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NOAM’S PEOPLE
Kevin Sites visits a Cambodian death chamber:
By the sheer number of photographs now displayed at the former prison known as S-21, it is clear the Khmer Rouge was very good at two things: killing people and documenting the lives of its victims.
Here, in what is now a museum called Tuol Sleng (“poisonous hill” in English), the faces of the Cambodian genocide are much more than memories.
Visitors walking through the hallways of this former high school turned prison must confront the pain, uncertainty and fear of thousands of victims looking back at them from the black and white photographs taken by prison guards.
Suggestion to an enterprising documentary-maker: walk Noam Chomsky (who once claimed that “the deaths in Cambodia were not the result of systematic slaughter and starvation organized by the state”) through that prison. Keep the camera on his face.
When the Khmer Rouge’s atrocities became impossible to deny any longer, Chomsky just started spinning the genocide as America’s fault. A prison tour would be nothing more than an opportunity for him to use it as a “teaching tool” about American crimes. No amount of contrary evidence will ever deter him from that theme.
Posted by Randal Robinson on 2006 07 12 at 02:01 PM • permalinkHis favorite real-life political model was the short-lived anarchist enclave formed in Barcelona in 1936–1937 during the Spanish Civil War.
This, alone, is enough to condemn Chomsky, in my view; however, considering his many other intellectual crimes, his espousal of something as obscenely violent as the anarcho-syndicalists in Spain is merely gravy (and yes, I mean “intellectual crimes”; to harness an intelligent mind to a political superstructure as empirically wicked as the framework of poisonous “-isms” he has publicly supported for years is an intellectual crime).
We’ve already seen film of Chomsky babbling glib, vague lies. Nothing new there.
Posted by P. Froward on 2006 07 12 at 02:10 PM • permalinkA profile headlined “Conscience of a Nation” in the English daily The Guardian declared: “Chomsky ranks with Marx, Shakespeare, and the Bible as one of the ten most quoted sources in the humanities—and is the only writer among them still alive.” The New York Times has called him “arguably the most important intellectual alive.”
Europeans rank Chomsky The Smartest Man in the World and think he would make a fine President of the One World Government. How ever did this cut rate intellectual attain such heights?
Posted by Kyda Sylvester on 2006 07 12 at 02:38 PM • permalinkThe greatest crimes are always intellectual crimes. One individual, or even a gang of individuals, can only do so much. For mass murder and destruction, you need an intellectual to justify it.
Ask yourself why totalitarian dictatorships find it necessary to pour money and effort into propaganda for their own helpless, chained, gagged slaves, who have no means of protest or defense. The answer is that even the humblest peasant or the lowest savage would rise in blind rebellion, were he to realize that he is being immolated, not to some incomprehensible “noble purpose,” but to plain, naked human evil.- Ayn Rand
Europeans rank Chomsky The Smartest Man in the World and think he would make a fine President of the One World Government.
Now, now…I dare say there aren’t really more European left-wing wankers idolizing ol’ Noam than there are in the US. Doesn’t make it any better, but for a change this isn’t really a Euro phenomenon.
And honestly, I think the guy will be forgotten five minutes after he’s dead.
We have a winner!! No more phonecalls please!! Chomsky is THE vanguard of the reality-intolerant.
Posted by Tarquin Wombat-Carruthers on 2006 07 12 at 06:32 PM • permalinkSuggestion to an enterprising documentary-maker: walk Noam Chomsky (who once claimed that “the deaths in Cambodia were not the result of systematic slaughter and starvation organized by the state”) through that prison. Keep the camera on his face.
If there’s a mic on him, he’ll rattle off a long explanation of how it was all the fault of the US.
Posted by Rob Crawford on 2006 07 12 at 08:02 PM • permalinkUnfortunately, the US bears more than a little of the responsibility for the KR. As do the Russians and the Chinese.
John Kerry, for example, personally ran weapons to them.
Posted by Rob Crawford on 2006 07 12 at 08:07 PM • permalinkOh I don’t know, PW; I’m not sure a poll of Americans would yield the same results at all.
Posted by Kyda Sylvester on 2006 07 12 at 08:18 PM • permalink# 17 How about this corker:
“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”
or
“The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history “
or
“If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.”
Posted by MentalFloss on 2006 07 12 at 08:26 PM • permalink#16 “Unfortunately, the US bears more than a little of the responsibility for the KR. As do the Russians and the Chinese. Only my Vietnamese mates come out of the whole affair with any integrity.”
jlc, you’ve read too much Chomsky et al, haven’t you? Unless you mean your ‘Vietnamese mates’ are all anti-communist.
The only way you can blame the USA is to say that the North Vietnamese had a right to use
Cambodia, with or without Kymer Rouge support, as an arms depot to conquer South Vietnam.
That was OK to you? Tell me what real option Nixon had, facing leftists like Kerry..As OK as the ‘brave nationalist insurgents’ killing Iraqis right now, all for another no-good ideology.
As OK as Iran making Nukes, while saying the opposite.
This is the rusted-on leftist mindset that blames the US for everything.
Why not blame the weak Cambodian leaders?The US *fought* the Communist ideology, so it was *responsible* for it too?
Give me a break.
#17
It’s a buyers market, but I’m prepared to offer 99c a pound.
Posted by Infidel Tiger on 2006 07 12 at 10:09 PM • permalinkIt may be useful to see the film of the “reconciliation” between victims of the Khmer Rouge and their jailers (gaolers), entitled S-21, la machine de mort Khmère rouge or, “S-21, The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine”. It makes for a strange documentary (in fact, it was someone on Tim’s blog who alerted me to it last year, I believe). In it, some of the Cambodian citizens who were actually imprisoned under the ultra-left uber-Maoist Khmer Rouge government met with some fellow Cambodians who had ended up members of the KR and being in charge of one of the prisons. There was little outright anger. What pervades the piece is sorrow and disbelief.
The biggest question from the imprisoned to their neighbor/jailers seems to be not Why did you do it but How could you do it? How could you have done this to your fellows, to you neighbors, to your kin? It’s an almost bland rendition, not like so many Holocaust films which are much better produced and generally much slicker. This movie is almost anti-climactic in its slow-moving patient examination. The tales of what happened there are chilling, or rather, would be were it not for the mind-dulling pace and repetitive nature of the film.
Still, it’s an important documentary to see. I watched it twice, and once the barely perceptible rhythm of the narrative is accepted, it becomes riveting. It took two viewings for me just to sort out the players. Also, one needs to hear it twice at least to get all the circumlocutory and nuanced language often employed by the jailers to bump blame away from them, who try very hard not to admit to deliberate and heinous wrongdoing.
It’s agonizing getting even one of them to admit to real culpability. Much like the Nazis and the Germans who participated in the horrific acts prepared and carried out by the Third Reich, these men say, It was my job, and we, now quite savvy to this kind of creepy non-excuse, want to leap through the TV and grab them by their scrawny necks and throttle them to get at least one of them to cop to what he’s done.
I must say, the Cambodian victims of this monstrous wrong are much better men than I: they are strong enough to forgive their keepers, their torturers (I think that the biggest torturers were not in this film). I wanted to have them all flayed alive in the public square.
I think Brother #1 died peacefully in his bed.
Kyda, you wouldn’t happen to refer to this Grauniad article?
Chomsky, who was underwhelmed by the honour, beat off challenges from Umberto Eco, Richard Dawkins, Vaclav Havel and Christopher Hitchens to win the Prospect/Foreign Policy poll. ...
More than 20,000 voters from around the world took part in selecting the winners from a list of 100. ...
Since the poll was for the world’s leading intellectuals, it should come as no surprise that websites manned by supporters of Chomsky, Hitchens and Abdolkarim Soroush were used to draw attention to the poll. Chomsky’s supporters are clearly the most energetic: he took 4,800 votes to Eco’s 2,500. Voters came mainly from Britain and the US.
Wow, now that’s an indictment of Europeans if I ever saw one.
Sheesh.
Here’s Paul Johnson in his fine book Intellectuals (1988) on Chomsky. Apologies for the long quote but it’s hard to cut back without missing good bits. Actually the preceding section of the book runs to a couple of pages and it’s all great but too long for here. Needless to say Johnson tips a huge bucket of shite on the ludicrous Chomsky:
The response of Chomsky and his associates thus moved through four phases. (1) There were no massacres; they were a Western propaganda invention. (2) There may have been killings on a small scale; but the ‘torment of Cambodia has been exploited by cynical Western humanitarians, desperately eager to overcome the ‘Vietnam Syndrome”’. (3) The killings were more extensive than at first thought, and were the result of the brutalization of the peasants by American war crimes. (4) Chomsky was finally driven to quoting ‘one of the handful of authentic Cambodian scholars’ who, by skilful shifting of the chronology, was able to ‘prove’ that the worst massacres occurred not in 1975 but ‘in mid-1978’, and took place not for Marxist but for ‘traditionalist, racist, anti-Vietnamese reasons’. The regime had by then ‘lost any Marxist colouring it had once had’ and had become’ a vehicle for hyperchauvinist poor peasant populism’. As such it ‘at last’ won the approval of the CIA, who moved from exaggerating the massacres for propaganda purposes to actively perpetrating them. In short Pol Pot’s crime was in fact America’s, quod erat demonstrandum.
By the mid-1980s Chomsky’s focus of attention had shifted from Vietnam to Nicaragua but he had moved himself well beyond the point at which reasonable people were still prepared to argue with him seriously, thus repeating the sad pattern of Russell and Sartre. So yet another intellect, which once seemed to tower over its fellows, plodded away into the wasteland of extremism, rather as old Tolstoy set off, angry and incoherent, from Yasnaya Polyana.
There seems to be, in the life of many millenarian intellectuals, a sinister climacteric, a cerebral menopause, which might be termed the Flight of Reason.
Posted by walterplinge on 2006 07 12 at 11:19 PM • permalink#28 ekw. Thanks for the review. It looks interesting. Part of the explanation for the passive attitudes of the Cambodians might be found in their religion.
Their idea of karma produces a kind of apathy and resignation to life which makes it hard to name and fight real evil, which becomes reflected in the political weakness of so many in that country, and in Vietnam in the 1950s+ too.
Their response to events is totally different to, say, the Islamists, who are fired by their absolutes and revenge dicta.The mental refusal of the perpetrators -Third Reich ones included - is not surprising.
Their royal Noradom Sianouk [sp?] was so otherworldly that he vacillated morally, and offered no real leadership, believing himself to be ‘above it all’ like a national guru, so the Cambodians became victims of a western ideology of change, Communism, like the Vietnamese did.
The US found it hard to teach these people the subtleties of democracy and progress -much like in Iraq now.#17. I still don’t really have any idea about who Chomsky is, other than a complete barking moonbat.
No quotes here, sorry.
Posted by Nilknarf Arbed on 2006 07 14 at 01:34 AM • permalink
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I doubt he’d bat an eye. Eggs, omelets, etc.