Chomsky:The White House seems determined to demolish the foundations of our civil liberties"

[JackRiddler]

32. This is an ancient right-wing smear.

The crazy thing is that the U.S. supported the Khmer Rouge through China, after Vietnam invaded Cambodia to overthrow them and stop the genocide in 1979. But what does history matter?

For decades the right-wing has engaged in a vicious smear campaign to suggest, falsely, that Chomsky supported the Khmer Rouge. It's no surprise to hear this old lie coming from a "Conservative Democrat," emphasis on the conservative. After all, Wolfowitz and Perle and Co. started as staffer to the insane hard-line cold warrior, Sen. Henry Jackson, a Democrat. Some Democrats were neocons before there were even neocons -- a tradition that goes back to Truman.

What Chomsky actually did was to compare U.S. press coverage of atrocities by Khmer Rouge to those of the simultaneous atrocities by the U.S. client state dictatorship, Indonesia, in East Timor following the visit there by Ford and Kissinger in 1975. Coverage of the Khmer atrocities was plentiful because they were "communists," even though they later received U.S. government support once the Vietnamese communists overthrew them and stopped the genocide. Coverage of similar atrocities in East Timor was almost non-existent. By pointing this out, Chomsky was apologizing for the Khmer Rouge, at least in the insane logic of the American right wing.