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.
So much of ignorant baby leftist belief these days boils down to a baseline of “America always bad,” which then logically leads to “anyone opposing America always good,” which is how you get AnTi-iMpErIaLiStS supporting Russian imperialism.
I know so many guys who did study abroad in St. Petersburg in the mid-00s and after mainlining propaganda for a year came home to teach us all about how Stalin was good actually and the crushing of the Hungarian uprising was necessary and moral.
