Chomsky wrote off a live genocide as a fabrication while the killing was still underway. In 1977, with Pol Pot still in power, he wrote in The Nation that refugee accounts of Khmer Rouge executions were fabrications built to discredit the left.

Chomsky wrote off a live genocide as a fabrication while the killing was still underway.

In 1977, with Pol Pot still in power, he wrote in The Nation that refugee accounts of Khmer Rouge executions were fabrications built to discredit the left.

Before the regime fell in 1979, about 1.7 million people, nearly a quarter of Cambodia, were dead from execution, starvation, and disease.

After that, he and Edward Herman treated survivor testimony as inherently unreliable and blamed Western journalists for inflating the violence to justify American intervention.

They accused François Ponchaud of revising his death toll upward for political effect. He denied it but Chomsky never retracted.

When Vietnam’s invasion made the atrocities undeniable, he recast it as a methods critique. The 1977 piece had already used “fabrication” and “conscious restructuring of history” for the mainstream accounts.

That same move is still the default on Xinjiang, Venezuela, and Cuba. The method outlived the dead.

— Rothmus 🏴 (@Rothmus) October 6, 2026