After the Cataclysm: The Political Economy of Human Rights: Volume II [Hardcover]

Noam Chomsky (Author), Edward S. Herman (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 392 pages
• Publisher: South End Press (July 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 089608101X
• ISBN-13: 978-0896081017
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,924,209 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Cuts through official propaganda, September 30, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (Keithville, LA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: After the Cataclysm: The Political Economy of Human Rights: Volume II (Paperback)

Nowhere does the book praise "Stalinism." The issue is simply that of a colonial power smashing a national movement. In the 19th Century the prevailing ideollogy might have been Christiandom vs. Islam; by the 1960's it was the "Free World" vs. "Godless Communism." The essential power relatons of empire remain the same. To criticise the larger power and its bullying tactics is not to whitewash the other side; but the normal human reaction among the unbrainwashed is to take the side of the little guy fighting for his life over the big fat aggressor.

17 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beware Imperialist Running Dogs!, January 24, 2000

By 

Octavio Solaris (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: After the Cataclysm: The Political Economy of Human Rights: Volume II (Hardcover)

A book that begs us to call into serious question the nature of the society in which we, live. Using examples from postwar Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, it presents the broader issue, of "how our system really works": Government, media, and such.

36 of 86 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A disgraceful love letter to Pol Pot and Ieng Sary, March 3, 2002

By 

Roger Williams (Providence, RI) - See all my reviews

This review is from: After the Cataclysm: The Political Economy of Human Rights: Volume II (Paperback)

Ensconced in the ivory tower of American academia, neither Noam Chomsky nor Edward Herman would have survived day one of Cambodia's infamous "Year Zero" - an "agrarian reform" that led to the deaths of roughly two million people - one quarter of the population of Cambodia.

Luckily for Chomsky, the governor of Massachusetts (Chomsky is a linguistics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA) did not summarily round up, torture, convict and execute the intelligensia and bourgeois classes in Massachusetts. Sadly for Cambodia (or Kampuchea, if you prefer) Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge government did just this in Cambodia. Under the rule of the Khmer Rouge, the "crime" of being an elementary school teacher, to say nothing of being a tenured university professor!, was excuse enough for the revolutionary heroes Chomsky sings the praises of in "After The Cataclysm", to kill you and your entire family.

Chomsky's book fails in every conceivable way when analyzing the bloody regime of Pol Pot, attempting to write off refugee reports of the unimaginably large scale atrocities as the spin of an imperialist media seeking to defame the agrarian revolution. Chomsky could not have been more wrong, nor proved more valuable a western mouthpiece for one of the most brutal dictators in living memory.

The fiery anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism polemics and philippics that were Chomsky's milieu during the Vietnam war pigeonholed his analysis of the Pol Pot regime, and it shows in this book. After his bitter condemnations of anything even vaguely pro-American in Asian politics, Chomsky had ideologially painted himself into a corner. Rather than renounce one ounce of his invective, he instead wrote this book, which regardless of intent, reads as an apologist eulogy to the Khmer Rouge.

I give this book five stars because it's a five star work on the excesses of the old guard left in American academic circles, and a lingering stench on Chomsky's reputation. Had Chomsky had the integrity and courage to admit that the emperor Pol Pot had no clothes on, this book never would have been written....The disingenuousness presented in "After The Cataclysm" is nearly too astounding, as if written as a savage and bitter satire of professional academics-cum-polemicists. It's not, and academia is left tarnished for it.