Alterman on Chomsky

Michael Pugliese debsian at pacbell.net
Fri Jun 21 15:09:43 PDT 2002


Expectations of famine by Western intelligence sources for 1977 were dismissed by Porter and Hildebrand in light of FUNK broadcasts that claimed superb rice harvests due to superior two-cycle rice-farming under Khmer Rouge leadership. They write:

Tiev Chin Leng, former director of the port of Sihanoukville and a member of the NUFK [FUNK] residing in Paris, the 1975 crop amounted to 3.25 million tons of paddy, or about 2.2 million tons of rice. For the Cambodian people this bumper harvest represents 250 grams of rice per meal per adult, and 350 grams per meal doe worker on the production force.... In addition meat eating has increased, In the past, under the influence of Buddhist tradition, the peasants took little part in the slaughtering of animals, and ate very little meat.[83]

Both points (including the statistics) reappear in Malcolm Caldwell's posthumously published essay turned book Kampuchea: Rationale for a Rural Policy (1979) reviewed in the following section. The unending gullibility of Porter and Hildebrand is itself incredible. However, that was not the end of it. For instance, Porter and Hildebrand believed that forcing monks to work was not an act that could "fairly be represented as religious persecution,"[84] because everyone else, they argued, old and young was forced to work, too.

Although Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution is about Cambodia, a good portion of it is devoted to blaming America for the starvation which, as it turns out, was tampered by the Khmer Rouge's liberation of Phnom Penh. Porter and Hildebrand leave no stone unturned in their critique of U.S. intervention and its destruction of Cambodia. Porter and Hildebrand describe a scissors-like extraction mechanism curiously like the Soviet law of primitive socialist accumulation, when they explain that modern industry would be fueled by "capital raised by the expansion of agricultural production."[85] Their conclusion makes Cambodia the victim not of the Khmer Rouge, but of the Americans and the half decade of underdevelopment and destruction by U.S. bombs. In addition, the U.S. media, according to Porter and Hildebrand, was a co-conspirator in this cover-up, by not doing justice to Cambodia. Porter and Hildebrand fastidiously conclude that:

Cambodia is only the latest victim of the enforcement of an ideology that demands that social revolutions be portrayed as negatively as possible, rather than as responses to real human needs which the existing social and economic structure was incapable of meeting. In Cambodia--as in Vietnam and Laos--the systematic process of mythmaking must be seen as an attempt to justify the massive death machine which was turned against a defenseless population in a vain effort to crush their revolution.[86]

As Porter and Hildebrand romanticize the "social revolutions," they reveal their motive: defending the Khmer revolution. Far from being scholarly or objective, they make evident their biases by citing, without so much as a pathetic reservation or qualification, the propaganda which forms their defense of the Khmer revolution ergo the Khmer Rouge. What they achieved, unquestionably, was the temporary confounding of the events in the new Kampuchea, perched from half the globe away, they played a role in legitimizing it for another three years. Next, we canonize the significant contributions of Malcolm Caldwell. Caldwell was an author, STAV scholar, tireless Khmer Rouge defender, and finally a victim of the Khmer Rouge themselves.

Malcolm Caldwell's Kampuchea

Another academic who romanticized the Khmer revolution and its revolutionaries was Malcolm Caldwell, a lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He was an economic historian "committed to the struggle of the colonized, oppressed, and impoverished against imperialism and neo-colonialism."[87] In short, Caldwell became the leading academic supporter of the Khmer Rouge. His colleagues write upon his assassination that he "would not have liked to have gone down in history as an academic in the usual sense of the term. He would have wanted to be remembered as an activist on the British Left and an anti-imperialist fighter."[88] Caldwell published a number of articles[89] before submitting the draft of a paper titled "Cambodia: Rationale for a Rural Policy" was published after his death in 1979 under the auspices of James Cook University of North Queensland.[90]

The introductory note by Hering and Utrecht in Malcolm Caldwell's South-East Asia echo similar points gathered from Porter and Hildebrand (1976) as well as Summers (1975 and 1976),

The Western Press, apparently feeling insulted and being outraged, excelled in negative reporting on developments in Kampuchea under the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary regime. Not only did strongly exaggerated reports on the mass killings in the regime appear in the Western mass media, but also reports of crop failures and hunger in Kampuchea. Contrary to this unfavorable reporting in the Western newspaper, Malcolm was able to find more reliable data and compose a much more favorable account of economic development in Kampuchea in the last two years before the Vietnamese invasion of January 1979. [Emphasis added.][91]



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