Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [202]
As we also noted from the first paragraph of our earlier review of this material, to which we will simply refer here for specifics, “there is no difficulty in documenting major atrocities and oppression, primarily from the reports of refugees”; there is little doubt that “the record of atrocities in Cambodia is substantial and often gruesome” and represents “a fearful toll”; “when the facts are in, it may turn out that the more extreme condemnations were in fact correct,” although if so, “it will in no way alter the conclusions we have reached on the central question addressed here: how the available facts were selected, modified, or sometimes invented to create a certain image offered to the general population. The answer to this question seems clear, and it is unaffected by whatever may yet be discovered about Cambodia in the future.” As we repeatedly stressed, in this chapter of a two-volume study on U.S. policy and ideology, our concern remained the United States, not Indochina; our purpose was not to “establish the facts with regard to postwar Indochina” on the basis of the evidence available, but rather to examine the constructions developed on the basis of this evidence, to analyze the way this evidence was refracted “through the prism of Western ideology, a very different task.”78 The conclusions drawn there remain valid. To our knowledge, no error or even misleading statement or omission has been found.79
This review of an impressive propaganda exercise aroused great outrage—not at all surprisingly: the response within Soviet domains is similar, as are the reasons, when dissidents expose propaganda fabrications with regard to the United States, Israel, and other official enemies. Indignant commentators depicted us as “apologists for Khmer Rouge crimes”80—in a study that denounced Khmer Rouge atrocities (a fact always suppressed) and then proceeded to demonstrate the remarkable character of Western propaganda, our topic throughout the two-volume study in which this chapter appeared. There was also a new wave of falsification, often unanswerable when journals refused to permit response. We will not review these further propaganda exercises here, but merely note that they provide an intriguing expression of what, in other contexts, is described as the totalitarian mentality: it is not enough to denounce official enemies; it is also necessary to guard with vigilance the right to lie in the service of power. The reaction to our challenge to this sacred right again fits neatly within the expectations of a propaganda model, standing alongside the Freedom House attack on the media for failure to serve state policy with sufficient vigor and optimism.
By early 1977, denunciations of the Khmer Rouge for having caused unprecedented “murder in a gentle land” and “autogenocide” extended from mass circulation journals such as Reader’s Digest (with tens of millions of readers) and TV Guide (circulation nineteen million), to the New York Review of Books and the media generally, in addition to a best-selling book by John Barron and Anthony Paul based on their Reader’s Digest article and the widely misquoted study by François Ponchaud mentioned earlier. Similar material continued to flow in abundance in the press and newsweeklies, the New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. Evidence about the 1977–78 period became available primarily after the Vietnamese expulsion of the Khmer Rouge regime, which brought phase II of the genocide to a close, eliciting new outrage over the alleged “genocide