alt Hacker NewsOk, lot of stuff to unpack here, but I'll stick to just pointing out obvious misinfo, which is often repeated:
Chomsky never backed the Khmer rouge, he questioned some of the claims and western focus on the Khmer rouge, which was ignoring US culpability. He also never denied that the Khmer rouge were committing atrocities.
Was he wrong? Yes, at least in specific instances. But he was never outright supportive of the Khmer rouge. This is very old propaganda.
I've read Chomsky's work (more extensively than most people here, I'd wager, given I have degrees in both polsci and linguistics) and his sympathy to the Khmer Rouge was pretty clear.
Chomsky was about as pro-Khmer Rouge as Tucker Carlson is pro-Russia; he's not out there waving flags and singing patriotic songs for them, but he's sure as hell doing a lot of very useful work "just asking questions" about biolabs in Ukraine / the extent to which the US may have "provoked" the Khmer Rouge to do what it did. If someone wrote equivalent things about the atrocities in Nazi Germany, we would not be mincing words about that person's sympathies. Chomsky ought to be treated with the same intellectual honesty.
Chomsky was a useful idiot for murderous tyrants. And a truly wonderful linguist. Ah, the duality of man.