You, Michael Coghlan, wrote:

>Again, what do you  mean exaggerated? The numbers were
>exaggerated? What's it matter if it were 10, 20, 100, or 500,000? The impact
>is colossal. A week in Cambodia is enough to see the fear that still lives
>in their eyes......or have I missed a point here?
Yes. The point that Chomsky was trying to make in the Political Economy
of Human Rights Vol. II was that the crimes of official enemies are
always inflated to serve state propaganda, no matter how awful they are
to start with. This does NOT mean that the actual numbers were "only"
such and such (though anyone who questions official propaganda in this
regard will surely be labeled as an "apologist for so-and-so"). Look at
it from the other end of the telescope: it's the cynical exaggeration of
the real atrocities of the Khmer Rouge that insults the memory of their
victims, as if an actual death toll of half a million, or a million
weren't tragedy enough. (Contemporary estimates were running as high as 2
million, all of them attributed to summary executions and not to the
widespread famine that was also endemic at the time.)

What state interests did it serve to promote high-end speculations about
the Khmer Rouge death toll? Well, one big one was to obscure the
*earlier* genocide--namely the one conducted by U.S. warplanes against
the Khmer population, which not only killed hundreds of thousands, but
which, by destroying the fabric of Khmer society, laid the groundwork for
the ultimate takeover by the Khmer Rouge. You can see the success of this
propaganda mission in New York Times accounts of Cambodia's "nightmare",
which is always dated from 1974--as if the years before that (which are
never mentioned) were one long picnic.

_________
Tresy Kilbourne, Seattle WA
"The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't
betray it I'd be ashamed of myself." --Noam Chomsky, responding to an
accusation of betrayal by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.