Moonbat alert: Chomksy condemns Bin Laden kill.

Attacks on Chomsky for "supporting" the Khmer Rouge, distilled:

Noble Warrior: "The Khmer Rouge are the evilest people ever and they killed X million people!"

Chomsky: "The KHmer Rouge are certainly evil, but if you look at the record, they killed Y million people actually and if you look at Z this was a factor in all the deaths too.."

Noble Warrior: "Chomsky supports the killing fields! Chomsky loves the Khmer Rouge"

The Manicheans will be with us always I suppose....
 
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Attacks on Chomsky for "supporting" the Khmer Rouge, distilled:

Noble Warrior eyewitness: "The Khmer Rouge are the evilest people ever evil and they killed X million people!"

Chomsky: "The KHmer Rouge are certainly might be evil, but if you look at the record, they killed Y million people actually and if you look at Z this American policy was a factor in all the deaths too.."

Noble Warrior eyewitness: "Chomsky supports the killing fields! communists Chomsky loves the Khmer Rouge communists"

The Manicheans will be with us always I suppose....

Edited for hyperbole.

Please note Chomsky was apoligizing (for the KR) before, and back tracked later when the west had a better picture of the extent of the tragedy, and acting as an apoligist at that point was beyond the pale.

I put Chomsky at about a step ahead of a holocaust denier.
 
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Attacks on Chomsky for "supporting" the Khmer Rouge, distilled:

Noble Warrior: "The Khmer Rouge are the evilest people ever and they killed X million people!"

Chomsky: "The KHmer Rouge are certainly evil, but if you look at the record, they killed Y million people actually and if you look at Z this was a factor in all the deaths too.."

Noble Warrior: "Chomsky supports the killing fields! Chomsky loves the Khmer Rouge"

The Manicheans will be with us always I suppose....

My understanding of the Khmer Rouge thing was that Chomsky had initially expressed skepticism at the atrocity stories that were filtering out of Cambodia and had tried to dissect some of the stories by Readers' Digest and the French missionary, Francois Ponchaud saying that much of their reports went beyond the available evidence.

In some way this is fairly legitimate at least until further evidence comes in. By now the science is well and truly in on the Khmer Rouge and Chomsky would be more honest if he were to simply own up to it.

If you want to see what I mean please read the Noam Chomsky article, Distortions at Fourth Hand particularly from the second paragraph:

http://www.chomsky.info/articles/19770625.htm

It does seem to vindicate something that Susan Sontag once said of the Reader's Digest vs. The Nation albeit in reference to the Cold War. She said that you would have had a clearer picture of within the Soviet Union from having read the Reader's Digest rather than The Nation and she was of course booed and declared an apostate for this bit of heresy (that's just to point out that Manicheans can be found among the readership of the Nation too). Her statement would also be applicable to life under the Khmer Rouge as well, I think.
 
Chomsky and others simply turned a blind eye to the facts, and in some instances tried to place blame on the United States for the KR's genocide.
 
Ah! I see you have already linked to an annotated version of that article.

To be honest, I think just reading the original Chomsky article is good enough to start jaws dropping at free-fall speed.

Chomsky and Herman said:
The Wall Street Journal acknowledged [Hildebrand and Porter's book's] 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.

Remember what Chomsky's article here is saying is, given that Vietnam benefitted from the US leaving and that things were actually much better than the US press said it was there, it is all advisable to believe the same is quite possible about Cambodia too.

Well, Chomsky turned out to be dead wrong. In fact, I have a copy of his Hegemony or Survival on my bookshelf in which he says that Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia and ousting of the Khmer Rouge and establishing a puppet government was an example of humanitarian intervention.
 
I don't know who is an apoligist to the KR, but Chomsky and others certainly were apoligists for the KR

Malcolm Caldwell is someone who could have started a political version of the Darwin Awards.

A rough description would be a Western intellectual or activist who vigourously supports a totalitarian regime which then murders said supporter:

James Alexander Malcolm Caldwell (27 September 1931 – 23 December 1978)[1] was a British academic and a prolific Marxist writer. He was a consistent critic of American imperialism, a campaigner for Asian communist liberation and socialist movements, and a strong supporter of Pol Pot. Despite his vocal support for the Kampuchean revolution and Pol Pot's regime, support which only increased after visiting the country, Malcolm Caldwell was murdered, supposedly on the orders of Pol Pot, a few hours after meeting him, in 1978

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Caldwell
 
I find it hard to believe that anyone who isn't a radical Islamist would give an asswipe about Bin Laden's demise. Who honestly wishes he was still alive?

I tell a lie. I don't find it hard to believe. Like a fundamentalist preacher claiming a hurricane is punishment for sin, the radical left have been using Al-Qaeda and 9/11 and a vicarious lash against the society and culture they despise.

Chomksy is a known supporter of the Iranian-backed Shiite terrorist group; Hezbollah.

Chomksy is upset of course, that we "invaded Pakistani territory" and "carried out a political assassination".

He claims George Bush is more evil than Bin Laden, and comparable to Nazi war criminals.

If you start war, you get war. Al-Qaeda are not entitled to any sort of kid gloves.

I am joining this discussion a little bit late.
My apologizes.

As for the Chomsky issue, I more or less agree with what Chomsky says, looks like self-evident to me.
Bin Laden was not executed for the murder of about 3000 people, in fact, this is more or less irrelevant in the whole discussion.
Bin Laden was killed for the murder of about 3000 American people, had the victims been Vietnamese or Iranian, nobody would have cared.
 
also, "Reagan supported terrorists" - perhaps, but he was roundly and correctly condemned for it.

But he ended his days in his bed, not shot by a commando

Here you go -

Not that this matter with the topic at hand, but..

9) . . . he [Chomsky] has gushed over genocidal maniacs like the Khmer Rouge, predicted that the United States would visit a holocaust on Afghanistan, and imagined a postwar alliance [WWII] between Uncle Sam and Nazi brownshirts.

Chomsky provided accurate historical information on U.S. contributions to the rise of the Khmer Rouge, corrected hysterical anti-Communist propaganda based on faked photographs and hugely inflated numbers, cited information from the New York Times demonstrating that U.S. war planners were anticipating that their 2001 bombing campaign in Afghanistan would increase the number of Afghans at risk of starvation by millions in a matter of weeks, and correctly documented Washington hiring Nazis for post-WWII counterinsurgency work in the USSR, appropriating Nazi counterinsurgency doctrine for its own uses in the process.

(apparently, I can not post any link as I have to reach 15 messages)

JP
 
I am joining this discussion a little bit late.
My apologizes.

As for the Chomsky issue, I more or less agree with what Chomsky says, looks like self-evident to me.
Bin Laden was not executed for the murder of about 3000 people, in fact, this is more or less irrelevant in the whole discussion.
Bin Laden was killed for the murder of about 3000 American people,
So?

had the victims been Vietnamese or Iranian, nobody would have cared.
So Iranians and Vietnamese are "nobodies"?

Your post is quite telling, and illustrative of the clueless racism many on the left engage in. Anyone non-white or non-western may as well be like small children, and have no responsibility for their actions and therefore cannot be held to the same standards as real human beings, i.e. "white people".

This manifests itself most clearly in the Israel-Palestine issue, where mainstream Palestinian extremism gets ignored while Israel gets held to a standard no nation could meet.
 
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So?
So Iranians and Vietnamese are "nobodies"?

Your post is quite telling, and illustrative of the clueless racism many on the left engage in. Anyone non-white or non-western may as well be like small children, and have no responsibility for their actions and therefore cannot be held to the same standards as real human beings, i.e. "white people".

This manifests itself most clearly in the Israel-Palestine issue, where mainstream Palestinian extremism gets ignored while Israel gets held to a standard no nation could meet.

1) I am not on the left
2) I never said non-white or non-western are like small children
3) I have never ever started to even touch the Palestine issue

My point is very clear.
Since may of the people posting here are American or from the West, they could not care less if the 3000 victims were, say, Iranians.
They would have applauded the death of 3000 Iranians.
The next day they would have forgotten about the whole thing.
But the 3000 people dead were American citizens, therefore the murder of them becomes a big crime worth starting 2 wars (or one, or one and a half).

Again, this point is quite self-evident to me.

JP
 
Since may of the people posting here are American or from the West, they could not care less if the 3000 victims were, say, Iranians.

You should perhaps participate in more threads before you make silly statements like this.

They would have applauded the death of 3000 Iranians.

Because we are mostly American and Westerners, right?

The next day they would have forgotten about the whole thing.

The next day? No, but everything has a shelf life of emotion attached to it. The further the disconnect, the less emotional time you spend on it.

But the 3000 people dead were American citizens, therefore the murder of them becomes a big crime worth starting 2 wars (or one, or one and a half).

Being Americans, we have a pretty strong attachment to other Americans.

I can tell you're going to be fun.
 
Being Americans, we have a pretty strong attachment to other Americans.

This is more or less what I was saying.
Were you Chinese, you would not care a heck about "terrorists" driving planes against buildings in the US.
 
This is more or less what I was saying.
Were you Chinese, you would not care a heck about "terrorists" driving planes against buildings in the US.

But what you're implying is a little more insidious (and quite ignorant) than that. You are saying we wouldn't give a damn about any other atrocity in the world because it's not America who is suffering. This is not the case, especially with this forum, which is why you need to do a little reading. You will find many posters here ('Westerners' as you call them) that are quite proactive when it comes to defending human rights abroad and for doing their best to support dissidents in other countries (Egypt and Palestine being examples).

That feeling is amplified when it's your own countrymen - that does not diminish your feelings for other nationalities.

Don't paint with such a broad brush.

*Eta

The same thing applies to China.
 
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