Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [207]
That there was “silence” over Pol Pot atrocities was also an insistent claim right at the peak of the bitter outrage over Pol Pot genocide. Time magazine published a major article by David Aikman on July 31, 1978, claiming that the Khmer Rouge “experiment in genocide” was being ignored, and adding a new twist that was also taken up with enthusiasm in the subsequent reconstruction of history: “there are intellectuals in the West so committed to the twin Molochs of our day—‘liberation’ and ‘revolution’—that they can actually defend what has happened in Cambodia”; “some political theorists have defended it, as George Bernard Shaw and other Western intellectuals defended the brutal social engineering in the Soviet Union during the 1930s.” No one was mentioned, for the simple reason that no one could be found to fit the bill, although Time did vainly attempt to elicit positive statements about the Pol Pot regime from antiwar activists to buttress this useful thesis.
Each of these themes—the “silence” of the West, the defense of Pol Pot by Western intellectuals—is unequivocally refuted by massive evidence that is well known, although ignored, by the mobilized intellectual culture. But this level of misrepresentation in the service of a noble cause still does not suffice. The two themes were combined by William Shawcross in an inspired agitprop achievement that carried the farce a step further.99 This new contribution evoked much enthusiasm; several of the comments just cited are from reviews of his book, or are obviously inspired by it.
In his study of “Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience,” Shawcross muses on the relative “silence” of the West in the face of Khmer Rouge atrocities. The facts are radically different, but the idea that the West ignores Communist atrocities while agonizing over its own is far more appealing to the Western conscience. Shawcross then proceeds to adopt Aikman’s second thesis, applying it in an ingenious way to explain the mechanism that lies behind this unwillingness of the West to face up to Communist atrocities, so notable a feature of Western life. The silence over phase II of the genocide, he argues, resulted from “the skepticism (to use a mild term) displayed by the Western left toward the stories coming out of Democratic Kampuchea. That skepticism was most fervently and frequently expressed by Noam Chomsky . . ., [who] asserted that from the moment of the Khmer Rouge victory in 1975 the Western press colluded with Western and anti-Communist Asian governments, notably Thailand, to produce a ‘vast and unprecedented’ campaign of propaganda against the Khmer Rouge.”100
To buttress this claim, Shawcross provides what purports to be a quote—but without citing an identifiable source, for two good reasons. First, the quote does not exist,101 although even his version undermines his basic claim, with its reference to “the grim reality” of Cambodia under Khmer Rouge rule. Second, the source of the manufactured quote is a work published in November 1979, almost a year after the fall of the Pol Pot regime. To cite the date would have raised the question of how this “fervent and frequent” expression of skepticism could have intimidated governments and the media from 1975 through 1978. Furthermore, we made it crystal clear that the record of atrocities was “gruesome,” perhaps even at the level of the most outlandish fabrications.
Note that Shawcross could have cited real examples of “skepticism”; for example, the skepticism of State Department analysts at the height of the furor over Cambodia, or the retrospective comments of Douglas Pike and others cited earlier (pp. 248–49), or the comments of journalists during phase II who were willing to conclude only that refugee accounts “suggest that the Khmer Rouge is finding it hard to govern the country except by coercion” and “even suggest that terror is being employed as a system of government,” noting that refugees