Our story begins, fittingly so, in the ivory towers of some of the world's finest universities. At the Sorbonne (University of Paris), for instance, where would-be Khmer Rouge leaders like Khieu Samphan, Hu Nim, and Hou Youn acquired their ideological training courtesy of the French communist party, and at Cornell University, where a generation of Cambodianists were increasingly attuned to revolutionary causes and movements. Stephen J. Morris reveals the legacy of the South-East Asia Program's (SEAP) at Cornell in his National Interest essay entitled "Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, and Cornell."[20] A cursory look at Morris' article shows the enormity of his thrust. He unravels a sordid tale of revolutionary fanaticism at Cornell's SEAP from the 1960s though the 1970s. Morris's censure starts at the very top with politics Professor George McTurnin Kahin and ends with Kahin's students. Some of his milder critics argue that his article lacks historical context. In order to avoid this pitfall, the following section discusses this context.
The Political Context
In the late 1960s to the early 1970s, while the United States was still in Vietnam, American B-52s began massive "secret" bombings to eliminate North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia. In The Rise and Demise of Democratic Kampuchea, Craig Etcheson writes,
The fact is that the United States dropped three times the quantity of explosives on Cambodia between 1970 and 1973 that it had dropped on Japan for the duration of World War II. Between 1969 and 1973, 539,129 tons of high explosives rained down on Cambodia; that is more than one billion pounds. This is equivalent to some 15,400 pounds of explosives for every square mile of Cambodian territory. Considering that probably less than 25 percent of the total area of Cambodia was bombed at one time or another, the actual explosive force per area would be at least four times this level.[21]
This gave rise to a slew of American and Australian critics early on such as Noam Chomsky and Wilfred Burchett.[22] Later, British journalist William Shawcross made quite a name for himself for his Far Eastern Economic Review article entitled "Cambodia: The verdict is guilty on Nixon and Kissinger"[23] and his acclaimed Sideshow: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Destruction of Cambodia (1978). In both, Shawcross advances a "cause and effect" hypothesis that in essence condemns "Nixinger" foreign policy for creating the Khmer Rouge. Gunn and Lee (1991) offer insights into this bent, they write, "But if the mainstream press and academic interest had turned away from Cambodia in the wake of US retreat, leftist interest had been passionately ignited by the violence of the US saturation bombing of Cambodia."[24] Those who became "passionately ignited," grew ever more eager to see the maquis triumph in Cambodia.
Before constructing the Khmer Rouge Canon, we must first deconstruct the ideological framework "thought" to have guided the Khmer Rouge once they took power. Surely, had the world known of what would become of postwar Cambodia, few scholars or academics would have sympathized with the Khmer Rouge cause. What drew the young, idealistic students of Cambodia to it? It was the duality of peasants driven by academic cum revolutionary concerns. Additionally, any struggle against neo-colonialism would have made friends of STAV scholars who shared these values. At least part of the awe expressed for the Khmer Rouge leadership by the STAV scholars lay in its equally educated background. Khmer Rouge would-be leaders like Khieu Samphan, Hu Nim, and Hou Youn (who, like Trotsky, would be eliminated in purges) all received doctorates in economics or law from the University of Paris. These were, of course, the intellectual figureheads, not the anti-intellectual masterminds like Saloth Sar (known by his nom de guerre as Pol Pot), Son Sen, Nuon Chea, Ke Pauk, Mok, and Ieng Thirith.[25] Professor Chandler points out the "old canard" one too easily falls into every now and then, when one assumes that because of intellectuals like Khieu Samphan and Hou Youn, the Khmer Rouge were somehow an intellectually driven bunch. He writes,
The idea that a Ph.D. thesis forms the basis for a revolution is an example of academic folie de grandeur, from which I suffer occasionally myself. What built the Cambodian Communist party in my view was the phenomenon of continuing warfare in Indochina between 1945 and 1970. The party enjoyed Vietnamese patronage throughout this period. Those trained in France inhaled fumes from the French Communist Party. Mao helped. But the Khmer Rouge were never intellectually based. Khieu Samphan was and is, to his metaphors, the dog running in front of Pol Pot and other anti-intellectuals who wield power in the CPK [Communist Party of Kampuchea].[26]
Also, it seemed that their developmental strategy for Cambodia matched those of French- trained Marxist theorists like Amin Samir, one of the eminence to the World-Systems theory that called for autarkic development in the Third World. In this heretofore exploitation-exploited schema, where underdevelopment grows from the yoke of capitalism and international integration, a less-developed country can expect to develop only if it severs itself from the World-System (that is, the world itself). For Khieu Samphan, autarkic development was renamed "conscious, autonomous development" to make it appear more palatable. Later, conscious, autonomous development was re- christened "self-reliance."
In September 1976, over a year after the Khmer Rouge took power, the Berkeley- based Indochina Resource Center (IRC) published a partial translation of Khieu Samphan's 1959 economics dissertation.[27] At the time, it was meant as a vision into the new Kampuchea. Virtually no one recognizes that vision as the master plan for Cambodia, but the standard total academic view held that it was. In this sense, what the Khmer Rouge actually did or thought does not matter--at least not for our purpose here--since this is a study of the STAV on Cambodia, thus a study of Cambodian studies. Summers' abridged translation intended to offer the world a peek into the mysterious Khmer Rouge and their plans for Cambodia. Khieu Samphan's dissertation is unrevolutionary in most instances, though it exudes the same young, graduate student's "humanitarian socialist ideals" that inspired other graduate students studying the Cambodia years later. For our purpose, what IRC circles believed was a plan for the postwar years, is sufficient to represent the standard total academic view. Of course, the dissertation being tame relative to the Kampuchea's reality shows how far they off the mark. Yet, from that dissertation, of which the conclusion follows, the reader can see how the STAV perceived the Khmer revolution. Khieu Samphan's conclusion states that:
The task of industrializing Cambodia would appear above all else a prior, fundamental decision: development within the framework of international integration, that is, within the framework of free external trade, or autonomous development.
International integration has apparently erected rigid restrictions on the economic development of the country. Under the circumstances, electing to continue development within the framework of international integration means submitting to the mechanism whereby handicrafts withered away, precapitalist structure was strengthened and economic life was geared in one-sided fashion to export production and hyperactive intermediary trade. Put another way, agreeing to international integration means accepting the mechanism of structural adjustment of the now underdeveloped country to requirements of the now dominant, developed economies. Accepting international integration amounts to accepting the mechanism by which structural disequilibria deepens, creating instability that could lead to violent upheaval if it should become intolerable for an increasingly large portion of the population. Indeed, there is already consciousness of the contradictions embodied in world market integration of the economy.
Self-conscious, autonomous development is therefore objectively necessary. . . .[28]
In the first instance, Samphan offers two possible paths: "international integration" or "autonomous development". Because of conditions imposed on the country by the "international integration" method of development, Samphan argues, atavistic modes of production are amplified. How does he reach that particular finding? By going back to the late 19th century, when the industrialized French penetrated the pre-industrial Cambodian economy, Samphan asserts that this disruption stopped the course of development for Cambodia. In other words, French colonization derailed the Cambodian economy. Using balance of trade and composition of trade analysis, to make his case, Samphan concludes that exploitation takes place when Cambodia and France trade, and that peasants too are exploited by urban elite who buy imported luxury goods which deplete foreign exchange reserves. Hence, the contention that "structural disequilibria" from "international integration" would lead to "social upheaval ... for an increasingly large portion of the population." In other words, revolution. It seemed to make sense to the person who translated the thesis, Laura Summers, and still others who admired it, Malcolm Caldwell and Ben Kiernan, just to name two others.
Thus, the conclusion "objectively" reached, meant that "self-conscious, autonomous development", i.e., autarky or "self-reliance" was the answer. It would be facile to ridicule this notion in this day and age, but in the context of economic history, autarkic development cast a spell on young, idealistic students who had grown increasingly critical of the "neo-colonial world", in their words. As they looked elsewhere for space to forge ahead, their eyes stopped on Cambodia, where a fresh revolution had taken place, and its charming leaders had closed the country to the rest of the world. They were in love. As professor Chandler says, it is an "old canard" to place too much emphasis on Khieu Samphan's thesis as the master plan, since, of course, the Khmer Rouge followed their own anti-intellectual national development policy of slavery; but for our purpose, what matters here is not what the Khmer Rouge thought or actually did vis-à-vis the economy, but what the STAV scholars believed was happening. Equally inspiring to these scholars was Hou Youn's dissertation, "Kampuchea's Peasants and the Rural Economy." Like Khieu Samphan, Hou Youn stressed the exploitative dimensions of trade, not just between countries, but urban and rural regions. Siding with the peasant's plight, Hou Youn decried the "thievery" that took place when "The tree grows in the rural areas, but the fruit goes to the towns."[29] With this in mind, we turn momentarily to the military context of how the Khmer Rouge came to power.
The Rise of Democratic Kampuchea
Cambodia is the transliterated name of Cambodja, the remnants of a once mighty Khmer empire that stretched out over much of Southeast Asia. Cambodia's contemporary history began with its colonization by France in 1883. Independence came after World War II, in 1953, and until 1970, Cambodia was a constitutional monarchy. The coup d'etat which deposed Prince Norodom Sihanouk on March 18, 1970, brought to power the pro- American prime minister Lon Nol. Sihanouk, who has never been known to give up easily, immediately began a crusade to regain his country. Believing, like General Motors, that "What's good for GM, is good for America," Sihanouk believed that "What was good for Sihanouk, would be good for Cambodia." He created the resistance/maquis known as the National United Front for Kampuchea (FUNK) soon after his overthrow. FUNK was a coalition of communists and royalists. For the next five years, Cambodia was mired in wars on several fronts, both internally and externally.
[The] FUNK joined Vietnamese and Laotian communists on the "single battlefield" to struggle against "U.S. imperialism" under the banner of the United Front of the Three Indochinese People (UFTIP). Militarily, this entailed combined military operations--that is, guerrilla, conventional or proxy military action as was expedient and/or possible-- conducted from "liberated" areas of the country.[30]
These "liberated" areas grew as it became clear that America would pursue a "retreat with honor" policy with respect to South Vietnam. By 1973, when the bombings on Cambodia had reached their zenith, PFLANK, the military wing of FUNK, "launched its first full- scale `solo' offensive." Though was by no means a success, the "real significance of this offensive was political."[31] This was significant politically in the sense that Pol Pot's no- compromise policy, according to Etcheson, took center-stage for the communists who were becoming the real brains behind FUNK.
The Rise of the Standard Total Academic View on Kampuchea
The rise of Democratic Kampuchea paralleled that of a new consensus among scholars who studied Cambodia. Many had grown hysterical against the war and destruction of 1970-1975, and looked forward to the FUNK's victory. As increasing specie- speculation and corruption combined with large infusions of U.S. aid brought the economy into hyperinflation, the national product: rice, became increasingly scarce because of the war-destruction of agricultural capacity.[32] Shells reigned down on Phnom Penh for two months before April 1975, the beginning of a new lunar year for Cambodians, and the start of Year Zero for the Khmer Rouge. "Two thousand years of Cambodian history have virtually ended," declared Phnom Penh Radio in January 1976.[33] Cambodia's rebirth into Democratic Kampuchea would make heavy use of self-reliance. To almost all the scholars who had studied Cambodia, this made sense. Not just for its economics, which had been "objectively" proven by Khieu Samphan, but for its international politics too. David Chandler who briefly toyed with the standard total academic view, wrote in April 1977, "In the Cambodian case, in 1976, autarky makes sense, both in terms of recent experience--American intervention, and what is seen as Western-induced corruption of previous regimes--and in terms of Cambodia's long history of conflict with Vietnam."[34] That foreign policy dimension to self-reliance, became the justification for closing Cambodia's doors to all foreigners. Toward that end, Laura Summers, a lecturer in the politics department at the University Lancaster, England, began her apologia for Khmer Rouge activities.
A graduate of the South-East Asia Program at Cornell, Summers authored two articles in Current History about Cambodia. These articles, entitled "Cambodia: Consolidating the Revolution" and "Defining the Revolutionary State in Cambodia," were published in December 1975 and December, 1976, respectively. [35] She was in England during these years, a point which will undermine her work and that of many other STAV scholars canonized in this thesis. She did not fieldwork, interviewed no Cambodians for either articles. Summers' first article "Cambodia: Consolidating the Revolution," ranks among the first attempts by scholars of her generation to justify the Khmer revolution that was achieved with the April 17th, 1975 fall of Phnom Penh to the FUNK.
The Khmers could not be certain about whether the [alleged American intelligence] document [regarding sabotage operations] contained authentic plans or speculative, contingency proposals. What was certain was the tenacious and frequently violent insistence of American governments upon controlling the course of Khmer politics.[36]
First, she makes no distinction between "Khmers," FUNK, Khmer Rouge--presumably they are one and the same. She takes at face value Khmer Rouge vice-premier Ieng Sary's explanation that documents of American sabotage were authentic. Becoming a virtual mouthpiece for the Khmer Rouge, she writes,
For Khmers who survived [the legacy of U.S. policies -- 600,000 killed, prolonged suffering and incidental charity], the awesome task was to transform accumulated bitterness and suffering into impetus for socio-economic reconstruction of the country all while normalising the country's foreign relations to prevent further harmful intervention.[37]