Sunday, July 21, 2013
Noam Chomsky's ZSpace Page
[...]
Let’s turn the empirical facts that Žižek finds so boring.
Žižek cites nothing, but he is presumably referring to joint
work of mine with Edward Herman in the ‘70s (Political Economy of Human Rights)
and again a decade later in Manufacturing Consent, where we review and
respond to the charges that Žižek apparently has in mind. In PEHR we
discussed a great many illustrations of Herman’s distinction between worthy
and unworthy victims. The worthy victims are those whose fate can be attributed
to some official enemy, the unworthy ones are the victims of our own state and
its crimes. The two prime examples on which we focused were Cambodia under the
Khmer Rouge and the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in the same years. A long
chapter is devoted to each. These are very telling examples: comparable
atrocities, in the same region, in the same years. Victims of the Khmer Rouge
are “worthy victims,” whose fate can be blamed on an enemy. The Timorese are
“unworthy victims,” because we are responsible for their fate: the Indonesian
invasion was approved by Washington and fully supported right through the worst
atrocities, labeled “genocidal” by a later UN investigation, but with ample
evidence right at the time, as we documented. We showed that in both cases
there was extraordinary lying, on a scale that would have impressed Stalin, but
in opposite directions: in the case of the KR vast fabrication of alleged
crimes, recycling of charges after they were conceded to be false, ignoring of
the most credible evidence, etc. In the case of ET, in contrast, mostly
silence, or else denial.
The two cases are of course not identical. The ET case is
incomparably more significant, because the atrocities could have easily been
brought to an end, as they finally were in September 1999, merely by an
indication from Washington that the game is over. In contrast, no one had any
proposal as to what might be done to end KR atrocities. And when a Vietnamese
invasion brought them to an end in 1979, the Vietnamese were harshly condemned
by the government and the media, and punished, and the US turned at once to
diplomatic and military support for the KR. At that point commentary virtually
ceased: the Cambodians had become unworthy victims, under attack by their KR
torturers backed by Washington. Similarly, they had been unworthy victims prior
to the KR takeover in April 1975 because they were under vicious assault by the
United States in the most intensive bombing in history, at the level of all
allied bombing in the Pacific theater during World II, directed against the
defenseless rural society, following the orders transmitted by Henry Kissinger:
“anything that flies on anything that moves.” Accordingly little was said about
their miserable fate, then or until today.
Cambodia scholars have pointed out that there has been more
investigation of Cambodia from April 1975 through 1978 than for the rest of its
entire history. Again, not surprising, given the ideological utility of the
suffering of worthy victims, another topic that we discussed.
In these books and elsewhere we compiled extensive
documentation showing that the pattern is quite normal: Cambodia under the KR
(but, crucially, not before and after) and ET constitute a particularly dramatic
example. We also observed that the pattern cannot be perceived, giving many
examples and offering the obvious explanation.
What we wrote about the vastly more important case of ET,
then and since, has been virtually ignored. The same is true of what we and
others have written about Cambodia during the periods when they were unworthy
victims, under US attack. In contrast, a considerable industry had been
created, with much hysteria, seeking to find some errors in our review of the
evidence on Cambodia under the KR and how it was treated – so far, without
success. I am sure I speak for Ed Herman in saying that we’d be glad to have it
reprinted right now, along with the much more important work on the unworthy
victims, just as we were happy to review the facts and the storm of criticism a
decade later.
It is not too surprising that no errors have been found. We
did little more than review what was in print, making it very clear – as one of
the commentators on Žižek quotes – that “our primary concern here is not to
establish the facts with regard to postwar Indochina, but rather to investigate
their refraction through the prism of Western ideology, a very different task,”
and a far simpler one. We wrote that we cannot know what the actual facts are,
but suggested that commentators keep to the truth, and that they pay attention
to the documentary record and the most qualified observers, in particular to
the conclusions we quoted from US State Department intelligence, recognized to
be the most knowledgeable source. Furthermore, the chapter was carefully read
by most of the leading Cambodia scholars before publication. So the lack of
errors is no great surprise.
Of much greater general interest is the fact that to this
day, those who are completely in the grip of western propaganda adhere
religiously to the prescribed doctrine: a show of great indignation about the
KR years and our accurate review of the information available, along with
streams of falsification; and silence about the vastly more significant cases
of ET and Cambodia under US attack, before and after the KR years. Žižek’s
comments are a perfect illustration.
[...]
