Chomsky & Cambodia

Dissent, June 26, 1978

"Do the recent events in Cambodia warrant a reconsideration of our opposition to the Vietnam War"? Consider the factual and moral premises that allow this question to be seriously raised.
Let us assume the accuracy of the condemnation of the Khmer Rouge (noting, however, that the susceptibility of intellectuals to fabricated atrocity stories has been no less notorious since World War I than their apologetics for some favored state, and that skepticism is aroused in this case by the many documented falsehoods). On this assumption, should we reconsider opposition to the Vietnam War?

One who raises this question must be assuming (1) that the U.S. war was intended to avert Khmer Rouge barbarity, or might have had this likely effect; and (2) that the U.S. has the right to exercise force and violence to avert potential crimes.

Assumption (1) is ludicrous in the light of the factual record. Cambodia was an island of relative tranquility prior to the American invasion of 1970, though it had been repeatedly attacked by American and U.S.-backed forces from 1957 on. There was limited local insurgency, aroused by government repression, even by the 1960s. As Vietnamese were driven to a narrow border strip by the savage American military operations of early 1967, direct U.S. attacks on Cambodia escalated. By May 1967, the Pentagon was concerned that Cambodia was "becoming more and more important as a supply base -- now of food and medicines, perhaps ammunition later," an obvious consequence of U.S. operations in Vietnam and Laos. In March 1969. shortly after the "secret bombings" began, Sihanouk vainly called upon the Western press to publicize his government's protest over the "criminal attacks" on Khmer peasants. The 1970 invasion helped organize the Khmer Rouge rebellion as thousands of peasants rallied to the resistance under the impact of the vicious bombing and ground attacks of the U.S. military and the Vietnamese forces it organized. Charles Meyer, who had long been close to ruling forces in Cambodia, warned then that "it is difficult to imagine the intensity of the hatred (of the peasants) for those who destroyed their villages and their possessions" (Derriere le sourir khmer). This was well before the murderous American bombings of the 1970s, which surely inflamed peasant hatred and desire for revenge.

Those who failed to devote their energies to ending the American war in Indochina bear a double burden of guilt: for the atrocities committed under American initiative and for the legacy of starvation, disease, hatred, and revenge that was a direct and predicted consequence of the attack on rural Cambodia. Similar remarks apply in the case of Vietnam and Laos.

Assumption (2) has not been defended explicitly. One can easily see why. If the U.S. is entitled to launch a major war to avert potential barbarism, then a fortiori it is entitled to invade countries where state violence currently proceeds; say, much of Latin America, which turned into a horror chamber in one of the recent successes of U.S. foreign policy. Surely, the absurdities of this position are obvious.

Furthermore, one may ask why the U.S. should be uniquely privileged to serve as global judge and executioner. By virtue of its historic role in defense of freedom and human rights within its own sphere of influence, perhaps? Again, discussion is superfluous.

One who advocates the resort to force must present an overwhelmingly powerful argument. There is ample reason to adopt as a guiding principle the restriction on use of force, now codified in law, to self-defense against armed attack. In fact, the official claim always was that the U.S. was defending South Vietnam from "aggression from the North." Internal documents were more honest. Immediately after the Geneva accords of 1954, the U.S. undertook to help its clients "to defeat local Communist subversion or rebellion not constituting armed attack," with potential "use of U.S. military forces either locally or against the external source of such subversion or rebellion" -- all as determined unilaterally by the U.S. It was the secret plan that was pursued; the official defense is no less ludicrous than the assumption.

The U.S. at once installed a client regime in South Vietnam that abrogated the terms of the Geneva settlement and initiated a program of repression and massacre. When resistance ensued, the U.S. turned to direct military action by 1962 and an outright invasion of South Vietnam in 1965. Government analysts never doubted that the South Vietnamese enemy was the only mass-based political force, while the regimes the U.S. imposed as a basis for its intervention had negligible support. The peace treaty signed but immediately undermined by the U.S. in January 1973 was virtually a paraphrase, in essentials, of the program of the South Vietnamese forces that the U.S. was dedicated to destroy.

By the time the first North Vietnamese battalion was detected in the South -- more than two months after the initiation of the systematic bombing of the North and the far more extensive bombing of the South -- more than 150,000 South Vietnamese had been killed "under the crushing weight of American armor, napalm, jet bombers and, finally, vomiting gases." This is the judgment of Bernard Fall, a committed hawk, who turned against the war because he feared that "Vietnam as a cultural and historic entity... is threatened with extinction" as "the countryside literally dies under the blows of the... (American)... military machine." The U.S. won its filthy war in South Vietnam, decimating the local forces that resisted American violence and the peasant society in which they were rooted, thus guaranteeing North Vietnamese dominance of the wreckage and leaving ample opportunity for the hypocrites who now bewail the consequences of the American war that they supported.

Now we are asked whether opposition to the U.S. attack on rural South Vietnam, later all Indochina, was legitimate, in the light of postwar suffering and atrocities that are in large measure a result of this aggression. With comparable logic, Germans might have asked whether opposition to Nazi aggression should be reconsidered after the massacre of tens of thousands in France under American civil-military rule.

We are sometimes told that "the story is more complex." That is true; the real world is more complex than our descriptions, a fact that may be exploited by the cynical or deluded. They can dismiss as a guide to attitude and action the salient features of this real but too complex world.

Like most colonial wars, the U.S. war in Indochina was in part a civil conflict, though in scale and savagery the U.S. intervention has had few historical parallels. Such wars are generally brutal, and the domestic losers often suffer grievously. Those who devoted themselves to ending American aggression and who now work to reverse the inhuman policy of refusing reparations or even aid to its victims have a moral right to condemn repressive acts of the regimes that have arisen from the ruins. Comparably, anti-Nazi resisters had the moral right to condemn the atrocities committed after liberation. Others may well be accurate in their condemnation, but it reeks to high heaven.

The American media have been deluged with denunciations of postwar Indochina, while more favorable accounts, however credible, receive little notice; and murderous repression within the American sphere -- in Timor or Uruguay, for example -- is consistently ignored. That should not surprise us. As had been predicted, a major effort is underway to reconstruct the interventionist ideology that eroded as popular opposition to the Vietnam war developed. History must be rewritten and principle revised to to conform to the needs of a power that will be called upon to lead the industrial capitalist world in the "North-South" conflict. We read that we must overcome our "Vietnam hang-up" and be willing to use force to defend our interests, often disguised in cynical humanitarian rhetoric. Or we are informed that revolutionary regimes are capable of great brutality, as has been obvious for centuries, and that "we" should rise to the defense of peoples, not states; reasonable enough (and no less familiar) if the term "we" refers to individuals, though it is easily transmuted to refer to state power in a new version of colonialist doctrine.

One who protests barbarism or repression must consider the probable human consequences of his acts. That is why, for example, Amnesty International urges that one write politely to the most miserable tyrant. Unless the goal of protest is self-aggrandizement or service to one's state, finite energies will be distributed in accordance with a likely impact. A Russian who condemns American behavior in Vietnam or Chile may speak the truth, but we do not admire his courage or moral integrity. Similar considerations apply here. The central responsibility for Americans is to try to modify policies that we can influence; primarily those of the American government and its client regimes, or elsewhere, when there is a likelihood that protest can contribute to the relief of human misery.

Returning to the specific questions of this symposium: events in postwar Indochina amply reinforce the moral imperative of protest and resistance against the American war. Principled opponents of that war should now devote themselves with no less energy to attempting to heal its wounds and help its victims -- those in exile, those who are oppressed, and those who are struggling to construct a viable society from the ruins left by American terror. If honest inquiry reveals terror and repression, protest is legitimate. One who undertakes it must ask how his acts may help those who suffer, bearing in mind also the domestic consequences and the fate of future victims of the interventionist ideologies now being reconstructed. One will of course win acclaim in the West by joining the chorus of protest focused on those who have escaped the Western orbit, but for ugly reasons. It is easy to avoid these considerations, but an honest person with true human concern will not lightly do so. Individuals may differ in their assessment of these complex issues, but they deserve more careful attention than they often receive. We cannot escape the world in which we live, inconvenient though that fact may be.

ZMag Forums

The original claim that the Khmer Rouge had "boasted" of having killed 2 million people was by Jean Lacouture in the New York Review, quickly taken up by Anthony Lewis and others. Lacouture was reviewing a French book by Francois Ponchaud, a priest who had lived in Cambodia. I was curious, obtained Ponchaud's book from a friend in France, and read it (it was being widely quoted all over the place on the basis of L's review; I wouldn't be surprised if I were the only person in the country who had actually seen it -- it had just appeared).

What Ponchaud actually wrote was that the US war had killed 800,000 people (which seems to be a considerable exaggeration) and that according to the US Embassy, 1.2 million had died since (that would be from April 75 through 1976 -- the statement was flatly denied by the Embassy). Adding these two (incorrect) figures, we get two million. The boast comes free. A few weeks later, in "corrections" (which I brought to his attention, privately), L. says that maybe there were only thousands killed, but asks whether it really matters -- a position for which he has won great acclaim. When Ed Herman and I responded to his challenge to me by saying that we thought that a factor of 1000 did matter, that aroused huge outrage, which still continues ("nit-picking," it's called on the left). Oddly, no one has taken the same view when we said we thought it also mattered whether the US killed thousands or millions in, say, Operation Speedy Express. In dealing with US atrocities, facts matter. For official enemies, anything goes.

Since that time figures of all sorts have been bandied about. In January 1979, the Far Eastern Economic Review (the main business journal covering Asia, now part of the Dow Jones system) claimed that the population of Cambodia had risen to 8.2 million under the Khmer Rouge (that would be an increase of about 1 million). The next year they said it had fallen to 4 million. The actual figure, by census count, was about 6.7 million. The CIA, in its demographic study in 1980, claims that Pol Pot killed 50-100,000 people and attributes most deaths to the Vietnamese invasion, also denying flatly the atrocities of 1978, which were by far the worst (that's the source of the famous piles of skulls, etc.; these became known after the Vietnamese invasion in 1979, and were certainly known to the CIA). Michael Vickery has written about the CIA study, suggesting that it was tailored to fit the fact that the US was tacitly supporting Pol Pot in '78 and later.There's a careful analysis in Vickery's "Cambodia." He's a very serious Cambodia scholar, and his analysis is taken seriously by other reputable scholars (e.g., Australian scholar Robert Cribb, in his standard scholarly work on the Indonesian massacres with comparative evidence). Vickery estimates about 700,000 deaths "above the normal" in the Pol Pot years -- which, if accurate, would be about the same as deaths during the US war (the first phase of the "Decade of Genocide," as 1969-79 is called by the one independent government analysis, Finland). For that period, the CIA estimates 600,000 deaths. The Yale Genocide project (Ben Kiernan and others) gives higher estimates, about 1.5 million.In fact, no one knows. No one ever knows in such cases, within quite a broad range. When numbers are put forth with any confidence, and without a big plus-or-minus, you can be sure that there is an ideological agenda, in any such case. Demographic analyses are very weak.If we wanted to be serious, we would also ask how many of the post-1975 deaths are the result of the US war. The predictions by US officials, doctors in Phnom Penh, and others were that there would be a huge toll in the coming years; people were dying in Phnom Penh alone at 100,000 a year when the KR took over (no one has a clue as to what was happening in the heavily bombed countryside). The figure of 1 million potential deaths was reported by the highly respected correspondent of the FEER, Nayan Chanda, attributed to a high US official.

But these are ideological footballs. Only a few of those who write about the topic are interested in such boring things as truth -- as the original 2 million figure indicates.Incidentally, these numbers are from memory. I've quoted them exactly in print, and could check if you like -- or you could check originals. I think they are accurate, or close to.

Noam Chomsky



Noam Chomsky: more on
Atrocities in Cambodia

I didn't quite understand the first comment, which reads: "Quick response: Kiernan cites a figure of 1.5 million. He criticizes Vickery's population figures as too low by about 700,000--which explains the difference between the two estimates."

Remember that the relation is reciprocal. Vickery criticizes Kiernan's figures as too high. And there are various other differences in (highly uncertain) estimates. As I think I may have mentioned, leading specialists go both ways: thus Robert Cribb, in the standard scholarly study of Indonesian and comparative genocide, takes Vickery's figures.

It's true that the KR (not just Pol Pot, I believe) were rabidly racist, and had support for that. There was an element of what Vickery calls "poor peasant chauvinism." How large an element it was is another point of dispute. Vickery thinks a lot; Kiernan thinks less. Not easy to determine. We can't answer questions like that easily even for far more familiar and intensively studied societies: our own, for example.

On "casualities resulting directly and indirectly from the bombing of Cambodia," estimates are even more uncertain than for the Pol Pot period. The topic isn't studied, for the obvious reason (just ask who will be blamed). The Finnish government study "Decade of Genocide: 1969-1979," the only independent governmental study, recognizes that the "genocide" had two phases, but devotes only a few pages to the first phase, because there is so little information. US reporters on the scene (like Sydney Schanberg, called "the conscience of the press" because of his dedication to exposing Pol Pot terror) literally refused to interview refugees fleeing into Phnom Penh. That didn't require trekking into the jungle (which reporters were happy to do to interview refugees who could expose Pol Pot terror): just crossing the street from their hotel. Ed Herman and I documented this in detail in "Manufacturing Consent." It's standard. I saw it myself, first-hand, in Laos in 1970. I happened to be there just when the CIA mercenary army had drive a flood of refugees from the Plain of Jars to encampments about 20 miles out of the capital city, which was then hosting leading journalists from all over the world, who flew in because of fraudulent US claims of a North Vietnamese invasion (everyone knew it was a fraud, and there was much ridicule in the hotel bar where the journalists hung out, but they reported it soberly). The Plain of Jars had been subjected to the most intense bombing in history (later exceeded by US bombing in Cambodia); in fact, thousands of people are still dying every year from unexploded "bomblets," mostly children and farmers, while the US refuses to do anything about it and it isn't reported here though it is known -- another horror story. To get back to the point, I spent maybe 20 hours during the few days I was in Vientiane interviewing refugees to learn something about what had been going on in the Plain of Jars (I was taken by a Lao-speaking US volunteer, Fred Branfman, who had been trying desperately to get Western reporters to have a look at the facts, with no luck). Virtually no US reporters wanted to find out; they preferred the 5PM handouts at the US Embassy, which all knew were absurd. The story gets much worse. I wrote about it in "At War with Asia" (1970); Fred has a much more detailed account in his "Voices from the Plain of Jars." There's more in my "For Reasons of State" and later.

Same in Vietnam. Millions of people were fleeing into the slums of Saigon from US saturation bombing of the densely-populated Meking Delta. How many interviews can you find? Americans estimate the deaths in Indochina at about 100,000; journalists sometimes report that figure too; official figures are over 3 million. If we discovered that ordinary Germans estimated Holocaust deaths at a few hundred thousand, there would (properly) be an outcry. Have you heard one here?

It's easy to continue. US crimes are off the agenda.

To get to your question (finally), the little evidence is something like this. The CIA (in its postwar demographic study) estimates deaths in the first phase of the "decade of genocide" at 600,000 (of course, they don't regard the US as responsible). In 1975, just before the Khmer Rouge takeover, Western doctors in Phnom Penh were estimating deaths at 8000 a month -- what was going on in the countryside, where the bombing was in progress, no one tried to estimate. They also predicted that there would be a "lost generation," as a result of the horrendous attack on the countryside. The only extensive study of this that I know is Gary Porter and George Hildebrand's book, but since it is a heavily documented study of US atrocities, it is undiscussable here. Progressives, like "Progressive" editor Matthew Rothschild, regard it as outrageous even to say that the book is well-documented (though it transparently is); written in 1976, it is mostly devoted to US crimes, therefore even to cite it is criminal. We have to agree that before the KR takeover, Cambodia was a "gentle land" of happy people: to question that is another outrage, according to standard doctrine, going as far to the dissident side as Rothschild and "In These Times."

To continue, high US officials cited by the highly-respected Asia correspondent of the (eminently respectable) Far Eastern Economic Review predicted that 1 million would die as a consequence of the US bombings. US aid officials leaving Phnom Penh when the KR took over predicted that two years of "slave labor" would be necessary to overcome the effects of the bombing.

Whether these estimates are right or wrong, no one knows, and no one cares. There is a doctrine to be established: we must focus solely on the (horrendous) crimes of Pol Pot, thus providing a retrospective justification for (mostly unstudied) US crimes, and an ideological basis for further "humanitarian intervention" in the future -- the Pol Pot atrocities were explicitly used to justify US intervention in Central America in the '80s, leaving hundreds of thousands of corpses and endless destruction. In the interests of ideological reconstruction and laying the basis for future crimes, facts are simply irrelevant, and anyone who tries to suggest otherwise is targeted by a virulent stream of abuse. That runs pretty much across the spectrum, an instructive phenomenon. But one consequence is that no one can give a serious answer to the question you raise, because it is about US crimes.

Noam Chomsky

Chicago Media Watch Newsletter August 1997

In mid June, rumors began to percolate in Cambodia that Pol Pot, for the past 34 years, the leader of the Khmer Rouge forces that ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, when they were driven from power by the invading Vietnamese military, had been captured by a faction of former Khmer loyalists that turned against their leader in the hopes of negotiating amnesties between themselves and the government in Phnom Penh.

Immediately, and reflexively, the U.S. media called for Pol Pot to be brought to justice for the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge while in power. "Trying Pol Pot for the crimes he is accused of masterminding would be an extraordinary triumph for law and civilization," the New York Times affirmed (June 24). "There are times when a trial—and even the death sentence—doesn’t seem justice enough for a mass exterminator," the Chicago Tribune lamented just days before the purported capture. "Yet, civilization demands such a process. Pol Pot represents such a case" (June 17).

Long a critic of the Khmer Rouge’s reign in Cambodia, New York Times Abroad at Home columnist Anthony Lewis added his voice to the choir. "The yearning for human rights is universal," Lewis averred. Wherever crimes against humanity are perpetrated, whether in Nazi Germany, Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia or Rwanda and the Congo, "the fight against mass murder for reasons of race or religion or politics has to be made case by case," Lewis aargued. Indeed, "Every case is a test of civilization" (June 23).

But even more interesting (and selectively hypocritical) than Lewis’ call for the establishment of a "permanent court to deal with crimes against humanity" were the names of those "few Western intellectuals" that, in his words, "refused to believe what was going on in Cambodia [during the reign of the Khmer Rouge]." Said Lewis: "A few Western intellectuals, notably Prof. Noam Chomsky, refused to believe what was going on in Cambodia. At first, at least, they put the reports of killing down to a conspiratorial effort by American politicians and press to destroy the Cambodian revolution."

After some prodding by his longtime colleague Edward S. Herman, Chomsky gave in, and agreed to submit a letter to editor of the Times in response. That was in late June. But the Times refused to publish Chomsky’s letter—as well as the letters of several other writers that had raised the same issue with Lewis’ assertions. "That I don’t find so surprising," Chomsky told Chicago Media Watch. "After all, it’s an institution, and has an institutional role. More surprising to me is that [Anthony] Lewis is such a coward that he doesn’t insist on publication, agreeing to hide under Mommy’s skirt after he threw some shit at one of his enemies. Well, so it goes."

Well. So it went. Unlike the Newspaper of Record, CMW is honored to ensure that Chomsky’s brief, 224-word letter will not be kept a secret from the rest of the world.

Dear Editor:

Anthony Lewis writes (June 23) that I "refused to believe what was going on in Cambodia," and "put the reports of killing down to a conspiratorial effort by American politicians and press to destroy the Cambodian revolution." The second charge is an invention. The first is his rendition of my suggestion that in dealing with horrendous crimes, one should try to keep to the truth, whoever the agent: for Cambodia, that means during both halves of the "decade of genocide," as the years 1969-79 are described in the one governmental inquiry (Finland). At the time I reviewed these and many other cases, including the "grisly" record of Khmer Rouge "barbarity."

More interesting than the invented charges is what Lewis omits: my comparison of two huge crimes of 1975-1978, Cambodia and East Timor. The cases are not identical. There was no constructive proposal as to how to end or even mitigate Pol Pot’s crimes (as a check of Lewis’s columns will illustrate). In contrast, there were easy ways to respond to the crimes in Timor, apparently the worst slaughter relative to population since the Holocaust: by withdrawing the decisive US military and diplomatic support for them. The reaction to the two cases is instructive, as is Lewis’s conclusion that by describing Khmer Rouge crimes as comparable to those in Timor I was denying these crimes.

Noam Chomsky

The Nation, June 25, 1977

Books & The Arts

George C. Hildebrand and Gareth Porter. Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution. Monthly Review Press (1976).
Francois Ponchaud. Cambodge Année Zéro. Julliard Press. Paris (1977).
John Barron and Anthony Paul. Murder of a Gentle Land. Thomas Y. Crowell (1977).
* * *

On May 1, 1977, the New York Times published an account of the "painful problems of peace" in Vietnam by Fox Butterfield. He describes the "woes" of the people of the South, their "sense of hardship" and the grim conditions of their life, concluding that "most Southerners are said to appear resigned to their fate." His evidence comes from "diplomats, refugees and letters from Vietnam." In journals of the War Resisters League and the American Friends Service Committee of March-May 1977, in contrast, there are lengthy reports by Carol Bragg on a visit to Vietnam earlier this year by a six-person AFSC delegation, including two who had worked in Vietnam and are fluent in Vietnamese. The group traveled widely in the South and spoke to well-known leaders of the non-Communist Third Force who are active in the press and government, as well as ordinary citizens. They report impressive social and economic progress in the face of the enormous destruction left by the war, a "pioneering life" that is "difficult and at times discouraging," but everywhere "signs of a nation rebuilding" with commitment and dedication.

Butterfield claims that "there is little verifiable information on the new economic zones -- no full-time American correspondents have been admitted since the war -- but they are evidently not popular." While it is true that American correspondents are not welcomed in Vietnam, there is nonetheless ample expert eyewitness testimony, including that of journalists of international repute, visiting Vietnamese professors from Canada, American missionaries and others who have traveled through the country where they worked for many years. Jean and Simonne Lacouture published a book in 1976 on a recent visit, critical of much of what they saw but giving a generally very positive account of reconstruction efforts and popular committment. Max Ediger of the Mennonite Central Committee, who worked in Vietnam for many years and stayed for thirteen months after the war, testified before Congress in March 1977 on a two-week return visit in January, also conveying a very favorable impression of the great progress he observed despite the "vast destruction of soil and facilities inflicted by the past war." There have also been positive accounts of the "new economic zones" in such journals as the Far Eastern Economic Review and the Canadian Pacific Affairs.

But none of this extensive evidence appears in the New York Times's analysis of "conditions in Indochina two years after the end of the war there." Nor is there any discussion in the Times of the "case of the missing bloodbath," although forecasts of a holocaust were urged by the U.S. leadership, official experts and the mass media over the entire course of the war in justifying our continued military presence. On the other hand, protests by some former anti-war individuals against alleged human rights violations in Vietnam are given generous coverage. This choice of subject may be the only basis on which U.S. -- as opposed to Soviet -- dissidents can get serious attention in the mass media today.

The technical name for this farce is "freedom of the press." All are free to write as they wish: Fox Butterfield, with his ideological blinders, on the front page of the Times (daily circulation more than 800,000); and Carol Bragg, with her eyewitness testimony, in New England Peacework (circulation 2,500). Typically, reports which emphasize the destruction caused by the United States and the progress and commitment of the Vietnamese reach a tiny circle of peace activists. Reports that ignore the American role -- Butterfield can only bring himself to speak of "substantial tracts of land made fallow [sic] by the war," with no agent indicated -- and that find only "woes" and distress, reach a mass audience and become part of the established truth. In this way a "line" is implanted in the public mind with all the effectiveness of a system of censorship, while the illusion of an open press and society is maintained. If dictators were smarter, they would surely use the American system of thought control and indoctrination.

It was inevitable with the failure of the American effort to subdue South Vietnam and to crush the mass movements elsewhere in Indochina, that there would be a campaign to reconstruct the history of these years so as to place the role of the United States in a more favorable light. The drab view of contemporary Vietnam provided by Butterfield and the establishment press helps to sustain the desired rewriting of history, asserting as it does the sad results of Communist success and American failure. Well suited for these aims are tales of Communist atrocities, which not only prove the evils of communism but undermine the credibility of those who opposed the war and might interfere with future crusades for freedom.

* * *

It is in this context that we must view the recent spate of newspaper reports, editorials and books on Cambodia, a part of the world not ordinarily of great concern to the press. However, an exception is made when useful lessons may be drawn and public opinion mobilized in directions advantageous to the established order. Such didacticism often plays fast and loose with the truth.

For example, on April 8, 1977, The Washington Post devoted half a page to "photographs believed to be the first of actual forced labor conditions in the countryside of Cambodia [to] have reached the West." The pictures show armed soldiers guarding people pulling plows, others working fields, and one bound man ("It is not known if this man was killed," the caption reads). Quite a sensational testimonial to Communist atrocities, but there is a slight problem. The Washington Post account of how they were smuggled out by a relative of the photographer who died in the escape is entirely fanciful. The pictures had appeared a year earlier in France, Germany and Australia, as well as in the Bangkok Post (April 19, 1976) with the caption "True or False?" In fact, an attempt by a Thai trader to sell these photos to the Bangkok Post was turned down "because the origin and authenticity of the photographs were in doubt." The photos appeared in another Thai newspaper two days before the April 4th election. The Bangkok Post then published them, explaining in an accompanying article that "Khmer watchers" were dubious about the clothes and manner of the people depicted, and quoting "other observers" who "pointed to the possibility that the series of pictures could have been taken in Thailand with the prime objective of destroying the image of the Socialist parties" before the election.

This story was reported in the U.S./Indochina Report of the Indochina Resource Center in July 1976, along with the additional information that a Thai intelligence officer later admitted that the photos were indeed posed inside Thailand: "'Only the photographer and I were supposed to know,' he confided to a Thai journalist." The full details were given in the International Bulletin (April 25, 1977; circulation 6,000). A letter of April 20 to the Washington Post on these points has not appeared. In short, the "freedom of the press" assures that readers of the International Bulletin will get the facts.

Even if the photographs had been authentic, we might ask why people should be pulling plows in Cambodia. The reason is clear, if unmentioned. The savage American assault on Cambodia did not spare the animal population. Hildebrand and Porter, in their Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, cite a Cambodian Government report of April 1976 that several hundred thousand draft animals were killed in the rural areas. The Post did not have to resort to probable fabrications to depict the facts. A hundred-word item buried in The New York Times of June 14, 1976, cites an official U.N. report that teams of "human buffaloes" pull plows in Laos in areas where the buffalo herds, along with everything else, were decimated (by the American bombing, although this goes unmentioned in the Times. Much the same is true in Vietnam. Quite possibly the U.N. or the Laotian Government could supply photographic evidence, but this would not satisfy the needs of current propaganda.

The response to the three books under review nicely illustrates this selection process. Hildebrand and Porter present a carefully documented study of the destructive American impact on Cambodia and the success of the Cambodian revolutionaries in overcoming it, giving a very favorable picture of their programs and policies, based on a wide range of sources. Published last year, and well received by the journal of the Asia Society (Asia, March-April 1977), it has not been reviewed in the Times, New York Review or any mass-media publication, nor used as the basis for editorial comment, with one exception. The Wall Street Journal acknowledged its existence in an editorial entitled "Cambodia Good Guys" (November 22, 1976), which dismissed contemptuously the very idea that the Khmer Rouge could play a constructive role, as well as the notion that the United States had a major hand in the destruction, death and turmoil of wartime and postwar Cambodia. In another editorial on the "Cambodian Horror" (April 16, 1976), the Journal editors speak of the attribution of postwar difficulties to U.S. intervention as "the record extension to date of the politics of guilt." On the subject of "Unscrambling Chile" (September 20, 1976), however, the abuses of the "manfully rebuilding" Chilean police state are explained away as an unfortunate consequence of Allendista "wrecking" of the economy.

In brief, Hildebrand and Porter attribute "wrecking" and "rebuilding" to the wrong parties in Cambodia. In his Foreword to Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, Asian scholar George Kahin observes that it is a book from which "anyone who is interested in understanding the situation obtaining in Phnom Penh before and after the Lon Nol government's collapse and the character and programs of the Cambodian Government that has replaced it will, I am sure, be grateful..." But the mass media are not grateful for the Hildebrand-Porter message, and have shielded the general public from such perceptions of Cambodia.

* * *

In contrast, the media favorite, Barron and Paul's "untold story of Communist Genocide in Cambodia" (their subtitle), virtually ignores the U.S. Government role. When they speak of "the murder of a gentle land," they are not referring to B-52 attacks on villages or the systematic bombing and murderous ground sweeps by American troops or forces organized and supplied by the United States, in a land that had been largely removed from the conflict prior to the American attack. Their point of view can be predicted from the "diverse sources" on which they relied: namely, "informal briefings from specialists at the State and Defense Departments, the National Security Council and three foreign embassies in Washington." Their "Acknowledgements" mention only the expertise of Thai and Malaysian officials, U.S. Government Cambodian experts, and Father Ponchaud. They also claim to have analysed radio and refugee reports.

Their scholarship collapses under the barest scrutiny. To cite a few cases, they state that among those evacuated from Phnom Penh, "virtually everybody saw the consequences of [summary executions] in the form of the corpses of men, women and children rapidly bloating and rotting in the hot sun," citing, among others, J.J. Cazaux, who wrote, in fact, that "not a single corpse was seen along our evacuation route," and that early reports of massacres proved fallacious (The Washington Post, May 9, 1975). They also cite The New York Times, May 9, 1975, where Sydney Shanberg wrote that "there have been unconfirmed reports of executions of senior military and civilian officials ... But none of this will apparently bear any resemblance to the mass executions that had been predicted by Westerners," and that "Here and there were bodies, but it was difficult to tell if they were people who had succumbed to the hardships of the march or simply civilians and soldiers killed in the last battles." They do not mention the Swedish journalist, Olle Tolgraven, or Richard Boyle of Pacific News Service, the last newsman to leave Cambodia, who denied the existence of wholesale executions; nor do they cite the testimony of Father Jacques Engelmann, a priest with nearly two decades of experience in Cambodia, who was evacuated at the same time and reported that evacuated priests "were not witness to any cruelties" and that there were deaths, but "not thousands, as certain newspapers have written" (cited by Hildebrand and Porter).

Barron and Paul claim that there is no evidence of popular support for the Communists in the countryside and that people "fled to the cities" as a result of the "harsh regimen" imposed by the Communistrs -- not the American bombing. Extensive evidence to the contrary, including eyewitness reports and books by French and American correspondents and observers long familiar with Cambodia (e.g., Richard Dudman, Serge Thion, J.C. Pomonti, Charles Meyer) is never cited. Nor do they try to account for the amazingly rapid growth of the revolutionary forces from 1969 to 1973, as attested by U.S. intelligence and as is obvious from the unfolding events themselves.

Their quotes, where they can be checked, are no more reliable. Thus they claim that Ponchaud attributes to a Khmer Rouge official the statement that people expelled from the cities "are no longer needed, and local chiefs are free to dispose of them as they please," implying that local chiefs are free to kill them. But Ponchaud's first report on this (Le Monde, February 18, 1976) quotes a military chief as stating that they "are left to the absolute discretion of the local authorities," which implies nothing of the sort.

These examples are typical. Where there is no independent confirmatory evidence, the Barron-Paul story can hardly be regarded as credible. Their version of history has already appeared in the Reader's Digest (circulation more than 18 million), and has been widely cited in the mass media as an authoritative account, including among them, a front-page horror summary in the Wall Street Journal, an article in TV Guide (April 30, 1977; circulation more than 19 million) by Ernest Lefever, a foreign policy specialist who is otherwise known for his argument before Congress that we should be more tolerant of the "mistakes" of the Chilean junta "in attempting to clear away the devastation of the Allende period," and his discovery of the "remarkable freedom of expression" enjoyed by critics of the military regime (The Miami Herald, August 6, 1974).

Ponchaud's book is based on his own personal experiences in Cambodia from 1965 until the capture of Phnom Penh, extensive interviews with refugees and reports from the Cambodian radio. Published in France in January 1977, it has become the best-known unread book in recent history, on the basis of an account by Jean Lacouture (in the New York Review of Books), widely cited since in the press, which alleges that Ponchaud has revealed a policy of "auto-genocide" (Lacouture's term) practiced by the Communists.

* * *

Before looking more closely at Ponchaud's book and its press treatment, we would like to point out that apart from Hildebrand and Porter there are many other sources on recent events in Cambodia that have not been brought to the attention of the American reading public. Space limitations preclude a comprehensive review, but such journals as the Far Eastern Economic Review, the London Economist, the Melbourne Journal of Politics, and others elsewhere, have provided analyses by highly qualified specialists who have studied the full range of evidence available, and who concluded that executions have numbered at most in the thousands; that these were localized in areas of limited Khmer Rouge influence and unusual peasant discontent, where brutal revenge killings were aggravated by the threat of starvation resulting from the American destruction and killing. These reports also emphasize both the extraordinary brutality on both sides during the civil war (provoked by the American attack) and repeated discoveries that massacre reports were false. They also testify to the extreme unreliability of refugee reports, and the need to treat them with great caution, a fact that we and others have discussed elsewhere (cf. Chomsky: At War with Asia, on the problems of interpreting reports of refugees from American bombing in Laos). Refugees are frightened and defenseless, at the mercy of alien forces. They naturally tend to report what they believe their interlocuters wish to hear. While these reports must be considered seriously, care and caution are necessary. Specifically, refugees questioned by Westerners or Thais have a vested interest in reporting atrocities on the part of Cambodian revolutionaries, an obvious fact that no serious reporter will fail to take into account.

To give an illustration of just one neglected source, the London Economist (March 26, 1977) carried a letter by W.J. Sampson, who worked as an economist and statistician for the Cambodian Government until March 1975, in close contact with the central statistics office. After leaving Cambodia, he writes, he "visited refugee camps in Thailand and kept in touch with Khmers," and he also relied on "A European friend who cycled around Phnom Penh for many days after its fall [and] saw and heard of no ... executions" apart from "the shooting of some prominent politicians and the lynching of hated bomber pilots in Phnom Penh." He concludes "that executions could be numbered in hundreds or thousands rather than in hundreds of thousands," though there was "a big death toll from sickness" -- surely a direct consequence, in large measure, of the devastation caused by the American attack. Sampson's analysis is known to those in the press who have cited Ponchaud at second-hand, but has yet to be reported here. And his estimate of executions is far from unique.

Expert analyses of the sort just cited read quite differently from the confident conclusions of the mass media. Here we read the "Most foreign experts on Cambodia and its refugees believe at least 1.2 million persons have been killed or have died as a result of the Communist regime since April 17, 1975" (UPI, Boston Globe, April 17, 1977). No source is given, but it is interesting that a 1.2 million estimate is attributed by Ponchaud to the American Embassy (Presumably Bangkok), a completely worthless source, as the historical record amply demonstrates. The figure bears a suggestive similarity to the prediction by U.S. officials at the war's end that 1 million would die in the next year.

In the New York Times Magazine, May 1, 1977, Robert Moss (editor of a dubious offshoot of Britain's Economist called "Foreign Report" which specializes in sensational rumors from the world's intelligence agencies) asserts that "Cambodia's pursuit of total revolution has resulted, by the official admission of its Head of State, Khieu Samphan, in the slaughter of a million people." Moss informs us that the source of this statement is Barron and Paul, who claim that in an interview with the Italian weekly Famiglia Cristiana Khieu Samphan stated that more than a million died during the war, and that the population had been 7 million before the war and is now 5 million. Even if one places some credence in the reported interview nowhere in it does Khieu Samphan suggest that the million postwar deaths were a result of official policies (as opposed to the lag effects of a war that left large numbers ill, injured, and on the verge of starvation). The "slaughter" by the Khmer Rouge is a Moss-New York Times creation.

A Christian Science Monitor editorial states: "Reports put the loss of life as high as 2 million people out of 7.8 million total." Again, there is no source, but we will suggest a possibility directly. The New York Times analysis of "two years after the Communist victory" goes still further. David Andelman, May 2, 1977, speaks without qualification of "the purges that took hundreds of thousands of lives in the aftermath of the Communist capture of Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975." Even the U.S. Government sources on which journalists often uncritically rely advance no such claim, to our knowledge. In fact, even Barron and Paul claim only that "100,000 or more" were killed in massacres and executions -- they base their calculations on a variety of interesting assumptions, among them, that all military men, civil-servants and teachers were targeted for execution; curiously, their "calculations" lead them to the figure of 1.2 million deaths as a result of "actions" of the Khmer Rouge governing authorities, by January 1, 1977 ("at a very minimum"); by a coincidence, the number reported much earlier by the American Embassy, according to Ponchaud. Elsewhere in the press, similar numbers are bandied about, with equal credibility.

* * *

Ponchaud's book is serious and worth reading, as distinct from much of the commentary it has elicited. He gives a grisly account of of what refugees have reported to him about the barbarity of their treatment at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. He also reminds us of some relevant history. For example, in this "peaceful land," peasants were massacred, their lands stolen and villages destroyed, by police and army in 1966, many then joining the maquis out of "their hatred for a government exercising such injustices and sowing death." He reports the enormous destruction and murder resulting directly from the American attack on Cambodia, the starvation and epidemics as the population was driven from their countryside by American military terror and the U.S.-incited civil war, leaving Cambodia with "an economy completely devastated by the war." He points out that "from the time of Sihanouk, then Lon Nol, the soldiers of the government army had already employed, with regard to their Khmer Rouge 'enemies,' bloodthirsty methods in no way different from those of Democratic Cambodia" (the Khmer Rouge). He also gives a rather positive account of Khmer Rouge programs of social and economic development, while deploring much brutal practice in working for egalitarian goals and national independence.

Ponchaud's book lacks the documentation provided in Hildebrand and Porter and its veracity is therefore difficult to assess. But the serious reader will find much to make him somewhat wary. For one thing, Ponchaud plays fast and loose with quotes and with numbers. He quotes an unattributed Khmer Rouge slogan, "One or two million young people will be enough to build the new Cambodia." In an article in Le Monde (February 18, 1976) he gives what appears to be the same quote, this time as follows: "To rebuild the new Cambodia, a million people are enough." Here the quote is attributed to a Khmer Rouge military commander, along with the statement misrepresented by Barron and Paul, noted above (Lacouture changes the numbers to 1.5 million to 2 million, attributes the quote to an unnamed Marxist, and concludes that it goes beyond barbarism). This is one of the rare examples of a quote that can be checked. The results are not impressive.

Ponchaud cites a Cambodian report that 200,000 people were killed in American bombings from March 7 to August 15, 1973. No source is offered, but suspicions are aroused by the fact that Phnom Penh radio announced on May 9, 1975 that there were 200,000 casualties of the American bombing in 1973, including "killed, wounded, and crippled for life" (Hildebrand and Porter). Ponchaud cites "Cambodian authorities" who give the figures 800,000 killed and 240,000 wounded before liberation. The figures are implausible. By the usual rule of thumb, wounded amount to about three times killed; quite possibly he has the figures reversed.

More significant is Ponchaud's account of the evacuation of Phnom Penh in April 1975. He reports the explanation given by the revolutionary government: that the evacuation was motivated by impending famine. But this he rejects, on the ground that rice stocks in Phnom Penh would have sufficed for two months, with rationing (what he thinks would have happened after two months, with no new harvest, he does not say). He gives no source for this estimate, and fails to observe that "According to Long Boret, the old Government's last Premier, Phnom Penh had only eight days worth of rice on hand on the eve of the surrender" (Agence France-Presse, Bangkok; New York Times, May 9, 1975). Nor does he cite the testimony of U.S. AID officials that Phnom Penh had only a six-day supply of rice (William Goodfellow, New York Times, July 14, 1975).

In fact, where an independent check is possible, Ponchaud's account seems at best careless, sometimes in rather significant ways. Nevertheless, the book is a serious work, however much the press has distorted it.

As noted, Ponchaud relies overwhelmingly on refugee reports. Thus his account is at best second-hand with many of the refugees reporting what they claim to have heard from others. Lacouture's review gives at best a third-hand account. Commentary on Lacouture's review in the press, which has been extensive, gives a fourth-hand account. That is what is available to readers of the American press.

As an instance, consider the Christian Science Monitor editorial already cited, which gives a fair sample of what is available to the American public. This editorial, based on Lacouture's review, speaks of the "reign of terror against the population" instituted by the Khmer Rouge. Lacouture, like Ponchaud, emphasizes the brutality of the American war, which laid the basis for all that followed. These references disappear from the Monitor editorial, which pretends that the current suffering in Cambodia takes place in an historical vacuum, as a mere result of Communist savagery. Similarly, an earlier editorial (January 26, 1977), based on Barron and Paul, also avoids any reference to American responsibility, though there is much moralizing about those who are indifferent to "one of the most brutal and concentrated onslaughts in history" in this "lovely land" of "engaging people."

* * *

The newspaper report that elicited these judgements, on which the press uncritically relies, does appear in Ponchaud's book. The source, however, is not a Cambodian Government newspaper but a Thai newspaper, a considerable difference. The quoted paragraph was written by a Thai reporter who claims to have had an interview with a Khmer Rouge official. In his corrections, Lacouture notes the error, and adds that this Khmer Rouge official "said, as Ponchaud writes, that he found the revolutionary method of the Vietnamese 'very slow'..." A more accurate statement would be that the Thai reporter claims that that is what was said -- by now, a sufficiently remote chain of transmission to raise many doubts. How seriously would we regard a critical account of the United States in a book by a hostile European leftist based on a report in Pravda of a statement allegedly made by an unnamed American official? The analogy is precise. Why then should we rest any judgment on Ponchaud's account of a Thai report of an alleged statement by an unnamed Khmer Rouge official? What is certain is that the basis for Lacouture's accusations, cited above, disappears when the quotes are properly attributed: to a Thai reporter, not a Cambodian Government newspaper.

Lacouture's review contained other errors, as he notes in his corrections. Thus he attributed to "texts distributed in Phnom Penh" what in fact appear to be slogans remembered by refugees, again a rather considerable difference. None of the examples he quotes is specifically attributed by Ponchaud.

In his corrections, Lacouture raises the questions whether precision on these matters is very important. "Faced with an enterprise as monstrous as the new Cambodian Government, should we see the main problem as one of deciding exactly which person uttered an inhuman phrase, and whether the regime has murdered thousands of hundreds or thousands of wretched people?" He adds that it hardly matters what were the exact numbers of the victims of Dachau of Katyn. Or perhaps, we may add, whether the victims of My Lai numbered in the hundreds or tens of thousands, if a factor of 100 is unimportant.

If, indeed, postwar Cambodia is, as he believes, similar to Nazi Germany, then his comment is perhaps just, though we may add that he has produced no evidence to support this judgement. But if postwar Cambodia is more similar to France after liberation, where many thousands of people were massacred within a few months under far less rigorous conditions than those left by the American war, then perhaps a rather different judgement is in order. That the latter conclusion may be more nearly correct is suggested by the analyses mentioned earlier.

We disagree with Lacouture's judgement on the importance of precision on this question. It seems to us quite important, at this point in our understanding, to distinguish between official government texts and memories of slogans reported by refugees, between the statement that the regime "boasts" of having "killed" 2 million people and the claim by Western sources that something like a million have died -- particularly, when the bulk of these deaths are plausibly attributable to the United States. Similarly, it seems to us a very important question whether an "inhuman phrase" was uttered by a Thai reporter or a Khmer Rouge official. As for the numbers, it seems to us quite important to determine whether the number of collaborators massacred in France was on the order of thousands, and whether the French Government ordered and organized the massacre. Exactly such questions arise in the case of Cambodia.

* * *

We do not pretend to know where the truth lies amidst these sharply conflicting assessments; rather, we again want to emphasize some crucial points. What filters through to the American public is a seriously distorted version of the evidence available, emphasizing alleged Khmer Rouge atrocities and downplaying or ignoring the crucial U.S. role, direct and indirect, in the torment that Cambodia has suffered. Evidence that focuses on the American role, like the Hildebrand and Porter volume, is ignored, not on the basis of truthfulness or scholarship but because the message is unpalatable.

It is a fair generalization that the larger the number of deaths attributed to the Khmer Rouge, and the more the U.S. role is set aside, the larger the audience that will be reached. The Barron-Paul volume is a third-rate propaganda tract, but its exclusive focus on Communist terror assures it a huge audience. Ponchaud's far more substantial work has an anti-Communist bias and message, but it has attained stardom only via the extreme anti-Khmer Rouge distortions added to it in the article in the New York Review of Books. The last added the adequately large numbers executed and gave a "Left" authentication of Communist evil that assured a quantum leap to the mass audience unavailable to Hildebrand and Porter or to Carol Bragg. Contrary facts and even authors' corrections of misstatements are generally ignored or inadequately reported in favor of a useful lesson (we note one exception: an honest retraction of an editorial based on Lacouture in the Boston Globe. We noted earlier that the Monitor editorial and other press comments built on the Lacouture review offer at best a fourth-hand account. The chain of transmission runs from refugees (or Thai or U.S. officials), to Ponchaud, to the New York Review, to the press, where a mass audience is reached and "facts" are established that enter the approved version of history.

Grand Street Magazine, Autumn 1985

In his imperishable Treatise on the Art of Political Lying, published in 1714, Dr. John Arbuthnot laid down a standard for falsifiers and calumniators that has yet to be excelled:

Detractory or defamatory lies should not be quite opposite to the qualities the person is supposed to have. Thus it will not be found according to the sound rules of pseudology to report of a pious and religious prince that he neglects his devotions and would introduce heresy; but you may report of a merciful Prince that he has pardoned a criminal who did not deserve it.

Sixteen years ago I went to the Examination Schools at Oxford University to hear Professor Noam Chomsky deliver the John Locke Lectures. The series was chiefly concerned with modern theories of grammar, syntax, and linguistics, but Chomsky attached a condition which the syndics of the university could not easily decline. He insisted on devoting one entire, self-contained lecture to the American war in Indochina and to the collusion of "academic experts" in an enterprise which was, he maintained, debauching America even as it savaged Vietnam.

Several things intrigued me about the stipulation. First, I liked the way Chomsky separated his political statement from his obligation as a guest lecturer rather than, as was and is the style at Oxford, pretending to objectivity while larding the discourse with heavily sarcastic political "pointers." There was no imported agenda of the kind one got from Hugh Trevor-Roper, Max Beloff, or John Sparrow. Second, I was impressed by his insistence, which was the inverse of the shifty practice of Tory and liberal scholars, that academics could and should have a role in political life but should state their allegiance squarely. It had, after all, been only a few months since Gilbert Ryle had told us, as we clamored about the crushing of Czechoslovakia, "What can we do? We are philosophers, not lifeboat men." That there was something wrong with the Rylean bleat I was certain. What it was, I was not sure. Chomsky seemed to suggest that you need not politicize the academy in order to take a stand, but that if you did not take a stand, then you were being silent about a surreptitious politicization of it. To the hundreds of us who broke the habit of many terms and for once attended lectures consistently and on time, he seemed to have a measured, unshakable, but still passionate manner that contrasted rather well with the ardent ultraleft confusion and the creepy conservative evasions that were competing at the time.

Still, Chomsky was unmistakably on the left, though he scorned the sectarians and the know-alls. In those days, also, you could read him everywhere; his name had a kind of cachet. He was interviewed with respect on television and radio, though more often abroad than in America. He was a seminal contributor to The New York Review of Books. His predictions about a widening of the Indochina war, and a consequent narrowing of the choices between a Sovietization of the peninsula and an utter devastation of it, now seem almost banal in their accuracy. Nineteen sixty-nine was before Nixon's "madman theory," before Kissinger's "decent interval," before the Christmas bombing, the Church Committee, the "plumbers," and all the rest of it. Tumultuous as it seemed at the time, the period in retrospect appears an age of innocence. The odd thing -- and I wonder why it didn't occur to me more forcefully then -- was that, the more Chomsky was vindicated, the less he seemed to command "respect." To the extent that I reflected about this at all, I put it down to shifts in fashion ("Chomsky? -- a sixties figure"), to the crisis undergone by many superficial antiwar commentators when the American war was succeeded by Spartan regimes (of which more later), and to the fact that Chomsky had started to criticize the Israelis, seldom a prudent course for those seeking the contemplative life.

As "wound healing" went on in American society, and as we were being bidden to a new age where "self-doubt and self-criticism" were things of the past, and just as I was wondering whether one would admire an individual who had put self-doubt and self-criticism behind him, Oxford struck back at Noam Chomsky. In the 1983 Biographical Companion to Modern Thought, edited by Alan Bullock, there appeared a 550-word entry under Chomsky, Avram Noam. Of these 550 words, the most immediately arresting were those which maintained that he had

forfeited authority as a political commentator by a series of actions widely regarded as ill-judged (repeated polemics minimising the Khmer Rouge atrocities in Cambodia; endorsement of a book -- which Chomsky admitted he had not read -- that denied the historical reality of the Jewish Holocaust).

The piece was written by Geoffrey Sampson, an academic nonentity who made various other incautious allegations and who later, while engaged in an exchange with my friend Alexander Cockburn [The Nation, December 22, 1984, and March 2, 1985], strolled into the propellers and was distributed into such fine particles that he has never been heard from again.

Elsewhere in his entry, Sampson alluded foolishly to "relationships between the academic and political sides of Chomsky's thought," going so far as to say that "Chomsky has sometimes made such links explicit, for instance in arguing that Lockean empiricist philosophy paved the way for imperialism," and concluding lamely that "recently, however, Chomsky has insisted on a rigid separation between the two aspects of his work." This, insofar as it was not a simple-minded non sequitur, I knew to be flatly untrue from my attendance at the John Locke Lectures in 1969. In a 1985 article in The New Criterion, Sampson made an equally false claim about threats of legal action against his person from Chomsky, succeeded in convincing only its editor, the too-credulous Hilton Kramer, and the undiscriminating Martin Peretz, of The New Republic, of his veracity, was made to apologize by Cockburn, and, as I said, disappeared like breath off a razor blade.

My curiosity was ignited, not at first by the debate over the integrity of the Bullock crib, but by the fact that anything so cavalier and crude had been published at all. Bullock and his deputies are nothing if not respecters of persons. And we live in a world where fact checkers, subeditors, and (except for people like Chomsky, who eschew them on principle) libel lawyers work mightily to protect reputations on both sides of the Atlantic. How came it that Noam Chomsky, among the few Americans of his generation to lay claim to the title of original thinker, could be treated in such an offhand way? As I later found, Chomsky had written to a stoically indifferent Bullock:

If you would have the time or interest to look into the matter, I would be intrigued to hear your opinion about what the reaction would be under the circumstance that such scurrilous lies were to appear in a biographical dictionary -- or were to be published in a book by a reputable publisher such as Oxford or Fontana -- about a person who is not known as a political dissident.

All this began to interest me at about the turn of the New Year. In the following weeks, without even trying, I was able to glean the following merely from the journals and papers to which I subscribe in the ordinary way:

As the Khmer Rouge were about to take over, Noam Chomsky wrote that their advent heralded a Cambodian liberation, "a new era of economic development and social justice. " (David Horowitz and Peter Collier, The Washington Post Sunday Magazine, April 8, 1985)

To justify his assertion that American political science is corrupt (a very serious charge), he [Philip Grant] quotes from Noam Chomsky and other supporters of the North Vietnamese cause in the Vietnam war, who attacked those leaders of political science in America who were either impartial in their attitude to that war or were sympathetic to the cause of South Vietnam. (Professor Maurice Cranston, Letters, The Times Literary Supplement April 5, 1985)

Who among them [leaders of the antiwar movement] has been willing to suggest that the murder of a million or more Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge might have been averted if American military force had not been removed from Indochina? If any of them spoke out this way, I missed it. But I did hear Noam Chomsky seek to prove the Cambodian genocide hadn't happened. (Fred Barnes, Senior Editor, The New Republic, April 29, 1985)

Nor was this all. Without digging very much further, I found that the London Spectator had just published an article by Richard West on September 29, 1984, which lustily indicted

the Communists and their apologists in the West like the odious Noam Chomsky. When Vietnam invaded Cambodia and let the world see the proof and magnitude of the Khmer Rouge crime, the Chomskys were able to turn to Sideshow for an explanation: the Khmer Rouge were the creation of Nixon and Kissinger. The atrocities in Cambodia were used to justify not only the Vietnamese invasion but their remaining as an occupying power.

This comment appeared in a review of The Quality of Mercy, which, like Sideshow, was written by William Shawcross. On page 55 of The Quality of Mercy, which was published in the fall of 1984, appears the following, as an explanation of relative Western indifference toward the Calvary in Cambodia. Of the assumed indifference, Shawcross wrote:

Through 1976 and 1977 and especially in 1978 the Western press's coverage of Cambodia increased. Nonetheless, the issue never reached critical mass. I did not write enough myself. And there was no broadly based campaign of protest in the West as there was, say, over abuses of human rights in Chile.

One reason for this was the skepticism (to use a mild word) displayed by the Western left toward the stories coming out of Democratic Kampuchea. That skepticism was most fervently and frequently expressed by Noam Chomsky, the linguistic philosopher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He asserted that from the moment of the Khmer Rouge victory in 1975 the Western press collaborated with Western and anti-Communist Asian governments, notably Thailand, to produce a vast and unprecedented" campaign of propaganda against the Khmer Rouge.

It seems that Chomsky is impaled on some kind of inquisitorial fork here. He is accused of leaning on Shawcross, who in turn accuses him of culpable complacency, if not outright intellectual complicity. Then there is the bland assertion by the editors of The New Republic, on December 24, 1984:

This is also a very old controversy, which Mr. Chomsky has sought to confuse over the years by tossing adjectives like "brazen" and "scurrilous" at critics who recognize both Pol Pot's crimes and the efforts to whitewash the Nazi genocide for what they are.

After reading which, Martin Peretz's flat assertion earlier that "Noam Chomsky's views are quite mad" seems a mere grace note. Reaching for the denunciation of last resort, Peretz yelled that "even in circles which had once revered him, Mr. Chomsky is now seen as a crank and an embarrassment."

As I said, I found all these references with no more effort than it takes to keep up with he weeklies. And I can count William Shawcross and Richard West among my friends, The Spectator and The Times Literary Supplement among my employers, David Horowitz and Fred Barnes among my distant nodding acquaintances. No real "research," in other words. was needed to amass these confident citations. But a little work was required to establish a small fact. Not one of the extracts quoted above, whether you take them "in their context" or out of it, contains any approximation to the truth. I lay down my pen and look at what I have just written. Have I the blind spot or have they? Have I discounted enough for my own prejudices? Should I say here that Noam Chomsky once gave a book of mine a very decent review? That I have met him three times and found him sane? All these allowances made, I still maintain that we are in the territory so deftly mapped by Dr. Arbuthnot -- and by Ryszard Kapuscinski in Shah of Shahs;

What should one write to ruin an adversary? The best thing is to prove that he is not one of us -- the stranger, alien, foreigner. To this end we create the category of the true family. We here, you and I, the authorities, are a true family. We live in unity, among our own kind. We have the same roof over our heads, we sit at the same table, we know how to get along with each other, how to help each other out. Unfortunately, we are not alone.

The gravamen of the bill against Noam Chomsky is this. That, first, he did euphemize and minimize the horrors of the Khmer Rouge. That, second, he did "endorse" or otherwise recommend a pamphlet or paper that sought to prove the Nazi Holocaust a fiction. That, third, he is an enemy of the Jewish state and a friend to footpads and terrorists of every stripe. This is what "everybody" knows about the lonely, derided linguist who no doubt blames America first and is a self-hating Jew into the bargain. Never was an open society better insulated from dissent. In Britain, he would be dismissed as "brilliant but unsound; doesn't know when to stop." In the United States, it takes a little more than that to encompass the destruction of a reputation.

The best procedure must be the tedious one: to take the accusations in order, and to put them at their strongest. Let me arrange them as did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, with the suspicions uppermost.


The Case of the Cambodian Genocide
David Horowitz and Peter Collier were wrong, in the syndicated article announcing their joint conversion to neoconservatism, to say that Chomsky hailed the advent of the Khmer Rouge as "a new era of economic development and social justice." The Khmer Rouge took power in 1975. In 1972, Chomsky wrote an introduction to Dr. Malcolm Caldwell's collection of interviews with Prince Norodom Sihanouk. In this introduction, he expressed not the prediction but the pious hope that Sihanouk and his supporters might preserve Cambodia for "a new era of economic development and social justice." You could say that this was naive of Chomsky, who did not predict the 1973 carpet-bombing campaign or the resultant rise of a primitive, chauvinist guerrilla movement. But any irony here would appear to be at the expense of Horowitz and Collier. And the funny thing is that, if they had the words right, they must have had access to the book. And if they had access to the book.... Well, many things are forgiven those who see the error of their formerly radical ways.

The Richard West-William Shawcross fork also proves, on investigation, to be blunt in both prongs. Chomsky and Shawcross have this much in common: that they both argue for and demonstrate the connection between the Nixon-Kissinger bombing and derangement of Cambodian society and the nascence of the Khmer Rouge. It is not the case that Chomsky borrowed this idea from Shawcross, however. He first went to press on the point in 1972, seven years before Sideshow was published, with an account supplied by the American correspondent Richard Dudman of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Dudman is one of the few people to have been both a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge and a chronicler of his own detention. His testimony indicated a strong connection between American tactics in the countryside of Cambodia and the recruitment of peasants to the guerrilla side. (Imagine the strain of composing an account that denied such a connection.)

This more or less disposes of West, who has simply got the order of things the wrong way about and added some random insults. The case of Shawcross is more complicated. In his The Quality of Mercy, he quotes three full paragraphs apparently from Chomsky's pen, though he does not give a source. The three paragraphs do not express "skepticism" about the massacres in Cambodia, but they do express reservations about some of the accounts of them. They also argue that the advent of the Khmer Rouge should be seen in the historical context of the much less ballyhooed American aerial massacres a few years earlier -- a point which the author of Sideshow is in a weak position to scorn. Finally, the three paragraphs convey a sardonic attitude toward those who claim that it "took courage" to mention the Khmer Rouge atrocities at all.

But mark the sequel. The three paragraphs as quoted do not appear anywhere. They are rudely carpentered together, without any ellipses to indicate gaps in the attribution, from the summary and introduction to Volume 1 of The Political Economy of Human Rights, which was written by Noam Chomsky and Professor Edward Herman of the Wharton School of Business. The book went to press in 1979, after the forcible overthrow of the Pol Pot regime. Thus, even if the paragraphs were quoted and sourced properly, and even if they bore the construction that Shawcross puts on them, they could hardly have contributed to the alleged indifference of civilized opinion "throughout 1976 and 1977 and especially in 1978" or inhibited the issue from reaching "critical mass." Since Shawcross lists the book, with its date, in his bibliography, the discrepancy can hardly be due to ignorance.

As for the gratuitous insinuation about protest over Chile, I can't help recording that one of the anti-Khmer Rouge blockbusters with which the American public was regaled came in TV Guide (circulation 19 million) in April 1977 and was written by Ernest Lefever. Lefever had earlier told Congress that it should be more "tolerant" of the "mistakes" of the Pinochet regime in attempting to "clear away the devastation of the Allende period." He also wrote, in The Miami Herald, of the "remarkable freedom of expression" enjoyed in the new Chile. In 1981, Lefever proved too farouche to secure nomination as Reagan's Under Secretary for Human Rights.

William Shawcross enjoys his reputation for honesty. And so I have had to presume that his book represents his case at its most considered. Why, then, if he has room for three paragraphs from Chomsky and Herman, does he not quote the equally accessible sentences, published in The Nation on June 25, 1977, where they describe Father Francois Ponchaud's Cambodia: Year Zero as "serious and worth reading," with its "grisly account of what refugees have reported to him about the barbarity of their treatment at the hands of the Khmer Rouge"?

Chomsky and Herman were engaged in the admittedly touchy business of distinguishing evidence from interpretation. They were doing so in the aftermath of a war which had featured tremendous, organized, official lying and many cynical and opportunist "bloodbath" predictions. There was and is no argument about mass murder in Cambodia: there is still argument about whether the number of deaths, and the manner in which they were inflicted, will warrant the use of the term "genocide' or even "autogenocide." Shawcross pays an implicit homage to this distinction, a few pages later, when he admits that Jean Lacouture, in his first "emotional" review of Father Ponchaud, greatly exaggerated the real number of Khmer Rouge executions. These errors, writes Shawcross, "were seized upon by Noam Chomsky, who circulated them widely. In a subsequent issue of The New York Review, Lacouture corrected himself. Not all of those who had reported his mea culpa published his corrections. Chomsky used the affair as part of his argument that the media were embarked on an unjustified blitz against the Khmer Rouge."

If this paragraph has any internal coherence -- and I have given it in its entirety -- it must lead the reader to suppose that Chomsky publicized Lacoutre's mea culpa without acknowledging his corrections. But in The Political Economy of Human Rights there is an exhaustive presentation of the evolution of Lacoutre's position, including both his mea culpa and his corrections and adding some complimentary remarks about his work. Incidentally, Lacouture reduced his own estimate of deaths from "two million" to "thousands or hundreds of thousands." Is this, too, "minimization of atrocities"?

Ironies here accumulate at the expense of Chomsky's accusers. A close analysis of Problems of Communism and of the findings of State Department intelligence and many very conservative Asia specialists will yield a figure of deaths in the high hundreds of thousands. Exorbitant figures (i.e. those oscillating between two and three million) are current partly because Radio Moscow and Radio Hanoi now feel free to denounce the Pol Pot forces (which now, incredibly, receive official American recognition) in the most abandoned fashion. Chomsky wrote that, while the Vietnamese invasion and occupation could be understood, it could not be justified. May we imagine what might be said about his complicity with Soviet-bloc propaganda if he were now insisting on the higher figure? For both of these failures to conform, he has been assailed by Leopold Labedz in Encounter, who insists on three million as a sort of loyalty test, but, since that magazine shows a distinct reluctance to correct the untruths it publishes -- as I can testify from my own experience -- its readers have not been exposed to a reply.

Chomsky and Herman wrote that "the record of atrocities in Cambodia is substantial and often gruesome." They even said, "When the facts are in, it may turn out that the more extreme condemnations were in fact correct." The facts are now more or less in, and it turns out that the two independent writers were as close to the truth as most, and closer than some. It may be distasteful, even indecent, to argue over "body counts," whether the bodies are Armenian, Jewish, Cambodian, or (to take a case where Chomsky and Herman were effectively alone in their research and their condemnation) Timorese. But the count must be done, and done seriously, if later generations are not to doubt the whole slaughter on the basis of provable exaggerations or inventions.

Maurice Cranston's letter to The Times Literary Supplement, with its unexamined assumption that Chomsky was a partisan of North Vietnam, falls apart with even less examination. In 1970, Chomsky wrote up his tour of the region for The New York Review of Books and said:

It is conceivable that the United States may be able to break the will of the popular movements in the surrounding countries, perhaps even destroy the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, by employing the vast resources of violence and terror at its disposal. If so, it will create a situation in which, indeed, North Vietnam will necessarily dominate Indochina, for no other viable society will remain.

I think of that article whenever I read wised-up Western newsmen who dwell upon the "ironic" fact that the North Vietnamese, not the NLF, now hold power in Ho Chi Minh City. It takes real ingenuity to blame this on the antiwar movement, but, with a little creative amnesia and a large helping of self-pity for the wounds inflicted by the war (on America), the job can by plausibly done.

Finally, to Fred Barnes, recruited to The New Republic from The Baltimore Sun and The American Spectator. I wrote to him on the day that his article appeared, asking to know where he heard Chomsky say such a thing. I received no reply until I was able to ask for it in person two months later. I then asked him to place it in writing. It read as follows:

I sat next to Noam Chomsky at a seminar at Lippmann House (of the Nieman Foundation) of Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., in 1978. On the matter of Genocide in Cambodia, the thrust of what he said was that there was no evidence of mass murder there. As I recall, he was rather adamant on the point. He had, by this time, I believe, written a letter or two to The New York Review of Books making the same point. Chomsky seemed to believe that tales of holocaust in Cambodia were so much propaganda. He said, on another point, that there was an effort underway to rewrite the history of the Indochinese war -- in a way more favorable to the U.S. Perhaps he thought the notion of genocide in Cambodia was part of that effort.

Since this meeting took place in the year after Chomsky and Herman had written their Nation article, and in the year when they were preparing The Political Economy of Human Rights, we can probably trust the documented record at least as much as Mr. Barnes's recollection. And there was no letter from Chomsky about Cambodia in The New York Review of Books. It is interesting, and perhaps suggestive, that Barnes uses the terms "genocide," "holocaust," and "mass murder" as if they were interchangeable. His last two sentences demonstrate just the sort of cuteness for which his magazine is becoming famous.

Here is the story, as far as I can trace it, of Chomsky's effort to "minimize" or "deny" the harvest of the Khmer Rouge. It will be seen that the phony "credibility" of the charge against him derives from his lack of gullibility about the American mass killings in Indochina (routinely euphemized or concealed by large sections of the domestic intelligentsia). From this arises the idea that Chomsky might have said such things; was the sort of person who could decline to criticize "the other side"; was a well-known political extremist. Couple this with the slothful ease of the accusation, the reluctance of certain authors to prove they are not unpatriotic dupes, and you have a scapegoat in the making. Dr. Arbuthnot was right. Nobody would believe that Chomsky advocated a massacre. But they might be brought to believe that he excused or overlooked one.

The Case of the Negated Holocaust

Here, Dr. Arbuthnot gives way to Ryszard Kapuscinski. The tactic is not to circulate a part-untruth so much as it is to associate the victim with an unpardonable out-group, against which preexisting revulsion and contempt can be mobilized.

My tutor at Oxford was Dr. Steven Lukes, a brilliant and humane man with an equal commitment to scholarship and to liberty. His books on Durkheim, on power, on utopianism, and on Marxism and morality are, as people tend to say, landmarks in their field. He took me as his guest to one of Chomsky's private seminars in that spring of 1969. When, in 1980, he told me that Chomsky had written an introduction to a book by a Nazi apologist, and that the book described the extermination of the Jews as a Zionist lie, I was thunderstruck. Like Noam Chomsky, Steven Lukes is Jewish. Like Chomsky, he was and is much opposed to the usurpation of Israel by the heirs of Jabotinsky. But this seemed incomprehensible. The political rights of hateful persons was one question (rather a vexed one in the British case, where the police and not the courts usually decide who may or may not speak in public), but keeping company with them was quite another. More, it appeared that Chomsky had dignified this character's book with a preface and had not even bothered to read the text he was decorating. I admit that I allowed myself a reflection or two about the potentially harmful effects on Chomsky of his political and personal isolation on the Middle East.

When I began to write this article, I wrote to Lukes at Balliol and asked him to furnish me with the background material to l'affaire Faurisson. I also pursued all the other references in print. I do not read French very well, but I have studied Nadine Fresco's famous article "The Denial of the Dead," adapted in Dissent from Les Temps modernes; Pierre Vidal-Naquet's "A Paper Eichmann?" reprinted in Democracy; and Arno J. Mayer's "Explorations" column on the same theme in the same magazine. There is also Paul Berman's article in The Village Voice of June 10, 1981, "Gas Chamber Games: Crackpot History and the Right to Lie," which is a sort of macedoine of the first three.

Let us not waste any time on Robert Faurisson. He is an insanitary figure who maintains contact with neo-Nazi circles and whose project is the rehabilitation, in pseudoscholarly form, of the Third Reich. How he came to be appointed in the first place I cannot imagine (from what I have seen his literary criticism is pitiful), but in 1979 he was a teacher in good standing of French literature at the University of Lyons. If, like our own Arthur Butz, who publishes "historical revisionist" garbage from Northwestern University, he had been left to stew in his own sty, we might have heard no more of him. But in that year he published an article entitled " `The Problem of the Gas Chambers' or the Rumor of Auschwitz.' " The whole appeared in Maurice Bardeche's sheet, Defense de l'Occident, and extracts were reprinted in Le Monde. Faurisson summarized his conclusions in a supplement:

(1) Hitler's "gas chambers" never existed. (2) The "genocide" (or the "attempted genocide") of the Jews never took place; clearly, Hitler never ordered (nor permitted) that someone be killed for racial or religious reasons. (3) The alleged gas chambers and the alleged "genocide' are one and the same lie. (4) This lie, essentially of Zionist origin, permitted a gigantic politico-financial swindle whose principal beneficiary is the State of Israel. (5) The principal victims of this lie and swindle are the Germans and the Palestinians.

The rest of the "supplement" concerned the sinister ways in which the media had prevented these truths from becoming generally known.

I have no idea whether Faurisson hoped to attract unpleasant attention by the publication of this stuff, but the consequences were fairly immediate. His sternist critic, Nadine Fresco, records: "At Lyons, there were displays of antipathy and Faurisson was lightly molested by Jewish students. Consequently, the president of the university chose to suspend his classes." Fresco slightly minimizes (if that is the word I want) the fact that a subsequent suit, brought against Faurisson for "falsification of history" and for allowing others to use his work for their own fell purposes, was successful and he was condemned by a French court.

In the early stages of this process, Chomsky received a request, from his friend Serge Thion, that he add his name to a petition upholding Faurisson's right to free expression. This, on standard First Amendment grounds and in company with many others, he did. The resulting uproar, in which he was accused of defending Faurisson's theses, led to another request from Thion. Would Chomsky write a statement asserting the right to free speech even in the case of the most loathsome extremist? To this he also assented, pointing out that it was precisely such cases that tested the adherence of a society to such principles and adding in a covering letter that Thion could make what use of it he wished. At this stage, only the conservative Alfred Grosser among French intellectuals had been prepared to say that Faurisson's suspension by the University of Lyons set a bad example of academic courage and independence. Chomsky's pedantic recitation of Voltairean principles would probably have aroused no comment at all had Thion not taker rather promiscuous advantage of the permission to use it as he wished. Without notification to Chomsky, he added the little essay as an avis to Faurisson's pretrial Memiore en defense.

Chomsky's seven-page comment received more attention in the international press, as Paul Berman noted, than any other piece of work for which he had been responsible. Let me summarize those reactions, which are still worth quoting and which are still (when occasion demands) being repeated:

Poor Chomsky, innocent victim of a quasi-Pavlovian automatism. Someone mentions "rights," he signs. Someone says "freedom of speech," he signs. He goes even further with the famous preface (which is not really a preface, though it strangely resembles one) to Faurisson's Memoire en defense. The press seized on the event, and I leave to others the delicate pleasure of pinpointing the ambiguities and contradictions that run through Chomsky's comments about the preface. But it is important to emphasize that the Faurisson affair is not an issue of legal rights. (Nadine Fresco, Dissent, Fall 1981)

Chomsky -- who, breaking with his usual pattern, praised the traditions of American support for civil liberties. . . . (Ibid.)

Regrettably, Faurisson's new book has an unconscionable preface by Noam Chomsky that is being used to legitimate Faurisson at a bona-fide scholar of the Holocaust. As an unqualified civil libertarian Chomsky claims -- disingenuously -- that he has not read the book he is prefacing! (Arno J. Mayer, Democracy, April 1981)

Certain people have rallied to Faurisson's defense for reasons of principle. A petition that includes several hundred signatures, among the first those of Noam Chomsky and Alfred Lilienthal, protests against the treatment that Faurisson has received. It implicitly describes his activities as authentic historical research: "Since 1974, he has been conducting extensive independent research into the Holocaust question," and continues by confirming what is not true, namely, that "frightened officials have tried to stop him from further research by denying him access to public libraries and archives." What is scandalous about this petition is that it doesn't for one moment ask whether what Faurisson says is true or false; and it even describes his findings as though they were the result of serious historical research. Of course, it can be contended that everybody has the right to lie and "bear false witness," a right that is inseparable from the liberty of the individual and recognized, in the liberal tradition, as due the accused for his defense. But the right that a "false witness" may claim should not be granted him in the name of truth. (Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Democracy, April 1981)

Of these criticisms, the most nearly fair seems to me the one offered by Vidal-Naquet (an early hero of mine because of his book on torture in Algeria). But he is wrong on one factual point. Fresco herself confirmed, and justified, the refusal of certain archivists and documentation centers to permit access to Faurisson. And he is at risk in his distinction between truth and false witness, a distinction which Milton understood better in Aeropagitica when he argued that the two must be allowed to confront one another if truth is to prevail. There is therefore no obligation, in defending or asserting the right to speak, to pass any comment on the truth or merit of what may be, or is being, said. This is elementary.

Also rather unsafe is the injunction (employed above most crudely by Vidal-Naquet's colleague Arno Mayer) to be careful of the use that may be made of one's remarks or signatures. Elsewhere in the same essay, for example, Vidal-Naquet asserts, "In the case of the genocide of Jews, it is perfectly evident that one of the Jewish ideologies, Zionism, exploits this terrible massacre in a way that is at times quite "scandalous." Scandalous -- the same word that he attaches to Chomsky's signature on a petition. But he supplies the corrective himself -- "that an ideology seizes upon a fact does not make this fact inexistent." Precisely. And the "fact" here is that Chomsky defended not Faurisson's work but his right to research and publish it. Vidal-Naquet undoubtedly knows better than to resort to the old Stalinist "aid and comfort" ruse. Where, then, is the core of his objection?

Does this not leave Arno Mayer, also, in some difficulty? The fact that neo-Nazis may have seized upon Noam Chomsky's civil-libertarian defense does not, of itself, make that defense invalid. Or, if it does, then by himself seizing upon what they have seized upon, Mayer is "objectively" associating civil-libertarian principles with the Nazis -- an unintended compliment that the latter scarcely deserve. Vidal-Naquet's point about Zionism's exploitation of the Holocaust could, if cleverly enough ripped from its context, be used to support point (4) in Faurisson's "supplement" above. Who but a malicious falsifier would make such a confusion as to who was in whose galere?

I wouldn't accuse any of the critics listed here of deliberate falsification. But it is nevertheless untrue to describe Chomsky's purloined avis as a preface, as Fresco does on almost a dozen occasions and as Mayer does twice. It is also snide, at best, to accuse Chomsky of "breaking with his usual pattern" in praising "the traditions of American support for civil liberty." He has, as a matter of record, upheld these traditions more staunchly than most -- speaking up for the right of extremist academics like [Walter] Rostow, for example, at a time during the Vietnam War when some campuses were too turbulent to accommodate them. It is irrelevant, at least, to do as Fresco also does and mention Voltaire's anti-Semitism. (As absurd a suggestion, in the circumstances, as the vulgar connection between Locke and imperialism.) Would she never quote Voltaire? Finally, she says that no question of legal rights arises because the suit against Faurisson was "private." What difference does that make? An authoritarian law, giving the state the right to pronounce on truth, is an authoritarian law whoever invokes it.

Chomsky can be faulted here on three grounds only. First, for giving a power of attorney to Serge Thion, who seems rather a protean and quicksilvery fellow. Second, for once unguardedly describing Faurisson as "a sort of relatively apolitical liberal." Admittedly, this came in the context of an assertion that Faurisson's opinions were a closed book to him; still, all the more reason not to speculate. The whole point is that Faurisson's opinions are not the point. Third, for attempting at the last minute, when he discovered too late that he was being bound into the same volume as a work he had not read, to have his commentary excised. He writes of this that "in the climate of hysteria among Paris intellectuals it would be impossible to distinguish defense of the man's right to express his views from endorsement of these views." Maybe. But Voltairean precepts involve precisely the running of that risk.

This is still nothing to do with "endorsement" and explains the repeated feverish sarcasm with which his critics claim that he had not "even read the endorsed" volume. Again, the irony would seem to be at their expense. An unread book is an unendorsed one, unless one assumes that Chomsky would endorse any Holocaust revisionist on principle -- an allegation so fantastic that it has not "even" been made. If, by any action or statement, Chomsky had hinted at sympathy for Faurisson's views, I think that we would know about it by now. The recurring attempt, therefore, to bracket him with the century's most heinous movement must be adjudged a smear. And the wider attempt -- to classify all critics of Israel as infected or compromised with anti-Semitism -- is, of course, itself a trivialization of the Holocaust.


The Case of the Forgotten War

Chomsky's evolving position on the Middle East conflict is the source of much of his unpopularity and (one sometimes suspects) the cause of much of the spite with which he is attacked on other issues. But where are the baying hounds this time? I can offer no lists of critics, no litany of denunciations. Chomsky wrote a book of more than 450 pages that was devoted to the United States and the Lebanese war of 1982, and what do you think? There was barely a squeak.

An unreviewed book is no rare thing in the United States, There is usually some explanation for the nonevent. The author may be obscure, or the subject arcane, or the issue dead, or the "issue" too widely covered already. Again, there may be no qualified reviewer in sight, so that, rather than assign the volume to an amateur, the books department may blushfully "pass" on the whole idea. A version of the same procedure is sometimes followed when no reviewer with a big enough "name" is on hand. And there are postal delays, crowded schedules, demands on inelastic space. Everyone remotely connected with "the trade" understands this, even when the rough and the smooth seem to be insufficiently random in their distribution. A good advertising budget has been known to help, but nobody is so coarse as to insinuate that it determines anything much.

These well-known vagaries and mutabilities cannot explain why, in the fall of 1983, Chomsky's book The Fateful Triangle was treated as if it did not exist. Consider: One of America's best-known Jewish scholars, internationally respected, writes a lengthy, dense, highly documented book about United States policy in the Levant. The book is acidly critical of Israeli policy and of the apparently limitless American self-deception as to its true character. It quotes sources in Hebrew and French as well as in English. It is published at a time when hundreds of United States marines have been killed in Beirut and when the President is wavering in his commitment, which itself threatens to become a major election issue. It is the only book of its scope (we need make no judgment as to depth) to appear in the continental United States. The screens and the headlines are full of approximations and guesses on the subject. Yet, at this unusually fortunate juncture for publication, the following newspapers review it: (1) the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner; (2) The Boston Globe. In Los Angeles, Chomsky has an admirer who is also a local book reviewer. This man prevails after a struggle. In Boston, Chomsky is a well-known local figure. But that's it. Many months later, after its foal, the London Review of Books, has devoted many respectful columns to the book, and after almost every major newspaper and magazine in England, Canada, and Australia has done the same, The New York Review of Books publishes a "mixed review." This presumably takes care of the only other possible editorial excuse (itself significant) -- that The Fateful Triangle was published by a small radical house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, named South End Press.

Paranoia would be inappropriate here. After all, this was not 1973, when the first edition of Chomsky and Herman's The Political Economy of Human Rights was suppressed by its own publishers, Warner Communications, for making unpatriotic assertions about United States policy in Indochina and elsewhere. The twenty thousand copies might have been pulped if it were not for a legally binding contract. Instead they were sold to an obscure outfit named MSS Information Corporation, where upon Warner -- which later bid high for the Nixon memoirs -- washed its hands of the entire deal and of all responsibility for advertising, promotion, and distribution. Difficult to imagine that happening to anyone else of remotely comparable stature, but, as I say, 1983 was different. The book was out, and the foreign-policy intelligentsia had every chance to comment.

I confess that I have no ready explanation for the total eclipse that followed. The New York Times had found Chomsky interesting enough to publish two long and pitying articles about the Faurisson business. Other newspapers and magazines seem, as I suppose I have shown, to find him deserving of comment. I therefore rang a selection of literary editors and asked if they could explain their reticence on this occasion.

I began with The New Republic, because it is mentioned so often in The Fateful Triangle and because its editors had assured me at the time that they would not let the critique go unanswered. Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor, told me jauntily when I inquired:

The book was sent to reviewers. The first was too disgusted to review it. The second said that he would, and finally didn't, which frequently happens. I see no reason not to assign Chomsky's books for review, because I see no reason for him to be above criticism.

Editors at The New York Times Book Review and The Washington Post Book World were less ready to be quoted but quite ready to talk. From the Times I heard variously, "I think we tuned out on Noam after Vietnam," "It fell through the cracks," and "We never received the book." From the Post, I heard that "by the time we got all those letters protesting about not reviewing it, the book wasn't in local bookstores -- so we didn't." I also heard that there was some doubt about having received the copy in the first place.

Katha Pollitt, who was literary editor of The Nation at this time, told me that there were already too many books about the Middle East, that the "front half" of the magazine devoted plenty of space to the subject, and that she herself preferred to preserve her pages for articles on fiction, poetry, and feminism.

Joe Clark, then books editor at Dissent, told me, "My guess is that I didn't feel a very strong desire to review the book." He said he would "have needed an overpowering reason." Clearly, the frequent and scornful mention of Dissent in The Fateful Triangle did not supply this incentive. For the literary editor of The New Republic to say that he sees "no reason for [Chomsky] to be above criticism" is presumably a joke. For him to say that the first invited contributor was "too disgusted" to review the book is not. The first invited reviewer, as I know and as Wieseltier confirmed to me, was Ze'ev Schiff, military correspondent of Ha'aretz and coauthor of Israel's Lebanon War. "Disgust" is certainly not what he evinced when I spoke to him about the book in the summer of 1984.

A category mistake is involved in the Post explanation, unless the editors of that newspaper assume there to be no connection between their failure to review a book and its absence from Washington's bookstores. I like the idea, though, of their not giving in to letters from readers.

The Times may perhaps not have received a copy, though South End Press was doing nothing but lobby for its chief title between November and June, and claims to have sent four in all. Radical incompetence allowed for, what is there to prevent an editor from doing what editors do every day and requesting a copy?

Pollitt has a point, and even though the rules of fairness oblige me to be harder on a former colleague, I can't see a way through her candor.

So what it comes down to is this. Life is unfair, and though it does seem odd that such a book is ignored only in its country of origin (and the country whose state policy it attacks), the whole thing is easily explicable. Above all, it is nobody's fault. Does this mean that there is no reluctance to hear the bad news about the Middle East? Well, again, and whether or not you believe in cock-up rather than conspiracy -- a favorite evasion of the soothing commentator -- it does seem harder for some people to get an audience than others. Especially hard for the man who, according to Shawcross, enjoyed sufficient sway to confuse or silence the American press over the question of Cambodia.

Whether he is ignored, whether he is libeled, or whether he is subjected to an active campaign of abuse, Chomsky is attacked for things that he is thought to believe, or believed to have said. A lie, it has been written, can travel around the world before truth has even got its shoes on. Merely to list the accusations against Chomsky, whether they are made casually or with deliberation, is a relatively easy task. Showing their unfairness or want of foundation involves expense of ink on a scale which any reader who has got this far will know to his or her cost. Perhaps for this reason, not all the editors who publish matter about Chomsky ever quite get around to publishing his replies. I could write an ancillary article showing this in detail, with his answers either unpublished or unscrupulously abridged. And, of course, a man who writes a lot of letters to the editor soon gets a reputation, like Bellow's Herzog, as a crank, an eccentric, a fanatic. Whereas the absence of a reply is taken as admission of guilt. . .

Ought I to be "evenhanded" and indicate where I disagree with Chomsky myself? I don't really see why I ought. My differences with him concern things that he does believe and has said. I also dissent from him, quite often, concerning the way in which he says things and on his repeated misuse of the verb "to brutalize." I think he has sometimes been facile about Cold War "moral equivalence" as well. But this is between him and me, or him and any other political opponent or critic who observes the rules of evidence and debate.

For the recurrent way in which this is not done, and for the process whereby the complaisant mainstream and the conservative guardians actually agree not to hear what is being said about them and their system, we need a word. "Marginalization" is too merely descriptive. "Ghettoization" is too self-pitying. It may come to me.

The contemporary United States expresses the greatest of all paradoxes. It is at one and the same time a democracy -- at any rate a pluralist open society -- and an empire. No other country has ever been, or had, both things at once. Or not for long. And there must be some question about the durability of this present coexistence, too. Already spokesmen of the Reagan Administration say plainly that their foreign and military policy is incompatible with the disloyalty and division that stem from a deliberative Congress and an inquisitive press. They laughably exaggerate the reflective capacity of the first and the adversary character of the second, but they have a point. If it is to have the least chance of success, their strategy calls for an imposed national unanimity, a well-cultivated awareness of "enemies within," and a strong draft of amnesia.

The academy and the wealthy new batch of think tanks are awash with people who collude, at least passively, in the process. As C. Wright Mills once wrote:

Their academic reputations rest, quite largely, upon their academic power: they are the members of the committee; they are on the directing board; they can get you the job, the trip, the research grant. They are a strange new kind of bureaucrat. They are executives of the mind. . . . They could set up a research project or even a school, but I would be surprised, if, now after twenty years of research and teaching and observing and thinking, they could produce a book which told you what they thought was going on in the world, what they thought were the major problems for men of this historical epoch.

Not even Mills, or Chomsky in his "New Mandarins" essay, could have anticipated the world of the Heritage Foundation, of "Kissinger Associates," of numberless power-worshipping, power-seeking magazines and institutes interlocking across the dissemination of culture, priority, information, and opinion. But Mills did write, in 1942:

When events move very fast and possible worlds swing around them, something happens to the quality of thinking. Some men repeat formulae; some men become reporters. To time observation with thought so as to mate a decent level of abstraction with crucial happenings is a difficult problem.

Noam Chomsky has attempted, as a volunteer, necessarily imperfectly, to shoulder this responsibility at a time of widespread betrayal of it. And it must be an awed attitude to the new style -- a willingness to demonstrate flexibility in the face of so much pelf and so much cant -- that allows so many people to join in ridiculing him for doing so. As a philosophical anarchist, Chomsky might dislike to have it said that he had "done the state some service," but he a useful citizen in ways that his detractors are emphatically not.