By Oliver Kamm
Noam Chomsky
I commented on Andrew Anthony's article in The Observer last week about Malcolm Caldwell, the Scottish academic who supported the Khmer Rouge and was murdered in return. Andrew noted in his piece the influence of Noam Chomsky on those who in the 1970s refused to believe the accounts of refugees fleeing Pol Pot's genocidal regime.
Chomsky can rarely see a critical reference to himself in print without sending a lengthy justification of his enduring wisdom. That's his prerogative, and The Observer publishes a long letter from him today. If you didn't know the author, you'd be able to tell immediately from the distinctive laboured sarcasm. I've had it too. Chomsky and I had an exchange in Prospect magazine a few years ago in which he lied blatantly, in print and on a matter easily checked (namely, whether I'd quoted him accurately from a book published in 1969).
The oddity of the letter, and of Chomsky's comments on Cambodia, is that - as on all other subjects - he stands by what he wrote in the 1970s. And what he wrote was praise of a book that Andrew accurately characterises as "cravenly rehash[ing] the Khmer Rouge's most outlandish lies to produce a picture of a kind of radical bucolic idyll".
The volume is Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, 1976, by George Hildebrand and Gareth Porter. These writers' thesis, which Porter recited before a Congressional committee in May 1977, was that "I cannot accept the premise of your question, which is that it is a fact that 1 million people have been murdered systematically or that the Government of Cambodia is systematically slaughtering its people". Porter's incredulous and disgusted interlocutor, Congressman Stephen Solarz of New York, drew a parallel at this point with Arthur Butz, the notorious Holocaust denier.
Hildebrand and Porter were so determined to deny the horrific truth of what was happening in Cambodia that they even wrote, in that same month, to my friend William Shawcross asking if he had any information on "CIA-operated radio stations designed to spread 'disinformation' - especially with regard to Cambodia". And in their book they said this, of the worst regime of the 20th century (page 56, quoted by Sophal Ear, a political scientist at the US Naval Postgraduate School and a refugee from Pol Pot's regime):
"A careful examination of the facts regarding the evacuation of Cambodia’s cities thus shows that the description and interpretation of the move conveyed to the American public was an inexcusable distortion of reality. What was portrayed as a destructive, backward-looking policy motivated by doctrinaire hatred was actually a rationally conceived strategy for dealing with the urgent problems that faced postwar Cambodia."
Andrew's depiction of this sort of material could scarcely have been more accurate. Yet to Chomsky that clinical description is a "farcical rant". Given his practice of never acknowledging error, Chomsky was unlikely to say anything else. In June 1977 Chomsky and Edward Herman wrote an article for The Nation entitled "Distortions at Fourth Hand", which purported to discuss Hildebrand and Porter's book, among others. This is the review that Chomsky refers to in his letter.
Chomsky has defended his and Herman's comments about Cambodia in all the years since. He stated in an interview in 2008, for example: “Nobody’s found a thing [that’s inaccurate]. If we were to rewrite it now, we’d do it exactly the same way.” And 20 years ago, in a letter to The Independent (2 November 1990), he maintained that his critics expounded a "recurrent fantasy that has regularly been refuted in detail". It was unfortunate for Chomsky that that letter was read by someone who knows his work well, Adam Roberts, professor of international relations at Oxford. The Independent published a letter from Roberts, on 6 November 1990, that cut through Chomsky's bluster and did him the extreme disservice of quoting him accurately.
Referring to the Nation review, Roberts said that it made some serious points, such as that US actions before 1975 had contributed to the terrible suffering later in the decade. But it also included several passages that came close to justifying the accusation (which had been made by Douglas Hurd, then Foreign Secretary) that Chomsky had acted as an apologist for the Khmer Rouge. Roberts continued:
"The 1977 article, reviewing several books on Cambodia, praised two authors for presenting “a carefully documented study of the destructive American impact on Cambodia and the success of the Cambodian revolutionaries in overcoming it...” (italics added). By contrast, an author who did describe Khmer Rouge atrocities, Francois Ponchaud, is treated less sympathetically. He is described as giving “a grisly account of what refugees have reported to him...” but then we are told that “the serious reader will find much to make him somewhat wary.”
"In his letter Professor Chomsky implies that he had written in the Seventies that the Khmer Rouge atrocities “were comparable to those of Indonesia in Timor, apparently the worst slaughter relative to population since the Nazi Holocaust.” But in the 1977 article he and Herman in fact cast doubt on the comparison of postwar Cambodia with Nazi Germany, concluding that comparing Cambodia to France after liberation was “more nearly correct.”
"Professor Chomsky and Herman said: “We do not pretend to know where the truth lies between these sharply conflicting assessments,” but they then went on to refer to “alleged Khmer Rouge atrocities.”
"Whether or not all this adds up to acting as an apologist for the Khmer Rouge, as Mr Hurd alleges, may be debated. But Professor Chomsky’s record on this issue is not quite what he would now have us believe."
I've quoted Roberts's account of Chomsky at length for two reasons. First, it's a model of Roberts's scholarly approach: he doesn't exaggerate and he doesn't state what the evidence won't support. He states what Chomsky's record is, and no more than that.
I don't, as it happens, regard Chomsky as an apologist for the Khmer Rouge or for other appalling regimes. I regard him as a sophist possessed of reflexive anti-Americanism. It's because his position is an article of faith that he's so unreliable when it comes to describing the actual sins of omission and commission in American foreign policy. In his position, factual accuracy is secondary (his writings on the Balkans, for example, are an intellectual disgrace). His method is, as I've referred to, sarcasm and insinuation. He is different from his associate Edward Herman, who is best known these days as a crude denier of Serb war crimes, notably the genocide at Srebrenica.
Secondly, Roberts is a type of critic that Chomsky finds impossible to deal with. During the first Gulf War, Chomsky indulged in a characteristic technique by remarking in an interview published in Z Magazine, March 1991:
"The worst deceit in this comes from the academic profession -- people like Professor Adam Roberts at Oxford who is the great British expert on the United Nations. Read his articles in The Independent (of London) on this. He is the main British specialist on this topic, so when he does it, it is not just ignorance, it is conscious deceit."
Roberts is a scrupulous scholar whose political roots are on the Left - indeed, the radical Left. He comes from the same background of Vietnam-era activism as Chomsky, and was a leading figure in the Committee of 100, the direct-action offshoot of CND in the 1960s. (An indication of his views came in a volume he edited called The Strategy of Civilian Defence, 1967, p. 9, where he wrote that "non-violent action might provide the basis for a defence policy and prove capable of resisting internal and external threats to a society's freedom and independence".)
Faced with someone like this, the world's top public intellectual resorts to what he reliably does when faced with serious criticism - hurl abuse and accusations of deceit.
Along with Chomsky's letter in today's Observer, incidentally, is one from Richard Gott about his sometime "good friend and political ally" Malcolm Caldwell. Gott resigned as literary editor of The Guardian in 1994 after allegations that he had worked for the KGB.
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