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Phase II, the Pol Pot era, is the “holocaust” that was widely compared to the worst atrocities of Hitler and Stalin, virtually from the outset, with massive publicity and outrage at the suffering of these “worthy” victims.

Phase III renewed the status of the people of Cambodia as worthy victims, suffering under Vietnamese rule. The Vietnamese being official enemies of the United States, they quickly became the villains of the piece, responsible for unspeakable conditions within Cambodia and guilty of unprovoked aggression. Meanwhile, the United States backed its ally China as it conducted a punitive invasion of Vietnam in February 1979 and reconstructed the defeated Pol Pot forces.

In the early stages of phase III, it was alleged “that the Vietnamese are now conducting a subtle ‘genocide’ in Cambodia,” a charge tacitly endorsed in a CIA demographic study, which estimated a population drop of 700,000 during “the first year of the Heng Samrin rule.”22 This new “holocaust” was constructed on the basis of serious misinterpretation of available evidence, as was demonstrated by Michael Vickery in a response to William Shawcross’s warnings of “the end of Cambodia,”23 but not before it had left its mark on popular perceptions, and many distortions and, indeed, contradictions persist. In his Quality of Mercy, Shawcross agrees that, as Vickery had concluded, there was no large-scale famine of the character initially reported,24 but he later wrote that the Heng Samrin regime “was responsible for creating many of the conditions that caused the famine” in Cambodia. These conflicting accounts were noted by Australian Cambodia scholar Ben Kiernan, who suggested a partial explanation: “There was a threat of famine, as the Heng Samrin government proclaimed in mid-1979. But it was offset by the small but crucial December–January harvest, which Shawcross hardly mentions, and by the massive international aid program, which he regularly denigrates.”25

The eagerness to uncover Vietnamese villainy in “ending Cambodia,” the easy reliance on sources known to be unreliable,26 and the subsequent evasions after the accusations dissolve are readily explained by U.S. (indeed, general Western-bloc) hostility to Vietnam, which led the United States to align itself quietly with Pol Pot and to transform its alleged concern over Cambodians to the victims of the Vietnamese occupation.

Phase III also had a domestic U.S. aspect that is highly relevant to our concerns. In an intriguing exercise, characteristic of system-supportive propaganda campaigns, it was charged that the horrors of phase II were passed over in “silence” at the time. This alleged fact, developed in William Shawcross’s influential book Quality of Mercy, elicited much commentary on “Holocaust and Modern Conscience,” the subtitle of Shawcross’s book, and on the failure of civilized people to react appropriately to ongoing atrocities. In “Phase III at home” (p. 269), we will turn to the merits of this charge with regard to phase II. As for phase I of “the decade of the genocide,” the charge of silence is distinctly applicable, but it was never raised, then or now, nor is phase I designated a period of “holocaust” or “genocide” in mainstream literature. Phase I elicited no calls for international intervention or trials for crimes against humanity, and it has since been largely expunged from the record. In retrospect, the harshest critics within the mainstream attribute “the destruction of Cambodian society” during phase I to “years of warfare” and “careless policies of the White House,” nothing more.27 The issue of U.S. bombing of Cambodia did arise during the Watergate hearings, but the primary concern there was the failure to notify Congress.

Michael Vickery suggests an “interesting comparison which an investigative journalist might make” if truly concerned about the problems of the region—namely, between Cambodia, during phase III, and Thailand, “where there has been no war, foreign invasion, carpet bombing, nor revolution, and where foreign investment