Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [201]
Others too stress that “memory is the answer.” Commenting on the award-winning film The Killing Fields, Samuel Freedman writes that “While Holocaust survivors have helped perpetuate the memory of Nazi infamy, the Cambodian genocide is already being forgotten,” referring to phase II of the genocide, phase I having passed into oblivion with no concern.72 The New York Times reminds us that “Cambodia remains perhaps the most pitiful victim of the Indochina wars,” as it is caught between the forces of Pol Pot and Hanoi, which used Pol Pot attacks against Vietnamese villages as “a long-sought pretext to invade” and now exploits “Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge army of 30,000 inside Cambodia” (in fact, mostly inside Thailand) as “the pretext for remaining in Cambodia.” “Unimaginable slaughter, invasion, brutal occupation have followed famine and pestilence,” all attributable to the Communists, although the suffering has been “aggravated by the cynicism of big powers,” not further differentiated. As for the United States, “When Vietcong guerrillas used a neutral Cambodia as a sanctuary, it was pounded by American bombs and drawn into a war it hoped to avoid,” but that is all. In a later comment, the editors concede that “murderous aerial bombing followed by brutal revolution, famine and civil war” brought Cambodia to ruin, but of all of this, “what cannot be sponged away are the Khmer Rouge’s butcheries” and the actions of Hanoi, which has “subjugated and impoverished” Cambodia: phases II and III of “the decade of the genocide.”73
“Memory is the answer,” but only when focused on proper targets, far from home.
6.2.6. THE POL POT ERA
Phase II of “the decade of the genocide” began with the Khmer Rouge takeover in April 1975. Within a few weeks, the Khmer Rouge were accused in the national press of “barbarous cruelty” and “genocidal policies” comparable to the “Soviet extermination of the Kulaks or with the Gulag Archipelago.”74 This was at a time when the death toll was perhaps in the thousands; the half million or more killed during phase I of the genocide never merited such comment, nor were these assessments of the first days of phase II (or later ones, quite generally) accompanied by reflection on the consequences of the American war that were anticipated by U.S. officials and relief workers on the scene, reviewed earlier, or by any recognition of a possible causal link between the horrors of phase II and the American war against the rural society during phase I.
We will not document here the flood of rage and anger directed against the Khmer Rouge from the outset and the evidence on which it was based, having done so elsewhere in detail.75 Several facts documented there bear emphasis: (1) the outrage, which was instant and overwhelming, peaked in early 1977 and, until the overthrow of Pol Pot, was based almost exclusively on evidence through 1977, primarily 1975–76;76 (2) apart from a few knowledgeable journalists, the State Department’s Cambodia experts, and probably the majority of the small group of Cambodia scholars—that is, most of those with a basis for judgment—the most extreme accusations were adopted and proclaimed with a great show of indignation over Communist atrocities, the integrity of which can be measured by comparison to the reaction to phase I of the genocide and U.S. responsibility for it; (3) these skeptical assessments, almost entirely suppressed in the media, proved fairly accurate for the period in question; (4) the evidence that provided the crucial basis for the denunciations of Communist genocide was of a kind that would have been dismissed with derision had something of the sort been offered with regard to phase I of the genocide or other U.S. atrocities, including faked