Conclusion

The Chomsky-Lacouture Controversy has been described in different if not
contradictory terms by its participants. Lacouture and Ponchaud called it a
"polemical" exchange, while Chomsky and Herman took it quite seriously. They
were all partly right. The Controversy was a polemical exchange, which is
unfortunate, because it was also very serious. It added insult to injury for
the thousands of refugees fleeing Cambodia, not to speak of those who never
lived to read the Chomsky-Herman-STAV thesis. What is apparent in the
Chomsky-Herman line of argument is the attempt to divorce seeking truth from
establishing it positively. There can be no doubt that Chomsky and Herman,
unlike Summers, Caldwell, Porter, and Hildebrand tried their best to put on
an objective face. They qualify both the emissaries' and refugees' stories
with warnings, but they quote only the emissaries, not the refugees.

The 1977 and 1979 works of Chomsky and Herman, and those of Summers,
Caldwell, Retbøll, Kiernan, Hildebrand, and Porter, are today remembered
only in a footnote. Though they may be a parenthesis in history, these
scholars and the standard total academic view they shared cannot be
forgotten. The mistake they made was fundamentally the same: they were so
caught-up in the idea of a peasant revolution that they did not to stop and
ask the peasants themselves how they liked the ride. Additionally for
Chomsky and Herman, the elder statesmen of the Left, their mistake was
perhaps most egregious: Chomsky and Herman rejected the very idea of
searching for truth, which at least those canonized in chapter 2 had
pretended to do. Instead, they embarked on a high-minded crusade against
media, based on secondary and tertiary evidence which they themselves
accused the media of having used. For Chomsky and Herman, their hypocrisy
knows no bounds. In the following chapter, we look beyond the STAV on
Cambodia.

CHAPTER 4: BEYOND THE STAV


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.


--Noam Chomsky, 1970[191]

Now you're telling me you're not nostalgic,

then give me another word for it.

You were so good with words,

and at keeping things vague.

`Cause I need some of that vagueness now

it's all come back too clearly.

Yes I loved you dearly,

and if you're offering me diamonds and rust,

I've already paid.


--Joan Baez, 1975[192]

Throughout this thesis, the canonized authors who found solidarity with the
Khmer Rouge or simply the "Khmer peoples" claim that the Western media
undertook an unprecedented propaganda campaign against the new Kampuchea.
Furthermore, they assert that this campaign began soon after the fall of
Phnom Penh.[193] In the words of Noam Chomsky,

The U.S. role and responsibility have been quickly forgotten or even
explicitly denied as the mills of the propaganda machine grind away. From
the spectrum of informed opinion only the most extreme condemnations have
been selected, magnified, distorted, and hammered into popular consciousness
through endless repetition.[194]


Upon closer examination, if anything were "magnified, distorted, and
hammered," it would be that very dubious assertion by the STAV on Cambodia
of an unprecedented propaganda campaign. How often do capital cities of 2-3
million people get evacuated? In the history of the world this had never
happened, until Phnom Penh. François Ponchaud notes that in France, under
which Cambodia had been a colony until 1953, newspaper coverage focused on
the French embassy affair. In chapter 2, Summers referred to it as the
"French Embassy Affair," and denounced the French government for violating
protocol. Ponchaud was more concerned, however, with the paucity of coverage
on the death march itself. He writes:

The Khmer revolution has shown how woefully ill informed the French were. In
April and May 1975 French newspapers gave most of their coverage the fate of
the foreigners interned in the French embassy in Phnom Penh. Nothing could
be more natural than that the press should rise up to denounce violations of
human rights in Spain, Latin America, and South Africa. But nothing could be
less justifiable than that so few voices should be raised in protest against
the assassination of a people. How many of those who say that are
unreservedly in support of the Khmer revolution would consent to endure one
hundredth part of the present suffering of the Cambodian people?


With that said, Ponchaud exposes one of the biggest untruths about the media
coverage of the new Kampuchea. Contrary to the STAV's assertion that there
was a media frenzy against the policies of the new regime, this chapter
shows that coverage was fragmentary and not concerted. According to
Ponchaud, the press denounced human rights violations elsewhere more than it
did in the new Kampuchea. More rigorous media analysis by Shawcross shows
that the onslaught began after the publication of Chomsky and Herman's After
the Cataclysm, when incontrovertible evidence surfaced after the Vietnamese
invasion.

Round One: "Media Can't See Mountains for Molehills"

Accuracy in the Media (AIM), a group Chomsky and Herman denounce as
"right-wing," found that for 1976, there were many times more stories and
editorials by the New York Times and the Washington Post on the condition of
human rights in South Korea and Chile than there were on Cambodia, Cuba, and
North Korea, combined. This is especially surprising given that the New York
Times was home to Sydney Shandberg, winner of a Pulitzer-prize for his
coverage of the evacuation of Phnom Penh during the French embassy affair.
Porter, Hildebrand, Chomsky, and Herman all criticized his article for
starting a broo ha ha over the evacuation of Phnom Penh. The November 1977
AIM Report rebuked the press in its headline: "Media Can't see the Mountain
for the Molehills." Editor Reed Irvine, rhetorically asks, "Are Cambodia,
Cuba, and North Korea ... relatively free from human rights violations ...
in comparison with Chile and South Korea?"[195] For the readers of the AIM
Report, he writes, "the answer may seem so obvious that you may wonder why
we pose such a silly question."[196] Later, Irvine insists that "For
starters, the media might try giving the mountainous crimes of the Cambodian
communists the kind of attention that they have been devoting to the
relative molehills of human rights violations taking place in countries such
as Chile and South Korea."[197] Irvine is evidently outraged with the
imbalance, as was Ponchaud with the French media's paucity of coverage on
Cambodia.

Irvine derived from the Television News Index and Abstracts a statistical
table on media coverage of human rights in Chile, South Korea, North Korea,
Cuba and Cambodia. The news organizations covered were the New York Times,
the Washington Post, and the three television networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC.
The findings were startling.[198] The table covers 1976, and had by then
passed the first anniversary of the evacuation of Phnom Penh by the Khmer
Rouge. In table 4.1, the reader will see that contrariwise to the
Porter-Hildebrand-Chomsky-Herman claims, the New York Time and Washington
Post published four and nine stories on human rights in Cambodia,
respectively.

Table 4.1: Human Rights in the News 1976

                Chile   South Korea   North Korea   Cuba    Cambodia
New York Times    66    61            0             3       4
Washington        58    24            1             4       9
Post
Sub-total        124    85            1             7       13
ABC               5     2             0             0       1
CBS               5     3             0             0       2
NBC               3     0             0             0       0
Sub-total         13    5             0             0       3
Total            137    90            1             7       16


Source: AIM Report, November 1977, Part I, No. 21, p. 2.
According to table 4.1, Chile received more than eight times the coverage
"on human rights problems" as compared to Cambodia. Pinochet was no angel,
but he was no Pol Pot either. South Korea was covered merely 5.6 times more
often. The total allocation of media resources to Cambodia paled in
comparison to the massive campaign against Chile and South Korea, two
non-communist countries.[199] Perhaps the reason why Chomsky and Herman use
anecdotal evidence to prove their theories, is because they know that
aggregate analysis would show that they were wrong.

Round Two: "Massacre Stories a Big Lie"

The charge that there was a propaganda campaign as it pertains to Chomsky's
and Herman's theory of the Free Press is unsubstantiated for 1977. Porter,
Hildebrand, and Summers insinuated that campaign's presence as early as 1975
and 1976. For the year 1977, coverage picked-up, but it remained dispersed.
Stories appeared in a variety of newspapers, but these were not all
negative. For instance, on March 30, 1977, the New York Guardian headlined a
story by George C. Hildebrand "Kampuchean refugee challenges terror stories
circulated in the U.S.A." in which refugee Khoun Sakhon says "I don't know
what I'm doing here [in America], I feel I belong back there [in the new
Kampuchea]."[200] By mid-1977, while in Washington D.C., Gareth Porter wrote
to the editor of the Washington Star: "It requires hard work to dig through
the available data and sift reliable from unreliable reports, but it is
evident that the Star does not wish to be bothered with the task. And the
value of your conclusions is therefore very doubtful."[201] A review of the
Porter-Hildebrand book, Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, in June 1977
found that:

Refugee accounts portray the new leaders [of Democratic Kampuchea] as wildly
irrational, visionary fanatics. Hildebrand and Porter disagree. Their
sources? More than three hundred footnotes referring to suppressed
information, confidential AID, World Bank and IMF reports, accounts of
foreign diplomats and French journalists as well as the author's own
conversations with Cambodia's spokesmen. Read this book to get a fresh,
well-documented and scholarly interpretation; then make up your own mind, It
could prove to be one of the most unsettling experiences you've read since
reading the Pentagon Papers. [Emphasis added.][202]


Indeed, the reviewer did not attempt to reconcile these diametrically
opposed views, instead he compares the Porter-Hildebrand book to the antiwar
movement's favorite "Pentagon Papers." In October 1977, Yuri Antoshin
declared that, "A new era, an era of peace, independence and socialist
change, has opened before [Kampuchea]."[203] To be sure, media coverage in
1977 included negative stories, but these were dispersed, not concerted. For
instance, it was in early 1977 that Reader's Digest published the
Barron-Paul book excerpt, at about the same time that Lacouture's review
appeared in the New York Review of Books. Later, in October, Morton
Kondracke's "How Much Blood Makes a Bloodbath?" appeared in the New
Republic. Kondracke, who was in Bangkok, Thailand, interviewing refugees on
the border writes:

[The] doves who pooh-poohed the bloodbath theory also were wrong and cannot
escape the fact by saying, "oops it happened in Cambodia." Some anti-war
activists try to blame Cambodia's fate on the Untied States, claiming that
American bombing "destroyed the fabric" of the Khmer society, uprooted its
population and accelerated communist "revolution" ... but the doves
themselves had better explain why similar things haven't happened in
Vietnam, where the bombing and uprooting were worse, and more sustained.
Clearly, Cambodia has fallen into the hands of monsters.[204]


Kondracke, who makes assertions similar to Lacouture's, interviewed twelve
refugees for the story. The fall of Saigon took place a month after the fall
of Phnom Penh, and it is true that the Vietnamese communists were more
restrained than the Khmer Rouge were in seeking vengeance. For one things,
they did not evacuate Saigon. Writing for the New York Times later that
October, Henry Kamm quotes a refugee as saying "Americans are good," a
statement he finds "unfounded in view of Cambodia's experience with the
United States."[205] More rigorous media analysis of the period immediately
following the 1975 evacuation and 1979 invasion of Cambodia by Vietnam
suggests that the STAV's skepticism not only added insult to injury, but
could have influenced public opinion sufficiently to kill the potential for
a Cambodian cause before 1979. There was no cause celebre for Cambodia, as
we shall next see.

Round Three: "Some Perceptions of a Disaster"

Further examination of the media by William Shawcross in his 1983 essay
"Cambodia: Some Perceptions of a Disaster"[206] reveals that, contrary to
Chomsky and Herman, many reporters covering Cambodia were actually
sympathetic to the Khmer Rouge. Shawcross, who became famous for blaming the
actions of the Khmer Rouge on the United States, thought that very few
journalists "wanted to believe the bloodbath theory." Some of the
journalists, according to Shawcross, were so bold as to sing to the tune of
"She Was Poor But She Was Honest" with the following lyrics:

Oh will there be a dreadful bloodbath

When the Khmer Rouge come to town?

Aye, there'll be a dreadful bloodbath

When the Khmer Rouge come to town.[207]


Chomsky and Herman made no mention of this in their own high-minded media
analysis. Why? Simply because they saw only what they wanted to see:
evidence which would prove media bias against the Khmer Rouge. Shawcross'
own analysis found that:

Chomsky and Herman believe that the press coverage of Democratic Kampuchea
from 1975-79 amounted to "a propaganda campaign" of "vast and unprecedented"
scope. It is true that there was a lot of coverage during this period, but
there was not the intensity which developed in the fall of 1979, after their
book was published. Why was that? An important reason is that in the 1975-78
period, governments did not in fact put their immense resources behind a
propaganda campaign. There was never an anti-Khmer Rouge conspiracy of the
"free press," Thailand and its allied governments in the West as Chomsky and
Herman assert.

Accounts of Khmer Rouge atrocities began to appear in the Western press in
the summer of 1975 as Chomsky/Herman point out... But this did not
constitute a massive or coordinated campaign against the Khmer Rouge--not by
the "free press," and also not by governments... [Among the reporters who
went to the Thai border] some believed, at least for a short time (as
Chomsky and Herman were to believe for years), that the refugees were
unreliable, that the CIA was cooking up a bloodbath to say, "We told you
so," and so on. [Emphasis added by Shawcross].[208]


His analysis of Chomsky and Herman's goals are perceptive, and he does not
lose sight of the slippery language in which they coat their arguments.
Shawcross asserts, correctly, that the Chomsky-Herman goal was "designed to
give an excuse--even a justification--to all those who denied (sometimes
until the Vietnamese asserted it) that terrible things were happening in
Cambodia. At least that has been the effect."[209]

Shawcross also tackles charge of bias which Chomsky and Herman level against
the media. The bias concerned differential coverage of East Timor versus
Cambodia. In East Timor, the Indonesian government had allegedly killed
200,000 out of over a million Timorese, Chomsky and Herman asserted, a
proportion roughly equal to that suggested for Cambodia where Ponchaud had
said in 1977 that 1.2 million had died out 7 million. Chomsky and Herman
argued that the media did not cover the East Timor massacres because
Indonesia, a country friendly to the U.S., was the perpetrator. Shawcross
suggests instead that:

A different, less conspiratorial, but perhaps more structurally serious
explanation is that there has been a comparative lack of sources [in the
case of Timor]. The American Government was very anxious to say nothing of
Timor. So was the Indonesian Government. There were not many refugees; there
was no "border" for journalists to visit.[210]


Of course, we may ask, were the STAV scholars interested in visiting the
Thai-Cambodia "border" where countless refugees had amassed? Porter was in
Washington D.C., Summers and Caldwell were in England, Kiernan, a graduate
student, was in Australia, and Chomsky was at MIT. Armchair fieldwork,
perhaps? When Kiernan and Hildebrand finally cared enough to visit the
refugee camps in 1979, they quickly realized that the massacres were not all
"a big lie."

Did the STAV scholars realize that the harder they fought to defend the
Khmer Rouge, the more likely they were fighting against truth itself?
Shawcross' heuristic evidence points to a realization by one member of the
STAV that something was bizarre. He began to doubt himself even as he
pressed on with the STAV's version of the truth. Shawcross quotes Gavin
McCormick, a colleague of Chomsky's, and a proponent of the STAV on
Cambodia, as having written in an essay:

The Kampuchean question is shrouded in a dense fog of prejudices,
distortions, propaganda, and half truth. The Western media and intelligence
worked hard on Kampuchea. But, and here is a tragic irony, it becomes
increasingly likely that some of the most malicious fantasies of
propagandists, conceived with little or no regard for truth, may actually be
close to the truth. This is a difficult and unpalatable conclusion.[211]


McCormick's boldfaced admission is seen by Shawcross as an attempt to
"vindicate the fact that he and others ... denied the suffering of those
people"--a difficult position at best. In chapter 3, we saw that for Chomsky
and Herman, their hypocrisy knew no bounds, so why should there be an
exception for their colleagues in the STAV? Shawcross' scathing indictment
continues,

In fact, the "scepticism"--a mild word in the circumstances--displayed by
the Western left towards what was going in Cambodia is one of the principal
reasons why an international campaign, such as that for Chile after 1973,
was never mounted on behalf of the Khmers. The moral force of the
left--Communist and non-Communist--was not exerted on behalf of the
Cambodians until 1979.[212]


Shawcross, who is well respected by the Left for his Sideshow: Nixon,
Kissinger, and the Destruction of Cambodia (1979), a book that damns Nixon
and Kissinger for creating the Khmer Rouge, is merciless towards the Left.
The response by Chomsky and Herman has been to argue that nothing could have
been done for the Cambodians. They quote, out of context, Douglas Pike's
response to Senator George McGovern's call for "international military
intervention" in Cambodia as having been "the notion of a quick, surgical
takeout of the government of Cambodia probably is not possible."[213]
Chomsky and Herman use this as proof that the U.S. government was not going
to do anything, ergo After the Cataclysm made no difference with respect to
the final outcome. In an endnote, they call Pike a "State Department
propagandist whose effusions are often simply embarrassing."[214]Again,
Chomsky and Herman want to have their cake and to eat it too.

The State of the STAV

Sixteen years have passed since the STAV's last stand. Since the 1979
publication of After the Cataclysm, where are the romantics of the Khmer
revolution? As alluded to in chapter 3, Chomsky and Herman maintain that
they were right all along. For the canonized few, some, like Chomsky and
Herman have remained in the academic limelight, others have quietly
disappeared. This portion of the thesis is about what has happened to them.
It attempts to reconcile the image of the young idealistic scholars/student
with their current image. What has happened to the members of the STAV on
Cambodia? What were the avenues for Summers, Caldwell, Porter, and
Hildebrand? Michael Vickery offers three paths, summarized by Gunn and Lee,
as follows:

1) Some decided they had been wrong and lost interest in Cambodia.

2) Others admitted they had been wrong and accepted the STV [Standard Total
View by Ponchaud, Lacouture, Barron, Paul, the media], but sought to study
why the revolution had run off the rails.

3) Others admit the STV is partially true and continue to insist that
1975-79 brought positive achievements. This group rejects the People's
Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) or Heng Samrin government solution and accepts
uncritically the STV for 1979-80 [that 1 million deaths took place that
year].[215]


These are, of course, ideal types. Few of the canonized authors fall
squarely in one category versus another. Some, for instance, George C.
Hildebrand, chose (3) and then switched (1). Others like Ben Kiernan chose
(2) and performed a unilateral switch to the People's Republic of Kampuchea
(Cambodia's new name between 1979 and 1989), led by former Khmer Rouge Heng
Samrin. For his act of bravery, Kiernan was immediately issued a visa to
visit the PRK. This was one side of a two-sided switch. Gareth Porter, like
Kiernan, chose option (2) a la Hanoi. Laura Summers took option (3)
initially, but today writes for the Economist Intelligence Unit's reports on
Cambodia. Finally, Chomsky and Herman have taken hybrid path between option
(2) and (3). Although, if Vickery had created it, a fourth option might be
to "continue to maintain that they were right all along," which is what
Chomsky and Herman have done.

George C. Hildebrand

George C. Hildebrand co-author with Gareth Porter of Cambodia: Starvation
and Revolution, the sine qua non of the Khmer Rouge Canon, has kept silent
on Cambodia. At the "Kampuchea Conference" in Stockholm, November 17-18,
1979 convened after the Vietnamese invasion, Hildebrand spoke to an audience
of like-minded individuals who sought the withdrawal of Vietnamese troops
from Cambodian soil. Marita Wikander, chairman of the Swedish-Kampuchea
Friendship Association, opened the conference with a message from Democratic
Kampuchea President Khieu Samphan. Samphan's letter states that:

During these 11 months of invasion, more that 500,000 Kampucheans have been
massacred and more than 500,000 others have died from starvation... The aim
of the Hanoi authorities is very clear: to empty Kampuchea of its
population, establish there the Vietnamese settlement in its place, annex
Kampuchea to be an integral part of their "Big Vietnam" under the sign of
"Indochina Federation" and to carry on its expansion in Southeast Asia.[216]


The death toll from the Vietnamese invasion invites debate given that it
sums to a convenient 1,000,000; nearly the total death toll being blamed on
the Khmer Rouge themselves. There is no mention of any deaths under their
own leadership until 1987, when an official Khmer Rouge document admits to
20,000 excess deaths.[217] Samphan's position is almost the ideal type for
Vickery's third option, namely that it admits something went wrong (though
that would happen later) during 1975-1979, but attributes the bulk of deaths
on the Vietnamese.

From this, where does that leave Hildebrand? He give no specifics. From his
speech, he falls in the third category of believers who resigned themselves
to the fact that what Ponchaud, Lacouture, Barron, and Paul were saying was
"partially true," but continued to "insist that 1975-79 brought positive
achievements." Hildebrand, who is listed as a "scholar" at the Kampuchea
Conference, begins his speech on an apologetic note:

Let me say at the out-set that, on the basis of my conversations with
refugees in Thailand and the United States, I believe that there were some
extremely serious problems in Cambodia during the period 1975-78. I believe
that things happened that were, simply speaking, wrong, both morally and
politically. Since the responsible authorities of the Government of
Democratic Kampuchea, notably Deputy Premier Ieng Sary and State Council
President Khieu Samphan, have acknowledged some very serious internal
problems, and since they have invited constructive criticism, I feel it is
my responsibility to indicate support for the reexamination and
transformation, in the interests of heightening the unity of the Cambodian
people in the face of what must be the most serious crisis they have ever
faced [, the invasion of Cambodia by Vietnam].[218]


Hildebrand's mealy-mouthed apology would mean something if he were actually
sincere. More specifically, what does he now find so "morally and
politically" wrong since having co-authored Cambodia: Starvation and
Revolution? Nobody knows, he offers no specifics. In any case, at
Hildebrand's askance for "reexamination and transformation," perhaps, the
Khmer Rouge admitted in 1987 of having caused 20,000 deaths from
malnutrition and illness during the evacuation of Phnom Penh, another 10,000
of whom died because of "Vietnamese agents" who had infiltrated the Khmer
Rouge and taken liberties with innocent Cambodians.[219]

Hildebrand expends far more breath denouncing the Western media for its
portrayal of the Khmer Rouge. For instance, he admonishes the Washington
Post for publishing photographs which it later had to disavow, but, were
subsequently republished in Newsweek, a subsidiary of the Washington Post,
some months later. These were the same photographs Chomsky and Herman were
crusading against in After the Cataclysm. Hildebrand then denounces the New
York Times for trimming ambassador Kaj Bjork's positive comments on his
visit to Cambodia. "All The News That's Fit to Print" citing the New York
Time's motto, Hildebrand retorts, "All the News That Fits." He then
demolishes the almost three year-old condensed Barron-Paul "Murder of a
Gentle Land" Reader's Digest article, pointing out that, "[Barron and Paul]
unaccountably forgot to mention the Nixon Administration's February-August
1973 bombing of Cambodia--bombing, according to U.S. Congressional sources
aimed at least 50 procent [sic] at the Cambodian people..."[220] It is the
same old broken record we have heard from Chomsky and Herman to Retbøll and
Kiernan. In a new twist, Hildebrand mocks Reader's Digest's reasons for not
releasing the interviews used to write the Barron-Paul book. These reasons
include (1) fear of reprisal against the refugee's family and (2) fear of
litigation, to which Hildebrand responds: "Can people who raise such
considerations really seriously be searching for truth about Cambodia?"[221]

Hildebrand spends the remainder of his speech condemning the Vietnamese and
their propaganda practices. Having sharpened his skills on the Americans,
Hildebrand has no problem portraying the Vietnamese as STAV enemy number
one. He writes,

Can we trust the Vietnamese, and their friends in Phnom Penh?... This
handful of subservient functionaries, who as long as 23 March [1979]
announced a "serious food shortage" in Cambodia in the hopes of turning
international aid into back-door recognition of their regime, and who,
confronted with the failure of this play, then declared through their
spokesman... last month [October 1979] in Moscow, that "No one is starving
in our country?[222]


His new sensibilities are refreshing. Suddenly, the "subservient
functionaries" and "spokesman" to the "Vietnamese" and "their friends in
Phnom Penh" are no longer good enough to converse with as the "Cambodian
spokesmen" were when he co-authored his 1976 book. He discovers that, "War
implies propaganda... so let us proceed with due caution in trying to
understand Cambodia from all that is said about the Cambodians from their
enemies, past and present."[223] Unfortunately for Hildebrand, the lesson
ends when revolution implies propaganda. Like the other romantics of his
generation, "utmost skepticism" meant "utmost skepticism to what you don't
like."

Hildebrand's final comments are his most passionate yet. With respect to
international relations and the balance of power in the region, he calls
upon the world community to stop Vietnam now. "The policies of the
Vietnamese government, Party, and Army," he says, "are totally wrong." He
continues, "They are a threat to the region and a threat to the world. They
must be stopped--and they must be stopped now."[224] In retrospect,
Hildebrand should have said the same about Democratic Kampuchea four years
earlier, but of course, he never did. Speaking with moral authority, he
states:

I strongly urge you to do everything you can to support Cambodia, to promote
unity among the Cambodian people living abroad, to extend all possible aid
to refugee victims of this aggression, whether Boat People or Lao and
Cambodian land refugees--and contrarywise [sic], to deny any form of aid or
support to the aggressor at this time, and to support the human rights and
democratic struggle in the region, so that the people--the one sure force we
can count on--will be free to give their fullest energies in support of the
independence of their countries.[225]


These are a lot of histrionics from a man whose first instinct was to
support the Khmer Rouge's evacuation of Phnom Penh. He sees the Vietnamese
aggression as a "threat to the region and a threat to the world" but could
not see the threat from within. While terrified refugees were lepers to be
cautiously handled, their stories always under suspicion, now, "all possible
aid" was to be extended to them. One wonders how Hildebrand reconciled his
flip-flop on refugees. One wonders too what has happened to him since the
1979 Kampuchea Conference. He has not published since then, and is assumed
to have switched into Vickery's first category, those who "simply lost
interest."

Gareth Porter

Gareth Porter falls somewhere along the second type of reaction proposed by
Vickery. He shifted gears rapidly from a focus on Cambodia to Vietnam, the
country for which his old professor George McTurnin Kahin had made a name
for himself. In May 1977, Porter testified in congressional hearings on
human rights in Cambodia. He told the committee:

But the notion that the leadership of Democratic Kampuchea adopted a policy
of physically eliminating whole classes of people, of purging anyone who was
connected with the Lon Nol government, or punishing the entire urban
population by putting them to work in the countryside after the "death
march" from the cities is a myth fostered primarily by the authors of a
Reader's Digest book . . .[226]


Of course, this was still 1977, and the STAV on Cambodia was in great shape
especially with emergence of the dynamic duo of Chomsky and Herman to their
rescue. Moreover, Porter's testimony would in turn help Chomsky and Herman
make their own case. Since Porter continued to remain unconvinced by the
refugee reports because of internal contradictions found in some of them, he
pointed this out to the committee. He was subsequently embraced by Chomsky
and Herman, both for his testimony and for the "well-documented" book he
co-authored with Hildebrand: Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution. In After
the Cataclysm, Chomsky and Herman write:

In the May Hearings Porter cites the case of Chou Try, who told a CBS
reporter that he had witnessed the beating to death of five students by
Khmer Rouge soldiers. In October 1976, he told Patrice de Beer of Le Monde
that he had witnessed no executions though he had heard rumors of them... As
Porter and Retbøll both insist, refugee reports should certainly not be
disregarded, but some care is in order.[227]


To be sure, the contradictions were minor ones, but we know that Chomsky,
Herman, Retbøll, and Porter invented new ways of treating refugees, "with
care and caution," "utmost skepticism," otherwise known as suspicion.
Porter, who was not discussed in chapter 3 for his involvement in the
Chomsky-Lacouture Controversy, played a small, but acknowledged part. In
Ponchaud's "Note for the English Translation" to his book Cambodia: Year
Zero, he writes:

[In addition to Mr. Chomsky,] Mr. Gareth Porter also criticized my book very
sharply during a congressional hearing on the subject of human rights in
Cambodia, and argued that I was trying to convince people that Cambodia was
drowned in a sea of blood after the departure of the last American
diplomats. He denied that a general policy of purge was put into effect and
considered that the tragedy through which the Khmer people are now living
should mainly be attributed to the American bombings. He censured me for
lacking a critical approach in my use of refugee accounts, on the ground
that they were not credible because the refugees were deliberately trying to
blacken the regime they had fled.[228]


Indeed, Porter made significant contributions to his own stature at the 1977
May Hearings. He went to work for the Institute of Policy Studies in
Washington, D.C., and while there wrote letters to the editor, such as the
one denouncing the Washington Star. According to Morris, Porter then took
temporary teaching positions until he became an aid to Representative
Clarence Long of Maryland. From there, he gained the position of
"Professional Lecturer" in Southeast Asian Studies at Johns Hopkins
University's School of Advanced International Studies. While there, he
contributed an essay to the Chandler-Kiernan book Revolution and Its
Aftermath in Kampuchea (1983), the same book in which William Shawcross
attacked Noam Chomsky, Gavin McCormick, the STAV, viz. the Left in his
essay: "Cambodia: Some Perceptions of a Disaster." Porter now specializes on
Vietnam more so than on Cambodia.[229] His essay in the Chandler-Kiernan
book is about Vietnamese communist policy towards Cambodia covering 1930 to
1970. Using Vickery's possible paths, Porter would most likely fit in the
second category. Although this author has yet to see Porter's mea culpa, he
has evidently tried his best to avoid the whole issue of his past
involvement. Like Kiernan, who switched over to the People's Republic of
Kampuchea not long after the invasion, Porter would presumably be in that
camp. Next, we turn to Laura Summers, the only woman to be canonized.

Laura Summers

By 1979, Laura Summers was not so openly doting the Khmer Rouge or their
revolution, though she remained quite sympathetic to their cause. In a
Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars article of that same year entitled, "In
Matters of War and Socialism, Anthony Barnett Would Shame and Honor
Kampuchea Too Much," she argues against her fellow socialist colleague
Anthony Barnett who, like Kiernan, had switched to the PRK. Summer's wrath
on American foreign policy in "Cambodia: Consolidating the Revolution" and
"Defining the Revolutionary State in Cambodia" was replaced by a
Hildebrand-style denunciation of Vietnam. In any event, Kampuchea was always
the unwilling victim of foreign intrusion and intervention. In that sense,
Summers falls in Vickery's third category of true believers. They "admit the
STV [Ponchaud-Lacouture-Barron-Paul thesis] is partially true [but] continue
to insist that 1975-79 brought positive achievements," and denounce the
1979-1980 invasion period as the genocide of a people. She writes,

The media image of Kampuchea as the most radical, heretical and murderous of
socialisms probably bedevilled [sic] Vietnam's foreign policy thinking and
sense of socialist and national superiority... By 1978, Vietnam took the
bait. It exploited the Western image of Kampuchea to justify its armed and
political intervention in the internal affairs of its neighbouring communist
state in a manner suggesting nothing more or less than expediency.[230]


The mind-boggling naïveté, exposed in her first Current History article, has
been replaced by an unadorned anti-Vietnamese line. Having been unreservedly
in support of the Khmer revolution, she could not allow Vietnam's foreign
policy to interfere with Kampuchea's future. It is remarkable that Summers
makes no mention of any atrocities in Democratic Kampuchea in the 1979 BCAS
article. Perhaps it is not the purpose of her article, just as it was not
Porter's in "Vietnamese Policy Towards Kampuchea, 1930-1970."

Instead, Summers engages Barnett in a debate over war and socialism, to be
sure, more sophistry. Summers asks, "So did the Kampucheans start the war or
not? In my opinion, we'll never know. Moreover, it is probably not important
to know who fired the first the first shot. They are indicative of deep
political conflict. In the absence of resolution by other means such
conflicts find martial expression."[231] She surmises that, "clashes
occurred between the two neighboring states [Vietnam and Cambodia] in the
aftermath of their extremely difficult liberation struggles is not at all
surprising."[232] Her syntactic use of "Kampucheans," presupposes that the
Khmer Rouge legitimately represent all Cambodian. It is only a small change
from her early adoption of "Khmer" for "Khmer Rouge" in "Cambodia:
Consolidating the Revolution." Summers partially reveals her position, with
respect to the STAV, when she writes, "These impressions and judgments
[against Kampuchea and in favor of Vietnam] are apparently based on the
consensus of opinion in the world media, excluding the serious press--the
opinions of specialists hostile to Kampuchea--Vietnamese state propaganda
and other forms of hearsay."[233] She refers presumably to the momentum
gained after the invasion of Cambodia, in which the 1979 media that,
according to Shawcross, drew worldwide attention to the atrocities in
Democratic Kampuchea. Summers mocks Vietnam's concurrence with the findings
of an Oslo conference on "alleged atrocities" (a recurring marker in
Caldwell, Chomsky, et al.) committed by the Khmer Rouge and is particularly
critical of Reader's Digest for giving Vietnam ammunition to proselytize its
own citizens against Kampuchea. In what must be a strange admission, she
concludes that "It is difficult not to see the imperial "divide and rule"
obstructing peace between warring communist neighbors."[234] Wrapping-up her
article with a tampered Hildebrand-style call-to-action, she writes:

The final task confronting anti-war activists should be the most obvious
(though I fear, given the extraordinary confusion and partisanship
alternately paralyzing or dividing international opinion, isn't). But if we
are to lend meaningful support to the Kampuchean people and the Vietnamese
people who pay the price for the undemocratic, martial adventures of their
states as well as part of the high human cost of the criminal invasion to
punish Vietnam launched by the Chinese authorities, then, it should be
apparent that peace requires the withdrawal of the Vietnamese army from
Kampuchea. To express disapproval of Vietnam's Kampuchea policy, to discuss
it critically, is not to "attack" Vietnam or to be "hostile" to the
Vietnamese revolution.[235]


Her conciliatory remarks on behalf of the antiwar activists bears little
resemblance to her fiery anti-American rhetoric of past articles. She
concedes, by her own admission, that "martial adventures" are possible among
socialist states and that these are "undemocratic." She still possesses,
however, the same young, idealistic, romantic views of liberation a la
peasant revolution, and anti-colonial struggles. Summers continues,

To the contrary, it is perhaps the best way to defend the visions of
liberation from colonial tyranny and imperial subjection which inspired the
Vietnamese revolution from its origins--visions which seem moreover worthy
of liberation. In denying rights of sovereignty and independence to the
Kampuchean nation, the Vietnamese state has simply lost its revolutionary
way. In defense of peace between the Kampuchea and Vietnamese peoples,
democrats everywhere are obliged to say so. [Emphasis added.][236]


Summers herself has not lost her "revolutionary way." Four years after the
"monstrous dark age ... has engulfed the people of Cambodia," she wants
more. Though she does not elaborate how democrats can be obliged to say
anything of "visions of liberation," "colonial tyranny," "imperial
subjection" that seem "worthy of liberation," her 1979 BCAS article sounds
positively objective when compared to her earlier 1975 and 1976 essays in
Current History. The irony of it is that she achieves this while attacking
her socialist colleague, Anthony Barnett.

Whether Laura Summers would continue to defend the Khmer revolution to this
day, no one can be sure. What it clear, though, is that she is still active
in Cambodian studies. She currently teaches at the University of Hull and
contributes frequently to the Internet list Seasia-L, though refrains from
public debate through that channel. She is gratefully acknowledged for
helping current scholars on Cambodia do research, myself included.
Furthermore, Morris' parenthetical note on Summers states,
"[She]...subsequently reevaluated [her] pro-Khmer Rouge views, and now
discretely sympathizes with the Cambodian noncommunists.[237] She is rumored
to be the person in charge of writing for the Economist's Intelligence Unit
reports on Cambodia. If that is correct, it would be ironic given the
Economist's noncommunist proclivity. In sum, Summers would be classified in
Vickery's typology as a type three (mostly rejects the
Ponchaud-Lacouture-Barron-Paul thesis) moving slowly to a type two (where
she mostly accepts the thesis). Next, we remember Malcolm Caldwell's
contributions and surmise where he would stand with respect to the STAV on
Cambodia today.

Malcolm Cadwell Remembered

Malcolm Caldwell never had the opportunity to look back at the Pol Pot-Ieng
Sary regime after it was overturned by Vietnamese troops. He was killed only
days before the invasion began, while in Phnom Penh. Caldwell, along with
Richard Dudman and Elizabeth Becker were the first Western journalists
(Caldwell's London Times curiously titled article, "Inside Cambodia: another
side to the picture," qualified him as a journalist) to be invited into
Cambodia in December 1978. Malcolm Caldwell's last conversation with
Elizabeth Becker, a correspondent for the Washington Post, is our last entry
for him. Becker recounts their conversation the evening of his death:

After dinner, Dudman went to his room to type up notes and Caldwell and I
stayed at the table to have our last argument about Cambodia. Caldwell took
what he considered the longer view and said the revolution was worth it. I
said, on the contrary, I was more convinced of the truth of the refugee
stories--which is what I eventually wrote. That night Caldwell tried once
more to get me to change my mind. He compared Cambodia to Scotland--he was a
Scottish nationalist--and said Cambodia feared Vietnam the way Scotland
feared the English. I saw no relevance to such a remark, and he retired to
his room with the prophecy that Scotland would be independent of England by
the middle of the 1980s.[238]


The Khmer Rouge Canon has seen many a comparison between the Khmer
revolution and other revolutions. Summers compared it to the Puritan
revolution in England. She thought it out of "cultural and historical
context" when compared to the Russian experience. Here we see a comparison
between the geopolitical status of Cambodia and that of Scotland. Many
observers agree that Cambodia is like Poland, in between larger states, but
like Scotland? We may ask too whether Scotland is anywhere closer to
independence in the 1990s than it was in the 1980s? Predictive abilities
aside, Caldwell was simply way off the mark in comparative politics.

Later that December night, Caldwell was murdered by a Khmer Rouge assassin
in a "plot meant to embarrass the regime on the eve of war." Becker adds
that, "Circumstantial evidence inside the confessions [of the assassins]
suggests that Caldwell was selected because he was the "friend" of the
revolution..."[239] Becker surmises that the assassination was planned by
someone in the "inner party circle" opposed to Pol Pot. Also from
confessions exacted from two men who were tortured at Tuol Sleng[240] for
the murder of Caldwell, Becker concludes in her Epilogue that "Caldwell's
death would show that the revolution could not even care for its friends,
that it was fraught with chaos. The two Americans [Becker and Dudman] were
saved so that they could write back about the attack."[241]

The Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars remembered Caldwell in a 1979
article entitled "Malcolm Caldwell, 1931-1978."[242] The authors of the
article, Peter F. Bell and Mark Selden, eulogize him. Like Summers' BCAS
essay of that same year, Bell and Selden sound conciliatory if not
positively dialectic:

[Caldwell's] death was tragically linked to the contradictions of socialist
revolution in Southeast Asia; he was caught in the contradictory cross-fire
of the very changes for which he had struggled so long. The subsequent
Vietnamese overthrow of the Pol Pot regime underlines forcibly the need for
a critical evaluation of the revolutionary regimes in Southeast Asia, to
which many of us gave strong support in previous years.[243]


On that apologetic note, which of the revolutions (Khmer or Vietnamese) Bell
and Selden refer to is not self-evident. Caldwell is remembered as an
"indefatigable activist" who was also "best known abroad for his books and
articles and for his work as a founding editor and moving spirit of the
Journal of Contemporary Asia, the only English journal explicitly committed
to the revolutionary movements of Asia."[244]

In Bell's and Selden's estimation, Malcolm Caldwell was not one to beat
around the bush when it came to supporting the revolution in Kampuchea. As
was clear in his own writings of the Khmer Rouge regime, published both
before and after his death, Caldwell was among those who romanticized the
Khmer revolution enormously. Bell and Selden write,

Malcolm, one of the staunchest defenders of the Pol Pot regime in the West,
viewed that regime through the prism of agrarian revolution. His systematic
attempt to deflate Western journalistic reports of mass executions in
Kampuchea made him the object of attack from many quarters. He was accused
by some of Stalinism for this type of reasoning: "How many people died in
the French revolution? (His long essay on Kampuchea may be published in
England as a book.) To the end he defended the right to national
self-determination and to the charting of independent routes to socialism
for Vietnam as well as for Kampuchea and all others.[245]


From comparisons to Scotland's independence movement, the Puritan
revolution, and Russian history, the Khmer revolution is now equivalent to
the French revolution. Fittingly so, in remembering Caldwell, his colleagues
compare him to the celebrated Noam Chomsky. They continue:

The British scholar and journalist, John Gittings, writing in the London
Guardian, compared Caldwell's role to that of Noam Chomsky in the U.S.--"a
lone heretic in the academic world, of enormous personal charm who was
respected internationally for views which many colleagues failed to
understand." Malcolm's writings did not spring from a consistent theoretical
conception, and he was often eclectic. His major concern was to expose
historical and contemporary exploitation. A brilliant critic of imperialism
in general, and U.S. imperialism in particular, he sought to capture the
human experience which led Asian people in country after country to rise in
revolution.[246]


Caldwell was a dye in the wool revolutionary. He had expressed concern to
Utrecht (see chapter 2) before visiting the new Kampuchea, that if an
innocent peasant had been killed it was a token of fascism. But we know from
Becker that after interviewing Pol Pot, "[Caldwell] returned delighted with
his time with Cambodia's leader. The two had spent most of the interview
discussing revolutionary economic theory, the topic of choice for Caldwell
throughout the trip."[247] So much so that Caldwell was invited to return
the following year by Pol Pot, "to measure how the revolution had prospered.
[Caldwell] agreed as long as it would not coincide with the Christmas
holiday, when he preferred to be with his family."[248] Caldwell, if he were
alive, would surely be in Vickery's third category, namely those who insist
"1975-1979 brought positive achievements." Next we examine whether Edward
Herman has moved beyond the STAV on Cambodia.

Edward S. Herman

Like many of the STAV scholars who found solidarity with the Khmer people
and their revolution, Herman has not offered any explanation, excuse, or
recantation for his position. It is true that because his work with Chomsky
was cloaked in media analysis, he has had an easier time defending himself.
He continues to maintain that his work with Chomsky, "was and remains on
target."[249] Given that position, he would likely fall, in Vickery's third
type: those who remain believers in the Khmer Rouge mission even if it is
not divorced from the violence they acknowledge took place, though on a
smaller scale than is normally accepted. Herman likes to use Michael
Vickery's estimate of 750,000 deaths resulting from 1975-1979 because it is
among the lower estimates available (notwithstanding the Khmer Rouge's
admission of having caused 20,000-30,000 deaths). In a letter to the editor
of the New York Review of Books, Herman had this to say, "Rod Nordland's
assertion... that the Khmer Rouge `tried to exterminate or at least
deliberately work to death a majority of the population' resuscitates an
especially foolish propaganda claim of the 1970's that has been rejected by
every serious student of the subject." Adding,

It also fails to explain why, if the Khmer Rouge aim was "autogenocide," it
was unable to come anywhere near meeting its objective. The best overall
survey of the period, by Michael Vickery, estimates 750,000 excess deaths in
the Khmer Rouge era from all causes (including starvation and disease from
the terrible early postwar conditions), on a population base of six to eight
million.[250]


Herman's assertion is a simple one: in order for the word autogenocide to be
used, the majority of Cambodians would have to be dead. Since this was not
the case, it cannot be called "autogenocide." What Herman would call it,
nobody knows, since he does not call it anything at all. Herman writes, "Mr.
Nordland's review is based on an implausible and ridiculous myth."[251]

Herman would not take back anything, to say the least. He felt all the more
vindicated in making his conclusions in light of these myths and attacks on
his work with Chomsky. This use of the evidence appears quite circular. If
the media objects to the theory of the Free Press, then it must be proof
that the theory is right. Herman posits:

[Mr. Nordland's] further assertion that Noam Chomsky attributed the deaths
of the Pol Pot era to "nothing but" war-induced famine [by the Americans] is
an outright lie. Mr. Chomsky (and the present writer, who was co-author with
Mr. Chomsky of his published works on Cambodia) went to great pains to
stress that there were no doubt that the Khmer Rouge was committing serious
crimes, although we took no position on their scale (which was very
uncertain at the time).[252]


Instead, Herman contends that his work with Chomsky was not about the Khmer
Rouge per se, rather the media coverage and its distortions. He is at least
partly correct, after all, the chapter on Cambodia in After the Cataclysm
was mainly an analysis and critique of the media and the
Ponchaud-Barron-Paul-Lacouture thesis. Hence, the cloak of "media analysis."
Herman is vainglorious, when he asserts that, "These were perfectly
legitimate subjects in themselves, justified even more by the fact that the
West wasn't even proposing doing anything useful for the victims..."[253]
This final assertion which invites debate given the fact that the Left in
which Chomsky and Herman were prominent members, along with the STAV, could
have turned Cambodia into a cause celebre, as argue Ponchaud, Shawcross, and
AIM, did nothing of the sort. Herman is indignant, and concludes:

But in the West, to focus on the distortions and hypocrisies of a propaganda
campaign is to become an "apologist" for the villains of that campaign. Mr.
Nordland's review, which rests on one of the myths of the Pol Pot era as
well as a now institutionalized lie about our own work on the subject, show
that our effort was and remains on target.[254]


Herman's reaction is not unexpected. "Perhaps someday," to reverse Chomsky's
phrase, the STAV scholars "will acknowledge their `honest errors' in their
memoirs, speaking of the burdens" of academia 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."[255] This brings us finally to Noam Chomsky,
linguiste extraordinaire.

Noam Chomsky

Of all the STAV scholars who were involved in the debate on Cambodia,
Chomsky was honored even by Jean Lacouture, as the most respectable among
them. Bruce Sharp, editor of Cambodian Life, a Texan periodical on Cambodian
issues, makes a number of excellent points, for which I am indebted. Sharp
writes:

The mistake that I think Noam Chomsky makes is a pretty common one. He has
formulated a theory about collusion between the government and the media,
and he looks for evidence to support his theory ... To emphasize: he looks
for evidence to support his theory. He doesn't simply examine evidence
objectively. He seeks out evidence that supports his theory, and disregards
evidence that tends to dispute it. And in the case of Cambodia, that has
caused him to accept some very dubious conclusions ... Any attempt at honest
scholarship would have revealed that the stories were true. But Chomsky
never bothered to make that effort; because Hildebrand and Porter were
saying what he wanted to hear, he did not subject their claims to the same
rigorous critique that he applies to works which contradict his opinions.
That is a pity... I think Chomsky has few peers when it comes to cutting
through bullshit.[256]


Sharp's critique of Chomsky underlines the academic mistake that caused
scholars in the STAV to reject refugee stories with suspicion. They were so
caught-up in the idea of a peasant revolution that they did not stop and ask
the peasants themselves how they liked the ride. Sharp's assertion that
Chomsky "has few peers" is especially true now, since he continues to
maintain no one has successfully challenged his claims in After the
Cataclysm. He and Herman do admit to having expressed "skepticism" in
"Distortions at Fourth Hand," though that would be a "mild word in these
circumstances" according to Shawcross. In 1988, Chomsky's and Herman's
theory of the Free Press is still on target according to their latest book,
though their scale of atrocities in Cambodia is quite a bit off.

Manufacturing Consent

Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman devote a paltry thirty-six pages and
seventy-two endnotes to Cambodia (a far cry from their 159 pages and 427
endnotes in After the Cataclysm) in Manufacturing Consent (1988).[257]
Unfortunately, they offer little that is new. By the third page of their
section on Cambodia, Chomsky and Herman continue their blame the U.S. game.
Their righteous rhetoric is mildly tampered now, though still present.
Chomsky and Herman clarify that they expressed "skepticism" in "Distortions
at Fourth Hand" in reference to claims of atrocities. They write, "To be
clear, in our one article, to which Ponchaud alludes, we did express some
`skepticism,' not only about the claims that had already been withdrawn as
fabrications but also about other that remained to be assessed."[258]
Notwithstanding this concession, they continue to insinuate that because the
cessation of U.S. aid would have caused one million deaths in Cambodia after
1975, that America bears indirect responsibility for most of the deaths
incurred under Pol Pot, hence "war-induced famine." In After the Cataclysm,
Chomsky and Herman suggested that the Khmer Rouge were right to evacuate
Phnom Penh, because it had saved lives. The flip side of it is that had the
United States continued emergency aid to the Khmer Republic, and the Khmer
Rouge been contained, no death march to the countryside would have taken
place. For Chomsky and Herman, that scenario is out of the question.

Of course, they continue to argue that the war was mostly America's doing,
notwithstanding the fact that the Khmer Rouge and Vietcong were on the other
side fighting too. From this familiar baseline, Chomsky and Herman make an
incredible comparison: "it seems fair to describe the responsibility of the
United States and Pol Pot for atrocities during `the decade of the genocide'
as being roughly in the same range."[259] How is this done, or for that
matter possible, the reader might wonder? Chomsky and Herman use an estimate
of 500,000 casualties resulting from the 1970-1975 War in which the United
States, South Vietnam, North Vietnam, the Khmer Republic, and the FUNK which
was composed primarily of the Khmer Rouge, fought and bombed one another on
Cambodian soil. In their calculus these half-million lives fall squarely on
the shoulders of the Americans. As for the casualties during the Democratic
Kampuchea period, Chomsky and Herman use Michael Vickery's figure of 750,000
deaths (recognized to be among the lowest available). This Chomskian
comparison is not a parallel one: casualties of war versus revolution die
for different reasons. While it might be plausible for both sides to sustain
casualties during war, the Kampuchean revolution cost the lives of primarily
non-revolutionaries and in 1978 began to take the lives of purged
"Vietnamese agents" cum revolutionaries too.

The historical revisionism continues unabated when Chomsky and Herman shrink
the STAV on Cambodia into "Maoist circles," while excluding themselves and
their colleagues. The Khmer Rouge Canon shows that this was not the case.
They write, "there was virtually no doubt from early on that the Khmer Rouge
regime under the emerging leader Pol Pot was responsible for gruesome
atrocities. But there were differing assessments of the scale and character
of these crimes."[260] Indeed, that scale ranged from the very truest
believers in Pol Pot who thought that the atrocities were, to begin with,
alleged, and those who did not, namely Ponchaud, Barron-Paul, Lacouture,
Shawcross, and the media. Having successfully obfuscated the debate on the
Khmer Rouge, while reiterating that they were careful to admit to the
possibility of bloodbaths, Chomsky and Herman do some relevant handiwork on
the image of Cambodians as a "not-so-gentle" people to begin with. With
heuristic quotes, they suggest that Cambodians, especially peasants, "appear
to have lived under conditions of extreme hatred for oppressors from outside
the village,"[261] thus somehow excusing their use of violence against those
they perceived to have been American cum Khmer Republic collaborators. There
is but one problem with this abuse excuse, namely that half of the 1.5
million estimated to have perished during the Democratic Kampuchea period
were peasants themselves.[262]

Chomsky and Herman still uphold every argument forwarded in After the
Cataclysm. They add that no one has yet been able to prove them wrong. On
the face of it, this sounds ludicrous, but they are partly right. It is true
that they adroitly peppered the chapter on Cambodia in After the Cataclysm
with qualifications, but their motive was hardly in doubt.[263] They caught
a number of erratas in the media, Barron-Paul and Ponchaud books and
magnified them, generalized on them, to make a model. As much as their
pretext was to analyze the media, this cannot absolve them of liability for
their own Khmer Rouge propaganda campaign. They accuse the media of
"manufacturing consent," when it is they, along with their STAV friends, who
manufactured dissent on the basis of feeble evidence and contrary
objectives. The evidence used to crucify the Khmer Rouge, they contend,

was of a kind that would have been dismissed with derision had something of
the sort been offered... [during the U.S. bombardments of 1968-1973] of the
genocide or other U.S. atrocities, including faked interviews or photographs
and fabricated statements attributed to Khmer Rouge officials, constantly
repeated even after they had been conceded to be frauds; fabricated casualty
estimates based on misquoted studies that became unquestionable doctrine
even after they were publicly withdrawn as inventions; and highly selective
refugee reports that ignored much refugee testimony, including detailed
studies by Cambodia scholars, that could not be exploited for what soon
became a propaganda campaign at a level of deceit of astonishing
proportions.[264]


The litany of erratas seems only to originate from the Chomskian opposition,
notwithstanding, Chomsky and Herman made no attempt to seek the truth for
themselves. They proudly restate their goal of examining the media in After
the Cataclysm, in quotation, and use it to their benefit. It did not matter
where the truth lay, simply that Chomsky and Herman had valid points that
could be used against the media's "propaganda campaign" against the Khmer
Rouge. Of course, we know from the first round of media analysis that, to
the contrary, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the three
television networks were doing little on Cambodia as opposed to Chile or
South Korea in 1976. From round two, we examined the media in 1977, and
determined that there were more fragmentary reports, but that these were
mixed with simultaneous Porter/Hildebrand/Chomsky/Herman objections. In the
third round, Shawcross nailed Chomsky's thesis by proving that the reporters
did not all believe the refugees in the beginning, and that it was not until
after the Vietnamese invasion that news stories on the Cambodian genocide
picked up significantly.

Unfortunately for Chomsky, that invasion took place while he wrote After the
Cataclysm in which he, along with Herman, forward their theory of
gravitating propaganda machines against the "evils of communism." But that
does not really matter, does it? Chomsky is a very, very intelligent man. To
be sure, Chomsky is a genius, but this does not necessarily make him right
all the time. Chomsky and Herman do not use statistical analysis to prove
their propaganda thesis for Cambodia. They do this for the mass-media
coverage of "worthy and unworthy victims" in Latin America versus
Poland,[265] perhaps because they know something can be shown from it, but
for Cambodia, news anecdotes are sufficient. In any case, they argue, what
could the U.S. have done anyway? What difference would it have made had they
not criticized the media and the refugees? No difference whatsoever, hence
no harm, no foul. But they are wrong again, says Shawcross. He writes, "The
moral force of the left--Communist and non-Communist--was not exerted on
behalf of the Cambodians until 1979."[266] In the following chapter, which
concludes this thesis, the common threads of chapter 2 and 3 are woven
together to create an STAV quilt that shows how the "Khmer Rouge Canon
1975-1979" was the "Standard Total Academic View on Cambodia."

CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION


This [deceit] was apparent to anyone listening closely to his [Pol Pot's]
speeches and press conferences in 1977 and 1978 and to the unsettling
propaganda broadcast every day over Radio Phnom Penh by the Kampuchean
Communist Party (meaning Pol Pot himself) from 1975 until January 7, 1979,
when Vo Nguyen Giap's blitzkrieg brought down Phnom Penh. Never in the human
memory has a leader (be he an emperor or dictator), government, or a
political party in power sung its own praises in such a dithyrambic,
insolent, deceitful, shameless, and immodest way as the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary
regime did. As Radio Hanoi has since stated, Messers. Pol Pot and Ieng Sary
outstripped even their guru, the late Joseph Goebbels, when it came to
propaganda!


--King Norodom Sihanouk, 1980[267]

For once, it seems, Sihanouk was right. "The Khmer Rouge Canon 1975-1979:
The Standard Total Academic View on Cambodia," as this thesis is titled,
represents more than anything a blunder on the part of academia. If we are
to understand how the STAV developed, we must go back to the very beginning
of our story. In the context of the Vietnam War, a common thread runs
through the STAV: the vision of a struggle between two forces, good versus
evil, socialism versus neo-colonialism. The deceptions which successive
presidential administrations (Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon) pressed on the
American people could serve to mitigate why this generation of Cambodian
scholars grew increasingly suspicious of everything the U.S. government said
and did. But this does not explain how suspicion of the government turned
into suspicion of the U.S. media and Cambodian refugees. This had been,
after all, the same American press that almost single-handedly pushed public
opinion away from further American intervention in Vietnam before Watergate.
For the answer, we must go beyond the surface and venture into the very
heart of the STAV.

As we have seen throughout this thesis, common threads in logic, arguments,
and evidence have recurred. Among these threads, two stand out: (1) a
pro-revolutionary prism through which these scholars saw themselves in a
greater struggle against imperialism; (2) a romanticization of peasants and
the Khmer revolution in an appallingly detached context. They were all
scholars and professors who thought nothing strange of romanticizing
peasants and revolutions from arms-length. We know that the scholars
canonized in this thesis did not bother to walk the distance and ask the
tough questions that would test their "solidarity with the peoples of
Kampuchea" and the Khmer revolution. Others admitted they did not know where
the truth lay, but made no pretense to search for it. This error was perhaps
more egregious in retrospect.

In the next section, we briefly examine Ben Kiernan's 1979 Bulletin of
Concerned Asian Scholars article entitled "Vietnam and the Governments and
Peoples of Kampuchea" for the purpose of seeing an actual apology from an
ex-STAV scholar. In chapter 4, Hildebrand sounded apologetic, but he was
really very insincere. Caldwell never had a chance, but we concluded that he
probably would not have thought it necessary. Summers and Porter were
surmised to have recanted, but they made no public exhibition of it. As for
Chomsky and Herman, all they concede is "skepticism," but insist they
"remain on target."

The Two-Sided Switch: Benedict Kiernan and the Khmer Rouge

Ben Kiernan, noted academic and author of the serious and worth reading book
How Pol Pot Came to Power (1985) and co-editor with David Chandler of such
other notable works as Revolution and Its Aftermath (1983), will lead the
U.S. State Department funded Yale University program that will create a
database documenting Khmer Rouge genocidal crimes. We know from this thesis,
however, that there is another story to Dr. Kiernan; the story of a young,
idealistic graduate student, mesmerized by the idea of a people's revolution
and socialism. Ben Kiernan was a leading Khmer Rouge defender during
Democratic Kampuchea.[268] With all due respect to him and the studied work
he has done since 1979, he deserves to be canonized for being a leading
proponent of the STAV on Cambodia.

In fact, it was not until Kiernan interviewed five hundred Cambodian
refugees in the camps in 1978 or 1979 that he recognized that he had been
"late in realizing the extent of the tragedy in Kampuchea."[269] In what
amounted to a mea culpa in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars in 1979,
entitled "Vietnam and the Governments and People of Kampuchea," he writes,

I was wrong about ... the brutal authoritarian trend within the
revolutionary movement after 1973 was not simply a grass-roots reaction, and
expression of popular outrage at the killing and destruction of the
countryside by U.S. bombs, although that helped it along decisively. There
can be no doubting that the evidence also points clearly to a systematic use
of violence against the population by that chauvinist section of the
revolutionary movement that was led by Pol Pot. In my opinion this violence
was employed in the service of a nationalist revivalism that had little
concern for the living conditions of the Khmer people, or the humanitarian
socialist ideals that had inspired the broader Kampuchean revolutionary
movement. [Emphasis added.][270]


Kiernan was indeed very wrong about the brutality of the Khmer Rouge and
their "systematic use of violence." He also reveals one of the excuses which
the STAV fondly dangled when critics questioned the draconian practices of
the Khmer Rouge. The convenient "U.S. bombs" made them do it. To be sure,
Khmer Rouge membership increased, but the bombing had already stopped by
that time. Moreover, Kiernan reveals that it was the "humanitarian socialist
ideals" of the Khmer Rouge that attracted him to them. His point about
"nationalist revivalism" sounds familiar, because Caldwell confided to a
friend that "If it is true that Pol Pot has also killed Khmer Peasants, [it]
is a token of fascism."[271] In fact, attempts to commit this senseless act
of historical revisionism on Cambodia's contemporary history has succeeded.
The debunked Pol Pot-Ieng Sary regime, it is now said, was more of a fascist
cum Nazi regime than a Communist cum Maoist one! Truth may yet be stranger
than fiction.

In April 1977, Kiernan and his Cambodian wife Chanthou Boua among many
others, published the Australian News from Kampuchea. The goal of the
newsletter, according to Gunn and Lee was "to keep Kampucheans in Australia
informed of developments in their native country" and "to develop and foster
close ties between the peoples of Australia and Kampuchea."[272] By November
1978, its goal was amended to "also [lending] support to all progressive
movements in the world trying to rid themselves of all forms of domination"
and to refute the "imperialist media"[273] (a mission shared by Chomsky and
Herman). In November 1979, when News from Kampuchea was renamed to News of
Democratic Kampuchea, "[it] revealed itself exclusively an Australian
mouthpiece of Democratic Kampuchea." By that time, however, Ben Kiernan and
Chanthou Boua had been expelled from News from Kampuchea, and "aligned
themselves more closely with the Australian Vietnam Society."[274]

It should be noted that Gunn and Lee themselves present a curiously
uncritical view of this disturbing record, when, in other instances, they
write:

Whatever else, the Tarr's description of the events surrounding the
evacuation of foreigners from the French Embassy compound [contrary to the
then prevailing media stereotype--a description of the orderly nature of the
evacuation, the absence of executions and other atrocities, the degree of
voluntarism and the absence of coercion on the part of cadres and the degree
of understanding on the part of evacuees of the rationale for the uprooting]
stands in studied contrast to the banalised "killing fields" which has since
become the "definitive media interpretation" ... The "Killing Fields" was
made in Thailand on a budget of fifteen million dollars around the theme of
the sentimental rendez-vouz [sic] between a New York Times correspondent and
his Cambodian offsider, a "miraculous" survivor of Democratic Kampuchea.
[Emphasis added.][275]


Granted, the "Killing Fields" became a cinematic symbol of despair and hope
for many Cambodians, but that fact need not be mocked. Surely, nothing of
the sort would be contemplated of "Schindler's List," for instance.[276]

Returning to Kiernan's confession, it is useful to us since it brings an
insider's perspective to understanding the STAV. In one particularly
poignant reference to George Orwell, he eloquently states,

[The] many proven falsehoods spread in the Western Press led to
preoccupation with the correction of specific lies or distortions (fake
atrocity photographs, fake interview, etc.). While such correction is
important to anyone sorting through the evidence, it does not by itself
establish the truth about the actual situation in Kampuchea. As George
Orwell pointed out in reference to atrocity stories about the Spanish Civil
War, those whose interests are against social change will always spread
disinformation about revolutions; but these stories are irrelevant to the
truth, neither its identity nor its opposite. It is up to those interested
in the truth to establish it positively.[277]


Kiernan is correct in asserting that the correction of falsehoods became a
substitute for truth. Indeed, if the STAV scholars were interested, they
made little effort to establish it positively anywhere near Cambodia as we
saw in chapter 4. Next, we speculate on how this community of academics
became so consumed by the need to prove their theories supporting peasant
revolutions to realize the consequences of their actions on Cambodia.

The Khmer Rouge Canon 1975-1979: The Standard Total Academic View on
Cambodia

The goal of this thesis, reiterated, was to construct a Khmer Rouge Canon
1975-1979, while at the same time deconstruct the STAV on Cambodia. Having
done this, more or less, the question remains: why Cambodia? The reasons
seem clear now. To the STAV scholars, Democratic Kampuchea symbolized their
wildest hopes and dreams. From the classroom to the politburo, the new
Kampuchea was, to these scholars, theory becoming reality, from Chomsky's
1973 prediction for Cambodia of "a new era of economic development and
social justice" to Caldwell's 1978 conclusion that:

[The] Kampuchean Revolution will appear more and more clearly as one of the
most significant early indications of the great and necessary change
beginning to convulse the world in the later 20th century and shifting from
a disaster-bound course to one holding our promise of a better future for
all. In the mean time we can surely rejoice that the people of Kampuchea are
assured now steadily rising living standards while those of their still
"free world" neighbors continue to deteriorate.[278]


The standard total academic view on Cambodia hoped for, more than anything,
a socialist success story with all the romantic ingredients of peasants,
fighting imperialism, and revolution. A cursory examination of the titles to
the articles they wrote on Cambodia during that period yields further
evidence of their rapture for these elements: "Consolidating the
Revolution," or "Defining the Revolutionary State," or "Social Cohesion in
Revolutionary Cambodia," or "Rationale for a Rural Policy," and still, not
be outdone, "Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology."

It would be facile to dismiss the authors of these works as outliers or
exceptions, but for one problem: they were not the exception. In fact, these
scholars were the norm, hence the title of STAV scholars. Their stance was
not the result of some freak accident of nature, but an institutionalized
revolutionary conditioning. Indoctrination, whether through academia or by
other means, seems to be the only plausible explanation. In Australia,
England, and America, Ben Kiernan, Malcolm Caldwell, and Noam Chomsky
reached similar conclusions on Cambodian refugees. The only common
denominator: a proclivity for revolutions in an academic backdrop. Seeking
"truth wherever it may lead," in the words of Thomas Jefferson, had no place
when it came to revolutions. For that purpose, the empirical process was
turned upside down, first came theory, followed by evidence.

As Bruce Sharp asserts, Chomsky created his theory of the Free Press and
from then on sought only evidence that would support it. Together with
Herman, Chomsky painted all other contrary evidence with wide strokes of the
same color: imperialist media propaganda and disinformation "that
`liberation' by `Marxists' is the worst fate that can befall any people
under Western dominance." Chomsky and Herman were professional sophists,
whereas Caldwell, Summers, Hildebrand and Porter could only have considered
themselves amateurs. The evidence leaves little doubt: "Consolidating the
Revolution," "Defining the Revolutionary State," "Rationale for a Rural
Policy," and Starvation and Revolution had virtually no cloaks or token
allowances. Chomsky and Herman, on the other hand, submitted that the
atrocities were true, but questioned their scale. They latched on to a few
mistakes by the media, Ponchaud, Barron-Paul, and turned these into one
hundred pages of text without appearing to even argue or pretend to know the
facts on Cambodia.

Few people today remember the Chomsky-Lacouture Controversy, fewer people
still, remember what Summers, Caldwell, Hildebrand, and Porter wrote between
1975 and 1979, and when they do, these are looked back upon as the
utterances of idealistic scholars who were caught up in the revolutionary
spirit of their decade. It is always easier to forget than to remember the
past, but for this parenthesis in history, we may use the World War II
phrase: "Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for people."

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