Stephen Morris' 1981 Criticism of Chomsky
brian turner
of Chomsky's "Political Economy of Human Rights" books. For those
interested in reading it, I subsequently discovered it can also be
found on Google. The French scholar Serge Thion, in the mid-1990s,
posted a huge file on the controversy over Ben Kiernan's appointment
to head the Cambodia Genocide project. Stephen Morris had written a
letter of protest over this, which started a whole squabble. Thion
spread the file over 20 separate posts, with titles like "CAMBODIA GEN
CONTR FILE 1/20" and "CGCF 4/20". The beginning of the file has an
index of all the contents, and one of the items is Morris's critique
of Chomsky's PEHR books. There is plenty of other stuff in these
posts for those interested in the debates over the Khmer Rouge and the
Indochina wars generally.
Anyway here's my two cents about Morris' critique.
I can see he has some good points to make, but I also think he has the
same type of biases to the right as Chomsky does to the left. For
instance Chomsky may be reluctant to acknowledge atrocities by the
revolutionary movements he sympathized with, but he does admit that
the Vietnamese communists, for instance, committed atrocities. And in
the infamous 1977 Nation article, accepts without any objection a
claim that the Khmer Rouge were guilty of barbarism during the civil
war. Morris on the other hand, at least in this essay (I have no
knowledge of his other writings), has few unkind words about US Cold
War foreign policy in Latin America or Asia. Is Morris an objective
observer of world events, who thinks the US is a force for good most
of the time? Or just a knee jerk pro-US partisan in every case? We
can't tell from this piece alone, but wouldn't it have been better to
have made it clear?
-----------------------
The essay has two main parts:
1) a critical look at the way Chomsky/Herman handled the evidence
coming out of Vietnam in the late 1970s. Here, Morris has a pretty
good case.
2) a critical look at Chomsky/Herman's comparisons of state violence
around the world in "The Political Economy of Human Rights". This
part of Morris' piece is much weaker; it has questionable statements
and the same kind of bias he's trying to expose in Chomsky/Herman's
work.
-----------------------
1) re: the post-war Vietnam evidence. On his website essay
criticizing Chomsky, Bruce Sharp suggests that Chomsky seems to think
(re: Cambodia, in the case Bruce was discussing), that right-wing bias
or liberal pro-US foreign policy bias is best countered not by
objective weighing of all the evidence and making an argument for a
particular figure or picture, but by just throwing pro-leftist
counter-claims out there and then standing aloof on a final judgement.
Or fighting propaganda with "counterpropaganda" as Bruce put it.
Morris was not putting it this way exactly, instead claiming C/H had a
selective bias in the way they analyzed different types of post-war
Vietnam evidence, but I think Bruce Sharp's interpretation is better.
Morris did show that Chomsky used laser-like critical analysis on
refugee claims that were critical of the Vietnamese government, while
neglecting to look skeptically at any positive reports.
The only problem I had with this part of Morris piece is that Morris
seems to condemn, across the board, reports by travelers in Vietnam.
I do not think it's fair to assume that every such traveler invited
into Vietnam was either a communist propagandist or someone naive and
thus duped after a couple of model farm and model factory visits. It
might be correct that *some* have this problem, perhaps even most, but
broad brushing is unfair. I know nothing of Vietnam, but in China I
am familiar with this kind of reporting.
After the Nixon visit, there was a tidal wave of political tour books
and articles that were are uncritical hymns to Mao's China, and far
from all from leftists. Of course there were similar things for other
communist regimes before and since. Though a small minority, there
are a few such writings on Mao's China, from the post-Nixon era and a
few before, that have either stood the test of time as is, or needed
only modest revision. And the control of travel by the state may have
been stronger in China than in post-war Vietnam, I'm not sure, so
maybe religious aid workers in Vietnam had more independent time, thus
a larger % of it would be usuable.
So, the problem was not, in my opinion, that Chomsky/Herman relied on
first hand reports from Quakers or leftist foreigners in Vietnam, but
that they did not apply the same critical eye towards them
case-by-case as he did the negative refugee evidence.
2) re: the part of Morris' essay on C/H's general state violence
comparisons
3 decent points:
a. C/H use the most negative labels for US client regimes while using
still negative but blander labels for left wing dictatorships. Most
people use differential labels depending on their biases, but that
doesn't make it ok for C/H too do so.
b. C/H only look at killings and torture, ignoring rates of political
imprisonment not involving death or torture. Implied is that this
oversight is favorable to communist countries.
c. Morris claims that C/H ignore some bloody leftist, Soviet allied
regimes in Africa.
Some questionable statements:
d. Morris writes: "There is only one regime which has received arms
and aid from the United States, and which has a record of brutality
which is even a noticeable fraction of the brutality of Pol Pot, Idi
Amin, Mao, or the Hanoi politburo. That is the Suharto government in
Indonesia." and later writes "It is an easily calculated fact that
either the Maoist regime alone (whose executed and imprisoned victims
number in the millions) ... has killed more than the combined total of
all civilians killed by American-armed and aided regimes in Asia,
Latin America, and the Middle East, and the Indonesian invaders of
East Timor."
Not that Morris does this, but I notice that many people, including
myself in the past, Chomsky/Herman quite often, shift back and forth
between absolute levels of violence and per-capita levels of violence
as it suits their case, making no attempt to be consistent.
Anyway, how is Vietnam so much more murderous than Suharto's
Indonesia? There were no allegations of a major bloodbath in Vietnam
at the time of this writing (1981). There was later
[Desberats/Jackson's 100,000], but its statistical methods were
apparently found to be erroneous, and this critique was never rebutted
as far as I know.
As for Mao's China, what information is he going on? Taiwan lobbyist
Richard Walker's ludicrous 30-60 million figure (including no famine
deaths), submitted before Congress in 1971 and again in 1979--to try
to ward off derecognition of Taiwan in the first case, and formal
normalization with the PRC in the latter case. Or is he using the US
State Department's 1.8 million civil war + early 1950s executions plus
400,000 Cultural Revolution deaths from Agence France Press (1979)?
It makes a big difference. Incidentally, the population of China
according to the 1953 census was 580 million, in the 1982 census,
around 1 billion.
e. Morris continues "But there are several reasons why the brutality
of the Suharto regime cannot be used to support the Chomsky-Herman
thesis. First, its major act of domestic brutality the massacre of
Communists and suspected Communists in the wake of the aborted
Communist coup in 1965 was carried out with arms and aid supplied by
the Soviet Union and China. The United States was not the principal
foreign supplier of Indonesia when the generals seized power. (Nor is
there any credible evidence of American involvement in the coup.)
I don't know what information he had in 1981, but we know now the US
had been encouraging a coup since the late 1950s. Morris at least
could have noted the glee in which the Johnson administration greeted
the coup (especially MaNamara), and the friendliness of the Nixon and
Ford administrations.
f. "...Finally, the current brutality of the Suharto regime, which
Chomsky devotes most of his attention to, is being directed against
the people of East Timor a former colony of Portugal which Indonesia
is trying to take over by force. The fact that the brutality is being
perpetrated as part of an external war in no way diminishes the
inhumanity of the act. But it is a brutality which is being exercised
as part of the process of foreign military intervention, not as part
of its normal process of domestic rule"
This sounds like an admission that East Timor was not a proper part of
Indonesia, and Ford and Kissinger ok'd aggression with US arms.
g. He continues "...But even if one were to play the game by
Chomsky's rules, and judge the human rights record of a regime by
referring to its behaviour in foreign wars, then Indonesia's cruelty
towards the East Timorese has at least one serious competitor the
Vietnamese invaders of Cambodia. The Vietnamese Communist regime,
which had launched a military invasion of its neighbor under the
pretext of saving the Cambodian people from Pol Pot, had prevented
food and medicines from being delivered to the starving population via
a truck convoy from Thailand. According to the Central Intelligence
Agency study Kampuchea: A Demographic Catastrophe (recommended to me
by Professor Chomsky), the Vietnamese invasion and food embargo caused
700,000 deaths in Cambodia in 1979. This is seven times as many people
as had died (in Chomsky's estimate) in East Timor"
According to Bruce Sharp and Dan Clore, who are the regulars on this
newsgroup most familiar with mainstream scholarship about the early
People's Republic of Kampuchea, this figure is not where close to
correct. I welcome correction from Bruce or Dan if I am
misrepresenting their view. To be fair to Morris, perhaps we have a
lot better information about it now than then.
f. Morris writes: "...Chomsky and Herman make the repression in
Argentina (and alleged American responsibility) one of the
centerpieces of their argument. Yet while the United States had
supplied Argentina with considerable assistance over many years before
1977, it was only in 1976 that the truly repressive Videla regime came
to power. Within a year of the Videla coup, once the nature of the
Argentinian junta had been clearly established, the United States
terminated its arms sales to Argentina. Furthermore, the United States
has continually denounced Argentinian repression in international
forums"
This is partly valid, I think C/H do sometimes overstate the degree to
which a tyrannical right wing regime is a US client state (Chomsky
once tried to link Romania's repression vaguely with US policy).
However, did US intelligence not aid Argentine intelligence even a
little, even if in general opposed to the 'dirty war'? Perhaps Dan
Clore can provide more details here.
Mekong Network
> Oliver Kamm, upon request, emailed me the 1981 Stephen Morris critique
> of Chomsky's "Political Economy of Human Rights" books. For those
> interested in reading it, I subsequently discovered it can also be
> found on Google. The French scholar Serge Thion, in the mid-1990s,
> posted a huge file on the controversy over Ben Kiernan's appointment
> to head the Cambodia Genocide project. Stephen Morris had written a
> letter of protest over this, which started a whole squabble
<lots snipped>
> I can see he has some good points to make, but I also think he has the
> same type of biases to the right as Chomsky does to the left.
<lots more snipulated>
> [Stephen Morris] continues "...But even if one were to play the game by
> Chomsky's rules, and judge the human rights record of a regime by
> referring to its behaviour in foreign wars, then Indonesia's cruelty
> towards the East Timorese has at least one serious competitor the
> Vietnamese invaders of Cambodia. The Vietnamese Communist regime,
> which had launched a military invasion of its neighbor under the
> pretext of saving the Cambodian people from Pol Pot, had prevented
> food and medicines from being delivered to the starving population via
> a truck convoy from Thailand. According to the Central Intelligence
> Agency study Kampuchea: A Demographic Catastrophe (recommended to me
> by Professor Chomsky), the Vietnamese invasion and food embargo caused
> 700,000 deaths in Cambodia in 1979. This is seven times as many people
> as had died (in Chomsky's estimate) in East Timor"
>
> According to Bruce Sharp and Dan Clore, who are the regulars on this
> newsgroup most familiar with mainstream scholarship about the early
> People's Republic of Kampuchea, this figure is not where close to
> correct. I welcome correction from Bruce or Dan if I am
> misrepresenting their view. To be fair to Morris, perhaps we have a
> lot better information about it now than then.
<more snips>
For those who are interested, the URL of Morris' article is
http://www.abbc.com/totus/CGCF/file10Morris.html.
I think Brian's points here are valid. I'd add one other note. Brian
suggested, correctly, that I think the estimate of 700,000 dead during
the first year of PRK rule is high. Not only is that figure high,
Morris is misrepresenting his source: the CIA report does _not_ claim
that there were 700,000 deaths in the first year of the PRK. It
estimates a net population loss of 700,000. That figure includes
refugees who fled to Thailand, not just deaths. In fact, the report
shows that _most_ of the loss is from the exodus of refugees: the
figure works out to (approximately) 400,000 to 500,000 refugees,
depending on which set of estimation assumptions one chooses, meaning
that the death toll would be something on the order of 200,000 to
300,000.
Brian's point that Morris and Chomsky are, to some extent, both
laboring under similar levels of bias is supported by the fact that
Chomsky made a similar, equally unfounded claim about the same CIA
report: Chomsky incorrectly states that the document attributes most
deaths during the Khmer Rouge years to "the Vietnamese invasion."
(http://www.zmag.org/forums/chomcambodforum.htm). For those who wish
to compare the actual report to the dubious interpretations offered by
both Morris and Chomsky, it's online at
http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/demcat.htm.
I think it is also important to note that Morris is being disingenuous
when he blames the Vietnamese and the PRK regime for the deaths that
did occur. Most of the deaths were due to famine, and while the PRK's
_response_ to the famine was flawed, it's unfair to blame the PRK for
the fact that the famine occured.
regards,
Bruce
"If anyone wants me, I'll be in the Angry Dome!"
Stephen Denney
I will just reply briefly to a part of Brian's posting below, namely on
visitors to Vietnam, as cited by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in their
1977 Nation essay and 1979 book After the Cataclysm (PEHR II) on post-75
Indochina.
The period covered in both writings was a time when reunified Vietnam was
at its most closed, totalitarian nature. Some foreigners were able to stay
on in Vietnam for a few months after the change of regimes in April 1975,
but it was then closed off to the West as the country underwent radical
transformation. Not on the scale of the Khmer Rouge, of course, but
nevertheless quite harsh for southerners who were accustomed to enjoying
at least a little freedom.
A handful of westerners were allowed to visit Vietnam during this period
-- mostly people who had been involved in anti-war groups or
organizations promoting friendly relations with the new regime. Some of
them included people with religious organizations, but they were quite
credulous. I recall reading, for example, congressional testimony of a
lady with the National Council of Churches who described her visit to a
re-education camp in Vietnam as if it were a tropical resort. Another
delegation member asked his guide why the regime was so merciful to the
prisoners (former South Vietnam officers and officials), why did they not
execute them instead. I read all the reports that I could find at the
time, but cannot recall a single objective account by an American visitor
to Vietnam during this period. There might have been some French or East
European visitors who presented a more balanced view, but the Americans
who visited were small in number and the circumstances of their visit
tightly controlled.
At that time there were three sources of information about Vietnam: 1)
official statements and publications of the regime; 2) accounts by foreign
visitors; and 3) the testimony of refugees and defectors who lived under
the regime. All three sources were necessary but I would find accounts by
sympathetic visitors to be the least useful.
When I first came across the Chomsky-Herman book I was curious to see what
they had to say about the persecution of Buddhists in Vietnam, since the
top leaders of the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam had been imprisoned
since April 1977, and this church had developed close ties with the
anti-war movement. Documents had been smuggled out of the country
detailing the repression of the church. To my surprise they said nothing.
Instead they suggested Nguyen Cong Hoan, a defector and former congressman
(from both north and south Vietnam) was a liar because his account of
religious repression contradicted the accounts of sympathetic activists
allowed to visit Vietnam.
This is an example of how Chomsky omitted inconvenient evidence in order
to present a slanted view of post-75 Vietnam.
- Steve Denney
bk...@hotmail.com (brian turner) wrote:
> Message-ID: <66dc0679.0302...@posting.google.com>
>
> Oliver Kamm, upon request, emailed me the 1981 Stephen Morris critique
> of Chomsky's "Political Economy of Human Rights" books. For those
> interested in reading it, I subsequently discovered it can also be
> found on Google. The French scholar Serge Thion, in the mid-1990s,
> posted a huge file on the controversy over Ben Kiernan's appointment
> to head the Cambodia Genocide project. Stephen Morris had written a
> letter of protest over this, which started a whole squabble. Thion
> spread the file over 20 separate posts, with titles like "CAMBODIA GEN
> CONTR FILE 1/20" and "CGCF 4/20". The beginning of the file has an
> index of all the contents, and one of the items is Morris's critique
> of Chomsky's PEHR books. There is plenty of other stuff in these
> posts for those interested in the debates over the Khmer Rouge and the
> Indochina wars generally.
>
> Anyway here's my two cents about Morris' critique.
>
> I can see he has some good points to make, but I also think he has the
> g. He continues "...But even if one were to play the game by
> Chomsky's rules, and judge the human rights record of a regime by
> referring to its behaviour in foreign wars, then Indonesia's cruelty
> towards the East Timorese has at least one serious competitor the
> Vietnamese invaders of Cambodia. The Vietnamese Communist regime,
> which had launched a military invasion of its neighbor under the
> pretext of saving the Cambodian people from Pol Pot, had prevented
> food and medicines from being delivered to the starving population via
> a truck convoy from Thailand. According to the Central Intelligence
> Agency study Kampuchea: A Demographic Catastrophe (recommended to me
> by Professor Chomsky), the Vietnamese invasion and food embargo caused
> 700,000 deaths in Cambodia in 1979. This is seven times as many people
> as had died (in Chomsky's estimate) in East Timor"
>
> According to Bruce Sharp and Dan Clore, who are the regulars on this
> newsgroup most familiar with mainstream scholarship about the early
> People's Republic of Kampuchea, this figure is not where close to
> correct. I welcome correction from Bruce or Dan if I am
> misrepresenting their view. To be fair to Morris, perhaps we have a
> lot better information about it now than then.
>
> f. Morris writes: "...Chomsky and Herman make the repression in
> Argentina (and alleged American responsibility) one of the
> centerpieces of their argument. Yet while the United States had
> supplied Argentina with considerable assistance over many years before
> 1977, it was only in 1976 that the truly repressive Videla regime came
> to power. Within a year of the Videla coup, once the nature of the
> Argentinian junta had been clearly established, the United States
> terminated its arms sales to Argentina. Furthermore, the United States
> has continually denounced Argentinian repression in international
> forums"
>
> This is partly valid, I think C/H do sometimes overstate the degree to
> which a tyrannical right wing regime is a US client state (Chomsky
> once tried to link Romania's repression vaguely with US policy).
> However, did US intelligence not aid Argentine intelligence even a
> little, even if in general opposed to the 'dirty war'? Perhaps Dan
> Clore can provide more details here.
> -- end of forwarded message --
>