Chomsky and Herman attempt to downplay the significance of child labor by claiming that "vocational training" for twelve-year-old children is "not generally regarded as an atrocity in a poor peasant society."(90) The argument is a waste of ink. No amount of scholarly doublespeak can conceal the fact that child slavery is not "vocational training."

https://www.mekong.net/cambodia/chomsky.htm

https://chomsky.info/19770625/

"What was portrayed as a destructive, backward-looking policy motivated by doctrinaire hatred was actually a rationally conceived strategy for dealing with the urgent problems that faced postwar Cambodia," wrote Gareth Porter and George Hilderbrand in their 1977 book Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution. "Cambodia is only the latest victim of the enforcement of an ideology that demands that social revolutions be portrayed as negatively as possible, rather than as responses to real human needs which the existing social and economic structure was incapable of meeting."

https://www.amazon.com/Cambodia-Starvation-Revolution-Gareth-Porter/dp/0853453829