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In one of his sermons on human rights, President Carter explained that we owe Vietnam no debt and have no responsibility to render it any assistance because “the destruction was mutual,”164 a statement that elicited no comment, to our knowledge, apart from our own—a fact that speaks volumes about the prevailing cultural climate.
According to standard state and media doctrine, South Vietnam (i.e., the client regime that we established) lost the war to North Vietnam—the official enemy, since the U.S. attack against the South cannot be conceded.
Throughout the war, elite groups remained loyal to the cause, apart from expressing qualms about the bombing of North Vietnam, which was regarded as problematic since it might lead to a broader conflict, drawing in China and the USSR, from which the United States might not be immune.
A current pretense is that principled critics of the war had access to the mainstream media during these years. In fact, they were almost entirely excluded, and now we are regaled with accounts of their alleged crimes but are almost never permitted to hear their actual words, exactly as one would expect in a properly functioning system of indoctrination with the task of preserving privilege and authority from critical analysis.
While proceeding to extirpate the “rot” of successful independent development in Indochina, the United States moved forcefully to buttress the second line of defense.
In his personal Times retrospective, Pentagon Papers director Leslie Gelb observes that ten years after the war ended, “the position of the United States in Asia is stronger” than at any time since World War II, despite “the defeat of South Vietnam,” quoting “policy analysts” from government and scholarship who observe that “Thailand and Indonesia … were able to get themselves together politically, economically and militarily to beat down Communist insurgencies,” in the manner just indicated, as were the Philippines and South Korea, also graced with a U.S.-backed military coup in 1972.179
Postwar U.S. policy has been designed to ensure that the victory is maintained by maximizing suffering and oppression in Indochina, which then evokes further gloating here.
A tiny report in the Christian Science Monitor observes that the United States is blocking international shipments of food to Vietnam during a postwar famine, using the food weapon “to punish Vietnam for its occupation of Cambodia,” according to diplomatic sources.
To evaluate this effort at “balance,” we may observe that during the preceding summer (1965), five months after the United States began the regular bombing of North Vietnam, the Pentagon estimated that the 60,000 U.S. troops then deployed faced an enemy combat force of 48,500, 97 percent of them South Vietnamese guerrillas (“Viet Cong”).
Balance is also preserved in an “account from both sides” of what happened in the village of Thuy Bo, in January 1967, where British producer Martin Smith had been shown the site of what villagers claimed to be a My Lai-style massacre, one of many they alleged, with a hundred women and children killed.
After the breakdown of negotiations in October 1972, “The North was again intransigent,” we learn—namely, in demanding that the agreements be signed, a fact ignored; and “In South Vietnam, too, the agreement was still unacceptable,” the familiar evasion of U.S. responsibility
Our point is not that the retrospectives fail to draw what seem to us, as to much of the population, the obvious conclusions; the more significant and instructive point is that principled objection to the war as “fundamentally wrong and immoral,” or as outright criminal aggression—a war crime—is inexpressible.
6 The Indochina Wars (II): Laos and Cambodia
THE GENEVA ACCORDS OF 1954 PROVIDED FOR A POLITICAL SETTLEMENT in Laos and Cambodia. Both countries, however, were drawn into the U.S. attack on Indochina, with devastating consequences. In both cases, the media made a noteworthy contribution to this outcome.
6.1. LAOS
In Laos, as in Vietnam, the United States undertook to prevent a political settlement, as described frankly in congressional hearings by Ambassador Graham Parsons, who stated that “...
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In short, the terror bombing of northern Laos, although known, remained off the agenda, and reporting in general was slight and highly misleading, to say the least.
The New York Times reviewed the war in Laos at the war’s end, concluding that 350,000 people had been killed, over a tenth of the population, with another tenth uprooted in this “fratricidal strife that was increased to tragic proportions by warring outsiders.”
6.2. CAMBODIA 6.2.1. “The decade of the genocide”
Few countries have suffered more bitterly than did Cambodia during the 1970s. The “decade of the genocide,”
6.2.2. Problems of scale and responsibility
Phase I, for which the United States bore primary responsibility, was little investigated at the time, or since, and has never been described with anything like the condemnatory terms applied to phase II. The vast number of Cambodians killed, injured, and traumatized in this period were, in our conceptualization of chapter 2, “unworthy” victims. Phase II, the Pol Pot era, is the “holocaust” that was widely compared to the worst atrocities of Hitler and Stalin, virtually from the outset, with massive publicity and outrage at the suffering of these “worthy” victims.
Phase III renewed the status of the people of Cambodia as worthy victims, suffering under Vietnamese rule.
Assessing these various elements, it seems fair to describe the responsibility of the United States and Pol Pot for atrocities during “the decade of the genocide” as being roughly in the same range.
6.2.3. The “not-so-gentle” land: some relevant history
Part of the illusory story constructed about Cambodia during the 1970s and since is that this “gentle land” with its “smiling people” had known little suffering before the country was drawn into the Indochina war and then subjected to Pol Pot “autogenocide.”
Attacks by U.S. and Saigon army forces against border posts and villages in Cambodia intensified from the early 1960s, causing hundreds of casualties a year. Later, Vietnamese peasants and guerrillas fled for refuge to border areas in Cambodia, particularly after the murderous U.S. military operations in South Vietnam in early 1967, giving rise to cynical charges from Washington, echoed in the media, about Communist encroachment into neutral Cambodia.
6.2.4. Phase I: The U.S. destruction of Cambodia
On March 18, 1969, the notorious “secret bombings” began.
Once again, the U.S. escalation of the war against Cambodia in 1969 coincided with similar efforts in Laos and Vietnam.
In early 1973, U.S. bombing increased to a scale that might truly merit the term “genocidal” used by the Finnish Inquiry Commission.
6.2.5. Phase I in the media
During this period, there was extensive media coverage of Cambodia, and there was no dearth of evidence on what was taking place in the regions subjected to U.S. Air Force atrocities.
In forty-five columns, then, there are three in which victims of U.S. bombing are granted a few phrases to describe what is happening in Cambodia. Not a single column seeks to explore the reactions of the refugees not far from the Hotel Le Phnom, or in Battambang, or in the far more miserable refugee camps in the countryside nearby; or to attempt to develop some sense of what must have been happening under the frenzied bombing of these months.
Others too stress that “memory is the answer.” Commenting on the award-winning film The Killing Fields, Samuel Freedman writes that “While Holocaust survivors have helped perpetuate the memory of Nazi infamy, the Cambodian genocide is already being forgotten,” referring to phase II of the genocide, phase I having passed into oblivion with no concern.
6.2.6. The Pol Pot era
Phase II of “the decade of the genocide” began with the Khmer Rouge takeover in April 1975. Within a few weeks, the Khmer Rouge were accused in the national press of “barbarous cruelty” and “genocidal policies” comparable to the “Soviet extermination of the Kulaks or with the Gulag Archipelago.”
The nature of the Western agony over Cambodia during phase II of the genocide, as a sociocultural phenomenon, becomes clarified further when we compare it to the reaction to comparable and simultaneous atrocities in Timor.
6.2.7. Phase III in Indochina: Cambodia and the bleeding of Vietnam
As we write in 1987, Western moralists remain silent as their governments provide the means for Indonesia to continue its campaign of terror and
repression in...
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6.2.8. Phase III at home: the great silence and the hidden potency of the left
Turning to the home front, phase III illustrates the expectations of a propaganda model in yet a different way. The truth about the response to the Pol Pot atrocities in the media and “the culture” in general, and the dramatic contrast to comparable examples where the United States bears primary responsibility, is not pleasant to contemplate.
William Shawcross
6.2.9. Summary
Putting aside the undoubtedly sincere reactions of many people who were exposed to evidence of properly selected atrocities that passed through the media filter, the only rational conclusion from this illuminating record is that the West was consumed with horror over Khmer Rouge atrocities during phase II not because of a sudden passion for the fate of the suffering people of Cambodia—as the record during phase I, and elsewhere, makes sufficiently clear—but because the Khmer Rouge had a useful role to play: namely, to permit a retrospective justification for earlier French and American crimes
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7 Conclusions
It is frequently asserted that the media were not always as independent, vigilant, and defiant of authority as they allegedly are today; rather, the experiences of the past generation are held to have taught the media to exercise “the power to root about in our national life, exposing what they deem right for exposure,” without regard to external pressures or the dictates of authority (Lewis).
History has been kind enough to contrive for us a “controlled experiment” to determine just what was at stake during the Watergate period, when the confrontational stance of the media reached its peak.
In the case of the Vietnam War as well, as we showed in chapter 5, even those who condemn the media for their alleged adversarial stance acknowledge that they were almost universally supportive of U.S. policy until after large numbers of U.S. troops had been engaged in the “intervention” in South Vietnam, heavy casualties had been taken, huge dollar sums had been spent, and elite protest had surfaced on grounds of threats to elite interests.
