CHAPTER 3: THE CHOMSKY-LACOUTURE CONTROVERSY
http://www-mcnair.berkeley.edu/uga/osl/mcnair/Sophal_Ear_canon.html

Questions that are obviously crucial even apart from the legacy of the
war--for example, the sources of the policies of the postwar Cambodian
regime in historical experience, traditional culture, Khmer nationalism, or
internal social conflict--have been passed by in silence as the propaganda
machine gravitates to the evils of a competitive socioeconomic system so as
to establish its basic principle: that "liberation" by "Marxists" is the
worst fate that can befall any people under Western dominance.

--Chomsky and Herman, 1979[115]

So argued the celebrated political activist Noam Chomsky and his sidekick
Edward S. Herman in After the Cataclysm, one of the most supportive books of
the Khmer revolution (especially since it was written after the end of the
Pol Pot-Ieng Sary regime), yet least rejected among the works canonized, to
originate from the standard total academic view on Cambodia. Chomsky had
been involved with the antiwar movement since the early days of Vietnam, and
had made a name for himself as an outspoken critic of the war. Born in 1928,
he is the world-famous MIT linguist who advanced the grammatical system
known as transformational, or generative, grammar. By the late 1960s,
however, he became engrossed in the debate over U.S. intervention in
Vietnam, becoming one of its most formidable and ingenious critics. With the
end of the War, however, few imperialist causes remained to rebel against,
and he was left with no real enemy to fight. Chomsky's long record on
Indochina started with his book entitled American Power and the New
Mandarins (1969). It was followed up with At War with Asia in 1970, he was
also affiliated with the progressive Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars,
another hotbed for the STAV. Not long after 1976, when Ben Kiernan, Chanthou
Boua, and their collective published News from Kampuchea, an Australian
newsletter devoted to bringing news to refute the "imperialist media,"
Chomsky re-emerged as force to be reckoned with in the debate over Cambodia.

Gunn and Lee speculate that News from Kampuchea was published as a catalyst
to the Barron-Paul book Murder of a Gentle Land (1977) which was the first
English-language book to lambaste the Khmer revolution for its brutal
excesses. A long excerpt was first published as a Reader's Digest article in
February 1977. François Ponchaud's book, Cambodia: Year Zero, followed on
the heels of that article by Barron and Paul, and was more authoritative
since Ponchaud had lived in Cambodia from 1965 to 1975, and could speak
Khmer. Unfortunately, Cambodia: Year Zero was Cambodge: Annee Zero (1977)
until 1978, when it was translated from the French. What Gunn and Lee call
the "endeavor to deconstruct distortions and bias in western press coverage
of Democratic Kampuchea" became News from Kampuchea's prime directive. That
endeavor was joined by Chomsky and Herman when they began a public campaign
against the media in their Nation article titled "Distortions at Fourth
Hand."[116] Chomsky, who has a tendency to write letters to the editor,
criticized the Christian Science Monitor's editorial of April 26, 1977
entitled "Cambodia in the year zero." He was later condemned by the Wall
Street Journal for his "heroic efforts to disprove the bloodbaths in
Cambodia,"[117] but well regarded by some of the scholars reviewed in the
previous chapter.[118]

Together with Herman, Chomsky devised an attack strategy on the media that
would allow him to criticize Ponchaud, Barron-Paul, and the media for
specific erratas, but without the appearance of searching for facts on
Cambodia. His favorable position towards the Khmer revolution would be
hidden by the cloak of criticizing the print media's biases. Of the
individuals who were sympathetic to the Khmer Rouge, Chomsky and Herman
merit closer scrutiny because of the sophistication of their argument. The
Khmer Rouge Canon is about the STAV and Cambodia, not the STAV on the media.
That is how Chomsky's supporters like to retell his involvement. Their
attack on the media was far too thin a facade to protect Chomsky and Herman
from being canonized. It is for that purpose that this chapter is devoted to
the Chomsky-Lacouture Controversy. First it attempts to reconstruct the
Controversy in chronological order, second it deconstructs the
Chomsky-Herman thesis and shows how it parallels the Porter-Hildebrand-STAV
thesis on Cambodia. The Chomsky-Lacouture Controversy became the last stand
for the critics of the Khmer Rouge critics. But, one might wonder, what does
Jean Lacouture have to do with this, and who is he? Lacouture was
instrumental in inciting Chomsky and Herman into a polemical exchange.
Because of Lacouture's extremely favorable review of the Ponchaud book in
the New York Review of Books entitled "The Bloodiest Revolution,"[119]
combined with his opposition to the Vietnam War, Lacouture was like traitor
to Chomsky and friends.[120]

To counter Lacouture, Ponchaud, Barron, and Paul, Chomsky and Herman used
evidence from Summers, Caldwell, Kiernan, Porter, and Hildebrand.[121] In
addition, Chomsky and Herman placed a rather ingenious spin on the U.S.
State Department's findings, making them appear to agree with their own
sense that the magnitude of the tragedy in Cambodia, though significant, was
nowhere near those reported by the media or Lacouture or Ponchaud or Barron
and Paul. The Chomsky-Herman objections were numerous, but they centered on
the media's unabated use of discredited sources. Three layers of objections
were apparent from the Chomsky-Herman standpoint: (1) Ponchaud's book had
four erratas, which were further exacerbated in Lacouture's review, (2)
Barron and Paul's book was itself attacked then dismissed, even more
harshly, than was Ponchaud's book, (3) the print media, which used the two
books and/or Lacouture's review, was accused of having suppressed evidence
favorable to the Khmer Rouge, and propagated untruths (such as fake photos
and in particular a fake interview with Khieu Samphan). Chomsky and Herman
made full use of these layers, as they painted a sinister picture of
conspiracy and propaganda against the Khmer revolution by the Western media.

The Chomskian Context

Chomsky is no stranger to radical politics. He has written countless books
and articles attacking U.S. foreign policy and the U.S. media. His
background in linguistics makes him a formidable debater, and even his
enemies call him a genius. Chomsky shies away from excessive demagoguery,
but not from polemical exchanges. What separates him from the amateur
activists cum academics in chapter 2 is his luster as a professional sophist
or armchair academicien de grandeur. His extensive experience has taught him
to anticipate potential quagmires and to make certain that token allowances
are peppered throughout his works. He uses these vague concessions to make
himself appear more or less "objective," always high-minded and (partially)
right in retrospect, when he later quotes himself selectively.[122]
Unfortunately for Chomsky, he does far too little of that to appear remotely
objective. Chomsky wrote the preface to Malcolm Caldwell and Lek Hor Tan's
Cambodia in the Southeast Asian War (1973) published by the Monthly Review
Press (which would also publish Hildebrand and Porter's Cambodia: Starvation
and Revolution among other Marxist works).[123] Chomsky's vision of
Cambodia's future, to which he credits U.S. foreign policy, bears no
resemblance to reality. He writes:

The misery and destruction for which Nixon and Kissinger bear direct
responsibility are crimes that can never be forgotten. By the impulse it has
to the revolutionary forces, this vicious attack may have also prepared the
ground, as some observers believe, not only for national liberation but also
for a new era of economic development and social justice.[124]


A revisionist favorable to Chomsky might interpret a "new era of economic
development and social justice" in a negative sense, but Chomsky would be
the victim of historical revisionism. Others may argue that the years after
"liberation" were productive, as did the canonized authors covered in
chapter 2, but that would be historical revisionism on Cambodia. What is
self-evident, however, is Chomsky's research techniques and predictive
sensibilities. He uses far too little empirical evidence to create theories,
which in turn do not predict very well.

In his book, At War with Asia (1970), Chomsky exudes the same peasant
romanticism which younger, less experienced members of the STAV displayed
shamelessly, when referring to Khieu Samphan. Chomsky was no idealistic
graduate student, though he was a world-renowned scholar, when he wrote the
following words:

Perhaps someday they [Nixon and Kissinger] will acknowledge their "honest
errors" in their memoirs, speaking of the burdens of world leadership and
the tragic irony of history. Their victims, the peasants of Indochina, will
write no memoirs and will be forgotten. They will join the countless
millions of earlier victims of tyrants and oppressors.[125]


To the contrary, if Nixon blamed himself for anything, it was for having
left Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge partly because of Watergate.[126] Whether
the peasants of Indochina blame Nixon and Kissinger more than they do their
revolutionary leaders is something Chomsky may never want to ask. He is not
an empiricist, nor does he pretend to be. The true "tragic irony of history"
would not end here however, Chomsky's exploitation of Indochinese peasants
would continue throughout the 1970s.

By 1977, Chomsky was itching for a new target, since he did not have Nixon
and Kissinger to kick around anymore. With his long-time collaborator Edward
Herman, Chomsky found the Western media and its alleged differential
treatment of atrocities in Cambodia versus East Timor, a convenient Trojan
horse for a new wave of attacks on "imperialism" at the expense, of course,
of the peasants he loved. Chomsky's onslaught was unrelenting, he began with
a broadside on May 2, 1977 to the Christian Science Monitor for its
editorial "Cambodia in the year zero" (CSM, 04/26/77) based on Jean
Lacouture's "The Bloodiest Revolution" (NYRB, 03/31/77). He followed with
personal correspondence to Lacouture and Bob Silvers, editor of the New York
Review of Books, which published the translated Lacouture review. This
correspondence resulted in a clarification by Lacouture in "Cambodia:
Corrections" (NYRB, 05/26/77). Still unsatisfied with these results, Chomsky
and Herman published a book review in the Nation on June 25, 1977, entitled
"Distortions at Fourth Hand" in which they dismissed the Barron-Paul book as
"third rate propaganda"[127] and called the Ponchaud book "serious and worth
reading" but full of erratas and unreliable, especially since it was based
on interviews with refugees. Chomsky and Herman pioneered, with Ben Kiernan,
a new way to look at refugees: suspiciously. The Nation article was then
followed by correspondence to and from Ponchaud, until the republication of
the Nation article in the antiwar newsletter Indochina Chronicle published
by the notorious IRC, 1977. In 1978, Ponchaud's book appeared in the U.S.,
finally translated, followed by Lacouture's Survive le peuple cambodgien!
(Cambodians Survive!) in France that same year. The following year, Chomsky
and Herman, irritated by this outcome, published After the Cataclysm (1979)
which covered "Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial
Ideology." That book deserves a special place in the Khmer Rouge Canon, not
just for recycling the Porter and Hildebrand line, which it does--but for
its originality, inventiveness and ingenuity. These are qualities which have
allowed Chomsky and Herman to maintain to this day that they were right all
along.

The Genesis of the Controversy

The February 1977 edition of Reader's Digest published a condensed version
of John Barron and Anthony Paul's Murder of a Gentle Land. This book, like
Ponchaud's Cambodia: Year Zero, became a favorite resource for the Western
media in their effort to shed light on the mysterious Pol Pot-Ieng Sary
regime. The Barron-Paul book, which followed some months later, told of
harrowing tales of hope and despair in the new Kampuchea. These lucid
anecdotes, gathered from interviews with Cambodian refugees in Thailand,
painted a picture of misery for those still living in the country.
Self-described, it "is an account of the monstrous dark age that has
engulfed the people of Cambodia."[128] Barron and Paul criticized the mass
media for not publicizing the mayhem and murder taking place in Cambodia.
Barron and Paul write, "[The] world largely has remained silent. No outraged
student protest on campuses. There is no great outcry in Congress. No one
demonstrates on Pennsylvania Avenue, the Champs Elysee or Trafalgar Square
about what "peace" has brought to Cambodia."[129] The 1970 Kent State
University student protest against Nixon's "secret" bombing of Cambodia was
replaced by utter silence in the year 1977. The Australian News from
Kampuchea described the Barron-Paul book as "full of untruths and
exaggerations because it is based on unreliable second-hand sources."[130]
In the preface to Murder of a Gentle Land, Barron and Paul underline their
endeavor:

We believe that the documentation conclusively shows that cataclysmic events
have occurred in Cambodia and that their occurrence is not subject to
rational dispute. We hope that upon learning of these events, people in all
parts of the world will act to halt the ongoing annihilation of the
Cambodian people and to spare the world a repetition of their tragedy.[131]


Indeed, because of the paucity of coverage, Barron and Paul were the first
to publish an English-language study unfavorable to the Khmer revolution.
This was almost two years after the fact, and in the mean time Summers,
Porter, and Hildebrand had already published their works upholding the STAV
on Cambodia. The Barron-Paul book instantly antagonized the STAV. "Indeed,"
write Gunn and Lee "it would almost seem that the Reader's Digest article
[of February, 1977] was the catalyst for the emergence of News [from
Kampuchea]."[132] There were, however, some erratas in the book from which
that article was based. Chomsky and Herman found two citations which were
non-existent. The citations were for important quotations--and thus proof
enough to gloat that the book was "third rate propaganda."[133] The
Barron-Paul book was predictably dismissed by Chomsky, Herman, and the STAV.
Chomsky and Herman would question even the "Acknowledgments" section of the
Barron-Paul book because they incriminated themselves by thanking experts in
U.S. State Department and Thai officials.[134] And, like Hering and Utrecht
in their "Introductory Note" to Malcolm Caldwell's South-East Asia, Chomsky
and Herman attempted guilt by association on Barron and Paul because the
publisher, Reader's Digest, has an anti-Communist bias.

The second broadside came when Jean Lacouture, an academic and supporter of
the antiwar movement and the FUNK, reviewed Ponchaud's Cambodia: Year Zero
(French edition published in January 1977) in the French periodical, Le
Nouvel Observateur. Lacouture, whose namesake I use as part of the
Controversy, took on the difficult task of fighting Chomsky. Lacouture's
review, "The Bloodiest Revolution," was translated and published in the
March 31, 1977 edition of the New York Review of Books. The review had a
number of mistakes which were corrected in "Cambodia: Corrections" (NYRB,
05/26/77). These corrections were prompted by Noam Chomsky, who brought
these errors to the attention of Robert Silvers, editor of the NYRB. At
about the same time, Chomsky wrote a letter to the Christian Science Monitor
regarding an editorial titled "Cambodia in the year zero" (CSM, 04/26/77)
which he correctly surmised was based on Lacouture's review of the Ponchaud
book. Chomsky's objections were, as usual, methodical and blunt. He writes,
"I judge from the editorial that the author had not read the book, but
relied on a review that appeared in the New York Review of Books. That is
rather dubious practice at best."[135]

The Bloodiest Revolution

Jean Lacouture's eloquence comes across well even when translated. His
review of Ponchaud's book in the NYRB became a lightning rod for opinion
page editors. Soon, the Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Star, and
the Economist issued opinion page editorials admonishing the Khmer
revolution.[136] This no doubt caused significant alarm, if not distress, on
the part of those who opposed American intervention in Southeast Asia. They
were, in essence, being told that their struggle against the War had
resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of people in Indochina. The
Chomskian line was to attack and discredit the Western media for basing its
stories and editorials on third-hand accounts. Chomsky's personal complaint
with CSM stated that, "The editorial is based on the third-hand source: the
review of a book which transmits (and interprets) reports of refugees. We
are unable to check the accuracy of the first link, but can check the
second, since both the book and the review are available."[137] Chomsky is
correct in his assertion, but he offers no better alternative. To be sure,
there is no way that one can check the story of a refugee, just as there is
no way one can check the story of a suspect if he has no alibi. However,
refugees and suspects are not one and the same, though Chomsky and friends
might confuse the two. Painfully aware, the News from Kampuchea agreed,
noting "Obviously, the way most refugees see the revolution is not the same
way Kampuchean working people might see it."[138] The distinction of
"working" as opposed to "not used to working" escapes the current author,
but it has the same aftertaste that Caldwell and Summers left behind in
chapter 2: romanticizing the Khmer revolution (or its peasants).

Lacouture's review was perceived by his ex-colleagues in the STAV as an
indictment from one of their own. It became a personal affair for some, like
Chomsky and Herman, who had prided themselves with the idea of never being
wrong. Lacouture was implying that something hideous was happening in the
new Kampuchea, an idea the STAV did not want to believe. Far detached from a
mealy-mouthed accusation, Lacouture compared modern-day Kampuchea to
Auschwitz. He writes:

The new masters of Phnom Penh have invented something original,
auto-genocide. After Auschwitz and the Gulag, we might have thought this
century had produced the ultimate in horror, but we are now seeing the
suicide of a people in the name of revolution; worse: in the name of
socialism... Here the leaders of a popular resistance movement, having
defeated a regime whose corruption by compradors and foreign agents had
reached the point of caricature, are killing people in the name of a visions
of a green paradise. A group of modern intellectuals, formed by Western
thought, primarily Marxist thought, claim to seek to return to a rustic
Golden Age, to an ideal rural and national civilization. And proclaiming
these ideas, they are systematically massacring, isolating, and starving
city and village populations whose crime was to have been born when they
were, the inheritors of a century of historical contradictions...[139]


Few have spoken so eloquently yet been so slandered for doing so much good
to so many, as was Lacouture. He was not meek about calling Cambodia's
ordeal a socialist experiment gone awry--an experiment which he initially
supported. He was among the first to undergo one side of a "two-sided
switch" to use Gunn and Lee's typology. From an ardent supporter of the FUNK
he switched sides to become one of its most formidable critics. Lacouture's
timing, too, is significant. Few Western academics had realized their own
"historical contradictions" in explaining why, if Vietnam had been bombed
many more times than Cambodia, its new rulers were not practicing anywhere
near the same degree of brutality as those of the new Kampuchea. Lacouture's
legitimacy within the antiwar circle, from having been an antiwar activist
himself and scholar on Vietnam,[140] meant that he could not be
contemptuously dismissed as a "right-winger."

Lacouture's Erratas

The Chomsky-Lacouture Controversy had only begun. Chomsky's personal letters
to Lacouture and Silvers resulted in corrections that appeared the New York
Review of Books some weeks later. This would prove useful for Chomsky and
Herman since they could underscore their points with proof. Lacouture made
errors which he corrected in "Cambodia: Corrections" (NYRB, 05/26/77). But
to their dismay, Lacouture's corrections article was even more articulate
than his original review. It is a mea culpa of the sincerest form, one that
is made in public. Lacouture writes:

The pseudo revolutionaries in Cambodia have locked their country away from
the eyes of the world, have turned many of their people into cadavers or
mere cattle; they have not only killed Lon Nol's officials but have also
murdered their women and children, maintaining order with clubs and guns. I
think that the problem that presents itself today is that of the life of a
people. And it is not only because I once argued for the victory of this
regime [RGNU], and feel myself partially guilty for what is happening under
it, that I believe I can say: there is a time, when a great crime is taking
place, when it is better to speak out in whatever company, than to remain
silent.[141]


Far distanced from Summers' proud, but naive assertion in her December, 1975
Current History article, "Cambodia: Consolidating the Revolution" that there
had been "no war crimes trials," Khmer Rouge "justice" was swift and
merciless. Lacouture drew even more blood by implicating the entire antiwar
movement and all the scholars who upheld the STAV on Cambodia. Not to be
outdone, Chomsky and Herman counter-attacked with their own tour de force in
"Distortions at Fourth Hand."[142]

Distortions at Fourth Hand

Chomsky's and Herman's "Distortions at Fourth Hand" published in the Nation,
and republished in the Indochina Chronicle, was an editorial cloaked in a
book review of the Hildebrand-Porter, Barron-Paul, and Ponchaud books. They
were positively rambunctious with Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution,
dismissive of Murder of a Gentle Land, and weary of Cambodia: Year Zero. In
order to understand in what context After the Cataclysm was published in
1979, a cursory analysis of Chomsky's and Herman's 1977 article is
necessary. "Distortions at Fourth Hand" begins with a review of the
post-liberation Vietnamese literature and weans cynical conclusions
regarding how an author or journalist may get published. "The technical name
for this farce," write Chomsky and Herman, "is `freedom of the press.'"[143]
Indeed, the paltry "media analysis" which they perform is itself nothing
short of a farce. They pick a few stories here and there, turn them into
representative samples, and suddenly they have a theory of how the press
supposedly works. This practice is at best heuristic, though far from
compelling. From these such weakly formed theories, Chomsky and Herman
assert, "If dictators were smarter, they would surely use the American
system of thought control and indoctrination."[144]

The baseline for their reasoning can be found in the first few paragraphs of
the article. They show a dual motive for historical revisionism (standard
practice today for some historians): (1) discrediting those opposed to the
war, (2) serving American foreign policy interests. Resigned, Chomsky and
Herman write:

It was inevitable with the failure of the American effort to subdue South
Vietnam and to crush the mass movements elsewhere in Indochina, that there
would be a campaign to reconstruct the history of these years so as to place
the role of the United States in a more favorable light ... Well suited for
these aims are tales of Communist atrocities, which not only prove evils of
communism but undermine the credibility of those who opposed the war and
might interfere with future crusades for freedom.[145]


What was more inevitable, perhaps, was that Chomsky and Herman would fall
into their own trap. Reversing, for a moment, their statement, one can
conclude that they were themselves busy hoping for and practicing historical
revisionism on Cambodia. Theirs is a warped history of media coverage, as
Shawcross will show in chapter 4. Uncovering distortion and bias in the
press became an obsession which fed on itself and convinced Chomsky and
Herman of the righteousness of their cause and theory. For instance, to
support their theory of censorship in the press, they bemoan the low
circulation level of the New England Peacework (an antiwar journal) and News
from Kampuchea (circulation less than 500).[146]

It is in this twisted context that Chomsky and Herman's onslaught on the
mass media began. They were meticulous, if not retentive, in pointing the
minor faults of the Western press. They blew out of proportion a few
erratas, which they latched onto and repeated in After the Cataclysm. They
rebuked the media, along with Ponchaud and Barron-Paul, for shamelessly
using refugees whom no objective person could trust. Why? Refugee stories
could not be substantiated. Like Hildebrand, Porter, Summers, and Caldwell,
Chomsky and Herman accuse the U.S. government of war-induced famine, but
hypocritically assert that Khmer Rouge quick thinking in evacuating Phnom
Penh served to rescue the population from starvation. Chomsky and Herman
want to have their cake and eat it too. For instance, after dwelling on the
several allegedly faked photographs of a man being murdered by the Khmer
Rouge, and another pulling plows,[147] they conclude that "Even if the
photograph had been authentic, we might ask why people should be pulling
plows in Cambodia, the reason is clear, if unmentioned. The savage American
assault on Cambodia did not spare the animal population."[148] Their logic
is as appalling as Hildebrand and Porter's brazen defense of the Khmer Rouge
evacuation of Phnom Penh's hospitals, though Chomsky and Herman do that too.

While Chomsky and Herman review the Porter-Hildebrand book, Cambodia:
Starvation and Revolution, glowingly, they criticize and dismiss the
Barron-Paul book in what must amount to nothing less than an ad hominem
attack on the publisher, Reader's Digest. They use guilt by association in
pointing out that Barron and Paul resorted to experts in the U.S. State
Department as well as Thai authorities, all of whom had vested interest in
excoriating the Khmer Rouge.[149] They forget, or perhaps ignore, the source
of much of the information for the Porter-Hildebrand book: propaganda photos
and unadorned "official" explanations. In fact, Chomsky and Herman offer not
one single criticism for the methods and evidence used in that book. As was
shown in the previous chapter, Porter and Hildebrand naively quote Ieng
Sary's claim that that "By going to the countryside, our peasants have
potatoes, bananas, and all kinds of foods."[150] To be sure, Chomsky and
Herman contribute original ideas, but they are insufficient to balance their
seething biases.

In 1978, Ponchaud's "Note for the English Translation" of Cambodia: Year
Zero, discusses the "polemical exchange" between himself, Noam Chomsky,
Robert Silvers, Edward Herman, and Jean Lacouture. He writes,

[Chomsky] drew my attention to the way it [Cambodia: 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 Authony Paul and John Barron in Murder of a Gentle Land.151


Ponchaud, who was himself sympathetic to the peasant cause initially, did
not want to appear outlandish in reporting the stories he had recorded from
refugees in Thailand and France. Having lived in Cambodia from 1965 to 1975,
longer, one might note, than anyone else mentioned in this entire thesis,
Ponchaud could speak Khmer fluently and thus communicate with refugees
without the need for a translator whose interest it might be to distort the
refugee stories. Ponchaud took offense with Chomsky and Herman's suggestions
that he could have been misled by bourgeois refugees, which he was careful
to avoid. In describing the process, he writes:

The first precaution I took was to look for the context of the refugees'
stories and to see how they should be interpreted. These people had been
traumatized by the cyclone that had swept through their society, by loss of
those closest to them, and, in some cases, by the loss of their privileges
and by the new necessity of performing hard work with their hands ... In
weighing the value of each refugee's testimony, his personality has been
taken into account; I was instinctively suspicious of people who had
"revelations" to make and came bearing sensational tidings. I also
mistrusted those who spoke French and whose who came from wealthier classes,
who had lost too much under the new regime. I was mainly interested in the
ordinary people, army privates, peasants, laborers, who could neither read
nor write nor analyze what they had seen but those illiterate memories could
supply exact details.[152]


Ponchaud took great care and caution with the refugees, some could say, he
was even biased against those who had suffered the greatest loss, namely the
wealthier individuals. The "ordinary people" who composed his sample were
telling him awful things about the new Kampuchea, things which he felt
obligated to report to the world. So what was the big problem with using
these refugees? Randomness of sampling? Geographical parity? All good points
that cannot, in any case, be controlled. Chomsky and Herman argued a little
of that, but their number one concern was with refugees in general. Were
they trustworthy? In other words, a refugee is the ultimate
self-selector--he/she moves his/her body to another location.

Chomsky and Herman were, of course, quick to point out that they were not
dismissing refugee accounts outright, merely that great "care and caution"
had to be used whenever refugees were involved. After all, no independent
observer could corroborate the horrid tales coming from refugees. Yet in a
country where no one is allowed access unless by invitation, how could an
independent observer gain such entry? They admitted that there were few
objective onlookers, to be sure, but that did not mean that refugees could
be objective sources. Notwithstanding this difficult situation, they
maintain that,

Refugees are frightened and defenseless, at the mercy of alien forces. They
naturally tend to report what they believe their interlocuters [sic] wish to
hear. While their reports must be considered seriously, care and caution are
necessary. Specifically, refugees questioned by Westerners or Thais have a
vested interest in reporting atrocities on the part of Cambodian
revolutionaries, an obvious fact that no serious reporter will fail to take
into account.[153]


This ostensibly unprejudiced analysis is only too convenient for the
purposes of undermining Ponchaud, Barron-Paul, and the media. One can only
wonder whether Chomsky and Herman would have warned the same of Albert
Einstein, a refugee himself. And what of Nicaraguan refugees from the days
of Daniel Ortega as opposed to today's Guatemalans? Ponchaud's exhaustive
study, based on the life-stories of fifty-six refugees from Thailand, is
deemed "serious" and "worth reading" but "lacks the documentation provided
in Hildebrand and Porter and its veracity is therefore difficult to
assess."[154] Chomsky and Herman's curious juxtaposition of Cambodia: Year
Zero with Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, giving the latter the edge on
"documentation," is nothing short of a farce.

"Distortions at Fourth Hand" gives a preview of what one can expect from
Chomsky and Herman in After the Cataclysm. One of the points stressed in the
introduction to this chapter was Chomsky's ability to keep things vague by
offering token allowances to his critics. In the article, Chomsky and Herman
end with the same qualifications they use in After the Cataclysm, which
makes the latter a longer broken-record of "Distortions at Fourth Hand." In
what sense are Chomsky and Herman careful to absolve themselves of any
responsibility? For instance, Chomsky and Herman craftily hide their
argument in the cloak of academic sophistry when they profess that they "do
not pretend to know where the truth lies amidst these sharply conflicting
assessments [Ponchaud versus Hildebrand and Porter, dismissing altogether
Barron and Paul]..."[155] If that were the case, then why would Chomsky and
Herman sing the praises of Porter and Hildebrand? Chomsky and Herman say
that all they want to do is to point out the imbalance of treatment that:

filters through to the American public is a seriously distorted version of
the evidence available, emphasizing alleged Khmer Rouge atrocities and
downplaying or ignoring the crucial U.S. role, direct or indirect, in the
torment that Cambodia has suffered. Evidence that focuses on the American
role, like the Hildebrand and Porter volume, is ignored, not on the basis of
truthfulness or scholarship but because the message is unpalatable.[156]


The mission is not, in itself, objectionable, since it deals with how the
media "filters" news for mass consumption. At the same time, one might ask
how Chomsky and Herman can judge that filter if they do not "pretend to know
where the truth lies." Instead, they default to a position where, because
there is, in their view, confusion on what is going on in Cambodia, utmost
skepticism must be practiced with all information originating from Cambodian
refugees.

Cambodians Survive!

In June 1978, Jean Lacouture published his own book on Cambodia, titled
Survive le peuple cambodgien! (Cambodians Survive!). The book was never
translated into English, but Lacouture's thesis is relevant to the
Chomsky-Lacouture Controversy. Survive le peuple cambodgien! is practically
the confession of an ex-FUNK supporter that begins with these passionate
words:

La honte aurait suffi... La honte, a elle seule, jusifiait que l'on ecrivit
ce petit livre--qui est d'abord un cri d'horreur. La honte d'avoir
contribue, si peu que ce soit, si faible qu'ait pu etre en la matiere
influence de la press, a l'instauration de l'un des pouvoirs les plus
oppressifs que l'histoire ait connus. [trans. Shame would have sufficed...
The shame, alone, would have justified that this book be written--which is
firstly a cry of horror. The shame of having contributed, even as little as
it was, as weak as its influence could have been on the mass media, to the
establishment of one of the most oppressive powers history has ever
known.][157]


Lacouture's shame is no doubt sincere. He admits that he mistakenly thought
the Khmer revolution would bring peace to Cambodia, but that instead it
brought to power one of the most totalitarian regimes in the history of the
world. Following on his string of mea culpas, from "The Bloodiest
Revolution" to "Cambodia: Corrections" to now Survive le peuple cambodgien!,
Lacouture was further aggravating Chomsky and Herman in America. In the
final chapter entitled "Un genocide plebecite [trans. A genocide of the
common people]," he leaves not a scintilla of doubt that, based upon what he
has observed whether from second or third hand accounts, a monstrous Age had
enveloped Cambodia. He accuses Chomsky of complicity in light of the
Cambodian genocide. This is the most severe blow to the Chomskian thesis
because it unmasks all the layers of sophistry which protect it. In essence,
Lacouture accuses Chomsky of being an accomplice to the "murder of a
people." He writes:

Plus tristes, plus grave, l'attitude prise, face au genocide cambodgien, par
un certain nombre d'intelectuels americains adversaires de la strategie
asiatique de Washington, dont le plus notable, et respectable, est a coup
sur Noam Chomsky. [Il] deploya toutes les ressources de son genie
dialectique pour demontrer, a moi et a la communaute scientifique et
progressiste americaine, qu'il n'etait pas possible de porter d'accusation
precise contre un pays ou n'avait pu penetrer un enqueteur serieux et sur
lequel de nonbreux temoignages jetaient en doute sur ceux, terribles, que
nous citons... [trans. More unfortunate, more serious still, the position
taken with respect to the Cambodian genocide by a certain number of American
intellectuals opposed to the Washington consensus on Asia, of whom the most
notable and respectable is Noam Chomsky. [He] deployed all the resources of
his dialectical genius to show me and the scientific and progressive
American community that it was not possible to accuse a country where no
serious inquirer had gained access in addition to the numerous testimonies
that contradicted the ones we have cited here...][158]


Lacouture's indictment of Chomsky and friends for ignoring the Cambodian
genocide fell on deaf ears. His description of the exchange as centering
around the scale of atrocities is correct. Chomsky and Herman both
maintained that since no objective observers were present, no one could be
sure of the scale of atrocities. Furthermore, by so insisting, Chomsky thus
rejects the 1977 statistic proposed by Ponchaud, namely 1.2 million
deaths.[159] He rejects it in part because it originated from the U.S.
embassy in Bangkok, which was sure, according to him, not to know what it
was talking about. Later, in After the Cataclysm, Chomsky insinuates that
the scale is not hundred of thousands dead, but "hundreds or thousands."
Lacouture's final words to Chomsky are perhaps his most severe, yet.
Lacouture asserts, "Le Cambodge et les Cambodgiens sont en marge de cet
univers ethique ... Si Noam Chomsky et ses amis [Herman, Caldwell ou Bragg]
en doutent, qu'ils etudient les dossiers, les cultures, les faits. [trans.
Cambodia and Cambodians are on their way to ethnic extinction ... If Noam
Chomsky and his friends [Herman, Caldwell or Bragg] doubt it, they should
study the papers, the cultures, the facts."[160] Lacouture and his book were
both dismissed in an endnote to the Chomsky-Herman book the following year
(1979). In the main text of After the Cataclysm, Lacouture is found guilty
by the righteous Chomsky and Herman court of an "incredible moral
lapse."[161] And what exactly is this "moral lapse"? That of ignoring the
U.S. responsibility in all that has happened to Cambodia since liberation.
Next, we examine the link between the Chomsky-Herman thesis and the standard
total academic view on Cambodia.

Chomsky, Herman, and the STAV

Before delving into After the Cataclysm, we momentarily note Torben
Retbøll's "Kampuchea and the Reader's Digest," an essay published in the
Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, which was affiliated with Noam
Chomsky.[162] The article covered the much-maligned Barron-Paul Reader's
Digest book, Ponchaud's book and Lacouture's review. Like other articles on
Kampuchea in BCAS, Retbøll's was peppered with propaganda photos of workers
"happily" at work. Such pictures could visualize Democratic Kampuchea in a
normal light, a difficult task at best. The BCAS was itself a powerhouse for
the STAV on Cambodia. Laura Summers and Ben Kiernan were both contributors
in late 1979. Summers held that Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia months
earlier meant, in the pejorative, that Vietnam had lost its "revolutionary
way."[163] Kiernan, on the other hand, made his side of a two-sided switch
in that same BCAS issue, following Summers' article. He switched sides to
support the "good Khmer Rouge" in the words of Stephen Morris. These were
the pleasant Vietnamized Khmer Rouge of the eastern zone, not fanatical and
always calm.

But returning now to Torben Retbøll's article, which preceded the
Chomsky-Herman book, in it he forwards the same two falsified references
Chomsky and Herman grasped out of the Barron-Paul book Murder of a Gentle
Land. Retbøll's assertions are important because they represent support for
the Chomsky-Herman thesis and a direct link to the STAV on Cambodia through
the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars. A point emphasized throughout
Retbøll's essay is that Barron and Paul were committing something sinister
and that ergo their whole book was up-to-no-good. The same Chomskian
treatment for Ponchaud is in store. Retbøll vilifies him. He writes "The
petty deceit which [Ponchaud] practices here and which is very easily
exposed is not very likely to increase our confidence in those parts of his
account which we are unable to verify."[164] Like Chomsky and Herman,
Retbøll's critique of refugees calls for "care and caution" but ultimately
leads back to the bottom line: suspicion. He writes,

Those relatively few persons who have cared about the facts and who quite
unjustly have been branded as apologists of the new Kampuchea--such as, for
instance, the late Malcolm Caldwell, Noam Chomsky and Ben Kiernan--have all
stressed that refugee accounts should be taken seriously and that there has
been considerable suffering for the population. But they have also insisted
that Kampuchea's isolation from the outside world is no excuse for believing
everything, and that information about this country therefore should be
treated with the utmost skepticism. [Emphasis is Retbøll's.]"[165]


In an attempt to exculpate his colleagues, Caldwell, Chomsky, and Kiernan,
Retbøll instead aggravates his own position and theirs. The few refugee
accounts Chomsky and friends were taking seriously were ones that were
favorable to the new Kampuchea. The bias against the majority of refugees is
so severe that the only instance where a refugee critical of the Pol
Pot-Ieng Sary regime is given equal treatment is when Chomsky taints him
with CIA and drug-trafficking ties. Indeed, Retbøll's interpretation of the
Chomskian position in the final sentence to his article corroborates
Lacouture. Because no pure and "objective" viewers could be found, as the
result of Khmer Rouge "self-reliance" foreign policy, the STAV defaulted to
a position of "utmost skepticism" favorable to the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary regime.
Next, we return to Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman and the only work in the
Khmer Rouge Canon to still be defended by its authors. As sufficient
evidence, in 1988, Herman, writing for himself and Chomsky, told the editors
of the New York Review of Books,

Mr. Nordland's review [of Haing Ngor's A Cambodian Odyssey], which rests on
one of the myths of the Pol Pot Era [that the Khmer Rouge "tried to
exterminate or at least deliberately work to death a majority of the
population"] as well as a now institutionalized lie about our own work on
the subject [that Noam Chomsky attributed the deaths of the Pol Pot era to
"nothing but" a war-induced famine], shows that our effort was and remains
on target.[166]


As his evidence that the Khmer Rouge did not try to exterminate or work to
death the majority of the Cambodian population, Herman points to the fact
that the Khmer Rouge were "unable to come anywhere near meeting its
objective."[167] We now turn to the book Herman refers to as the victim of
an "institutionalized lie": After the Cataclysm.

Dialectical Acrobats in After the Cataclysm

Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in the last stand for the STAV on Cambodia,
authored After the Cataclysm. It was the last stands because the Vietnamese
invasion of Cambodia had taken place in late December 1978, and the
incontrovertible evidence to which Timothy Carney referred to in the
footnote to his essay "Unexpected Victory" would pour down on the STAV
shortly. At that point, the members of the STAV had to choose which side
they were going to follow: the Vietnamese communists who maintained that
atrocities and mass murder were taking place in neighboring Cambodia, or the
Khmer Rouge who denied having committed such atrocities. The canonized
scholars, in chapter 2, had quickly moved to counter the hysterical Western
media and its bloodthirsty coverage of the new Kampuchea. The
Chomsky-Lacouture Controversy had simmered for two years, and in 1979, the
Chomsky-Herman book After the Cataclysm: "Postwar Indochina and the
Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology," became the STAV's final stand.

By 1979, to deny the existence of Khmer Rouge atrocities had become an
untenable position given the mounting evidence pointing to unprecedented
excesses. Chomsky and Herman were therefore very careful not to spread
themselves too thinly when expressing "utmost skepticism." In other words,
they used language that would be vague; After the Cataclysm was peppered
with token allowances and qualifications. For instance, Chomsky and Herman
state that: "When the facts are in, it may turn out that the more extreme
condemnations were in fact correct."[168] Unfortunately for them, the facts
were already in years earlier, when terrified Cambodians began to escape
across the Thai border even before April, 1975.[169] Later, Chomsky and
Herman add,

Perhaps evidence will be forthcoming to support the claim of the British
Foreign Office that "many hundreds of thousands of people have perished in
Cambodia directly or indirectly as result of the policies of the Communist
government," evidence more credible than the material on which they
uncritically relied.[170]


How credible was the evidence Ponchaud, Barron-Paul, and Lacouture relied
upon? How credible were terrified refugees? Not credible enough for Chomsky
and Herman.

Chomsky and Herman's tone on Cambodia in After the Cataclysm is set, in the
very first sentence of the chapter by that namesake: "The third victim of
U.S. aggression and savagery in Indochina, Cambodia, falls into a different
category than postwar Vietnam and Laos. [Emphasis added.]"[171] After the
Cataclysm is not and does not pretend to be a work of original research, no
Cambodian refugees were interviewed or for that matter asked to be
interviewed. After the Cataclysm is, if anything, a voluminously endnoted
book. Chapter 6, on Cambodia, has 427 endnotes in 159 pages. Many of these
endnotes are superfluous ad hominem attacks and commentary mixed with
conniving cynicism. With no pretense to know where the truth lies, Chomsky
and Herman attempt to undermine the credibility and validity of all sources
critical of the Khmer Rouge. Their task, say the authors, "is not [to]
establish the facts with regard to postwar Indochina but rather to
investigate their refraction through the prism of Western ideology, a very
different task."[172] This convenient cloak allows its authors to
legitimately attack the media's coverage of the new Kampuchea, while
appearing not at all concerned with searching for "truth" in and of itself.
Chomsky's defenders like to point out that he is performing "media analysis"
not Khmer Rouge crimes analysis. That is why they object to categorizing the
Chomskian thesis as a chapter in Cambodian studies.

Chomsky and Herman promote a theory of the Free Press which they engender
from anecdotal evidence. That theory postulates that "the more severe the
allegations of crimes committed by an enemy [of the American government],
the greater (in general) the attention they receive."[173] That tendency,
they argue, appears only when communist countries are alleged to have
committed these crimes. They juxtapose the case of East Timor's massacres
against that of Cambodia's postwar regime and fervently maintain the
hypocrisy of the media coverage when, on the one hand direct U.S. government
cover-up of the massacres of Timor's citizens leads to media silence, and on
the other, those crimes being alleged of the Khmer Rouge are turned into a
media frenzy. These examples, if correct, would surely put a dent in the
armor of the Western media. For one, the Chomsky-Herman thesis that "If
dictators were smarter, they would surely use the American system of thought
control and indoctrination,"[174] would sound positively plausible.

The Free Press, Chomsky and Herman point out, was "unable to conjure up the
bloodbaths in Cambodia," (a sentence which mysteriously appears in one
variant or another, sometimes with the word "exultant" in the work of
Caldwell and that of Porter and Hildebrand). They rationalize that the
widespread media use of three fake pictures and one To be sure, Chomsky and
Herman contribute original ideas, but they are insufficient to balance their
seething biases. Ponchaud's letter (08/17/77) to Chomsky makes clear that
there were mistakes in Lacouture's review (which were acknowledged and
corrected), and that some quotes were of dubious origin in Cambodia: Year
Zero. But Ponchaud also makes clear he has grave concerns with Chomsky's
dismissal of refugee testimonies, especially since they are so numerous and
gruesome. In one memorable point in the letter, Ponchaud pointedly asks
Chomsky "How many Khmer refugees have you interviewed, where, when, in which
language?"[175] manufactured interview with Khieu Samphan by Famiglia
Christiana, in which when asked "what had happened to all these [1 million
missing] people," Samphan was quoted "It's incredible how concerned you
westerners are about war criminals."[176] These instances of fraud were the
tip of the counter-revolutionary propaganda iceberg. Chomsky and Herman are
careful, however, not to deny the likelihood that atrocious crimes occurred
in the new Kampuchea, though they doubt the scale is in the hundreds of
thousands. By 1979, however, Chomsky and Herman had not cared to assess the
new evidence, such as many more refugee reports, but then again, it was not
their goal. "Media analysis" was their goal. But if that were the case, why
did they feel compelled to suggest, contrary to Ponchaud and friends, that
the Porter and Hildebrand book was on target when it had been but a
bold-faced apologia for the Khmer Rouge? The Chomsky and Herman logic is
simple enough: since no one can objectively assess the scale of atrocities
in Cambodia, it would be wrong to speculate. "The record of atrocities in
Cambodia is substantial and often gruesome," say Chomsky and Herman, "but it
has by no means satisfied the requirements of Western propagandists, who
must labor to shift the blame for the torment of Indochina to the victims of
France and the United States [namely, the Indochinese countries
themselves]."[177] Who would Chomsky and Herman rather blame for the
"torment of Indochina"? Taking a cue from their younger colleagues in the
STAV, Caldwell, Summers, Porter, and Hildebrand, Chomsky and Herman concur
in blaming the United States. For instance, they argue that the media never
takes into account the deplorable postwar conditions of the country (due
mainly to "U.S. aggression and savagery") and the necessity of evacuating
Phnom Penh to prevent impending starvation (again, due mainly to "U.S.
aggression and savagery").

Chomsky and Herman reject Ponchaud's assertion that there is a prima facie
case against the Khmer Rouge. They question the credibility of refugees or
what they are alleged to have said. They write:

Most of the well-publicized information concerning postwar Cambodia derives
from reports of refugees--or to be more precise, from accounts by
journalists and others of what refugees are alleged to have said. On the
basis of such reports, these observers draw conclusions about the scale and
character of atrocities committed, conclusions which are then circulated
(often modified) in the press or the halls of Congress.[178]


Refugees tend to exaggerate stories, over time, Chomsky and Herman argue,
which makes them less than ideal "objective" sources of information. In
addition, Chomsky and Herman discredit some refugees altogether with their
singular example of Pin Yathay whom they taint with alleged ties to the CIA
and drug-trafficking.[179] Instead, they point to the experience of other
expatriates (many of whom were not Cambodians, such as those found in Phnom
Penh Libere) who saw no untoward behavior by the Khmer Rouge during the
evacuation of Phnom Penh. According to them, the "censorship" of these
favorable accounts by the mass media is additional fuel for
counter-revolutionary bias. Chomsky and Herman perform what amounts to a
defense of the Khmer Rouge cloaked in an attack on the media. They are
high-minded when they demand documented evidence to point towards a "central
direction and planning of atrocities," things which they know to be utterly
impossible to find since no foreign observers are allowed entry unless
invited.

"Serious inquiry" Chomsky and Herman declare, should examine the following
issues: "(1) the nature of the evidence available; (2) the media selection
from the evidence available; (3) the credibility of those who transmit their
version of refugee reports and draw conclusions from them; (4) the further
evidence they select and present."[180] They establish that the evidence is
at best to be taken under advisement, though that would be generous. Their
observations on the trustworthiness of the evidence has been covered
previously. They argue that the media's selection of the evidence is biased
against the Khmer Rouge. They question the credibility of those who transmit
the evidence, mocking the Barron-Paul book as they had done two years
earlier in "Distortions at Fourth Hand." They facetiously call the
publisher, Reader's Digest, "that noteworthy journal of cool and
dispassionate political analysis."[181]

Chomsky and Herman are themselves cool and dispassionate towards their old
friend and colleague Jean Lacouture, when they write,

We disagree with Lacouture's judgment on the importance of accuracy on this
question, particularly in the present historical context, when allegations
of genocide are being used to whitewash Western imperialism, to distract
attention from the `institutionalized violence' of the expanding system of
subfascism and to lay the ideological basis for further intervention and
oppression.[182]


The "expanding system of subfascism" that is being whitewashed by
allegations of "genocide" has little basis, but their jihad goes on. They
assert that Lacouture is trying to apologize for imperialism, when in fact,
it is they who, at every opportunity, whitewash Khmer Rouge atrocities by
obfuscating the evidence. Why is it, then, that if they were so uncertain of
where the truth lay, that they could be so sure America was to blame? No one
knows for sure, but we can examine what they have to say on the American
role in the evacuation of Phnom Penh.

Like Hildebrand and Porter, Chomsky and Herman argue that the deplorable war
conditions made the evacuation of Phnom Penh's residents necessary.[183]
They write,

In the first place, is it proper to attribute deaths from malnutrition and
disease to the Cambodian authorities?... It surely should occur to a
journalist or the reader to ask how many of the deaths in Cambodia fall tot
he U.S. account. There is evidence on this matter, but it is systematically
excluded from the press.[184]


The politics of food and starvation, a favorite topic of Caldwell, Porter,
and Hildebrand, is not lost to Chomsky and Herman, when they postulate that
if Phnom Penh had six to eight days of food after liberation, "the
evacuation of Phnom Penh, widely denounced at the time and since for its
undoubted brutality, may actually have saved many lives."[185] They forget
that it was because of the Khmer Rouge's two month long siege of Phnom Penh
that made the city a living hell for the 2 million refugees who now flooded
her streets. Having it both ways, Chomsky and Herman argue in a
self-contradictory logic that: (1) had there been starvation, it was due to
American aggression and savagery; (2) that there may not have been
starvation, or at least not as much as there could have been thanks to the
brilliant Khmer Rouge evacuation strategy.

Even when the issue of the evacuation of hospital patients is faced, Chomsky
and Herman resort to the same justification offered by Hildebrand and
Porter. They find a rationale for everything. They offer the same reasons as
Porter and Hildebrand to justify the evacuation of all patients, namely that
the conditions were deplorable, and that it was, in effect, an act of mercy.
Lacouture, who objected to the evacuation and used it as an example of a
gravely inhumane act, recalls a conversation he had with a Norwegian
journalist who, like Chomsky, Herman, Porter, and Hildebrand, justified it
this way:

[Il m'a dit] "Mais vous ne savez pas que sous le regime de Lon Nol, la
medecine etait aux mains des Americans, corrompue et decadente. Il fallait a
tout prix arracher ces malheureux a ce corps medicale aliene..." [je lui
dit:] Un nouveau "complot des blouses blanches." [trans. [He said to me:]
But didn't you know that under the Lon Nol regime, medical practice was in
the hands of the Americans, corrupt and decadent. These poor souls had to be
ripped out, at all cost, from this alienating medical facility. [To which I
replied:] A new "conspiracy of white coats ."[186]


In virtually every instance, the Chomsky-Herman thesis is parallel to the
Porter-Hildebrand-STAV thesis. We may ask then, what were the differences?
Chomsky and Herman simply added a media analysis cloak in addition to the
aforementioned token allowances, to create a more palatable design. Their
design, however, strays into reductio ad absurdia, when it compares the
Khmer Rouge crimes to the "robbery and murder" committed by U.S. troops:

occupying Japan or their participation in mass murder of members of the
anti-Japanese resistance in the Philippines, to take a case where the armed
forces in question and the society from which they were recruited had not
suffered anything remotely like the savagery that the Khmer Rouge had
endured.[187]


Chomsky and Herman taking pity on the Khmer Rouge for why they committed
gruesome crimes can otherwise be seen as an apology on their behalf. Its
impact is nothing short of the sine qua non of the Khmer Rouge Canon:
Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution.

The similarities between the Chomsky-Herman thesis and the
Porter-Hildebrand-STAV thesis have been elaborated, but little has been said
on their differences. For instance, Chomsky and Herman are not, unlike
Hildebrand, Porter, Caldwell, and Summers, so gullible as to use emissary
testimonials without qualification. Anyone believing that the Khmer Rouge
would allow the sight of starving people or dead bodies in view of visitors
would clearly be less than objective, they warned. Yet they do not see the
STAV scholars, with whom they agree and rely upon, as having been anything
less than objective when these authors plastered, without qualification, the
comments of emissaries favorable to the new Kampuchea. Chomsky and Herman
are careful to say directly that they are not among those "defending the
Khmer Rouge," a position that they maintain is highly unpopular even to
them. But that is exactly what they do. They cite the Porter-Hildebrand book
in the same glowing light as they did in "Distortions at Fourth Hand." In
the span of two years, Chomsky and Herman had discovered nothing new.

Finally Chomsky and Herman play the old broken-record of exposing erratas in
the Barron-Paul book, in Ponchaud's book, and in the media. It is much ado
about nothing, in retrospect, given that to this day we still do not know
whether the three photographs that were published in newspapers across the
world were fake or real. Even to Chomsky and Herman, this did not seem to
mater since, "Even if the photograph had been authentic, we might ask why
people should be pulling plows in Cambodia, the reason is clear, if
unmentioned. The savage American assault on Cambodia did not spare the
animal population."[188] They anticipate every contingency, as was alluded
to earlier. But at the same time, this shows that they have their own
preconceived version of truth, despite their claims of not pretending to
know where the truth lies amidst these conflicting stories. They are
resolute in concluding that:

There is no doubt that many hundred of thousands, if not millions of people
have perished in other third world countries in the same period as a direct
or indirect result of the policies of Western powers, victims of aggression,
starvation, disease, hideous condition of work, death squads, etc.
Furthermore, this will continue, with continuing Western responsibility but
without government protest or media exposure. The conclusions from such a
comparison seem obvious.[189]


It is no wonder to the reader that having passed such historical judgment on
"Western powers," Chomsky and Herman could not have been expected to look
beyond the STAV on Cambodia. With such polemical conclusions, Chomsky and
Herman's "heroic effort to deny the bloodbaths"[190] is exposed for what it
really is: a defense of the Khmer Rouge cloaked in sophisticated "media
analysis." While it served them well to write a book of mostly unoriginal
ideas, as seen from the standpoint of chapter 2, hundreds of thousands, not
"hundreds or thousands" as Chomsky and Herman insinuated, would die in
Cambodia.