The king of “America Bad” geopolitical analysis Noam Chomsky, likely on his way out.

[BaggerofTea]

Truly one of the greatest of all time.

man illuminated me to reality.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Here’s a great video on his history of genocide denial and running cover for genocidal regimes because his entire political life has been “America Bad”

Why should we watch a 40-minute video from a random Youtuber that is repeating claims which have already been clearly debunked in this thread? You didn't even have a response to the debunking of your lies other than to just post a random video.

Post something in print from a reputable source with actual citations for its claims so that we can check the context.

On 6 June 1977, Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman published an article in The Nation that contrasted the views expressed in the books of John Barron and Anthony Paul, François Ponchaud, and Gareth Porter and George Hildebrand, as well as in articles and accounts by Fox Butterfield, Carol Bragg (eyewitness testimony), Asian scholar George Kahin, J.J. Cazaux, Sydney Schanberg, Swedish journalist Olle Tolgraven, and others. Their conclusion was:[14]

Chomsky and Herman had both faint praise and criticism for Ponchaud's book Cambodia: Year Zero, writing on the one hand that it was "serious and worth reading, as distinct from much of the commentary it has elicited", and on the other that "the serious reader will find much to make him somewhat wary."[14] They wrote that the refugee stories of Khmer Rouge atrocities "must be considered seriously", but should be treated with great "care and caution" because "refugees are frightened and defenseless, at the mercy of alien forces. They naturally tend to report what they believe their interlocuters wish to hear."[14]

In the article Chomsky and Herman described the book by Gareth Porter and George Hildebrand, as 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". Chomsky also attacked testimonials from refugees regarding the massacres, calling into question the claims of hundreds of thousands killed. Chomsky does this on the basis of pointing to other first hand accounts that show killings more in the hundreds or thousands. He does not deny the existence of any executions outright. According to historian Peter Maguire, for many years Chomsky served as a "hit man" against media outlets which criticized the Khmer Rouge regime.[27]

You realize that that doesn't support what you claimed? In our past discussions, it's been clear that you know very little about Asian history beyond what you copy-paste from wikipedia in any given discussion, and you've admitted on multiple occasions your lack of study in the region. So you probably don't realize that the USA had disposed Cambodia's popularly-supported prince in a coup, then bombed them with an unprecedented level of ordinance, directly paving the way for the Khmer Rouge to take power, and then cynically used the Khmer Rouge to advance their anti-communist agenda. In the 1970s, it was OBVIOUS that anything the USA had to say about Vietnam and Cambodia was loaded with propaganda, and as a result it was extremely difficult to trust their claims being made from there.

Chomsky, as you quote yourself, never said that the accounts of refugees were wrong. He said that they had to be taken seriously, but at the same time warily with the understanding that refugees often paint a picture that matches what they think their host country wants to hear. Think, for example, of how much US policy leading into the Iraq War was based on what we believed from Iraqi ex-pats, much of which ended up being false. In 1978, it was extremely unclear how much information coming out of Cambodia was legitimate, how much was US propaganda, and how much was Chinese or Cambodia propaganda. The fuller picture wasn't clear until the 1990s.

 

[wire28]

fukk that Genocide denier

Is this really true

 

[Professor Emeritus]

In this debate over whether or not Chomsky denied a massacre, it is important not to lose sight of something more damning and much less controversial: that Chomsky quite openly denies that genocide took place, either in Srebrenica or in Bosnia as a whole, and makes no bones about putting the word ‘genocide’ in quotes – this despite the fact that an international tribunal, established by the UN, has convicted a Bosnian Serb general of aiding and abetting genocide in Srebrenica.

Once again, Chomsky has never denied that those events took place or that they were war crimes. He just disagrees about how widely the word "genocide" should be applied. That has already been addressed in this thread and you're Gish Galloping with the same disingenuous arguments you've already posted rather than engaging with any of the counterarguments at all.



Notice how the OP declared with his title that he doesn't like Chomsky because Chomsky criticizes America. Yet he hasn't offered a SINGLE argument against any of Chomsky's criticisms of America. He realizes that Chomsky's arguments against American imperialism are too on-point, so instead he aims for a character attack by cherry-picking two incidents in his 60 years of political commentary that he thinks were politically correct and can be mischaracterized into easy attacks.


If his issue, as he says in the title, is "Chomsky is the king of America = bad", then why has he failed to address a single one of Chomsky's criticisms of America in this entire thread?

 

[Sir ZDuke]

The man is a genius, look at his contributions to linguistics and computer science ( automata theory) . He’s not always on the money with his political commentary, but he has said some really prescient shyt. Plus we share a birthday

 

[Mister Terrific]

The origins of Chomskys Khmer Rouge genocide denial

Distortions at Fourth Hand

The Noam Chomsky Website.

chomsky.info

Some quotes from Chomsky

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.” 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).

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. 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.

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

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.

If, indeed, postwar Cambodia is, as he believes, similar to Nazi Germany, then his comment is perhaps just, though we may add that he has produced no evidence to support this judgement. But if postwar Cambodia is more similar to France after liberation, where many thousands of people were massacred within a few months under far less rigorous conditions than those left by the American war, then perhaps a rather different judgement is in order. That the latter conclusion may be more nearly correct is suggested by the analyses mentioned earlier.

 

[Mister Terrific]

Is this really true

I used to debate Holocaust deniers in college. While the level of education is obviously miles an apart, they verbiage and logic Chomsky and guys like David Irving use is virtually the same.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

He was butt buddies with Jeffrey Epstein is all anyone needs to know.

Oh look, another lie, what a surprise.

Literally his only connection with Epstein was meeting him in his office twice when he was 90 years old so that Epstein could move funds for him internationally from one account to another that he was having difficulty with because he co-held the account with his late wife (Epstein was a financer, that's how he got rich). Chomsky never gave a single penny to Epstein, it was solely his own money getting transferred to his own account. He knew Epstein because Epstein was obsessed with MIT and donated a lot of money to them (where Chomsky worked) and loved meeting with intellectuals to boost his image - he also met with Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne, Marvin Minsky, Stephen Jay Gould, Oliver Sacks, Frank Wilczek, Murray Gell-Mann, and others.

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/crime/article283847883.html

Epstein held a conference with 21 of the leading scientists in astronomy/astrophysics, then brought Stephen Hawking to his private island afterwards.

Stephen Hawking pictured on Jeffrey Epstein's 'Island of Sin'

Cambridge professor photographed on convicted paedophile's private Caribbean island

www.telegraph.co.uk

Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and dozens of prominent scientists/professors were much more closely connected to Epstein than Chomsky was, and literally no one has ever accused Chomsky of visiting Epstein's island or using his illegal services. Did he display poor judgment by meeting with Epstein? Definitely, but he was 90 years old at that point and I have no idea how much he knew of the allegations against Epstein. He made the same error that numerous academics at MIT had made, he wasn't no fukking "butt buddy".

 

[Pressure]

smart guy, but he isn’t beyond criticism.

If we used these same arguments to say crime were committed but genocide isn’t happening in Gaza you guys would be spiraling out of control.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

I used to debate Holocaust deniers in college. While the level of education is obviously miles an apart, they verbiage and logic Chomsky and guys like David Irving use is virtually the same.

He's already been quoted in this very thread stating that the Holocaust was clearly a genocide, the most obvious example of a genocide in his lifetime. The degree to which you all will lie to tar him is amazing.


This is Chomsky on the Holocaust:

"The Nazis really are historically unique. There have been a lot of atrocities in human history, but industrialized mass extermination of the style that the Nazis carried out is off the spectrum. There’s just nothing that compares to it. The Jews and the Roma, the people we call Gypsies, were treated about the same way, and some other groups. That was unique."

Chomsky and Genocide

Noam Chomsky may justly be considered the most important public intellectual alive, and the most significant of the post-World War Two era. Despite his scholarly contributions to linguistics, at least three generations know him primarily for his political writings and activism, voicing a...

digitalcommons.usf.edu

Imagine trying to equate that person with a Holocaust denier.



Notice you still haven't quoted even ONE critique of his arguments against American imperialism, which you admitted in your title is what you actually care about. You're just slinging mud from every angle you can think of to try to discredit him. You lack any intellectual integrity at all.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

The origins of Chomskys Khmer Rouge genocide denial

Distortions at Fourth Hand

The Noam Chomsky Website.

chomsky.info

Some quotes from Chomsky



If, indeed, postwar Cambodia is, as he believes, similar to Nazi Germany, then his comment is perhaps just, though we may add that he has produced no evidence to support this judgement. But if postwar Cambodia is more similar to France after liberation, where many thousands of people were massacred within a few months under far less rigorous conditions than those left by the American war, then perhaps a rather different judgement is in order. That the latter conclusion may be more nearly correct is suggested by the analyses mentioned earlier.

Notice that he quotes the exact reasons for his analysis, pointing out that the claims being made about Cambodia repeatedly either fail to cite their sources or cite sources falsely, and he was able to back up each one of those statements with verifiable citations.

And despite all those errors he identified, he still notes that the claims about genocide in Cambodia COULD be true, but there was no way to verify one way or the other because legitimate conclusive evidence hadn't been produced yet. And he was absolutely right about that.

In the end, the claims about massacres in Cambodia on a horrific scale turned out to be true, and he acknowledged that. That doesn't change the fact that made of the early claims were part of a Western propaganda campaign and untrustworthy. Propaganda campaigns can sometimes use the truth too.

 

[wire28]

I used to debate Holocaust deniers in college. While the level of education is obviously miles an apart, they verbiage and logic Chomsky and guys like David Irving use is virtually the same.

That’s wild man. Thanks for the education you learn something new every day.

 

[Mister Terrific]

Trial of Slobodan Milošević - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Here is David Irving, probably the foremost academic in the area of Holocaust denial and Nazi revisionism

David Irving - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

He too was a respected historian and widely quoted like Chomsky. Notice the similarities argument when it comes to denying genocide. Compare and contrast with what Chomsky says about Srebrenica and Cambodia


Only real difference is Chomsky hides behind his background as a linguist so he can haggle over the definition of genocide and hides behinds the words of others offering praise for their work of more upfront genocide denial.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

smart guy, but he isn’t beyond criticism.

If we used these same arguments to say crime were committed but genocide isn’t happening in Gaza you guys would be spiraling out of control.

But he's said exactly that about Palestine in the past.

He has never, ever called the Israeli occupation of Palestine a genocide, even though he is very strongly against it and thinks it is a horrific crime. At the same time, he has repeatedly warned that it could be a prelude to genocide, because Israel is breeding the circumstances via which they could at some point justify killing/expelling the entire Palestinian population, which would rise to the level of genocide by his definition.

Chomsky has a somewhat different and stronger definition of genocide than the UN. You don't have to agree with that. But arguing over how he uses a single word, rather than actually engaging in his critiques of American empire, seems asinine and disingenuous to me.


It's not the least surprising that Chomsky's critics in this thread have said NOTHING to engage with any of his advances in numerous fields or any of his insights on the geopolitical issues they actually care about. Instead, they keep making ad hominem attacks based on fringe issues that they've never brought up anywhere else, in the desperate hope to smear him because they know they lose actually discussing the real issues.

 

[88m3]

@Professor Emeritus You seem really read in on Chomsky! Any thought on his positions re Syria, China, Russia, and recent African conflicts?

Do you think he knocked it out of the park so to speak regarding the Bosnian Serbs actions in Srebrenica? I have many close friends who were impacted by the conflicts there and some of my friends served there. Is Chomsky right in your eyes?

​

I'm just read this quick now as a refresher
Two Prominent Leftist Writers Split on Syria’s War


I thought the left in this country started down a bad path when the Syrian Civil War happened... denial of war crimes and what have you. I wonder if Chomsky helped foster that skepticism and denialism? Food for thought.