Seasons Greedy

Tis the season to be Greedy
Fa la la la la!

People race around and make Fat Cats happy.
Fa la la la la!




$pend and $pend until your broke and burned out.
Fa la la la la!




Did Jesus Christ really want us to celebrate his birth this way?
Fa la la la la!



Christians stole their decorations from early Pagans.
Fa la la la la!
Today it’s just a business venture.
Fa la la la la!

Some still pay for doubting the mainstream news media

Pol Pot is probably one of the most discredited revolutionary Marxist leaders of the 20th Century. His four year government is now considered a disaster. Outside of Cambodia, he has few, if any admirers. His crimes are almost unanimously acknowledged, although the scope and numbers are still debated by some people. No one doubts that Poll Pot, under his Communist Party of Kampuchea, unnecessarily executed innocent people, overworked some of them, starved some of them, even tortured some. These crimes may have caused up to a million unnecessary deaths.
With that in mind, it would seem a dead subject to debate the merits of Pol Pot’s government. But it isn’t. There seems to be a chorus of people from both the right and the left, who want to castigate, ridicule and discredit anyone who wrote anything positive about the Pol Pot years, regardless of when they wrote it. That would include myself for an article I published opposing Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia and occupation lasting through the 1980s. The article is outdated by now, (see below) but don’t tell anti-Pol Pot hardliners who continue to trash Noam Chomsky and many other academic and political activists who originally defended Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea.
Typical are the following:

The Khmer Rouge Canon 1975-1979:
The Standard Total Academic View on Cambodia
Sophal Ear:

”-most effective apologists in the West”
“-an unequivocal record of complicity existed between a generation of academics who studied Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge.”

The hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky
by Keith Windschuttle:

“Although information was hard to come by, Chomsky suggested in an article in 1977 that post-war Cambodia was probably similar to France after liberation at the end of World War II when thousands of enemy collaborators were massacred within a few months. This was to be expected, he said, and was a small price to pay for the positive outcomes of the new government of Pol Pot. Chomsky cited a book by two American left-wing authors, Gareth Porter and George Hildebrand, who had “presented a carefully documented study of the destructive American impact on Cambodia and the success of the Cambodian revolutionaries in overcoming it, giving a very favorable picture of their programs and policies.”
By this time, however, there were two other books published on Cambodia that took a very different line. The American authors John Barron and Anthony Paul called their work Murder of a Gentle Land and accused the Pol Pot regime of mass killings that amounted to genocide. François Ponchaud’s Cambodia Year Zero repeated the charge.
Chomsky reviewed both books, together with a number of press articles, in The Nation in June 1977. He accused them of publishing little more than anti-communist propaganda. Articles in The New York Times Magazine and The Christian Science Monitor suggested that the death toll was between one and two million people out of a total population of 7.8 million. Chomsky mocked their total and picked at their sources, showing some were dubious and that a famous photograph of forced labor in the Cambodian countryside was actually a fake.”

"Averaging Wrong Answers: Noam Chomsky and the Cambodia Controversy"
By Bruce Sharp:

“A peculiar irony is at the heart of this controversy: Noam Chomsky, the man who has spent years analyzing propaganda, is himself a propagandist. Whatever one thinks of Chomsky in general, whatever one thinks of his theories of media manipulation and the mechanisms of state power, Chomsky's work with regard to Cambodia has been marred by omissions, dubious statistics, and, in some cases, outright misrepresentations. On top of this, Chomsky continues to deny that he was wrong about Cambodia. He responds to criticisms by misrepresenting his own positions, misrepresenting his critics' positions, and describing his detractors as morally lower than "neo-Nazis and neo-Stalinists."(2) Consequently, his refusal to reconsider his words has led to continued misinterpretations of what really happened in Cambodia. Misconceptions, it seems, have a very long life.”

And:

“The first evidence of this is apparent in December 1972, in Chomksy's introduction for Cambodia in the Southeast Asia War by Malcolm Caldwell and Lek Tan. In the introduction, Chomsky writes, quite rightly, "The misery and destruction for which Nixon and Kissinger bear direct responsibility are crimes that can never be forgotten…..
It is a rather drastic jump to move from remembering the crimes of Nixon and Kissinger, to suggesting that the Khmer Rouge would be "liberators" who would usher in "economic development and social justice." By 1972, there was already disturbing evidence of the brutality of the Cambodian communists, and only a naive romantic would have seen them as just and noble freedom fighters. Caldwell, however, was a devout Marxist, and not surprisingly his book makes no mention of the reports of Khmer Rouge brutality.
This, in essence, was a sign of things to come. Unlike the crimes of the West, the crimes of the Khmer Rouge were not to be illuminated. They were to be obfuscated.”

It’s not hard to see why the right wants to discredit left-wing academics. Such academics are critical of the U.S. Empire and its democratic illusions. The right also want to create a constant connection between Pol Pot and other Marxists of any kind.
But what is surprising is the leftist who have gotten on the bandwagon. According to these liberals, leftists, etc, we were supposed to accept the reports of atrocities revealed to us by members of the press who regularly lied to us (and still do today). Their reports were based onrather flimsy evidence at the time, the testimony of a few refugees. Chomsky pointed out in his own article these kinds of claims were used in Central America against leftist guerrillas.

"Chomsky: more on Atrocities in Cambodia"
Z-Mag:

“There is a doctrine to be established: we must focus solely on the (horrendous) crimes of Pol Pot, thus providing a retrospective justification for (mostly unstudied) US crimes, and an ideological basis for further "humanitarian intervention" in the future -- the Pol Pot atrocities were explicitly used to justify US intervention in Central America in the '80s, leaving hundreds of thousands of corpses and endless destruction.”

Chomsky also brings up President Richard Nixon’s meddling in Cambodia. That action contributed to a bloody civil war. Nixon secretly sent to Cambodia 30,000 US troops, and US planes dropped a quarter-of-a-million tons of bombs in the eastern part of the country in 140 days. That not only killed a lot of people, but left much of the farmland useless. The CIA, under Nixon, overthrew the nationalistic Norodom Sihanouk regime and replaced it with the corrupt and incompetent right-wing-military leader Lon Nol. By 1974 most of Cambodia’s countryside was under the control of the National United Front of Kampuchea, a coalition that was mostly Norodom Sihanouk, a few of his supporters, and Pol Pot’s Communist Party of Kampuchea. The CPK (called the Khmer Rouge in the press) made up 90 percent of the NUFK, while Sihanouk served as a figure head, for recruitment purposes. Lon Nol’s Khmer Republic government, was so corrupt that his generals fought with “ghost troops” (names on paper so military officers could collect and pocket their pay). Lon Nol’s army quickly lost control of the country and controlled little more than the capitol, Phnom Penh.

Chomsky said:
“The CIA (in its postwar demographic study) estimates deaths in the first phase of the "decade of genocide" at 600,000 (of course, they don't regard the US as responsible). In 1975, just before the Khmer Rouge takeover, Western doctors in Phnom Penh were estimating deaths at 8000 a month -- what was going on in the countryside, where the bombing was in progress, no one tried to estimate. They also predicted that there would be a "lost generation," as a result of the horrendous attack on the countryside. The only extensive study of this that I know is Gary Porter and George Hildebrand's book, but since it is a heavily documented study of US atrocities, it is undiscussable here. Progressives, like "Progressive" editor Matthew Rothschild, regard it as outrageous even to say that the book is well-documented (though it transparently is); written in 1976, it is mostly devoted to US crimes, therefore even to cite it is criminal. We have to agree that before the KR takeover, Cambodia was a "gentle land" of happy people: to question that is another outrage, according to standard doctrine, going as far to the dissident side as Rothschild and "In These Times."

In my book Memoirs Of A Drugged-up, Sex-crazed Yippie ---Tales from the 70's Counterculture: Drugs, Sex, Politics and Rock and Roll, I discussed my illusions about Pol Pot’s revolution and what I later found out to be the truth about the four year period of Democratic Kampuchea. It was a nationalist peasant revolution, badly blundered by its leaders. Pol Pot believed he would somehow be seen in the future as being more important and greater than Mao (毛泽东). Today there seems a rise in Maoism, world-wide, while Pol Pot is largely forgotten or dismissed as a fluke.
I still feel Vietnam took advantages of Cambodia when they invaded and many scholars now believe Democratic Kampuchea wanted war with Vietnam to avoid seeing their government on the verge of collapse. They would have been overthrown anyway. And today, there is no socialist program in Cambodia of any kind.
So even with this issue behind us, I suppose there are those who will condemn me to academic damnation for ever doubting our own bourgeois news services. Even though they lied in the past and lie today, I was supposed to believe what they said on Cambodia. I haven’t been to Cambodia, but I have been to El Salvador and Nicaragua. I did find two different countries than those I read about in our news media. I also doubted the credibility of Vietnam's and the Soviet Union’s news media as well – another crime according to some leftist thinkers.










Noam Chomsky

"Kampuchea Today: A Response to Hoang Tung,”

Contemporary Marxism,
No. 12 – 13, Spring 1986, p. 64 - 67

By Steve Otto


The debate over Vietnam's occupation of Kampuchea has divided many people on the Left. The Vietnamese position, which many people in the U.S. and Canadian Left support, is that the present Kampuchean government is an independent nation. In a speech to the U.N. General Assembly on October 21, 1981, concerning a ne­gotiated settlement to the Kampuchea problem, the Vietnamese claimed that there was no "Kampuchea problem" and hence there could be no "comprehensive settlement." With this statement the Vietnamese were trying to ignore the real situation in Kampuchea.
Since that time, the Vietnamese have made a few proposals of their own for a negotiated settlement. These include negotiations with the non-Khmer Rouge members of the Democratic Kam­puchea Coalition, a dialogue with China, and a proposal to allow some Khmer Rouge members to enter the government, provided they come in as individuals and not as a group. They still refuse to negotiate with the Khmer Rouge. This indicates that the Vietnam­ese now realize that the "Kampuchea problem" is no longer a prob­lem they can afford to ignore.
After the Vietnamese began their invasion and occupation, both they and the Soviets started their own propaganda campaign to dis­credit the Khmer Rouge. Since China was and still is the Khmer Rouge's only real ally, and since China has lost most of its influence among Third World, communist, and other Left groups, it is dif­ficult for the average person to get unbiased accounts presenting the other side of the issue.
The present government of Kampuchea, headed by Heng Sam­rin, is entirely dependent on Vietnam for survival. Not only does Vietnam have 180,000 troops in Kampuchea, it also has Vietnam­ese officials that playa principal administrative role, overseeing most of the work of the Phnom Penh government. I It is believed that the present government would collapse to the anti-Vietnamese almost immediately if the Vietnamese pulled out. This contradicts the idea of an independent nation.
Recent reports indicate that the Democratic Kampuchea Coali­tion has grown in size and is beginning to gain some support inside Kampuchea.2 At the same time the People's Republic of Kam­puchea has been unable to build an effective army to counter the rebels on its own.
Some of the statements made by Hoang Tung in his interview with Kathleen Gough (in this issue), contradict his statement that Kampuchea is not a satellite of Vietnam. In his statement that Viet­nam's zone of security is very modest compared to the military alli­ances of the U.S. and Canada, he is admitting that Vietnam has a sphere of influence similar to but much smaller than that of the U.S. or Canada. Tung is trying to down-play the imperialist nature of Vietnam's Kampuchea policy by pointing fingers elsewhere. But a little imperialism is still imperialism.
Tung criticized Romania and North Korea for their support of the Pol Pot regime. These countries are Marxist-Leninist countries that have taken pride in their status as unaligned, independent so­cialist states. This concept is very popular with many Third World people who do not want their country dominated by the Soviets any more than they want domination by the U.S. or Western imperi­alism. North Korea's stand on Kampuchea has not prevented it from having good relations and support from most of the other progressive Third World countries, including Nicaragua, Mozam­bique, and Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe also voted in favor of the Demo­cratic Kampuchea Coalition in the U.N. General Assembly.
Tung said, "At least 9 million people were killed by Stalin, one way or another." Yet he is willing to give Stalin credit for bringing the U.S.S.R. out of poverty, and for his fight against Hitler. But he fails to credit the Khmer Rouge with their remarkable agriculture program, which increased rice production by growing rice through the dry seasons. They did this by building an extensive irrigation system and implementing a program of water conservation.3 Tung uses the figure of 3 million people killed by Pol Pot; less biased ac­counts of the killings are closer to one and a half million. Of these, one third were believed to be executions and the rest indirect deaths resulting from overwork or inadequate food rations.4
This is not to say that killing a million people, as opposed to 3 million, is justified. The point is that the issue needs to be dealt with objectively. When the Khmer Rouge came to power, the Western media immediately began exploiting their problems and distorting the facts. While reports of the killings had a base in truth, other sto­ries didn't. It was reported by the Western media that vehicles were abandoned in junk-piles because the Khmer Rouge condemned them as relics of Western imperialism. Actually, the vehicles were disas­sembled so the parts could be used for irrigation machinery.5
Tung's comment that both Pol Pot and Mao believed "it was necessary to kill a percentage of people" is a gross oversimplifica­tion. China under Mao used executions only for the most extreme cases of antisocial behavior, mostly relating to loss of life of land­lords who committed extremely brutal acts against peasants.6
Mao himself has been quoted as saying:
"A head isn't a leek. It doesn't grow again once it's been cut. If you cut if off wrongfully, then even if you want to correct your error, there's no way of doing it."7
While socialism takes away the basic impetus toward colonialism and imperialism which is inherent in modern capitalist society, it does not mean an automatic end to all imperialist tendencies. The Soviets' invasion of Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and the present occupation of Afghanistan, are proof of this. These policies have not been popular with the people of the nations involved. These ac­tions have also been condemned by most of the Western Left. The Soviets are learning the same lesson the U.S. learned in Vietnam: the people of any given country will actively oppose the presence of foreign troops on their soil. The Vietnamese are experiencing a similar situation in Kampuchea.
It could be argued that the government of Pol Pot was brutal ­therefore overthrowing it was a humanitarian act. Since the guerril­las have gained support and have grown in strength, and since the present government is not able to produce an effective army, it seems that not all Kampucheans agree that Vietnamese occupation is preferable to the Khmer Rouge, which makes up almost three fourths of the Democratic Kampuchea Coalition.
This argument is similar to that of the British in Northern Ire­land. The British claim that there would be a bloody civil war and most of the Catholics would be slaughtered if they pulled out. How­ever, it is the Catholics who have rejected this claim, and, in fact, support for the IRA is growing.
If Vietnam is justified in saving the Kampucheans from their mistakes in Kampuchea, can the U.S. use the same excuse to over­throw the brutal and repressive Khomeini regime? Would the Irani­an people appreciate a move like this?
As the U.S. anti-imperialist movement continues to focus on colonialist and neocolonialist ties in Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere, we should remain consistent with the theme of self-determination for all people. Each country has the right to develop its own brand of socialism at its own pace. Naturally there will be some mistakes. There will be countries whose revolutions will bring regressive rather than progressive policies. The U.S. Left has a right, if not an obligation, to speak out against regimes that rely on brutality. But that does not mean an endorsement of inva­sion and occupation, even if that invasion is by another socialist gov­ernment.
Democratic Kampuchea was an independent, neutral, and non­aligned country, which had come to power through a legitimate revolution against U.S. imperialism and its lackey, Lon Nol.8 If there is to be a change, it should come from the Kampucheans.
Those in the U.S. Left who continue to support the Vietnamese puppet government could experience embarrassment if the so-called independent government becomes more isolated and dependent on foreign support. We can support U.N. resolutions which call for a comprehensive political settlement involving negotiations and repre­sentation of all Kampuchean parties and a total withdrawal of all foreign troops.

NOTES:

I. The Guardian (Jan. 5, 1983).
2. U.S. News and World Report (Aug. 8, 1983).
3. George C. Hildebrand and Gareth Porter, Cambodia: Starvation and Revolu­tion, (Monthly Review Press, 1976), p. 74.
4. Ben Kiernan, The Guardian (Dee. 29, 1982).
5. Hildebrand and Porter, op. cit., p. 15.
6. John and Elsie Collier, China's Socialist Revolution, (Monthly Review Press,
1973), p. 113.
7. Time (Sept. 20, 1976).
8. Group of Kampuchean Residents in America, Black Paper, Facts and Evi­dences of the Acts of Aggression and Annexation of Vietnam Against Kampuchea, (Department of Press and Information of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Demo­cratic Kampuchea, Sept. 1978).

Turkey Day is coming soon

In a few short weeks it will be Thanksgiving, otherwise known as Turkey Day. It’s only fitting that this site provides a turkey of our own.


According to the Washingtonpost.com, November 14, 2005:
“Amid all the tumbling poll numbers of late, (President George) Bush's biggest problem is this: A sizeable majority of Americans -- 55 percent according to the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll -- believe that he intentionally misled the American public in making his case for war in Iraq.”

Kansas School Board trashes science standards/ attacks public education

The new science standards for Kansas schools are more pieces of the puzzle, of an agenda designed to render public education a dead and useless institution. Recently they put a man in the position of “education commissioner,” Bob Corkins, who was a lobbyist against public funding for education. Since he had no experience for the job, he has tried to hire consultants, at the taxpayer’s expense, to tell him how to do his job. He had no experience holding any other office.
Now they have trashed our science standards and sent Kansas Schools back to the middle ages.
The new standards are highly critical of evolution and clearly favor a religious explanation for the existence of life on earth, as well as denying evolutionary changes. They include many of the arguments of the Intelligent Design school of thought.
Kansas Education Board member Steve Abrams has already said he wants science to include the supernatural rather than just scientific fact.
Next on their agenda is vouchers for faith based schools. They will work with their allies in the legislature for that idea.
This is an embarrassing time to live in Kansas. The present school board seems out to totally destroy public education. The real losers here are the students who won’t have the necessary science skills for the average college or university.


At this point, it would be an insult to the apes to suggest we descended from them. Apes are smarter than the idiots that the fundamentalist Christian right has voted in charge of our education system.
Upset? Who can blame him? He’s smarter than Bob Corkins.

Memoirs of a Drugged-Up, Sex-Crazed Yippie

Memoirs of a Drugged-Up, Sex-Crazed Yippie takes the reader through the life of a 1970s counter-culture drug user. Mark Spies goes from casual pot smoking to habitual use of pharmaceutical narcotics and cocaine.




Due to the changing sexual attitudes, Spies has several unconventional sexual encounters. The 1970s brought us the "Woodstock generation."


There was a sense of idealism that developed at the beginning and died at the end of that decade. Many counter-culture books focus on the 1960s, yet there are plenty of events in the 1970s that deserve attention.






Nixon's war in Vietnam and Cambodia dominated the news and affected America's youth. Nixon's war on drugs impacted the counter-culture life style. Then there was punk rock, disco, casual cocaine use and revolutions braking out around the world by 1979.With politics in the background, this book gives the reader a look at drug use and the difficult business of drug dealing.



The drugs, sexual attitudes,




music and politics made the 1970s what they were. Taken as a whole, this book will give some insight into the people and events of the 1970s counter-culture.

Steve Otto is a free-lance writer, living in Maize, KS. He is the author of War on Drugs/ War on People, published by Ide House, 1995, an expose of government corruption connected with the "war on drugs." Otto has published numerous articles in magazines, journals and newspapers.

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