Noam Chomsky

Enrique Diaz-Alvarez enrique at anise.ee.cornell.edu
Tue Oct 6 11:45:40 PDT 1998


Brad De Long wrote:
>
> Re:
> >Brad, this is demented, and I'm stunned you're saying these things.
> >Noam Chomsky is an anarchist, which makes him about as far from
> >a fascist as you can get. In fact, he's too anti-statist for me...
>
> Doug--
>
> I've been wrong before. I'll be wrong again. And I may be wrong this time.
> But I don't *think* so.
>
> I will admit that the first time I heard Chomsky it was a... bad
> experience. It was 1976 or maybe 1977 or 1978, and he was comparing the
> Khmer Rouge to the Free French, and mocking those who said: "Look. The
> Khmer Rouge has sealed the borders. Refugees are saying horrible things.
> When a regime that professes a totalitarian ideology seals its borders and
> refugees start telling horror stories, fear the worst." Ever since then
> he's been on my list of bad guys: enemies of human freedom who are not to
> be cut any slack.

Actually, this is the exact chomskian qoute in reris polpoticus:


> In brief, Hildebrand and Porter attribute "wrecking"
> and "rebuilding" to the wrong parties in Cambodia. [...]
>
> Their scholarship collapses under the barest scrutiny.[.....]
> They do not mention the Swedish journalist, Olle Tolgraven,
> or Richard Boyle, of Pacific News Service, the last newsman
> to leave Cambodia, who denied 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).
>
> [.....]
>
> 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.

-- Enrique Diaz-Alvarez Office # (607) 255 5034 Electrical Engineering Home # (607) 758 8962 112 Phillips Hall Fax # (607) 255 4565 Cornell University mailto:enrique at ee.cornell.edu Ithaca, NY 14853 http://peta.ee.cornell.edu/~enrique



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