The film recounts the bombing of Cambodia by the United States in the 1970s, a chapter of the Vietnam War kept secret from the American population, the subsequent brutality and Cambodian genocide perpetrated by Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge militia after their take over of the country, the poverty and suffering of the people, and the limited aid since given by the West.
This funded the first substantial relief for Cambodia, including the shipment of life-saving medicines such as penicillin, and clothing to replace the black uniforms people had been forced to wear.
[2][3] According to The Times journalist Oliver Kamm, Pilger "failed to disclose that Communist Vietnam, having invaded Cambodia and installed a puppet regime, was trying to control which starving people were fed and which were not".
[5]Shawcross wrote in The Quality of Mercy that "Pilger's reports underwrote almost everything that refugees along the Thai border had been saying about the cruelty of Khmer Rouge rule since 1975, and that had already appeared in the books by the Reader's Digest and Francois Ponchaud.
[6] Ben Kiernan, in his review of Shawcross's book, notes that Pilger did compare Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge to Stalin's terror, as well as to Mao's Red Guards.
Kiernan notes instances where other writers' comparisons of Pol Pot to Hitler or the Vietnamese to the Nazis are either accepted by Shawcross in his account, or not mentioned.
Britain and the US even backed Pol Pot's demand that his man continue to occupy Cambodia's seat at the UN, while Margaret Thatcher stopped children's milk going to the survivors of his nightmare regime.
For me, the public response to Year Zero gave the lie to clichés about "compassion fatigue", an excuse that some broadcasters and television executives use to justify the current descent into the cynicism and passivity of Big Brotherland.