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Shawcross attributes this “left-wing skepticism,” which had such awesome consequences because of the influence of the left on Western institutions, in part to Vietnamese propaganda. Vietnam’s “spokesmen had undercut the refugee stories about Khmer Rouge conduct,” he writes, “thus adding to disbelief in them, particularly on the Western left,”108 which naturally takes its cues from Hanoi and closely parrots its doctrines, according to approved dogma—although it is interesting that Shawcross also insinuates that the influence of Hanoi extended beyond its acolytes. And why not? If we have reached the point of claiming that the Western left silenced the media and governments, why not proceed to maintain that even outside these dangerous circles, Vietnamese propaganda is a powerful force in shaping opinion? Naturally Shawcross does not make even a pretense of providing any evidence for what he knows perfectly well to be the sheerest fantasy, from beginning to end.

We may place this outlandish explanation of the “silence” of the West alongside the similar claims that State Department Communists lost China, that the media are threatening the foundations of democracy with their “adversarial stance,” etc. The reaction, however, was not ridicule, but rather great enthusiasm. To cite just one typical example, David Hawk observes that Shawcross “attributes the world’s indifference” to “the influence of antiwar academics and activists on the American left who obfuscated Khmer Rouge behavior, denigrated the post-1975 refugee reports and denounced the journalists who got those stories.”109 He accepts this thesis as valid but cites no evidence either for the “indifference” to the atrocities, which were being denounced worldwide as genocidal, or for the alleged behavior of the American left, nor does he explain the mechanisms whereby this behavior, had it existed, could have controlled the mainstream media, or even marginally influenced them. Convenient mythologies require neither evidence nor logic. Nor do they require any attention to Hawk’s own performance at the time, as an Amnesty International official and specialist on Southeast Asia. The AI Annual Report for 1977 noted that the number of alleged executions in Cambodia was “fewer than during the preceding year,” and while it summarizes a number of reports of executions and disappearances, its account is restrained. The 1978 Annual Report, while stronger in its allegations of violence, pointed out that refugee reports, on which it was necessary to rely heavily, “are often imprecise or conflicting,” thus leaving AI and Hawk in the Shawcross-Hawk category of those who “denigrated the post-1975 refugee reports.” It is so easy to moralize in retrospect.

Shawcross develops his thesis further in interesting ways.110 To show that Western commentators refused to recognize that “the Khmer Rouge was a Marxist-Leninist government,” he states that British journalist John Pilger “constantly compared” the Khmer Rouge with the Nazis, suppressing the fact that he explicitly compared their actions with “Stalin’s terror,” as Pilger noted in a response to one of the many reviews that repeated Shawcross’s inventions.111 Shawcross claims further that the present authors “were to believe for years” that “the refugees were unreliable, that the CIA was cooking up a bloodbath to say, ‘We told you so.’” He cites our one article (The Nation, 1977), in which there is no hint of any such thesis, as there is none elsewhere. In that article we were clear and explicit, as also subsequently, that refugee reports left no doubt that the record of Khmer Rouge atrocities was “substantial and often gruesome,” and that “in the case of Cambodia, there is no difficulty in documenting major atrocities and oppression, primarily from the reports of refugees.”112 To support his contention with regard to our alleged denial of the reliability of refugees, Shawcross cites our comment on the need to exercise care in analyzing refugee reports, carefully suppressing the fact that we are quoting Ponchaud, his primary source,