Source on Noam Chomsky

“It is untrue that Chomsky’s support for Johnstone was limited to her “right to free speech”. An open letter signed by Chomsky describes Johnstone’s book in the following terms: “We regard Johnstone’s Fools’ Crusade as an outstanding work, dissenting from the mainstream view but doing so by an appeal to fact and reason, in a great tradition.” In his own open letter on Johnstone’s book, to which he refers in his letter to the Guardian of November 2, Chomsky states: “I have known her for many years, have read the book, and feel that it is quite serious and important… Johnstone argues – and, in fact, clearly demonstrates – that a good deal of what has been charged has no basis in fact, and much of it is pure fabrication.” Conversely, nowhere does Chomsky express the slightest disagreement with anything that Johnstone’s book says (except perhaps in the Brockes interview, which he has repudiated). This goes beyond support for Johnstone’s right to free speech, and amounts to an endorsement of her arguments.”

“Chomsky claims that Herman and he were exclusively concerned with demonstrating the “systematic bias” in the Western media and that they did not give their “views concerning the Pol Pot regime”. But this is untrue, as any reader of the book [After the Cataclysm] can attest. It advanced a clear thesis about what it was plausible to believe had happened in Pol Pot’s Cambodia. That thesis goes well beyond the self-evident truths that the US bombing was one major precondition for what occurred… It asserts that... “the deaths in Cambodia were not the result of systematic slaughter and starvation organized by the state but rather attributable in large measure to peasant revenge, undisciplined military units out of government control, starvation and disease that are direct consequences of the US war, or other such factors””

“Noam Chomsky takes issue with my criticism of his one-dimensional focus on what he sees as America’s nefarious role in the world. If Chomsky had entitled his book “America’s Evil History,” I would have accepted his exclusive focus. However, he entitled it “Who Rules the World?” yet goes on to write as if the United States is virtually alone as the cause of all the world’s problems.”

“I do not agree in any way with those who accuse Chomsky of sympathizing with Khmer Rouge, although I find [Chomsky’s] parallel between Cambodia after the KR takeover and France liberated in 1944 very problematic. Did de Gaulle after the liberation of Paris order its complete evacuation? Did his government reorganize entire social life into collective communes run by military commanders? Did it close down schools? If anything, de Gaulle's first government was way too tolerant…”

“I agree that one should approach reports on humanitarian crises or genocidal violence in Western media with a great measure of skepticism: they are as a rule heavily biased due to political and economic interests. However, although Chomsky claims he doesn’t pretend to know what actually went on in Cambodia, the bias of his own description is obvious: his sympathies lies with those who try to minimize and relativize Khmer Rouge atrocities.... And it is this bias which displays Chomsky’s ideology in selecting and ordering data, what he downplays and what he emphasizes, not only in the case of Cambodia but also in the case of post-Yugoslav war (his downplaying of the Srebrenica massacre), etc.... With regard to Chomsky, I claim that his bias sometimes leads him to selections of facts and conclusions which obfuscate the complex reality he is trying to analyze.”

“Today we know that the accusations against the KR regime were mainly true. Chomsky’s answer would probably have been that such heavy accusations have to be grounded in precise empirical facts, and that in the case of Cambodia back in the late 1970s such facts were sorely missing. While there is some truth in this claim (especially with regard to the devastation caused earlier in Cambodia by the US Army), I have again some problems with it. There is a thin line that separates justified doubt about media reports from comfortable skepticism which allows us to ignore or downplay atrocities. One can easily imagine a similar line of argumentation in the late 1930s about the Nazi atrocities or the Stalinist purges: we don’t have enough reliable data, we should not pretend to know what really goes on in these countries, so it is advisable to doubt Western press reports...”