In the current issue of Prospect Robin Blackburn and Oliver Kamm offer opposing evaluations of Chomsky's standing in light of the Prospect poll in which he is ranked as the leading contemporary intellectual. In support of this result Blackburn says, 'The huge vote for Noam Chomsky as the world's leading "public intellectual" should be no surprise at all. Who could match him for sheer intellectual achievement and political courage?' In discussing Chomsky's political activities Blackburn states:
The huge admiration for Chomsky evident in Prospect's poll is obviously not only, or even mainly, a response to intellectual achievement. Rather it goes to a brilliant thinker who is willing to step outside his study and devote himself to exposing the high crimes and misdemeanours of the most powerful country in the world and its complicity with venal and brutal rulers across four continents over half a century or more.By contrast, Kamm is critical of Chomsky, citing instances of extreme and unreasonable positions that he has taken on a variety of issues.
Interestingly, Blackburn doesn't refer to one of the most acutely problematic and revealing of Chomsky's political escapades. In 1979, together with Edward Hermann, Chomsky published After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology (Spokesman Press, London). In this book he discusses events in Cambodia under the Pol Pot regime and the subsequent Vietnamese invasion of the country. The main argument that he is concerned to develop is that, while the Pol Pot regime may have committed an occasional atrocity, the Western press demonized the Khmer Rouge and failed to produce convincing evidence of a systematic government campaign of mass murder directed at the Cambodian population. Chomsky and Hermann accuse the West in general, and the United States in particular, of orchestrating a campaign against the Khmer Rouge in order to justify the Vietnamese invasion and occupation, which they regard as an act of aggression.
... Cambodia was a particular target of abuse. In fact, it became virtually a matter of dogma in the West that the regime was the very incarnate of evil with no redeeming qualities, and that the handful of demonic creatures who had somehow taken over the country were systematically massacring and starving the population. How the "nine men at the center" were able to achieve this feat or why they chose to pursue this strange course of "autogenocide" were questions that were rarely pursued. Evidence suggesting popular support for the regime among certain strata - particularly the poorer peasants - was ignored or dismissed with revulsion and contempt... Ordinary critical examination of sources, indeed, any effort to discover the truth, was regarded as a serious moral lapse. Furthermore, there was a substantial fabrication of evidence. [Preface, p. xi.]Chomsky and Hermann state that 'The Vietnamese invasion can be explained, but it cannot be justified' (Preface, p. xix), and then go on to claim...
As the London Economist observed: "If Vietnam believed that, because the Cambodia regime was almost universally condemned, criticism of the invasion would be muted its belief was correct." The Economist then indicated that it shared this attitude. Whether the peasants of Cambodia share it as well is another question, but one which is naturally of little concern to the West. [Preface, p. xii.]In the conclusion of the book the authors argue:
We speculated in the preface that the Vietnamese invasion would prove disastrous for Cambodia. Any assessment of the resulting conditions should be carefully compared with what visitors observed just prior to the invasion - specifically, with their general assessment that food supplies appeared adequate and that there were certain constructive developments, whatever one may think of the regime. If there is a deterioration in the conditions of Cambodia, this is very likely a consequence of the invasion itself; and here again the Western contribution cannot be ignored, including the special role played by the propaganda hysteria and climate of opinion of 1975-78, discussed at length above [p. 294].Curiously, Chomsky appears to have changed his view of the Khmer Rouge's campaign of mass murder and the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, but without ever acknowledging that his initial defence of Pol Pot was profoundly mistaken. In 1999 he posted 'The Current Bombings: Behind the Rhetoric' on the Z Magazine website. The article is a sharp criticism of the Nato bombing campaign against Milosevic's army in Kosovo, which Chomsky denounces as Western imperialism. In this piece Chomsky expresses general scepticism concerning the idea of a humanitarian military campaign. He cites the Vietnamese overthrow of the Khmer Rouge as one of the rare cases in which foreign intervention succeeded in mitigating a catastrophe, and he condemns the United States for supporting the Khmer Rouge campaign against the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia:
In that period, perhaps the most compelling example of (III) [trying to mitigate the catastrophe - SL] is the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in December 1978, terminating Pol Pot's atrocities, which were then peaking. Vietnam pleaded the right of self-defense against armed attack, one of the few post-Charter examples when the plea is plausible: the Khmer Rouge regime (Democratic Kampuchea, DK) was carrying out murderous attacks against Vietnam in border areas. The US reaction is instructive. The press condemned the "Prussians" of Asia for their outrageous violation of international law. They were harshly punished for the crime of having terminated Pol Pot's slaughters, first by a (US-backed) Chinese invasion, then by US imposition of extremely harsh sanctions. The US recognized the expelled DK as the official government of Cambodia, because of its "continuity" with the Pol Pot regime, the State Department explained. Not too subtly, the US supported the Khmer Rouge in its continuing attacks in Cambodia.Here Chomsky has completely reversed the account of the Pol Pot regime that he offered in his 1979 book. To the best of my knowledge, at no time in the period between the publication of this book and the appearance of his article in 1999 on the Nato bombing of Kosovo did Chomsky ever publicly acknowledge that he had made a serious error of judgement in portraying the Khmer Rouge as innocent victims of Western-inspired Vietnamese aggression, although he may have modified his account of the events. The nature of the catastrophe in Cambodia changes from one version to the other. In the first, it is the Vietnamese invasion, while in the second it is Pol Pot's campaign of mass murder that this invasion halted. It is important to note that common to both descriptions is the conclusion that the United States is the real culprit responsible for the disaster, whichever set of events one takes the disaster to consist in.
This exercise in adaptability illustrates many qualities, but it is hard to recognize political courage or intellectual integrity as among them. It is perfectly reasonable to change one's views in light of new evidence or a reconsideration of the relevant facts. By contrast, substituting one shrill opinion for its opposite for the purpose of promoting an unchanging Manichean agenda is a mark neither of insight nor of serious judgement.
Chomsky's political record is well known and the facts reported here are neither new nor obscure. For some reason his admirers, like Blackburn, see no difficulty in recommending him to us as a latter-day oracle, despite his defence of the Khmer Rouge regime in the late 1970's, and his subsequent refusal to address this episode when the facts on the ground rendered his initial views too embarrassing to sustain. Ronald Reagan was described as the teflon president because of his apparently miraculous ability to escape the taint of any of the many scandals and political misdeeds that afflicted his administration. The ongoing chorus of uncritical applause for Chomsky's political pronouncements among people who pride themselves on their commitment to progressive causes suggests that this talent is not limited to one side of the political spectrum. (Shalom Lappin, Department of Philosophy, King's College London)