How the left defends mass murder and gets away with it: the Noam Chomsky Syndrome as we might call it.

Communism should not be savable through some sort of historical revisionism, it should be confined to the same place as Nazism and Fascism and its proponents treated with the same opprobrium

Since Noam Chomsky is in the news as he tries to defend Corbyn’s egregious antisemitism, I thought it worth while reposting two old blog posts of mine about Chomsky, Campbodia and why communists still get away with it…

First from July 2018, “Not True Communism - the left and Cambodian genocide”

“It was in 1980 when I first encountered the Western academic response to the Khmer Rouge, Angkar and Pol Pot. This was something of an eye-opener - my spectacularly low opinion of Noam Chomsky was formed at this time - as we considered the still emerging evidence of communist atrocity in Cambodia set alongside the dominant commentary, inspired by the likes of Chomsky, that the refugee tales couldn't be believed and it was just "...a rationally conceived strategy for dealing with the urgent problems that faced postwar Cambodia."

Cambodian academic, Sophal Ear and US researcher, Donald W. Beachler call this the "Standard Total Academic View" - it was pretty much what that part of my South East Asian Politics module taught. Question the reports, challenge the numbers (we had a whole seminar dissecting the numbers who died - downwards and sideways mostly) and argue that the sources of criticism were either 'neo-colonialist', US imperialist or Viet imperialist. Even as we read reports about children killed, their heads smashed against trees, starvation and mass murder using the most basic of implements - shovels, mattocks, axes, our reading list contained stuff like this:

Chomsky invites us to consider historian Ben Kiernan’s hypothesis that the Khmer Rouge leaders never properly established discipline over insubordinate soldiers: “[Kiernan] notes that most of the atrocity stories come from areas of little Khmer Rouge strength, where orders to stop reprisals were disobeyed by soldiers wreaking vengeance, often drawn from the poorest sections of the peasantry.”

This quote comes from a frightening article by Matthew Blackwell describing both the personal tragedy, the scale of death and the manner in which so much of what we'd now call "progressive academia" denied or down-played what was happening. These were heroic socialist liberators, how could they possibly install such a reign of murderous terror? Even today some still deny - here from 2012 in American 'radical' magazine, Counterpunch:

The Pol Pot the Cambodians remember was not a tyrant, but a great patriot and nationalist, a lover of native culture and native way of life. New Cambodia (or Kampuchea, as it was called) under Pol Pot and his comrades was a nightmare for the privileged, for the wealthy and for their retainers; but poor people had enough food and were taught to read and write. As for the mass killings, these are just horror stories, averred my Cambodian interlocuters.

Set against a million dead people, torture and starvation, we have people - academics, commentors, reporters - prepared to spin and prevaricate so as to suggest that, far from the Killing Fields being the direct consequence of a deliberate policy imposed by the Angkar and inspired by the Marxism they'd learned in 1950s Paris, they were some sort of accident or mistake.

This is a pattern for these progressive academics and writers - from G B Shaw's apologia for Stalinism through Chomsky's excusing of Pol Pot to today's left fawning over Chavez's Venezuela and Castro's Cuba. And when the denial of the violent oppression communism requires becomes to painful, our leftists fall back on "that wasn't true communism".”

And secondly, from May 2019, “Communism is evil - how come its apologists get so much time, attention and space to promote this murderous, coercive faith?”

"The second memorial lecture was given in January by the American political theorist Jodi Dean, who is keen to rescue the word 'communist' from its negative - and, she insists, historically inaccurate - associations..."

This is the world we're in - this quotation doesn't come from some obscure spartist website or even from communism's house journal, The Morning Star, but from the London Review of Books. From the lead article in the latest issue of this august journal.

Imagine just for a minute that the LRB's main article was from an avowed fascist arguing that Gentile's actualism and the policies of 1920s Italy were powerful, change-making forces for good and that Fascism is misunderstood and perceived negatively. No, you can't imagine it because you know it would never happen - the repainting of Fascism in bright 21st century colours is simply not something we could countenance. Not so with communism.

Time and time again - on the TV, in magazines, in film and in theatre - the evils of communism are given a different set of teeth, a new smile, a smart set of modern clothes. The millions of dead bodies on which today's communism perches get brushed aside as a detail, explained away as some sort of tragic error or, worst, seen as a necessary collateral in the pursuit of the New Man and true communism.

I understand how people who've arrived at a left-wing - even socialist - perspective might be troubled by the discovery that people who proclaimed the same faith were responsible for genocide, rape, murder, incarceration, torture and oppression. Aren't these the sins of the 'right' - the things the left opposes? So we get revisionism - I remember a bizarre seminar at university where we discussed the bewildering manner in which the number of dead bodies in Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge was parsed according to the ideological position of the calculator. My lecturer took the Noam Chomsky position - there weren't as many dead as claimed and, anyway, it was down to individual actions by bad soldiers and Pol Pot didn't know about what was going on (I paraphrase but this summarises the then academically popular apologia for one of the worst genocides of the 20th century). Portraying this - the consequence of communism in power - as somehow an historical aberration, not real communism, is precisely what Jodi Dean and her fellow travellers want to do. Just so they can carry on promoting a faith that demands coercion and oppression as well as producing, in so many tragic cases, violence, death and starvation.

Communism should not be savable through some sort of historical revisionism, it should be confined to the same place as Nazism and Fascism and its proponents treated with the same opprobrium. So long as elite journals like the LRB can lead with unchallenged communist apologia, we are a long way from seeing the murderous ideas of communism properly confined to the madder corners of obscure websites and batty college pamphleteers.