Thankfully I read the books in question during my undergraduate at Cambridge because if I hadn’t I would have been thoroughly persuaded by this genuinely brilliant but utterly misleading comment. There is not a semblance of support led to the Khmer Rouge nor Pol Pot in all of his works. Anti intellectuals who seem to think that academic disputes over the validity of sources somehow equates advocating genocide are the absolute most tiresome bores on this planet. The sheer amount of energy you consume from those around you is insufferable. It’s like a black hole.
What is so startling about your comment is you completely fail to mention that the Porter book is largely concerned with a different time period than Ponchaud. Porter mostly documents the American war crimes in Cambodia that occurred prior to the Khmer Rouge taking over. Ponchaud is talking about the period after.
Looking closely, you omit dates almost everywhere. Perhaps this is because you were not expecting me to have a non 0 level of knowledge on the issues!?
The irony in your comment is that someone will come away from it thinking that Chomsky in any way denies the atrocities that occurred in Cambodia. You are perpetuating an alternate form of denial in refusing to admit he accepts that they happened. He has said so many times. His book makes it clear that he accepts this. He specifically compared Cambodia to East Timor because they were comparable.
What he criticizes is the media and others jumping into complete fiction. Presumably you remember the most prominent example of the review of Ponchaud’s book claiming (wrongly) that Ponchaud had alleged that 2,000,000 had been killed and when correct changed that number to “in the thousands”? Presumably you have read the dozens of media reports that continued to cite the 2,000,000 figure on the basis of that incorrect review published in the New York Review of Books?
The point that you people never ever understand is that when Chomsky points out that the 2,000,000 figure was based on a lie, he isn’t offering a view as to what the figure is or isn’t. He is analyzing the sources used by media reports. You should be thanking him for correcting the record on this.
"The “slaughter” by the Khmer Rouge is a Moss-New York Times creation."
I’m not going to spend more time on your completely out of context quotes. I don’t have the book to hand. But having read it I can safely say that Chomsky is referring to reports based on evidence available at the time. He isn’t saying a massacre didn’t happen (he literally bases the premise of this part of the book on the fact that it did). Rather, he is saying that at the point at which the NYT was claiming there had been a genocide, there was nowhere near enough evidence to suggest that that was the case. I have never seen anyone refute him on this point. Ever. US intelligence reports from Cambodia support Chomsky on this. If I remember correctly, the NYT was relying on the American embassy in Bangkok. Do I need to explain why that isn’t a good source?
Anyway, congrats for absolutely butchering all meaning with that comment.