> >But anyway, (sorry for the long post), I was wondering if anyone could
> >give me any details on this guy's background.
> I did realize David Horowitz had graced our fair city with his odiferous
> presence. I must have been indoors. Your recap of his talk sounds right
> He's a complete idiot, and utterly unprincipled. Most relevantly he
> falsely claimed Chomsky praised the Khmer Rouge, using a quote of NC's
> that he wrote in a preface to a book about *Norodom Sihanouk*. This bit


Yeah, that was exactly the line of attack Horowitz was using. Apparently
there is one right wing position, and one left wing position and no room
in between, and so all the liberals must atone for the Khmer Rouge and the
crimes of stalin etc., not that he bothered to atone for segregation or
Hitler or anything. He attacked my liberal friend for saying his
professors aren't Marxist and bringing up the right-wing genocide in East
timor, and he said that this sort of thinking leads him to believe that he
is a utopian idealist who would be setting up a concentration camp for the
un-PC people if he had the power. hmm
But it is sort of interesting... I've heard this line of attack on Noam C.
several times, i.e. that he is an apologist for the khmer rouge. This
doesn't make much sense, because NC isn't a communist. I suppose I
could understand that an ardent maoist who totally believed that communism
was going to do great things for SE Asia and then was proven wrong may
have a reason to go into denial ala the Holocaust deniers, but Noam would
have no such motivation. Their half argument seems to go that because he
compares the East Timor genocide to the killing fields, calling the former
proportionally worse, that he is mitigating the atrocities in Cambodia. I
never read a NC book where he discussed SE asia... Is there any place
where he actually does do anything akin to this? I wouldn't think so.

And also,... it is a common for many right wingers to argue that American
vietnam war protesters are responsible for the murders in Cambodia,
because if we had stayed a bit longer and poured some more money in, then
they would have won and the khmer rouge never would have come to power. My
high school history class conveniently ended the story at the 'successful'
civil rights era (concluding that everything has been rosy ever since), so
they never discussed the war, and all college classes I've had have never
brought up the issue at all. But it has always been my impression that it
was only because of the Americans bombing the shit out of Cambodia for no
good reason that that significant minority of people got freaked out and
put their support in such an extremist regime, which allowed those
killings to happen.
 What evidence is there to show or not to show that the
khmer rouge would have come to power anyway if there had been no US
involvement?

Christine