No More Learning

. For the first time, in the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley, Americans fought the North Vietnamese-face to face. For the first time, B-52s supported troops in the field. And for the first time, to Americans, Vietnam meant a major new war.
Here we have "balance," but of a special kind. One may believe, with johnson, that North Vietnam is invading the South, or, with Ho, that North Vietnam is fighting to liberate the South. We may not believe, however, that the United States is invading South Vietnam, which, we learn two episodes later, it had been bombing since 1961. Rather, we must assume, as a given fact not subject to debate, that the U. S. com- mitment was "to defend South Vietnam. "
T o evaluate this effort at "balance," we may observe that during the preceding summer (1965), five months after the United States began the regular bombing of North Vietnam, the Pentagon estimated that the 60,000 U. S. troops then deployed fa. ced an enemy combat force of
48,500,97 percent of them South Vietnamese guerrillas ("Viet Cong"). A few months after the Ia Drang Valley battle, in March 1966, the Pentagon reported 13,100 North Vietnamese forces in the South, along with 225,000 Viet Cong, facing 216,400 U. S. troops and 23,000 third- country troops (mostly South Korean), in addition to 690,000 ARVN troops. 189 Considering these facts, and the earlier history, it would seem possible to imagine a point of view that departs from the framework established here, one that is, furthermore, plainly accurate: the United States was stepping up its attack against South Vietnam. But that goes
250 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
beyond "balance," which is construed similarly throughout, thus con- signing the series to the familiar system of state propaganda on the most crucial and essential point. A position critical offoreign aggression (that is, the U. S. aggression that was plainly the central element of the war) is excluded as unthinkable, although it may be conceded that "To the Communists in Hanoi, America's presence in the South was yet another act offoreign aggression" (episode 4). The NLF in the South is granted no opinion on the matter, and the episode ends with a ringing declara- tion by LBJYXl
It is not that the facts are entirely hidden. Thus episode 5 ("America Takes Charge") opens with a description by a GI of how "the ARVN and the VC are the same people, the same race, the same culture, and yet one side seems to be chicken and the other side seems to fight in the face of overwhelming disadvantages" in what is clearly "their coun- try. " A U. S. major discusses the problem in Binh Dinh Province, which "had never been really in friendly hands" since I946 but rather "under VC control" throughout, compelling the United States to resort to "awesome fire power" that turns heavy jungle into a "moonscape. " But the plain truth that such facts entail cannot be expressed, or perceived.
Balance is also preserved in an "account from both sides" of what happened in the village of Thuy Bo, in January 1967, where British producer Martin Smith had been shown the site of what villagers claimed to be a My Lai-style massacre, one of many they alleged, with a hundred women and children killed. Fox Butterfield reports that in contrast to the "balanced" picture actually presented by PBS, the British participants in the series argued that "the Marine attack on [Thuy Bo] should be labeled a war crime. " This failure to maintain "balance" was in keeping with what a filmmaker involved in the project termed their "more moralistic stance, anxious to accentuate the aspects of the war that were immoral at the expense of looking at it afresh," which would apparently exclude the "more moralistic stance. "191 In this episode, the marines tell their story of an assault on a VC-defended village and then the villagers (given thirty-five lines of the transcript, to ninety for the marines) tell their conflicting version of a marine massacre of wounded and captured civilians. The sequence ends with
a marine describing what took place as a "normal procedure," with "burning them hootches down and digging them Vietnamese people out of holes [with grenades and rifle fire] and scattering animals, pigs and chickens around like we normally do," especially after three days in the field under brutal conditions.
The account continues in the same vein. We hear that "American
'l.
THE INDOCH1:>iA W ARS (I): VIETNAM 251
aircraft dropped six times more bombs on South Vietnam than on the Communist North," and that "most of the enemy troops were native southerners" (episode 8). But no conclusion is suggested, except that the purpose of the U. S. bombing of Vietnam, distributed in this curious manner and at "twice the tonnage dropped on Germany and Japan in World War II," was to try "to stop North Vietnam from sending soldiers and supplies to the South. " Nevertheless, 140,000 made it through 1967 according to the U. S. government (episode 7), about half the number of South Korean mercenaries and a small fraction of the Americans who were destroying South Vietnam.
The Phoenix program of political assassination is justified at length by its director, William Colby, who denies that it was what it was, and, for balance, some comments are added by critics in the military and by a civilian aide worker, describing apparent random killing and torture. The post-T et military operations are passed over in total silence. After Nixon's election in 1968, when these wholesale U. S. massacres began in full force, "the war continued," we learn: "The weapons were Viet- cong rockets, the victims were Danang civilians" killed by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese.
After the breakdown of negotiations in October 1972, "The North was again intransigent," we learn-namely, in demanding that the agreements be signed, a fact ignored; and "In South Vietnam, too, the agreement was still unacceptable," the familiar evasion of U. S. respon- sibility (see "The Paris Peace Agreements, p. 228). The terms of the January 1973 agreement are given, but with no indication that the U. S. government announced at once its intent to disregard them, as it did. Rather, we hear that "to the North Vietnamese and Vietcong, the struggle had not ended," because "Vietnam was still divided. " The facts are quite different, as we have seen. They are indeed more accurately stated, although briefly, two episodes later (episode 12), although the U. S. role is suppressed except by implication: "America was still com- mitted to South Vietnam," the narrator says, without noting that this commitment to the GVN, identified with South Vietnam by the U. S. government and by PBS, is in explicit violation of the agreements signed in Paris.
"Whatever their views of the war," the narrator adds, "most Ameri- cans now believed that the cost had been too great," particularly the cost of American lives; "They believed that no more Americans should die for Vietnam. " The only other Americans are those who thought it proper that "more Americans should die for Vietnam. " Americans were dying for Vietnam in the same sense in which Russian boys are dying
252 MANUFACTURING CONSEIH
for Afghanistan, but those who could perceive this fact, and who op- posed the war not merely because the cost was too great but because aggression is wrong, are excluded from the category of Americans.
As in the media retrospectives, the antiwar movement is given short shrift. A few activists are quoted, but permitted to discuss only ques- tions of tactics. Even Eugene McCarthy, plainly the favored antiwar figure in this presentation, says nothing except that "I think the case is rather clear about what's wrong about our involvement"-which is fair enough, since the media's favorite dove had never been a serious critic of the war and was to disappear quickly from the scene after failing to gain political power, thus demonstrating again where his commitments lay. James Fallows is permitted to describe "the spirit of the times": "to look for the painless way out, namely, a physical defer- ment. " In the real world, this was a position that hardly defined "the spirit of the times," although it is a facet of this "spirit" that is far more acceptable to mainstream opinion than the principled and courageous resistance of many thousands of young people, an intolerable phenome- non and therefore erased from the record. As Peter Biskind observes, for all the attempt at "balance," and "despite the preference of (the PBS series] for doves over hawks, it is the right, not the left, that has set this film's political agenda," in conformity to elite opinion.
Biskind concludes his review ofthe PBS series by stating: "The truth is that the war was a crime, not a tragedy. The tragedy is that this film lacks the conviction to say so. " The same may be said about the retro- spective commentary generally. The war was a "tragic error," but not "fundamentally wrong and immoral" (as the overwhelming majority of the American people continue to believe), and surely not criminal aggression-the judgment that would be reached at once on similar evidence if the responsible agent were not the United States, or an ally or elient.
Our point is not that the retrospectives fail to draw what seem to us, as to much of the population, the obvious conclusions; the more signif- icant and instructive point is that principled objection to the war as "fundamentally wrong and immoral," or as outright criminal aggres- sion-a war crime-is inexpressible. It is not part of the spectrum of discussion. The background for such a principled critique cannot be developed in the media, and the conclusions cannot be drawn. It is not present even to be refuted. Rather, the idea is unthinkable.
All of this again reveals with great clarity how foreign to the mobil- ized media is a conception of the media as a free system of information and discussion, independent of state authority and elite interests,
1.
6
The. Indochina Wars (II): Laos and
Cambodia
THEGENEVA ACCORDS OF I954 PROVIDED FOR A POLITICAL SET- tlement in Laos and Cambodia. Both countries, however, were drawn into the U. S. attack on Indochina, with devastating consequences. In both cases, the media made a noteworthy contribution to this outcome.
6. 1. LAOS
In Laos, as in Vietnam, the United States undertook to prevent a political settlement, as described frankly in congressional hearings by Ambassador Graham Parsons, who stated that "I struggled for 16 months to prevent a coalition. " A U. S. military mission was established under civilian cover in violation of the Geneva Accords, headed by a general in civilian guise, and U. S. aid flowed in an effort to establish U. S. control. A measure of its scale and purposes is given by the fact
254 MANUFACTURING CONSUlT
that Laos was "the only country in the world where the United States supports the military budget 100 percent. "1
Nevertheless, a coalition government was established in 1958 after
the only elections worthy of the name in the history of Laos. Despite extensive U. S. efforts, they were won handily by the left. Nine of the thirteen candidates of the Pathet Lao guerrillas won seats in the na- j tional assembly, along with four candidates of the left-leaning neutral-
ists ("fellow travelers," as they were called by Ambassador Parsons).
Thus "Communists or fellow travelers" won thirteen of the twenty-one
seats contested. The largest vote went to the leader of the Pathet Lao, Prince Souphanouvong, who was elected chairman of the national assembly.
U. S. pressures-including, cruciany, the withdrawal of aid--quickly led to the overthrow of the government in a coup by a "pro-Western neutralist" who pledged his allegiance to "the free world" and declared his intention to disband the political party of the Pathet Lao (Neo Lao Hak Sat, or NLHS), scrapping the agreements that had successfully established the coalition. He was overthrown in turn by the CIA favor- ite, the ultra-right-wing General Phoumi Nosavan. After U. S. cliems won the 1960 elections, rigged so crudely that even the most pro-U. S. observers were appalled, civil war broke out, with the USSR and China backing a coalition extending over virtually the entire political spec- trum apart from the extreme right, which was backed by the United States. The U. S. government assessment was that "By the spring of1961 the NLHS appeared to be in a position to take over the entire country," primarily because of its control of the countryside, where it had "dili- gently built up an organization covering most of the country's ten thousand villages," as noted ruefully by the bitterly anti-Communist Australian journalist Denis Warner. 2 The problem was the familiar one: the United States and its clients were militarily strong but politically weak.
Recognizing that its policies were in a shambles~ the United States agreed to take part in a new Geneva conference, which proposed a new settlement in 1962. This too quickly broke down, and the civil war resumed with a different line-up and with increasing intervention by the United States and its allies, and by North Vietnam, in the context of the expanding war in Vietnam. U. S. clandestine military operations began in 1961, and the regular U. S. bombing began in early 1964: Operation Barrel Roll, directed against northern Laos, was initiated in December 1964, several months before the regular bombing of North Vietnam. The bombing of northern Laos was intensified in 1966, reach- ing extraordinary levels from 1968 with the "bombing halt" in North
THE INDOCHINA WARS (II): LII. OS AND CAMBODIA 255
Vietnam-in reality, a bombing redistribution, the planes being shifted to the destruction of Laos. 3
Media coverage of Laos during the earlier period was sometimes extensive---over three times as great as of Vietnam in the New York Times in 1961, the Pentagon Papers analyst observes. But its contents were often absurd. For example, the aid cut-off that was the essential factor in the U. S. subversion of the elected government of Laos in 1958 "was never even reported in the national press," which barely men- tioned the eVents, and then with misleading commentary reflecting Washington deceit. 4 Bernard Fall gave a detailed and derisive exposure of some of the more ludicrous incidents, including inflammatory fabri- cations that helped create major crises and led to deeper U. S. involve- ment in Thailand and Indochina. Joseph Alsop's fevered reports of
largely invented Communist military actions were parr. icularly note- worthy. s
As the Vietnam War escalated, Laos became "only the wan on the hog of Vietnam," as Dean Rusk put it, a "sideshow war," in Walter Haney's phrase, as Cambodia was to be later on. Media coverage de- clined as the "sideshow war" escalated. There were, in fact, three distinct U. S. wars: the bombing of the Ho Chi Minh trail in the South; the bombing of the peasant society of northern Laos, which the U. S. government conceded was unrelated to the war in South Vietnam; and the "clandestine war" between a CIA-run mercenary force based on mountain tribesmen and the Pathet Lao, backed by North Vietnam apparently at about the level of the Thai and other mercenaries intro-
duced by the United States. The bombing of southern Laos was re- ported; the clandestine war and the bombing of northern Laos were not, apart from tales about North Vietnamese aggression, often fanciful and subjected to no critical analysis. 6
In July 1968, the Southeast Asia correspondent of Le Monde, Jacques Decornoy, published lengthy eyewitness reports of the bombing of northern Laos, which had become". . . a world without noise, for the surrounding villages have disappeared, the inhabitants themselves liv- ing hidden in the mountains . . . it is dangerous to lean out at any time of the night or day" because of the ceaseless bombardment that leads to "the scientific destruction of the areas held by the enemy. " He
describes "the motionless ruins and deserted houses" of the capital of Sam Neua district, first bombed by the U. S. Air Force in February 1965, Much of this "population center" had been "razed to the ground" by bombing, and as he arrived he observed the smoking ruins from recent raids with phosphorus bombs, the "enormous craters" everywhere in the town, the churches and houses "demolished," the remnants of U. S.
256 MASUI'ACTURJNG CONSENT
fragmentation bombs dropped to maximize civilian casualties. From this town to a distance of thirty kilometers, "no house in the villages and hamlets had been spared. Bridges had been destroyed, fields up to the rivers were holed with bomb craters. "7 After Decornoy's reports, there could be no doubt that the U. S. Air Force was directing murder- ous attacks against the civilian society of northern Laos. These reports of terrible destruction were repeatedly brought to the attention of the media, but ignored or, more accurately, suppressed. Later described as "secret bombings" in an "executive war," the U. S. attack was indeed "secret," not simply because of government duplicity as charged but because of press complicity.
Not omy did the media fail to publish the information about the attack against a defenseless civilian society or seek to investigate further for themselves, but they proceeded to provide exculpatory accounts that they knew to be inaccurate, on the rare occasions when the bomb- ing was mentioned at all. As the bombing of Laos began to be reported in 1969, the claim was that it was targeted against North Vietnamese infiltration routes to South Vietnam (the "Ho Chi Minh trail"), and, later, that U. S. planes were providing tactical support to government forces fighting North Vietnamese aggressors, a far cry from what Decornoy had witnessed and reported, and a much more tolerable version of the unacceptable facts. S
Keeping just to the New York Times, through 1968 there was no mention of the bombing apart from tiny items reporting Pathet Lao complaints (Dec. 22, 31, 1968). On May 18, 1969, the Times reported U. S. bombing in Laos, alleging that it was "directed against routes, including the so-called Ho Chi Minh Trail, over which the North Vietnamese send men and supplies to infiltrate South Vietnam. " A June 14 report states that "American planes bomb targets all over Laos, especially along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in an effort to harass the Pathet Lao, the Communist-led rebel movement in Laos, and to stop tbe flow of enemy supplies to South Vietnam. " Charles Mohr reported on July 16 that U. S. bombing "is directed against infiltration routes from North Viet- nam that pass through Laos en route to the South. " There is a July 28 reference to "200 American bombing sorties a day over northeastern Laos," directed against North Vietnamese forces, and Hedrick Smith adds from Washington on August 2 that the United States "has been bombing North Vietnamese concentrations" in Laos. T. D. Allman repOI1ed bombing sorties "in tactical support" of government forces fighting the North Vietnamese and "harassing attacks against Commu- nist positions all over northeast Laos" on ~llgust25, the latter providing
Ii<
THE INDOCHINA WARS (II): LAOS AND CAMBODIA 257
the first glimpse of something beyond the approved version. Further reports of U. S. air power in tactical support and "to cut North Viet- namese supply routes" appear on September 7, followed by Allman's report of successes of a government offensive with forces "stiffened by Thai soldiers," supported by "the most intense American bombing ever seen in Laos" (Sept. I8). Then followed reports from Washington and Vientiane (Sept. I9, 20, 23, 24, 30) confirming that the U. S. Air Force was providing tactical support for government combat missions in addi- tion to bombing North Vietnamese infiltration routes, including a Sep- tember 23 Agence-France-Presse dispatch reporting "bombing of Pathet Lao areas by United States aircraft," thus implying that the bombing went well beyond infiltration routes and combat operations, common knowledge in Paris and Vientiane but yet to be reported here.
In short, the terror bombing of northern Laos, although known, remained off the agenda, and reporting in general was slight and highly misleading, to say the least. Elterman observes that the war in Laos and Cambodia was virtually "invisible" in the media through 1969, apart from the leftist National Guardian, which gave substantial coverage to what was in fact happening. 9
On October I, I969, the New York Times finally ran an account by T. D. Allman, whose valuable reporting throughout the war appeared primarily overseas, concluding that "the rebel economy and social fab- ric" were "the main United States targets now," and that the American bombardment had driven the population to caves and tunnels during the daylight hours, making it difficult for the Pathet Lao "to fight a 'people's war' with fewer and fewer people. " Control of territory was now of lesser importance, he wrote, "with United States bombers able to destroy, almost at will, any given town, bridge, road or concentration of enemy soldiers or civilians. "lo
This confirmation of what had long been known in restricted peace- movement circles, and consciously suppressed in the mainstream press, passed without particular notice. The CIA clandestine army had swept through the Plain of Jars in the preceding months, evacuating all re- maining civilians to areas near Vientiane, where they and their harrow- ing stories were largely ignored by the well-represented media, although available elsewhere. II
Walter Haney, a Lao-speaking American who compiled a detailed collection of refugee interviews that was described as "serious and carefully prepared" by U. S.
Ambassador to Laos William Sullivan, quotes remarks by a UN official in Laos as "the most concise account of the bombing":
258
MANUFACTURING CONSENT
By 1968 the intensity of the bombings was such that no organized life was possible in the villages. The villages moved to the outskirts and then deeper and deeper into the forest as the bombing reached its peak in 1969 when jet planes came daily and destroyed all stationary structures. Nothing was left standing. The villagers lived in trenches and holes or in caves. They only farmed at night. {Each} of the informants, without any exception, had his village completely destroyed. In the last phase, bombings were aimed at the systematic destruction of the (material} basis of the civilian society. 12
A staff study by a Kennedy subcommittee concluded that a main pur- pose of the U. S. bombardment was "to destroy the physical and social infrastructure" in areas held by the Pathet Lao, a conclusion well supported by the factual record. H
There were also eyewitness reports of the destruction of northern
Laos by Western reporters, but published overseas. T. D. Allman flew
over the Plain of Jars in late 1971, reporting that "it is empty and ravaged" by the napalm and B-sz saturation bombing being "used in
an attempt to extinguish all human life in the target area"; "All vegeta-
tion has been destroyed and the craters, literally, are countless" and
often impossible to distinguish among the "endless patches of churned
earth, repeatedly bombed. " At the same time, the WashingUJn Post published the statement of Air Force Secretary Robert Seamans, who reported from northern Laos that "I have seen no evidence of indis- criminate bombing"; it is the North Vietnamese who are "rough," and
the people are not "against the United States-just the opposite. " The Lao-speaking Australian reporter John Everingham traveled in 1970 t "through dying village after dying village" of the Hmong tribesmen
who had been "naive enough to trust the CIA" and were now being
offered "a one-way 'copter ride to death' " in the CIA clandestine army,
in the remains of a country where bombing had "turned more than half
the total area of Laos to a land of charred ruins where people fear the
sky" so that "nothing be left standing or alive for the communists to inherit. " No U. S. journal, apart from the tiny pacifist press, was inter-
ested enough to run his story, although later the media were to bewail
the plight of the miserable remnants of the Hmong, put on display as "victims of Communism. " In 1970, the Bangkok World (Oct. 7) pub-
lished an AP report on U. S. bombing that was "wiping out" towns, and
by ]972 such repons sometimes appeared in the U. S. pressY' Later~
Nayan Chanda visited the Plain of Jars, reporting overseas that from t the air it "resembles a luna. landscape, pockmarked as it is with bomb
THE INDOCHINA WARS (II): LAOS AND CAMBODIA 259
craters that are a stark testimony to the years of war that denuded the area of people and buildings" during "six years of 'secret' bombing" by U. S. aircraft, while "at ground level, the signs of death and destruction are even more ubiquitous," including the provincial capital, "com- pletely razed," as had been reported earlier by refugees who were ignored. Following the practice of American volunteers during the war, American relief workers with long experience in Laos attempted to bring information about postwar Laos to the media-with little effect- and inform us privately that their accounts were seriously distorted by New York Times reporters "by the device of omission and taking the negative side of balanced statements we made" and similar means. 15
The U. S. government officially denied all of this, continuing the deception even after the facts were exposed and known in some detail to those concerned enough to learn them. Many regarded the U. S. war in Laos as "a success" (Senators Jacob Javits and Stuart Symington), or even "A spectacular success" (a former CIA officer in Laos, Thomas McCoy). 16
In scale and care, the extensive analysis of refugee reports by a few young American volunteers in Laos compares very favorably to the subsequent studies of refugees from Cambodia that received massive publicity in the West after the Khmer Rouge takeover, and the story was both gruesome and highly pertinent to ongoing U. S. operations. But there was little interest, and published materials, which appeared primarily outside of the mainstream, were virtually ignored and quickly forgotten; the agency of terror was inappropriate for the needs of the doctrinal system. Media failure to report the facts when they were readily available, in 1968, and to investigate further when they were undeniable, by late 1969, contributed to the successful deception of the public, and to the continuing destruction.
When the war ended, ABC News commentator Harry Reasoner expressed his hope that Laos and its "gentle folk" could return to peaceful ways after "the clowning of the CIA and the vicious invasion of the North Vietnamese. "17 The "clowning of the CIA" included the destruction of "the rebel economy and social fabric" in northern Laos, with unknown numbers killed in areas that may never recover, and the decimation of the Hmong who were enlisted in the CIA cause and then abandoned when no longer useful. Nothing remotely comparable may be attributed to "the vicious invasion of the North Vietnamese"- which did, however, include such atrocities as killing twelve U. S. Air Force men in Match 1968 at a U. S. radar base near the North Viet- namese border used to direct the bombing of Nonh Vietnam and operations in North Vietnam by U. S. -led mercenaries. 18
260 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
The New York Times reviewed the war in Laos at the war's end, concluding that 350,000 people had been killed, over a tenth of the population, with another tenth uprooted in this "fratricidal strife that was increased to tragic proportions by warring outsiders. " The "fratri- cidal strife" might well have been terminated by the 1958 coalition government had it not been for "outsiders," with the United States playing a decisive role throughout, a role completely ignored in this purported historical analysis apart from a few misleading comments. At this late date, the Times continued to pretend that the U. S. bombing was directed against North Vietnamese supply trails-nothing else is mentioned. The crucial events of the actual history also disappear, or are grossly misrepresented. Subsequent reporting also regularly obliterated the U. S. role in creating the devastation and postwar "prob- lems" attributed to the Communists alone, a shameful evasion in the light of the undisputed historical facts. 19
Once again, the media record, less than glorious, is well explained throughout by the propaganda model.
1
1
1 1
6. 2. CAMBODIA
6. 2. 1. "The decade of the genocide"
Few countries have suffered more bitterly than did Cambodia during I the 1970s. The "decade of the genocide," as the period is termed by the I Finnish Inquiry Commission that attempted to assess what had taken
place,20 consisted of three phases-now extending the time scale to the present, which bears a heavy imprint of these terrible years:
Phase I: From 1969 through April 1975, U. S. bombing at a histori- cally unprecedented level and a civil war sustained by the United States left the country in utter ruins. Though Congress legislated an end to the bombing in August 1973, U. S. government participa- tion in the ongoing slaughter continued until the Khmer Rouge victory in April 1975. 21
Phase II: From April 1975 through 1978 Cambodia was subjected ~ to the murderous rule of the Khmer Rouge (Democratic Kampu- j chea, DK), overthrown by the Vietnamese invasion of C a m b o d i a j in December1 9 7 8 . . . . 1
1
THE INDOCHINA WARS (II): LAOS A"D CAMBODIA 261
Phase III: Vietnam installed the Heng Samrin regime in power in Cambodia, but the Democratic Kampuchea (DK) coalition, based primarily on the Khmer Rouge, maintained international recogni- tion apart from the Soviet bloc. Reconstructed with the aid of China and the United States on the Thai-Cambodia border and in Thai bases, the Khmer Rouge guerrillas, the only effective DK military force, continue to carry out activities in Cambodia of a sort called "terrorist" when a friendly government is the target.
We turn now to the travail of Cambcdia during these grim years, and the way it has been depicted, first with some preliminary observations and then in further detail, phase by phase.
6. 2. 2. Problems of scale and responsibility
The three phases of the "decade of the genocide" have fared quite differently in the media and general culture, and in a way that conforms well to the expectations of a propaganda model. Phase I, for which the United States bore primary responsibility, was little investigated at the time, or since, and has never been described with anything like the condemnatory terms applied to phase II. The vast number of Cambodi- ans killed, injured, and traumatized in this period were, in our concep- tualization of chapter 2, "unworthy" victims.
Phase II, the Pol Pot era, is the "holocaust" that was widely com- pared to the worst atrocities of Hitler and Stalin, virtually from the outset, with massive publicity and outrage at the suffering of these "worthy" victims.
Phase III renewed the status of the people of Cambodia as worthy victims, suffering under Vietnamese rule. The Vietnamese being official enemies of the United States, they quickly became the villains of the piece, responsible for unspeakable conditions within Cambodia and guilty of unprovoked aggression. Meanwhile, the United States backed its ally China as it conducted a punitive invasion of Vietnam in Febru- ary 1979 and reconstructed the defeated Pol Pot forces.
In the early stages of phase III, it was alleged "that the Vietnamese are now conducting a subtle 'genocide' in Cambodia," a charge tacitly endorsed in a CIA demographic study, which estimated a population drop of 700,000 during "the first year of the Heng Samrin rule. "22 This new "holocaust" was constructed on the basis of serious misinterpreta-
262 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
tion of available evidence, as was demonstrated by Michael Vickery in a response to William Shawcross's warnings of "the end of Cam~ bodia,"23 but not before it had left its mark on popular perceptions, and many distortions and, indeed, contradictions persist. In his Quality of Mercy, Shawcross agrees that, as Vickery had concluded, there was no large-scale famine of the character initially reported,24 but he later wrote that the Heng Samrin regime "was responsible for creating many of the conditions that caused the famine" in Cambodia. These conflict- ing accounts were noted by Australian Cambodia scholar Ben Kiernan, who suggested a partial explanation: "There was a threat of famine, as the Heng Samrin government proclaimed in mid-I919. But it was offset by the small but crucial December-January harvest, which Shawcross hardly mentions, and by the massive international aid program, which he regularly denigrates. "25
The eagerness to uncover Vietnamese villainy in "ending Cam- bodia," the easy reliance on sources known to be unreliable,26 and the subsequent evasions after the accusations dissolve are readily explained by U. S, (indeed, general Western-bloc) hostility to Vietnam, which led the United States to align itself quietly with Pol Pot and to transform its alleged concern over Cambodians to the victims of the Vietnamese occupation.
Phase III also had a domestic U,S. aspect that is highly relevant to our concerns. In an intriguing exercise, characteristic of system-sup- portive propaganda campaigns, it was charged that the horrors of phase II were passed over in "silence" at the time. This alleged fact, devel- oped in William Shawcross's influential book Quality ojMercy, elicited much commentary on "Holocaust and Modem Conscience," the: subti- tle of Shawcross's book, and on the failure of civilized people to react appropriately to ongoing atrocities. In "Phase III at home" (p. 288), we will turn to the merits of this charge with regard to phase II. As for phase I of "the decade of the genocide," the charge of silence is dis- tinctly applicable, but it was never raised, then or now, nor is phase I designated a period of "holocaust" or "genocide" in mainstream litera- ture, Phase 1 elicited no calls for international intervention or trials for crimes against humanity, and it has since been largely expunged from the record. In retrospect, the harshest critics within the mainstream attribute "the destruction of Cambodian society" during phase I to "years of warfare" and "careless policies of the White House," nothing more,27 The issue of U. S, bombing of Cambodia did arise during the Watergate hearings, but the primary concern there was the failure to notify Congress.
Michael Vickery suggests an "interesting comparison which an in-
THE INDOCHINA WARS (II): LAOS A~D CAMBODIA 263
vestigative journalist might make" if truly concerned about the prob- lems of the region-namely, between Cambodia, during phase III, and Thailand, "where there has been no war, foreign invasion, carpet bombing, nor revolution, and where foreign investment is massive and the sympathy of the most advanced western powers is enjoyed," but where conditions in the peasant society were so terrible that "since 1980 substantial foreign 'refugee' aid near the border has been given to 'Affected Thai Villagers,' whose health and living standard, much to the shock of foreign aid personnel, were found to be little better than the condition ofCambodian refugees. "28 No such comparison was under- taken, nor was there even a flicker of concern over simultaneous re- ports, buried in appropriate obscurity, about the tens of thousands of children, many under ten years old, working as "virtual slaves" in Thai factories resembling concentration camps,29 nor over the normal condi- tions of peasant life in the region, now exposed to the visitors flocking to the border camps to witness the consequences of Communist terror and express their compassion for its victims.
The actual scale of the slaughter and destruction during the two authentic phases of large-scale killings during the "decade of the geno- cide" (phases I and II) would be difficult to estimate at best, and the problems have been compounded by a virtual orgy of falsification serv- ing political ends that are all too obvious. 3o The Finnish Inquiry Com- mission estimates that about 600,000 people in a population of over seven million died during phase I, while two million people became refugees. 31 For the second phase, they give 75,000 to 150,000 as a "realistic estimate" for outright executions, and a figure of roughly one million dead from killings, hunger, disease, and overwork. Vickery's analysis is the most careful attempt to sort out the confused facts to date. He accepts as plausible a "war loss" of over 500,000 for the first phase, calculated from the CIA estimates but lower than their conclu- sions (see note 31), and about 750,000 "deaths in excess of normal and due to the special conditions of OK," with perhaps 200,000 to 300,000 executed and a total population decline for this period of about
4 00,000. 32
These estimates, the most careful currently available in print to our
knowledge, suggest that the toll under phase II of "the genocide" is somewhat greater than that under phase I, although not radically dif- ferent in scale. But before accepting these figures at face value we must bear in mind that part of the death toll under phase II must be at- tributed to the conditions left by the U. S. war. As the war ended, deaths from starvation in Phnom Penh alone were running at about 100,000 a year, and the U. S. airlift that kept the population alive was immedi-
:64 MANUFACTURIl"G CONSENT
ately terminated. Sources close to the U. S. government predicted a million deaths in Cambodia if U. S. aid were to cease. A Western doctor working in Phnom Penh in 1974-75 reported that
This generation is going to be a lost generation of children. Mal- nutrition is going to affect their numbers and their mental capaci- ties. So, as well as knocking off a generation of young men, the war is knocking off a generation of children.
The V. S. embassy estimated that available rice in Phnom Penh would suffice for at most a few weeks. The final V. S. AID report observed that the country faced famine in 1975, with 75 percent of its draft animals destroyed by the war, and that rice planting for the next harvest, eight months hence, would have to be done "by the hard labor of seriously malnourished people. " The report predicted "widespread starvation" and "Slave labor and starvation rations for half the nation's people" for the coming year, and "general deprivation and suffering . . . over the next two or three years before Cambodia can get back to rice self- sufficiency. "33
There is also the matter of the effect of the U. S. bombing on the Khmer Rouge and the peasant society that provided their social base, a factor noted by all serious analysts. Cambodia specialist Milton Os- borne concludes that Communist terror was "surely a reaction to the terrible bombing of Communist-held regions" by the U,S. Air Force. Another Cambodia scholar, David Chandler, comments that the bomb- ing turned "thousands of young Cambodians into participants in an anti-American crusade," as it "destroyed a good deal of the fabric of prewar Cambodian society and provided the CPK (Khmer Rouge] with the psychological ingredients of a violent, vengeful, and unrelenting social revolution," a "class warfare between the 'base people: who had been bombed, and the 'new people' who had taken refuge from the bombing and thus had taken sides, in CPK thinking, with the United States. " <<French intransigence had turned nationalists into Commu- nists," Philip Windsor observes, while "American ruthlessness now turned Communists into totalitarian fanatics. "34 One may debate the weight that should be assigned to this factor in determining Khmer Rouge policies, embittering the peasant society of "base people," and impelling them to force those they perceived as collaborators in their destruction to endure the lives of poor peasants or worse. But that it was a factor can hardly be doubted.
Assessing these various elements, it seems fair to describe the re-
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THE INDOCHINA WARS (II): LAOS AND CAMBODIA 265
sponsibility of the United States and Pol Pot for atrocities during "the decade of the genocide" as being roughly in the same range.
Little is known about phase I of "the genocide. " There was little interest in ascertaining the facts, at the time or since. The Finnish Inquiry Commission Report devotes three cursory pages to the topic, because the information available is so meager. The second phase has been far mOre intensively studied, and by now substantial evidence is available about what took place. David Chandler and Ben Kiernan observe that as a result of the intense interest in phase II, "we know a great deal more about the texture of daily life in Democratic Kampu- chea, supposedly a 'hermit' regime, than we do about the ostensibly open regimes of the Khmer Republic (1970-1975) or the Sihanouk era (1954-1970) which preceded it. "35 Despite this already large imbalance in knowledge, the Cambodia Documentation Center in New York City concentrates on phase II of the genocide. The dramatic difference in the information available for the two phases, and the focus of the ongoing research effort, are readily explicable in terms of a propaganda model.
Outside of marginal Maoist circles, there was virtually no doubt from early on that the Khmer Rouge regime under the emerging leader Pol Pot was responsible for gruesome atrocities. But there were differing assessments of the scale and character of these crimes.
State Department Cambodia specialists were skeptical of the allega- tions that had received wide publicity by 1977-rightly, so subsequent inquiry revealed. The Far Eastern Economic Review based its January 1979 conclusion that the population had actually risen during the Pol Pot period on CIA sources, and its very knowledgeable correspondent Nayan Chanda, discussing the background for the Vietnamese inva- sion, reported that "some observers are convinced that had the Cambo- dian regime got a year's reprieve, its internal and international image would have been improved enough to make any Vietnamese drive difficult if not impossible. "36
Differing assessments persisted even after the abundant evidence provided by the flow of refugees to Thailand in 1979 and visits to Cambodia, which also provided the first significant information about the years 1977-78. At one extreme, Pol Pot continued to be described as having forged new patterns of genocide comparable to the worst excesses of Hitler and Stalin. At the other extreme, we have the postwar evaluation by U. S. government specialist Douglas Pike, now head of the University of California Indochina Archives, the "independent- minded" scholar lauded by Freedom House and the exemplar of the
266 MAKUFACTURING CONSENT
new, nonideological scholarship much admired by the New York Times.
Pike described Pol Pot in November 1979 as the "charismatic" leader
of a "bloody but successful peasant revolution with a substantial resi-
due of popular support," under which "on a statistical basis, most of them [peasants] . . . did not experience much in the way of brutality. "37
The 1980 CIA demographic study assigns the Pol Pot--era executions
to the period ending in January 1977, and for 1977-78 merely says that "living conditions most likely did not vary during these two years from
the conditions during 1976. " although as was known when the CIA study was undertaken, these later years were the worst, by far. in the context of internal purges and the escalating conflict with Vietnam at
a time when the United States was beginning its "tilt" toward China
and Pol Pot. The CIA concludes that among the "old people," the j "rural population" who were "the foundation for the new Khmer Rouge revolutionary society. " there was a slight increase in population through the DK period. A still more muted assessment is provided by
the close U. S. ally Deng Xiaoping, who emerged as "party strongman"
in China in December 1978 and soon implemented his p1a. n to "punish Vietnam," and who remained the main supporter of Pol Pot. He bitterly opposed attempts to remove the Khmer Rouge from their leading role ~ in the DK coalition in 1984. stating in a rage that "I do not understand
why some people want to remove Pol Pot. It is true that he made some mistakes in the past but now he is leading the fight against the Viet- namese aggressors. "38 Deng has been backed in this stance by the Reagan administration (see "Phase III in Indochina," p. 285). 38
In addition to such real examples of less harsh interpretations of the Pol Pot period, there are also mythical ones to which we return.
6. 2. 3. The "not-so-gentle" land: some relevant history
Part of the illusory story constructed about Cambodia during the 1970S
and since is that this "gentle land" with its "smiling people" had known
little suffering before the country was drawn into the Indochina war and
then subjected to Pol Pot "autogenocide. " The reality is different. Behind the famous "Khmer smile," as Prince Sihanouk's French ad-
viser Charles Meyer observed. lies ample bitterness and violence. 39 Vickery observes that earlier chronicles "are filled with references t o j public executions, ambushes, torture, village-burnings and forced emi- . 1 gration," with the destruction of villages and landscapes, torture, and
1
I
, j
THE INDOCHINA WARS (II): LAOS AsD CAMBODIA 267
killing a matter of course, and few institutional restraints on terror. The peasantry of inner Cambodia, largely unknown to Western scholarship or to the urban population, appear to have lived under conditions of extreme violence and hatred for the oppressors from outside the village.
During the French war of reconquest in the late I940s, up to "per- haps one million rural inhabitants . . . were forcibly 'regrouped. ' " The huge flow of refugees to Phnom Penh during phase r of the "decade of the genocide" was not the first massive dislocation in recent history, Vickery continues, adding that it is, furthermore, "a strange kind of history" that regards the displacement of people fleeing from U. S. bombs and savage fighting "as somehow less abhorrent or more 'nor- mal' than the reverse movement of 1975," the forcible evacuation when the peasant army of the Khmer Rouge conquered the city. Leaders of the anti-French resistance after World War II describe horrifying atrocities conducted with obvious pleasure as a "normal" part of "Khmer mores. " In the same years, government forces led by Lon N01, who was to head the U. S.