MS concludes:
>One should not judge the morality of NC's statements at the time by
how well they accord with what is known retrospectively, in light of
the reality that the sources on genocide were not trustworthy.
Untrustworthy sources can be right on occasion, but it is not
smart to depend on them. You would have to show the availability
of a fount of information from unbiased sources to conclude that NC
ignored evidence he ought not to have ignored.
>SD's post is unfair.<
If you read their book, it's very clear that Chomsky & Herman are almost entirely focussed on the official "Western" press (the NY TIMES, etc.) Their main point is that the official press damns the "bad" killings (e.g., the Khmer Rouge) while downplaying the "good" ones (e.g., in Indonesia), where it is the US State Department that decides what bad and good are. If a group is seen as "bad" by State, the official press rushes to condemn it, while the truth about the "good" massacres come out later, sometimes several years later.
As one who leans toward anarchism, NC is no apologist for the KR, a horribly statist organization.
(BTW, given the chaos created by (in rough order of importance) the US bombings and invasions, the Vietnamese use of the territory as a staging ground, and the precipitous collapse of the Lon Nol government, the Hobbesian "nasty, brutish, and short" nightmare threatened. So a cynic might say that the KR was exactly the Leviathan that Dr. Hobbes ordered, forcibly creating lawnorder. But the victory of the KR was not inevitable.)
JD
