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By Root 2887 0

Harry Reasoner expressed his hope that Laos and its “gentle folk” could return to peaceful ways after “the clowning of the CIA and the vicious invasion of the North Vietnamese.”17 The “clowning of the CIA” included the destruction of “the rebel economy and social fabric” in northern Laos, with unknown numbers killed in areas that may never recover, and the decimation of the Hmong who were enlisted in the CIA cause and then abandoned when no longer useful. Nothing remotely comparable may be attributed to “the vicious invasion of the North Vietnamese”—which did, however, include such atrocities as killing twelve U.S. Air Force men in March 1968 at a U.S. radar base near the North Vietnamese border used to direct the bombing of North Vietnam and operations in North Vietnam by U.S.-led mercenaries.18

The New York Times reviewed the war in Laos at the war’s end, concluding that 350,000 people had been killed, over a tenth of the population, with another tenth uprooted in this “fratricidal strife that was increased to tragic proportions by warring outsiders.” The “fratricidal strife” might well have been terminated by the 1958 coalition government had it not been for “outsiders,” with the United States playing a decisive role throughout, a role completely ignored in this purported historical analysis apart from a few misleading comments. At this late date, the Times continued to pretend that the U.S. bombing was directed against North Vietnamese supply trails—nothing else is mentioned. The crucial events of the actual history also disappear, or are grossly misrepresented. Subsequent reporting also regularly obliterated the U.S. role in creating the devastation and postwar “problems” attributed to the Communists alone, a shameful evasion in the light of the undisputed historical facts.19

Once again, the media record, less than glorious, is well explained throughout by the propaganda model.

6.2. CAMBODIA

6.2.1. “THE DECADE OF THE GENOCIDE”

Few countries have suffered more bitterly than did Cambodia during the 1970s. The “decade of the genocide,” as the period is termed by the Finnish Inquiry Commission that attempted to assess what had taken place,20 consisted of three phases—now extending the time scale to the present, which bears a heavy imprint of these terrible years:

Phase I: From 1969 through April 1975, U.S. bombing at a historically unprecedented level and a civil war sustained by the United States left the country in utter ruins. Though Congress legislated an end to the bombing in August 1973, U.S. government participation in the ongoing slaughter continued until the Khmer Rouge victory in April 1975.21

Phase II: From April 1975 through 1978 Cambodia was subjected to the murderous rule of the Khmer Rouge (Democratic Kampuchea, DK), overthrown by the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in December 1978.

Phase III: Vietnam installed the Heng Samrin regime in power in Cambodia, but the Democratic Kampuchea (DK) coalition, based primarily on the Khmer Rouge, maintained international recognition apart from the Soviet bloc. Reconstructed with the aid of China and the United States on the Thai-Cambodia border and in Thai bases, the Khmer Rouge guerrillas, the only effective DK military force, continue to carry out activities in Cambodia of a sort called “terrorist” when a friendly government is the target.

We turn now to the travail of Cambodia during these grim years, and the way it has been depicted, first with some preliminary observations and then in further detail, phase by phase.

6.2.2. PROBLEMS OF SCALE AND RESPONSIBILITY

The three phases of the “decade of the genocide” have fared quite differently in the media and general culture, and in a way that conforms well to the expectations of a propaganda model. Phase I, for which the United States bore primary responsibility, was little investigated at the time, or since, and has never been described with anything like the condemnatory terms applied to phase II. The vast number of Cambodians killed, injured, and traumatized in this period were, in our conceptualization