b: Well, I'm glad you provided Hitchen's contextual antidote. (he also has more "style")Qx: Looking up this Sophal Ear guy's homepage and thesis I'm not the least bit impressed by his writing at all. Being a McNair scholar doesn't do much either. Let's take a look at this guy's style as he quotes Chomsky...
Questions that are obviously crucial even apart from the legacy of the war--for example, the sources of the policies of the postwar Cambodian regime in historical experience, traditional culture, Khmer nationalism, or internal social conflict--have been passed by in silence as the propaganda machine gravitates to the evils of a competitive socioeconomic system so as to establish its basic principle: that "liberation" by "Marxists" is the worst fate that can befall any people under Western dominance.
So argued the celebrated political activist Noam Chomsky and his sidekick Edward S. Herman in After the Cataclysm, one of the most supportive books of the Khmer revolution (especially since it was written after the end of the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary regime), yet least rejected among the works canonized, to originate from the standard total academic view on Cambodia.
Qx: Quite styly to see how Ear has made use of an ad-hominem (sidekick) to start off this part of his thesis. Perhaps, he had a mentor to get him started.Anyways, let's go down a little further and look at this..
With the end of the War,however, few imperialist causes remained to rebel against, and he was left with no real enemy
to fight.
<>Now this is real academic swill that Ear spews forth and it can get people wondering about which direction the McNair Scholars Program is going. If you have a conscience then you might understand that the fight for democracy is never over. But let's get to more fun.
By 1977, Chomsky was itching for a new target, since he did not have Nixon and Kissinger to kick around anymore. With his long-time collaborator Edward Herman, Chomsky found the Western media and its alleged differential treatment of atrocities in Cambodia versus East Timor, a convenient Trojan horse for a new wave of attacks on "imperialism" at the expense, of course, of the peasants he loved.
Qx: Interesting how Ear presupposes that Chomsky
"was itching for a new target" when it's really rather obvious that the target wasn't new at all. Yes, Hitchens beats Sophal Ear by a long shot and Dr. Cruel might as well go back to griping about Linux.
None.
