Undergraduate Political Science Honors Thesis:

The Khmer Rouge Canon 1975-1979:

The Standard Total Academic View on Cambodia

Part 1

[The footnotes were incorrectly coded and I have not had time to correct them all.  If you are reading the whole of this thesis it would be best to print out the footnote page.] Footnotes

Part 1  Part 2  Part 3  Part 4  Part 5  

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 2: ROMANTICIZING THE KHMER REVOLUTION

CHAPTER 3: THE CHOMSKY-LACOUTURE CONTROVERSY

CHAPTER 4: BEYOND THE STAV

CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

There can be no doubt but that this thesis would not have been possible without the contributions of the following people. I am delighted to acknowledge their contributions to this thesis.

For help in the early research phase of this thesis, I would like to thank Professor Ben Kiernan of Yale University, Professor Laura Summers of the University of Hull, and University of California Indochina Archive Director Douglas Pike.

For research suggestions, materials, and references, I am eternally grateful to Professor David P. Chandler of Monash University and my dear friend Bruce Sharp. They were both always ready to help, and only an e-mail away.

I am especially grateful to archivist Steve Denney of the Indochina Archive for showing me the Cambodian vault and referring me to the Chomsky-Lacouture Controversy over a year ago. Steve's great advice was ubiquitous throughout this project.

For constructive criticism on an earlier draft of this thesis, I am indebted to Dr. Marc Pizzaro and Andy Lei.

Last, but not least, this political science honors thesis would not have been possible without the great inspiration of my advisor, political science Professor Anthony James Gregor.

Although each of these contributors helped the final product, they are in no way responsible for the views expressed or the mistakes made by the author. The author alone is solely responsible for those.

Sophal Ear

Oakland, California

TO CAMBODIANISTS OF ALL PARTIES

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

How many of those who say they are unreservedly in support of the Khmer revolution would consent to endure one hundredth part of the present sufferings of the Cambodian people?

--François Ponchaud, 1977[1]

So concludes François Ponchaud's Cambodia: Year Zero, the first book to detail the "assassination of a people" being perpetrated in the name of socialist revolution in Cambodia. Hundreds of other books and articles on Cambodia have been published since 1977. Many have focused on the period during which the Red Cambodians or "Khmer Rouge" controlled the country which they renamed "Democratic Kampuchea" between 1975 and 1978. Under the Khmer Rouge, hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died from execution, forced labor, disease and starvation. Since it will never be possible to ascertain the exact number of deaths, estimates fall on a range. Michael Vickery estimates 750,000 deaths,[2] while Ben Kiernan adds to that another 800,000. Karl Jackson puts the figure near 1.3 million,[3] while the Campaign to Oppose the Return of the Khmer Rouge (CORKR) claims at least 1.5 million deaths. The Khmer revolution was perhaps the most pernicious in history; reversing class order, destroying all markets, banning private property and money. It is one worth studying for the ages, not for what it accomplished, but for what it destroyed.

The idea for this thesis grew from research into Cambodia's economic development and history for a simultaneous economics honors thesis.[4] In particular, a 1979 book entitled Kampuchea: Rationale for a Rural Policy by Malcolm Caldwell, was my first glimpse into a community of academics, I had no idea existed. To be sure, this community was not some extreme "fringe" faction of Cambodian scholars, but virtually all of them.[5] In other words, their view of the Khmer revolution ergo the Khmer Rouge, became the Standard Total Academic View on Cambodia or the STAV.[6] These scholars, many of whom worked for the Berkeley-based antiwar Indochina Resource Center, became the Khmer Rouge's most effective apologists in the West.[7] While they expressed unreserved support for the Khmer revolution, fully twenty percent of the Cambodian population may have perished due to execution, forced labor, illness, and malnutrition during the period 1975-1979.[8] From periodicals such as the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars and Current History to books like Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution and Kampuchea: Rationale for a Rural Policy, an unequivocal record of complicity existed between a generation of academics who studied Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge.

Reading Karl Jackson's Cambodia: 1975-1978 (1989), a footnote revealed that debate among scholars of contemporary Cambodia in the West, during the late 1970s, included "sympathetic treatment" of the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary regime, namely the Khmer Rouge. The unassuming footnote, reprinted here, came from Timothy Carney's essay entitled, "Unexpected Victory."

Some representative points of view on the Pol Pot regime would include, on the critical side, Shawcross 1976a and 1978a and Lacouture 1977a, 1977b, and 1978. Sympathetic treatment is in Porter and Hildebrand 1976 and Summers 1975 and 1976. Also of interest is Chomsky and Herman 1977. Works by authors with greater background or better judgment in Cambodian affairs include Ponchaud 1976 and 1978 and Chandler 1977. Since 1979, in any case, few have remained sympathetic to the Democratic Kampuchea regime, as incontrovertible evidence has detailed its brutality, dwarfing even Stalin's excesses. [Emphasis added.][9]

The list took on a life of its own, as the pieces to the puzzle of "Who, in academia, supported the Khmer Rouge?" came together. Here was, in effect, the origin of the "Khmer Rouge Canon". When Jean Lacouture published a book review of Ponchaud's Cambodia: Year Zero in 1977, he touched off an intense debate with American academic cum activist Noam Chomsky. Chomsky, who is a distinguished linguist, found erratas in both Lacouture's review and Ponchaud's book. In a series of polemical exchanges that were sometimes public, other times private, Chomsky referred to these mistakes as examples of deception and fraud that fueled anti-revolutionary propaganda against the Khmer Rouge by the media. Together with Edward S. Herman, Chomsky published an article in mid-1977 in the Nation, entitled "Distortions at Fourth Hand" that became the centerpiece of his argument against the media's frenzy over Pol Pot.[10] Two years later, after the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary regime was toppled by Vietnam, the Nation article was followed by a book that continued to express doubt about the truthfulness of "alleged" Khmer Rouge crimes.

Between 1975 and 1979, "the movement of solidarity with the peoples of Kampuchea and Indochina as a whole"[11] as described by of one of its members, Gavin McCormick, vociferously defended the Kampuchean revolution and its perpetrators. To be sure, there have been very few articles or books on this topic, since it is so unpleasant for those Ponchaud bluntly characterized as "unreservedly in support of the Khmer revolution," to be reminded of their responsibility in what Jean Lacouture has called "the murder of a people." The study of this movement is considered by some, especially those who continue to support Chomsky, to be wholly outside Cambodian studies. They suggest that it is more in line with American studies since Chomsky attacked the Western media's propaganda machine as it gravitated around the "evils of communism."

This thesis seeks to dispel this mitigating advance in favor of a wider Canon for pro-Khmer Rouge literature published between 1975 and 1979. "The Khmer Rouge Canon 1975-1979," unlike other canons, is not an official list of works in this case, since no one has ever agreed to one (Carney's list is a small exception). For a work to be listed and reviewed in the "Khmer Rouge Canon" requires that it have been written in the period 1975 to 1979 and, of course, have supported, whether explicitly or implicitly, the policies of the Khmer Rouge (hence the inclusion of Chomsky's and Herman's work). A second criterion involves the nature of the publication, namely print; the work must have been published in a reasonably well-known English-language periodical (Current History, the Nation, etc.), a monograph (Malcolm Cadwell's South-East Asia by Cook University), or a book (Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution and After the Cataclysm). Beyond this requirement is the obvious need for the author of this thesis to have read that particular work in order to be able to review it. Of course, there are countless dissertations, newsletter articles (such as those in News from Kampuchea and News from Democratic Kampuchea), and other journal articles (from the Journal of Contemporary Asia) that will not be covered because they were unavailable or would have required extensive treatment or for lack of time. The Khmer Rouge Canon is by no means exhaustive, far too many other Indochina scholars deserve to be canonized, yet because of circumstances will have to wait.

This partial Canon offers a glimpse into the assumptions and logic, evidence and arguments that a generation of Western scholars used to defend the Khmer Rouge or rationalize their policies during the mid-to-late 1970s. Together, they created the standard total academic view. This glimpse, whether representative or not, is in and of itself a testament to Khmer Rouge's charm over academia.

This thesis seeks to answer the following questions on the STAV: First, in what military-political context did it develop? Second, what are examples of STAV scholarship, who made them, what arguments did they make, and why? Third, how does the Chomsky-Herman thesis fit in, differ from or was similar to the standard total academic view? Fourth, beyond the STAV, what were the counter-arguments, and for the members of the STAV scholars, Summers, Caldwell, Hildebrand, Porter, Chomsky, and Herman, what was the continuity and change in their political thinking (using Vickery's STV typology)?

In sum, this thesis deconstructs the standard total academic view on Cambodia and constructs the foundation for the Khmer Rouge Canon 1975-1979.

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 the Nation (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.

CHAPTER 2: ROMANTICIZING THE KHMER REVOLUTION

Universities are based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.

--Thomas Jefferson

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]

Praising the Khmer Rouge for their rice farming techniques, as Porter and Hildebrand would do in Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution in 1976, and justifying the need for the evacuation of Phnom Penh based on the fact that 3 million people would now have to be fed by the new regime, Summers contends that "[the] heavy [U.S.] bombing deterred many from voting with their feet until the day of liberation."[38] There is, she writes authoritatively, "little evidence of famine" although "food allowances in the solidarity groups are small."[39] On the positive side, "rice substitutes" are being grown, and the "end of war also means greater security for fishing and livestock industries."[40]

Her analysis of Cambodia's agricultural and industrial prospects leave much to be desired too. She does not cite any sources, official or otherwise, which would certainly cast doubt on how she procured her information. Despite this, she concludes that in Democratic Kampuchea, "Life is without doubt confusing and arduous in many regions of the country, but current hardships are probably less than those endured during the war. It is mistaken to interpret postwar social disorganization or confusion as nascent opposition to the revolution."[41] Laura Summers, who had been to Cambodia once before 1975, on a brief visit, knew very little of the hardships before "liberation" much less afterwards. She explains that,.

Thus far, few Khmers have left the country and many of these are former officers from Lon Nol's army or former civil servants who fear prosecution for wartime activities. No war crimes trials have, in fact, come to light probably because of an RGNU [Royal Government of National Union, i.e., the Khmer Rouge] decision to avoid deepening internal socio-political conflicts and bitterness in a time of reconstruction.[42]

Her naïveté is mind-boggling here, Summers assumes that those who wished to leave were actually allowed to do so, not to speak of the total and unnecessary use of tribunals for which the Khmer Rouge could very easily have simply been judge and executioner at once.

In discussing Cambodia's foreign policy, the French Embassy and the Mayagez Affairs, Summers, of course, sides with the FUNK whom she knew were the Khmer Rouge. For our purpose here, a brief discussion of the French embassy incident will suffice. Before the Khmer Rouge "liberated" Phnom Penh, the French government had already discussed normalizing relations with them. Thus, the French did not intend to leave their embassy. "Hundreds of Frenchmen who had earlier refused to leave the country, journalists of several nationalities, Cambodian officials of the defeated military regime and diplomats from other foreign missions including the Soviet embassy, sought and received shelter from the French."[43] This infuriated the Khmer Rouge, with whom she concurred. Diplomatic protocol would have forced the French to close down the embassy and re-open after the re-establishment of relations. Why had the government of France attempted such fraud? She explains, "Unhappy over the prospect of losing its remaining neo-colonial privileges, France hoped to maintain its large cultural mission in Cambodia and sought compensation for nationalized rubber plantations."[44] Again, one must wonder how she arrive at such creative and perceptive conclusions.

Throughout the article permeates a sense of disproportion. For instance, Summers speaks of massive resettlement as though it were a normal affair. Her nonchalant treatment of evacuations stands in stark contrast to the seething sarcasm she expresses towards French and American actions with respect to the Royal Government of National Union (RGNU), the regime name for FUNK (which took power). "Cambodia: Consolidating the Revolution" ended on another of many positive notes. The overall foreign policy of Democratic Kampuchea is praised, and its impact on the region assessed. "Among Asians, if not among other [sic], Khmer desires for peace and respect have been recognized and reciprocated."[45] Laura Summers' defense of the new Kampuchea is multifaceted. From domestic to foreign policy, the Khmer Rouge could do no wrong. She does a fantastic job of rationalizing away the more awkward Khmer Rouge policies such as expelling all foreigners. They were expelled, she argues, for historical reasons. After years of abuse by her neo-colonial master, who could blame Cambodia for wanting to kick the foreigners out? Her apologetics obfuscate the fragmentary reports coming of refugees who were, in fact, fleeing the country. Later, she suggests that they have reasons to lie: collaborators with the ancien regime perhaps? or worse, the discredited Americans! What emerges from this first English-language essay on the new Kampuchea is the picture of a still idyllic revolutionary State, divorced from reality.[46]

Defining the Revolutionary State

In her second Current History article regarding the new Kampuchea, published in December 1976, Summers is more reserved in her alacrity to praise Khmer Rouge accomplishments. One might call it cautious but very optimistic. In contradistinction, David Chandler, who felt the obligation to give the new leaders of Cambodia the benefit of the doubt, put it this way:

Can the regime recapture the grandeur of Angkor [in which the great temples were built in the 12th century] without duplicating the slavery (and by implication, the elite ) that made Angkor what it was? Is the price for liberation, in human terms, too high? Surely, as a friend of mine has written, we Americans with our squalid record in Cambodia should be "cautiously optimistic" about the new regime, "or else shut up." At the same time, I might feel less cautions and more optimistic if I were able to hear the voices of people I knew in the Cambodian countryside fourteen years ago, telling me about the revolution in their words.[47]

The reverse is perhaps true for Laura Summers, who upon reading the comments of "emissaries" to Kampuchea, decides that all must be fine. Having acquired new material to propagate, she quotes, without so much as a single qualification (with respect to the controlled nature of the visit), the Swedish ambassador to China's observations while visiting Democratic Kampuchea as an invited guest of the new regime. Believing perhaps that the ambassador was free to visit all places yet saw "no signs of starvation," Summers generalizes this finding to contradict refugee claims of atrocities and starvation. But she goes too far, however, when she admonishes the ambassador for not recognizing what she insists is an obvious bomb crater in Siem Riep, caused by American bombs dropped some time during his visit of 1976. Of course, she was not an eyewitness nor an expert on bomb craters, not to speak of American-made ones.

On the status of Prince Sihanouk, who founded FUNK, but was subdued by the Khmer Rouge, she writes, "Since his retirement, Sihanouk continues to live in Cambodia, where, according to another visiting emissary, he enjoys the respect and affection befitting his status as an eminent nationalist."[48] The title of his memoirs Prisonier des Khmer Rouges (1986) is self-evident in contradicting that emissary's observations. Here, the mistake she makes is to believe too easily in emissaries. Far from being randomly selected, the emissaries who visited Cambodia were not chosen for their critical bent. It took the regime three-and-half years to invite Western journalists, a total of three to be exact. One of them was Malcolm Caldwell, a lecturer in Southeast Asian economic history at the University of London, and author of occasional essays, one book on Cambodia in the Southeast Asian war,[49] and newspaper articles in support of the Khmer revolution. He writes, in 1977 for the London Times, "Profound changes were needed, changes which could be brought about only by revolution..."[50] Caldwell, who, like Summers, is canonized in this thesis, was understandably biased towards the Khmer Rouge. One would think, given all this, that scholars like Laura Summers and Malcolm Caldwell, both of whom held the standard total academic view on Cambodia (see no evil, hear no evil), would turn to fresh sources of information or at least do some fieldwork where they could interview refugees and the like, but that apparently ranked low on their list of priorities.

Regarding the refugee accounts of atrocities, Summers for example, dismisses them for having received more attention than they literally "deserved." In a series of apologetics, she rationalizes their overuse by the Press as having "served to harden Phnom Penh's attitude towards Western journalism even as the government welcomed a few Asian journalists into the country."[51] Not only were the Americans at fault for causing starvation and thus the evacuation of Phnom Penh, as her colleagues would argue, but the negative press was making them uncomfortable. Their no comment, closed doors policy was thus understandable! Laura Summers attributes everything the Khmer Rouge do to knee-jerk reaction to French and American malfeasance and imperialism.[52]

Summers then outlines, quite favorably, the constitution of Democratic Kampuchea with its radical collectivist ideas. After describing the elaborate process of writing the Democratic Kampuchea Constitution, which she concludes is a mixture of Leninist and peasant customs, she sings the preamble in obvious admiration, "happiness, equality, justice and true democracy reign without rich or poor people, without exploiting or exploited classes and where people live in harmony and the greatest national unity."[53] This preamble was republished onto the fifth page of Long Live the 17th Anniversary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, a propaganda booklet published by "Group of Kampuchean Residents in America" or G.K. Ran. The booklet contains a translation of Premier Pol Pot's speech commemorating that 17th anniversary. In France and England, similar groups published press releases from the Royal Government of National Union of Democratic Kampuchea. These were the "Comite des Patriotes du Kampuchea Democratique en France" and the "British Kampuchea Support Campaign," which, until 1991 lingered on.[54] Summers, who no doubt belonged to one, was by herself, a virtual think-tank. She did not have to take orders from anyone in order to formulate her justifications, but she did need considerable official information from official organs, to be so keen.

The evacuation of Phnom Penh, which was roundly criticized by the rest of the world as "barbaric" was really justified according to the standard total academic view which she supported. As her justification, she writes "By all accounts, however, universal conscription for work prevented a postwar famine,"[55] but admits that "It also appears that some work groups, in lieu of other forms of reeducation, are obliged to work harder and longer than others."[56] One must wonder how she knows this, given that she has not been inside the country. Does she have a reference? No source is listed. With respect to statements from refugees and Khmer Rouge defectors sponsored by resistance groups abroad, Summers dismisses them entirely. She writes:

These public pleas for support and the public concern raised by sensational, but false, documents finally provoked the Paris Mission of Democratic Kampuchea to protest that some journalists were degrading their profession and that the French held a major share of the responsibility for allowing these activities to continue.[57]

Some of the documents to be discredited were, for instance, several faked photographs and interviews which between 1976 and 1977 were published in newspapers from Australia to America.[58] The issue of the photographs, in particular, will be summoned when the Chomsky-Herman book, After the Cataclysm, is discussed in the following chapter.

In "Defining the Revolutionary State in Cambodia," Summers does admit, albeit sparingly, that life was difficult. As in her first Current History article, Summers compares the Khmer revolution with other historical revolutions, proposing that "Like the puritan revolution in England the Khmer revolution is the expression of deep cultural and social malaise unleashed by a sudden and violent foreign assault on the nation's social structure."[59] Her concern for the "difficulty" of life in the new Kampuchea is so disingenuous as to discount its value altogether. The urban "elite" were having problems because they were simply not used to farming the land! A remarkable discovery that took a year to reach. Summers throws that glimpse of sympathy away, however, when she adds, "What the urban dwellers consider 'hard' labor may not be punishment or community service beyond human endurance ... Such associations [with memories it invokes of Russian history] take what is happening in Cambodia out of its historical and cultural context."[60] One must wonder what specific context she means, when she says that hard labor may not be punishment. In any case, Summers' article proposes an embryonic theory of the Free Press that Chomsky and Herman would elaborate in 1979, and again as recently as 1988. To be sure, that theory was more sophisticated than the conceptual framework alluded to by Summers, but still it contained all the elements of this tragedy. She asserts that:

The United States press, not to be outdone, produced dramatic news reports and editorials based on refugee and unnamed intelligence sources. In retrospect, these reports were partly inaccurate and are still largely unverified. The flap illustrates the powerful and potentially dangerous force that is generated when the political machinations of a few capture the attention of a concerned and uninformed public.[61]

Like Chomsky and Herman, Summers dismisses the refugee accounts as bearing little evidentiary validity. Perhaps it is hubris that prevents her from paying more attention to these refugees, but that does not excuse her from taking them seriously. Therefore, as in other instances, she works these into a lather of ever-less reasonable justifications for why they would have unpleasant things to say about the new regime. Consistent with the STAV, she writes:

Clearly, they [the reported incidents] reflect the fears and expectations arising from the exile's position in the old society. Most Cambodians leaving the country in 1975 managed to do so without much difficulty as if the regime were acknowledging that they were among the few whose values could not be accommodated in a people's state.[62]

Summers concludes, in the same fashion as her first article, "Cambodia: Consolidating the Revolution," by returning to the realm of foreign policy and Kampuchea's position vis-à-vis its historical enemies. She notes that the new regime's posture towards Vietnam is cool, but that with its "Indian" brothers to the west and north, Thailand and Laos, respectively, relations have improved.

The Khmer revolutionaries have actively contributed to the post-war regional integration of Southeast Asia while consolidating Cambodia's position as a nonaligned [meaning socialist] state. Despite these signs of the growing acceptance of Cambodia's revolution, Phnom Penh has not yet relaxed its guard against hostile foreign powers who might still attempt to disrupt the people's state.[63]

This cautious but optimistic ending suggests that she grew more wary from December 1975 to December 1976 of what was in store for Democratic Kampuchea. In her first Current History article, Summers was cautious but very optimistic about every facet of the new regime's policies. By 1976, however, she had to defend the regime's increasingly battered record on human rights.

Laura Summers, it must be said, did not know for certain what was really going on in Cambodia. From her vantage point in Lancaster, England, she saw very little. However, she chose to write on Cambodia's revolution nonetheless. For other scholars whose canonical contributions are covered in this chapter, the standard total academic view reigned supreme. Like so many other students and scholars of her generation, Laura Summers was a romantic of revolutions. Self-reliance and non-alignment were code-words that suggested breaking away from the World-System, i.e., imperialism, the same imperialism which she blamed for destroying Cambodia during the first half of the 1970s. Combined with this STAV on Cambodia was her incredibly low suspicion of official RGNU explanations for why certain policies were undertaken. Instead, she hypocritically exercises a "healthy" skepticism towards the media. What emerges from these two contributions to the "Khmer Rouge Canon" is the picture of an academic far too obsessed with rationalizing every objectionable Khmer Rouge action, to realize that the more severe and numerous the objections, the more likely some grain of truth was in them.

Part 1  Part 2  Part 3  Part 4  Part 5  Footnotes