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Thanks for your clarification. I admit my statement was made broadly, for rhetorical purposes. But in this instance, his detractors are not criticizing his int

Thanks for your clarification. I admit my statement was made broadly, for rhetorical purposes. But in this instance, his detractors are not criticizing his interpretation of available evidence, they brand him, despite his words, as an apologist for Pol Pot and an excuser of genocide. I think this is consistent with my larger point that the arguments made against him are of low quality and not fact-based.

dalke 12y ago
You are right in that I'm reacting to your broad statements, made for rhetorical purposes. I'll point out though that you've changed the topic. His detractors in the 1970s, who argued that Chomsky minimized the extent of the Cambodian massacre, did not justify their "low quality arguments" (as you term them now) by saying that the implications of Chomsky being right were unthinkable. What is "unthinkable" about the idea that there were only a few thousand murders, rather that a genocide of 1-3 million people? I am not referring to detractors who claim he is/was an apologist for the Khmer Rouge. I am only referring to those detractors who in the 1970s argued that Chomsky was wrong in greatly discounting the information from Ponchaud's "Cambodia: Year Zero" and Barron and Paul's "Murder of a Gentle Land".