Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [206]
One would be hard put to find any serious observers of the current Cambodian scene who believe that the Vietnamese have reduced Cambodia to a level below that of the DK period, as these comments imply. Rather, among people who are concerned about the people of Cambodia for themselves and not merely because of their value for propaganda exercises, few would question that “it is clear that life for the people is far better now than under Democratic Kampuchea,”95 and some Cambodia specialists have suggested that the current regime compares favorably with any of its predecessors. Consistent opponents of aggression would have a moral basis for condemning the Vietnamese invasion, despite the rapidly escalating atrocities of 1977–78 and the murderous raids against Vietnam by Cambodian forces under Pol Pot’s rule.96 It is a little difficult to take this argument seriously, however, when it is put forth by people who condemn the West for not having undertaken more vigorous actions to “rescue” the Cambodians from Pol Pot—a “rescue” that would have been no less self-serving in intent than the Vietnamese invasion, as history makes clear. And we need not tarry over the argument when it is offered by those who tolerate or applaud murderous aggression when it suits their ends: the Indonesian invasion of Timor, the “liberation” of Lebanon by Israeli forces in 1982 (as the Times editors called it), or the “defense of South Vietnam,” to mention a few obvious cases.
6.2.8. PHASE III AT HOME: THE GREAT SILENCE AND THE HIDDEN POTENCY OF THE LEFT
Turning to the home front, phase III illustrates the expectations of a propaganda model in yet a different way. The truth about the response to the Pol Pot atrocities in the media and “the culture” in general, and the dramatic contrast to comparable examples where the United States bears primary responsibility, is not pleasant to contemplate. Since the facts are too overwhelming to refute, it is a better strategy simply to dispatch them to the memory hole. This task having been achieved with the customary alacrity, we may now observe with wonder that “The West awoke to the suffering of Kampuchea in autumn, 1979” (William Shawcross), and then go on to ruminate about the curious inability of the West, always consumed with self-flagellation, to perceive the atrocities of its enemies.97 And so matters have proceeded in the latest phase of the sad tale of Cambodia.
“There was silence in the mid-1970s during the mass murders by the Khmer Rouge” (Floyd Abrams), and “The atrocity stories coming out of Cambodia after 1975 quite simply were not believed” (David Hawk)—at a time when accusations of genocide of the Hitler-Stalin variety were resounding from the New York Times and Washington Post to the Reader’s Digest and TV Guide to the New York Review of Books, and the mass media extensively. “The West woke up to the horror of what had happened only after the Vietnamese invasion” (Economist), and “hardly anyone outside, on Left or Right, had noticed [the horrors of the Pol Pot regime] at the time they were actually going on (1975–1978)” (Conor Cruise O’Brien)—that is, at the time when Jimmy Carter branded Pol Pot “the world’s worst violator of human rights,” and a British Foreign Office report condemned the regime for the death of “many hundreds of thousands of people.”98 One might imagine that such outlandish claims could not pass without a raised eyebrow at least, but that is to underestimate the ability of the ideological institutions to rally to a worthy