Alexander continues his skill at skirting the razor’s edge of Getting
It, talking about accusations that Chomsky is a Cambodian genocide
apologist:
>And usually I hate terms like “genocide apologist”, because very few
people are actually genocide apologists so it’s usually a call to
outrage aimed at riling up an angry mob against someone based on one
comment they may or may not have said a long time ago.
>
>But,
This is absolute gold
Edit: Having finished the review, this is still the most poignant,
but I’m not sure if it’s the best. What an excellent piece
Nowhere does Scott demonstrate more plainly his total intellectual bankruptcy than in the following paragraph:
> They touch on this issue in the book, but I have trouble figuring out what to make of it. Certainly they are outraged that anyone accuses them of denying the Cambodian genocide, and they say this is evil right-wing character assassination propaganda. They then go on to say, kind of flailingly, that also the Cambodian genocide wasn’t that bad, that all the media reports about it were lies, that it was the US’ fault anyway, that the US did worse things anyway, that Cambodia before the genocide was even worse, that America secretly loved Pol Pot and was his best friend, and also shut up shut up shut up. As far as I can get any kind of coherent thesis at all out of this, they seem to be saying they were Gettier cased; every media report of the genocide was a vile right-wing propaganda lie, but coincidentally, a genocide exactly like the one reported in the media occurred.
The only thing the reviewer I linked gets wrong is the notion that Scott is a generally well-meaning, empathetic person. He is a vile ghoul who attacks his ideological opponents with vicious falsehoods as flagrant as those invented by any Republican mouthpiece. Go ahead and try to validate any of these claims he makes! Surely one should be able to produce this evidence with ease, since Scott espouses and follows all these Principles of Charity (or at least he does when speaking with “neoreactionaries” or any apologists for imperialism and state violence).
I will tell you what conclusion I've come to on the matter but invite you to check whether it is the case yourself.
The active period in which Chomsky expressed skepticism regarding the Cambodian genocide appears to be in the mid-to-late 70's. Very little information about what was going on was available in this period, and Chomsky was extremely critical of the sources alleging the crimes of the genocide at this time. In retrospect, even many particularly astonishing claims regarding the cruelty of this period (e.g. that the khmer rouge were killing anyone who wore glasses or spoke a foreign language) can now be substantiated, so any comments by Chomsky expressing the view that reports of the crimes of the Khmer Rouge could be exaggerated appear (rightly) to us as either serious missteps or horrendous apologism.
In my opinion Chomsky's ideology powerfully determined which accounts he would subject to intense scrutiny and which accounts he would tacitly accept or actively promote as potentially representative of the reality in Cambodia. He maintains that, based on the information available at the time, [there is no flaw with the veracity of the claims made in this piece](https://chomsky.info/19770625/). I think it is easy to conclude that Chomsky was ideologically motivated to defend the Khmer Rouge from unfair representation in the media, and that he would be anticipating any violent communist revolution to be covered as a genocide in the U.S..
It is unclear to me whether this is sufficient to label him a denialist or a skeptic, since he no longer disagrees with the claims that the Khmer Rouge killed or tortured at least a million people. It is also very easy in retrospect to misread his point that U.S. media was uncritical of early claims of the atrocities based on weak evidence as "The U.S. media *shouldn't* have believed these claims" rather than that they should have subjected them to more scrutiny, because it is obvious to us now that those early claims were accurate and applying such scrutiny appears unwarranted.
The US media being particularly opposed to the Khmer Rogue is weird since they were the major diplomatic supporters of the regime (for complicated cold war reasons mainly involving leftover beef from the Vietnam War)
Yeah, I went through a period of going deep into the Chomsky/Cambodia thing. It's one of those situations that I don't think will ever get a clean resolution since it all eventually devolves into all sides having to argue about what the other's "true motives" are/were.
Though one thing I think is important to stress for context is that Chomsky was very clearly making his arguments in light of the 'missing bloodbath' in Vietnam where bogus reports were used to justify extending the war years and years probably costing hundreds of thousands or millions of lives.
As can be seen in the responses, it takes a lot of words to disagree with the simple proposition that Chomsky used to be a Khmer defender and Cambodian genocide denialism, and has since been rather muddy both on the original event and his own previous stance.
Plainly speaking, Chomsky was indeed a genocide denier. This is clear when one reads his actual words at the time, in, e.g., Chomsky & Herman's Nation article, which is painfully stupid whataboutism in the face of millions slaughtered. He had the same documents available that those who spoke of genocide had, but attacked refugees as being liars motivated by ideology.
YMMV on to what extent that damns him - I think it's not such a big deal, him getting Vietnam right (as a mistake and a horrible crime) very early is much more representative of the man and his views - but the contortions into which his apologists go to white-wash Chomsky here - instead of simply admitting he was wrong - are embarrassing.
He didn't deny it. He just downplayed it by stating that the two were comparable and thus the fact that there was more news focused on Cambodia's genocide between 1975-78 as opposed to East Timor's genocide during the same time frame, that clearly Americans are doing it because genocide is okay when it's done in the name of anticommunism! This of course, whitewashes several minor observations.
1) Two million people plus died in the Cambodian Genocide in a span of three years roughly and the vast number of deaths was due to execution, forced labor (ie worked to death, starved to death, exposure etc) Between one and two hundred thousand died in the East Timor Genocide. The number of people that died or disappeared due to hostile acts was estimated to be around twenty thousand, the rest being from disease and starvation which often wasn't of the variety that occurred in Cambodia (ie herding hundreds of thousands of people to quasi death camps). Of the overall deaths, two thirds were estimated by their Truth and Reconciliation equivalent to of been the responsibility of the Indonesian (anticommunist!) military. This also occurred during actual fighting and occupation. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge basically won the war in 1975. So at it's most reasonable interpretation, the Cambodian genocide was ten times greater in scale then the East Timorese one. But it could readily be argued it was a hundred times greater in scale if you throw in all of the mitigations.
2) The other argument is that the 'proportion' of victims was greater in Timor, then in Cambodia. But it's believed, most generously, to of been roughly quarter of the population. Two million out of seven million in Cambodia or 200,000 out of 800,000 plus in regards to East Timor.
3) Chomsky obviously ignores the fact that the United States was invested in Vietnam and Cambodia, and not nearly as much (though some) in Indonesia. Southeast Asia thus was very relevant to the American press and journalists unlike East Timor. There was the legacy of the Vietnam War, Reapproachment with China, Nixon's Fallout and the Bombing of Cambodia, and a billion other things. If we want to make a more relative metaphor, I'm sure there was far more discussion of the ongoing conflict in the Former Yugoslavia were only tens of thousands died, as opposed to Rwanda where half a million died. (of course in this instance Chomsky would state it's just imperialist racism or somesuch) Or a more apt metaphor, we talk constantly then and now about how bad the Nazis were but comparatively less about Japanese atrocities in China (besides Pearl Harbor of course), or Stalin's atrocities in Ukraine etc. Or you know, why do we focus so much on the American Civil War in America, when the Taiping Rebellion was forty times more worse! Clearly a racial bias exists there and America was pro-zany Chinese Christian or something... :p
4) It also ignores the fact that much of the press pertaining to Cambodia was of a slant that blamed America or Nixon or the West etc for the genocide for various reasons which would by definition be running contrary to Chomsky stating this is an imperialist or anticommunist slant. This is important to keep in mind. There was a strong sense of denial in the media in general that an egalitarian peasant movement like the Khmer Rouge was engaging in the mass killings and genocide that some were alleging. The first pictures to reach media sources were in the Bangkok Post in July of 1976. It was a FULL YEAR until the Washington Post and then other media sources cautiously started to publicize these images, often with qualifications because there was a large segment of the journalist community that assumed that these pictures and atrocities were staged. Chomsky ignores this and assumes that the pictures were staged and these media organizations simply weren't doing their due diligence, even though they sat on the pictures for a year... He's not denying that the crimes happened, just the scale... and that the photographs might be fake and engages in a great deal of manufacturing of doubt and downplaying like a skilled lawyer in that the Western media is unfairly maligning the Khmer Rouge. He also accuses the Washington Post of being ideologists despite one of their articles that posted the picture stating this as the first paragraph:
The Washington Post has learned that the photographs depicting forced labor inside Cambodia, which appeared in Friday's edition, appeared April 24, 1976, in the French magazine, Paris Match. The pictures are believed to be authentic, but the possibility can not be ruled out that they were planted for propaganda purposes by an anti-Khmer Rouge group.
Does Chomsky mention this qualification when mentioning the article? Of course not because all Western Media is ideological and clearly just wants to propagandize everything without any restraint or integrity!
5) Chomsky's critique of the media in relation to East Timor versus Cambodia is apologism because he spends a significant portion of his writing explaining away why the Cambodian genocide isn't just 'comparable' to East Timor, but that it is exaggerated. He spends literal paragraphs arguing about a discrepancy one French Priest who wrote the book Year Zero in 1977 about the Cambodian genocide (when again barely anyone was giving a shit for two years straight) and constantly hammering the point that a Cambodian genocide couldn't of killed one or two million people because this French Priest stated that the Khmer Rouge wanted to kill all Cambodians until only 1 or 2 million were left. Thus Chomsky states... if that's the case... how come five million Cambodians aren't dead? He then tries to extrapolate that statement in that obviously was then mutated into the popular figure of two million were dead. Yes... the leap of logic goes from French Priest says the Khmer Rouge want to kill off all Cambodians until only 1-2 million are left into the Western Media stated 2 million are dead. It. Does. Not. Follow. This is partly because Chomsky's 'sources' don't say such things but oftentimes Chomsky states they 'imply' it. Thankfully Chomsky is here to interpret said sources which are often in foreign languages for us to enjoy (except of course when the sources are too big to quite or too hard to find, for example he whines a great deal about not finding an Italian religious newspaper which has a citation of over a million Cambodian dead being stated by a Cambodian Premier and spends several paragraphs criticizing others for not having accessed it, but doesn't quote or translate it himself but assumes it was a CIA fabrication and never existed)
He also goes into random subjects... such as the Cambodians were 'forced into urbanization' by US bombing (as opposed to even say... VC/NVA/Khmer Rouge activity) and thus the forced resettlement into the country was overstated. He states that the reason they were using Humans instead of Oxen or Horses was because... again... the United States killed half of Cambodia's livestock. He quotes foreign visitors who state they saw little evidence of starvation, or armed conflict, and even that it was a system of cooperatives of complete equality with no evidence of food shortages and they abolished money and other awesome things like improving education and great health care. He also states that the United States was responsible for the deaths of 450,000 Cambodians... and states that's an honest figure on the US indiscriminate bombing. Of course, it's doubtful that a tenth that number were killed in US Bombings in Cambodia. Or even probably in North Vietnam... but anyways... one could go on... The reason people think his book was whitewashing was probably because it was whitewashing. He literally took one of the most positive views of the Khmer Rouge regime that he could while still covering his ass (they were bad guys) whilst downplaying every aspect of their genocidal regime by attacking literally every shred of evidence he could and blaming Murrica for it whenever he had the chance to. In 1979 he was just on the wrong side of history. When he repeats that prattle now, he's just being a highly intelligent idiot.
6) It's not that Chomsky is apologetic for the Cambodian Genocide. He just thinks it wasn't two million people killed. It was probably just 'tens of thousands' of people. Of course most estimates then and now cite:
American Embassy/State Department (1977): 1.2 million by the end of 1975.
Priest Francois Ponchaud (1977) (The French Priest in Question): 1-2 million.
Central Intelligence Agency (1979): 1.4 million by the end of 1978.
Michael Vickery (1984): 750,000 deaths by the end of 1978.
Research Committee on Pol Pot's Genocidal Regime by the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea (1983): 3.3 million - Vietnamese backed government survey
Documentation Center of Cambodia (1999): 2.2 million
Keep in mind, Chomsky wrote most of his crap in 1979, but he's repeatedly stated that he stands by a large amount of his research (especially the death toll being in the thousands) rather recently.
Copied form a forum post.
>He didn’t deny it.
Good to start off with some facts.
>He just downplayed it by stating the two were comparable
The two what? Oh...
> Copied form a forum post.
Well instead of discussing the point “did Chomsky recognize the magnitude of the Cambodian genocide to an appropriate degree,” or whatever tangential point you were lazily recycling, I would like to invite you to respond to my actual comment, which itself was an invitation to substantiate any of Alexander’s claims against him. If you like I can link you to an exchange he had in which he cites and concurs with the U.S. State Department’s assessment of 1.2 million people killed, but I have no interest in putting forth the effort to debunk a copy/pasted list of motivated unexamined distortions of the facts that was procured for some other discussion (the subject of which, I’m sure, was more an assassination of Chomsky’s credibility rather than a faithful historical analysis of the flawed critiques he made in the late 70’s when reliable information on the matter was scarce or unavailable).
> They then go on to say, kind of flailingly, that also the Cambodian genocide wasn’t that bad, that all the media reports about it were lies, that it was the US’ fault anyway, that the US did worse things anyway, that Cambodia before the genocide was even worse, that America secretly loved Pol Pot and was his best friend,
Don't downplay what happened, Scott's point that Chomsky and his defender's attitude towards the Cambodian genocide has been dismal filled with equivocations and Dismissal is fundamentally sound.
Pro-tip, when charged with defending a genocide and underplaying the death count of a tradagey out of political malice, don't justify what you did as "pointing out western hypocrisy" and he's countinued to downplay what he did in the 70's
I am still waiting for you to substantiate those claims. I don't care what your pro-tips about what the decorum is to convince you that he's a Swell Guy, I care about whether or not Chomsky has actually made the claims that
>the Cambodian genocide wasn’t that bad
that
>all the media reports about it were lies
that
>it was the US’ fault anyway
that
>the US did worse things anyway
that
>Cambodia before the genocide was even worse
and that
>America secretly loved Pol Pot and was his best friend.
You are welcome also to not reply, since that option accomplishes the same amount of substantiation to these claims as you have already provided while requiring less attention on the part of either of us.
Even if Scott were legitimately of the opinion that Chomsky's attitude was "dismal", he would have to prove it through a rigorous analysis of Herman and Chomsky's writings and the wider literature on Cambodian history, Indonesian history, etc. Instead, he skims wikipedia and admits that he has "trouble figuring out what to make of it". What a dud. Of course, since C&H are leftists, he sees no reason to treat their argument with any charity.
This is the absolute intellectual impotence that Rationalism leads to. And then we have someone backing up Scott by copy/pasting a post from the spacebattles.com forum? Is this some sort of meta-joke about the massively dopey ways that sci-fi jocks get their political information?
This bit (rebutting Scott’s absurd reactionary beliefs about how US
media was pro-Soviet in the cold war):
These are NYT articles on the USSR between 1955-1965, beginning with
the oldest - the years generally referenced in Alexander’s
“scholarship,” and the years before opposition to the USSR became a
consensus on the left. There are hundreds of articles there, but a
pattern immediately emerges: the USSR and its allied states are called
“Reds,” “totalitarian,” and “tyrannies;” a great many scary stories
about the Soviet atom bomb, Stalin depicted as a brute, many stories of
repression and about refugees fleeing from the USSR.
This is not to say that these are inaccurate, or that some of them
are not valid criticisms. But it does paint a vastly different picture
of the one Alexander is writing, that the media of the time loved the
Soviet Union and were trying their best to cover up their crimes.
Reminds me of something: Scott (and even more so Yudkowsky) is a big
fan of autodidactism; studying by yourself, outside of an academic
institution. And the big problem with this is that you don’t know
what you don’t know, so you don’t know what you have to learn to
have a base level of understanding of the field.
You end up with these extremely broad gaps in your knowledge base
that are invisible to you, in the same way someone with certain types of
degenerative eye diseases can be nearly blind before realising their
vision is compromised at all. We’re really, really bad at
identifying our own blind spots: I’m sure Scott thinks he has a good
knowledge of 20th century history, but thinking American media at the
height of the Cold War was in any way pro-communist is the kind of
embarrassing mistake that any first-year history student would be
immediately corrected on.
Now; consider how many Rationalists who consider themselves
self-taught experts in genetics or AI or economics have similar blind
spots.
The solution to this problem is, ironically, to do what the rationalist crowd say you should do and actively seek out contradictory opinions
One of the reasons that I'm so frustrated with that crowd is that I *did this* even in an *academic setting* where I could have not bothered
I wrote a Master's dissertation on economics in a philosophy department, where everybody I spoke to about it assumed I was taking the traditional "capitalist ideology" top down approach, and where I was simply not doing that: I want(ed) to build a case against advocates of free-market anti-interventionist neoliberalism from the ground-up with particular criticisms of specific events in the history of economic thought
It turns out: if you've got the time and resources to do research, it *isn't that fucking hard* to engage with people outside your immediate expertise
You just have to put in the fucking *effort* instead of just being a fucking "meta-contrarian" or whateverthefuck
What is it that allows men like Alexander, men of some intelligence
and sensitivity, to get so close to understanding, and fail so
miserably, over and over? We can find the answer here at the end of his
piece: we see that he stumbled, baffled, like a giraffe with a head
injury loose in Manhattan, through the entire book, then through an
entire long review, without comprehending its basic point. Until
he finally found the technique that allowed him to resolve the
dissonance: Both Sides Are The Same, The Truth Is Somewhere In The
Middle, and I Am Smarter Than Both Sides For Seeing This. This
underlies all liberal failures to Get It. They oppose any radical
opinion or social change for this reason: Both Sides Are The Same, The
Truth Is Somewhere In The Middle, and I Am Smarter Than Both Sides For
Seeing This. It is ego and sloth.
There have been US-based major media outlets publishing leaked
classified documents about major secret internal spying matters for over
a year now and there has been no serious attempt to stop them by force,
at least in the US.
Suddenly a wild Assange appears. (Yes, the guy is an asshole at
least, and a rapist at worst, but they are really throwing everything at
him atm, bad from a press freedom perspective).
This gives me some motivation to write about his atrocious Kuhn and MacIntyre book reviews.
This is absolute gold
Edit: Having finished the review, this is still the most poignant, but I’m not sure if it’s the best. What an excellent piece
This bit (rebutting Scott’s absurd reactionary beliefs about how US media was pro-Soviet in the cold war):
Reminds me of something: Scott (and even more so Yudkowsky) is a big fan of autodidactism; studying by yourself, outside of an academic institution. And the big problem with this is that you don’t know what you don’t know, so you don’t know what you have to learn to have a base level of understanding of the field.
You end up with these extremely broad gaps in your knowledge base that are invisible to you, in the same way someone with certain types of degenerative eye diseases can be nearly blind before realising their vision is compromised at all. We’re really, really bad at identifying our own blind spots: I’m sure Scott thinks he has a good knowledge of 20th century history, but thinking American media at the height of the Cold War was in any way pro-communist is the kind of embarrassing mistake that any first-year history student would be immediately corrected on.
Now; consider how many Rationalists who consider themselves self-taught experts in genetics or AI or economics have similar blind spots.
The crossover event I didn’t know I needed
love those Rhizzone fellas
Just gonna drop this here
Fuck you Scott
Who is Scott Alexander?
Suddenly a wild Assange appears. (Yes, the guy is an asshole at least, and a rapist at worst, but they are really throwing everything at him atm, bad from a press freedom perspective).