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

[ConservativeDemocrat]

96. They are neither "made up" nor "unsupported"

There are many references to show how much of an apologist he was for the Khmer Rouge. Here's just one:

Their scholarship collapses under the barest scrutiny. To cite a few cases, they state that among those evacuated from Phnom Penh, “virtually everybody saw the consequences of (summary executions) in the form of the corpses of men, women and children rapidly bloating and rotting in the hot sun,” citing, among others, J.J. Cazaux, who wrote, in fact, that “not a single corpse was seen along our evacuation route,” and that early reports of massacres proved fallacious (The Washington Post, May 9, 1975). They also cite The New York Times, May 9, 1975, where Sydney Shanberg wrote that “there have been unconfirmed reports of executions of senior military and civilian officials ... But none of this will apparently bear any resemblance to the mass executions that had been predicted by Westerners,” and that “Here and there were bodies, but it was difficult to tell if they were people who had succumbed to the hardships of the march or simply civilians and soldiers killed in the last battles.”

Chomsky neglects to mention that the evacuation was not under the control of the journalists — the foreigners were captives of the Khmer Rouge, and Schanberg concluded that the reason they saw no corpses was because the Khmer Rouge made sure they did not. Schanberg also tells us that the Khmer Rouge nearly executed him for seeing what little he did see.

Schanberg on not seeing corpses:

We suddenly turned right- that is, west-down the road to the airport, and this was puzzling because we were supposed to be heading north and northwest toward Thailand.

We did not know it yet, but this was to be the detour that kept us from seeing that early stretch of Route 5 north of Phnom Penh that had been clogged with refugees forced out of Phnom Penh and may now be dotted with bodies.

Our convoy started south west out of the capital down Route 4, then cut north along a rutted secondary road until we picked up Route 5 near Kompong Chhnang.

Cazaux does indeed remark he saw no dead bodies, though the context was not that he was scornfully suggesting that it was ridiculous to suggest that there were dead bodies, but rather in the context that “all that is certain is that none of the foreigners who saw the start of the revolution will be able to witness its progress.”

In the same newspaper article from which Chomsky quotes Cazaux the chief surgeon at Calmette Hospital in Cambodia's capital, a Frenchman who came out with the last group of westerners, said that he had seen three hundred bodies with their throats cut in the capital's central market, consistent with Barron and Paul's remark about “bodies bloating in the hot sun”


More Chomsky agitprop:

They do not mention the Swedish journalist, Olle Tolgraven, or Richard Boyle of Pacific News Service, the last newsman to leave Cambodia, who denied the existence of wholesale executions; nor do they cite the testimony of Father Jacques Engelmann, a priest with nearly two decades of experience in Cambodia, who was evacuated at the same time and reported that evacuated priests “were not witness to any cruelties” and that there were deaths, but “not thousands, as certain newspapers have written” (cited by Hildebrand and Porter).

Notice that Chomsky and Herman strangely neglect to tell us where the words of any of these important witnesses to the innocence of the Khmer Rouge can be found. I managed to find Olle Tolgraven, LA Times, 1975 May 9, page 9. The LA Times quotes various people who were imprisoned in the embassy, and subsequently sent out of Cambodia on the same trucks as Cazaux and Schanberg, and he was one of them.

Phnom Penh was described by many of the returnees as a “dead city,” littered with decomposing bodies, and abandoned household goods and populated by a few forlorn pets and a few Khmer Rouge soldiers.

One Frenchman said last Thursday the Khmer Rouge had come to his house and ordered him to leave or be shot. He recalled:

“On the way to the embassy I saw several dead bodies rotting in the street. Some of them apparently had been shot, but some had their heads crushed and appeared to have been beaten to death.”

A Swedish journalist, Olle Tolgraven of Swedish Broadcasting, said he did not believe there had been wholesale executions. But he said there was evidence the Khmer Rouge had shot people who refused to leave their homes in a mass evacuation ordered the first day of the takeover. This was corroborated by others.

One Cambodian woman said many old people died on the trek out of the City “because it was too hard for them to walk.”

Again, Chomsky evasively avoided actually saying what every reader would think him to have said. It sounds as if Chomsky and Herman gave a citation to contradictory evidence, but they did not. By complaining of all those Barron and Paul do not mention, he implies that these sources provide contradictory evidence, while avoiding any actual statement that Tolgraven and the rest provided contradictory evidence. It sounds like a citation pointing to evidence proving Barron and Paul to be liars, when it merely points to a trail of breadcrumbs in a dark forest.
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Research not mine, though clearly well done.

- C.D. Proud Member of the Reality Based Community

p.s. It's rich to hear such a full throated defender of genocidal maniacs pretend that the United States is so evil.