I apparently skipped level ??? and went straight to believing the Black Book is fascist propaganda. I didn’t realize I was supposed to stan Pol Pot first!
I have literally never seen anyone defend the Khmer Rouge, ever lol
The Khmer Rouge were defended by the US and got up to $215 million in weapons from them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_United_States_support_for_the_Khmer_Rouge
lol why is the last level beyond ???, the last level statement is just objectively true.
TFW you don’t take the black book at face value
This is a situation in which I am happy to defend Chomsky. At the point of writing there was little evidence for some of the most extraordinary claims, claims which were similarly leveled from propaganda channels against socialist regimes in Vietnam and else were - often without a base. Chomsky did alter his opinion based on new sources and contrasting evidence. However the people who do critique Chomsky do it mostly for anti communist reasons, ignore his later writings and at the same time ignore that the USA did support the Red Khmer after the evidence came out for quite a bit.
Let me quote wikipedia to make a point about how it is leveled and against whom it is leveled:
In addition to Chomsky, Porter, and Hildebrand, the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge have also been denied and/or whitewashed by such academics as Marxist scholar Malcolm Caldwell, Laura Summers,[18] Edward S. Herman, and Torben Retbøll.[19]
All I’m saying is that it’s very suspicious that the only AES state Chomsky has ever defended was funded by the CIA
you can find them but they’re fringe. Usually weirdos who are just dipping their toes in marxism and think the khmer rouge must have been lied about, and then outright weirdo agendaposters there to wreck communism with their terrible takes. You can spot the latter because they’re historical revisionists outright, like cherry-picking quotes and parts of documents that support their narrative and usually nothing more substantial to offer if you press them.
Yeah, I’ve seen a depressingly large number of the first lot. (Though that number is still only in the low double digits, any is really a depressing number).
I think it is as simple as them being idealists. They’ve “read Pol Pot” or whatever and assume that because he wrote something halfway decent on paper, all the of the actual actions of the Khmer Rouge are irrelevant.
Alternatively they might take the attitude of “the west lies about every other AES, therefore everything bad that happened in Cambodia was also a lie.”
I remember seeing like maybe two or three over a course of several years back on reddit.
And that is actually very telling, even on a website where you’ll find tons of people who have latched on to the most baby-brained ideologies possible, many of which only really exist in vidyagames, it’s exeedingly rare to come across anyone who has anything positive to say about the KR at all.
Some MLMs did even after the news got out, most notably some Gonzalo supporters. But even there not a lot would support him once he threw in with the monarchy.
Some of the new left intellectuals did, such as infamously Noam Chomsky, or Samir Amin.
