Linguist Noam Chomsky was among the academics who attempted to refute Barron, Paul, Ponchaud, and Lacouture. On June 6, 1977, Chomsky and his co-author Edward S. Herman published a review of the books by Barron and Paul, Ponchaud, and Porter in The Nation. They called Barron and Paul's book, Murder of a Gentle Land, "third rate propaganda" and part of a "vast and unprecedented propaganda campaign" against the Khmer Rouge. According to Chomsky and Herman, Ponchaud's book Year Zero was "serious and worth reading" but "the serious reader will find much to make him somewhat wary." The two author's wrote that the refugee stories of Khmer Rouge atrocities should be treated with great "care and caution" as no independent verification was available.[12]
In the American edition of his book, Ponchaud responded to Chomsky.
"He [Chomsky] wrote me a letter on October 19, 1977 in which he drew my attention to the way it [Year Zero] was being misused by antirevolutionary propagandists. He has made it my duty to 'stem the flood of lies' about Cambodia -- particularly, according to him, those propagated by Anthony Paul and John Barron in Murder of a Gentle Land."[13]
By contrast, Chomsky was highly favorable towards Porter and Hildebrand's book, which, according to journalist Andrew Anthony in the London Observer, "cravenly rehashed the Khmer Rouge's most outlandish lies to produce a picture of a kind of radical bucolic idyll."[14] Chomsky also opined that the documentation of Porter's book was superior to that of Ponchaud's -- although almost all the references cited by Porter came from Khmer Rouge documents while Ponchaud's came from interviews with Cambodian refugees.[15]
