No More Learning

The occasional media reaction to these incursions was instructive. On March 25, 1964, New York Times correspondent Max Frankel, now executive editor, reported a Saigon army (ARVN) attack on the Cam- bodian village of Chantrea with armored cars and bombers, leaving many villagers killed and wounded. The ARVN forces were accom- panied by U. S. advisers, including a U. S. army pilot "dragged from the wreckage" of an observer plane "shot down in the action. " Diplomats on the scene confirmed that "at least one troop-carrying helicopter had landed at Chantrea with three Americans on board. " Frankel was out- raged-at Cambodia, which had the gall to demand reparations, leaving Washington "alarmed and saddened, but confused. " The headline reads: "Stomping on U. S. Toes: Cambodia Typical of Many Small Nations Putting Strain on a Policy of Patience. " Cambodia has "bor- rowed a leaf from Fidel Castro's book," Frankel stormed, by requesting compensation for this U. S. atrocity: "It is open season again for the weaker nations to stomp on the toes of big ones. . . . Leading the pack in big-power baiting these days is one of the smallest of nations, the Southeast Asian kingdom of Cambodia" with its "clever, headstrong, erratic leader," whom Washington finds "lacking some of the talent and
270 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
temperament for the job," although "the Administration's instinct has been to try to save a wayward young nation's independence in spite of itself and, at times, despite its own leaders. " Washington is also alarmed by "Cambodia's current effort to force the United States into a major conference that would embarrass its Thai and Vietnamese friends," Frankel continues, an effort that will "be resisted"-referring to a conference that would settle border questions and guarantee Cam- bodia's neutrality at a time when the United States was desperately seeking to undermine international efforts to neutralize South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia so as to avert the major war toward which the United States was driving because of its political weakness in Indo- china.
This classic of colonialist paternalism reflects quite accurately the general mood of the day-as does the refusal to report such trivial matters as the regular V. S. -ARVN attacks on Cambodia, which have largely passed from history in the United States, apart from the dissi- dent literature.
6. 2. 4. Phase I: The U. S. destruction of Cambodia
On March 18, 1969, the notorious "secret bombings" began. One week later, on March 26, the Cambodian government publicly condemned the bombing and strafing of "the Cambodian population living in the border regions . . . almost daily by U. S. aircraft," with increasing killing and destruction, alleging that these attacks were directed against "peaceful Cambodian farmers" and demanding that "these criminal attacks must immediately and definitively stop. . . . " Prince Sihanouk called a press conference on March 28 in which he emphatically denied reports circulating in the United States that he "would not oppose U. S. bombings of communist targets within my frontiers. " "Unarmed and innocent people have been victims of U. S. bombs," including "the latest bombing, the victims of which were Khmer peasants, women and children in particular. " He then issued an appeal to the international press: "I appeal to you to publicize abroad this very clear stand of Cambodia-that is, I will in any case oppose all bombings on Cambo- dian territory under whatever pretext. "45
It will come as no surprise that his appeal went unanswered. Further- more, this material has been suppressed up to the present time, apart from the dissident literature. '"' The standard position within the main-
THE INDOCHINA WARS (II): LAOS AND CAMBODIA 271
stream, adopted by defenders of the bombing and critics as well, is that "Sihanouk did not protest" (William Shawcross). When the "secret bombings" became public knowledge in 1973, it was claimed that Siha- nouk had privately authorized bombing of Vietnamese bases near the border areas. True or false, that is irrelevant to the suppression of Sihanouk's impassioned appeals, which referred to the bombing of Khmer peasants. Furthermore, as we observed in earlier discussion, "while commentators and media analysts may draw whatever conclu- sions they please from the conflicting evidence available, this does not entitle them to suppress what is, by any standards, crucial evidence, in this case, Sihanouk's attempt to arouse international protest over the U. S. bombing of the civilian society. "47
Reviewing this period in his Cambodia Year Zero, Franc;ois Pon- chaud remarks that Sihanouk called the U. S. bombings of "Vietcong bases" a "scandal and a crime over Radio Phnom Penh, but nobody was deceived. " Ponchaud and his readers, however, are deceived: Sihanouk publicly denounced the bombing and other attacks on Khmer peasants, and not only over Radio Phnom Penh but in quite public documents and appeals to the international press. In his Sideshow, Shawcross says only that Cambodia "continued to denounce" American air and artil- lery attacks through 1969, but "made no public protest that specifically mentioned B-52 attacks" (p. 94}-true, but irrelevant for the reasons repeated in the last paragraph. 48
In May 1969, William Beecher reported B-52 raids on "Vietcong and North Vietnamese supply dumps and base camps in Cambodia," citing U. S. sources. Beecher stated that "Cambodia has not made any pro- test," disregarding Sihanouk's appeals and his protest against the mur- der of "Khmer peasants, women and children in particular," not Vietnamese military bases. Beecher also commented that "in the past, American and South Vietnamese forces had occasionally fired across the bOrder and even called in fighters or helicopter gunships to counter fire they received from enemy units there," ignoring the somewhat more important fact that U. S. aircraft and U. S. -ARVN-South Korean forces had been attacking Cambodian villages, according to the "friendly" government of Cambodia. The headline for his article states falsely: "Raids in Cambodia by U. S. Unprotested. " Beecher's article caused consternation in Washington, setting off the first stage of what later became the Watergate scandaL As we have commented elsewhere, "It is remarkable that Beecher's unique though quite inadequate ac- count is now held up as evidence that the press maintained its honor throughout this period, despite the crimes of Richard Nixon. "49
Once again, the U. S. escalation of the war against Cambodia in 1969
272 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
coincided with similar efforts in Laos and Vietnam. The general reac- tion was similar throughout, and remains so. The post-Tet accelerated pacification campaign, which thoroughly demolished the civilian base of the NLF, was regarded as so uninteresting that it is passed over in virtual silence in the popular retrospectives. As for the wars in Laos and Cambodia, Elterman comments, after reviewing the major media cover- age, that apart from the "alternative press," they were virtually "invisi- ble" in the press in 1969 when they were expanding to new heights as the U. S. Air Force was shifted from North Vietnam to Laos and Cam- bodia after the "bombing halt. "50
In March 1970, Cambodia was drawn irrevocably into the camage sweeping Indochina. On March 18, Sihanouk was overthrown in "an upper-class coup, not a revolution," carried out for "interests of domes- tic and political expedience," and with at least "indirect U. S. support," if not more. ;']. Two days later, ARVN ground and air operations began in Svay Rieng Province, at the Vietnamese border, continuing through April and leading to the U. S. -ARVN invasion on April 29, conducted with an extreme brutality sometimes vividly depicted in the media, which were particularly appalled by the behavior of the ARVN forces. Much of the enormous civilian toll, however, resulted from air power, including U. S. bombing strikes that leveled or severely damaged towns and villages. 52 One effect of the invasion was to drive the Vietnamese forces away from the border and deeper into Cambodia, where they began to support the growing peasant resistance against the coup lead- ers. A second effect, as described by U. S. correspondent Richard Dud- man, who witnessed these events at first hand after his capture by the Cambodian resistance, was that "the bombing and shooting was radi- calizing the people of rural Cambodia and was turning the countryside into a massive, dedicated, and effective revolutionary base. "B Cam- bodia was now plunged into civil war, with increasing savagery on both sides.
U. S. bombing continued at a high level after the withdrawal ofU. S. forces from Cambodia. By late 1971, an investigating team of the Gen- eral Accounting Office concluded that U. S. and Saigon army bombing is "a very significant cause of refugees and civilian casualties," estimat- ing that almost a third ofthe seven-million population may be refugees. U. S. intelligence reported that "what the villagers feared most was the possibility of indiscriminate artillery and air strikes," and refugee re- ports and other sources confirm that these were the major cause of civilian casualties and the flight of refugees. 54
Information about what was happening in the peasant society of Cambodia in the early 1970S was limited but not unavailable. There
THE INDOCHI~A WARS (II): LAOS AND CAMBODIA 273
were, first of all, many refugees with stories to tell, although the media were not interested. There was also an eyewitness account by French Southeast Asia specialist Serge Thion, who spent two weeks in regions controlled by the Cambodian guerrillas. His reports were offered to the Washington Post, but rejected. 55 They were of no more interest than the reports of life under the bombing in Laos, or similar questions regard- ing Vietnam throughout the war and in the retrospectives.
As in Laos, the escalating war remained largely "invisible" in the media. Surveying a five-month period in early 1972 in the national press, Elterman found that "In terms of war casualties, the focus in The New York Times and Time was on military-related deaths and almost always only those that occurred in Vietnam, ignoring also the civilian deaths and refugees in that country too. . . . During the winter and spring of 1972, the war in Cambodia and Laos was ignored more than usually with most of the Indo-China news coverage given to the North Vietnamese offensive into South Vietnam and the United States bombing ofHanoi and Haiphong. . . . Time, in fact, had more coverage
on civilian casualties in Northern Ireland during the first half of 1972 than it did on the Indo-China War. "56
Meanwhile, Cambodia was being systematically demolished, and the Khmer Rouge, hitherto a marginal element, were becoming a significant force with substantial peasant support in inner Cambodia, increasingly victimized by U. S. terror. As for the U. S. -backed Lon Nol regime, Michael Vickery points out that their "client mentality" and subse- quent "dependency led them to acquiesce in, or even encourage, the devastation of their own country by one of the worst aggressive on- slaughts in modern warfare, and therefore to appear as traitors to a victorious peasant army which had broken with old patron-client rela- tionships and had been self-consciously organized and indoctrinated
for individual, group, and national self-reliance. "S7
In early 1973, U. S. bombing increased to a scale that might truly
merit the term "genocidal" used by the Finnish Inquiry Commission. In the fi~'e-monrh period after the signing of the Paris peace accords, the bombing matched the level of the preceding three years,58 and it was to continue at that level until Congress forced a halt in August- although bombing and shelling of the countryside by armies of the U. S. -backed regime were to continue on a substantial scale, with U. S. guidance and supply, until the war's end. Over a million refugees fled to Phnom Penh, which became a horror chamber while the countryside was laid waste, including B-S2 bombing targeted "on the most heavily populated areas of Cambodia," where U. S. Air Force maps showed
"thousands of square miles of densely populated, fertile areas . . .
274 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
marked black from the inundation"-"the careless policies of the White House" criticized by William Shawcross. 59 At just this time, Khmer Rouge programs became extremely harsh, so available studies indicate, including a refugee study by Kenneth Quinn, of the National Security Council staff, who never considers a possible causal connection, how- ever, between the harshening of policy and the sharp increase in the program of saturation bombing. 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
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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.
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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
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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.