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“Even on the rare occasions when Mr. Chomsky is dealing with facts and not with fantasies,
he exaggerates by a factor of, plus or minus, four or five.”
- Walter Laqueur
(The New Republic, March 24, 1982)“

The Lie: “If 2-2½ million people… have been systematically slaughtered by a band of murderous thugs [then intervention is sought]… [But not] if the figure of those killed were, say, less by a factor of 100 – that is, 25,000 people… [or] if the deaths in Cambodia were not the result of systematic slaughter and starvation organized by the state…”37

The Truth: No honest observer thought that only 25,000 died under the Khmer Rouge or that
the mass deaths were not the result of systematic slaughter and starvation. A UN investigation
reported 2-3 million dead, while UNICEF estimated 3 million dead.38 Even the Khmer Rouge
acknowledged 2 million deaths – which they attributed to the Vietnamese invasion.39

event horizon wrote:The Lie: “If 2-2½ million people… have been systematically slaughtered by a band of murderous thugs [then intervention is sought]… [But not] if the figure of those killed were, say, less by a factor of 100 – that is, 25,000 people… [or] if the deaths in Cambodia were not the result of systematic slaughter and starvation organized by the state…”37

The Truth: No honest observer thought that only 25,000 died ...

If 2-2½ million people, about a 1/3 of the population, have been systematically slaughtered by a band of murderous thugs who have taken over the government, then McGovern is willing to consider military intervention. We presume that he would not have made this proposal if the figure of those killed were, say, less by a factor of 100 – that is, 25,000 people -though this would be bad enough. Nor would he have been able to propose the extreme measure if the deaths in Cambodia were not the result of systematic slaughter and starvation organized by the state but rather attributable in large measure to peasant revenge, undisciplined military units out of government control, starvation and disease that are direct consequences of the US war, or other such factors."

This review is useless for several reasons.
1) It doesn't cite a single actual reference to the work in question.
2) It doesn't cite its own claims (which refugee reports exactly did it write off? The ones reporting the massive starvation caused by intense bombing by US bombers between 1970 and 1975?)
3) It's the only thing that really fits the author's description of being "written as a savage and bitter satire of professional academics-cum-polemicists".

I'm inclined to believe that either the [reviewer] didn't read the book or read it quite poorly, as nearly all of his points can be refuted by simply reading the work in question. Chomsky never condones the Khmer Rouge. This book is not even ABOUT the Khmer Rouge, necessarily. It's about the American Mass Media's handling of the situation which, in my opinion, is expertly handled

event horizon wrote:Chomsky said the massacres carried out by the Khmer Rouge - where over one million Cambodians perished, countless others tortured, displaced, etc - was comparable to the liberation of France, which resulted in the deaths of 30-40 thousand people, not Nazi atrocities.

The Lie: "The US and Britain... killed maybe 100,000 people [in the occupation of Iraq] by last October [2004]..."

The Truth: A 2004 study by anti-war researchers blamed the Iraq war for 100,000 deaths. It counted both enemy killings and allied killings; counted both combatants and civilians; and included deaths from crime, accidents, heart attacks, strokes, infections, etc. And independent analysis of its figures suggested that 39,000 had been killed by either side and that the rest had died from other causes.