“Suspecting that we would be accused of apologetics for the Khmer Rouge, Chomsky and I went to some pains to point out Khmer Rouge crimes and to stress that our purpose was to emphasize the discrepancy between available facts and media claims and to lay bare what we saw to be a propaganda campaign of selective indignation and benevolence. This effort was futile. With such a powerful propaganda bandwagon underway, from the very beginning the mass media were closed to oppositional voices on the issue, and any scepticism, even identification of outright lies, was treated with hostility and tabbed apologetics for the Khmer Rouge. Our crime was the very act of criticizing the workings of the propaganda system and its relation to US power and policy, instead of focusing attention on approved villainy, which could be assailed violently and ignorantly, without penalty. The issue was framed as a simple one: those for and against Pol Pot. […] I would estimate with some confidence that over 90 percent of the journalists who mentioned Chomsky's name in connection with Cambodia never looked at his original writings on the subject, but merely regurgitated a quickly adopted line. The critics who helped formulate the line also could hardly be bothered looking at the actual writings; the method was almost invariably the use of a few selected quotations taken out of context and embedded in a mass of sarcastic and violent denunciation.”

— Edward S. Herman

Herman, “Pol Pot, Faurisson, and the Process of Derogation”, in Otero, Ed. (1994), Noam Chomsky: Critical Assessments, pp. 598-615.
1990s

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Edward S. Herman 55

American journalist 1925–2017

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“Here is the story, as far as I can trace it, of Chomsky's effort to "minimize" or "deny" the harvest of the Khmer Rouge. It will be seen that the phony "credibility" of the charge against him derives from his lack of gullibility about the American mass killings in Indochina (routinely euphemized or concealed by large sections of the domestic intelligentsia). From this arises the idea that Chomsky might have said such things; was the sort of person who could decline to criticize "the other side"; was a well-known political extremist. Couple this with the slothful ease of the accusation, the reluctance of certain authors to prove they are not unpatriotic dupes, and you have a scapegoat in the making.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

" The Chorus and Cassandra https://web.archive.org/web/20070220102220/http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/other/85-hitchens.html" in: Grand Street Magazine, Autumn 1985: On Noam Chomsky/Cambodia.
1980s

“I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. I encouraged the Thai to help the Khmer Rouge. The question was how to help the Cambodian people. Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him. But China could.”

Zbigniew Brzeziński (1928–2017) Polish-American political scientist

Elizabeth Becker, When The War Was Over..., 1979, p. 435 http://books.google.com/books?id=3NHoI2HoFiQC&pg=PA435&lpg=PA435&dq=%22i+encouraged+the+chinese+to+support+pol+pot%22+becker&source=web&ots=XLHBFETcFH&sig=kznWEHGxoTAgUR-BTChSThlGrpk (Brzezinski responded in the letter the NYT http://www.nytimes.com/1998/04/22/opinion/l-pol-pot-s-evil-had-many-faces-china-acted-alone-605387.html clarifying his postion at the time: "China acted alone [... Becker's article] asserts flatly as if it was a fact that the Carter Administration "helped arrange continued Chinese aid" to Pol Pot.[...] we told the Chinese explicitly that in our view Pol Pot was an abomination and that the United States would have nothing to do with him directly or indirectly.").
Disputed

“I, for one, will not have [the Vietcong] insulted by any comparison to the forces of Zarqawi, the Fedayeen Saddam, and the criminal underworld now arrayed against us. These depraved elements are the Iraqi Khmer Rouge.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

2006-06-05
The Hell of War
Slate
1091-2339
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2006/06/the_hell_of_war.html
2000s, 2006

“Even today, as regards East Timor, where our brutal Indonesian satellite (authors of the 1965-1966 butcheries) have very possibly killed as many people as did the Khmer Rouge, there is a virtually complete blackout of information in the Free Press. This is a bloodbath carried out by a friendly power and is thus of little interest to our readers. It is a “benign bloodbath” in our terminology.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Chomsky and Herman (1979), The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, p. 22.
Quotes 1960s-1980s, 1970s

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

Source: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, with Noam Chomsky, 1979, p. 22.

“The only difference between "propaganda" and "education," really, is in the point of view. The advocacy of what we believe in is education. The advocacy of what we don't believe in is propaganda.”

Edward Bernays (1891–1995) American public relations consultant, marketing pioneer

Source: Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923), p. 212

“Talk about the reality, about the facts, when to talk about children being killed, children of who? where? how? you're talking about propaganda, about media campaign, about sometimes fake pictures on the internet, we cannot talk but ones of the facts. We can talk about the facts, I cannot talk about allegations.”

Bashar al-Assad (1965) President of Syria

Interview with Bill Neely https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45odEv_1DAY (July 2016) on " NBC: Exclusive Interview with Bashar al-Assad https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/syria-s-president-bashar-al-assad-speaks-nbc-news-n608746"

“Perhaps this is an obvious point, but the democratic postulate is that the media are independent and committed to discovering and reporting the truth, and that they do not merely reflect the world as powerful groups wish it to be perceived. Leaders of the media claim that their new choices rest on unbiased professional and objective criteria, and they have support for this contention in the intellectual community. If, however, the powerful are able to fix the premises of discourse, to decide what the general populace is allowed to see, hear, and think about, and to “manage” public opinion by regular propaganda campaigns, the standard view of how the system works is at serious odds with reality.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Quotes 1990s, 1990-1994, Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, 1992

“I think that everybody tries to produce what Marshall McLuhan called a ‘counter environment.’ That is, you set yourself in opposition to the kind of mass tendencies which the media set up. That’s what’s so important about the humanities in the university…There’s something of a personal dialogue between one human being and another. And the fact that this dialogue is being carried out in the teeth of all the mass emotion techniques of the electronic media is a very important side of the humanities.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

"Canadian Energy: Dialogues on Creativity: Northrop Frye." Descant 12, no. 32-3 (1981).
"Quotes", Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008)

“I mean, the realization that crime does not begin when you murder people. Crime begins with propaganda, even if such propaganda is for a good cause. The moment propaganda turns against another nation or against any human being, evil starts”

Hans Fritzsche (1900–1953) German Nazi official

To Leon Goldensohn, April 6, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004
Context: What I would like to emanate from the darkness of this tragedy is one spark of life. I mean, the realization that crime does not begin when you murder people. Crime begins with propaganda, even if such propaganda is for a good cause. The moment propaganda turns against another nation or against any human being, evil starts. Whereas the Germans started propaganda toward the end of this tragedy, you Allies stand at the beginning of the tragedy.

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Edward S. Herman 55

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