Chomsky on solutions

Morgan Friedman: "...this is the most significant point damning of
Chomsky, possibly besides his holocaust-denial: he criticizes
overwhelmingly every foreign policy decision the US government makes;
but he readily admits that he does not know of nor can think of any
other possible options."

Admittingly, in my mind I couldn't rebut this statement. Perhaps I
haven't read enough Chomsky, and presume this to be the case. But can
anyone here please point me to some links that could clear this up for
me? Personally, I don't buy the argument that one has to supply
solutions when making criticisms, yet I'd still like to know more
about how chomsky fares in this regard.

thanks,

max

umm... chomsky never denied the holocaust. he made a speech and wrote a
piece about the freedom of speech, defending a holocaust denier, but that
doesn't make him a holocaust denier.

chomsky is a social anarchist. that's how he sees an idea world, but that
doesn't mean he's not a pragmatist. he knows he won't see a functioning
social anarchist society in his life time, but you could say he strives to
make this country more progressive: more social programs and etc.

"dabbled in politics"? the man put out more books than all the popular
conservative personalities put together. you could disagree with his
analysis, but you can't refute his research and his academic prowess when it
comes to research. i suggest you get hold of his CSPAN and Charlie Rose
interview.

I saw the one on CSPAN. Actually I have met the man. When I ws in a
doctoral program at a large university, he was a speaker and I met him
at the soiree following the activities of the day. Norma

Sure you can refute his research. Lots of people have done so.
Pick up any one of his books. Flip open at random. There
usually will be some extraordinary and improbable citation on
at least one of those two pages.

Look up the most remarkable citation you find on those two
pages. You will find it curiously difficult. Rather than
being a straight citation, it is a trail of bread crumbs in a
dark forest, a hint about a hint about a pointer to an actual
citation. It looks like a normal citation, but is in fact a
deeply obfuscated citation, for example "The CIA, in its
demographic study in 1980, claims that Pol Pot killed
50-100,000 people and attributes and attributes most deaths to
the Vietnamese invasion" Finding the actual material cited
turns out to be a major research project. When you finally
find the material cited, you will find that Chomsky just plain
lied about it.

My favorite, much repeated example, being of course "repeated
discoveries that massacre reports were false"

In the 'demographic study' he referred to above, the actual
title was "Kampuchea, a Demographic Catastrophe". He evaded
giving the actual title, for had he done so, his lie would have
been obvious -- 50 000 to 100 000 people is rather small for "a
demographic catastrophe" It would not even show up by
demographic measures.

--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
EpfU63ZEtDv+jEmTZ3ZZncP8KAs0dVSgKtubh2P5
4awjWSawQDZtzMI4KHzuUrlJWvPtLKD8ZSdgl/te3

So ? Big deal..you met the guy........
Why do you not agree with his political works ?
Too accurate?

--
Ho hum
Jez
"Few of us can easily surrender our belief that
society must somehow make sense. The thought
that the State has lost its mind and is punishing so
many innocent people is intolerable. And so the
evidence has to be internally denied."
- Arthur Miller

He lies about the facts, and what his alleged sources contain.
When caught lying, he does not say "Well I guess I made a
mistake", or "I got a bit carried away when depicting what that
source said". Instead he blusters.

8xdg3AW/NN1EK4wrjR6rkFacwHRBZN80dyy300+j
4PcZc2oazd2LkTAr6eww7yVt9v/tEbyJE/5vXT4af

i think on that CNN interview with bennet, in response to some
sort of charge of hating america, chomsky said that he thinks america does
some horrible things, and that it should stop. that seems like a pretty
clear possible option.

-gr

I've heard this complaint before, and it continues
to baffle me -- Chomsky consistently offers specific
and detailed alternatives to the actions he criticizes:
what should be (or should have been) done in
Israel/Palestine, Iraq, and other places of tension;
how the US should structure relationships with the UN,
the IMF, and other international organizations; how
the US should (and shouldn't) participate in international
aid; how the US should structure domestic controls
on corporations, including the media; the list goes on.
I suspect the complaint is made most often by people
who have not read him very well.

This "lack of solutions" argument may also be a
byproduct of the media by which he (and everyone)
is represented -- it's very hard to propose an intelligent
solution to a complicated problem during a short
interview. The world is more complex than that.
Television, radio, and magazines are much more
conducive to brief statements like: "The Arabs are
all wackos, the Democrats are traitors, and America
is the only hope for peace in the world." It's inarguable
empty rhetoric, undebatable and unprovable -- but
most importantly, you can but a commercial before it
and after it and not leave any loose ends dangling. :)

-----
Reasonable

GC.

okay... instead of making accusations, i challenge you to find 10 lies, and
have concrete evidences to back them up. this doesn't include his opinions.
i'm talking about specific events you're accusing him of lying.

...and? what does that say about his credibility?

His credibility in linguistics was always solid with me. But when he
added all the other areas that he considered as his own "expertise"
that melted away. His research is really suspect by those who have
been engaged in hard research. He studies something he has never
experienced. He relies on too many "other" sources of (whatever
data?), and his conclusions have to be questioned. I have lived and
worked in the Middle East, and I know that he is not on target a lot
of the time. Norma

So where do you expect him to go for information? Do you expect every
journalist/scholar to live through every single event they cover? That's
ridiculous. Chomsky's like every other scholar; he siphons through myriad of
information and picks the most unbiased report, and I trust his judgment.
You might say he's biased for picking human rights watch report versus the
New York Times, but he picks the human rights watch report because he feels
there's less agenda, and have more objective look on America.

When defining and examining human events and rights, I do expect some
"hands on" experience. See and being there are very important in the
analysis process. One can't do much analysis through the biases and
ideas of other when it involves how humans live. That is a very
different matter than a scientific lab. experiment. Lifestyle
descriptions and ideas should not come third or fourth hand. Humans
are not purely chemical beings, the cognitive process is so
unpredictable that a sampling on sight is necessary.

We won't agree on this, but we don't have to. Don't feel compelled to
keep picking my words and ideas apart. I trust my personal
experiences a great deal, and can't "see" how he can conceptualize
anything without that. Norma

You really do make me want to vomit.
So smug.
So poor.
So wrong.

But so smug in your nice little dream.
{Runs for bucket}

chomsky actually goes and visits lot of the hot spots around the world, and
you would know this if you knew anything about the man. he's seen all over
south america as well as in the middle east as he is a good friend to many
of the dissidents around the world. and tell me, do i really need to live
through the holocaust to know it existed?

i have no idea what you're talking about here...

you haven't made a single compelling argument, and i'm not getting into
semantics with you. i just want to know why he has no credence with you.

Obviously, it doesn't matter. Halas! Norma

James A. Donald:

Superlifer:

What? One big lie not good enough for you? Then why would
ten lies be good enough for you?

OK, here is a paragraph by paragraph of his infamous "Nation'
article. I will get tired of exposing the lies half way
through, but I could continue like this through the whole
article:

: : Distortions at Fourth Hand Noam Chomsky and Edward
: : S. Herman The Nation, June 25, 1977

: : ----------------------------------------------------
: :
: : On May 1, 1977, the New York Times published an
: : account of the "painful problems of peace" in
: : Vietnam by Fox Butterfield. He describes the "woes"
: : of the people of the South, their "sense of
: : hardship" and the grim conditions of their life,
: : concluding that "most Southerners are said to appear
: : resigned to their fate." His evidence comes from
: : "diplomats, refugees and letters from Vietnam."
: :
: : In journals of the War Resisters League and the
: : American Friends Service Committee of March-May
: : 1977, in contrast, there are lengthy reports by
: : Carol Bragg on a visit to Vietnam earlier this year
: : by a six-person AFSC delegation, including two who
: : had worked in Vietnam and are fluent in Vietnamese.
: : The group traveled widely in the South and spoke to
: : well-known leaders of the non-Communist Third Force
: : who are active in the press and government, as well
: : as ordinary citizens. They report impressive social
: : and economic progress in the face of the enormous
: : destruction left by the war, a "pioneering life"
: : that is "difficult and at times discouraging," but
: : everywhere "signs of a nation rebuilding" with
: : commitment and dedication.
: :

: : Butterfield claims that "there is little verifiable
: : information on the new economic zones -- no
: : full-time American correspondents have been admitted
: : since the war — but they are evidently not popular."
: : While it is true that American correspondents are
: : not welcomed in Vietnam, there is nonetheless ample
: : expert eyewitness testimony, including that of
: : journalists of international repute, visiting
: : Vietnamese professors from Canada, American
: : missionaries and others who have traveled through
: : the country where they worked for many years. Jean
: : and Simonne Lacouture published a book in 1976 on a
: : recent visit, critical of much of what they saw but
: : giving a generally very positive account of
: : reconstruction efforts and popular commitment. Max
: : Ediger of the Mennonite Central Committee, who
: : worked in Vietnam for many years and stayed for
: : thirteen months after the war, testified before
: : Congress in March 1977 on a two-week return visit in
: : January, also conveying a very favorable impression
: : of the great progress he observed despite the "vast
: : destruction of soil and facilities inflicted by the
: : past war." There have also been positive accounts of
: : the "new economic zones" in such journals as the Far
: : Eastern Economic Review and the Canadian Pacific
: : Affairs.

Chomsky and Herman ignore, rather than rebut, the more serious
accusations made by Butterfield thus implicitly conceding that
his account was true

They represent him as merely accusing the Vietnamese of being
poor, when in fact he accused the Vietnamese government of
being bloody, tyrannical, oppressive, and acting like a hostile
alien enemy occupier.

Butterfield accuses the communists of tyranny, of making
massive use of slave labor, without much concern for the life
and health of the slaves, and of routinely torturing people.

: : But none of this extensive evidence appears in the
: : New York Times' analysis of "conditions in Indochina
: : two years after the end of the war there." Nor is
: : there any discussion in the Times of the "case of
: : the missing bloodbath", although forecasts of a
: : holocaust were urged by the U.S. leadership,
: : official experts and the mass media over the entire
: : course of the war in justifying our continued
: : military presence. On the other hand, protests by
: : some former anti-war individuals against alleged
: : human rights violations in Vietnam are given
: : generous coverage. This choice of subject may be the
: : only basis on which U.S. " as opposed to Soviet "
: : dissidents can get serious attention in the mass
: : media today.

This leads the reader to believe that no one in the press even
suggested there was a bloodbath in Vietnam. The audience was
eager to believe because they were painfully aware of such
suggestions and suspected them to be true.

Back then when Chomsky and Herman wrote, the left, myself among
them, all knew that something terrible was happening in
Vietnam, though most now claim to remember otherwise. Today
even Chomsky himself now remembers that no one in the press
even suggested such a thing. though back then when he and
Herman wrote those slippery words, the New York Times described
"human rights violations " so bloody that they might plausibly
be called a bloodbath, violations that were called a bloodbath
in right wing sources two months before Chomsky and Herman so
indignantly complained of the failure to report the bloodbath
as "missing ". Two months before before Chomsky and Herman
complained that more coverage should be given to the fact that
the bloodbath was "missing", the National Review told us:

THE BLOODBATH is motivated not so much by hatred or
revenge as by the necessity for the Communist system to
purge itself of undesirable elements From a Marxist
viewpoint political purge is a necessity in order to
achieve political purity, a precondition to the
building of socialism. Political purity ensures single
mindedness, which in turn achieves high efficiency. The
Vietnamese Communists, as they showed in their conduct
of the war, are doctrinaire single minded, efficient.
But not until all Vietnamese men, women, and children
think the Communist way will political purity be
achieved for the new nation as a whole. This is why
indoctrination ("re-education" as they call it) is of
prime importance. For those who are too old or too
stubborn to change elimination is the only alternative.

The crimes committed by the North Vietnamese regime against the
Vietnamese people were minor compared to the crimes committed
by the Khmer Rouge against the Cambodians, but for us on the
left they were emotionally far more significant.

When these Vietnamese crimes became known, the reaction of the
left was ignore the facts, the details and evidence of the
accusations, and attack the messenger, a reaction that was
strikingly inconsistent with our self image as the conscience
of the world, our image of ourselves as people who cared deeply
about the welfare of faraway strangers. Today, most of the
radical left comfortably remember these accusations that they
so venemously condemned as never having been made.

: : The technical name for this farce is "freedom of
: : the press". All are free to write as they wish: Fox
: : Butterfield, with his ideological blinders, on the
: : front page of the Times (daily circulation more
: : than 800,000); and Carol Bragg, with her eyewitness
: : testimony, in New England Peacework (circulation
: : 2,500). Typically, reports which emphasize the
: : destruction caused by the United States and the
: : progress and commitment of the Vietnamese reach a
: : tiny circle of peace activists. Reports that ignore
: : the American role — Butterfield can only bring
: : himself to speak of "substantial tracts of land
: : made fallow [sic] by the war," with no agent
: : indicated — and that find only "woes" and distress,
: : reach a mass audience and become part of the
: : established truth. In this way a "line" is
: : implanted in the public mind with all the
: : effectiveness of a system of censorship, while the
: : illusion of an open press and society is
: : maintained. If dictators were smarter, they would
: : surely use the American system of thought control
: : and indoctrination.
: :
: : It was inevitable with the failure of the American
: : effort to subdue South Vietnam and to crush the mass
: : movements elsewhere in Indochina, that there would
: : be a campaign to reconstruct the history of these
: : years so as to place the role of the United States
: : in a more favorable light. The drab view of
: : contemporary Vietnam provided by Butterfield and the
: : establishment press helps to sustain the desired
: : rewriting of history, asserting as it does the sad
: : results of Communist success and American failure.
: : Well suited for these aims are tales of Communist
: : atrocities, which not only prove the evils of
: : communism but undermine the credibility of those who
: : opposed the war and might interfere with future
: : crusades for freedom.

The press did not depict the occupation as "drab", but as
violent and criminal. If Chomsky intended to expose press bias
then to deny that the press made the harsh accusations that it
did make seems an odd way of doing it.

It is a curiously feeble "system of thought control and
indoctrination" if it merely accuses an enemy dictatorship of
being "drab".

: : It is in this context that we must view the recent
: : spate of newspaper reports, editorials and books on
: : Cambodia, a part of the world not ordinarily of
: : great concern to the press. However, an exception is
: : made when useful lessons may be drawn and public
: : opinion mobilized in directions advantageous to the
: : established order. Such didacticism often plays fast
: : and loose with the truth.
: :
: : For example, on April 8, 1977, The Washington Post
: : devoted half a page to "photographs believed to be
: : the first of actual forced labor conditions in the
: : countryside of Cambodia [to] have reached the West."
: : The pictures show armed soldiers guarding people
: : pulling plows, others working fields, and one bound
: : man ("It is not known if this man was killed," the
: : caption reads). Quite a sensational testimonial to
: : Communist atrocities, but there is a slight problem.
: : The Washington Post account of how they were
: : smuggled out by a relative of the photographer who
: : died in the escape is entirely fanciful. The
: : pictures had appeared a year earlier in France,
: : Germany and Australia, as well as in the Bangkok
: : Post (April 19, 1976) with the caption "True or
: : False?" In fact, an attempt by a Thai trader to sell
: : these photos to the Bangkok Post was turned down
: : "because the origin and authenticity of the
: : photographs were in doubt." The photos appeared in
: : another Thai newspaper two days before the April 4th
: : election. The Bangkok Post then published them,
: : explaining in an accompanying article that "Khmer
: : watchers" were dubious about the clothes and manner
: : of the people depicted, and quoting "other
: : observers" who "pointed to the possibility that the
: : series of pictures could have been taken in Thailand
: : with the prime objective of destroying the image of
: : the Socialist parties" before the election.
: :
: : This story was reported in the U.S./Indochina Report
: : of the Indochina Resource Center in July 1976, along
: : with the additional information that a Thai
: : intelligence officer later admitted that the photos
: : were indeed posed inside Thailand: "'Only the
: : photographer and I were supposed to know,' he
: : confided to a Thai journalist." The full details
: : were given in the International Bulletin (April 25,
: : 1977; circulation 6,000). A letter of April 20 to
: : the Washington Post on these points has not
: : appeared. In short, the "freedom of the press"
: : assures that readers of the International Bulletin
: : will get the facts.
: :
: : Even if the photographs had been authentic, we might
: : ask why people should be pulling plows in Cambodia.
: : The reason is clear, if unmentioned. The savage
: : American assault on Cambodia did not spare the
: : animal population. Hildebrand and Porter, in their
: : Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution , cite a
: : Cambodian Government report of April 1976 that
: : several hundred thousand draft animals were killed
: : in the rural areas. The Post did not have to resort
: : to probable fabrications to depict the facts. A
: : hundred-word item buried in The New York Times of
: : June 14, 1976, cites an official U.N. report that
: : teams of "human buffaloes" pull plows in Laos in
: : areas where the buffalo herds, along with everything
: : else, were decimated (by the American bombing,
: : although this goes unmentioned in the Times . Much
: : the same is true in Vietnam. Quite possibly the U.N.
: : or the Laotian Government could supply photographic
: : evidence, but this would not satisfy the needs of
: : current propaganda.

Chomsky and Herman find that "space limitations preclude" them
from providing any examples of "repeated discoveries that
massacre reports were false", yet strangely they have plenty of
space for a lengthy polemic about a photograph that may have
been a mere re-enactment of real events, rather than a genuine
photograph of real events.

They provide a very persuasive defense against the accusation
that the Cambodians were poor, but the actual accusation was
that the Khmer Rouge were mass murderers — that there was a
very high rate of death from overwork among laborers who had
been abducted for forced labor in places far from their homes.
The crime was not that men were pulling ploughs, but that
slaves were pulling ploughs until they dropped. Again, if
Chomsky's objective is to expose press bias, it is very strange
that he conceals the very serious accusations that were made.

: : The response to the three books under review nicely
: : illustrates this selection process. Hildebrand and
: : Porter present 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.

Hildebrand and Porter's "very favorable picture" of Khmer Rouge
rule is not based on a "wide range of sources" but on one
single source: Official Khmer Rouge statements and documents.
When they cite more reputable sources, it is only for routine
stuff that no one is likely to care much about.

It is a report of official reality, not the reality of the
senses. Even when they themselves visit Cambodia, they do not
tell us what they heard and saw, but merely what officials told
them they were seeing, as though they were blind.

: : Published last year, and well received by the
: : journal of the Asia Society (Asia, March-April
: : 1977), it has not been reviewed in the Times, New
: : York Review or any mass-media publication, nor used
: : as the basis for editorial comment, with one
: : exception. The Wall Street Journal acknowledged its
: : existence in an editorial entitled "Cambodia Good
: : Guys" (November 22, 1976), which dismissed
: : contemptuously the very idea that the Khmer Rouge
: : could play a constructive role, as well as the
: : notion that the United States had a major hand in
: : the destruction, death and turmoil of wartime and
: : postwar Cambodia. In another editorial on the
: : "Cambodian Horror" (April 16, 1976), the Journal
: : editors speak of the attribution of postwar
: : difficulties to U.S. intervention as "the record
: : extension to date of the politics of guilt." On the
: : subject of "Unscrambling Chile" (September 20,
: : 1976), however, the abuses of the "manfully
: : rebuilding" Chilean police state are explained away
: : as an unfortunate consequence of Allendista
: : "wrecking" of the economy.
: :
: : In brief, Hildebrand and Porter attribute "wrecking"
: : and "rebuilding" to the wrong parties in Cambodia.
: : In his Foreword to Cambodia: Starvation and
: : Revolution, Asian scholar George Kahin observes that
: : it is a book from which "anyone who is interested in
: : understanding the situation obtaining in Phnom Penh
: : before and after the Lon Nol government's collapse
: : and the character and programs of the Cambodian
: : Government that has replaced it will, I am sure, be
: : grateful…" But the mass media are not grateful for
: : the Hildebrand-Porter message, and have shielded the
: : general public from such perceptions of Cambodia.

Perhaps Hildebrand and Porter's book was ignored because it was
tedious, formulaic and predictable communist propaganda, the
stuff that few but communists would buy, and not even
communists would read.

: : In contrast, the media favorite, Barron and Paul's
: : "untold story of Communist Genocide in Cambodia"
: : (their subtitle), virtually ignores the U.S.
: : Government role. When they speak of "the murder of a
: : gentle land," they are not referring to B-52 attacks
: : on villages or the systematic bombing and murderous
: : ground sweeps by American troops or forces organized
: : and supplied by the United States, in a land that
: : had been largely removed from the conflict prior to
: : the American attack. Their point of view can be
: : predicted from the "diverse sources" on which they
: : relied: namely, "informal briefings from specialists
: : at the State and Defense Departments, the National
: : Security Council and three foreign embassies in
: : Washington." Their "Acknowledgements" mention only
: : the expertise of Thai and Malaysian officials, U.S.
: : Government Cambodian experts, and Father Ponchaud.
: : They also claim to have analysed radio and refugee
: : reports.

In actual fact Barron and Paul's list of sources runs for 23
pages, and Chomsky must have searched long and hard through the
entire 23 pages to find that handful of state sponsored sources
among them. The vast majority of sources were ordinary
Cambodians, and most of the rest were western newsmen and Khmer
Rouge radio. In contrast, Chomsky and Herman's favorite,
Hildebrand and Porter's Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution,
merely recycles official Khmer Rouge propaganda.

: : Their scholarship collapses under the barest
: : scrutiny. To cite a few cases, they state that among
: : those evacuated from Phnom Penh, "virtually
: : everybody saw the consequences of [summary
: : executions] in the form of the corpses of men, women
: : and children rapidly bloating and rotting in the hot
: : sun," citing, among others, J.J. Cazaux, who wrote,
: : in fact, that "not a single corpse was seen along
: : our evacuation route," and that early reports of
: : massacres proved fallacious (The Washington Post ,
: : May 9, 1975). They also cite The New York Times ,
: : May 9, 1975, where Sydney Shanberg wrote that "there
: : have been unconfirmed reports of executions of
: : senior military and civilian officials ... But none
: : of this will apparently bear any resemblance to the
: : mass executions that had been predicted by
: : Westerners," and that "Here and there were bodies,
: : but it was difficult to tell if they were people who
: : had succumbed to the hardships of the march or
: : simply civilians and soldiers killed in the last
: : battles."

Schanberg and Cazaux were in the group of newsmen imprisoned
for a time in the French Embassy, and subsequently shipped out
of Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge. When they got out, this group
filed reports that shocked the world.

Barron and Paul cite neither Cazaux nor Schanberg as evidence
that "virtually everybody saw the consequences" Indeed, they
only cite Schanberg as evidence for foolishly optimistic early
favorable perceptions of the Khmer Roug, though they could
easily have cited him for most of the rest — all of the newsmen
gave very similar accounts.

Chomsky neglects to mention that the evacuation was not under
the control of the journalists — the foreigners were captives
of the Khmer Rouge, and Schanberg concluded that the reason
they saw no corpses was because the Khmer Rouge made sure they
did not. Schanberg also tells us that the Khmer Rouge nearly
executed him for seeing what little he did see.

Schanberg on not seeing corpses:

We suddenly turned right- that is, west-down the road to the
airport, and this was puzzling because we were supposed to be
heading north and northwest toward Thailand. We did not know it
yet, but this was to be the detour that kept us from seeing
that early stretch of Route 5 north of Phnom Penh that had been
clogged with refugees forced out of Phnom Penh and may now be
dotted with bodies.

Our convoy started south west out of the capital down Route 4,
then cut north along a rutted secondary road until we picked up
Route 5 near Kompong Chhnang.

Cazaux does indeed remark he saw no dead bodies, though the
context was not that he was scornfully suggesting that it was
ridiculous to suggest that there were dead bodies, but rather
in the context that "all that is certain is that none of the
foreigners who saw the start of the revolution will be able to
witness its progress." In the same newspaper article from which
Chomsky quotes Cazaux the chief surgeon at Calmette Hospital in
Cambodia's capital, a Frenchman who came out with the last
group of westerners, said that he had seen three hundred bodies
with their throats cut in the capital's central market,
consistent with Barron and Paul's remark about "bodies bloating
in the hot sun" If few among the western reporters saw the
bodies bloating in the hot sun, that might well have been
because they were locked up under guard at the time, and if
none of it resembled the predicted mass executions, that was
because the predicted mass executions had for the most part not
yet begun. All the reporters in this group tell the same story,
which is consistent with later news reports, and with Barron
and Paul's story. A lot of people died because the aged, the
sick, and those in the middle of operations in the hospital
were forced to evacuate, a lot of people were summarily
executed, though the predicted large scale executions of those
associated with the former government had not begun, at least
not on a large scale, and the reporters were prevented from
seeing much of this because some of them were executed and the
rest sent to the French embassy. There are disagreements as to
when the predicted bloodbath of those associated with the
former regime started and how fast it went, but the stories,
early and later, are fairly consistent. The bloodbath started
after the evacuation, either days or weeks after the
evacuation, far from the cities and was largely complete
several weeks or several months after the evacuation. We still
do not know how fast the bloodbath of those associated with the
former regime went, or precisely when it started, but we know
now, and knew before Barron and Paul wrote, how hard it went.
Almost none survived.

Barron and Paul discuss the predicted bloodbath in the third
chapter, depicting it as a separate event from the summary
executions in the capital described in the first chapter,
something that happened later, after the evacuation, and in the
wilderness far from the capital.

The New York Times, May 6, 1975, page one, reports the
predicted mass executions of those associated with the former
regime as beginning, which suggest they began a short time
earlier, about the same time as Schanberg and Cazaux were
transferred from their embassy prison to the trucks. Barron and
Paul report the mass executions as starting earlier, on April
20, with the massacre of the soldiers of Battambang. This,
however was two hundred and fifty miles from the capital, on a
mountain some distance from Battambang. They describe other
massacres of soldiers of other provinces, far from Phnom Penh.
They nowhere discuss where or when the execution of the largest
group of members of the former government began, those who were
captured in Phnom Penh. The CIA report Kampuchea: A Demographic
Catastrophe tells us that the Khmer Rouge executed about 100
000 people for their connections with the former regime over a
period of nine months. This is the bloodbath that was
predicted, and if it took nine months, then indeed at the time
that Schanberg and Cazaux were put in the truck, then it was
indeed true that the bloodbath did not yet "bear any
resemblance to the mass executions that had been predicted by
Westerners."

And then, after the predicted bloodbath, came the unpredicted
bloodbath, the surprising and shocking bloodbath, as the Khmer
Rouge proceeded to exterminate class enemies, racial
minorities, and all those members of the Khmer Rouge that were
less saintly that the remarkably saintly top leaders of the
Khmer Rouge. In the end it appears that about one million were
executed, with most of those executed first being tortured, and
about two million died of brutality, overwork, and hunger.

Chomsky and Herman force a false context on these reporters
words to make them appear to contradict Barron and Paul, when
they do not: The mass executions that Cazaux denies, and the
bloodbath that Jon Swain denies, are not references to the
summary executions depicted by Barron and Paul during the
evacuation of Phnom Penh, but references to the expected
massacre of everyone connected to former regime, a bloodbath
that Barron and Paul depict as days after the evacuation, and
occurring deep in the wilderness, a bloodbath that had scarcely
begun at the time that many reporters denied that it had been
completed.

: : They do not mention the Swedish journalist, Olle
: : Tolgraven, or Richard Boyle of Pacific News Service,
: : the last newsman to leave Cambodia, who denied the
: : existence of wholesale executions; nor do they cite
: : the testimony of Father Jacques Engelmann, a priest
: : with nearly two decades of experience in Cambodia,
: : who was evacuated at the same time and reported that
: : evacuated priests "were not witness to any
: : cruelties" and that there were deaths, but "not
: : thousands, as certain newspapers have written"
: : (cited by Hildebrand and Porter).

Notice that Chomsky and Herman strangely neglect to tell us
where the words of any of these important witnesses to the
innocence of the Khmer Rouge can be found. I managed to find
Olle Tolgraven, LA Times, 1975 May 9, page 9. The LA Times
quotes various people who were imprisoned in the embassy, and
subsequently sent out of Cambodia on the same trucks as Cazaux
and Schanberg, and he was one of them.

Phnom Penh was described by many of the returnees as a
"dead city," littered with decomposing bodies. and
abandoned household goods and populated by a few
forlorn pets and a few Khmer Rouge soldiers.
One Frenchman said last Thursday the Khmer Rouge had come to
his house and ordered him to leave or be shot. He recalled:

"On the way to the embassy I saw several dead
bodies rotting in the street. Some of them
apparently had been shot, but some had their
heads crushed and appeared to have been beaten
to death."

A Swedish journalist, Olle Tolgraven of Swedish
Broadcasting, said he did not believe there had been
wholesale executions. But he said there was evidence
the Khmer Rouge had shot people who refused to leave
their homes in a mass evacuation ordered the first day
of the takeover. This was corroborated by others.

One Cambodian woman said many old people died on the
trek out of the City "because it was too hard for them
to walk."

Again, Chomsky evasively avoided actually saying what every
reader would think him to have said. It sounds as if Chomsky
and Herman gave a citation to contradictory evidence, but he
did not. By complaining of all those Barron and Paul do not
mention, he implies that these sources provide contradictory
evidence, while avoiding any actual statement that Tolgraven
and the rest provided contradictory evidence. It sounds like a
citation pointing to evidence proving Barron and Paul to be
liars, when it merely points to a trail of breadcrumbs in a
dark forest.

: : Barron and Paul claim that there is no evidence of
: : popular support for the Communists in the
: : countryside and that people "fled to the cities" as
: : a result of the "harsh regimen" imposed by the
: : Communists — not the American bombing. Extensive
: : evidence to the contrary, including eyewitness
: : reports and books by French and American
: : correspondents and observers long familiar with
: : Cambodia (e.g., Richard Dudman, Serge Thion, J.C.
: : Pomonti, Charles Meyer) is never cited.

Perhaps the reason Barron and Paul neglect to cite that
"evidence" that the bombing, not the communists, caused the
flight to the cities is that the bombing ended nearly two years
before the flight to the cities that they describe.

: : Nor do they try to account for the amazingly rapid
: : growth of the revolutionary forces from 1969 to
: : 1973, as attested by U.S. intelligence and as is
: : obvious from the unfolding events themselves.

Barron and Paul do account for that amazingly rapid growth.
Large supplies of Soviet guns and money, military aid from
North Vietnamese conscripts, and the pretense that the Khmer
Rouge were not going to introduce communism, but restore the
monarchy.

Cambodia fell primarily because US military aid to the anti
communists was cut off, while a flood of Chinese and Soviet
military aid to the communists continued.

: : Their quotes, where they can be checked, are no more
: : reliable. Thus they claim that Ponchaud attributes
: : to a Khmer Rouge official the statement that people
: : expelled from the cities "are no longer needed, and
: : local chiefs are free to dispose of them as they
: : please," implying that local chiefs are free to kill
: : them. But Ponchaud's first report on this (Le Monde,
: : February 18, 1976) quotes a military chief as
: : stating that they "are left to the absolute
: : discretion of the local authorities", which implies
: : nothing of the sort.

The Le Monde article does imply that, contrary to Chomsky's
citation, and Ponchaud in that article provides multiple
sources of evidence that the the local Khmer Rouge cadre were
free to kill them for any reason or no reason, and frequently
did so, and Barron and Paul in their Chapter IX, which cites
the broadcast to which Chomsky refers, also provide multiple
sources of of evidence that the local cadre were authorized to
exterminate those inconvenient, or merely not needed, and
sometimes did so.

: : These examples are typical. Where there is no
: : independent confirmatory evidence, the Barron-Paul
: : story can hardly be regarded as credible. Their
: : version of history has already appeared in the
: : Reader's Digest (circulation more than 18 million),
: : and has been widely cited in the mass media as an
: : authoritative account, including among them, a
: : front-page horror summary in the Wall Street Journal
: : , an article in TV Guide (April 30, 1977;
: : circulation more than 19 million) by Ernest Lefever,
: : a foreign policy specialist who is otherwise known
: : for his argument before Congress that we should be
: : more tolerant of the "mistakes" of the Chilean junta
: : "in attempting to clear away the devastation of the
: : Allende period," and his discovery of the
: : "remarkable freedom of expression&rquo; enjoyed by
: : critics of the military regime (The Miami Herald ,
: : August 6, 1974).

At the time Chomsky and Herman wrote this, Pinochet's regime
had wrongfully killed about two or three thousand people, and
the Khmer Rouge had wrongfully killed over a million people.
Yet the crimes of Pinochet's regime had received many times as
much publicity as the crimes of the Khmer Rouge regime.

Pinochet believed that communists were trying to take over
Chile and turn it into a totalitarian terrorist outpost of the
Soviet Union, and had come disturbingly close to succeeding.
His remedy for this threat was to kill communists and suspected
communists, but it was to not to kill those who opposed him
politically or spoke out against him, hence Lefever's entirely
accurate remark about the freedom of expression enjoyed by
opponents of Pinochet's regime.

The Khmer Rouge, on the other hand, were busy remaking man into
something better, and therefore not only killed anyone who
spoke out against them, but also anyone they suspected of
having a bad attitude, or of thinking insufficiently virtuous
thoughts, or of falling seriously short of the remarkable
example of kindness, goodness and virtue set by the Khmer
Rouge.

: : Ponchaud's book is based on his own personal
: : experiences in Cambodia from 1965 until the capture
: : of Phnom Penh, extensive interviews with refugees
: : and reports from the Cambodian radio. Published in
: : France in January 1977, it has become the best-known
: : unread book in recent history, on the basis of an
: : account by Jean Lacouture (in the New York Review of
: : Books ), widely cited since in the press, which
: : alleges that Ponchaud has revealed a policy of
: : "auto-genocide" (Lacouture's term) practiced by the
: : Communists.
: :
: : Before looking more closely at Ponchaud's book and
: : its press treatment, we would like to point out that
: : apart from Hildebrand and Porter there are many
: : other sources on recent events in Cambodia that have
: : not been brought to the attention of the American
: : reading public. Space limitations preclude a
: : comprehensive review, but such journals as the Far
: : Eastern Economic Review , the London Economist , the
: : Melbourne Journal of Politics, and others elsewhere,
: : have provided analyses by highly qualified
: : specialists who have studied the full range of
: : evidence available, and who concluded that
: : executions have numbered at most in the thousands;
: : that these were localized in areas of limited Khmer
: : Rouge influence and unusual peasant discontent,
: : where brutal revenge killings were aggravated by the
: : threat of starvation resulting from the American
: : destruction and killing. These reports also
: : emphasize both the extraordinary brutality on both
: : sides during the civil war (provoked by the American
: : attack) and repeated discoveries that massacre
: : reports were false.

Sounds very impressive, does it not? If such famous and
entirely respectable magazines denied the accusations that the
Khmer Rouge had committed vast crimes then obviously we cannot
take seriously these allegations of terror and mass murder by
dishonest capitalist tools who have already been proven to be
liars by Chomsky, right? Chomsky has supposedly just shown us
that those who accused the Khmer Rouge of enormous crimes were
lying about their citations. Now he seemingly tells us that
these very respectable sources tell and entirly different
story. There must be some substantial evidence, presented by
these magazines that shows or strongly suggests that the
refugee's tales of terror were nonsense, right?

And if the reader happens to recall lots of news reports about
massacres and casual disregard for human life, of slaves
marched long distances without food or water, with many of them
dropping on the way, as most readers in 1977 would have
recalled, well doubtless all that report was one of those
"repeated discoveries that massacre reports were false."8221

Of course the respectable magazines that Chomsky and Herman
cite (the Economist and the Far Eastern Economic Review say no
such thing, and if there had really been any "discoveries that
massacre reports were false" then Chomsky and the magazine in
which his article appeared would have given us chapter and
verse in type the size of tombstones.

Chomsky leads the reader to believe that a well informed
person, someone who reads prestigious news magazines like the
Economist, who reads magazines targeted primarily at the
wealthy, someone affluent and cultured, would not believe the
stuff about democide, that that business about democide was
just lowbrow propaganda for the ignorant trailer trash masses.
Chomsky uses the authority and prestige of these very reputable
magazines to contradict reports of vast crimes committed by the
Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. He claims that these are "conflicting
reports" that justify disbelief in the alleged crimes of the
Khmer Rouge, that these very respectable magazines endorse his
position (without actually admitting that that is his
position).

There was of course no such evidence, and no such endorsement.

When Chomsky and Herman tell us of "discoveries that massacre
reports were false" this leads the reader to expect (from the
context that this is a criticism of press reporting) that some
of the many horrific massacre reports he has read in the press
were discovered to be false, and that the terribly biased press
failed to broadcast this news. The reader expects that if he
looks up these sources he will find important neglected news,
some dramatic newsworthy facts that disproves some of these
terrible stories, and thus casts doubt on all these stories of
horror, terror and mass murder under the Khmer Rouge. Of course
that meaning, the meaning that Chomsky implies by the context,
is false. There are, as is usual in Chomsky's writings, some
hidden alternate true meanings, meanings that are unlikely to
occur to the reader, but are likely to turn up when someone
wants to explain away one of Chomsky's more astonishing claims:
The people cited did "discover" that the massacres reported by
the refugees were false — not by reference to any observable
facts, but by navel gazing. They "discovered" the falsity of
these reports from their own feelings about the Khmer Rouge.
Another, truer but even less obvious meaning, is that various
newsmen reported that they had heard rumors that the expected
bloodbath of those associated with the former regime had begun,
when in fact it had not yet begun, or was not yet taking place
on the expected scale, but these false rumors were only
reported as rumors, not as massacres, and in many cases by the
time they were reported as mere rumors, the delay in reporting
was such that they had ceased to mere rumors, and had ceased to
be false.

Similarly when Chomsky and Herman claimed "that executions have
numbered at most in the thousands" that exagerrates the claims
made in the magazines they cite. The nearest equivalent is a
reference by Chanda, one of the reporters of the Far Eastern
Economic Review to "thousands", but Chomsky and Herman made a
claim much stronger than that made by Chanda. Chanda claimed
that we cannot know for sure that there were vastly more than
thousands, but made no claim that there were definitely only
thousands. Chanda claimed ignorance of mass murder, (an
ignorance entirely self induced) while Chomsky and Herman
attribute to Chanda a claim that there was definitely no mass
murder. They claim that Chanda presented evidence demonstrating
innocence, while in fact Chanda merely denied the evidence
demonstrating guilt, a much weaker position than that
attributed to him.

Chanda does indeed smear the refugees, (though other
commentators, in the Review, for example in May 7, 76, and in
September 7, 77 confidently support the refugees) but he covers
himself against the possibility that the refugees were telling
the truth by saying "the numbers killed are impossible to
calculate", unlike Chomsky who leads us to believe that there
is substantial evidence disproving the stories of hundreds of
thousands.

The Economist wrote an article forcefully endorsing Ponchaud's
estimates of hundreds of thousands executed, a million or so
dying of brutal mistreatment . In response to this article,
Sampson, an employee of a UN agency who worked in Phnom Penh
until it fell wrote a letter to the editor, in which he took
much the same position as Chanda:

I feel that such executions could be numbered in the
hundreds or thousands rather than hundreds of thousands

It is this letter to the editor that the Economist "made
available". That Sampson "felt" that executions "could" have
been in the thousands is not very interesting. Chomsky and
Herman lead the reader to expect that the articles they cite
said something like "I went to the village that was widely
reported to have been massacred, and the people there told me
they were just fine." There is large difference between "feel"
and "discover". They lead us to expect that these "neglected
sources" discredit the reports of enormous crimes, rather than
merely whining about them. Neither Chanda nor Sampson were
willing to say "not tens of thousands" though doubtless they
would have liked to say it.

Chomsky presented the Far Eastern Economic Review as
confidently denying the possibility that the killings were
vastly higher, but Chanda specifically denies such knowledge
and confidence, and Sampson does not sound confident, nor does
he give the reader any very persuasive grounds for his
feelings.

Chanda's claim was not that he had evidence that the Khmer
Rouge were innocent, but that if we ignore all the evidence
indicating they are guilty, there is not much evidence that
they are guilty — a position that might perhaps have been
defensible when Chanda wrote in 1976, but had become untenable
when Chomsky and Herman wrote in 1977. The refugee reports of
casual murder, massacres, and frequent forgetfulness of the
need to feed and water the slaves, were confirmed by massacres
on the border. Sampson's claim was merely that he had not
encountered evidence that the Khmer Rouge were guilty — a claim
which was surely true, for whether one finds evidence depends
on how hard one looks.

: : They also testify to the extreme unreliability of
: : refugee reports, and the need to treat them with
: : great caution, a fact that we and others have
: : discussed elsewhere (cf. Chomsky: At War with Asia,
: : on the problems of interpreting reports of refugees
: : from American bombing in Laos). Refugees are
: : frightened and defenseless, at the mercy of alien
: : forces. They naturally tend to report what they
: : believe their interlocuters wish to hear. While
: : these reports must be considered seriously, care and
: : caution are necessary. Specifically, refugees
: : questioned by Westerners or Thais have a vested
: : interest in reporting atrocities on the part of
: : Cambodian revolutionaries, an obvious fact that no
: : serious reporter will fail to take into account.

Refugee reports are the only source of information one can
obtain once the iron curtain comes down. They are highly
reliable because most refugees lack the knowledge to construct
politically correct stories. Most of them have no comprehension
of the why they suddenly came to be defined as criminals. It is
all a mystery to them, as if a volcano erupted, and cloud of
hot ash came down upon them. They cannot tell anti communist
lies because they do not know what communism is.

Refugee reports are also reliable because there are lots of
refugees sneeking across different borders at different times
in different ways. It would be impossible for them to conspire
together to tell a consistent false story.

If, as Chomsky does, one treats official statements by mass
murderers as "documentation", while treating refugee reports as
"rumors" then one will necessarily come to the conclusion that
conditions in totalitarain terror regimes are pretty good, as
Chomsky invariably concluded for every murderous tyrant. One
will conclude, as Chomsky concluded while millions died in
Cambodia, that "Washington is the torture and political murder
capital of the world" and that conditions in totalitarian
terror regimes are much better, that communist domination is
everywhere liberation, and that freedom is everywhere slavery.

Of course, Chomsky's skepticism about refugee reports is highly
selective,in Chomsky's introduction to "On Power and Ideology:
the Managua Lectures". The Nicaraguan government introduced
him to some people they described as Honduran refugees.
Despite his extreme skepticism towards Cambodian refugees, he
apparently took this state-sponsored dog-and-pony show at face
value, despite the fact that communist regimes routinely
present complete Potemkin villages for the benefit of foreign
guests.

: : To give an illustration of just one neglected
: : source, the London Economist (March 26, 1977)
: : carried a letter by W.J. Sampson, who worked as an
: : economist and statistician for the Cambodian
: : Government until March 1975, in close contact with
: : the central statistics office. After leaving
: : Cambodia, he writes, he "visited refugee camps in
: : Thailand and kept in touch with Khmers," and he also
: : relied on "A European friend who cycled around Phnom
: : Penh for many days after its fall [and] saw and
: : heard of no ... executions" apart from "the shooting
: : of some prominent politicians and the lynching of
: : hated bomber pilots in Phnom Penh." He concludes
: : "that executions could be numbered in hundreds or
: : thousands rather than in hundreds of thousands,"
: : though there was "a big death toll from sickness" --
: : surely a direct consequence, in large measure, of
: : the devastation caused by the American attack.
: : Sampson's analysis is known to those in the press
: : who have cited Ponchaud at second-hand, but has yet
: : to be reported here. And his estimate of executions
: : is far from unique.

Sampson is not a "neglected source". His feelings fail to
contradict Ponchaud's facts. Feelings are not news.

: : Expert analyses of the sort just cited read quite
: : differently from the confident conclusions of the
: : mass media.

Those that stick their heads in the sand and failed to report
the news do indeed read quite differently to those that
reported the news, but they failed to report contradictory
news. If you read Chomsky's "neglected sources" you are not
going to find any of those "repeated discoveries that massacre
reports were false", that "space limitations preclude" them
from providing.

Reading Barron and Paul, one encounters a flood of very
detailed facts. Reading Chandra or Sampson, one encounters
almost no facts, no events, no people, no times, no places. No
news, just feelings. These articles were just not news, nor
newsworthy. The one news item in Sampsons account is that his
friend took a bicycle ride and did not see very much. But
Barron and Paul's refugee informants snuck through the darkness
and saw a great deal. The former is not news, the latter is
news.

: : Here we read the "Most foreign experts on Cambodia
: : and its refugees believe at least 1.2 million
: : persons have been killed or have died as a result of
: : the Communist regime since April 17, 1975" (UPI,
: : Boston Globe, April 17, 1977). No source is given,
: : but it is interesting that a 1.2 million estimate is
: : attributed by Ponchaud to the American Embassy
: : (Presumably Bangkok), a completely worthless source,
: : as the historical record amply demonstrates. The
: : figure bears a suggestive similarity to the
: : prediction by U.S. officials at the war's end that 1
: : million would die in the next year.

In 1976 Time estimated about six hundred thousand. In 1977
Ponchaud estimated about one million two hundred thousand
wrongful deaths, Barron and Paul the same, in 1978 McGovern
estimated two and a half million, consistent with the estimate
of three million three hundred thousand for 1979 issued by the
successor regime to the Khmer Rouge. The killing field records
we now have show a roughly constant rate of killing throughout
the existence of any one killing field, with perhaps a moderate
increase in the later years, thus these numbers are consistent
with each other, and consistent with the records we now have,
suggesting about six hundred thousand a year for the first two
years, and about one million a year for the next two years.

In the nineteen nineties, after the fall of communism,
outsiders were free to come in and start digging up the mass
graves and so forth, and at the start of the twenty first
century, found substantial evidence that the estimate of three
million three hundred thousand is around about right, which
should give us reason to examine all those "scholars" with
their impressive degrees, who kept producing substantially
lower (though ever rising) estimates.

: : In the New York Times Magazine , May 1, 1977, Robert
: : Moss (editor of a dubious offshoot of Britain's
: : Economist called "Foreign Report" which specializes
: : in sensational rumors from the world's intelligence
: : agencies) asserts that "Cambodia's pursuit of total
: : revolution has resulted, by the official admission
: : of its Head of State, Khieu Samphan, in the
: : slaughter of a million people." Moss informs us that
: : the source of this statement is Barron and Paul, who
: : claim that in an interview with the Italian weekly
: : Famiglia Cristiana Khieu Samphan stated that more
: : than a million died during the war, and that the
: : population had been 7 million before the war and is
: : now 5 million. Even if one places some credence in
: : the reported interview nowhere in it does Khieu
: : Samphan suggest that the million postwar deaths were
: : a result of official policies (as opposed to the lag
: : effects of a war that left large numbers ill,
: : injured, and on the verge of starvation). The
: : "slaughter" by the Khmer Rouge is a Moss- New York
: : Times creation.
: :
: : A Christian Science Monitor editorial states:
: : "Reports put the loss of life as high as 2 million
: : people out of 7.8 million total." Again, there is no
: : source, but we will suggest a possibility directly.
: : The New York Times analysis of "two years after the
: : Communist victory" goes still further. David
: : Andelman, May 2, 1977, speaks without qualification
: : of "the purges that took hundreds of thousands of
: : lives in the aftermath of the Communist capture of
: : Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975." Even the U.S.
: : Government sources on which journalists often
: : uncritically rely advance no such claim, to our
: : knowledge. In fact, even Barron and Paul claim only
: : that "100,000 or more" were killed in massacres and
: : executions -- they base their calculations on a
: : variety of interesting assumptions, among them, that
: : all military men, civil-servants and teachers were
: : targeted for execution; curiously, their
: : "calculations" lead them to the figure of 1.2
: : million deaths as a result of "actions" of the Khmer
: : Rouge governing authorities, by January 1, 1977 ("at
: : a very minimum"); by a coincidence, the number
: : reported much earlier by the American Embassy,
: : according to Ponchaud. Elsewhere in the press,
: : similar numbers are bandied about, with equal
: : credibility

The experts who actually made a study were Ponchaud, and Barron
and Paul. They independently came up with the same estimate
for 1976 — one million two hundred thousand wrongful deaths.
Subsequently the regime was toppled in middle of its crimes,
which means we can now, for the Khmer Rouge, as for the Nazis,
check the estimates. These estimates are consistent with other
estimates made by mainstream mass media at the time, such as
Time Magazine, were endorsed by the most reputable mainstream
magazines of that time, such as The Economist, contrary to what
Chomsky and Herman lead the reader to believe, and were
subsequently supported by on site investigations following the
fall of communism.

I am still only half way through Chomsky's article, and the
further we go, the thicker the lies come flying.

I will post the rest of it some other day.

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