier.
Chomsky wrote the foreword to a French book denying the Holocaust and spoke at the headquarters of Hezbollah - an internationally recognized terror group - amoung other asinine things. Why does anyone respect this guy?
20:00 has an interesting snippet where Chomsky relates the breakdown of working class cultural institutions and education then takes a stab at Google (one gets the sense the real audience response was edited heavily in post production).
"And they may not have gone to school. They certainly didn't go to Oxford, but the working class, the rising working class, had its own institutions of education and culture, which was significant. A lot of that has been destroyed in all kinds of ways. Google doesn't help."
Maybe there's some extra context in the minutes prior that gives this a different meaning but it sounds to me like he's saying that Google changed the way the middle class accesses information, which has destroyed the old ways. I did go back 20 or so seconds and he mentions that they read books, which I think backs this up somewhat (they used to go to libraries, now they don't need libraries, they have Google).
And the laughter doesn't sound edited to me, though there's clearly a cut there.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another problem is his position/denial of the Cambodian genocide by Khmer Rouge. What does Chomsky nowadays say on this matter? Does he acknowledge that his judgement was wrong? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial
Nowadays Chomsky points out something you can read in the December 23rd, 1985 edition of the New York Times - that six years after the hue and cry all over the US about "Cambodian genocide", the US began sending millions to Cambodia in order to arm Pol Pot. Of course at this time the US was using its power at the UN to keep the Cambodian UN seat in the hands of the political coalition that the Cambodian communists be…
Mud-throwing? I am just siting a wikipedia article, please care to follow the link. Even Chomsky sort of acknowledged that he was wrong on the subject, but you still can't do that.
"Cambodia scholar Bruce Sharp criticized Chomsky and Herman's Nation article, as well as their subsequent work After the Cataclysm (1979), saying that while Chomsky and Herman added disclaimers about knowing the truth of the matter, and about the nature of the regimes in Indochina, they nevertheless expressed a set of views by their comments and their use of various sources. For instance, Chomsky portrayed Porter and Hildebrand's book as "a carefully documented study of the destructive American impact on Cambodia and the success of the Cambodian revolutionaries in overcoming it, giving a very favorable picture of their programs and policies, based on a wide range of sources." Sharp, however, found that 33 out of 50 citations in one chapter of Porter and Hildebrand's book derived from the Khmer Rouge government and six from China, the Khmer Rouge's principal supporter.[8]
Veteran Cambodia correspondent Nate Thayer said of Chomsky and Herman's Nation article that they "denied the credibility of information leaking out of Cambodia of a bloodbath underway and viciously attacked the authors of reportage suggesting many were suffering under the Khmer Rouge."[18]
Journalist Andrew Anthony in the London Observer, said later that the Porter and Hildebrand's book "cravenly rehashed the Khmer Rouge's most outlandish lies to produce a picture of a kind of radical bucolic idyll."[19] Chomsky, he said, questioned "refugee testimony" believing 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.'"
Beachler cited reports that Chomsky's attempts to counter charges of Khmer Rouge atrocities also consisted of writing letters to editors and publications. He said: "Examining materials in the Documentation Center of Cambodia archives, American commentator Peter Maguire found that Chomsky wrote to publishers such as Robert Silver of the New York Review of Books to urge discounting atrocity stories. Maguire reports that some of these letters were as long as twenty pages, and that they were even sharper in tone than Chomsky’s published words."[20] Journalist Fred Barnes also mentioned that Chomsky had written "a letter or two" to the New York Review of Books. Barnes discussed the Khmer Rouge with Chomsky and "the thrust of what he [Chomsky] said was that there was no evidence of mass murder" in Cambodia. Chomsky, according to Barnes, believed that "tales of holocaust in Cambodia were so much propaganda."[21]
Journalist Christopher Hitchens defended Chomsky and Herman. They "were engaged in the admittedly touchy business of distinguishing evidence from interpretations."[22] Chomsky and Herman have continued to argue that their analysis of the situation in Cambodia was reasonable based on the information available to them at the time, and a legitimate critique of the disparities in reporting atrocities committed by communist regimes relative to the atrocities committed by the U.S. and its allies. Nonetheless, in 1993, Chomsky acknowledged the massive scale of the Cambodian genocide in the documentary film Manufacturing Consent. He said, "I mean the great act of genocide in the modern period is Pol Pot, 1975 through 1978 - that atrocity - I think it would be hard to find any example of a comparable outrage and outpouring of fury."[8]