...About Noam Chomsky - Links ... more readable discussion of Cambodia and who supported whom, from alt.fan.noam- chomsky. Read this first, and then you can plow through the Sophal Ear thesis ... http://www.talene.net/php/sslinks/links.php?cat=40 - 9k - Cached - Similar pages
My Allergic Reaction to Noam Chomsky ... trying to alert the outside world to the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia) ... and it seems to me that you have missed the point of Chomsky's main thesis ..http://. www.j-bradford-delong.net/Politics/chomsky.html - 24k - Cached - Similar pages http://216.239.35.100/search?q=cache:XevP8KMrnxEC:www.tiac.net/users/hcunn/e- asia/ch-kh-chron.html+chomsky+cambodia&hl=en&ie=utf-8
Cambodia and the Media: On Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman ... His response to Chomsky, quoted in Sophal's thesis: "...it is not only because I once argued for the victory of this regime, and feel myself partially guilty ... http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/media3.htm -
http://www.csua.berkeley.edu/~sophal/krcanon.html Khmer Conscience
Vol. IX, No. 1, WINTER 1995
THE KHMER ROUGE CANON
by Sophal EAR*
"How many of those who say they are un reservedly in support of the Khmer revolution would consent to endure one hundredth part of the present sufferings of the Cambodian people?"
-- François Ponchaud, Cambodia: Year Zero (1977)
Between 1975 and 1979, "the movement of solidarity with the peoples of Kampuchea and Indochina as a whole" as described by of one of its members, Gavin McCormick, vociferously defended the Kampuchean revolution and its revolutionaries. To be sure, ther e have been very few articles or books o n this topic, since it is so unpleasant for those Fr. Ponchaud characterized as "unreservedly in support of the Khmer revolution," to be reminded of their responsibility in what Jean Lacouture has called "the murde r of a people." The study of this movement is considered by some to be wholly outside "Cambodian studies"--more in line perhaps with the history of American academia, for instance. However classified this chapter in American studies surely had to do with Cambodia and the fate of her people.
The Khmer Rouge Canon, if there were one, would be composed of, among numerous other works, Laura Summers' "Consolidating the Revolution" (Dec. 1975) and "Defining the Revolutionary State in Cambodia" (Dec. 1976) in Current History, Georg e C. Hildebrand and Gareth Porter's biblical Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution (1976), Torben Retboll's "Kampuchea and the Reader's Digest" in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars (Jul.-Sept. 1979) and Malcolm Caldwell's long essay "Ca mbodia: Rationale for a Rural Policy" in Malcolm Cadwell's South-East Asia (1979). Perhaps one should add to this list Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman's masterful "Distortions at Fourth Hand" in The Nation (June 25, 1977) and After the Cat aclysm (1979), but in the latter case, Chomsky and Herman are mindful to state that they are by no means defending the Khmer Rouge nor "pretend to know where the truth lies"-- though most of what they do is to rehash the Hildebrand and Porter line in a more voluminously footnoted and palatable design. Together, these works and many others ranging from the Australian homegrown News from Kampuchea (later renamed News of Democratic Kampuchea) to the British Journal of Contemporary Asia forme d the Khmer Rouge Canon.
Three works come to mind with respect to how that Canon has been explored previously, William Shawcross' essay "Cambodia: Some Perceptions of a Disaster," in Revolution and its Aftermath in Kampuchea (1983), Stephen J. Morris' article "Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, and Cornell" in the National Interest (Summer 1989), and Geoffrey C. Gunn and Jefferson Lee's Cambodia Watching Down Under (1991). Shawcross and Morris, two individuals one would not expect to find in similar corners essentially agree with the notio n that a number of individuals on the Left failed, for one reason or another, to realize even after it became rather obvious, that atrocities were taking place in post- revolutionary or, alternatively, "liberated" Cambodia in unprecedented proportions. Sha wcross focuses in on the antiwar elements, specifically radical academic Noam Chomsky, whereas Morris tackles Cornell University's pro- Khmer Rouge elements in its South-East Asia Program (SEAP). Gunn and Lee offer a nearly exhaustive though curiously uncr itical view of the Australian connection to Democratic Kampuchea.
The context within which Khmer Rouge support incubated was the antiwar movement. To understand how someone in a wealthy Western democracy could have found solidarity with the revolution taking place in Kampuchea and elsewhere, one must first bear in mi nd the political atmosphere and conditioning from which grew the yoke of radical revolutionary support. It would be facile to strip the words of these Western academics from the context of history, a practice not unlike that being undertaken by current hi storical revisionists. But at the same time, these same activists cum academics must bear responsibility for what they used to reach their conclusions--namely the validity and credibility of the evidence they unceremoniously attacked when at the same time they hypocritically took at face value Ieng Sary or Khieu Samphan's utterances as words to live by. Notwithstanding the pro-revolutionary ideological framework from which they were taught to think, namely the revolutionary conditioning in Cornell's SEAP during the strife-ridden 1960s and 1970s, one must still wonder how those who studied Cambodia and ostensibly loved her most in the West, became supporters of her worst enemy?
*Sophal Ear, who left Cambodia in 1976 when he was one year old, is graduating with double honors from the University of California, Berkeley in double major Political Science and Economics. He is finishing up his thesis on the Khmer Rouge Canon . He got a fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation to continue his graduate studies at Princeton this fall. He plans to return to Cambodia some day.