01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 Chomsky and Herman: Distortions at Fourth Hand |
The Pol Pot Affair
Collaborators once more, Chomsky and Edward Herman published The
Political Economy of Human Rights in 1979. In the second volume
of this two-volume work, After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina
and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology, they compared two
sites of atrocity Cambodia and Timor and evaluated the
diverse media responses to each. It embroiled Chomsky in an entirely
new controversy.
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The Obscure History of East Timor |
Lukes makes no mention here of the subject of the book, which is clearly stated in the introduction to volume 1, which is entitled "Cambodia: Why the Media Find It More Newsworthy than Indonesia and East Timor." It is an explicit comparison between Cambodia and Timor the latter being the scene of the worst slaughter, relative to population size, since the Holocaust. Now if the atrocities perpetrated in Timor were comparable to those perpetrated by Pol Pot in Cambodia (and Chomsky claims that they were), then a comparison of Pol Pot's actions to those committed in Timor could not possibly constitute an apology for Pol Pot. Yet somehow Lukes suggested that it did. If such comparisons cannot be made without the intellectual community rising up in protest, then the entire issue of state-instigated murder can become lost inside the polemics of determining which team of slaughterers represents a lesser evil. That Lukes could ignore the fact that Chomsky and Herman were comparing Pol Pot to East Timor "says a lot about him," in Chomsky's opinion: By making no mention of the clear, unambiguous, and explicit comparison [of Pol Pot and East Timor], he is demonstrating himself to be an apologist for the crimes in Timor. That is elementary logic: if a comparison of Pol Pot to Timor is apologetics for Pol Pot, as Lukes claims (by omission of the relevant context, which he could not fail to know), then it must be that the crimes in Timor were insignificant. Lukes, then, is an apologist for the worst slaughter relative to population since the Holocaust. Worse, that is a crime for which he, Lukes, bears responsibility; uk support has been crucial. And it is a crime that he, Lukes, could have always helped to terminate, if he did not support huge atrocities; in contrast, neither he nor anyone else had a suggestion as to what to do about Pol Pot. (13 Feb. 1996)The vigor of Chomsky's remarks reflects the contempt that he feels for this kind of by-now-familiar tactic. Decorum must not take precedence over decrying slaughter and falsity, and Chomsky is compelled to demonstrate this: "Let us say that someone in the us or uk . . . did deny Pol Pot atrocities. That person would be a positive saint as compared to Lukes, who denies comparable atrocities for which he himself shares responsibility and knows how to bring to an end, if he chose. That's elementary. Try to find some intellectual who can understand it. That tells us a lot . . . about the intellectual culture" (13 Feb. 1996). The point of course goes beyond Lukes, and extends into a general discussion concerning the intellectual community, which itself, in Chomsky's opinion, "cannot comprehend this kind of trivial, simple, reasoning and what it implies. That really is interesting. It reveals a level of indoctrination vastly beyond what one finds in totalitarian states, which rarely were able to indoctrinate intellectuals so profoundly that they are unable to understand real trivialities" (14 Aug. 1995). Within weeks, two long and lucid replies to Lukes's piece were sent in to the Times Higher Education Supplement, accusing him of selective reading, of missing the entire point of both volumes of Political Economy, of ignoring the first volume, of trivializing the moral potency of Chomsky's thesis, of cold-bloodedly manipulating the truth, of misrepresenting Chomsky and Herman's work, and of disrespect. Neither reply came from Chomsky; one was from Laura J. Summers, the other from Robin Woodsworth Carlsen. Though bolstered by the support of those sympathetic to his position and his larger aims, Chomsky knew that a smear campaign could be much more effective and have a much wider dissemination than rational argumentation. In Herman's opinion, the Cambodia and Faurisson disputes imposed a serious personal cost on Chomsky. He put up a diligent defence against the attacks and charges against him, answering virtually every letter and written criticism that came to his attention. He wrote many hundreds of letters to correspondents and editors on these topics, along with numerous articles, and answered many phone enquiries and queries in interviews. The intellectual and moral drain was severe. It is an astonishing fact, however, that he was able to weather these storms with his energies, morale, sense of humour and vigour and integrity of his political writings virtually intact. ( "Pol Pot" 609) |
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Cambodia today: continuing carnage |
As ever, Chomsky is quick to point out that being the subject of such
treatment did not make him unique. But the ferocity of the attack on
him does reveal something about the power of popular media, the
lengths to which endangered elites will go to eliminate dissent, and
the nature of what passes for appropriate professional behavior. In a
letter he wrote to the Times Literary Supplement in January
of 1982 a reply to an article by Paul Johnson in that same
publication in which he, like Lukes, accused Chomsky and Herman of
sympathizing with the Khmer Rouge Chomsky examined one of the
tactics used against him: "[A] standard device by which the conformist
intellectuals of East or West deal with irritating dissident opinion
is to try to overwhelm it with a flood of lies. Paul Johnson
illustrates the technique with his reference to my `prodigies of
apologetics . . . for the Khmer Rouge' (December 25). I have stated
the facts before in this journal, and will do so again, not under any
illusion that they will be relevant to the guardians of the faith."
Chomsky asserted that the smear campaign was a side issue; the larger
concern was, of course, the intellectual apologists' ability to forgo
reasonable analysis when their own government was at fault:
The major international campaign orchestrated against Chomsky on completely false pretexts was only part though perhaps a crucial part of the ambitious campaign launched in the late 70s with the hope of reconstructing the ideology of power and domination which had been partially exposed during the Indochina war. The magnitude of the insane attack against Chomsky, which aimed at silencing him and robbing him of his moral stature and his prestige and influence, is of course one more tribute to the impact of his writings and his actions not for nothing he was the only one singled out. (310)
Such commentary assigns to the ruling elite a uniformity that is based
on the values shared by its members. Evidence for this may be found in
the heavy media coverage given to the Lukes camp and the general
reluctance to allow Chomsky space for rebuttal (particularly in
France).
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