No More Learning

Timothy Carney, the second of the three major U. S. government specialists on Cambodia (Quinn, Carney,
Charles Twining), also notes that "sometime in 1973 the party appar- ently decided to accelerate its program to alter Khmer society," for no suggested reason. 60
6. 2. 5. Phase I in the media
During this period, there was extensive media coverage of Cambodia, and there was no dearth of evidence on what was taking place in the regions subjected to U. S. Air Force atrocities. It was not necessary to undertake a difficult expedition to the Thai-Cambodia border to find refugees who would tell what they knew, but the victims of phase I of "the decade of the genocide" who were huddled in the slums of Phnom Penh or other towns and villages to which they fled were of no more interest than those in the miserable camps on the outskirts of Vien- tiane-unless they had tales of terror by the Cambodian insurgents to recount (the Vietnamese long having faded into the background). 6I No books or articles were written by Father Ponchaud, who lived among the peasants and sympathized deeply with their plight, so he informed us when the time came to expose atrocities of the Khmer Rouge. The same was true of many others who were later to expre~' their heartfelt concerns for Cambodians suffering under Khmer Rouge terror, but who did not seek to investigate and publicize the plight of the rural population during phase I of the genocide, when such efforts might have had a crucial impact on the policies that were destroying Cam-
bodia, a fact that might merit some thought.
The standard U. S. media picture of phase I is something like this.
"Umil the turning point in 1973, . . . on the surface, Cambodians smiled and were full of pleasantries,"62 but afterwards the mood of "Cambodi- ans" became one of "apathy" and "resignation" because "impoverished farmers, refugees and soldiers" (most of whom were press-ganged into service from among the poor and refugee communities) felt that their "leaders seem powerless to defend them against human and natural adversities. "63 There is a "spirit of doom" as the government is "teeter-
THE INDOCHINII WARS (Il): LAOS A:-JD CAMBODIA 275
ing on the wreckage of the democratic republic it set out to create" with the coup that overthrew Sihanouk. 64 The Americans try, but with little success, to "give the Cambodians some sense of confidence in their leadership," but, nevertheless, "Cambodian morale has been sliding steadily for a long time. " However, "Rather than any sense of urgency here [in Phnom Penh], there is the grand fatalism that is so much a part of Cambodia's Hindu-influenced Buddhism,"65 although it somehow does not seem to affect "the enemy," whose "determination" in the face of the awesome firepower unleashed against them "baffles" the Ameri- cans. But there is still "a feeling that the Americans will save the Cambodians at the last minute because they cannot save themselves. " "Almost every conversation with a Cambodian now is the same," namely, fear that the "demoralized army will collapse" when the American bombing terminates on August 15. The impending bombing cutoff is "painful" to the "Cambodians" because of "the recent steady successes of enemy troops" against overwhelming odds. In his final summary report from Phnom Penh as the U. S. bombing ended, Sydney Schanberg raised "the key unanswered question: How have the insur- gents-without any planes of their own, and without the extensive artillery support the Government troops have, with only small arms and mobile weapons . . . -been able not just to match the Government
forces, which are more than twice their size, but to push the Govern- ment forces back and sustain the offensive for six months without any significant lull? " "Since the insurgents are not superhuman, there must be other explanations for their success. " Perhaps they are so "deter- mined and capable" because they "are less fatalistic than the Khmers on this side" and "believe they can change their environment" (U. S. embassy official). In this regard, "the enemy" are quite different from "the Cambodian villager," who "usually has no politics" and "is not interested in taking sides, only to be left alone to farm and fish and feed his family and once in a while to celebrate on a Buddhist holiday. "66
The civil war, then, pits "the Cambodians" against "the enemy," Cambodian peasants who were surely not full ofpleasantries during the pre-1973 U. S. bombings. "The Cambodians," fatalistic and resigned, either want to be left alone ("the Cambodian villager") or hope that the United States will save them and their government, striving for democ- racy ("the Cambodians" generally). The enemy struggle on successfully against overwhelming odds, baffling the Americans-exactly as Ameri- cans building "democracy" have been baffled by the same problem in
South Vietnam, Central America, and many other places. Since these are the conclusions drawn from "almost every conversation with a Cambodian," they are surely realistic, at least as long as we understand
276 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
that "Cambodians" are those Cambodians who are not "the enemy" of 4 the objective press, just as "South Vietnamese" were South V ietnam ese' collaborating with the U. S. aggressors.
The framework is the usual one, although perhaps a shade more egregious in the light of what might have been passing through the minds of those Cambodians who were not "Cambodians" during phase I of the genocide.
About that topic, we learn very little from the media. The refugees flooding Phnom Penh and other areas where U. S. reporters traveled were virtually ignored. To gain a measure of this remarkable fact, let us review the reports during these months in the New York Time~ most of them by its Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent Sydney Schan- berg, who, more than any other U. S. reporter, came to be regarded as the conscience of the media with regard to Cambodia.
Schanberg arrived in Phnom Penh in May 1973. at the height of the intensified bombing, which continued until the mid-August halt. Dur- ing this period, the Times published twenty-seven of his reports from Cambodia, many of them long and detailed, along with a column in which he expressed his contempt for the "so-called international press corps" who spend their time "interviewing each other" in the Hotel Le Phnom. 67
From the outset, Schanberg reports "refugees pouring into the city," 4 but there are no interviews with refugees who relate the circumstances "'I oflife under the bombs. We hear a "well to do Cambodian woman" who
tells us that "The bombing is terrible"; she is "not frightened, just 4 annoyed-because it wakes my baby up every night in the middle of
the night, and I have to get up" (May 3). But those villagers who want
to be left alone are not granted the opportunity to relay their accounts
of somewhat more serious concerns, apart from a few scattered phrases,
and there is not a word to suggest that refugees might have had any attitude, apart from fear, with regard to those "determined" fighters
who "believe they can change their environment:' although plainly
they had a solid base in the peasant society that was being torn to shreds
by saturation bombing. As in Laos a few years earlier, the refugees
simply had the wrong tale to tell, and the kinds of stories that readily
flow if one is sufficiently interested to inquire are lacking here.
Running through the columns seriatim for relevant material, number 5 (May II) quotes a Western European diplomat who says that "Ameri- can men in American planes are bombing the hell out of this place," and notes that the U. S. aircraft "do not always receive accurate an- swers" about civilians in the targeted areas "from the Cambodian com- manders" who direct the jet fighter-bombers. The Cambodians, then,
THE I~DOCHINA WARS (II): LAOS A~D CAMBODIA 277
are to blame for the civilian casualties that must result, although "no reliable figures are available" and refugees are not asked to supplement with their personal knowledge. The next two columns (May 24) 27) are the only ones concerned directly with the effect of the bombing in the countryside. The first reports "extensive" destruction from bombing that has wiped out "a whole series of villages" along the main highway, with often not even a piece of a house left standing for miles, while "a few people wander forlornly through the rubble, stunned by what has happened, skirting the craters, picking at the debris. " A group ofvillag- ers from Svay Rieng Province) abutting Vietnam) report the destruction of seven villages) with many killed. "The frightened villagers uprooted by the bombing have a great deal to say," Schanberg comments, but we do not read it here. Rather, he explains that "There is no doubt that the Seventh Air Force is making a marked effort to avoid civilian casualties-at least outside the eastern third of the country, which is solidly held by the enemy"; and if there are casualties it is the fault of Cambodian military officials who request air strikes with "almost no
concern about civilian lives or property. " The second column informs us that "the refugees frequently tell about the bombing," which has destroyed villages and "terrified all the rest of the villagers)" a Western diplomat reports. But the refugees are granted only two phrases, an "incongruously polite" request that "I would be very glad if the Gov- ernment would stop sending the planes to bomb," and a plea from a monk to ask the Cnited States and other governments: "Don't destroy everything in Cambodia. "
We hear no more from the refugees until column 15 (July 26), a graphic account of "a terror attack on the civilian population"-by Communist forces who shelled the outskirts of Phnom Penh. A weeping child describes how her little brother's hand was cut off, and the blood- stained road and doorsteps testify to Communist barbarity, as distinct from the operations of the scrupulous American command. Column 19 (Aug. 5) tells of thousands of new refugees "fleeing from enemy as- saults," and column 21 (Aug. 7) describes Cambodian soldiers looting a recaptured village that "looked as if struck by a storm with a tongue of fire," with many houses "smashed in by shells," but no word from the victims, who had fled. Then follow three columns (Aug. 7) 9, 12) describing in extensive detail the bombing of the village of Neak Luong-in error-killing many government soldiers and their families.
This is the sole example of American bombing that was shown in the film The Killing Fields, the only depiction there of phase I of the genocide) a memory that is acceptable since it was plainly an error.
We located eighteen additional reports datelined Cambodia) from
278 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
March 25 through August 18. 68 One quotes a villager who says "The bomben ma. y kill some Communists but they kill everyone else, too" (Browne, April II), but we found no other examples of reactions by the victims, although there is a picture of a Cambodian soldier weeping for his wife and ten children killed in the bombing ofNeak Luong by error (Aug. 10).
In forty-five columns, then, there are three in which victims of U. S. bombing are granted a few phrases to describe what is happening in Cambodia. Not a single column seeks to explore the reactions of the refugees not far from the Hotel Le Phnom, or in Banambang, or in the far more miserable refugee camps in the countryside nearby; or to attempt to develop some sense of what must have been happening under the frenzied bombing of these months. Recall that in Phnom Penh alone there were almost 1. 5 million refugees who had fled from the countryside, some, surely, who must have had some information to relate about phase I of the genocide at its peak. The reader could no doubt ascertain that terrible things were happening in the Cambodian countryside, but what they were remains obscure, and the Americans are explicitly exonerated, apart from the error of bombing the wrong village.
The story remained much the same as phase I of the genocide continued. The horrors in Phnom Penh itself were sometimes vividly described, primarily abroad,69 but there was little effort to determine what was happening in the areas held by the enemy of the U. S. govern- ment-hence the enemy of the U. S. press; virtually the entire country as "the Cambodians" were confined to urban centers swelled by a huge flood of refugees who remain as hidden from view as those in the teeming slums of Saigon or the camps around Vientiane.
Western correspondents evacuated from Phnom Penh after the Khmer Rouge victory were able to obtain a fleeting picture of what had taken place in the countryside. British correspondent Jon Swain sum- marizes his impressions as follows:
The United States has much to answer for here, not only in terms of human lives and massive material destruction; the rigidity and nastiness of the un-Cambodian like fellows in black who run this country now, or what is left of it, are as much a product of this wholesale American bombing which has hardened and honed their minds as they are a product of Marx and Mao. . . . [The mass evacuation of the cities] does not constitute a deliberate campaign of terror, rather it points to poor organisation, lack of vision and the brutalisation of a people by a long and savage war. . . . The
THE INDOCHINA WARS (II); LAOS AND CAMBODIA 279
war damage here {in the countryside], as everywhere else we saw, is total. Not a bridge is standing, hardly a house. I am told most villagers have spent the war years living semi-permanently under- ground in earth bunkers to escape the bombing. . . . The entire countryside has been churned up by American B-52 bomb craters, whole towns and villages razed. So far I have not seen one intact pagoda. 70
The conditions are much like those reported in 1970 by refugees from the Plain of Jars, in Laos; in both cases, these accounts were almost entirely excluded from the mainstream media.
So ended phase I of the genocide. In later years, those who had transmitted narrowly selected fragments of this tale of horror expressed their bitterness that Cambodia had been "forgotten. " On the tenth anniversary of the Khmer Rouge takeover, Sydney Schanberg wrote two columns in the New York Times entitled "Cambodia Forgotten. " The first highlights the phrase: "Superpowers care as little today about Cambodians as in 1970," the second dismisses Richard Nixon's 1985 claim that there was no "indiscriminate terror bombing" but only "highly accurate" strikes "against enemy military targets. " Schanberg comments that "Anyone who visited the refugee camps in Cambodia and talked to the civilian survivors of the bombing learned quickly about the substantial casualties. " He recalls that "the Khmer Rouge were a meaningless force when the war was brought to Cambodia in 1970. . . . In order to flourish and grow, they needed a war to feed on. And the superpowers-including this country, with the Nixon incur- sion of 1970 and the massive bombing that followed-provided that war and that nurtUring material. " He does not, however, inform us about which superpower, apart from "this country," invaded Cambodia and subjected it to massive bombing. With comparable even-handedness we might deplore the contribution of the superpowers, including the USSR, to the destruction of Afghanistan, or the attitude of the great powers, including Nazi Germany, toward the victims of the death
camps, whom Schanberg brings up in a later column the same month entitled "Memory is the Answer. " He also does not comment on what the reader of his columns might have learned about life in the Cambo- dian countryside from his reporting during the peak period of the bombing. 71
Others too stress that "memory is the answer. " Commenting on the award-winning film The Killing Fields, Samuel Freedman writes that "While Holocaust survivors have helped perpetuate the memory of Nazi infamy, the Cambodian genocide is already being forgotten,"
280 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
referring to phase II of the genocide, phase I having passed into obliv- ion with no concern. 72 The New York Times reminds us that "Cambodia remains perhaps the most pitiful victim of the Indochina wars," as it is caught between the forces of Pol Pot and Hanoi, which used Pol Pot attacks against Vietnamese villages as "a long-sought pretext to invade" and now exploits "Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge army of 30,000 inside Cam- bodia" (in fact, mostly inside Thailand) as "the pretext for remaining in Cambodia. " "Unimaginable slaughter, invasion, brutal occupation have followed famine and pestilence," all attributable to the Commu- nists, although the suffering has been "aggravated by the cynicism of big powers," not further differentiated. As for the United States, "When Vietcong guerrillas used a neutral Cambodia as a sanctuary, it was pounded by American bombs and drawn into a war it hoped to avoid," but that is all. In a later comment, the editors concede that "murderous aerial bombing followed by brutal revolution, famine and civil war" brought Cambodia to ruin, but of all of this, "what cannot be sponged away are the Khmer Rouge's butcheries" and the actions of Hanoi, which has "subjugated and impoverished" Cambodia: phases II and III of "the decade of the genocide. "73
"Memory is the answer," but only when focused on proper targets, far from home.
6. 2. 6. The Pol Pot era
Phase II of "the decade of the genocide" began with the Khmer Rouge takeover in April 1975. Within a few weeks, the Khmer Rouge were accused in the national press of "barbarous cruelty" and "genocidal policies" comparable to the "Soviet extermination of the Kulaks or with the Gulag Archipelago. "74 This was at a time when the death toll was perhaps in the thousands; the half million or more killed during phase I of the genocide never merited such comment, nor were these assessments of the first days of phase II (or later ones, quite generally) accompanied by reflection on the consequences of the American war that were anticipated by U. S. officials and relief workers on the scene, reviewed earlier, or by any recognition of a possible causal link between the horrors of phase II and the American war against the rural society during phase I.
We will not document here the flood of rage and anger directed against the Khmer Rouge from the outset and the evidence on which it was based, having done so elsewhere in detai1. 7S Several facts docu- mented there bear emphasis: (I) the outrage, which was instant and
THE INDOCHINA WARS (II): tAOS AND CAMBODIA 28x
overwhelming, peaked in early 1977 and, until the overthrow of Pol Pot, was based almost exclusively on evidence through 1977, primarily 1975- 76;76 (2) apart from a few knowledgeable journalists, the State Depart- ment's Cambodia experts, and probably the majority of the small group of Cambodia scholars-that is, most of those with a basis for judg- ment-the most extreme accusations were adopted and proclaimed with a great show of indignation over Communist atrocities, the integ- rity of which can be measured by comparison to the reaction to phase I of the genocide and U. S. responsibility for it; (3) these skeptical assessments. almost entirely suppressed in the media, proved fairly accurate for the period in question; (4) the evidence that provided the crucial basis for the denunciations of Communist genocide was of a kind that would have been dismissed with derision had something of the sort been offered with regard to phase I of the genocide or other
U. S. atrocities, including faked interviews and photographs and fab- ricated statements anributed to Khmer Rouge officials, constantly re- peated even after they had been conceded to be frauds; fabricated casualty estimates based on misquoted studies that became unquestion- able doctrine even after they were publicly withdrawn as inventions; and highly selective refugee reports that ignored much refugee testi- mony, 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. 77
As we also noted from the first paragraph of our earlier review of this material, to which we will simply refer here for specifics, "there is no difficulty in documenting major atrocities and oppression, primarily from the reports of refugees"; there is little doubt that "the record of atrocities in Cambodia is substantial and often gruesome" and repre- sents "a fearful toll"; "when the facts are in, it may tum out that the more extreme condemnations were in fact correct," although if so, "it will in no way alter the conclusions we have reached on the central
question addressed here: how the available facts were selected, modi- fied, or sometimes invented to create a certain image offered to the general population. The answer to this question seems clear, and it is unaffected by whatever may yet be discovered about Cambodia in the fu- ture. " As we repeatedly stressed, in this chapter of a two-volume study on U. S. policy and ideology, our concern remained the United States, not Indochina; our purpose was not to "establish the facts with regard to postwar Indochina" on the basis of the evidence available, but rather to examine the constructions developed on the basis of this evidence, to analyze the way this evidence was refracted "through the prism of Western ideology, a very different task. "78 The conclusions drawn there
282 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
remain valid. To our knowledge, no error or even misleading statement or omission has been found. 79
This review of an impressive propaganda exercise aroused great outrage-not at all surprisingly: the response within Soviet domains is similar, as are the reasons, when dissidents expose propaganda fabrica- tions with regard to the United States, Israel, and other official enemies. Indignant commentators depicted us as "apologists for Khmer Rouge crimes"8? -in a study that denounced Khmer Rouge atrocities (a fact always suppressed) and then proceeded to demonstrate the remarkable character of Western propaganda, our topic throughout the two-vol- ume study in which this chapter appeared. There was also a new wave of falsification, often unanswerable when journals refused to permit response. We will not review these further propaganda exercises here, but merely note that they provide an intriguing expression of what, in other contexts, is described as the totalitarian mentality: it is not enough to denounce official enemies; it is also necessary to guard with vigilance the right to lie in the service of power. The reaction to our challenge to this sacred right again fits neady within the expectations of a propa- ganda model, standing alongside the Freedom House attack on the media for failure to serve state policy with sufficient vigor and opti- mism.
By early 1977, denunciations of the Khmer Rouge for having caused unprecedented "murder in a gentle land" and "autogenocide" extended from mass circulation journals such as Reader's Digest (with tens of millions of readers) and TV Guide (circulation nineteen million), to the New York Review ofBooks and the media generally, in addition to a best-selling book by John Barron and Anthony Paul based on their Reader's Digest article and the widely misquoted study by Franrrois Ponchaud mentioned earlier. Similar material continued to flow in abundance in the press and newsweeklies, the New York Times Maga- zine, and elsewhere. Evidence about the 1977-78 period became availa- ble primarily after the Vietnamese expulsion of the Khmer Rouge regime, which brought phase II of the genocide to a close, eliciting new outrage over the alleged "genocide" brought about by the "Prussians of Asia. "
The picture created by this chorus of denunciation, from the first days of Democratic Kampuchea (DK) in 1975, is described sardonically by Michael Vickery as "the standard total view" (STV). According to the STV, prior to the Khmer Rouge victory in April 1975, Cambodia had been a "gentle land" (Barron and Paul) of "gentle if emotional people" who "wanted only to live in peace in their lush kingdom" (Jack Anderson), a land in which hunger was "almost unknown" (Henry
THB II'DOCHINA WARS (ll): LAOS AND CAMBODIA 283
Kamm). But in 1975, the "formerly fun-loving, easy-going Cambodi- ans" were subjected to the "harsh regime" of the Khmer Rouge, who ordered that all those not under their rule before the victory can be "disposed of' because they are "no longer required," even if only one million Khmers remain (Donald Wise, citing several of the frequently quoted Khmer Rouge statements that were conceded to be fabrica- tions). 81
According to the STV, during the pre-1977 period on which the conclusions were based, the Khmer Rouge leadership was engaged in a policy of systematic extermination and destruction of all organized social and cultural life apart from the Gulag run by the "nine men at the top," Paris-trained Communists, without local variation and with no cause other than inexplicable sadism and Marxist-Leninist dogma. By early 1977, it was alleged that they had "boasted" of having slaugh- tered some two million people (Jean Lacouture in the New York Re- view). This figure remained the standard even after Lacouture withdrew it a few weeks later, acknowledging that he had misread his source (Ponchaud) and that the actual figure might be in the thousands, but adding that he saw little significance to a difference between thou- sands killed and a "boast" of two million killed. This position expresses with some clarity the general attitude toward fact during this period and since, as does his further statement that it is hardly important to deter- mine "exactly which person uttered an inhuman phrase"-the case in question had to do with inhuman phrases he attributed to Khmer Rouge officials but which turned out to be mistranslations of phrases that had been fabricated outright by his source (Ponchaud) or that had appeared not in a Cambodian journal, as he asserted, but in a Thai journal mistranslated by Ponchaud that expressed virtually the oppo- site of what was claimed. The two-million figure was later upgraded to three million or more, often citing Vietnamese wartime propaganda. The examples are quite typical.
Not everyone joined in the chorus. The most striking exceptions were those who had the best access to information from Cambodia, notably, the State Department Cambodia specialists. Their view, based on what evidence was then available (primarily from northwestern Cambodia), was that deaths from all causes might have been in the "tens ifnot hundreds of thousands," largely from disease, malnutrition, and "brutal, rapid change," not "mass genocide. " These tentative con- clusions were almost entirely ignored by the media-we found one important exception in our review-because they were simply not use- ful for the purpose at the time, just as refugee testimony that did not conform to the STY was ignored. Overseas, journalists who had special
2-84 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
knowledge of Indochina also gave rather nuanced accounts, notably, Nayan Chanda. 82
In his detailed, region-by-region study, Vickery shows that the STY was a picture with little merit, and that the few skeptics had been essentially accurate for the period in question, although in 1977-78, something approaching the STY came to be correct in the context of brutal inter-party purges and the expanding war with Vietnam. He also makes the obvious logical point that "the evidence for 1977-78," which only became available after the Vietnamese conquest in 1979, "does not retrospectively justify the STV ," which reigned on the basis of evidence from the 1975-76 period; "and the Vietnamese adoption of some of the worst Western propaganda stories as support for their case in 1979 does not prove that those stories were valid. "83 Recent work indicates that the worst massacres, including those that left the mass graves and horrifying heaps of skulls found by journalists who entered Cambodia
after the Vietnamese conquest, were in the eastern zone bordering Vietnam in mid- to late 1978. 84
The nature of the Western agony over Cambodia during phase II of the genocide, as a sociocultural phenomenon, becomes clarified further when we compare it to the reaction to comparable and simultaneous atrocities in Timor. There, as in phase I of the Cambodia genocide, the United States bore primary responsibility and could have acted to reduce or terminate the atrocities. In contrast, in Cambodia under DK rule, where the blame could be placed on the official enemy, nothing at all could be done, a point that was stressed by government experts when George McGovern caned for international intervention in August 1978, eliciting much media ridicule. 8s Neither McGovern nor anyone else recommended such intervention against the United States during phase] of the genocide, or against Indonesia and the United States during the Timor atrocities, to which the United States (and, to a much lesser extent, other powers) lent material and diplomatic support, just as there has been no call for intervention as the armies of El Salvador and Guatemala proceeded to slaughter their own populations with
enthusiastic U. S. support in the early 1980s.
The comparison between Timor and phase II in Cambodia was
particularly striking, and was occasionally noted after the fact. The excuses now produced for this refusal to report what was happening in Timor, or to protest these atrocities or act to stop them, are instructive in the present context. Thus, William Shawcross rejects the obvious interpretation of the comparative response to Timor and Cambodia in favor of a "more structurally serious explanation": "a comparative lack of sources" and lack of access to refugees. @6 Lisbon is a two-hour flight
THE INDOCHINA WARS (II): LAOS AND CAMBODIA 28S
from London, and even Australia is not notably harder to reach than the Thai-Cambodia border, but the many Timorese refugees in Lisbon and Australia were ignored by the media, which preferred "facts" offered by the State Department and Indonesian generals. Similarly, the media ignored readily available refugee studies from sources at least as credible as those used as the basis for the ideologically serviceable outrage over the Khmer Rouge, and disregarded highly credible wit- nesses whQ reached New York and Washington along with additional evidence from church sources and others. The coverage of Timor actually declined sharply as massacres increased with mounting U. S. support. The real and "structurally serious" reason for this difference in scope and character of coverage is not difficult to discern (see chapter I), although not very comfortable for Western opinion, and becomes still more obvious when a broader range of cases is considered that illustrate the same conclusions. 87
6. 2. 7.
Phase III in Indochina: Cambodia and the bleeding of V ietnam
As we write in 1987, Western moralists remain silent as their govern- ments provide the means for Indonesia to continue its campaign of terror and repression in Timor. Meanwhile, the United States backs the DK coalition, largely based on the Khmer Rouge, because of its "conti- nuity" with the Pol Pot regime, so the State Department informed Congress in 1982. The reason for this differential reaction to the Fretilin guerrillas resisting Indonesian aggression in Timor, and the Khmer Rouge guerrillas attacking Cambodia from Thai bases, is also explained by the State Department: the Khmer Rouge-based coalition is "unquestionably" more representative of the people of Cambodia than Fretilin is ofthe Timorese. 88 There is, therefore, no need to puzzle over the apparent inconsistency during the late 1970S in U. S. attitudes to- ward Pol Pot and the Indonesian generals: the former, the object of hatred and contempt for the massacres in Cambodia under his rule during phase II; the latter, our friends whom we cheerfully supplied and supported as they conducted comparable massacres in Timor at the
same time. This apparent inconsistency, which briefly troubled even the editors of the Wall Street Journal in the early 1980s,89 is now happily resolved: we support both the Khmer Rouge and the Indonesian generals.
286 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
The current U. S. support for the Khmer Rouge merits little atten- tion in the media, just as little notice is given to the Vietnamese posi- tion: a political settlement among Cambodians excluding Khmer Rouge leaders Pol Pot and his close associate Ieng Sary. 9(I As noted earlier, U. S. aid to the Khmer Rouge is reported by congressional sources to be extensive. Furthermore, the Reagan administration, following "Chi- nese rather than Southeast Asian inclinations," has refused to back the efforts of its Southeast Asian allies "to dilute the strength of China's ally, the deposed Pol Pot regime, by giving greater weight to non- Communist guerrillas and pOlitical groupings. "91 Nayan Chanda re- ported in 1984 that the United States had "more than doubled its financial assistance to the resistance forces," mainly through funds earmarked for humanitarian assistance that permit U. S. allies to divert funds to arms purchases, a familiar ploy. 92 While it is claimed that the funds are limited to the (generally ineffectual) non-Communist resist- ance, this is a shallow pretense. "Both Sihanouk's army and Son Sann's KPNLF," the two components of the non-Communist resistance, "are completely discounted in Phnom Penh," James Pringle reports from Phnom Penh in the Far Eastern Econom? c Reviefl). "'AU they do is sit
drinking coca-cola on the border,' said one well-informed Soviet bloc diplomat. " From the Thai border areas, Barbara Crossette reports that "Trucks loaded with men and boys, 150 or 200 at a time, pull away from settlements controlled by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge and ru. mble into Cambodia," where the supplies are carried "into the Cambodian inte- rior to stockpile supplies for the Khmer Rouge," in the expectation that they will be able to prevail by military force and terror once the Viet- namese withdraw as demanded by the United States. A spokesman for the Sihanoukisr National Army in Bangkok comments that "The main problem we now have is how to get the Vietnamese to pull out without bringing back the Khmer Rouge," the probable consequence of U. S. policy. Former Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke com- ments that the U. S. aid "will end up going to Pol Pot and his people," a fact noted also by several journalists. Sydney Schanberg's Cambodian associate Dith Pran, whose story of suffering under DK terror was the
basis for the widely publicized film The Killing Fields and much media commentary, found somewhat greater difficulty in reaching the public with his view that "Giving U. S. weapons [to the Khmer resistance] is like putting gasoline on afire," and is the last thing Cambodia needs. David Haw~ alleges that "it is common knowledge that Reagan- administration political officers and defence attaches from the US Em- bassy in Bangkok have visited Khmer Rouge enc1aves. "9J
The reasons for supporting the Thai-based OK coalition go beyond
THE j"DOCHDIA WARS (II): LAOS "'I'D CAMBODIA 287
their "continuity" with the Khmer Rouge regime. A more fundamental reason was outlined by our ally Deng Xiaoping in 1979: "It is wise to force the Vietnamese to stay in Kampuchea because that way they will suffer more and more and will not be able to extend their hand to Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore. "94 This motive of "bleeding Viet- nam" to ensure that it does not recover from its victimization at the hands of the West has additional advantages. By acting in such a way as to enhance suffering and repression in Indochina, we demonstrate retrospectively the "benevolence" of our "noble crusade" of earlier years.
As we discussed earlier, the Cambodians were "worthy victims" when they were being terrorized by the Khmer Rouge under phase II of the genocide> and they achieved this status once again after the Vietnamese invasion brought phase II of the genocide to an end, al- though with a change in the cast of characters, as the United States joined China in support of the Khmer Rouge. After early efforts to charge the Vietnamese with "genocide," the condemnation of the offi- cial enemy shifted to the terrible acts of "the Prussians of Asia," who have "subjugated and impoverished" Cambodia since overthrowing Pol Pot, according to the editors of the New York Times. Recail that of all the horrors of the past years, including the atrocities of phase I, "what cannot be sponged away" are "the Khmer Rouge's butcheries"-evi- dently of lesser moment in Washington now that the Pol Pot forces qualify as resistance forces under the Reagan doctrine.
One would be hard pUt to find any serious observers of the currenl Cambodian scene who believe that the Vietnamese have reduced Cam- bodia to a level below that of the DK period, as these comments imply. Rather, among people who are concerned about the people of Cam- bodia for themselves and not merely because of their value for propa- ganda exercises, few would question that "it is clear that life for the people is far better now than under Democratic Kampuchea,"95 and some Cambodia specialists have suggested that the current regime com- pares favorably with any of its predecessors. Consistent opponents of aggression would have a moral basis for condemning the Vietnamese invasion, despite the rapidly escalating atrocities of 1977-78 and the murderous raids against Vietnam by Cambodian forces under Pol Pot's rule. '~6 It is a little difficult to take this argument seriously, however, when it is put forth by people who condemn the West for not having undertaken more vigorous actions to "rescue" the Cambodians from Pol Pot-a "rescue" that would have been no less self-serving in intent than the Viecnamese invasion, as history makes clear. And we need not tarry over the argument when it is offered by those who tolerate or
288 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
applaud murderous aggression when it suits their ends: the Indonesian invasion of Timor, the "liberation" of Lebanon by Israeli forces in 1982 (as the Times editors called it), or the "defense of South Vietnam," to mention a few obvious cases.
6. 2. 8. Phase III at home: the great silence and the hidden potency of the left
Turning to the home front, phase III illustrates the expectations of a propaganda model in yet a different way. The truth about the response to the Pol Pot atrocities in the media and "the culture" in general, and the dramatic contrast to comparable examples where the United States bears primary responsibility, is not pleasant to contemplate. Since the facts are too overwhelming to refute, it is a better strategy simply to dispatch them to the memory hole. This task having been achieved with the customary alacrity, we may now observe with wonder that "The West awoke to the suffering of Kampuchea in autumn, 1979" (William Shawcross), and then go on to ruminate about the curious inability of the West, always consumed with self-flagellation, to perceive the atroci- ties of its enemies. 97 And so matters have proceeded in the latest phase of the sad tale of Cambodia.
"There was silence in the mid-1970s during the mass murders by the Khmer Rouge" (Floyd Abrams), and "The atrocity stories coming out of Cambodia after 1975 quite simply were not believed" (David Hawk)-at a time when accusations of genocide of the Hitler-Stalin variety were resounding from the New York Times and Washington Post to the Reader's Digest and TV Guide to the New York Review ofBO<Jks, and the mass media extensively. "The West woke up to the horror of what had happened only after the Vietnamese invasion" (Economist)'
and "hardly anyone outside, on Left or Right, had noticed [the horrors of the Pol Pot regime] at the time they were actually going on (1975- 1978)" (Conor Cruise O'Brien)-that is, at the time when Jimmy Carter branded Pol Pot "the world's worst violator of human rights," and a British Foreign Office report condemned the regime for the death of "many hundreds of thousands of people. "98 One might imagine that such outlandish claims could not pass without a raised eyebrow at least, but that is to underestimate the ability of the ideological institutions to rally to a worthy cause: in this case, the cause of suppressing the truth
THE INDOCHINA WARS (II); LAOS AND CAMBODIA 289
about the Western response to "the decade of the genocide" and other atrocities.
That there was "silence" over Pol Pot atrocities was also an insistent claim right at the peak of the bitter outrage over Pol Pot genocide. Time magazine published a major article by David Aikman on July 31, 1978, claiming that the Khmer Rouge "experiment in genocide" was being ignored, and adding a new twist that was also taken up with enthusiasm in the subsequent reconstruction of history: "there are inteJJectuals in the West so committed to the twin Molochs of our day-'liberation' and 'revolution'-that they can actually defend what has happened in Cam- bodia"; "some political theorists have defended it, as George Bernard Shaw and other Western intellectuals defended the brutal social engi- neering in the Soviet Union during the 1930s. " Noone was mentioned, for the simple reason that no one could be found to fit the bill, although Time did vainly attempt to elicit positive statements about the Pol Pot regime from antiwar activists to buttress this useful thesis.
Each of these themes-the "silence" of the West, the defense of Pol Pot by Western intellectuals-is unequivocally refuted by massive evi- dence that is well known, although ignored, by the mobilized intellec- tual culture. But this level of misrepresentation in the service of a noble cause still does not suffice. The two themes were combined by William Shawcross in an inspired agitprop achievement that carried the farce a step further. 99 This new contribution evoked much enthusiasm; sev- eral of the comments just cited are from reviews of his book, or are
obviously inspired by it.
In his study of "Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience,"
Shawcross muses on the relative "silence" of the West in the face of Khmer Rouge atrocities. The facts are radically different, but the idea that the West ignores Communist atrocities while agonizing over its own is far more appealing to the Western conscience. Shawcross then proceeds to adopt Aikman's second thesis, applying it in an ingenious way to explain the mechanism that lies behind this unwillingness of the West to face up to Communist atrocities, so notable a feature of West- em life. The silence over phase II of the genocide, he argues, resulted from "the skepticism (to use a mild term) displayed by the Western left toward the stories coming OUt of Democratic Kampuchea. That skepti- cism was most fervently and frequently expressed by Noam Chomsky . . . , [who] asserted that from the moment of the Khmer Rouge victory in 1975 the Western press colluded with Western and anti-Communist Asian governments, notably Thailand, to produce a 'vast and unprece-
dented' campaign of propaganda against the Khmer Rouge. "IOO
290 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
To buttress this claim, Shawcross provides what purports to be a quote-but without citing an identifiable source, for two good reasons. First, the quote does not exist,101 although even his version undermines his basic claim, with its reference to "the grim reality" of Cambodia under Khmer Rouge rule. Second, the source of the manufactured quote is a work published in November 1979, almost a year after the fall of the Pol Pot regime. To cite the date would have raised the question of how this "fervent and frequent" expression of skepticism could have intimidated governments and the media from 1975 through 1978. Furthermore, we made it crystal clear that the record of atrocities was "gruesome," perhaps even at the level of the most outlandish fabrications.
Note that Shawcross could have cited real examples of "skepticism"; for example, the skepticism of State Department analysts at the height of the furor over Cambodia, or the retrospective comments of Douglas
Pike and others cited earlier (pp. 265-66), or the comments of journal- ists during phase II who were willing to conclude only that refugee accounts "suggest that the Khmer Rouge is finding it hard to govern the country except by coercion" and "even suggest that terror is being employed as a system of government," noting that refugees "did not appear to be in a sorry condition" and that if the Khmer Rouge are perpetrating an "atrocity," as claimed, then "the atrocity did not begin in April [1975J-it simply entered its sixth year" (William Shaw- cross). 102 But the truth plainly would not have served the purposes of this exercise. 103
Perhaps there was some other example of this "fervent and frequent" expression of skepticism that silenced the West. Shawcross is wise to avoid examples, because as he knows well, his primary source, Pon- chaud, went out of his way to praise Chomsky for "the responsible attitude and precision of thought" shown in what he had written on Cambodia, referring to our 1977 review of his book cited earlier and unpublished correspondence he had seen, which exhausts anything relevant that appears during the DK period. 104 So Shawcross would have us believe that a single 1977 article in The Nation silenced the West, an article in which, furthermore, we praised the book written by his primary source, Ponchaud, as "serious and worth reading," with its "grisly account of what refugees have reported to him about the bar- barity of their treatment at the hands of the Khmer Rouge," and stated that we are in no position to draw any conclusion about the actual extent of the atrocities, in conformity to State Department specialists and other informed sources at the time.
To be clear, in our one article, to whic. 1t Ponchaud alludes, we did
THE INDOCHINA WARS (1I): LAOS A"'D CAMBODIA 291
express some "skepticism," not only about claims that had already been withdrawn as fabrications but also about others that remained to be assessed. Thus in reviewing Ponchaud, we expressed skepticism about his estimate ofcasualties caused by American bombing, which appeared to us excessive and possibly based on misinterpretation of figures he cited; and we raised questions about some of the quotes attributed to the Khmer Rouge on which he (and later others) crucially relied, but which he had presented in very different forms on different occasions- and which he later conceded to have no basis whatsoever. lOS It is noteworthy that our skepticism about charges against the United States, although based mereJy on suspicion, has elicited no comment, while our skepticism about charges against the Khmer Rouge, which was based on textual evidence and, as it later turned out, was much understated, has aroused great fury in what Vickery describes as "in- competent, even dishonest" and "often scurrilous" commentary. l06
The differential reaction is easily explained. It is taken for granted that U. S. actions must be recounted with scrupulous care and in nuanced manner, so our insistence on this is simply what is to be expected, meriting no comment. (We agree. ) In contrast, the acts of official ene- mies merit no such scruples, and it is an unforgivable crime to question propaganda exercises undertaken in the service of power.
Notice that even had the "skepticism" of "the Western left" to which Shawcross alludes existed to any significant degree, the idea that this could have the consequences he describes, coming from people sys- tematically barred from the media and mainstream discussion, is a construction of such audacity that one must admire its creator. Shaw- cross argues further that this alleged "left-wing skepticism" not only silenced Western media and governments but also prevented any mean- ingful Western response to Khmer Rouge atrocities. This thesis is too ludicrous to merit comment, and we can assess Shawcross's seriousness in advancing it by turning to his own proposals at the time as to what could be done, recalling that he had easy access to the mainstream
media throughout. We find not a word suggesting what might be done107-for the simple reason that neither he nor anyone else could think of anything useful. The situation was, of course, quite different during phase I of the genocide, or with regard to Timor during phase II and since, and in innumerable other cases where Shawcross's charge would indeed be valid. We learn a good deal about "holocaust and the modem conscience" by observing this exercise and the reaction it elicited.
Shawcross attributes this "left-wing skepticism," which had such awesome consequences because of the influence of the left on Western
292 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
institutions, in part to Vietnamese propaganda. Vietnam's "spokesmen had undercut the refugee stories about Khmer Rouge conduct," he writes, "thus adding to disbelief in them, particularly on the Western left,"I08 which naturally takes its cues from Hanoi and closely parrots its doctrines, according to approved dogma-although it is interesting that Shawcross also insinuates that the influence of Hanoi extended beyond its acolytes. And why not? If we have reached the point of claiming that the Western left silenced the media and governments, why not proceed to maintain that even outside these dangerous circles, Vietnamese propaganda is a powerful force in shaping opinion? Natu- rally Shawcross does not make even a pretense of providing any evi- dence for what he knows perfectly well to be the sheerest fantasy, from beginning to end.
We may place this outlandish explanation of the "silence" of the West alongside the similar claims that State Department Communists lost China, that the media are threatening the foundations of democ- racy with their "adversarial stance," etc. The reaction, however, was not ridicule, but rather great enthusiasm. To cite just one typical exam- ple, David Hawk observes that Shawcross "attributes the world's indif- ference" to "the influence of antiwar academics and activists on the American left who obfuscated Khmer Rouge behavior, denigrated the post-I975 refugee reports and denounced the journalists who got those stories. "I09 He accepts this thesis as valid but cites no evidence either for the "indifference" to the atrocities, which were being denounced worldwide as genocidal, or for the alleged behavior of the American left, nor does he explain the mechanisms whereby this behavior, had it existed, could have controlled the mainstream media, or even margin- ally influenced them. Convenient mythologies require neither evidence nor logic. Nor do they require any attention to Hawk's own perform- ance at the time, as an Amnesty International official and specialist on Southeast Asia. The AI Annual Report for 1977 noted that the number of alleged executions in Cambodia was "fewer than during the preced- ing year," and while it summarizes a number of reports of executions and disappearances, its account is restrained. The 1978 Annual Report, while stronger in its allegations of violence, pointed out that refugee reports, on which it was necessary to rely heavily, "are often imprecise
or conflicting," thus leaving AI and Hawk in the Shawcross-Hawk category of those who "denigrated the post-I975 refugee reports. " It is so easy to moralize in retrospect.
Shawcross develops his thesis further in interesting ways. ll0 To show that Western commentators refused to recognize that "the Khmer Rouge was a Marxist-Leninist government," he states that British jour-
THE INOOCHI"'A WARS (II): LAOS AND CAMBODIA 293
natist John Pilger "constantly compared" the Khmer Rouge with the Nazis, suppressing the fact that he explicitly compared their actions with "Stalin's terror," as Pilger noted in a response to one of the many reviews that repeated Shawcross's inventions. I l I Shawcross claims fur- ther that the present authors "were to believe for years" that "the refugees were unreliable, that the CIA was cooking up a bloodbath to say, 'We told you so. ''' He cites our one article (The Nation, 1977), in which there is no hint of any such thesis, as there is none elsewhere. In that article we were clear and explicit, as also subsequently, that refugee reports left no doubt that the record of Khmer Rouge atrocities was "substantial and often gruesome," and that "in the case of Cam- bodia, there is no difficulty in documenting major atrocities and oppres- sion, primarily from the reports of refugees. "112 To support his contention with regard to our alleged denial of the reliability of re- fugees, Shawcross cites our comment on the need to exercise care in analyzing refugee reports, carefully suppressing the fact that we are quoting Ponchaud, his primary source, and that the comment he cites is a familiar truism. His reference to the CIA cooking up a bloodbath is pure fantasy, although we might add that by the time he wrote, although after our book appeared, Michael Vickery did present evi- dence that the Barron-Paul Reader's Digest account was in part a CIA disinformation effort. In Shawcros$ states further his view, "contrary to Chomsky and Herman," that the U. S. government was "remarkably inactive" in anti-Khmer Rouge propaganda. We proposed no U. S. government role whatsoever in orchestrating the deceit we docu- mented, by William Shawcross and others, and in fact endorsed State Department reports as the most plausible then available. And so on, throughout.
But Shawcross and others who are deeply offended by our challenge to the right to lie in the service of one's favored state understand very well that charges against dissident opinion require no evidence and that ideologically useful accusations will stand merely on the basis of end- less repetition, however ludicrous they may be-even the claim that the American left silenced the entire West during the Pol Pot period.
Shawcross's charges against other enemies follow the same pattern- another factor, presumably, in the appeal of his message. Thus in pursuit of his fashionable quest to attribute primary responsibility for the continuing tragedy of Cambodia to Vietnam, not to those who were responsible for phase I of the genocide with their "careless" policies and who are now supporting Pol Pot, Shawcross rationalizes the cur- rent support for Pol Pot as a natural response to Vietnamese actions. Given Hanoi's invasion of Cambodia and subsequent conduct, he ex-
294 Mtr. NUFtr. CTURING CONSENT
plains, China and the ASEAN countries of Southeast Asia (not to speak of their "Western partners") were bound "to seek to apply all possible forms of pressure upon Hanoi" to renounce its intentions, and "the Vietnamese could have predicted that such pressures would include support for the Khmer Rouge. " Thus the Vietnamese are to blame if China and the United States support Pol Pot, along with such dedicated advocates of human rights and the strict reliance on peaceful means as Indonesia and Thailand. Such analysis is, however, not extended to the Vietnamese, who are always carrying out cold-blooded strategies in a world without threats from China or the United States, threats that might allow us to "predict" (and thus implicitly exonerate) these strate- gies. According to Shawcross, "Vietnam's conduct since its invasion of Cambodia rarely suggested that it wished to see a compromise in which the Khmer Rouge were removed as a viable force in Cambodia-which was what the ASEAN countries and their Western parmers insisted was their aim. " "It is impossible to predict whether any such suggestion [from Hanoi] would have been accepted by the Chinese or the ASEAN countries, but the point is that it was never made," Shawcross asserts without qualification. 1 l 4 Hanoi has repeatedly offered to withdraw in favor of an indigenous regime, the only condition being the exclusion
of the top Khmer Rouge leadership. Whether these offers were serious or not, we do not know, as they have been dismissed by the Deng- Reagan alliance and, with more vacillation, the ASEAN countries. These rejections, in favor of continued support for Pol Pot, have not been featured in the media, which would hardly surprise a rational observer. But these facts are hardly supportive of Shawcross's analysis, to say the least.
In a further effort to cast the blame on the approved enemy, Shaw- cross asserts that the Vietnamese "placed more confidence in the tor- turers than in their victims, that many of those people were actually being promoted by the new order into positions of new authority over them. " As his sale evidence, he cites a story, told twice in his book, about an old woman he met in Cambodia "who described with great passion how the Khmer Rouge murderer of her son was living, unpun- ished, in the neighboring village. " He repeated the same story in the
New York Review of Books~ eliciting a letter from Ben Kiernan, who accompanied him when this alleged incident took place (and was his interpreter). Kiernan cited the tape of the woman's statement, which reveals that she had simply said that the murderer had "run away" to a neighboring "district," suggesting, as Kiernan notes, that he feared punishment, but not that he had been "promoted" to "new authority. " Confronted with this evidence, Shawcross maintained his position
THE INDOCHINA WARS (ll): LAOS AND CAMBODIA 295
while retreating to the claim that some officials he met "seemed rather unpleasant," which suffices to prove the point, according to his logic. 115 These examples are quite typical. ll6
6. 2. 9. Summary
Summarizing, prior tQ "the decade of the genocide," media treatment of Cambodia was as predicted by the propaganda model, and the same is true, quite dramatically, during the two phases of this terrible period aod since. During phase I, refugee testimony was considered uninter- esting, and little is known today apart from the fact that there was obviously vast slaughter and destruction; this phase does not enter the record as a "holocaust" or exercise in "genocide," and the source is forgotten. During phase II, the myth of the "gentle land" was extended through 1975, and the U. S. role and responsibility for what then took place was also quite commonly effaced, although some did not sink to this level of vulgarity. Refugee testimony was eagerly sought, although only ifit lent support to the STV, and evaluations by State Department specialists and other knowledgeable commentators that gave a more nuanced (and in retrospect, essentially accurate) picture were dismissed as lacking utility. There was massive outrage, reaching its peak in early 1977 when the death toll was still well below that of phase I, with a record of deception that is highly illuminating. 117 As something like the STV came to be realized in 1977-78, its horrors were downplayed in official government circles, and subsequent U. S. support for Pol Pot arouses little notice.
Phase III proceeded along a dual course. In a fanciful reconstruction that maintains the level of integrity shown throughout, it is alleged that "left-wing skepticism" so dominated Western opinion and governments that there was "silence" throughout the DK period; the wide accept- ance of this thesis, despite the quality of the evidence provided and its manifest absurdity, counts as yet another example of how readily the most implausible contentions can become doctrine, as long as they are serviceable. In Indochina, a new phase of Western concern about the victimization of Cambodia began, with outrage now directed not against Pol Pot but against the new oppressors who overthrew him. The United States took a leading role in orchestrating the new concern, which combined Chinese and U. S. interest in "bleeding Vietnam" with a renewed exhibition of the Western conscience, properly bounded to
exclude phase I and its long-term effects, and bypassing the U. S. role in support of Pol Pot-in part via its Chinese allies, who have been
296 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
admirably frank in explaining their stand. This carefully channeled benevolence succeeded in the goal of keeping the Pol Pot forces active and injuring Vietnam and also, incidentally, the suffering people of Cambodia who are the objects of our profound concern. The relief effort in 1979-80 did succeed in aiding Cambodians in distress, but it has also sustained the Pol Pot forces and thereby impeded Cambodia's recovery and, perhaps, its independence, although about this we can only speculate.
Putting aside the undoubtedly sincere reactions of many people who
were exposed to evidence of properly selected atrocities that passed through the media filter, the only rational conclusion from this il- luminating record is that the West was consumed with horror over Khmer Rouge atrocities during phase II not because of a sudden pas-
sion for the fate of the suffering people of Cambodia-as the record during phase I, and elsewhere, makes sufficiently clear-but because
the Khmer Rouge had a useful role to play: namely, to permit a retro- spective justification for earlier French and American crimes in Indo- china, and to facilitate the reconstruction of Western ideology after the Vietnam trauma, so as to overcome the dread "Vietnam syndrome" and prepare the ground for a "resurgent America" pursuing its historical vocation of defending freedom and justice. The actual facts were, and j remain, of little interest, for the same reason. ,1
,'
,. - 7
. -~
Conclusions
-~
DEFENDING THE MEDIA AGAINST THE CHARGE THAT THEY HAVE become too independent and too powerful for the public good, Anthony Lewis of the New York Times writes that
The press is protected [by the First Amendment] not for its own sake but to enable a free political system to operate. In the end, the concern is not for the reporter Or the editor but for the citizen-critic of government.
What is at stake when we speak about freedom of the press "is the freedom to perform a function on behalf of the polity. "l Lewis cites Supreme Court Justice Powell, who observed: "no individual can obtain for himself the information needed for the intelligent discharge of his political responsibilities. . . . By enabling the public to assert meaningful control over the political process, the press performs a crucial function in effecting the societal purpose of the First Amendment. " Therefore, as Judge Gurfein ruled in supporting the right of the New York Times
298 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
to publish the Pentagon Papers after the government had failed to show any threat of a breach of security but only the possibility of embarrass- ment: "a cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous press must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know. "
We do not accept the view that freedom of expression must be defended in instrumental terms, by virtue of its contribution to some higher good; rather, it is a value in itself. But that apart, these ringing declarations express valid aspirations, and beyond that, they surely express the self-image of the American media. Our concern in this book has been to inquire into the relation between this image and the reality. In contrast to the standard conception of the media as cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in their search for truth and their inde- pendence of authority, we have spelled out and applied a propaganda model that indeed sees the media as serving a "societal purpose," but not that of enabling the public to assert meaningful control over the political process by providing them with the information needed for the intelligent discharge of political responsibilities. On the contrary, a propaganda model suggests that the "societal purpose" of the media is to inculcate and defend the economic, social, and political agenda of privileged groups that dominate the domestic society and the state. The media serve this purpose in many ways: through selection of topics,
distribution of concerns, framing of issues, filtering of information, emphasis and tone, and by keeping debate within the bounds of accept- able premises. We have sought to show that the expectations of this model are realized, and often considerably surpassed, in the actual practice of the media in a range of crucial cases. We quite agree with Chief Justice Hughes, whom Lewis also cites, on "the primary need of a vigilant and courageous press" if democratic processes are to function in a meaningful way. But the evidence we have reviewed indicates that this need is not met or even weakly approximated in actual practice.
It is frequently asserted that the media were not always as indepen- dent, vigilant, and defiant of authority as they allegedly are today; rather, the experiences of the past generation are held to have taught the media to exercise "the power to root about in our national life, exposing what they deem right for exposure," without regard to exter- nal pressures or the dictates of authority (Lewis). It is this period, then, that poses a challenge to a propaganda model, and we have therefore taken it as the focus of our inquiry. Many of the examples we discuss are from the past decade, when the liberal media were allegedly in confrontation with a "conservative" administration that they would
have been expected to oppose vigorously. In a further effort to ensure that we are not selecting exceptional cases, we have cast the net widely. We have selected for close examination cases that pose the most severe challenge to our model, namely, those put forth by critics as demon- strating that the media have gone too far in their exuberant indepen- dence and challenge to authority, so far that they must be curbed if democracy is to survive: for example, the coverage of the Tet offensive, the prime illustration of alleged excesses of the media offered in the 1970S and 1980s. Even these cases demonstrate the subordination of the media to the requirements of the state propaganda system. At the peak of alleged media independence, as the Vietnam War entered its final period and the media were threatening Nixon's presidency, the subor- dination to these demands never flagged, as illustrated by the media
coverage of the Paris peace treaty of 1973, one of the most flagrant examples of media misrepresentation based on an uncritical reiteration of official claims and adherence to the political agenda of the state.
We may illustrate the point in yet another case, chosen by those who defend the standard version of the media as their strongest ground: the Watergate affair. To many critics of the media, this incident illustrates their irresponsible excesses; to those who prOUdly defend the media, it illustrates their independence of higher authority and commitment to the values of professional journalism. What, then, are the lessons of Watergate?