> >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