CDR: Re: Niiice kitty....

[James A.. Donald]

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At 08:36 PM 10/7/2000 -0700, James A.. Donald wrote:
Chomsky before 1979:  (falsely purporting to be quoting "highly qualified 
specialists")
: : 	executions have numbered at most in the thousands; that
: : 	these were localized in areas of limited Khmer Rouge
: : 	influence and unusual peasant discontent, where brutal
: : 	revenge killings were aggravated by the threat of
: : 	starvation resulting from the American destruction and
: : 	killing


I am guilty of oversimplification here:

Chomsky and Herman 's claim to be quoting highly qualified specialists is 
true in the sense that one journalist who specialized in covering asia did 
offer opinions (opinions, not the promised evidence) somewhat similar to 
those that Chomsky described, but false in that the opinions of the cited 
"highly qualifed specialists" were considerably more cautious and less 
extreme than those attributed to them by Chomsky and Herman.

When Chomsky talks of "analyses by highly qualified experts" he is 
referring to the same people that Shawcross depicts as inexperienced stringers:

Shawcross <http://www.jim.com/jamesd/shawcross.htm> tells us:
: : 	Through 1974, however, as more and more reports of Khmer
: : 	Rouge brutality began to seep out of the growing areas
: : 	that they controlled, some journalists began to wonder
: : 	whether postwar reconciliation would be as easy as they
: : 	had hoped. In March 1974, the Baltimore Sun correspondent
: : 	wrote of "the incomprehensible brutality of the Khmer
: : 	Rouge communists"; the Washington Post reported on how the
: : 	Khmer Rouge were "restructuring people." Sydney Schanberg
: : 	of The New York Times wrote about the joy with which
: : 	refugees escaped Khmer Rouge control at Kompong Thom.
: : 	James Fenton wrote in the New Statesman of the fear with
: : 	which some Khmers were beginning to talk of the other
: : 	side. In the fall of 1974, journalists learned of Sar
: : 	Sarsdam, a village near Slem Reap, which had been burned
: : 	by the Khmer Rouge and in which, according to Catholic
: : 	Relief Services workers, over sixty peasants had been
: : 	brutally killed. Old women were reported to have been
: : 	nailed to the walls of their homes before being burned
: : 	alive. Children had been torn apart by hand.
: :
: : 	Even so, there were few journalists in Phnom Penh who
: : 	wanted to believe the blood-bath theory. It had been
: : 	invoked so often by United States officials in defense of
: : 	a policy with which most of those same journalists
: : 	disagreed, that there was a tendency in the final days of
: : 	the war to dismiss the United States Ambassador John
: : 	Gunther Dean and other officials who harped on Sar Sarsdam
: : 	as hawks who wished to prolong the war. Martin Woollacott
: : 	of the Guardian later recalled with pain that some
: : 	journalists sang a little song to the tune of "She Was
: : 	Poor but She Was Honest":
: :
: : 		Oh will there be a dreadful bloodbath
: : 		When the Khmer Rouge come to town?
: : 		Aye, there'll be a dreadful bloodbath
: : 		When the Khmer Rouge come to town.
: :
: : 	When the Khmer Rouge did come to town, in April 1975, only
: : 	a few foreigners remained in Phnom Penh. Closeted in the
: : 	French Embassy they watched, at first more astonished than
: : 	appalled, as the victorious young army began to empty the
: : 	entire city at gunpoint. Hospital patients, refugees,
: : 	schoolchildren, all had to take one of the main roads out
: : 	of the city. Most of the Cambodians in the Embassy were
: : 	ordered to leave its supposed sanctuary and to trek into
: : 	the countryside as well. The foreigners were then trucked
: : 	to the Thai border. From then on, the Khmer Rouge closed
: : 	Cambodia almost completely from the outside world and
: : 	embarked upon one of the most radical and bloody
: : 	revolutions in history.
: :
: : 	For the next three and a half years the few thousand
: : 	refugees who managed to escape to Thailand were the
: : 	principal source of news about the country. They told from
: : 	the start a consistent story of deaths from starvation and
: : 	exhaustion during the evacuation of Phnom Penh; of forced
: : 	evacuation of almost all the towns after Phnom Penh; of
: : 	relocation into new villages or work zones; of inadequate
: : 	food supplies and nonexistent medical care; of a rule of
: : 	terror conducted by young boys with AK-47s on behalf of a
: : 	shadowy, all-powerful organization known as Angka.
: : 	Refugees spoke of people being shot, clubbed to death or
: : 	buried alive for disobeying orders, asking questions or in
: : 	some other way infringing the rules that Angka laid down.
: : 	Among the dreadful tales they told were those of babies
: : 	being beaten to death against trees.
: :
: : 	Accounts of such atrocities began to appear in the Western
: : 	press in the summer of 1975. In London, early reports were
: : 	by Bruce Loudoun and John McBeth in the conservative Daily
: : 	Telegraph, the paper which had reported German atrocities
: : 	wrongly in World War I and correctly in World War 11. In
: : 	July, Henry Kamm wrote a long article in The New York
: : 	Times, and the paper ran an editorial cornparing the Khmer
: : 	Rouge policies with "Soviet extermination of kulaks or
: : 	with the Gulag Archipelago." Kamm was one of the few
: : 	journalists on a major newspaper to cover the Cambodian
: : 	story throughout.
: :
: : 	Clearly, Cambodia was not ignored. Its travails received
: : 	far more attention than those of, say, East Timor, Burundi
: : 	or the Central African Republic, to mention just three
: : 	other contemporary disasters. Nonetheless, it was some
: : 	time before many reporters came to accept that terrible
: : 	events were taking place in Cambodia. just as few people
: : 	had wished to believe in the elimination of the Jews until
: : 	the evidence was thrust before them, so many people wished
: : 	not to believe that atrocities were taking place in
: : 	Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge takeover. This was
: : 	especially true among reporters who had reported the war
: : 	negatively from the Lon Nol side, hoping for the victory
: : 	of the others. Far from eagerly seeking, let alone
: : 	fabricating, evidence of Khmer Rouge atrocities, they
: : 	shrank from it. Others believed, at least for a short
: : 	time, that the refugees were unreliable, that the CIA was
: : 	cooking up a blood bath to say, "We told you so."

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          James A. Donald
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