Noam Chomsky Supported the Khmer Rouge (Pol Pot, etc.)

hey there are some issues I really
hesitate to deal with on this channel because they're so hard to speak about with concision ah Noam Chomsky supported the Khmer Rouge some people already will be closing this video when fusing to hear what I say or demanding know how this can possibly be true yeah you can imagine why I hesitate to make this video look I spent years of my life studying the politics in history Cambodia Noam Chomsky didn't okay if you watching this video has spent years studying the history and politics Cambodia good I'm happy for you there may still be more that you can learn there may still be a few facts in this short video that surprised you and maybe not maybe you're one of the lucky few people who already know everything I have to share with you in these next few minutes okay but there is no point in being angry at me below this video I provide a link to an article by a guy named er so pal his family name is Phil ei R I see mispronounced yeah he is a Cambodian American I knew him years ago we now haven't spoken for a few years hi so pal if you watch this video that is really a very reasonable very patient article if you read it from beginning to end it does not just point a finger at Noam Chomsky and say chops he supported the Khmer Rouge therefore Chomsky is a bad guy it gives you a sense of the whole intellectual milieu of what was going on at that time it gives you a sense of what Chomsky was reading what he was influenced by what he was reacting to and I want to make a concession here to Chomsky that also gets at one of the deeper problems Chomsky was a member of a generation who were deeply scarred by the Vietnam War and by some specific incidents of the Vietnam War such as the Gulf of Tonkin incident if you haven't heard of that it's a good idea to look it up on Wikipedia the gulf of tonkin incident t o NK i n that incident it's not so much what happened it's the fact that for people of Noam Chomsky's generation it demonstrated that the CIA was willing to lie to Congress the CIA was willing to lie to the American journalists mislead the newspapers and that to some extent the facts of political history could be a kind of fiction presented to manipulate popular opinion to support US foreign policy goals I completely sympathize with why a guy like Noam Chomsky and thousands of others maybe millions of others I can completely sympathize why many people respond to that by losing all faiths and all trust in what we would consider for lack of a better term reputable sources of information the CIA may lie to you about one thing and tell you the truth about another as CIA remains a tremendously important source of information for this to the world but if you grew up at the time Noam Chomsky grew up it would be easy to understand why a guy like that would develop the attitude and the outlook of thinking hey the US government can lie to me about this if so then the US government can lie to me about millions of people being slaughtered in Cambodia the US government can completely misrepresent mass murder under a notorious communist dictatorship and why not that sort of thing became believable to Chomsky as a young man as a relatively young man and it shows up in his writing about Cambodia now the other problem here that I think is relatively profound that we all have to deal with no matter what our field of study is no matter what our interests are in life is simply that Chomsky was not an expert on Cambodia the moral justification for Chomsky doing what he did was that he thought of himself as a critic of u.s. foreign policy but the truth is both in his book which has the subtitle the political economy of human rights and in lectures he gave for decades afterwards Chomsky actually did not know which side the Americans were fighting on ok so you can't criticize u.s. foreign policy in this period by saying the US were intentionally making the Khmer Rouge look bad or vilifying the Khmer Rouge which is a very large part of what Chomsky has to say and why he is in effect making excuses for glorifying or supporting the Khmer Rouge and it's suggesting that their atrocities are not really so bad as the Americans made them seem he also tries at some length he tries to blame the Americans for the deaths as if the people who were slaughtered by the Khmer Rouge were really killed by US bombardment aerial bombardment from airplanes or as if the aerial bombardment should be blamed for atrocities and massacres carried out by the Khmer Rouge like a cause and effect mentality his whole level of understanding of the Cambodian Civil War and the Khmer Rouge period the communist revolutionary period is simply too crude to really be taken seriously if you are in the tiny minority of people who have really studied the political history and so on but even so I'm not even gonna point the finger and vilify Noam Chomsky on this point because I have met and spoken to people who really are lifelong experts in Cambodia who did not know the most fundamental political issues of exactly this period of history I spoke to Judy ledger would face to face she was and still is she's one of the very few Americans who's a professor basically of Cambodian politics contemporary Cambodia and she did not know that the Americans and the Khmer Rouge were fighting on the same side in that war so she was ignorant of and wrong about exactly the issue that Noam Chomsky was ignorant wrong about a guy who was more sophisticated Michael Vickery again so if you know and care about Cambodian history these are two very famous names duty leisure would Michael victory Michael Vickery I noticed that he wrote about this but was always vague and evasive so actually in the introduction to the second edition of his book on the Pol Pot period the Khmer Rouge period I read very carefully what he said and then I sent him an email saying look I've studied this period of history and I've written an article about it it seems to me that you're aware that at some point the Americans began supporting Pol Pot the Khmers but you don't know when that was it seems to me he was dodging the question of establishing when the policy decision was taken and then I explained him look if you read my article I explained I've done the research I know when that was and you should know sue and he had the honesty he wrote back to me he admitted that even though he devoted his life to the study of Cambodia in this case he did both ancient Cambodia and modern Cambodia so he didn't just do Vietnam War he didn't just do 20th century but I appreciate he had the integrity to admit that he did not know this that I was telling him new information that he didn't previously know but this Cambodia ok so it is not even the case that I can just say some people are experts on Cambodia and Noam Chomsky is not one of them therefore Noam Chomsky is not even it sells over there I can't say that at all now on the other hand we also can't trivialize what chomps he did and we can't take away the responsibility for both what he wrote in that book and what he's done afterwards in defending the book it is a terrible irony that noam chomsky will be remembered for writing what can be properly called Holocaust denial literature because he actively and intentionally denies the Holocaust of what happened in Cambodia he actively making speaks excuses for and denies the reality of mass murder at that time if you read the article by air--so Powell in depth it will explain to you what was known what was not known what exactly Chomsky said sadly if you search around the internet you were gonna see a lot of half-baked excuses for Chomsky from some of his fans who basically quote weasel words who quote passages where Chomsky equivocates and kind of sort of tells you to different contradictory things at the same time and doesn't directly say what the purpose of his work as a whole is his use of weasel words does not exclude him it doesn't excuse him it only is more damning because it makes it clear that he is intentionally lying to you and misleading you you can read here suppose article if you're really interested if you're not you can take my word for it what Chomsky really lacks is the humility and the sympathy to learn from his mistakes because learning is all about recognizing that you were wrong you're wrong again and again and again but you don't learn from being wrong you learn from recognizing that you're wrong you don't learn from making mistakes you learn from noticing your mistakes and the terrible thing about Chomsky really is and this whole debacle he got himself into of making excuses for the Khmer Rouge and refusing to back down on it and so on he is the kind of guy who refuses to admit that he's made mistakes and therefore he fails to learn from those mistakes