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By Root 2714 0

and that the comment he cites is a familiar truism. His reference to the CIA cooking up a bloodbath is pure fantasy, although we might add that by the time he wrote, although after our book appeared, Michael Vickery did present evidence that the Barron-Paul Reader’s Digest account was in part a CIA disinformation effort.113 Shawcross states further his view, “contrary to Chomsky and Herman,” that the U.S. government was “remarkably inactive” in anti-Khmer Rouge propaganda. We proposed no U.S. government role whatsoever in orchestrating the deceit we documented, by William Shawcross and others, and in fact endorsed State Department reports as the most plausible then available. And so on, throughout.

But Shawcross and others who are deeply offended by our challenge to the right to lie in the service of one’s favored state understand very well that charges against dissident opinion require no evidence and that ideologically useful accusations will stand merely on the basis of endless repetition, however ludicrous they may be—even the claim that the American left silenced the entire West during the Pol Pot period.

Shawcross’s charges against other enemies follow the same pattern—another factor, presumably, in the appeal of his message. Thus in pursuit of his fashionable quest to attribute primary responsibility for the continuing tragedy of Cambodia to Vietnam, not to those who were responsible for phase I of the genocide with their “careless” policies and who are now supporting Pol Pot, Shawcross rationalizes the current support for Pol Pot as a natural response to Vietnamese actions. Given Hanoi’s invasion of Cambodia and subsequent conduct, he explains, China and the ASEAN countries of Southeast Asia (not to speak of their “Western partners”) were bound “to seek to apply all possible forms of pressure upon Hanoi” to renounce its intentions, and “the Vietnamese could have predicted that such pressures would include support for the Khmer Rouge.” Thus the Vietnamese are to blame if China and the United States support Pol Pot, along with such dedicated advocates of human rights and the strict reliance on peaceful means as Indonesia and Thailand. Such analysis is, however, not extended to the Vietnamese, who are always carrying out cold-blooded strategies in a world without threats from China or the United States, threats that might allow us to “predict” (and thus implicitly exonerate) these strategies. According to Shawcross, “Vietnam’s conduct since its invasion of Cambodia rarely suggested that it wished to see a compromise in which the Khmer Rouge were removed as a viable force in Cambodia—which was what the ASEAN countries and their Western partners insisted was their aim.” “It is impossible to predict whether any such suggestion [from Hanoi] would have been accepted by the Chinese or the ASEAN countries, but the point is that it was never made,” Shawcross asserts without qualification.114 Hanoi has repeatedly offered to withdraw in favor of an indigenous regime, the only condition being the exclusion of the top Khmer Rouge leadership. Whether these offers were serious or not, we do not know, as they have been dismissed by the Deng-Reagan alliance and, with more vacillation, the ASEAN countries. These rejections, in favor of continued support for Pol Pot, have not been featured in the media, which would hardly surprise a rational observer. But these facts are hardly supportive of Shawcross’s analysis, to say the least.

In a further effort to cast the blame on the approved enemy, Shawcross asserts that the Vietnamese “placed more confidence in the torturers than in their victims, that many of those people were actually being promoted by the new order into positions of new authority over them.” As his sole evidence, he cites a story, told twice in his book, about an old woman he met in Cambodia “who described with great passion how the Khmer Rouge murderer of her son was living, unpunished, in the neighboring village.” He repeated the same story in the New York Review of Books, eliciting a letter from Ben Kiernan, who accompanied