On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Handre recounts the efforts of Noam Chomsky to minimize the atrocities happening in Cambodia because he strongly preferred to blame the west for all of the wrongs in the world:
Noam Chomsky, the “Father of modern linguistics”, looked at evidence of industrial-scale murder and decided the real problem was Western media bias.
By 1977, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge had already killed roughly 1.7 million Cambodians through execution, forced starvation, and slave labor. Chomsky, writing with Edward Herman in “Distortions at Fourth Hand”, treated survivor testimony and refugee accounts as State Department fabrications, preferring the far lower body counts published in sympathetic leftist sources.
The intellectual gymnastics required to reach that conclusion were extraordinary. Chomsky dismissed Father Ponchaud’s firsthand reporting, questioned Francois Ponchaud’s credibility directly, and leaned on a 1977 State Department document to suggest deaths numbered in the thousands, not hundreds of thousands. He applied maximum skepticism to anti-communist sources and near-zero skepticism to anything that cut against American foreign policy narratives. The methodology was selective to the point of being fraudulent.
Chomsky was not a fringe figure typing in a basement. He held an MIT professorship and commanded enormous intellectual authority among Western leftists. When he cast doubt on Cambodian atrocity reports, journalists and academics listened. Real people died while influential intellectuals debated whether their deaths were sufficiently well-sourced.
Collectivist ideology requires enemies to function. When the Khmer Rouge built their agrarian utopia by emptying Phnom Penh at gunpoint and executing anyone wearing glasses, Chomsky’s instinct was to protect the ideological project by attacking the messengers. Ideology over corpses.
