Long read.

September 10, 2021
Noam Chomsky and the Khmer Rouge
by Chris Green

Noam Chomsky is perhaps the world’s most renowned public intellectual. However, his courage in exposing the war crimes and human rights violations engaged in by the US state has made him a leading target of guardians of the notion that the United States is a force for freedom and justice in the world. In retaliation for his arguments that the US is a force for evil in the world, these guardians, particularly those on the right side of the political spectrum, have lobbed numerous charges at Chomsky: for example, that he, and his frequent collaborator, the late Edward S. Herman, covered up atrocities by the communist Khmer Rouge government which ruled Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. Critics have charged Chomsky and Herman with attacking the credibility of accounts of those atrocities made by Cambodian refugees; that they pushed absurdly low estimates of Cambodians killed by the KR; all part of their sinister anti-American effort to cover up the crimes of Communists like the KR.

In reality, the writings of Chomsky and Herman on Cambodia under KR rule had significantly more nuanced arguments than those attributed to them by their fevered right wing and sometimes liberal critics. In a June 1977 article in The Nation and their 1979 book After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology, they did not deny the brutality of the Khmer Rouge. For example, in The Nation article they wrote that Father Francois Ponchaud’s widely publicized book on Khmer Rouge terror was “serious and worth reading…He gives a grisly account of what refugees have reported to him about the barbarity of their treatment at the hands of the Khmer Rouge.” In After the Cataclysm, Chomsky and Herman noted that in response to their extensive criticisms of many aspects of Ponchaud’s documentation of Khmer Rouge atrocities, the introduction to the American edition of Ponchaud’s book featured praise from Ponchaud of Chomsky for correcting the former’s mistakes. However, in the book’s British edition, Ponchaud referred to Chomsky somewhat tartly and falsely claimed that the latter and Herman denied that the Khmer Rouge committed any massacres.
Full article: https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/09/10 ... mer-rouge/

The clips in the OP are pretty right, imo. But don't bother with the link unless you are into partisan disertations

We should get this clear for start > NObody got the KR regime right in the early days. (and before)
There was no information coming out of Cambodia - zero zip zot. no intell, no diplomats, no moles, no nuthin'.
Francois Ponchaud being the first to gather a large systematic collection of 1st hand reports from fleeing refugees - and then put that all into a broad enough context so that the real situation could become more apparent.

NB, there were various delays between every one of these steps..

when Ponchard's report was released
when it was actually distributed in France
when it was translated into english
when it was distributed in USA - and hence to Chomsky

There was, from memory, about 18 months between first release and when it got to Chomsky.
Or nearly.
So the claim Chomsky was denying the true nature of the KR when all the facts were already known - are just plain wrong.
ANd, as the OP report points out, he was never as uncritical of the KR as the Right likes to shout.

Remember all that talk that a "Blood Bath" would happen in Vietnam? Well it didn't, and so everyone became very sceptical.

Normally, great minds and retards alike, everybody might be a bit more open. But these were not normally times.
Remember? 15 years of outright lies about the state of the war - well, everybody had found that out by now.

So maybe you can understand the scepticism.
Only a blind fool would have had faith in any anti-communist reports at that time. EVery thing was a swirl of lies.
- which is a great pity.
Remember the boy who cried wolf? He fucked everybody up.
not Noam