<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>qsort</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s completely irrelevant that a promise was or wasn&amp;#x27;t made. NATO is a defensive alliance whose members join voluntarily, we don&amp;#x27;t go around planting flags with the Safari icon by right of conquest.&lt;p&gt;Hinting at a moral equivalence -- because let&amp;#x27;s be honest, that&amp;#x27;s what&amp;#x27;s happening here -- between Russian expansion and NATO &amp;quot;expansion&amp;quot; is at the very least intellectually dishonest.</text><parent_chain><item><author>TaupeRanger</author><text>You&amp;#x27;re just flat wrong about the Khmer apologist thing...a common attempt at character assassination by anti-Chomsky fanatics with no relevance at all to the subject at hand.&lt;p&gt;Chomsky didn&amp;#x27;t say it was written down or announced. But there&amp;#x27;s no argument here - Baker simply DID say that there would be no eastward movement. It&amp;#x27;s not even remotely controversial.</text></item><item><author>clarionbell</author><text>I didn&amp;#x27;t expect anything from Chomsky (notorious Khmer Rogue apologist) and he didn&amp;#x27;t disappoint:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;“What about Nato expansion? There was an explicit, unambiguous promise by [US secretary of state] James Baker and president George HW Bush to Gorbachev that if he agreed to allow a unified Germany to rejoin Nato, the US would ensure that there would be no move one inch to the east. There’s a good deal of lying going on about this now.”&lt;p&gt;No such promise was made, ever, it was floated but it was never written down in any treaty or even publicly announced. It&amp;#x27;s putins propaganda and if Chomsky had any shame he would be ashamed for parroting it.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Noam Chomsky: “We’re approaching the most dangerous point in human history”</title><url>https://www.newstatesman.com/encounter/2022/04/noam-chomsky-were-approaching-the-most-dangerous-point-in-human-history</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>tptacek</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t think the &amp;quot;character assassination&amp;quot; argument is tenable. Chomksy later condemned the Khmer Rouge, long after it was politically relevant, but he was indeed an apologist for it during its era in power, and he hasn&amp;#x27;t (to my knowledge?) acknowledged having done so.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;web.archive.org&amp;#x2F;web&amp;#x2F;20010915014621&amp;#x2F;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.zmag.org&amp;#x2F;zmag&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;chombookrev.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;web.archive.org&amp;#x2F;web&amp;#x2F;20010915014621&amp;#x2F;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.zmag.o...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is hard to read knowing what actually happened.</text><parent_chain><item><author>TaupeRanger</author><text>You&amp;#x27;re just flat wrong about the Khmer apologist thing...a common attempt at character assassination by anti-Chomsky fanatics with no relevance at all to the subject at hand.&lt;p&gt;Chomsky didn&amp;#x27;t say it was written down or announced. But there&amp;#x27;s no argument here - Baker simply DID say that there would be no eastward movement. It&amp;#x27;s not even remotely controversial.</text></item><item><author>clarionbell</author><text>I didn&amp;#x27;t expect anything from Chomsky (notorious Khmer Rogue apologist) and he didn&amp;#x27;t disappoint:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;“What about Nato expansion? There was an explicit, unambiguous promise by [US secretary of state] James Baker and president George HW Bush to Gorbachev that if he agreed to allow a unified Germany to rejoin Nato, the US would ensure that there would be no move one inch to the east. There’s a good deal of lying going on about this now.”&lt;p&gt;No such promise was made, ever, it was floated but it was never written down in any treaty or even publicly announced. It&amp;#x27;s putins propaganda and if Chomsky had any shame he would be ashamed for parroting it.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Noam Chomsky: “We’re approaching the most dangerous point in human history”</title><url>https://www.newstatesman.com/encounter/2022/04/noam-chomsky-were-approaching-the-most-dangerous-point-in-human-history</url></story>