Chomsky is a joke for anyone with a bit of nouse.

Hari is a very naive guy though. I watched him debating a Hizb-ut-tahrir activist on an Islamic channel.

First of all he was giving them legitimacy by appearing in a friendly chat with them. These are the party that would string up leftist wannabees by the neck if they ever got in power. They’d be doing Najibullah’s on the likes of middle class socialists like Hari.

But Hari also was naively bringing up points about killing homosexuals, apostates etc as if any such considerations would appeal to the Hizb brainwashed faithful. They are all about morality in an Islamic context and not petty appeals to political correctness or what’s in in the UK at the moment.

In reality they only appeal to soppy Western ideals to justify their own rights to subvert and destroy opponents of Islamic supremacism and Johann Hari’s naive talking to them is never going to achieve anything substantive other than giving them legitimacy.

Hari is obviously a naive and immature person if he can take Chomsky the crude anti-American communist as a guide to the world.

Chomsky uses his characteristic crass anti-American dressed up in the most dishonest pretense as dispassionate humanism or some such but never mentioning his real philosophy of communism but he lets the mask slip when he says in the linked interview that communism was never really tried in the USSR.

Chomsky will do verbal acrobatics to absolve others of responsibility for anything whilst blaming America, the supposedly evil country that hosts him and has made him a millionaire and superstar as guilty for everything, the same country that allows him full freedom to demonise it from its own soil.

That Hari uses this guy to figure out the world tells me that Hari has the world understanding of a spotty teenage student.

This is classic Chomsky. It is written in such a roundabout, evasive, stuffed-full-of-get-out-clause way that it really ties him down to nothing at all. Anybody can clearly see he is bending over backwards to give the most favorable possible comment he can on the Khmer Rouge, while at the same time leaving himself plausible deniability if it come back to bite him later.

Everything, everything Chomsky says is carefully calculated in this way. Sudan is just another example – he knows his sources on Sudan and Afghanistan are crap – but its not his fault, they give him that arms length deniability. Third party heresay is the best evidence of all for Chomsky, because then there is no evidence to inspect and nobody can answer for any of it. Chomsky is covered and can leave it to the drones to defend him in web forums.

He is a hatemongering propagandist.

And it’s precisely here that we have a problem. Scholarship is about looking at sources from as wide a range as feasible and reaching an argument from them, no matter how inconvenient what we have learned is for our beliefs. A work on a current issue that a) appears to take Khmer Rouge sources at face value while b) discounting or ignoring sources from elsewhere, particularly from refugees, seems to raise ethical problems if it is to be described as a work of scholarship rather than propaganda.

On looking at the book, the alarm bells start ringing. The book contains pictures of cheering peasants and a happy textile worker in Pnomh Penh; nothing that would not be out of place in a Soviet movie of the 30s. Then there is the publisher, Monthly Review Press.
Martin Bronfenbrenner, reviewing a book about North Korea in the Journal of African and Asian Studies notes that “[t]he resulting curiosity about the Second World, fanned by extremes of praise and denunciation, has inspired over the years a series of essentially “in-house” studies by essentially “authorized” visitors from the West. Most ambitious, most encyclopaedic, best certified-but eventually most disappointing!-of such works remains the Webbs’ two-volume, mid-1930’s Soviet Communism: A New Ciailization? on the USSR under the Great Stalin[...] Many such volumes bear the imprint of the Monthly Review Press”

As for the book itself, George Viksnins, reviewing the book in the Journal of Developing Affairs in 1977, describes it as ‘very one-sided’, particularly about the ‘death marches’ out of Pnomh Penh. David Chandler writing in Pacific Affairs praises the book for its first chapter on US intervention but accuses the authors of ‘tending to take Communist assertions of success on faith’. Malcolm Caldwell, who subsequently died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, praised it to the skies calling their government ‘the most maligned revolution in the world.’

As early as 1978, the year before Chomsky and Herman described slaughter by the Khmer Rouge as a ‘New York Times creation,’ Karl Jackson described Hildebrand and Porter’s stance as ‘initial doubts’ about the scale of the terror. As Donald Bleachler writes in the current issue of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, ‘Chomsky and Herman did not consider mass murder a possible impetus driving Cambodians to flee’ and that Chomsky ‘wrote to publishers such as Robert Silver of the New York Review of Books to urge discounting atrocity stories.’ Critical of accounts from both right and left, Bleachler concludes that ‘Genocide is ignored, rationalized or excused, as people – whether consciously or unconsciously – see only what conforms to their ideological predispositions.’ It is hard to disagree.

Cambodian political scientist Sophal Ear puts the book squarely into context in his discussion:
http://www.csua.berkeley.edu/~sophal/romanticize.pdf

‘Dining with an old man on a houseboat moored in the Tigris. I discovered that he inadvertently embodied the history of modern Iraq. He had been imprisoned in 1941 for opposing the British, again in 1959 for hostility to Kassem’s pro-Russian line and finally in 1969 by the present regime. The last of these had, he said, been easily the worst. He was personally interrogated by Nadim Kzar, then head of the secret police and since executed for his crimes. There had been torture and brutality of a far worse sort than his previous incarcerations.’

He also implictly compares Iraq under the Baath to Iran (then under a contemporary villain of the left, the Shah), and makes no secret of his disgust about how Tehran and Washington manipulated the Kurds, and then abandoned them to their fate.

It’s not exactly Gallowayesque grovelling, is it?

Link, please?

s&a, the claimant is perhaps referring to statements recounted here in a precis of a 1976 Hitchens’ article
http://www.newstatesman.com/society/2007/07/iraq-arab-saddam-iran-hitchens

And it [Iraq] has a leader — Saddam Hussain — who has sprung from being an underground revolutionary gunman to perhaps the first visionary Arab statesman since Nasser.

And yet he [Hitchens' interviewee] declared that he thought the present government [Saddam's] the best Iraqi Administration he had seen. Why? ‘Because it has made us strong and respected.’

There seems no getting round this point. From the festeringly poor and politically dependent nation of a generation ago, Iraq has become a power in every sense — military, economic and ideological. Currently, it is pressing for a more aggressive Opec pricing strategy in order to raise more cash for its development projects, and envisages a doubling of oil production from 2m. barrels per day to over 4m. within the next ten years.

etc etc….