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.
trying to do science in the USSR was politically waltzing through a minefield. Plenty of scientists spent time in gulags just for doing science. (Then let's talk about how many Soviet leaders were not ethnic Russian men.)
All except Sakharov. Hmm, wonder if his chosen area of research might have given him special value to the authorities, who desired real science and not puling sycophancy in this field and this field only... naw, that'd be crazy!