A monkish man of simple needs

Holocaust-denier Israel Shamir, recently discovered gracing the pages of the Morning Star with his views on Pussy Riot, revisits Pol Pot at Counterpunch (via): 

The Pol Pot the Cambodians remember was not a tyrant, but a great patriot and nationalist, a lover of native culture and native way of life. He was brought up in  royal palace circles; his aunt was a concubine of the previous king. He studied in Paris, but instead of making money and a career, he returned home, and spent a few years dwelling with forest tribes to learn from the peasants. He felt compassion for the ordinary village people who were ripped off on a daily basis by the city folk, the comprador parasites. He built an army to defend the countryside from these power-wielding robbers. Pol Pot,  a monkish man of simple needs, did not seek wealth, fame or power for himself. He had one great ambition: to terminate the failing colonial capitalism in Cambodia, return to village tradition, and from there, to build a new country from scratch....

The Cambodians I spoke to pooh-poohed the dreadful stories of Communist Holocaust as a western invention. They reminded me of what went on:  their brief history of troubles began in 1970, when the Americans chased away their legitimate ruler, Prince Sihanouk,  and replaced him with their proxy military dictator Lon Nol. Lon Nol’s middle name was Corruption, and his followers stole everything they could, transferred their ill-gotten gains abroad then moved to the US.  On top of this came US bombing raids. The peasants ran to the forest guerrillas of Khmer Rouge, which was led by a few Sorbonne graduates, and eventually succeeded in kicking out Lon Nol and his American supporters.

In 1975, Pol Pot took over the country, devastated by a US bombing campaign of Dresden ferocity, and saved it, they say...

And so on. 

This barely credible garbage appears under an advert for the next edition of Counterpunch: a special 32-page tribute issue for the late Alexander Cockburn. Appropriately, you may think. It certainly provides a telling perspective on the direction that Counterpunch, under Cockburn's editorship, has been travelling.

Comments

[RichardPowell]

Crumbs. Surely a candidate for the worst piece of "journalism" ever to appear on the internet? It's not just the general thrust of the article that's a monstrous lie - it's the supporting detail too, such as the factoid that NGO people earn more in a minute than a Khmer in a month. I wonder which Khmers Shamir spoke to - most people are too young to remember the 70s. But those who lived through the 70s under KR rule are astonishingly open about what they went through, based on my experience on three visits about a decade ago.

[JC]

Despicable. What's barely credible is how people can make a living writing this sort of garbage. I suppose there'll always be a market for genocide denial among the ideological bigots of the Far Left and the Far Right and someone will be there to tap into it.