This foundation to the Canon is composed of, among numerous other works, Laura Summers' "Consolidating the Revolution" (December 1975) and "Defining the Revolutionary State in Cambodia" (December 1976) in Current History, George C. Hildebrand's and Gareth Porter's sine qua non of the STAV: Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution (1976), Torben Retbøll's "Kampuchea and the Reader's Digest" in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars (July-September 1979) and Malcolm Caldwell's towering essay "Cambodia: Rationale for A Rural Policy" in Malcolm Cadwell's South-East Asia (1979). To this list chapter 3 will add Noam Chomsky's and Edward Herman's masterful "Distortions at Fourth Hand" in theNation (June 25, 1977) and After the Cataclysm (1979), though Chomsky and Herman are mindful to state that they are by no means defending the Khmer Rouge nor "pretend to know where the truth lies," though most of what they do is to rehash the Hildebrand and Porter line in a more palatable design. Together, they are a significant body of scholarship from the STAV.
Three works come to mind with respect to how different facets of the STAV has been explored previously, William Shawcross' essay "Cambodia: Some Perceptions of a Disaster," in Revolution and its Aftermath in Kampuchea (1983),[12] Stephen J. Morris' essay "Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, and Cornell" in the National Interest (Summer 1989), and Geoffrey C. Gunn and Jefferson Lee's Cambodia Watching Down Under (1991). Shawcross and Morris, two individuals one would expect to find on separate divides, essentially agree that the Left failed--for one reason or another--to become a moral force with respect to Cambodia until 1979. This while some on the Left, particularly those in STAV, zealously defended the Khmer revolution. Shawcross focuses on the Chomsky-Herman thesis, while Morris tackles Cornell's ties to the Khmer Rouge. Gunn and Lee offer a exhaustive though curiously insensitive view of the Australian connection to Democratic Kampuchea.
The context within which Khmer Rouge support incubated was the Vietnam War. To understand how students and scholars, presumed to be detached from peasant concerns, could have found solidarity with the peoples of Kampuchea and Indochina as a whole, one must first bear in mind the political atmosphere and conditioning from which grew the yoke of radical revolutionary support. It would be facile to strip the words of these academics from the context of history, a practice not unlike that being undertaken by current revisionists. But at the same time, these same activists cum academics must accept responsibility for how they reached their conclusions-- namely the validity and credibility of the evidence they unceremoniously attacked when at the same time they (quite hypocritically) accepted Khmer Rouge leaders Ieng Sary's or Khieu Samphan's utterances as words to live by. Notwithstanding the pro-revolutionary ideological framework from which they were taught to think, including the strife- ridden 1960s and 1970s, one must still wonder how those who studied Cambodia and ostensibly loved her most in the West, became supporters of her worst enemy?
By the 1970 Kent State killings of four students, these more extreme elements of the STAV saw U.S. intervention not only as a mistake that had to be stopped and stopped now, but increasingly inched toward the maquis. After the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1979, many of these activists, scholars, and academics were forced to choose between supporting their old friends, namely the Vietnamese communists or Democratic Kampuchea, which would have implicitly meant supporting the Khmer Rouge to varying degrees. That was what Gunn and Lee have called the "two-sided switch."[13] Yet even before that split, there was already division in the antiwar movement. Gunn and Lee describe it:
The first was the split within the left- liberal camp in the US. This was symbolized by the action of singer and civil rights activist Joan Baez in supporting a full page advertisement in the New York Times condemning Vietnam's re-education camps and human rights abuses. Her sources of information included recently resettled refugees in America who had undergone incarceration despite their anti-American activism and NLF sympathies in the pre- 1975 period. The result was splintering of the Indochina Lobby with pro-Hanoi hardliners increasingly condoning Vietnam's slide into the Moscow camp.[14]
Douglas Pike, Indochina Archive director at UC Berkeley, fondly recalls a conference of antiwar activists not long after the New York Times advertisement appeared which turned into a shouting match between doves who now could not agree with one another on whether to support or condemn Hanoi. He may have been facetious, but Pike, who became famous for being an outspoken State Department hawk, saw more fury between them than he had ever seen between hawks and doves. There was no lost love between either side, to be sure, but one would perhaps have expected more civility from "pacifists." As lines were drawn and crossed in the Third Indochina Conflict (the invasion of Cambodia by Vietnam), similar lines were drawn in the West as well, where a distinctly pro-Hanoi faction critical of the Khmer Rouge formed, leaving behind only the truest believers in Pol Pot (i.e., the last of STAV scholars).[15] Like F.A. Hayek's dedication of his classic 1944 treatise The Road to Serfdom to "Socialists of all parties," this thesis is about some of these same socialists.
Those who romanticized the Kampuchean revolution and upheld the standard total academic view in the years following "liberation" as they always referred it (covered in chapter 2), were young, idealistic scholars, like Laura Summers and Gareth Porter both from Cornell's South-East Asia Program (Albert Gore and Bill Clinton are from their generation), all of whom were baby boomers who had grown-up in the postwar era to a quagmire in Vietnam. This generation of Indochina academics, specialists on Cambodia, were very peculiar from those of the preceding generation, because they were far more mesmerized by the idea of a peasant revolution.
Chapter 2 of this thesis, entitled "Romanticizing the Khmer Revolution" is about the STAV scholars on Cambodia. It includes a brief review of Khmer Rouge leader Khieu Samphan's conclusions in his economics doctoral dissertation: "Cambodia's Economy and Problems of Industrialization,"[16] as a backdrop to why they may have gotten attracted to the Khmer Rouge. For instance, Laura Summers, who partially translated the thesis in 1976 for the Berkeley-based antiwar group Indochina Resource Center (later renamed Southeast Asia Resource Center, then eventually disbanded) had already expressed unflinching support for the revolution in late 1975 and 1976. Her articles in Current History, titled "Consolidating the Revolution" and "Defining the Revolutionary State" are reviewed. An overview of the arguments in Gareth Porter and George C. Hildebrand's Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, published in 1976 by the Marxist Monthly Review Press, follows Summers' articles.
Also discussed in chapter 2 is Malcolm Caldwell, a scholar Gunn and Lee bestow the dubious distinction of being "Democratic Kampuchea's leading academic supporter."[17] His life cut short by a Khmer Rouge's bullet (in a strange twist of fate), Caldwell was the founder of the Journal of Contemporary Asia, a periodical explicitly committed to supporting revolutionary movements in Asia and the author of Cambodia in the Southeast Asian War (1973) and several long essays on Cambodia's post- revolutionary development, such as "Cambodia: Rationale for a Rural Policy,"[18] published posthumously in 1979. The reader will see that the mistake made by each of these authors is academic. They question the validity of sources Khmer Rouge critics are using, but hypocritically take prima facie the claims by Khmer Rouge leaders like Ieng Sary and Khieu Samphan. They romanticize the revolution in the theoretically palatable thesis of Khieu Samphan, or Hou Youn, but do so at arms-length. Blinded by their own ideological biases, they believe themselves to be objective despite employing some very poor sources and methods.
In chapter 3, the Chomsky-Lacouture Controversy is reconstructed. It is more a Ponchaud- Barron-Paul-Lacouture- Chomsky-Herman Controversy, to be sure, but that would sound tediously long. In early 1977, François Ponchaud wrote the first book detailing the struggle, under socialism, of the Cambodian people. That year, Barron and Paul published their own book, Murder of a Gentle Land (1977) an equally if not more damning broadside against the Khmer revolution and the Khmer Rouge. Ponchaud and Barron- Paul were among the first to see to sound the alarm on Cambodia. In 1976, Ponchaud had written in Mondes Asiatiques about the nature of the Khmer revolution.[19] After publishing his book, it was reviewed favorably by Jean Lacouture, but that review got a broadside from the leading, most intellectually formidable member of the antiwar movement, Noam Chomsky. At the May Hearings in 1977 on Human Rights in Cambodia, Gareth Porter trashed Ponchaud his uncritical use of refugees in Cambodia: Year Zero. A polemical exchange ensued among Chomsky, Lacouture, Ponchaud, and Bob Silvers, then editor of the New York Review of Books which had translated the Lacouture review titled "The Bloodiest Revolution."
The Porter-Chomsky-Herman objections were numerous, but still Chomsky and Herman admitted that Ponchaud's book was "serious and worth reading" though full of discrepancies and unreliable refugee reports which were contradicted by other refugees (who, for instance, had said that they had walked across the country and seen no dead bodies). This was vindication of the Khmer Rouge-- reports of having seen no evil nor heard any evil. The Porter-Chomsky-Herman logic in a nutshell: Refugees are run away because they are displeased, thus will exaggerate, especially over time, if not lie about "alleged atrocities" altogether. Chomsky and Herman call for "care and caution," nothing short of patronizing to today's refugees from Guatemala, or El Salvador, or yesterday's from Auschwitz. Chomsky and Herman latched onto a number of media mistakes which include three fake photographs, a fake interview with Khieu Samphan, and a handful of misquotations. A little more fairly treated was Ponchaud's book, but the erratas first discovered by Ben Kiernan were blown out of proportion in Chomsky and Herman's review of the Ponchaud book for the Nation and repeated verbatim two years later in After the Cataclysm (1979).
Chapter 4 of this thesis, titled "Beyond the STAV," analyzes the aftermath of what amounted to a parenthetical note in the history of Western academia. Counterevidence is presented in three successive rounds: (1) Accuracy in Media's analysis of human rights in the news for 1976, (2) positive and negative coverage of Cambodia from a variety of news sources for 1977, (3) William Shawcross' test of the Chomsky-Herman thesis for 1975-1979. Following, the continuity and change in political thinking for each canonized STAV scholar is reviewed. To give a sense of possible outcomes, Michael Vickery's Standard Total View typology is used, namely that they (1) accepted, or (2) partially accepted, or (3) mostly rejected the idea that the STV that Ponchaud- Barron- Paul-Lacouture had forwarded.
It is within this context that the conclusion, in chapter 5, attempts to weave common threads in the arguments of Summers, Caldwell, Hildebrand, Porter, Chomsky, and Herman. Only after having fully absorbed their impact can the reader pass judgment on the significance of their contributions to the "Khmer Rouge Canon." What will emerge from this is the picture of a community of academics too consumed by the need to prove their theories supporting peasant revolutions to realize the consequences of their actions.
one must first bear in mi nd the political atmosphere and conditioning from which grew the yoke of radical revolutionary support. It would be facile to strip the words of these Western academics from the context of history, a practice not unlike that being undertaken by current hi storical revisionists. But at the same time, these same activists cum academics must bear responsibility for what they used to reach their conclusions--namely the validity and credibility of the evidence they unceremoniously attacked when at the same time they hypocritically took at face value Ieng Sary or Khieu Samphan's utterances as words to live by. Notwithstanding the pro-revolutionary ideological framework from which they were taught to think, namely the revolutionary conditioning in Cornell's SEAP during the strife-ridden 1960s and 1970s, one must still wonder how those who studied Cambodia and ostensibly loved her most in the West, became supporters of her worst enemy?
*Sophal Ear, who left Cambodia in 1976 when he was one year old, is graduating with double honors from the University of California, Berkeley in double major Political Science and Economics. He is finishing up his thesis on the Khmer Rouge Canon . He got a fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation to continue his graduate studies at Princeton this fall. He plans to return to Cambodia some day.