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The picture created by this chorus of denunciation, from the first days of Democratic Kampuchea (DK) in 1975, is described sardonically by Michael Vickery as “the standard total view” (STV). According to the STV, prior to the Khmer Rouge victory in April 1975, Cambodia had been a “gentle land” (Barron and Paul) of “gentle if emotional people” who “wanted only to live in peace in their lush kingdom” (Jack Anderson), a land in which hunger was “almost unknown” (Henry Kamm). But in 1975, the “formerly fun-loving, easy-going Cambodians” were subjected to the “harsh regime” of the Khmer Rouge, who ordered that all those not under their rule before the victory can be “disposed of” because they are “no longer required,” even if only one million Khmers remain (Donald Wise, citing several of the frequently quoted Khmer Rouge statements that were conceded to be fabrications).81

According to the STV, during the pre-1977 period on which the conclusions were based, the Khmer Rouge leadership was engaged in a policy of systematic extermination and destruction of all organized social and cultural life apart from the Gulag run by the “nine men at the top,” Paris-trained Communists, without local variation and with no cause other than inexplicable sadism and Marxist-Leninist dogma. By early 1977, it was alleged that they had “boasted” of having slaughtered some two million people (Jean Lacouture in the New York Review). This figure remained the standard even after Lacouture withdrew it a few weeks later, acknowledging that he had misread his source (Ponchaud) and that the actual figure might be in the thousands, but adding that he saw little significance to a difference between thousands killed and a “boast” of two million killed. This position expresses with some clarity the general attitude toward fact during this period and since, as does his further statement that it is hardly important to determine “exactly which person uttered an inhuman phrase”—the case in question had to do with inhuman phrases he attributed to Khmer Rouge officials but which turned out to be mistranslations of phrases that had been fabricated outright by his source (Ponchaud) or that had appeared not in a Cambodian journal, as he asserted, but in a Thai journal mistranslated by Ponchaud that expressed virtually the opposite of what was claimed. The two-million figure was later upgraded to three million or more, often citing Vietnamese wartime propaganda. The examples are quite typical.

Not everyone joined in the chorus. The most striking exceptions were those who had the best access to information from Cambodia, notably, the State Department Cambodia specialists. Their view, based on what evidence was then available (primarily from northwestern Cambodia), was that deaths from all causes might have been in the “tens if not hundreds of thousands,” largely from disease, malnutrition, and “brutal, rapid change,” not “mass genocide.” These tentative conclusions were almost entirely ignored by the media—we found one important exception in our review—because they were simply not useful for the purpose at the time, just as refugee testimony that did not conform to the STV was ignored. Overseas, journalists who had special knowledge of Indochina also gave rather nuanced accounts, notably, Nayan Chanda.82

In his detailed, region-by-region study, Vickery shows that the STV was a picture with little merit, and that the few skeptics had been essentially accurate for the period in question, although in 1977–78, something approaching the STV came to be correct in the context of brutal inter-party purges and the expanding war with Vietnam. He also makes the obvious logical point that “the evidence for 1977–78,” which only became available after the Vietnamese conquest in 1979, “does not retrospectively justify the STV,” which reigned on the basis of evidence from the 1975–76 period; “and the Vietnamese adoption of some of the worst Western propaganda stories as support for their case in 1979 does not prove that those stories were valid.