> Ricardo, we don't need this here. Chomsky was not interested in dismissing the
> problems in Cambodia but pointing out the selective outrage that existed in the
> capitalist press.
I probably admire Chomsky more than any other critic. Imagine he
came to talk to our nowhere campus, something which many left-
wing stars would have never done, 'cause they believe they'll get a
higher (personal) marginal return speaking to the workers teaching
at Yale, Princeton and Chicago. But Chomsky is too strong a
supporter in open discussion to censor any criticism of something
he did/said among the millions of other good things he has done.
So I don't feel bad citing Alain Finkielkraut's *The Future of a
Negation, Reflections on the Question of Genocide*: "...in this
conversation between Chomsky and Debray, the argumentation
moved up a notch: the American linguist figured the number of
victims of Khmer Rouge repression to be one hundred thousand.
'And', he added, 'we should probably take into account local
reprisals by peasants'. In other words the Cambodian regime was
probably not exactly heaven on earth, but it was in vain that its
leaders said, 'The revolution needs only a million and a half to two
Cambodians to build the country'. They were innocent of the
principal crime of which they were accused, that of having reduced
their people to slavery, having let the unfit die, and having
annihilated everyone who on the basis of culture or parentage was
denied acccess into the kingdom of the New Man. And if they were
innocent, it was precisely because the [western] media judged
them to be guilty. The absence of genocide was attested to by its
presence in the images from the news."
