And we should insist that it is "malevolent" in 1979 to analyze and debate what happened in Cambodia? That is of course just what the toadies to the US regime were doing then, too, as Chomsky mentions in the continuation of the paragraph you cite:
"Such a study [i.e., of the impact of Western imperialism on Cambodian peasant life], however, has yet to be undertaken. The West is much more concerned to excise from history the imperial role and to pretend that the history of contemporary Cambodia begins in April 1975 in a manner that is disconnected from the imperial legacy and must be explained by the lunacy of 'nine men at the center' who were systematically massacring and starving the population in a form of 'autogenocide' that surpasses the horrors of Nazism."
On Mon, 17 Jun 2002, Brad DeLong wrote:
> Chomsky's statement that the U.S. government in the 1990s chose the
> Bosnian Muslims as its proxy force for geostrategic reasons was really
> stupid.
>
> And I ran across a quote from page 291 of _After the Cataclysm_: "If a
> serious studyŠis someday undertaken, it may well be discoveredŠthat
> the Khmer Rouge programs elicited a positive responseŠbecause they
> dealt with fundamental problems rooted in the feudal past and
> exacerbated by the imperial system.Š Such a study, however, has yet to
> be undertaken..." To claim in 1979 that the character of the Khmer
> Rouge regime is still open to debate seems to me to be beyond the
> stupid, and into the malevolent.