After The Cataclysm (Mostly Book Review)

Healthy skepticism must not be limited to people you disagree with; it is useful to hold people you agree with to a higher standard and apply critical analytics with greater rigour to views and opinions you agree with. Humans are notoriously good at challenging evidence they disagree with and uncritically accepting evidence they tend to agree with. It was with this concept in mind that I read a book published in 1979 by Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky, After the Cataclysm.

After the Cataclysm is the second volume of a two part collaborative study. The first volume deals with the political economy of human rights and United States foreign policy. The second volume is a study of Western scholarship and media. It is perhaps one of the most controversial works Noam Chomsky is accredited it with. Critics claim that in it he supports the Khmer Rouge and offers apologetics for their atrocities. These barbs are used to discredit him today, as evidenced recently after an appearance on Bill Maher’s HBO show. The following, for example, is excerpted from an Amazon.com review. (I checked the author's other reviews and he has dedicated himself to criticizing Chomsky’s works. He also criticizes one book by Norman Finklestein, and has one positive review.)

On Cambodia, Chomsky and Herman produce some extraordinary apologetics for the Khmer Rouge, offering a figure of only 25,000 killed and claiming that the bloodbath has been exaggerated by a "factor of 100" (p139). They rely on accounts of stage-managed official visits undertaken by credulous Western fellow-travellers, while dismissing the evidence of the victims, on the basis that refugee reports are compromised by "extreme bias" in their selection by the media (pp147-8). They reject any parallel between the killing fields and Nazi Germany, asking whether "a more appropriate comparison is, say, to France after liberation," where tens of thousands of collaborators were massacred "with far less motive for revenge" (p149). They complain that "allegations of genocide" are being used "to whitewash Western imperialism," to distract attention from the "the expanding system of subfascism" and to lay the ideological basis for further Western intervention (pp149-50).

Chomsky and Herman ridicule the idea that the people are "suffering in misery under a savage oppressor bent on genocide," a notion disproved by "common sense" (pp151-2). They argue that if the population is being slaughtered, one would expect "unwillingness to fight for the Paris-educated fanatics at the top," whereas the record indicates that the Cambodian people "have not exactly been awaiting liberation from their oppressors" (p156). They suggest that the brutality of the killers "may actually have saved many lives" (p160). Echoing the ideology of the Khmer Rouge, they denounce the country's "urban society" as "a colonial implantation," which the perpetrators "know only as a murderer and a remote oppressor," and thus plainly deserves its fate (p290). In their eyes, the atrocities are a "direct and understandable response to the violence of the imperial system," a suggestion which readers may well interpret as an explicit justification of mass murder (p291).

Equally noteworthy is the authors' use of source material. Having conceded that the work of Khmer Rouge critic Francois Ponchaud is "serious" and deserves "careful study" (p253), they proceed to denounce him for his "careless and untrustworthy" writing (p274), his "petty deceit" (p280), his "highly unreliable" book (p282), etc. These scruples disappear, however, when the authors rely on Khmer Rouge sympathisers such as Michael Vickery (pp215-22), Ben Kiernan (pp226-30), or Shane Tarr (pp235-40), let alone Gareth Porter and George Hildebrand, whose "carefully documented" study ("Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution") has been "almost entirely ignored" by reviewers and journalists (pp284-5) - perhaps because it was based largely on Khmer Rouge press releases.

In the space available it is possible to document only a few of the falsifications of facts and evidence in these pages. Perhaps the most striking example is the libel of Cambodian refugee Pin Yathay, whose classic memoir ("Stay Alive, My Son") offers a detailed account of the unimaginable horrors of the Khmer Rouge dictatorship which destroyed his family. Chomsky and Herman refer, without further discussion, to a letter in a foreign newspaper which defames Yathay as a CIA-sponsored drug dealer (pp143-4). Needless to say, no supporting evidence whatsoever is offered for this scurrilous allegation from an anonymous source, which the authors uncritically deploy for the purpose of smearing a bereaved father and genocide survivor. One is reminded of the neo-Nazi attempts to discredit the diary of Anne Frank.

As Stephen J. Morris noted in a crushing review essay ("Chomsky on US Foreign Policy," Harvard International Review, December-January 1981), the object of this disgraceful exercise cannot be to convince the reader that the arguments offered are actually true. Rather, the goal is to affect the reader's emotional attitude, by dulling his or her sense of outrage on contemplating millions of tortured and mutilated corpses brought about by the radical movement which campaigned for a communist victory in Indochina. In this task, the book is eminently successful, not unlike the works of Holocaust denial which serve as its echo and mirror image.

The review distorts the authors words and arguments as we shall see. I had read many of Chomsky’s other works on more recent events and had never heard him make any supportive statements for the Khmer Rouge, Communist Russia, or similarly oppressive regimes. (A common rhetorical device for Chomsky is to unfavorably compare our media with the state propaganda Russian news service Pravda.) I decided to read the book and see what exactly Chomsky and Herman said and the context in which they said it. My original plan was to take notes and pen a letter to Chomsky to ask if he still backed his outrageous assertions. What I discovered upon reading it is that the above review is quite inaccurate and deliberately misleading.

Chomsky leaves the reader no room to misinterpret his feelings on the Khmer Rouge, and it is shameful that this is held up as an indictment of apologetics against him.

The book’s primary objective is to examine the media and intellectual culture of the Western world. Chomsky and Herman's thesis is that the media and intellectual culture promoted and uncritically accepted the official line of the government in regards to the Khmer Rouge. In their service to the state they ignored evidence, accepted false testimony, continued to publish doctored photographs, and exaggerated the Khmer Rouge’s record of atrocity. They also ignored the crucial historical context of Cambodia which had included an intense United States aerial bombardment of Cambodia for several years.

In this discussion we have not attempted to give a systematic portrayal of the nature of the Communist regime in Vietnam... Rather, our concern has been to show how the Free Press selects evidence from what is available to paint a picture that conforms to the requirements of state propaganda in the post Vietnam-war era (118)....

Our primary concern here is not to establish the facts with regard to postwar Indochina, but rather to investigate their refraction through the prism of Western ideology, a very different task.(140)...

These comments are no criticism of the [Ponchaud] book, of course. Rather, they relate to its remarkable reception, and thus are relevant to our primary concern: the workings of the Western propaganda system. (255)...

These remarks bear directly on the framework of Western propaganda. They do not touch another and very different question: how should one evaluate the programs and character of the countries (Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam). (299)

This is a small sampling of the words they dedicated to explicitly state their objective. The author of the above review does not seem able or perhaps willing to grasp the point.

Chomsky and Herman point out several dishonest practices including but are not limited to the following in the Western world.

• Western journalists repeatedly used photographs staged in Thailand depicting Khmer Rouge soldiers executing Cambodians. Journals including Time and Christian Science Monitor used said pictures for months and years after they had been exposed.
• Western claims about the number of people killed under the Khmer Rouge were based on a New York Book Review piece by Jean Lacoutre. Lacoutre reviewed Francois Ponchaud's book published in French and misinterpreted several facts and quotes. The familiar casualty count of 2 million killed comes from this book, but is in fact incorrect.
• A Readers Digest article by Gareth Porter is also full of disinformation which is uncritically reproduced throughout the Western world.
• Western intellectuals did not mention or discuss the impact the US bombing had on Cambodian society. They also ignored estimates from both the USG and experts who claimed that as a direct result of US bombing a million people would probably starve within five years. Western intellectuals ignored those claims, attributing all deaths to the Khmer Rouge.

The authors carefully make their point; when someone publishes something that agrees with the current political stance of the US government then intellectual standards are relaxed. If a similar work were published that went against the grain of the establishment, then it receives a much more strenuous critical analysis. They carefully note several times that the Khmer Rouge were indeed committing atrocities, but there was no reason to grossly distort the record in service of the state. Moreover at the exact same time atrocities of a similar scale were occurring in parts of the world under the US's supervision and approval, namely East Timor.

The authors make it clear how they feel about the Khmer Rouge’s atrocities. (Emphasis mine):

• There seems little doubt that the aftermath of the revolutionary victory has been remarkably free of vengefulness [in Vietnam]. The same is true in Laos. No doubt Cambodia differs, even when one discounts the for the stream of falsification in Western propaganda. (48)
• Some of what Hoan reports [on Vietnamese oppression] is no doubt accurate, particularly concerning severe restrictions on personal freedom, including freedom of expression and travel. (99)
• [In the first paragraph on their section concerning Cambodia] In the case of Cambodia, there is no difficulty in documenting major atrocities and oppression, primarily from the reports of refugees.
• These examples, [cited above] far from exhaustive, reveal how desperate Western commentators have been to find 'evidence' that could be used in the international propaganda campaign concerning Cambodia. The credible reports of atrocities - and there were many - did not suffice for these purposes, and it was necessary to seek out the most dubious evidence. (177)
• In Cambodia... the dark-skinned peasants exacted a fearful toll. Of that, there is little doubt. (290)

We now turn to the Francois Ponchaud book. The authors devote many pages to discuss both the book's contents and its reception in the West. This book is the source of many claims about the Khmer Rouge and their state pogrom of genocide. The book was written in French and published in France. The French speaking intellectual Jean Lacouture wrote a review of the book in an American journal. The authors praise Lacouture in general but take issue with his translation which included several distortions and misreadings. Lacouture retracted the mistakes. In spite of the deficiencies Chomsky and Herman agree with both Lacouture's interpretation and the book’s overall conclusion which in Ponchaud's words is that "the Khmer revolution is irrefutably the bloodiest of our century." (281) Western intellectuals ignored Lacoutre’s retractions. In the next paragraph the author’s remark,

As for the inconsistencies and mistakes in Ponchaud's book, how seriously one takes them is, of course, a matter of judgment… We find the book itself valid enough - and are indeed unaware of any contrary view. (282)

The author's support the book, and wrote favorable reviews in The Nation which Ponchaud acknowledges (256). The author’s note their support for Ponchaud’s conclusions elsewhere as well. Of support for the Khmer Rouge they remark [emphasis theirs], "It would be difficult indeed to find anyone defending the Khmer Rouge." (282)

At the end of the book, the authors again restate their thesis concerning the Western media and intellectuals. They add,

When the facts are in, it may turn out that the more extreme condemnations were in fact correct. But even if that turns out to be the case, it will in no way alter the conclusions we have reached on the central question addressed here: how the available facts were selected, modified, or sometimes invented to create a certain image offered to the general population. The answer to this question seems clear, and it is unaffected by whatever may yet be discovered about Cambodia in the future.

We urge once again that the reader concerned with the workings of Western propaganda compare the treatment of Cambodia - and the other societies of Indochina as well - with the attention given to other cases where the evidence available, the scale and character of atrocities alleged, and even the time frame is comparable: Timor, for example. (293)

I will now devote some attention to the Amazon.com review of the book. It is important only because it is a typical criticism of Chomsky and displays a remarkably high level of ability to not see the point or thrust of his arguments as reviewed above. I will limit the discussion to several examples of the Amazon review to make the broader point before moving on to more current events.

The first paragraph (of the review) contains a distortion. The reviewer remarks, "On Cambodia, Chomsky and Herman produce some extraordinary apologetics for the Khmer Rouge, offering a figure of only 25,000 killed and claiming that the bloodbath has been exaggerated by a 'factor of 100' (p139)." The full context of their quote and discussion is worth quoting. Either the reviewer is extremely cynical or unable to comprehend simple points.

The context of the quote is a discussion of George McGovern's advocacy for military intervention in Cambodia justified on wildly fluctuating and unsubstantiated claims about the numbers killed by the Khmer Rouge.

If 2-2.5 million people, about 1/3 of the population, have been systematically slaughtered by a band of murderous thugs who have taken over the government, then McGovern is willing to consider international military intervention. We presume that he would not have made this proposal if the figure of those killed were, say, less by a factor of 100- that is 25,000 people - though this would be bad enough.(139)

In the accompanying footnote the authors explain why they chose the arbitrary scale of 100.

We choose a factor of a hundred for illustration because of Jean Lacouture's observation, to which we return, that it is a question of secondary importance whether the number of people killed was in the thousands or hundreds of thousands.

Clearly the authors make no argument for how many the Khmer Rouge killed. They offer no figure (much less a specific figure of 25,000) but are concerned with McGovern’s wildly fluctuating figures. The underlying argument is that a military intervention is a serious affair, and accuracy and honesty are necessary to have a rational debate.

In another typically misleading statement, the reviewer claims,

Echoing the ideology of the Khmer Rouge, they denounce the country's "urban society" as "a colonial implantation," which the perpetrators "know only as a murderer and a remote oppressor," and thus plainly deserves its fate (p290).

The full context of the quote is actually an explanation for why the atrocities had occurred in Cambodia. One theme the authors repeatedly turn to is the effect the US's aerial bombardment had on Cambodia in the years prior to the Khmer Rouge takeover.

They had suffered bitterly in a war that had been fought with no quarter. Their enemy was a foreign power that come to destroy their villages and land, and an urban society, hardly less foreign in their eyes, a colonial implantation that they know only as a murderer and a remote oppressor.

This is worth quoting because Chomsky and Herman are seeking to explain the roots of Khmer Rouge violence. The "remote oppressor" is the United States which had bombarded the country with B-52 raids for several years, destroying the peasant and agricultural life of rural Cambodia driving peasants to live in underground bunkers or forests. If that is not the definition of "remote oppressor" then the phrase loses all sensible meaning. Again, as noted above the explanation of violence does not equate to justification for it. It takes real effort to miss the author's condemnation of atrocities committed by all parties. The reviewer remarks Chomsky and Herman's explanation is one "which readers may well interpret as a justification of mass murder." The paragraph from whence the above quotation was excerpted concludes with the following thoughts: (emphasis mine)

In Vietnam and Laos, where the circumstances were different though comparable, there appears to have been little murderous vengeance - little, that is, by historical standards. In Cambodia, however, the dark-skinned peasants exacted a fearful toll. Of that, there is little doubt.

All of the points within the review labor under similar distortions. The brief unmasking is sufficient to give a flavor of how credible the overall review is.

I was somewhat surprised to find After The Cataclysm a relevant work. The specific historical circumstances are dated, but the institutions and system of thought control remain in place. The author’s are primarily concerned with said institutions, and as such their comments and criticism ring true today. The system has perhaps crystallized further than the period of the book's publishing as corporate control over the mass media has expanded in the intervening years.

However, some of the dated information is surprisingly relevant. In several places throughout the book the authors note the laser like intensity directed at Cambodian crimes while completely ignoring and suppressing US sponsored crimes in East Timor. The primary difference between the two bloodbaths was that Indonesia was a US sponsored client. As of this writing, February 9, 2005, the media is still unable to admit to America's approval and support of the atrocity in East Timor. On February 7, 2005, about 40 years after the US supported coup ushered General Suharto into power the New York Times reported the following account of US-Indonesian relations. (Emphasis mine)

After a 13-year break, the Bush administration is acting to mend relations with the Indonesian military, the largest in Southeast Asia and a potentially crucial player in its campaign against terrorism.

Washington is seizing on an opportunity that came with the tsunami, when Indonesia accepted the help of the United States military in distributing aid and had daily contacts with the Americans. Congress, concerned about Indonesia's human rights record, curbed military ties in 1992 and cut them back further five years ago after the army was involved in the killings of hundreds of civilians in East Timor, a province that has since gained independence.

The Times' account is technically accurate. Clinton did finally let the Indonesian military know that enough was enough in 1997, putting an end to the Indonesian bloodbath which the US had supported for over 20 years. Throughout the worst atrocities the US remained the largest supplier of military weapons and training to Indonesian forces. The US intervened in the UN to prevent any international action against Indonesia. The Western media remained largely silent on the issue for years. As Chomsky and Herman note in After The Cataclysm the deafening outrage over Cambodian atrocity, of which the US could do very little, was relentless. The Indonesian forces killed hundreds of thousands of East Timor, although The Times only admits to "hundreds of civilians." In a narrow, technical sense this is accurate. "The army was involved" in the deaths of hundreds in the late 90s, but they were also involved in the deaths of hundreds of thousands in the years leading up the end of US support.

The Washington Post also called for the restoration of US-Indonesian relations the following day. They tell the reader "most U.S. military training for Indonesia, as well as arms sales, has been suspended since 1992 because of the Indonesian military's record of human rights violations." This piece is not even technically correct, US training and support did not end in 1992. The article also remains woefully devoid of any context. The US did not suspend arms sales because of "human rights violations." It did so because of an increasingly vocal international opposition to US support for those violations. The US ended their support because it was no longer politically and economically expedient to do so. If it had been about human rights, then any Congress or president from the preceding 20 years could have halted aid. The worst violations occurred years prior to the eventual action of the USG.
The Post goes on the remark,

The congressional limits came at a time when the Indonesian army was unrestrained by weak civilian rulers and stood accused of serious human rights crimes in the breakaway province of East Timor. Since then the army has waged another ruthless campaign against a separatist movement in Aceh; until the tsunami, the province was ruled under martial law. Yet as Indonesian democracy has grown stronger, so has civilian control over the military. Direct presidential elections last year brought to power a former general trained in the United States, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who appears committed to reform. His defense minister, Mr. Juwono, acknowledges the human rights abuses of the past; he says his mission is "to try and reconfigure the Indonesian defense force, particularly the army, so that it will be more accountable to democracy [and] more accountable to parliament." To do that, he says, he'd like to send many more of his officers to the United States for training.
This sounds like a reasonable request

The Indonesians are reformed, and apparently contrite. Although the careful reader examines the lengthier Times report he would discover at the bottom of the report one Indonesian General's view.

General Ryamizard, who has strong nationalist beliefs, has boasted of rising to the top of the military without training overseas, and is among those in whom American officials say they have sensed hostility to American overtures.

Asked about restoring ties, he said: "America is the one that cut relations. Why are we blamed?"

That impulse in the army to steer clear of the United States has mounted in the past decade, in part out of a sense of resentment that Washington took away what it gave during much of the cold war.