Your regular reminder that I personally loathe Noam Chomsky for the reprehensible things he said in apologia for the Khmer Rouge - and has never really taken back. He was no friend to the Cambodian people.
(Not to mention his stance on Ukraine).
It's a bit funny because how quick the left usually is to cut people loose for failing purity tests, but there's always the few who manage to get into the state of grace where the test must be wrong.
Tbh the left is pretty fucking awful at enforcing the “supporting Russia/genocides committed by vaguely leftist seeming countries” purity test nowadays
I really, really winds me up with folks valorize the USSR. I really do not think most folks understand the sheer scale of horror and baseline violence society operated under, how totally pervasive the kleptocracy was, how incompetent it was, how vicious it was, or how nationalistic and expansionist.
What always gets me on that is, like Maoists, this is still a "y'know we can just call up people who lived there, right? Primary sources are right here still with us, regular-ass people for whom this wasn't abstract?" issue
This is even to some extent understood as doctrine _in the PRC_ now and has been for years: “Mao was 70 percent good, 30 percent bad” and while I quibble with the ratio the 30% is very much referring to the famines and the purges and the cultural revolution and…
