Pol Pot had a personality cult? OK - what was the date that Pol Pot's name first appeared in the New York Times? Answer - August 1, 1976. The name did not appear again in the Times until May 2, 1977. The name Saloth Sar first appeared in the times first in November 1973, and appeared three more times until the end of 1976.
Between April 17, 1975 (liberation of Cambodia) and May 2nd, 1977 (the 2nd time Pol Pot's name appeared in the times), there were 1074 articles in the New York Times about Cambodia. So what does this say of your claim that Pol Pot had a "personality cult"? Pol Pot had the exact opposite of a personality cult, in his opinion, the less the American press wrote about him the better. He also had nothing approaching a personality cult in Cambodia, I'm sure a good number of Cambodians had no idea who he was.
The idea that Pol Pot was a mass murderer is equally ridiculous. That propaganda campaign went out the window as soon as the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia in 1979 anyway, and the US began fighting to let DK keep its seat at the UN. I guess now that that "problem" is gone they are trying to revive it or something.
The main thing the cult of "Cambodian genocide" people hang their case on is the Cambodian census. The problem is the last census done in Cambodia prior to 1979 was in 1962. And the last census done after that was in 1998. Even if you put aside the idea that the Vietnamese could have been politically motivated in their 1980 demographic survey, which was not a census and involved a lot of guess work, you must take account of factors from 1962 to 1980. Such as that the US air force dropped over half a million tons of bombs on Cambodia during that time period, probably killing hundreds of thousands (no one knows, all the studies have been in how many people the evil Khmer Rouge killed, not the brave, God-fearing US pilots). Or that one reason the population was lower was due to refugees going to Thailand and Vietnam and whatnot - how many? Who knows?
The US government and corporate media gets kudos for its "Cambodian genocide" propaganda (which ended promptly in 1979, when the Cambodians became angels again), but the case for it falls very flat when one looks at the evidence. The KR's real crime was not having as good a PR department that was focused on western liberals as the NLF did.
-- Lance