Undergraduate Political Science Honors Thesis:

The Khmer Rouge Canon 1975-1979:

The Standard Total Academic View on Cambodia

Sophal Ear

Department of Political Science

University of California, Berkeley

Ronald E. McNair Scholar

Academic Achievement Division

E-mail: sophal@csua.berkeley.edu

URL: http://www.csua.berkeley.edu/~sophal

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There can be no doubt but that this thesis would not have been possible without the contributions of the following people. I am delighted to acknowledge their contributions to this thesis.

For help in the early research phase of this thesis, I would like to thank Professor Ben Kiernan of Yale University, Professor Laura Summers of the University of Hull, and University of California Indochina Archive Director Douglas Pike.

For research suggestions, materials, and references, I am eternally grateful to Professor David P. Chandler of Monash University and my dear friend Bruce Sharp. They were both always ready to help, and only an e-mail away.

I am especially grateful to archivist Steve Denney of the Indochina Archive for showing me the Cambodian vault and referring me to the Chomsky-Lacouture Controversy over a year ago. Steve's great advice was ubiquitous throughout this project.

For constructive criticism on an earlier draft of this thesis, I am indebted to Dr. Marc Pizzaro and Andy Lei.

Last, but not least, this political science honors thesis would not have been possible without the great inspiration of my advisor, political science Professor Anthony James Gregor.

Although each of these contributors helped the final product, they are in no way responsible for the views expressed or the mistakes made by the author. The author alone is solely responsible for those.

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

How many of those who say they are unreservedly in support of the Khmer revolution would consent to endure one hundredth part of the present sufferings of the Cambodian people?

So concludes François Ponchaud's Cambodia: Year Zero, the first book to detail the "assassination of a people" being perpetrated in the name of socialist revolution in Cambodia. Hundreds of other books and articles on Cambodia have been published since 1977. Many have focused on the period during which the Red Cambodians or "Khmer Rouge" controlled the country which they renamed "Democratic Kampuchea" between 1975 and 1978. Under the Khmer Rouge, hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died from execution, forced labor, disease and starvation. Since it will never be possible to ascertain the exact number of deaths, estimates fall on a range. Michael Vickery estimates 750,000 deaths,[2] while Ben Kiernan adds to that another 800,000. Karl Jackson puts the figure near 1.3 million,[3] while the Campaign to Oppose the Return of the Khmer Rouge (CORKR) claims at least 1.5 million deaths. The Khmer revolution was perhaps the most pernicious in history; reversing class order, destroying all markets, banning private property and money. It is one worth studying for the ages, not for what it accomplished, but for what it destroyed.

The idea for this thesis grew from research into Cambodia's economic development and history for a simultaneous economics honors thesis.[4] In particular, a 1979 book entitled Kampuchea: Rationale for a Rural Policy by Malcolm Caldwell, was my first glimpse into a community of academics, I had no idea existed. To be sure, this community was not some extreme "fringe" faction of Cambodian scholars, but virtually all of them.[5] In other words, their view of the Khmer revolution ergo the Khmer Rouge, became the Standard Total Academic View on Cambodia or the STAV.[6] These scholars, many of whom worked for the Berkeley-based antiwar Indochina Resource Center, became the Khmer Rouge's most effective apologists in the West.[7] While they expressed unreserved support for the Khmer revolution, fully twenty percent of the Cambodian population may have perished due to execution, forced labor, illness, and malnutrition during the period 1975-1979.[8] From periodicals such as the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars and Current History to books like Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution and Kampuchea: Rationale for a Rural Policy, an unequivocal record of complicity existed between a generation of academics who studied Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge.

Reading Karl Jackson's Cambodia: 1975-1978 (1989), a footnote revealed that debate among scholars of contemporary Cambodia in the West, during the late 1970s, included "sympathetic treatment" of the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary regime, namely the Khmer Rouge. The unassuming footnote, reprinted here, came from Timothy Carney's essay entitled, "Unexpected Victory."

The list took on a life of its own, as the pieces to the puzzle of "Who, in academia, supported the Khmer Rouge?" came together. Here was, in effect, the origin of the "Khmer Rouge Canon". When Jean Lacouture published a book review of Ponchaud's Cambodia: Year Zero in 1977, he touched off an intense debate with American academic cum activist Noam Chomsky. Chomsky, who is a distinguished linguist, found erratas in both Lacouture's review and Ponchaud's book. In a series of polemical exchanges that were sometimes public, other times private, Chomsky referred to these mistakes as examples of deception and fraud that fueled anti-revolutionary propaganda against the Khmer Rouge by the media. Together with Edward S. Herman, Chomsky published an article in mid-1977 in the Nation, entitled "Distortions at Fourth Hand" that became the centerpiece of his argument against the media's frenzy over Pol Pot.[10] Two years later, after the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary regime was toppled by Vietnam, the Nation article was followed by a book that continued to express doubt about the truthfulness of "alleged" Khmer Rouge crimes.

Between 1975 and 1979, "the movement of solidarity with the peoples of Kampuchea and Indochina as a whole"[11] as described by of one of its members, Gavin McCormick, vociferously defended the Kampuchean revolution and its perpetrators. To be sure, there have been very few articles or books on this topic, since it is so unpleasant for those Ponchaud bluntly characterized as "unreservedly in support of the Khmer revolution," to be reminded of their responsibility in what Jean Lacouture has called "the murder of a people." The study of this movement is considered by some, especially those who continue to support Chomsky, to be wholly outside Cambodian studies. They suggest that it is more in line with American studies since Chomsky attacked the Western media's propaganda machine as it gravitated around the "evils of communism."

This thesis seeks to dispel this mitigating advance in favor of a wider Canon for pro-Khmer Rouge literature published between 1975 and 1979. "The Khmer Rouge Canon 1975-1979," unlike other canons, is not an official list of works in this case, since no one has ever agreed to one (Carney's list is a small exception). For a work to be listed and reviewed in the "Khmer Rouge Canon" requires that it have been written in the period 1975 to 1979 and, of course, have supported, whether explicitly or implicitly, the policies of the Khmer Rouge (hence the inclusion of Chomsky's and Herman's work). A second criterion involves the nature of the publication, namely print; the work must have been published in a reasonably well-known English-language periodical (Current History, the Nation, etc.), a monograph (Malcolm Cadwell's South-East Asia by Cook University), or a book (Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution and After the Cataclysm). Beyond this requirement is the obvious need for the author of this thesis to have read that particular work in order to be able to review it. Of course, there are countless dissertations, newsletter articles (such as those in News from Kampuchea and News from Democratic Kampuchea), and other journal articles (from the Journal of Contemporary Asia) that will not be covered because they were unavailable or would have required extensive treatment or for lack of time. The Khmer Rouge Canon is by no means exhaustive, far too many other Indochina scholars deserve to be canonized, yet because of circumstances will have to wait.

This partial Canon offers a glimpse into the assumptions and logic, evidence and arguments that a generation of Western scholars used to defend the Khmer Rouge or rationalize their policies during the mid-to-late 1970s. Together, they created the standard total academic view. This glimpse, whether representative or not, is in and of itself a testament to Khmer Rouge's charm over academia.

This thesis seeks to answer the following questions on the STAV: First, in what military-political context did it develop? Second, what are examples of STAV scholarship, who made them, what arguments did they make, and why? Third, how does the Chomsky-Herman thesis fit in, differ from or was similar to the standard total academic view? Fourth, beyond the STAV, what were the counter-arguments, and for the members of the STAV scholars, Summers, Caldwell, Hildebrand, Porter, Chomsky, and Herman, what was the continuity and change in their political thinking (using Vickery's STV typology)?

In sum, this thesis deconstructs the standard total academic view on Cambodia and constructs the foundation for the Khmer Rouge Canon 1975-1979.

This foundation to the Canon is composed of, among numerous other works, Laura Summers' "Consolidating the Revolution" (December 1975) and "Defining the Revolutionary State in Cambodia" (December 1976) in Current History, George C. Hildebrand's and Gareth Porter's sine qua non of the STAV: Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution (1976), Torben Retbøll's "Kampuchea and the Reader's Digest" in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars (July-September 1979) and Malcolm Caldwell's towering essay "Cambodia: Rationale for A Rural Policy" in Malcolm Cadwell's South-East Asia (1979). To this list chapter 3 will add Noam Chomsky's and Edward Herman's masterful "Distortions at Fourth Hand" in theNation (June 25, 1977) and After the Cataclysm (1979), though Chomsky and Herman are mindful to state that they are by no means defending the Khmer Rouge nor "pretend to know where the truth lies," though most of what they do is to rehash the Hildebrand and Porter line in a more palatable design. Together, they are a significant body of scholarship from the STAV.

Three works come to mind with respect to how different facets of the STAV has been explored previously, William Shawcross' essay "Cambodia: Some Perceptions of a Disaster," in Revolution and its Aftermath in Kampuchea (1983),[12] Stephen J. Morris' essay "Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, and Cornell" in the National Interest (Summer 1989), and Geoffrey C. Gunn and Jefferson Lee's Cambodia Watching Down Under (1991). Shawcross and Morris, two individuals one would expect to find on separate divides, essentially agree that the Left failed-for one reason or another-to become a moral force with respect to Cambodia until 1979. This while some on the Left, particularly those in STAV, zealously defended the Khmer revolution. Shawcross focuses on the Chomsky-Herman thesis, while Morris tackles Cornell's ties to the Khmer Rouge. Gunn and Lee offer a exhaustive though curiously insensitive view of the Australian connection to Democratic Kampuchea.

The context within which Khmer Rouge support incubated was the Vietnam War. To understand how students and scholars, presumed to be detached from peasant concerns, could have found solidarity with the peoples of Kampuchea and Indochina as a whole, one must first bear in mind the political atmosphere and conditioning from which grew the yoke of radical revolutionary support. It would be facile to strip the words of these academics from the context of history, a practice not unlike that being undertaken by current revisionists. But at the same time, these same activists cum academics must accept responsibility for how they reached their conclusions-namely the validity and credibility of the evidence they unceremoniously attacked when at the same time they (quite hypocritically) accepted Khmer Rouge leaders Ieng Sary's or Khieu Samphan's utterances as words to live by. Notwithstanding the pro-revolutionary ideological framework from which they were taught to think, including the strife-ridden 1960s and 1970s, one must still wonder how those who studied Cambodia and ostensibly loved her most in the West, became supporters of her worst enemy?

By the 1970 Kent State killings of four students, these more extreme elements of the STAV saw U.S. intervention not only as a mistake that had to be stopped and stopped now, but increasingly inched toward the maquis. After the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1979, many of these activists, scholars, and academics were forced to choose between supporting their old friends, namely the Vietnamese communists or Democratic Kampuchea, which would have implicitly meant supporting the Khmer Rouge to varying degrees. That was what Gunn and Lee have called the "two-sided switch."[13] Yet even before that split, there was already division in the antiwar movement. Gunn and Lee describe it:

The first was the split within the left-liberal camp in the US. This was symbolized by the action of singer and civil rights activist Joan Baez in supporting a full page advertisement in the New York Times condemning Vietnam's re-education camps and human rights abuses. Her sources of information included recently resettled refugees in America who had undergone incarceration despite their anti-American activism and NLF sympathies in the pre-1975 period. The result was splintering of the Indochina Lobby with pro-Hanoi hardliners increasingly condoning Vietnam's slide into the Moscow camp.[14]

Douglas Pike, Indochina Archive director at UC Berkeley, fondly recalls a conference of antiwar activists not long after the New York Times advertisement appeared which turned into a shouting match between doves who now could not agree with one another on whether to support or condemn Hanoi. He may have been facetious, but Pike, who became famous for being an outspoken State Department hawk, saw more fury between them than he had ever seen between hawks and doves. There was no lost love between either side, to be sure, but one would perhaps have expected more civility from "pacifists." As lines were drawn and crossed in the Third Indochina Conflict (the invasion of Cambodia by Vietnam), similar lines were drawn in the West as well, where a distinctly pro-Hanoi faction critical of the Khmer Rouge formed, leaving behind only the truest believers in Pol Pot (i.e., the last of STAV scholars).[15] Like F.A. Hayek's dedication of his classic 1944 treatise The Road to Serfdom to "Socialists of all parties," this thesis is about some of these same socialists.

Those who romanticized the Kampuchean revolution and upheld the standard total academic view in the years following "liberation" as they always referred it (covered in chapter 2), were young, idealistic scholars, like Laura Summers and Gareth Porter both from Cornell's South-East Asia Program (Albert Gore and Bill Clinton are from their generation), all of whom were baby boomers who had grown-up in the postwar era to a quagmire in Vietnam. This generation of Indochina academics, specialists on Cambodia, were very peculiar from those of the preceding generation, because they were far more mesmerized by the idea of a peasant revolution.

Chapter 2 of this thesis, entitled "Romanticizing the Khmer Revolution" is about the STAV scholars on Cambodia. It includes a brief review of Khmer Rouge leader Khieu Samphan's conclusions in his economics doctoral dissertation: "Cambodia's Economy and Problems of Industrialization,"[16] as a backdrop to why they may have gotten attracted to the Khmer Rouge. For instance, Laura Summers, who partially translated the thesis in 1976 for the Berkeley-based antiwar group Indochina Resource Center (later renamed Southeast Asia Resource Center, then eventually disbanded) had already expressed unflinching support for the revolution in late 1975 and 1976. Her articles in Current History, titled "Consolidating the Revolution" and "Defining the Revolutionary State" are reviewed. An overview of the arguments in Gareth Porter and George C. Hildebrand's Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, published in 1976 by the Marxist Monthly Review Press, follows Summers' articles.

Also discussed in chapter 2 is Malcolm Caldwell, a scholar Gunn and Lee bestow the dubious distinction of being "Democratic Kampuchea's leading academic supporter."[17] His life cut short by a Khmer Rouge's bullet (in a strange twist of fate), Caldwell was the founder of the Journal of Contemporary Asia, a periodical explicitly committed to supporting revolutionary movements in Asia and the author of Cambodia in the Southeast Asian War (1973) and several long essays on Cambodia's post-revolutionary development, such as "Cambodia: Rationale for a Rural Policy,"[18] published posthumously in 1979. The reader will see that the mistake made by each of these authors is academic. They question the validity of sources Khmer Rouge critics are using, but hypocritically take prima facie the claims by Khmer Rouge leaders like Ieng Sary and Khieu Samphan. They romanticize the revolution in the theoretically palatable thesis of Khieu Samphan, or Hou Youn, but do so at arms-length. Blinded by their own ideological biases, they believe themselves to be objective despite employing some very poor sources and methods.

In chapter 3, the Chomsky-Lacouture Controversy is reconstructed. It is more a Ponchaud- Barron-Paul-Lacouture-Chomsky-Herman Controversy, to be sure, but that would sound tediously long. In early 1977, François Ponchaud wrote the first book detailing the struggle, under socialism, of the Cambodian people. That year, Barron and Paul published their own book, Murder of a Gentle Land (1977) an equally if not more damning broadside against the Khmer revolution and the Khmer Rouge. Ponchaud and Barron-Paul were among the first to see to sound the alarm on Cambodia. In 1976, Ponchaud had written in Mondes Asiatiques about the nature of the Khmer revolution.[19] After publishing his book, it was reviewed favorably by Jean Lacouture, but that review got a broadside from the leading, most intellectually formidable member of the antiwar movement, Noam Chomsky. At the May Hearings in 1977 on Human Rights in Cambodia, Gareth Porter trashed Ponchaud his uncritical use of refugees in Cambodia: Year Zero. A polemical exchange ensued among Chomsky, Lacouture, Ponchaud, and Bob Silvers, then editor of the New York Review of Books which had translated the Lacouture review titled "The Bloodiest Revolution."

The Porter-Chomsky-Herman objections were numerous, but still Chomsky and Herman admitted that Ponchaud's book was "serious and worth reading" though full of discrepancies and unreliable refugee reports which were contradicted by other refugees (who, for instance, had said that they had walked across the country and seen no dead bodies). This was vindication of the Khmer Rouge-reports of having seen no evil nor heard any evil. The Porter-Chomsky-Herman logic in a nutshell: Refugees are run away because they are displeased, thus will exaggerate, especially over time, if not lie about "alleged atrocities" altogether. Chomsky and Herman call for "care and caution," nothing short of patronizing to today's refugees from Guatemala, or El Salvador, or yesterday's from Auschwitz. Chomsky and Herman latched onto a number of media mistakes which include three fake photographs, a fake interview with Khieu Samphan, and a handful of misquotations. A little more fairly treated was Ponchaud's book, but the erratas first discovered by Ben Kiernan were blown out of proportion in Chomsky and Herman's review of the Ponchaud book for the Nation and repeated verbatim two years later in After the Cataclysm (1979).

Chapter 4 of this thesis, titled "Beyond the STAV," analyzes the aftermath of what amounted to a parenthetical note in the history of Western academia. Counterevidence is presented in three successive rounds: (1) Accuracy in Media's analysis of human rights in the news for 1976, (2) positive and negative coverage of Cambodia from a variety of news sources for 1977, (3) William Shawcross' test of the Chomsky-Herman thesis for 1975-1979. Following, the continuity and change in political thinking for each canonized STAV scholar is reviewed. To give a sense of possible outcomes, Michael Vickery's Standard Total View typology is used, namely that they (1) accepted, or (2) partially accepted, or (3) mostly rejected the idea that the STV that Ponchaud-Barron-Paul-Lacouture had forwarded.

It is within this context that the conclusion, in chapter 5, attempts to weave common threads in the arguments of Summers, Caldwell, Hildebrand, Porter, Chomsky, and Herman. Only after having fully absorbed their impact can the reader pass judgment on the significance of their contributions to the "Khmer Rouge Canon." What will emerge from this is the picture of a community of academics too consumed by the need to prove their theories supporting peasant revolutions to realize the consequences of their actions.

CHAPTER 2: ROMANTICIZING THE KHMER REVOLUTION

Universities are based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.

Our story begins, fittingly so, in the ivory towers of some of the world's finest universities. At the Sorbonne (University of Paris), for instance, where would-be Khmer Rouge leaders like Khieu Samphan, Hu Nim, and Hou Youn acquired their ideological training courtesy of the French communist party, and at Cornell University, where a generation of Cambodianists were increasingly attuned to revolutionary causes and movements. Stephen J. Morris reveals the legacy of the South-East Asia Program's (SEAP) at Cornell in his National Interest essay entitled "Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, and Cornell."[20] A cursory look at Morris' article shows the enormity of his thrust. He unravels a sordid tale of revolutionary fanaticism at Cornell's SEAP from the 1960s though the 1970s. Morris's censure starts at the very top with politics Professor George McTurnin Kahin and ends with Kahin's students. Some of his milder critics argue that his article lacks historical context. In order to avoid this pitfall, the following section discusses this context.

In the late 1960s to the early 1970s, while the United States was still in Vietnam, American B-52s began massive "secret" bombings to eliminate North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia. In The Rise and Demise of Democratic Kampuchea, Craig Etcheson writes,

This gave rise to a slew of American and Australian critics early on such as Noam Chomsky and Wilfred Burchett.[22] Later, British journalist William Shawcross made quite a name for himself for his Far Eastern Economic Review article entitled "Cambodia: The verdict is guilty on Nixon and Kissinger"[23] and his acclaimed Sideshow: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Destruction of Cambodia (1978). In both, Shawcross advances a "cause and effect" hypothesis that in essence condemns "Nixinger" foreign policy for creating the Khmer Rouge. Gunn and Lee (1991) offer insights into this bent, they write, "But if the mainstream press and academic interest had turned away from Cambodia in the wake of US retreat, leftist interest had been passionately ignited by the violence of the US saturation bombing of Cambodia."[24] Those who became "passionately ignited," grew ever more eager to see the maquis triumph in Cambodia.

Before constructing the Khmer Rouge Canon, we must first deconstruct the ideological framework "thought" to have guided the Khmer Rouge once they took power. Surely, had the world known of what would become of postwar Cambodia, few scholars or academics would have sympathized with the Khmer Rouge cause. What drew the young, idealistic students of Cambodia to it? It was the duality of peasants driven by academic cum revolutionary concerns. Additionally, any struggle against neo-colonialism would have made friends of STAV scholars who shared these values. At least part of the awe expressed for the Khmer Rouge leadership by the STAV scholars lay in its equally educated background. Khmer Rouge would-be leaders like Khieu Samphan, Hu Nim, and Hou Youn (who, like Trotsky, would be eliminated in purges) all received doctorates in economics or law from the University of Paris. These were, of course, the intellectual figureheads, not the anti-intellectual masterminds like Saloth Sar (known by his nom de guerre as Pol Pot), Son Sen, Nuon Chea, Ke Pauk, Mok, and Ieng Thirith.[25] Professor Chandler points out the "old canard" one too easily falls into every now and then, when one assumes that because of intellectuals like Khieu Samphan and Hou Youn, the Khmer Rouge were somehow an intellectually driven bunch. He writes,

Also, it seemed that their developmental strategy for Cambodia matched those of French-trained Marxist theorists like Amin Samir, one of the eminence to the World-Systems theory that called for autarkic development in the Third World. In this heretofore exploitation-exploited schema, where underdevelopment grows from the yoke of capitalism and international integration, a less-developed country can expect to develop only if it severs itself from the World-System (that is, the world itself). For Khieu Samphan, autarkic development was renamed "conscious, autonomous development" to make it appear more palatable. Later, conscious, autonomous development was re-christened "self-reliance."

In September 1976, over a year after the Khmer Rouge took power, the Berkeley-based Indochina Resource Center (IRC) published a partial translation of Khieu Samphan's 1959 economics dissertation.[27] At the time, it was meant as a vision into the new Kampuchea. Virtually no one recognizes that vision as the master plan for Cambodia, but the standard total academic view held that it was. In this sense, what the Khmer Rouge actually did or thought does not matter-at least not for our purpose here-since this is a study of the STAV on Cambodia, thus a study of Cambodian studies. Summers' abridged translation intended to offer the world a peek into the mysterious Khmer Rouge and their plans for Cambodia. Khieu Samphan's dissertation is unrevolutionary in most instances, though it exudes the same young, graduate student's "humanitarian socialist ideals" that inspired other graduate students studying the Cambodia years later. For our purpose, what IRC circles believed was a plan for the postwar years, is sufficient to represent the standard total academic view. Of course, the dissertation being tame relative to the Kampuchea's reality shows how far they off the mark. Yet, from that dissertation, of which the conclusion follows, the reader can see how the STAV perceived the Khmer revolution. Khieu Samphan's conclusion states that:

In the first instance, Samphan offers two possible paths: "international integration" or "autonomous development". Because of conditions imposed on the country by the "international integration" method of development, Samphan argues, atavistic modes of production are amplified. How does he reach that particular finding? By going back to the late 19th century, when the industrialized French penetrated the pre-industrial Cambodian economy, Samphan asserts that this disruption stopped the course of development for Cambodia. In other words, French colonization derailed the Cambodian economy. Using balance of trade and composition of trade analysis, to make his case, Samphan concludes that exploitation takes place when Cambodia and France trade, and that peasants too are exploited by urban elite who buy imported luxury goods which deplete foreign exchange reserves. Hence, the contention that "structural disequilibria" from "international integration" would lead to "social upheaval ... for an increasingly large portion of the population." In other words, revolution. It seemed to make sense to the person who translated the thesis, Laura Summers, and still others who admired it, Malcolm Caldwell and Ben Kiernan, just to name two others.

Thus, the conclusion "objectively" reached, meant that "self-conscious, autonomous development", i.e., autarky or "self-reliance" was the answer. It would be facile to ridicule this notion in this day and age, but in the context of economic history, autarkic development cast a spell on young, idealistic students who had grown increasingly critical of the "neo-colonial world", in their words. As they looked elsewhere for space to forge ahead, their eyes stopped on Cambodia, where a fresh revolution had taken place, and its charming leaders had closed the country to the rest of the world. They were in love. As professor Chandler says, it is an "old canard" to place too much emphasis on Khieu Samphan's thesis as the master plan, since, of course, the Khmer Rouge followed their own anti-intellectual national development policy of slavery; but for our purpose, what matters here is not what the Khmer Rouge thought or actually did vis-à-vis the economy, but what the STAV scholars believed was happening. Equally inspiring to these scholars was Hou Youn's dissertation, "Kampuchea's Peasants and the Rural Economy." Like Khieu Samphan, Hou Youn stressed the exploitative dimensions of trade, not just between countries, but urban and rural regions. Siding with the peasant's plight, Hou Youn decried the "thievery" that took place when "The tree grows in the rural areas, but the fruit goes to the towns."[29] With this in mind, we turn momentarily to the military context of how the Khmer Rouge came to power.

Cambodia is the transliterated name of Cambodja, the remnants of a once mighty Khmer empire that stretched out over much of Southeast Asia. Cambodia's contemporary history began with its colonization by France in 1883. Independence came after World War II, in 1953, and until 1970, Cambodia was a constitutional monarchy. The coup d'etat which deposed Prince Norodom Sihanouk on March 18, 1970, brought to power the pro-American prime minister Lon Nol. Sihanouk, who has never been known to give up easily, immediately began a crusade to regain his country. Believing, like General Motors, that "What's good for GM, is good for America," Sihanouk believed that "What was good for Sihanouk, would be good for Cambodia." He created the resistance/maquis known as the National United Front for Kampuchea (FUNK) soon after his overthrow. FUNK was a coalition of communists and royalists. For the next five years, Cambodia was mired in wars on several fronts, both internally and externally.

These "liberated" areas grew as it became clear that America would pursue a "retreat with honor" policy with respect to South Vietnam. By 1973, when the bombings on Cambodia had reached their zenith, PFLANK, the military wing of FUNK, "launched its first full-scale `solo' offensive." Though was by no means a success, the "real significance of this offensive was political."[31] This was significant politically in the sense that Pol Pot's no-compromise policy, according to Etcheson, took center-stage for the communists who were becoming the real brains behind FUNK.

The rise of Democratic Kampuchea paralleled that of a new consensus among scholars who studied Cambodia. Many had grown hysterical against the war and destruction of 1970-1975, and looked forward to the FUNK's victory. As increasing specie-speculation and corruption combined with large infusions of U.S. aid brought the economy into hyperinflation, the national product: rice, became increasingly scarce because of the war-destruction of agricultural capacity.[32] Shells reigned down on Phnom Penh for two months before April 1975, the beginning of a new lunar year for Cambodians, and the start of Year Zero for the Khmer Rouge. "Two thousand years of Cambodian history have virtually ended," declared Phnom Penh Radio in January 1976.[33] Cambodia's rebirth into Democratic Kampuchea would make heavy use of self-reliance. To almost all the scholars who had studied Cambodia, this made sense. Not just for its economics, which had been "objectively" proven by Khieu Samphan, but for its international politics too. David Chandler who briefly toyed with the standard total academic view, wrote in April 1977, "In the Cambodian case, in 1976, autarky makes sense, both in terms of recent experience-American intervention, and what is seen as Western-induced corruption of previous regimes-and in terms of Cambodia's long history of conflict with Vietnam."[34] That foreign policy dimension to self-reliance, became the justification for closing Cambodia's doors to all foreigners. Toward that end, Laura Summers, a lecturer in the politics department at the University Lancaster, England, began her apologia for Khmer Rouge activities.

A graduate of the South-East Asia Program at Cornell, Summers authored two articles in Current History about Cambodia. These articles, entitled "Cambodia: Consolidating the Revolution" and "Defining the Revolutionary State in Cambodia," were published in December 1975 and December, 1976, respectively.[35] She was in England during these years, a point which will undermine her work and that of many other STAV scholars canonized in this thesis. She did not fieldwork, interviewed no Cambodians for either articles. Summers' first article "Cambodia: Consolidating the Revolution," ranks among the first attempts by scholars of her generation to justify the Khmer revolution that was achieved with the April 17th, 1975 fall of Phnom Penh to the FUNK.

First, she makes no distinction between "Khmers," FUNK, Khmer Rouge-presumably they are one and the same. She takes at face value Khmer Rouge vice-premier Ieng Sary's explanation that documents of American sabotage were authentic. Becoming a virtual mouthpiece for the Khmer Rouge, she writes,

Praising the Khmer Rouge for their rice farming techniques, as Porter and Hildebrand would do in Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution in 1976, and justifying the need for the evacuation yof Phnom Penh based on the fact that 3 million people would now have to be fed by the new regime, Summers contends that "[the] heavy [U.S.] bombing deterred many from voting with their feet until the day of liberation."[38] There is, she writes authoritatively, "little evidence of famine" although "food allowances in the solidarity groups are small."[39] On the positive side, "rice substitutes" are being grown, and the "end of war also means greater security for fishing and livestock industries."[40]

Her analysis of Cambodia's agricultural and industrial prospects leave much to be desired too. She does not cite any sources, official or otherwise, which would certainly cast doubt on how she procured her information. Despite this, she concludes that in Democratic Kampuchea, "Life is without doubt confusing and arduous in many regions of the country, but current hardships are probably less than those endured during the war. It is mistaken to interpret postwar social disorganization or confusion as nascent opposition to the revolution."[41] Laura Summers, who had been to Cambodia once before 1975, on a brief visit, knew very little of the hardships before "liberation" much less afterwards. She explains that,.

Her naïveté is mind-boggling here, Summers assumes that those who wished to leave were actually allowed to do so, not to speak of the total and unnecessary use of tribunals for which the Khmer Rouge could very easily have simply been judge and executioner at once.

In discussing Cambodia's foreign policy, the French Embassy and the Mayagez Affairs, Summers, of course, sides with the FUNK whom she knew were the Khmer Rouge. For our purpose here, a brief discussion of the French embassy incident will suffice. Before the Khmer Rouge "liberated" Phnom Penh, the French government had already discussed normalizing relations with them. Thus, the French did not intend to leave their embassy. "Hundreds of Frenchmen who had earlier refused to leave the country, journalists of several nationalities, Cambodian officials of the defeated military regime and diplomats from other foreign missions including the Soviet embassy, sought and received shelter from the French."[43] This infuriated the Khmer Rouge, with whom she concurred. Diplomatic protocol would have forced the French to close down the embassy and re-open after the re-establishment of relations. Why had the government of France attempted such fraud? She explains, "Unhappy over the prospect of losing its remaining neo-colonial privileges, France hoped to maintain its large cultural mission in Cambodia and sought compensation for nationalized rubber plantations."[44] Again, one must wonder how she arrive at such creative and perceptive conclusions.

Throughout the article permeates a sense of disproportion. For instance, Summers speaks of massive resettlement as though it were a normal affair. Her nonchalant treatment of evacuations stands in stark contrast to the seething sarcasm she expresses towards French and American actions with respect to the Royal Government of National Union (RGNU), the regime name for FUNK (which took power). "Cambodia: Consolidating the Revolution" ended on another of many positive notes. The overall foreign policy of Democratic Kampuchea is praised, and its impact on the region assessed. "Among Asians, if not among other [sic], Khmer desires for peace and respect have been recognized and reciprocated."[45] Laura Summers' defense of the new Kampuchea is multifaceted. From domestic to foreign policy, the Khmer Rouge could do no wrong. She does a fantastic job of rationalizing away the more awkward Khmer Rouge policies such as expelling all foreigners. They were expelled, she argues, for historical reasons. After years of abuse by her neo-colonial master, who could blame Cambodia for wanting to kick the foreigners out? Her apologetics obfuscate the fragmentary reports coming of refugees who were, in fact, fleeing the country. Later, she suggests that they have reasons to lie: collaborators with the ancien regime perhaps? or worse, the discredited Americans! What emerges from this first English-language essay on the new Kampuchea is the picture of a still idyllic revolutionary State, divorced from reality.[46]

In her second Current History article regarding the new Kampuchea, published in December 1976, Summers is more reserved in her alacrity to praise Khmer Rouge accomplishments. One might call it cautious but very optimistic. In contradistinction, David Chandler, who felt the obligation to give the new leaders of Cambodia the benefit of the doubt, put it this way:

The reverse is perhaps true for Laura Summers, who upon reading the comments of "emissaries" to Kampuchea, decides that all must be fine. Having acquired new material to propagate, she quotes, without so much as a single qualification (with respect to the controlled nature of the visit), the Swedish ambassador to China's observations while visiting Democratic Kampuchea as an invited guest of the new regime. Believing perhaps that the ambassador was free to visit all places yet saw "no signs of starvation," Summers generalizes this finding to contradict refugee claims of atrocities and starvation. But she goes too far, however, when she admonishes the ambassador for not recognizing what she insists is an obvious bomb crater in Siem Riep, caused by American bombs dropped some time during his visit of 1976. Of course, she was not an eyewitness nor an expert on bomb craters, not to speak of American-made ones.

On the status of Prince Sihanouk, who founded FUNK, but was subdued by the Khmer Rouge, she writes, "Since his retirement, Sihanouk continues to live in Cambodia, where, according to another visiting emissary, he enjoys the respect and affection befitting his status as an eminent nationalist."[48] The title of his memoirs Prisonier des Khmer Rouges (1986) is self-evident in contradicting that emissary's observations. Here, the mistake she makes is to believe too easily in emissaries. Far from being randomly selected, the emissaries who visited Cambodia were not chosen for their critical bent. It took the regime three-and-half years to invite Western journalists, a total of three to be exact. One of them was Malcolm Caldwell, a lecturer in Southeast Asian economic history at the University of London, and author of occasional essays, one book on Cambodia in the Southeast Asian war,[49] and newspaper articles in support of the Khmer revolution. He writes, in 1977 for the London Times, "Profound changes were needed, changes which could be brought about only by revolution..."[50] Caldwell, who, like Summers, is canonized in this thesis, was understandably biased towards the Khmer Rouge. One would think, given all this, that scholars like Laura Summers and Malcolm Caldwell, both of whom held the standard total academic view on Cambodia (see no evil, hear no evil), would turn to fresh sources of information or at least do some fieldwork where they could interview refugees and the like, but that apparently ranked low on their list of priorities.

Regarding the refugee accounts of atrocities, Summers for example, dismisses them for having received more attention than they literally "deserved." In a series of apologetics, she rationalizes their overuse by the Press as having "served to harden Phnom Penh's attitude towards Western journalism even as the government welcomed a few Asian journalists into the country."[51] Not only were the Americans at fault for causing starvation and thus the evacuation of Phnom Penh, as her colleagues would argue, but the negative press was making them uncomfortable. Their no comment, closed doors policy was thus understandable! Laura Summers attributes everything the Khmer Rouge do to knee-jerk reaction to French and American malfeasance and imperialism.[52]

Summers then outlines, quite favorably, the constitution of Democratic Kampuchea with its radical collectivist ideas. After describing the elaborate process of writing the Democratic Kampuchea Constitution, which she concludes is a mixture of Leninist and peasant customs, she sings the preamble in obvious admiration, "happiness, equality, justice and true democracy reign without rich or poor people, without exploiting or exploited classes and where people live in harmony and the greatest national unity."[53] This preamble was republished onto the fifth page of Long Live the 17th Anniversary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, a propaganda booklet published by "Group of Kampuchean Residents in America" or G.K. Ran. The booklet contains a translation of Premier Pol Pot's speech commemorating that 17th anniversary. In France and England, similar groups published press releases from the Royal Government of National Union of Democratic Kampuchea. These were the "Comite des Patriotes du Kampuchea Democratique en France" and the "British Kampuchea Support Campaign," which, until 1991 lingered on.[54] Summers, who no doubt belonged to one, was by herself, a virtual think-tank. She did not have to take orders from anyone in order to formulate her justifications, but she did need considerable official information from official organs, to be so keen.

The evacuation of Phnom Penh, which was roundly criticized by the rest of the world as "barbaric" was really justified according to the standard total academic view which she supported. As her justification, she writes "By all accounts, however, universal conscription for work prevented a postwar famine,"[55] but admits that "It also appears that some work groups, in lieu of other forms of reeducation, are obliged to work harder and longer than others."[56] One must wonder how she knows this, given that she has not been inside the country. Does she have a reference? No source is listed. With respect to statements from refugees and Khmer Rouge defectors sponsored by resistance groups abroad, Summers dismisses them entirely. She writes:

Some of the documents to be discredited were, for instance, several faked photographs and interviews which between 1976 and 1977 were published in newspapers from Australia to America.[58] The issue of the photographs, in particular, will be summoned when the Chomsky-Herman book, After the Cataclysm, is discussed in the following chapter.

In "Defining the Revolutionary State in Cambodia," Summers does admit, albeit sparingly, that life was difficult. As in her first Current History article, Summers compares the Khmer revolution with other historical revolutions, proposing that "Like the puritan revolution in England the Khmer revolution is the expression of deep cultural and social malaise unleashed by a sudden and violent foreign assault on the nation's social structure."[59] Her concern for the "difficulty" of life in the new Kampuchea is so disingenuous as to discount its value altogether. The urban "elite" were having problems because they were simply not used to farming the land! A remarkable discovery that took a year to reach. Summers throws that glimpse of sympathy away, however, when she adds, "What the urban dwellers consider 'hard' labor may not be punishment or community service beyond human endurance ... Such associations [with memories it invokes of Russian history] take what is happening in Cambodia out of its historical and cultural context."[60] One must wonder what specific context she means, when she says that hard labor may not be punishment. In any case, Summers' article proposes an embryonic theory of the Free Press that Chomsky and Herman would elaborate in 1979, and again as recently as 1988. To be sure, that theory was more sophisticated than the conceptual framework alluded to by Summers, but still it contained all the elements of this tragedy. She asserts that:

Like Chomsky and Herman, Summers dismisses the refugee accounts as bearing little evidentiary validity. Perhaps it is hubris that prevents her from paying more attention to these refugees, but that does not excuse her from taking them seriously. Therefore, as in other instances, she works these into a lather of ever-less reasonable justifications for why they would have unpleasant things to say about the new regime. Consistent with the STAV, she writes:

Summers concludes, in the same fashion as her first article, "Cambodia: Consolidating the Revolution," by returning to the realm of foreign policy and Kampuchea's position vis-à-vis its historical enemies. She notes that the new regime's posture towards Vietnam is cool, but that with its "Indian" brothers to the west and north, Thailand and Laos, respectively, relations have improved.

This cautious but optimistic ending suggests that she grew more wary from December 1975 to December 1976 of what was in store for Democratic Kampuchea. In her first Current History article, Summers was cautious but very optimistic about every facet of the new regime's policies. By 1976, however, she had to defend the regime's increasingly battered record on human rights.

Laura Summers, it must be said, did not know for certain what was really going on in Cambodia. From her vantage point in Lancaster, England, she saw very little. However, she chose to write on Cambodia's revolution nonetheless. For other scholars whose canonical contributions are covered in this chapter, the standard total academic view reigned supreme. Like so many other students and scholars of her generation, Laura Summers was a romantic of revolutions. Self-reliance and non-alignment were code-words that suggested breaking away from the World-System, i.e., imperialism, the same imperialism which she blamed for destroying Cambodia during the first half of the 1970s. Combined with this STAV on Cambodia was her incredibly low suspicion of official RGNU explanations for why certain policies were undertaken. Instead, she hypocritically exercises a "healthy" skepticism towards the media. What emerges from these two contributions to the "Khmer Rouge Canon" is the picture of an academic far too obsessed with rationalizing every objectionable Khmer Rouge action, to realize that the more severe and numerous the objections, the more likely some grain of truth was in them.

At Cornell, George McTurnan Kahin, director of the Southeast Asia program from 1961 to 1970, and professor of international relations at the University since 1951, became an expert on the Vietnam conflict. One of his students was Gareth Porter, soon to become a leading "scholar" on both Cambodia and Vietnam. Kahin's foreword to Gareth Porter's and George C. Hildebrand's book, Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution (1976), praises it for "what is undoubtedly the best informed and clearest picture yet to emerge of the desperate economic problems brought about in Cambodia largely as a consequence of American intervention, and of the ways in which that country's new leadership has undertaken to meet them."[64] Porter, who was probably a classmate of Laura Summers, co-authored the most famous book of all Khmer Rouge defenses published.

In 1976, SEAP graduate Gareth Porter, and his colleague George C. Hildebrand published a small, unread, but important book entitled Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution. It is important for two reasons: first, it was the first English-language book of the events unfolding in Cambodia (becoming the sine qua non for proponents of the standard total academic view).[66] Second, it rationalized everything the Khmer Rouge did and were doing (from the evacuation of Phnom Penh residents and hospital patients to the forcing of monks into hard labor). It became a veritable bible for defending the Khmer Rouge. Kiernan, Chomsky, Herman, and Caldwell all referred to the book favorably. In Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, Porter and Hildebrand offer what appears to be insurmountable evidence contrary to the reports of atrocities taking place in revolutionary Cambodia, renamed Democratic Kampuchea.

Using "suppressed" documents and "official" bulletins courtesy of the Government of Democratic Kampuchea, they argue that the April 17th, 1975 evacuation of Phnom Penh, was due to the U.S. war on the people of Cambodia, which resulted in the overpopulation of Phnom Penh (from 600,000 to 2-3 million between 1970 and 1975) and therefore its necessary evacuation. Furthermore, they argue that the explosion of corruption under the Lon Nol regime was the direct result of U.S. foreign aid, and that in turn, it exacerbated death, malnutrition, and disease in Phnom Penh, making it uninhabitable. Curiously, Porter and Hildebrand in their 100 plus pages book refer to the Khmer Rouge only by their more palatable coalition name of NUFK (National Front for a United Kampuchea, also known as "FUNK" in French acronyms).[67] They pepper their book with propaganda photos directly from the new regime.

In chapter 2, titled "The Politics of Starvation in Phnom Penh" Porter and Hildebrand attack the media reports of atrocities, as did Summers in Current History, because they were based on a single account written by Sydney Shandberg for the New York Times three weeks after the evacuation while cooped up in the French embassy. Porter and Hildebrand write, "The article was a weak foundation for the massive historical judgment rendered by the news media. It contained no eyewitness reports on how the evacuation was carried out in terms of food, medical treatment, transportation, or the general treatment of evacuees."[68] While it is true that Shandberg could not venture outside the embassy, from his vantage point he see more than Porter and Hildebrand could have, while in the United States. The point of not having eyewitnesses to corroborate or contradict reports of atrocities will becomes important when the Chomsky-Herman book is discussed at length in the following chapter. Continuing their critique of the mass media, Porter and Hildebrand write, "Nor was there any extensive analysis of the reasons Shandberg attributed to the revolutionary leadership for the action."[69] Here, Porter and Hildebrand refer to the circumstances of postwar Cambodia, circumstances which they insist were deplorable because of U.S. actions that prompted the evacuation. Like Chomsky-Herman, they assert the evacuation saved lives.

Porter and Hildebrand discount stories similar to New York Times journalist Sydney Shandberg's as sensational (by of their titles alone) and write "commentators and editorialists expected revolutionaries to be `unbending' and to have no regard for human life, and because they were totally unprepared to examine the possibility that radical change might be required in that particular situation."[70] Nowhere is the romance with revolutions more obvious than it is here. Porter and Hildebrand expect revolutionaries to bend and to be humanitarian because their indoctrination had taught that revolutions were good. Phnom Penh was in the jaws of starvation when the Khmer Rouge "liberated" it, so they argued, and that there was no other alternative than to evacuate everyone. By defending the Khmer Rouge, via justification of their policies, Porter and Hildebrand resort to official explanations and sources of information. Revolutions notwithstanding, there is no mention of any crime committed by the Khmer Rouge during the evacuation. On the other hand, numerous counterexamples of reasonable, if not caring Khmer Rouge behavior and demeanor, are forwarded.

More rigorous analyses supported by actual evidence suggests a rather more cynical desire to shut the economy down, reverse class order, and enslave the urban population. The controversy over the evacuation continues despite compelling evidence that suggests it was unnecessary and provoked numerous deaths. The Khmer Rouge's contempt for city dwellers is self-evident in one of their post-liberation broadcasts:

The anti-American theme was nothing new. After all, the FUNK fought U.S. imperialism. Perhaps, because of this, the followers of the standard total academic view were especially drawn to it. Ben Kiernan, who followed the STAV, interpreted this as forgivable nationalism. Porter and Hildebrand maintain that the evacuation was a reasonable course of action given low food reserves without American aid in sight. In retrospect, however, food supplies in Phnom Penh were not sufficiently low as to justify an evacuation to the countryside. If anything, it was the two month long shelling of the capital by the FUNK that resulted in the stranglehold on Phnom Penh. Furthermore, evidence that the evacuation was planned well before April suggests that strategic advantage, not the well-being of the citizens mattered to the Khmer Rouge. Hou Youn's dissertation had sufficiently maligned cities as to make them appear useless to the country. Not only was class order reversed, but city dwellers would be made to farm the land, in a complete occupational reversal. Charles Twinning explains:

Another Porter and Hildebrand justification for Phnom Penh's evacuation is that since 5/6 of the population of Phnom Penh were refugees from the countryside, they were simply being returned to the countryside. This explanation sounds, oddly enough, reasonable. But why then, would over 800,000 peasants turn up dead?

Moreover, Porter and Hildebrand were concerned about the image of the Khmer Rouge as somehow inhumane. A romance with revolution dictates that it be humanitarian and just. Porter and Hildebrand describe the difficult choices the Khmer Rouge faced, and how their actions were rational.

With this in mind, the evacuation made sense to Porter and Hildebrand. The reasoning followed that: first, the conversion of unproductive labor to productive labor (from city to countryside) would prevent starvation and second, epidemics necessitate evacuations. Porter and Hildebrand assert that the 600,000 city dwellers of Phnom Penh (i.e., those who were supposed to be there to begin with) were justifiably taken into the countryside because their labor was needed for the task of cultivating rice. The claim becomes nothing short of utopian fantasy when they write, "The 500,000 to 600,000 urban dwellers would by growing their own food, by freeing others from the task of getting food to them, substantially increase the total produced. By remaining unproductive during the crucial months, on the other hand, they would reduce the amount of food available to everyone."[74] Their logic is devoid of realistic consideration for the human toll, just as Summers' nonchalance reigned over the idea of evacuating millions away from home. When they take at face value Khmer Rouge vice-chairman Ieng Sary's claim that, "By going to the countryside, our peasants have potatoes, bananas, and all kinds of foods,"[75] they lose all sense of reality or objectivity. Stephen Morris said it best, "Serious students of communist regimes know that public utterances by communist officials and their media may or may not be true. But they are always made to serve a political purpose."[76] Porter and Hildebrand accept all the positions and policies of the new regime, re-printing without reservation propaganda pictures of postwar Cambodian workers in the fields and factories working "happily".

Countering charges that the print media's characterization of the evacuation as a "death march," is another falsehood Porter and Hildebrand dispel. They argue that such untruths were "fostered by U.S. government statements, including `intelligence documents,'"[77] They cite accounts contradicting claims of untoward behavior by the Khmer Rouge onto the population of Phnom Penh shortly after April 17. Most were from Phnom Penh Libere: Cambodge de l'autre sourire (1976), the very first book that favorably treated the Khmer Rouge evacuation of Phnom Penh. Gunn and Lee call it a "studied" account as opposed to the "banalized" version seen in the motion picture "The Killing Fields". Porter and Hildebrand conclude from this that the "death march" characterization was "unfounded."

Finally, leaving nothing to chance, Porter and Hildebrand hold that "the temporary clearing of most hospitals, far from being inhumane, was an act of mercy for the patients."[78] They argue that the hospitals of Phnom Penh had become overcrowded and unhealthy. It was thus necessary, for the well-being of the patients, to evacuate them. And what could they expect onto the elsewhere? Porter and Hildebrand offer as an alternative a propaganda photo of a Khmer Rouge surgical team operating in 1974 as proof that better care was just a countryside away. Jean Lacouture retells an encounter he had with a Khmer Rouge supporter in which the former argued that "under the Lon Nol regime, medical practice was in the hands of the Americans, corrupt and decadent. These poor souls had to be ripped out, at all cost, from this alienating medical facility. [To which I replied:] A new `conspiracy of white coats.'"[79] Porter's and Hildebrand's falls near the Norwegian journalist's.

The shameless propagandizing continued without refrain. Having rationalized the more gruesome Khmer Rouge actions, Porter and Hildebrand legitimize the leadership and sing its praises. They conclude the second chapter of Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, rather self-assuredly, by claiming that:

In chapter 3, Porter and Hildebrand explain the reasons behind Cambodia's agricultural revolution by legitimizing the Khmer Rouge leadership. In a juxtaposition of academic and peasants, they assert that because some of the Khmer Rouge leaders are doctors of philosophy, namely Khieu Samphan, Hou Youn and Hu Nim, which makes their policies well-thought out and legitimate. This romanticization seen not just here but elsewhere in Malcolm Caldwell's, Laura Summers' and Ben Kiernan's contributions to the STAV on Cambodia.[81] In a recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal opposing the U.S. State Department's half-million dollar grant to Yale University for the creation of database on Khmer Rouge crimes to be headed by Ben Kiernan, Stephen Morris writes, "Mr. Kiernan wrote that `Khieu Samphan's personality-particularly his assuming manner, ready smile and simple habits-endeared him to Khmer peasants. Himself a peasant by birth, he is said to have been somewhat ascetic in his behavior, but never fanatical and always calm.'"[82]

Expectations of famine by Western intelligence sources for 1977 were dismissed by Porter and Hildebrand in light of FUNK broadcasts that claimed superb rice harvests due to superior two-cycle rice-farming under Khmer Rouge leadership. They write:

Both points (including the statistics) reappear in Malcolm Caldwell's posthumously published essay turned book Kampuchea: Rationale for a Rural Policy (1979) reviewed in the following section. The unending gullibility of Porter and Hildebrand is itself incredible. However, that was not the end of it. For instance, Porter and Hildebrand believed that forcing monks to work was not an act that could "fairly be represented as religious persecution,"[84] because everyone else, they argued, old and young was forced to work, too.

Although Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution is about Cambodia, a good portion of it is devoted to blaming America for the starvation which, as it turns out, was tampered by the Khmer Rouge's liberation of Phnom Penh. Porter and Hildebrand leave no stone unturned in their critique of U.S. intervention and its destruction of Cambodia. Porter and Hildebrand describe a scissors-like extraction mechanism curiously like the Soviet law of primitive socialist accumulation, when they explain that modern industry would be fueled by "capital raised by the expansion of agricultural production."[85] Their conclusion makes Cambodia the victim not of the Khmer Rouge, but of the Americans and the half decade of underdevelopment and destruction by U.S. bombs. In addition, the U.S. media, according to Porter and Hildebrand, was a co-conspirator in this cover-up, by not doing justice to Cambodia. Porter and Hildebrand fastidiously conclude that:

As Porter and Hildebrand romanticize the "social revolutions," they reveal their motive: defending the Khmer revolution. Far from being scholarly or objective, they make evident their biases by citing, without so much as a pathetic reservation or qualification, the propaganda which forms their defense of the Khmer revolution ergo the Khmer Rouge. What they achieved, unquestionably, was the temporary confounding of the events in the new Kampuchea, perched from half the globe away, they played a role in legitimizing it for another three years. Next, we canonize the significant contributions of Malcolm Caldwell. Caldwell was an author, STAV scholar, tireless Khmer Rouge defender, and finally a victim of the Khmer Rouge themselves.

Another academic who romanticized the Khmer revolution and its revolutionaries was Malcolm Caldwell, a lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He was an economic historian "committed to the struggle of the colonized, oppressed, and impoverished against imperialism and neo-colonialism."[87] In short, Caldwell became the leading academic supporter of the Khmer Rouge. His colleagues write upon his assassination that he "would not have liked to have gone down in history as an academic in the usual sense of the term. He would have wanted to be remembered as an activist on the British Left and an anti-imperialist fighter."[88] Caldwell published a number of articles[89] before submitting the draft of a paper titled "Cambodia: Rationale for a Rural Policy" was published after his death in 1979 under the auspices of James Cook University of North Queensland.[90]

The introductory note by Hering and Utrecht in Malcolm Caldwell's South-East Asia echo similar points gathered from Porter and Hildebrand (1976) as well as Summers (1975 and 1976),

As the STAV scholars mobilized against the media's "negative reporting on developments in Kampuchea" they joined by one of their elder statesmen, Malcolm Caldwell. Although negative coverage did appear from various newspapers and magazines, it was never as concerted or organized as the editors assert, at least not until 1979. If anything, these reports were "fragmentary" according to analysis done for 1976 by Accuracy in the Media.[92] Hering and Utrecht furthermore add,

Caldwell's dramatized concern for these "disturbing reports" resulted in his own attack on the media and his further determination to prove them wrong. On the very night he was killed, December 23, 1978, Caldwell was in Phnom Penh at the invitation of the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary regime. Having visited the country on a guided "tour" and interviewed Pol Pot, he became even more convinced that the allegations against the Khmer Rouge by refugees were false. Furthermore, the connection to Chomsky and Ponchaud's ballyhooed erratas is elaborated upon in chapter 3 regarding the Chomsky-Lacouture Controversy.[94] Caldwell, like his STAV colleagues, Summers, Porter, and Hildebrand have in some fashion or another quoted one another (circulating references). Leaving original inquiry much to be desired, they seek the truth from the ivory towers of their Universities. The preface to the Janata Prachuranalu published book Kampuchea: Rationale for a Rural Policy, likewise admonishes the Western press:

To the contrary, the New York Times, Washington Post, and all three television networks in 1976 were reticent about human rights in Cambodia. As we will see in chapter 4, Accuracy in Media found that very few stories relative to those on South Korea and Chile appeared in this mass medium.

Yet the editors, in considering the prospects for Cambodia since the January 1979 invasion by Vietnam, contend that "Already within six months after its outbreak [the invasion] it has turned Kampuchea from a rich exporting country into a deadly place of hunger. It has rapidly annihilated the hard-won results of a unique development-model."[96] What is remarkable here is the blame placed on everyone except the Khmer Rouge. For instance, we saw that America had caused starvation to beset Phnom Penh, thus causing the need for an evacuation. Hering and Utrecht forthrightly inform the readers of Malcolm Caldwell's Southeast Asia that Malcolm told Ernst Utrecht: "If it is true that Pol Pot has also killed Khmer Peasants, I have to make a different evaluation of Kampuchea's development-model. Killing an innocent peasant is a token of fascism."[97] More transference-from calling the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary regime communist and "good" to fascist and "bad". Where will it end? No one knows.

In the first of three articles in Malcolm Caldwell's South-East Asia, written for the China Policy Study Group in London Caldwell chastises the media and the Barron-Paul book Murder of a Gentle Land (1977) for perpetuating lies about the Khmer Rouge and their intentions. Caldwell writes:

Caldwell's ad hominem attack on Barron's and Paul's book is of particular note, again, because Chomsky and Herman deploy their resources against it too. In addition, Ponchaud's Cambodia: Year Zero, was also assaulted by Caldwell and his STAV colleagues (Porter, Kiernan,[99] Chomsky, and Herman) as a cesspool of hearsay and falsehoods. Because the Barron-Paul gained early popularity in the U.S., and was the more vulnerable of the two, Caldwell and friends worked tirelessly to undermine that one, particularly. Caldwell dismisses them based on their conclusion that "the revolutionary regime is atavistic, anachronistic, barbaric, rustic ascetic, anarchic, cruel, irrational, and intent upon commanding a forced march back to the Dark Ages."[100]

In that essay, "Cambodia: Rationale for a Rural Policy" or Kampuchea: Rationale for a Rural Policy, Caldwell begins reasonably enough:

This thesis forces him to reach back into the economic dissertations of Khieu Samphan and leads him as well to the unreserved use of Government of Democratic Kampuchea bulletins and official explanations-just as the sine qua non of the Khmer Rouge Canon, Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution by Porter and Hildebrand resorted to in 1976. For example, Caldwell quotes favorably from the translation of Pol Pot's "17th Anniversary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea" speech as well as Ieng Sary's assertion in front of the U.N. general assembly that "Our objective is to make our country a modern agricultural and industrial country."[102] In addition, by quoting extensively from Khieu Samphan's thesis "Cambodia's Economy and Problems of Industrialization," Caldwell asserts that it is the backbone to the development-model being used by Democratic Kampuchea. Hence, further indication that the STAV was that the dissertation was a master plan. Like Laura Summers, Porter, and Hildebrand, Caldwell is quick to report the observations of the ambassador Kaj Bjork and other invited emissaries without reservation. In addition, he cites Porter's and Hildebrand's Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution over 15 times[103] and has this to say of their book,

"Birds of a feather," it is said, "flock together." Caldwell could not have found a more authoritative book to reference his own work. From his perch in England, he looked not Cambodians, but his colleagues for what made the Khmer Rouge tick.

The similarities do not end there, however. Caldwell did not excel at hiding his admiration for the Khmer Rouge leadership. Hence, like his STAV colleagues, he romanticized about the revolutionaries who were both peasants, but academics too. These were theoretician who were not afraid of a little hard work. He writes:

Caldwell's description of Khieu Samphan sound strikingly similar to Ben Kiernan's "ascetic" characterization as quoted by Stephen Morris.[106]Moreover he makes an excellent point about the "western scholars" who "pass judgment from afar." The lesson remain unlearned.

Summers, Porter, Hildebrand were fond of the superior farming abilities of the new Cambodia. The double or triple rice-cropping methods of the Khmer Rouge were indeed incredible. It became, however, a source of objections when the fact that double rice-cropping, as pointed by David Chandler, was "an achievement unequaled since the days of [12th c.] Angkor."[107] In awe of such a feat, Caldwell rationalizes the "close" supervision of city dwellers who were sure not to share these goals. He writes:

Caldwell, like Summers, considers the hardships that city-dwellers faced, yet like her, his facade wears thin. From justification, Caldwell turns to apologia for Khmer Rouge. He is shameless in singing the praises of what Prince Sihanouk has compared to propaganda that outstripped Joseph Goebbels. Caldwell's romanticization of the Khmer revolution is apparent when he describes that,

With "forethought," "ingenuity," and "dedication" too, Caldwell triumphs over his colleagues as the "leading academic supporter of the Khmer Rouge."[110] He is mistaken when he asserts that there was universal foreign skepticism of the winning side, since most of the negative reporting was fragmentary even in 1977. The real media campaign began, according to Shawcross after the invasion of Cambodia by Vietnam in 1979, at the time ex-STAV scholars like Ben Kiernan switched to the Vietnamese side. Caldwell's assertion that "manipulators" are behind the propaganda campaign against the Khmer revolution is not original. Summers explored that idea approvingly, while Chomsky and Herman will develop it to absurdity in their theory of the Free Press covered in the next chapter.

In the second-half of his paper-turned-book, Caldwell places the Khmer revolution in the context of international and historical perspective. Being somewhat more enthusiastic than his colleagues or perhaps more openly so, Caldwell proposes a counterfactual cloaked in a reprimand,

His tour de force reaches its nadir with this baseless comparison. The opposite is what one often wonders, when looking back at the years 1975-1979 for Cambodia. Upon reflection, in what must appear to be an entirely unfounded argument, Caldwell asserts that Cambodia is better off with the Khmer revolution. Sheer fantasy? Not to the STAV. Porter and Hildebrand went so far as to justify the evacuation because it had, in their opinion, saved lives. Chomsky and Herman allude to that and more when they compare postwar Cambodia to the horrid American devastation of the country during the war, as the reader will discover in the next chapter.

The conclusions, which Caldwell draws are so distanced from reality as to make them unrecognizable. He predicts that the revolution in Kampuchea marks the beginning of "the greatest and necessary change beginning to convulse the world in the later 20th century and to shift it from a disaster-bound course to one holding out promise of a better future for all."[112] With this in mind, however, he does feels that the alternative to the Kampuchean solution, inverting the World-System, "would not be a good option, in either sense (moral or rational): even the richest countries of the world today are still disfigured by poverty and gross inequalities."[113] For that assertion to be made, the "poverty and gross inequalities" in the First World would have to be equal to greater than those in the new Kampuchea. To it, one might wonder whom Ponchaud had mind when he pointedly asked, "How many of those unreservedly in support of the Khmer revolution would consent to endure one-hundredth part of the current suffering of the Cambodian people?" Whether they would consent is dubious, but we know form this chapter who four of them are: Malcolm Caldwell, Laura Summers, Gareth Porter, and George C. Hildebrand. Speaking for the peasants of the world, Lecturer Malcolm Caldwell of the University of London writes that there can be no doubt, "that the lesson [of the Khmer revolution] will not long be lost upon the as yet unliberated peasants."[114]

We know that the Cambodianists who wrote in support of the Khmer Rouge used similar arguments. That much was self-evident of Laura Summers, Gareth Porter, and George C. Hildebrand. Malcolm Caldwell, whose impact was equally impressive while in England with Summers, but nowhere near Cambodia, upheld the STAV on Cambodia. As exemplary STAV scholars, they have earned their place in the "Khmer Rouge Canon 1975-1979." These defenders of the Khmer revolution were influenced to some degree or another by the charisma or intellect of some of the Khmer Rouge leadership, namely, Khieu Samphan and Hou Youn, as evidenced in Caldwell's note that Khieu Samphan was truly a man who practiced what he preached. They romanticized the Khmer revolution and its revolutionaries by rationalizing the policies of the Khmer Rouge and believing that all contrary evidence was the work of manipulators and counter-revolutionary agitators. Furthermore, they convinced themselves of the Khmer Rouge mission to liberate peasants from the domineering urban parasites. But at what costs, one wonders, to the peasants themselves? Fully half if not more of the casualties of revolution were rural Khmer. They were fascinated by the idea that according to the Constitution, "exploiter and exploited" would no longer exist, and that "justice and harmony" for all would prevail in happy Kampuchea.

After the Vietnam War, these scholars were inclined to disbelieve refugees who had a vested interest in vilifying Democratic Kampuchea and its rulers, the Khmer Rouge, since they were running away from something or another to begin with. As this logic was picked-up by Chomsky and Herman, it became the central argument against the mounting refugee reports of atrocities as will be seen in the next chapter.

Another major point reiterated in the works of all four authors is that America must be held accountable for most of the postwar problems, since, they argue, it had created the deplorable pre-liberation conditions. But this was a two pronged argument, not only was America to blame for the annihilation of a country, but it was the Khmer Rouge who were the protagonists, heroic in their effort to stave off starvation by evacuating the cities. It is expounded upon repeatedly by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in the Chomsky-Lacouture Controversy, a controversy tackled in chapter 3. Summers, Caldwell, Porter and Hildebrand saw themselves through the prism of a struggle against neo-colonialism.

Their complete trust in the righteousness of Khmer Rouge actions was shown at its extreme when Porter and Hildebrand argued that the evacuation of even hospitals was an act of mercy. The consistent threads encountered in the works reviewed is the result of complete and utter naiveté in quoting the claims the Khmer Rouge. Sihanouk knew as much even while a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge. No hesitation nor reservation to quote Ieng Sary or Khieu Samphan's explanations was expressed by any of the four STAV scholars reviewed. It seems clear, therefore, that the mistakes which led each author to reach his/her respective conclusion was in fact academic. To be sure, there were judgments colored by ideology, but even a Marxist who possessed some objective fibers could see that speaking to common people might help. Peer review is a cornerstone of academia, but when the standard total academic view is to sing the praises of the Khmer revolution, what next? The STAV's methods led them to generate conclusions that were simply implausible when stacked on top of one another. Had they thought more critically, perhaps, they would not be canonized.

CHAPTER 3: THE CHOMSKY-LACOUTURE CONTROVERSY

-Chomsky and Herman, 1979[115]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jean Lacouture's eloquence comes across well even when translated. His review of Ponchaud's book in the NYRB became a lightning rod for opinion page editors. Soon, the Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Star, and the Economist issued opinion page editorials admonishing the Khmer revolution.[136] This no doubt caused significant alarm, if not distress, on the part of those who opposed American intervention in Southeast Asia. They were, in essence, being told that their struggle against the War had resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of people in Indochina. The Chomskian line was to attack and discredit the Western media for basing its stories and editorials on third-hand accounts. Chomsky's personal complaint with CSM stated that, "The editorial is based on the third-hand source: the review of a book which transmits (and interprets) reports of refugees. We are unable to check the accuracy of the first link, but can check the second, since both the book and the review are available."

The Khmer Rouge Canon 1975-1979:

The Standard Total Academic View on Cambodia

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 2: ROMANTICIZING THE KHMER REVOLUTION

CHAPTER 3: THE CHOMSKY-LACOUTURE CONTROVERSY