Cambodian genocide denial
On the other side of the argument, anti-communists in the United States and elsewhere saw in the rule of the Khmer Rouge vindication of their belief that the victory of Communist governments in Southeast Asia would lead to a "bloodbath."
Scholar Donald W. Beachler, writing of the controversy about the range and extent of Khmer Rouge atrocities, concluded that "much of the posturing by academics, publicists, and politicians seems to have been motivated largely by political purposes" rather than concern for the Cambodian people.
Between 2 and 3 million residents of Phnom Penh, Battambang, and other large towns were forced by the Communists to walk into the countryside without organized provision for food, water, shelter, physical security, or medical care.
Within one day of the Communists taking power, Fernand Scheller, chief of the United Nations development project in Phnom Penh stated, "What the Khmer Rouge are doing is pure genocide.
None of them, however, were allowed to visit Cambodia until the final few days of Khmer Rouge rule (except Gunnar Bergstrom, president of the Sweden–Kampuchea Friendship Association) and few actually talked to the refugees whose stories they believed to be exaggerated or false.
Shawcross's views were endorsed and summarized by human-rights activist David Hawk, who claimed that the West was indifferent to the atrocities taking place in Cambodia due to "the influence of anti-war academics on the American left who obfuscated Khmer Rouge behavior, denigrated the post-1975 refugee reports, and denounced the journalists who got those stories.
"[9] The controversy concerning the Khmer Rouge intensified in February 1977 with the publication of excerpts in Reader's Digest magazine from a book by John Barron and Anthony Paul called Peace With Horror: The Untold Story of Communist Genocide in Cambodia (printed in the US as Murder Of A Gentle Land).
"[16] Regarding Porter and Hildebrand's 1976 book, Shawcross wrote a review in which he stated that the authors' "use of evidence can be seriously questioned," and that "their apparent faith in Khmer Rouge assertions and statistics is surprising in two men who have spent so long analyzing the lies that governments tell.
"[17] In addition to Chomsky, Porter, and Hildebrand, the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge have also been denied and/or whitewashed by such academics as Marxist scholar Malcolm Caldwell, Laura Summers,[18] Edward S. Herman, and Torben Retbøll.
[23] Some scholars, such as Marxist anthropologist Kathleen Gough, have noted that Khmer Rouge activists in Paris in the 1950s already held ideas of eliminating counter-revolutionaries and organizing a party center whose decisions could not be questioned.
What filters through to the American public is a seriously distorted version of the evidence available, emphasizing alleged Khmer Rouge atrocities and downplaying or ignoring the crucial U.S. role, direct and indirect, in the torment that Cambodia has suffered.
[14]Chomsky and Herman had both faint praise and criticism for Ponchaud's book Cambodia: Year Zero, writing on the one hand that it was "serious and worth reading, as distinct from much of the commentary it has elicited", and on the other that "the serious reader will find much to make him somewhat wary.
"[14] In the article, Chomsky and Herman described the book by Gareth Porter and George Hildebrand, as a "carefully documented study of the destructive American impact on Cambodia and the success of the Cambodian revolutionaries in overcoming it, giving a very favorable picture of their programs and policies, based on a wide range of sources".
Mr. Chomsky was of the opinion that Jean Lacouture had substantially distorted the evidence I had offered, and, considering my book to be "serious and worth reading, as distinct from much of the commentary it has elicited," he wrote me a letter on October 19, 1977 in which he drew my attention to the way [Year Zero] was being misused by anti-revolutionary propagandists.
[29]Scholar of Cambodian History Michael Vickery, citing his own collection of refugee testimony in the Khao I Dang camp on the Thai border, concluded that Chomsky and Herman's criticism of Barron and Paul as well as Ponchaud had been correct, stating: The accumulated evidence about DK indicates that even if true-believer enthusiasm for the Cambodian revolution was misplaced, the serious criticism of the STV [i.e. the view given by Barron and Paul or Ponchaud] in 1975–76 was reasonable and largely correct.
For instance, Chomsky portrayed Porter and Hildebrand's book as "a carefully documented study of the destructive American impact on Cambodia and the success of the Cambodian revolutionaries in overcoming it, giving a very favorable picture of their programs and policies, based on a wide range of sources."
"[31] Journalist Andrew Anthony in the London Observer, said later that the Porter and Hildebrand's book "cravenly rehashed the Khmer Rouge's most outlandish lies to produce a picture of a kind of radical bucolic idyll."
Chomsky, he said, questioned "refugee testimony," believing that "their stories were exaggerations or fabrications, designed for a western media involved in a 'vast and unprecedented propaganda campaign' against the Khmer Rouge government, 'including systematic distortion of the truth.
Beachler said:Examining materials in the Documentation Center of Cambodia archives, American commentator Peter Maguire found that Chomsky wrote to publishers such as Robert Silver [sic] of The New York Review of Books to urge discounting atrocity stories.
"[33]: 118 In 1978, French scholar Jean Lacouture, formerly a fervent sympathizer of the Khmer Rouge, said: "Cambodia and Cambodians are on their way to ethnic extinction.… If Noam Chomsky and his friends doubt it, they should study the papers, the cultures, the facts.
[37] Prime Minister Olof Palme issued a joint declaration with Fidel Castro congratulating the Khmer Rouge on their victory, and immediately extended diplomatic recognition to the new rulers of Cambodia.
[36] Also accompanying Björk on his strictly guided tour of the country was Jan Lundvik, an official from Sweden's Ministry for Foreign Affairs, who dismissed concurrent reportage in the French press alleging 800,000 deaths under the Khmer Rouge as unimaginable.
Although he had made an effort to personally interview Cambodian refugees, Öberg dismissed their testimony as false because he felt their accounts were suspiciously consistent with what had been reported by John Barron and Anthony Paul in Reader's Digest.
[37] British Marxist academic Malcolm Caldwell, a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London and an associate of Noam Chomsky,[19][42] wrote extensively about Cambodia, including an article in The Guardian called "The Cambodian defence" denying reports of Khmer Rouge genocide,[32] and was regarded as one of "the staunchest defenders of the Pol Pot regime in the West.
Caldwell concluded that, in time,[T]he Kampuchean revolution will appear more and more clearly as one of the most significant early indications of the great and necessary change beginning to convulse the world in the later 20th century and shifting from a disaster-bound course to one holding out the promise of a better future for all.
[45]: 334 Caldwell was a member of the first delegation of three Western writers—two Americans, Elizabeth Becker and Richard Dudman, and Caldwell—to be invited to visit Cambodia in December 1978, nearly 4 years after the Khmer Rouge had taken power.
"[48] With the takeover of Cambodia by Vietnam in 1979 and the discovery of incontestable evidence of Khmer Rouge atrocities, including mass graves, the "tales told by refugees,"[citation needed] which had been doubted by many Western academics, proved to be entirely accurate.
[1]: 232 He noted that the supportive attitude towards the Khmer Rouge had also been expressed by the U.S. government and politicians for a dozen years after the overthrow of the regime in January 1979, as part of the denigration against the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia in the 1980s.
Richard Dudman, who accompanied Caldwell to Cambodia, challenged the "conventional wisdom that Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge are irrational fanatics who practiced deliberate genocide [and] slaughtered more than one million Cambodians" in a 1990 editorial in The New York Times, arguing that "The evidence for these fixed beliefs consists mainly of poignant though statistically inconclusive anecdotes from accounts of mass executions in a few villages.
"[55] This interpretation was criticised by Ben Kiernan, who pointed out that Short had truncated the UN's "definition of genocide: acts committed “with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” Quoting selectively, he substituted “exterminate” for “in whole or in part.”"[56] Kiernan also states that Short: overlooks the case that the Khmer Rouge committed genocide against substantial “parts” of Cambodia’s majority Khmer Buddhist community and of ethnic minorities such as the Vietnamese, Chinese, and Cham Muslims.
