Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [290]
30. For extensive evidence on this matter, see PEHR, II.6, and Vickery, Cambodia, extending the story to phase III.
31. Others give higher estimates. Ponchaud gives the figure of 800,000 killed, but, as noted in our 1977 review, he seems to have exaggerated the toll of the U.S. bombing, and as shown in the references of note 22, he is a highly unreliable source. “US Government sources put the figure unofficially at 600,000 to 700,000” (CIA demographic study, which accepts the lower figure).
32. Vickery, Cambodia, pp. 184f. Other estimates vary widely. At the low end, the CIA demographic study gives the figure of 50,000 to 100,000 for people who “may have been executed,” and an estimate of deaths from all causes that is meaningless because of misjudgment of postwar population and politically motivated assessments throughout; the Far Eastern Economic Review reported a substantial increase in the population under DK to 8.2 million, “mostly based on CIA estimates” (Asia 1979 and Asia 1980 yearbooks of the FEER, the latter reducing the estimate from 8.2 to 4.2 million, the actual figure apparently being in the neighborhood of 6.5 million); in the U.S. government journal Problems of Communism (May–June 1981), Australian Indochina specialist Carlyle Thayer suggests a figure of deaths from all causes at 500,000, of which 50,000 to 60,000 were executions. At the high end, estimates range to three million or more, but without any available analysis. As all serious observers emphasize, the range of error is considerable at every point.
33. George Hildebrand and Gareth Porter, Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976), based on U.S. and international aid reports, cited by Vickery, Cambodia, p. 79; FEER correspondent Nayan Chanda in several articles, cited in PEHR, I.6, 229f.; Western doctor is Dr. Penelope Key, of the World Vision Organization, cited by Hildebrand and Porter, along with similar reports from Catholic Relief Services and Red Cross observers; Shawcross, Sideshow, pp. 370f. Hildebrand and Porter’s book, the only extensive study of the situation at the war’s end, was highly praised by Indochina scholar George Kahin but ignored in the media, or vilified. See PEHR, II.6, 232f., for a particular egregious example, by William Shawcross in the New York Review of Books. When PEHR, II.6 was circulating to Cambodia scholars and journalists in manuscript, we received a letter from Shawcross demanding that references to him be eliminated. We responded that we would be glad to consider any specific case that he found wrong or misleading and delayed publication of the book awaiting his response, which never arrived. On his public response, see below.
34. Milton Osborne, Before Kampuchea (London: Allen & Unwin, 1980), p. 191; David Chandler, Pacific Affairs (Summer 1983); Philip Windsor, The Listener, BBC (London), July 11, 1985.
35. David Chandler and Ben Kiernan, eds., Revolution and Its Aftermath in Kampuchea, Monograph 25/Yale University Southeast Asia Series (1983), p. 1.
36. See note 32, above; FEER, January 19, 1979.
37. Douglas Pike, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 29, 1979, and Christian Science Monitor, December 4, 1979; cited by Vickery, Cambodia, p. 65. On the Freedom House and Times assessments of Pike’s work, see pp. 324, 326; Fox Butterfield, “The New Vietnam Scholarship,” New York Times Magazine cover story, February 13, 1983, where Pike is regarded as the exemplar of the “new breed” of dispassionate scholars.
38. Nayan Chanda, Brother Enemy (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), pp. 329, 394, for a detailed analysis of the maneuverings during this period. See also Grant Evans and Kelvin Rowley, Red Brotherhood