On postwar
experiences
of U.
Manufacturing Consent - Chomsky
A CIA analysis of April 1968 estimated that
"80,000 enemy troops," overwhelmingly South Vietnamese, were killed during
the Tet offensive. See note 44, above.
162. Arthur Westing, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (February 1981); Colin Norman, Science, March II, 1983, citing the conclusion of an international conference in Ho Chi Minh City; Jim Rogers, Indochina Issues, Center for International Policy (September 1985). On the effects of U. S. chemical and environmental warfare in Vietnam, unprecedented in scale and character, see
SIPRI, Ecological Consequences of the Second Indochina War (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1976). . '
163. Ton That Thien, Pacific Affairs (Winter 1983-84); ChItra Subramaruam, Pacific News Service, November 15, 1985; both writing from Geneva.
164. News conference, March 24, 1977; New York Times, March 25, 1977? 165. Bernard Gwertzman, New York Times, March 3, 1985.
166. Barbara Crossette, New York Times, November 10, 1985, February 28,
1988; AP, April 7, 1988.
167. John Corry, New York Times, April 27, 1985.
168. Time, April 15, 1985. The discussion here is in part dra~n from Noam Chomsky, "Visions of Righteousness," Cultural Critique (Spring 1986).
169. Wall Street Journa~ April 4, 1985. An exception was Newsweek (Apr. 15, 1985), which devoted four pages of its thirty-three-page account to ~,reportby Tony Clifton and Ron Moreau on the effects of the war on the wounded land. " The New York Times retrospective includes one Vietnamese, a defector to the West who devotes a few paragraphs of his five-page denunciation of
the enemy ;0 the character of the war, and there are scattered references in
other retrospectives.
170. Presidential adviser Walt W. Rostow, formerly a pro~esso~ at ~IT, now a respected commentator on public affairs and economiC hIstOrian at the
University of Texas, The View from the Seventh Floor (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), p. 244. Rostow's account of Mao and North Korea is as fanciful as his remarks on Indochina, as serious scholarship shows.
171. Stuart Creighton Miller, "Benevolent Assimilation" (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 271.
172. Allan E. Goodman and Seth P. Tillman, New York Times, March 24, 1985. 173. New York Times, March 31, 1985. Charles Krauthammer, New Republic, March 4, 1985.
174. On Lebanese opinion and the scandalous refusal of the media to consider it, and the general context, see Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle (Boston: South End Press, 1983).
175. It is widely argued that the United States supported France in Indochina out of concern for French participation in the U. S. -run European military system. This appears to be a minor factor at best, and one can also make a case that the reverse was true: that support for France in Europe was motivated by concern that France might "abandon Indochina" (see Geoffrey Warner, "The USA and the Rearmament of West Germany," International Affairs [Spring 1985]). This factor also fails to explain U. S. efforts to keep the French in Indochina, and to take up their cause after they withdrew.
176. Cited by Porter, A Peace Denied, p. 36, from 1966 congressional hearings. 177. See, inter alia, essays in PP, V, by John Dower, Richard DuBoff, and Gabriel Kolko; FRS, chapter I. V; Thomas McCormick, in Williams et aI. , America in Vietnam; Michael Schaller, "Securing the Great Crescent," Jour- nal ofAmerican History (September 1982).
178. See p. 187, above, and PEHR, vol. I, chapter 4.
179. Gelb, "10 Years After Vietnam, U. S. a Power in Asia," New York Times, April 18, 1985, quoting Professor Donald Zagoria.
180. See FRS, pp. 48f. , citing upbeat analyses from the Far Eastern Economic Review in 1972.
181. Far Eastern Economic Review, October I I , 1984.
182. SeeAWWA, p. 286.
183. Fox Butterfield, "The New Vietnam Scholarship: Challenging the Old Passions," New York Times Magazine, February 13, 1983, referring specifically to Race's study cited earlier, an in-depth analysis of the NLF victory in rural areas prior to the escalation of the U. S. war in 1965, "invalidated" by events that occurred years later, according to Butterfield's interesting logic.
184. See our PEHR, II, 84, 166ff. , 342; Daniel Southerland, "No Pens and Pencils for Cambodia," Christian Science Monitor, December 4, 1981; AP, "U. S. Bars Mennonite School Aid to Cambodia," New York Times, December 8,1981; Joel Charny and John Spragens, Obstacles to Recovery in Vietnam and Kampuchea: U. S. Embargo of Humanitarian Aid (Boston: Oxfam America, 1984), citing many examples of "explicit U. S. policy" under the Reagan ad- ministration "to prevent even private humanitarian assistance from reaching the people of Kampuchea and Vietnam. "
185. Louis Wiznitzer, Christian Science Monitor, November 6, 1981; Kamm, "In Mosaic of Southeast Asia, Capitalist Lands Are Thriving," New York Times, November 8, 1981.
186. See p. 187 and note 2.
187. For a point-by-point response, demonstrating that the accusations are a
380 NOTES TO PAGES 248-256
NOTES TO PAGES 256-259 381
melange of falsehoods and misrepresentations apart from a few minor points changed in subsequent broadcasts, see the "Content Analysis and Assess- ment," included in Inside Story Special Edition: Vietnam Op/Ed, cited in note 2, above.
188. Karnow,Vietnam. Foradetailedcritiqueofthishighlypraisedbest-seller, see Noam Chomsky, "The Vietnam War in the Age of Orwell," Race & Class 4 (1984 [Boston Review, January 1984]). See Peter Biskind, "What Price Bal- ance," Race & Class 4 (1984 [parts in The Nation, December 3, 1983]), on the PBS television history.
189. Kahin, Intervention, pp. 307-8.
190. Later, in another context, we hear that "to many peasants, [the U. S. Marines] were yet another threatening foreign force" (episode 6, on "Amer- ica's Enemy" and their point of view).
191. Biskind, citing a London Times account; Butterfield, New York Times, October 2, 1983.
Chapter 6: The Indochina Wars (II)
I. CitedbyBernardFall,AnatomyofaCn'sis(1961;reprint,NewYork:Double- day, 1969), p. 163, from congressional hearings. The reasons were political: the Pentagon was not in favor. See also Walter Haney, "The Pentagon Papers and U. S. Involvement in Laos," in Pentagon Papers, Senator Gravel edition (Bos- ton: Beacon Press, 1972; hereafter PP), vol. 5.
2. State Department Background Notes (March 1969); Denis Warner, Reporting Southeast Asia (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1966), p. 171.
3. On this period, see, among others, Haney, "U. S. Involvement in Laos"; Noam Chomsky, At War with Asia (New York: Pantheon, 1970; hereafter A WWA); Nina S. Adams and Alfred W. McCoy, eds. , Laos: War and Revolu- tion (New York: Harper & Row, 1970); Charles Stevenson, The End ofNowhere (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972).
4. Howard Elterman, The State, the Mass Media and Ideological Hegemony: United States Policy Decisions in Indochina, I974-'75-Historical Record, Gov- ernment Pronouncements and Press Coverage (Ph. D. diss. , New York University, 1978), p. 198.
5. Fall, Anatomy of a Crisis.
6. A request to the (very cooperative) American embassy in Vientiane to obtain their documentation would have quickly revealed to reporters that the claims they were relaying on the basis of embassy briefings had little relation to the facts, as one of us discovered by carrying out the exercise in Vientiane in early 1970. For a detailed review of the available facts concerning foreign (North Vietnamese, Thai, Chinese Nationalist, and U. S. ) involvement through the 1960s, and their relation to what the media were reporting, see A WWA, pp. 203-36; and Noam Chomsky, For Reasons ofState (New York: Pantheon, 1973; hereafter FRS), pp. 178-79. See also chapter 5, p. 177, and note 22.
7. In Adams and McCoy, Laos; excerpts in AWWA, PP. 96-97.
8. On attempts by former Times Saigon bureau chief A. J. Langguth to explain
away the suppression of the bombing of northern Laos by obscuring the crucial distinction between the bombing of the civilian society of the North and the bombing of the Ho Chi Minh trail in the South (acceptable within the doctrinal system in terms of "defense of South Vietnam against North Vietnamese aggression"), see Noam Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War (New York: Pantheon, 1982), p. 402.
9? Elterman, State-Media-Ideological Hegemony, pp. 332ff. and appendixes. 10. The report states that "until early this spring, when North Vietnamese troops began a series of advances in northeast Laos," the war had been "lim- ited," U. S. bombing had been aimed at "North Vietnamese supply routes" and "concentrations of enemy troops," and "civilian population centers and farm- land were largely spared. " Extensive refugee reports were soon to show that this account was inaccurate, as Decornoy's eyewitness reports had done fifteen months earlier.
II. See references cited above, and, shortly after, Fred Branfman, Voices from
the Plain ofJars (New York: Harper & Row, 1972); and Walter Haney, "A Survey ~fCivilian Fatalities among Refugees from Xieng Khouang Province, Laos," m Problems of War Victims in Indochina, Hearings before the [Kennedy] Subcommittee on Refugees and Escapees, U. S. Senate, May 9, 1972, pt. 2: "Laos and Cambodia," appendix 2. There were some 1970 reports in the media: e. g. , Daniel Southerland, Christian Science Monitor, March 14; Laurence Stern, Washington Post, March 26; Hugh D. S. Greenway, Life,
April 3; Carl Strock, New Republic, May 9; Noam Chomsky, "Laos," New York Review of Books, July 23, 1970, with more extensive details (reprinted in
AWWA).
12. Haney, PP, V. See FRS, pp. 176f. , on Sullivan's misrepresentation of
Haney's conclusions.
13? Refugee And Civilian War Casualty Problems in Indochina, Staff Report for
the [Kennedy] Subcommittee on Refugees and Escapees, U. S. Senate, Sep- tember 28, 1970.
14? One of the authors participated in a public meeting of media figures in New York, in 1986, at which a well-known television journalist defended media coverage of the bombing of northern Laos on the grounds that there was a report from a refugee camp in 1972. One wonders how much credit would be given to a journal that reported the bombing of Pearl Harbor in
1945?
15? T. D. Allman, Manchester Guardian Weekry, January I; Far Eastern Eco- nomic Review, January 8, 1972 (hereafter FEER); see FRS, pp. 173f. , for a lengthy excerpt. Robert Seamans, cited by George Wilson, Washington Post- Boston Globe, January 17, 1972; see FRS, pp. 172f. , for this and similar testi- mony before Congress by Ambassador William Sullivan. John Everingham and subsequent commentary on the Hmong (Meo) tribes, cited in Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, Political Economy of Human Rights (Boston: South End Press, 1979; hereafter PEHR) II, II9f. ; Chanda, FEER, December 23,
1977; see PEHR, II, 131f. , 340, for these and other direct testimonies, far from the mainstream, with a few noteworthy exceptions cited. Bangkok World, cited by Haney, "U. S. Involvement in Laos," p. 292, along with a Jack Anderson
column in the Washington Post (Feb. 19,1972).
On postwar experiences of U. S. relief workers, see PEHR, pp. 132f. , 340 .
NUl"~ Tv "AGI! S 202-263 3113
16. McCoy's emphasis, in a letter to the Washington Post; cited by Haney, "U. S. Involvement in Laos," p. 293.
17. Television commentary reprinted in Christian Science Monitor, June 10,
1975?
18. See A WWA, pp. II9f. , and Haney, "U. S. Involvement in Laos," citing
congressional hearings and the Washington Post, March 16, 1970.
19. Walter Saxon, New York Times, August 24,1975. See PEHR, chapter 5, for further details on this report and general discussion of postwar reporting of Laos.
20. Kimmo Kiljunen, ed. , Kampuchea: Decade of the Genocide, Report of a government-backed Finnish Inquiry Commission (London: Zed, 1984). See also Kiljunen, "Power Politics and the Tragedy of Kampuchea during the Seventies," Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars (April-June 1985).
21. See William Shawcross, Sideshow (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), and Seymour Hersh, The Price of Power (New York: Summit, 1983).
22. William Shawcross, "The End of Cambodia? " New York Review of Books, January 24, 1980, relying on reports by Fran~ois Ponchaud, a French priest whose work provided the major source ofevidence about Khmer Rouge atroci- ties in 1975-76: Fran~ois Ponchaud, Cambodia: Year Zero (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978), a revised version of a 1977 French study that became perhaps the most influential unread book in recent political history after a review by Jean Lacouture ("The Bloodiest Revolution," New York Review of Books, Mar. 31, 1977); see also his "Cambodia: Corrections," New
York Review ofBooks, May 26, 1977, withdrawing the most sensational claims. Our review (The Nation, June 25, 1977) was the first, to our knowledge, to attend to the actual text, which appeared in English a year later. See our PEHR, 11. 6, on the record of falsification based on this book, and on Pon- chaud's own remarkable record, further analyzed by Michael Vickery in his Cambodia: I975-I982 (Boston: South End Press, 1984). CIA Research Paper, Kampuchea: A Demographic Catastrophe (Washington: CIA, May 1980). For a critique of this study revealing extensive falsification conditioned by U. S. government priorities-specifically, suppression of the worst Pol Pot atrocities during the later period-see Michael Vickery, "Democratic Kampuchea- CIA to the Rescue," Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 14. 4 (1982), and his Cambodia. The latter is the major study of the Khmer Rouge period, by one of the few authentic Cambodia scholars, widely and favorably re- viewed abroad by mainstream Indochina scholars and others but virtually ignored in the United States, as was the Finnish Inquiry Commission report. See Noam Chomsky, "Decade of Genocide in Review," Inside Asia (London, February 1985, reprinted in James Peck, ed. , The Chomsky Reader [New York: Pantheon, 1987]), on several serious studies of the period, in- cluding these.
23. Michael Vickery, "Ending Cambodia-Some Revisions," submitted to the New York Review ofBooks in June 1981 but rejected. See his Cambodia for more extended discussion. Shawcross himself had had second thoughts by then (see "Kampuchea Revives on Food, Aid, and Capitalism," The Bulletin [Australia], March 24, 1981). See his Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), for a later version, now recast in ways to which we return.
24. Page 370, blaming Vietnamese deception for the account he had relayed in 1980.
25. Shawcross, The Nation, September 21, 1985; Ben Kiernan, letter to The Nation, October 3,1985, unpublished. For evaluation of the international relief efforts, see Vickery, Cambodia; Kiljunen, Kampuchea; Joel Charny and John Spragens, Obstacles to Recovery in Vietnam and Kampuchea: U. S. Embargo of Humanitarian Aid (Boston: Oxfam America, 1984); Shawcross, Quality of
Mercy.
26. Fran~ois Ponchaud, on whom Shawcross relied, is a highly dubious source for reasons that have been extensively documented; see note 22. No one with a record of duplicity approaching his would ever be relied on for undocu- mented charges of any significance if the target were not an official enemy. 27. Shawcross, Quality ofMercy, pp. 49-50. He observes that "those years of warfare saw the destruction of Cambodian society and the rise of the Khmer Rouge from its ashes, in good part as a result of White House policies"; "with the forces of nationalism unleashed by the war at their command, the Khmer Rouge became an increasingly formidable army," while in the "massive Ameri- can bombing campaign" to which the Khmer Rouge were subjected through August 1973, "their casualties are thought to have been huge. " The phrase "their casualties" presumably refers to Khmer Rouge military forces; there is no mention of civilian casualties. On the limited scope of Shawcross's "quality of mercy," see "Phase III at home" (p. 288), below.
28. Vickery, Cambodia, p. 293.
29. AP, Boston Globe, September 24, 1978, citing the Report of the Interna- tional Labor Organization in Geneva on over fifty million child laborers in the world, with Thailand singled out as one of the worst offenders, thanks to grinding poverty, an effective military government backed by the United States, lack oflabor union power, and "wide-open free enterprise. " See PEHR, 11. 6, 359, for excerpts and other examples that have elicited even less interest, and PEHR, II, xv, on a World Bank description of the situation in Thailand. On the brutal treatment of many of the estimated 10. 7 million child laborers in Thailand, see Human Rights in Thailand Report 9. 1. (January-March 1985) (Coordinating Group for Religion in Society, Bangkok); Thai Development Newsletter 3. 1 1985 (December 1986) (Bangkok). On the treatment of women in "the brothel of Asia," with its estimated 500,000 prostitutes, masseuses, and bar-waitresses, 20 percent of them under fourteen years of age, drawn to Bangkok (and sometimes sold off to Europe) from the impoverished rural areas through "a huge underground network of brothels and workshops feeding on child flesh and labor," see several articles in Beyond Stereotypes: Asian Women
in Development, Southeast Asia Chronicle (January 1985).
30. For extensive evidence on this matter, see PEHR, 11. 6, and Vickery, Cambodia, extending the story to phase III.
31. Others give higher estimates. Ponchaud gives the figure of 800,000 killed, but, as noted in our 1977 review, he seems to have exaggerated the toll of the U. S. bombing, and as shown in the references of note 22, he is a highly unreliable source. "US Government sources put the figure unofficially at 600,000 to 700,000" (CIA demographic study, which accepts the lower figure). 32. Vickery, Cambodia, pp. 184f. Other estimates vary widely. At the low end, the CIA demographic study gives the figure of 50,000 to 100,000 for people
384 NOTES TO P AGES 263-267
NOTES TO P AGES 268-274 385
who "may have been executed," and an estimate of deaths from all causes that is meaningless because of misjudgment of postwar population and politically motivated assessments throughout; the Far Eastern Economic Review reported a substantial increase in the population under DK to 8. 2 million, "mostly based on CIA estimates" (Asia 1979 and Asia 1980 yearbooks of the FEER, the latter reducing the estimate from 8. 2 to 4. 2 million, the actual figure apparently being in the neighborhood of 6. 5 million); in the U. S. government journal Problem~ of Communism (May-June 1981), Australian Indochina specialist Carlyle Thayer suggests a figure of deaths from all causes at 500,000, of which 50,000 to 60,000 were executions. At the high end, estimates range to three million or more, but without any available analysis. As all serious observers emphasize,
the range of error is considerable at every point.
33. George Hildebrand and Gareth Porter, Cambodia: Starvation and Revolu- tion (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976), based on U. S. and international aid reports, cited by Vickery, Cambodia, p. 79; FEER correspondent Nayan Chanda in several articles, cited in PEHR, 1. 6, 229f. ; Western doctor is Dr. Penelope Key, of the World Vision Organization, cited by Hildebrand and Porter, along with similar reports from Catholic Relief Services and Red Cross observers; Shawcross, Sideshow, pp. 370f. Hildebrand and Porter's book, the only extensive study of the situation at the war's end, was highly praised by Indochina scholar George Kahin but ignored in the media, or vilified. See PEHR, 11. 6, 232f. , for a particular egregious example, by William Shawcross in the New York Review ofBooks. When PEHR, 11. 6 was circulating to Cam- bodia scholars and journalists in manuscript, we received a letter from Shaw- cross demanding that references to him be eliminated. We responded that we would be glad to consider any specific case that he found wrong or misleading
and delayed publication of the book awaiting his response, which never ar- rived. On his public response, see below.
34. Milton Osborne, Before Kampuchea (London: Allen & Unwin, 1980), p. 191; David Chandler, Pacific Affairs (Summer 1983); Philip Windsor, The Listener, BBC (London), July II, 1985.
35. David Chandler and Ben Kiernan, eds. , Revolution and Its Aftermath in Kampuchea, Monograph 25/Yale University Southeast Asia Series (1983), p. I.
36. See note 32, above; FEER, January 19, 1979?
37. Douglas Pike, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 29, 1979, and Chn'stian Science Monitor, December 4, 1979; cited by Vickery, Cambodia, p. 65. On the Freedom House and Times assessments of Pike's work, see p. p. 324,326; Fox Butterfield, "The New Vietnam Scholarship," New York Times Magazine cover story, February 13, 1983, where Pike is regarded as the exemplar of the "new breed" of dispassionate scholars.
38. Nayan Chanda, Brother Enemy (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), pp. 329, 394, for a detailed analysis of the maneuverings during this period. See also Grant Evans and Kelvin Rowley, Red Brotherhood at War (London: Verso, 1984).
39. Derriere Ie sourire khmer (Paris: PIon, 1971); see FRS, chapter 2, section 2. 40. Vickery, Cambodia, pp. 7, 17, 5-6, 17, 43; ViCKery, "Looking Back at Cambodia," Westerry (Australia) (December 1976). See PEHR, 11. 6 for ex- cerpts from the latter study.
41. See FRS, pp. 192ft'. , and sources cited, particularly the fall 1971 studies by T. D. Allman, based on interviews with members of the Cambodian elite. 42. See Elizabeth Becker, When The War Was Over (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), p. 28, citing a 1963 U. S. embassy cable quoting Sihanouk; Chanda, Brother Enemy, pp. 61f. See A WWA and FRS on contemporary studies of the Sihanouk period that provide more detail.
43. Michael Leifer, "Cambodia," Asian Survey (January 1967). Becker, When the War Was Over, p. 27, asserts that the CIA was behind the 1959 plot. For sources on these developments here and below, largely French, see A WWA and FRS. See Peter Dale Scott in Pp, V, on the regional context of the 1963 escalation.
44. See A WWA and FRS for references and other examples.
45. Bombing in Cambodia, Hearings before the Committee on Armed Services, U. S. Senate, 93d Cong. , 1st sess. , July I August 1973, pp. 158-60, the primary source on the "secret bombings. "
46. See PEHR, 11. 6,288.
47? PEHR, 11. 6, 380; also 383. Shawcross, Quality ofMercy, p. 49, referring solely to B-52 bombings of Vietnamese "sanctuaries" in the border areas, the standard evasion of the issue.
48. See PEHR, 11. 6, 383, where the same point is noted, and its irrelevance discussed. These matters had been specifically brought to Shawcross's atten- tion during the period when he was working on his Sideshow, in commentary (which he had requested) on earlier articles of his on the topic in the British press.
49. William Beecher, New York Times, May 9, 1969; PEHR, 11. 6, 271, 289, 383.
50. Elterman, State-Media-Ideological Hegemony, p. 344. Note that the post- Tet operations were in part reported at the time, although often in the highly distorted framework already discussed. For samples, see A WWA. On media coverage of the Laos bombings in 1969, see "Laos" (p. 253).
51. T. D. Allman, FEER, April 9, 1970; Manchester Guardian, September 18, 1971. See note 41.
52. See FRS, p.
"80,000 enemy troops," overwhelmingly South Vietnamese, were killed during
the Tet offensive. See note 44, above.
162. Arthur Westing, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (February 1981); Colin Norman, Science, March II, 1983, citing the conclusion of an international conference in Ho Chi Minh City; Jim Rogers, Indochina Issues, Center for International Policy (September 1985). On the effects of U. S. chemical and environmental warfare in Vietnam, unprecedented in scale and character, see
SIPRI, Ecological Consequences of the Second Indochina War (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1976). . '
163. Ton That Thien, Pacific Affairs (Winter 1983-84); ChItra Subramaruam, Pacific News Service, November 15, 1985; both writing from Geneva.
164. News conference, March 24, 1977; New York Times, March 25, 1977? 165. Bernard Gwertzman, New York Times, March 3, 1985.
166. Barbara Crossette, New York Times, November 10, 1985, February 28,
1988; AP, April 7, 1988.
167. John Corry, New York Times, April 27, 1985.
168. Time, April 15, 1985. The discussion here is in part dra~n from Noam Chomsky, "Visions of Righteousness," Cultural Critique (Spring 1986).
169. Wall Street Journa~ April 4, 1985. An exception was Newsweek (Apr. 15, 1985), which devoted four pages of its thirty-three-page account to ~,reportby Tony Clifton and Ron Moreau on the effects of the war on the wounded land. " The New York Times retrospective includes one Vietnamese, a defector to the West who devotes a few paragraphs of his five-page denunciation of
the enemy ;0 the character of the war, and there are scattered references in
other retrospectives.
170. Presidential adviser Walt W. Rostow, formerly a pro~esso~ at ~IT, now a respected commentator on public affairs and economiC hIstOrian at the
University of Texas, The View from the Seventh Floor (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), p. 244. Rostow's account of Mao and North Korea is as fanciful as his remarks on Indochina, as serious scholarship shows.
171. Stuart Creighton Miller, "Benevolent Assimilation" (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 271.
172. Allan E. Goodman and Seth P. Tillman, New York Times, March 24, 1985. 173. New York Times, March 31, 1985. Charles Krauthammer, New Republic, March 4, 1985.
174. On Lebanese opinion and the scandalous refusal of the media to consider it, and the general context, see Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle (Boston: South End Press, 1983).
175. It is widely argued that the United States supported France in Indochina out of concern for French participation in the U. S. -run European military system. This appears to be a minor factor at best, and one can also make a case that the reverse was true: that support for France in Europe was motivated by concern that France might "abandon Indochina" (see Geoffrey Warner, "The USA and the Rearmament of West Germany," International Affairs [Spring 1985]). This factor also fails to explain U. S. efforts to keep the French in Indochina, and to take up their cause after they withdrew.
176. Cited by Porter, A Peace Denied, p. 36, from 1966 congressional hearings. 177. See, inter alia, essays in PP, V, by John Dower, Richard DuBoff, and Gabriel Kolko; FRS, chapter I. V; Thomas McCormick, in Williams et aI. , America in Vietnam; Michael Schaller, "Securing the Great Crescent," Jour- nal ofAmerican History (September 1982).
178. See p. 187, above, and PEHR, vol. I, chapter 4.
179. Gelb, "10 Years After Vietnam, U. S. a Power in Asia," New York Times, April 18, 1985, quoting Professor Donald Zagoria.
180. See FRS, pp. 48f. , citing upbeat analyses from the Far Eastern Economic Review in 1972.
181. Far Eastern Economic Review, October I I , 1984.
182. SeeAWWA, p. 286.
183. Fox Butterfield, "The New Vietnam Scholarship: Challenging the Old Passions," New York Times Magazine, February 13, 1983, referring specifically to Race's study cited earlier, an in-depth analysis of the NLF victory in rural areas prior to the escalation of the U. S. war in 1965, "invalidated" by events that occurred years later, according to Butterfield's interesting logic.
184. See our PEHR, II, 84, 166ff. , 342; Daniel Southerland, "No Pens and Pencils for Cambodia," Christian Science Monitor, December 4, 1981; AP, "U. S. Bars Mennonite School Aid to Cambodia," New York Times, December 8,1981; Joel Charny and John Spragens, Obstacles to Recovery in Vietnam and Kampuchea: U. S. Embargo of Humanitarian Aid (Boston: Oxfam America, 1984), citing many examples of "explicit U. S. policy" under the Reagan ad- ministration "to prevent even private humanitarian assistance from reaching the people of Kampuchea and Vietnam. "
185. Louis Wiznitzer, Christian Science Monitor, November 6, 1981; Kamm, "In Mosaic of Southeast Asia, Capitalist Lands Are Thriving," New York Times, November 8, 1981.
186. See p. 187 and note 2.
187. For a point-by-point response, demonstrating that the accusations are a
380 NOTES TO PAGES 248-256
NOTES TO PAGES 256-259 381
melange of falsehoods and misrepresentations apart from a few minor points changed in subsequent broadcasts, see the "Content Analysis and Assess- ment," included in Inside Story Special Edition: Vietnam Op/Ed, cited in note 2, above.
188. Karnow,Vietnam. Foradetailedcritiqueofthishighlypraisedbest-seller, see Noam Chomsky, "The Vietnam War in the Age of Orwell," Race & Class 4 (1984 [Boston Review, January 1984]). See Peter Biskind, "What Price Bal- ance," Race & Class 4 (1984 [parts in The Nation, December 3, 1983]), on the PBS television history.
189. Kahin, Intervention, pp. 307-8.
190. Later, in another context, we hear that "to many peasants, [the U. S. Marines] were yet another threatening foreign force" (episode 6, on "Amer- ica's Enemy" and their point of view).
191. Biskind, citing a London Times account; Butterfield, New York Times, October 2, 1983.
Chapter 6: The Indochina Wars (II)
I. CitedbyBernardFall,AnatomyofaCn'sis(1961;reprint,NewYork:Double- day, 1969), p. 163, from congressional hearings. The reasons were political: the Pentagon was not in favor. See also Walter Haney, "The Pentagon Papers and U. S. Involvement in Laos," in Pentagon Papers, Senator Gravel edition (Bos- ton: Beacon Press, 1972; hereafter PP), vol. 5.
2. State Department Background Notes (March 1969); Denis Warner, Reporting Southeast Asia (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1966), p. 171.
3. On this period, see, among others, Haney, "U. S. Involvement in Laos"; Noam Chomsky, At War with Asia (New York: Pantheon, 1970; hereafter A WWA); Nina S. Adams and Alfred W. McCoy, eds. , Laos: War and Revolu- tion (New York: Harper & Row, 1970); Charles Stevenson, The End ofNowhere (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972).
4. Howard Elterman, The State, the Mass Media and Ideological Hegemony: United States Policy Decisions in Indochina, I974-'75-Historical Record, Gov- ernment Pronouncements and Press Coverage (Ph. D. diss. , New York University, 1978), p. 198.
5. Fall, Anatomy of a Crisis.
6. A request to the (very cooperative) American embassy in Vientiane to obtain their documentation would have quickly revealed to reporters that the claims they were relaying on the basis of embassy briefings had little relation to the facts, as one of us discovered by carrying out the exercise in Vientiane in early 1970. For a detailed review of the available facts concerning foreign (North Vietnamese, Thai, Chinese Nationalist, and U. S. ) involvement through the 1960s, and their relation to what the media were reporting, see A WWA, pp. 203-36; and Noam Chomsky, For Reasons ofState (New York: Pantheon, 1973; hereafter FRS), pp. 178-79. See also chapter 5, p. 177, and note 22.
7. In Adams and McCoy, Laos; excerpts in AWWA, PP. 96-97.
8. On attempts by former Times Saigon bureau chief A. J. Langguth to explain
away the suppression of the bombing of northern Laos by obscuring the crucial distinction between the bombing of the civilian society of the North and the bombing of the Ho Chi Minh trail in the South (acceptable within the doctrinal system in terms of "defense of South Vietnam against North Vietnamese aggression"), see Noam Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War (New York: Pantheon, 1982), p. 402.
9? Elterman, State-Media-Ideological Hegemony, pp. 332ff. and appendixes. 10. The report states that "until early this spring, when North Vietnamese troops began a series of advances in northeast Laos," the war had been "lim- ited," U. S. bombing had been aimed at "North Vietnamese supply routes" and "concentrations of enemy troops," and "civilian population centers and farm- land were largely spared. " Extensive refugee reports were soon to show that this account was inaccurate, as Decornoy's eyewitness reports had done fifteen months earlier.
II. See references cited above, and, shortly after, Fred Branfman, Voices from
the Plain ofJars (New York: Harper & Row, 1972); and Walter Haney, "A Survey ~fCivilian Fatalities among Refugees from Xieng Khouang Province, Laos," m Problems of War Victims in Indochina, Hearings before the [Kennedy] Subcommittee on Refugees and Escapees, U. S. Senate, May 9, 1972, pt. 2: "Laos and Cambodia," appendix 2. There were some 1970 reports in the media: e. g. , Daniel Southerland, Christian Science Monitor, March 14; Laurence Stern, Washington Post, March 26; Hugh D. S. Greenway, Life,
April 3; Carl Strock, New Republic, May 9; Noam Chomsky, "Laos," New York Review of Books, July 23, 1970, with more extensive details (reprinted in
AWWA).
12. Haney, PP, V. See FRS, pp. 176f. , on Sullivan's misrepresentation of
Haney's conclusions.
13? Refugee And Civilian War Casualty Problems in Indochina, Staff Report for
the [Kennedy] Subcommittee on Refugees and Escapees, U. S. Senate, Sep- tember 28, 1970.
14? One of the authors participated in a public meeting of media figures in New York, in 1986, at which a well-known television journalist defended media coverage of the bombing of northern Laos on the grounds that there was a report from a refugee camp in 1972. One wonders how much credit would be given to a journal that reported the bombing of Pearl Harbor in
1945?
15? T. D. Allman, Manchester Guardian Weekry, January I; Far Eastern Eco- nomic Review, January 8, 1972 (hereafter FEER); see FRS, pp. 173f. , for a lengthy excerpt. Robert Seamans, cited by George Wilson, Washington Post- Boston Globe, January 17, 1972; see FRS, pp. 172f. , for this and similar testi- mony before Congress by Ambassador William Sullivan. John Everingham and subsequent commentary on the Hmong (Meo) tribes, cited in Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, Political Economy of Human Rights (Boston: South End Press, 1979; hereafter PEHR) II, II9f. ; Chanda, FEER, December 23,
1977; see PEHR, II, 131f. , 340, for these and other direct testimonies, far from the mainstream, with a few noteworthy exceptions cited. Bangkok World, cited by Haney, "U. S. Involvement in Laos," p. 292, along with a Jack Anderson
column in the Washington Post (Feb. 19,1972).
On postwar experiences of U. S. relief workers, see PEHR, pp. 132f. , 340 .
NUl"~ Tv "AGI! S 202-263 3113
16. McCoy's emphasis, in a letter to the Washington Post; cited by Haney, "U. S. Involvement in Laos," p. 293.
17. Television commentary reprinted in Christian Science Monitor, June 10,
1975?
18. See A WWA, pp. II9f. , and Haney, "U. S. Involvement in Laos," citing
congressional hearings and the Washington Post, March 16, 1970.
19. Walter Saxon, New York Times, August 24,1975. See PEHR, chapter 5, for further details on this report and general discussion of postwar reporting of Laos.
20. Kimmo Kiljunen, ed. , Kampuchea: Decade of the Genocide, Report of a government-backed Finnish Inquiry Commission (London: Zed, 1984). See also Kiljunen, "Power Politics and the Tragedy of Kampuchea during the Seventies," Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars (April-June 1985).
21. See William Shawcross, Sideshow (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), and Seymour Hersh, The Price of Power (New York: Summit, 1983).
22. William Shawcross, "The End of Cambodia? " New York Review of Books, January 24, 1980, relying on reports by Fran~ois Ponchaud, a French priest whose work provided the major source ofevidence about Khmer Rouge atroci- ties in 1975-76: Fran~ois Ponchaud, Cambodia: Year Zero (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978), a revised version of a 1977 French study that became perhaps the most influential unread book in recent political history after a review by Jean Lacouture ("The Bloodiest Revolution," New York Review of Books, Mar. 31, 1977); see also his "Cambodia: Corrections," New
York Review ofBooks, May 26, 1977, withdrawing the most sensational claims. Our review (The Nation, June 25, 1977) was the first, to our knowledge, to attend to the actual text, which appeared in English a year later. See our PEHR, 11. 6, on the record of falsification based on this book, and on Pon- chaud's own remarkable record, further analyzed by Michael Vickery in his Cambodia: I975-I982 (Boston: South End Press, 1984). CIA Research Paper, Kampuchea: A Demographic Catastrophe (Washington: CIA, May 1980). For a critique of this study revealing extensive falsification conditioned by U. S. government priorities-specifically, suppression of the worst Pol Pot atrocities during the later period-see Michael Vickery, "Democratic Kampuchea- CIA to the Rescue," Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 14. 4 (1982), and his Cambodia. The latter is the major study of the Khmer Rouge period, by one of the few authentic Cambodia scholars, widely and favorably re- viewed abroad by mainstream Indochina scholars and others but virtually ignored in the United States, as was the Finnish Inquiry Commission report. See Noam Chomsky, "Decade of Genocide in Review," Inside Asia (London, February 1985, reprinted in James Peck, ed. , The Chomsky Reader [New York: Pantheon, 1987]), on several serious studies of the period, in- cluding these.
23. Michael Vickery, "Ending Cambodia-Some Revisions," submitted to the New York Review ofBooks in June 1981 but rejected. See his Cambodia for more extended discussion. Shawcross himself had had second thoughts by then (see "Kampuchea Revives on Food, Aid, and Capitalism," The Bulletin [Australia], March 24, 1981). See his Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), for a later version, now recast in ways to which we return.
24. Page 370, blaming Vietnamese deception for the account he had relayed in 1980.
25. Shawcross, The Nation, September 21, 1985; Ben Kiernan, letter to The Nation, October 3,1985, unpublished. For evaluation of the international relief efforts, see Vickery, Cambodia; Kiljunen, Kampuchea; Joel Charny and John Spragens, Obstacles to Recovery in Vietnam and Kampuchea: U. S. Embargo of Humanitarian Aid (Boston: Oxfam America, 1984); Shawcross, Quality of
Mercy.
26. Fran~ois Ponchaud, on whom Shawcross relied, is a highly dubious source for reasons that have been extensively documented; see note 22. No one with a record of duplicity approaching his would ever be relied on for undocu- mented charges of any significance if the target were not an official enemy. 27. Shawcross, Quality ofMercy, pp. 49-50. He observes that "those years of warfare saw the destruction of Cambodian society and the rise of the Khmer Rouge from its ashes, in good part as a result of White House policies"; "with the forces of nationalism unleashed by the war at their command, the Khmer Rouge became an increasingly formidable army," while in the "massive Ameri- can bombing campaign" to which the Khmer Rouge were subjected through August 1973, "their casualties are thought to have been huge. " The phrase "their casualties" presumably refers to Khmer Rouge military forces; there is no mention of civilian casualties. On the limited scope of Shawcross's "quality of mercy," see "Phase III at home" (p. 288), below.
28. Vickery, Cambodia, p. 293.
29. AP, Boston Globe, September 24, 1978, citing the Report of the Interna- tional Labor Organization in Geneva on over fifty million child laborers in the world, with Thailand singled out as one of the worst offenders, thanks to grinding poverty, an effective military government backed by the United States, lack oflabor union power, and "wide-open free enterprise. " See PEHR, 11. 6, 359, for excerpts and other examples that have elicited even less interest, and PEHR, II, xv, on a World Bank description of the situation in Thailand. On the brutal treatment of many of the estimated 10. 7 million child laborers in Thailand, see Human Rights in Thailand Report 9. 1. (January-March 1985) (Coordinating Group for Religion in Society, Bangkok); Thai Development Newsletter 3. 1 1985 (December 1986) (Bangkok). On the treatment of women in "the brothel of Asia," with its estimated 500,000 prostitutes, masseuses, and bar-waitresses, 20 percent of them under fourteen years of age, drawn to Bangkok (and sometimes sold off to Europe) from the impoverished rural areas through "a huge underground network of brothels and workshops feeding on child flesh and labor," see several articles in Beyond Stereotypes: Asian Women
in Development, Southeast Asia Chronicle (January 1985).
30. For extensive evidence on this matter, see PEHR, 11. 6, and Vickery, Cambodia, extending the story to phase III.
31. Others give higher estimates. Ponchaud gives the figure of 800,000 killed, but, as noted in our 1977 review, he seems to have exaggerated the toll of the U. S. bombing, and as shown in the references of note 22, he is a highly unreliable source. "US Government sources put the figure unofficially at 600,000 to 700,000" (CIA demographic study, which accepts the lower figure). 32. Vickery, Cambodia, pp. 184f. Other estimates vary widely. At the low end, the CIA demographic study gives the figure of 50,000 to 100,000 for people
384 NOTES TO P AGES 263-267
NOTES TO P AGES 268-274 385
who "may have been executed," and an estimate of deaths from all causes that is meaningless because of misjudgment of postwar population and politically motivated assessments throughout; the Far Eastern Economic Review reported a substantial increase in the population under DK to 8. 2 million, "mostly based on CIA estimates" (Asia 1979 and Asia 1980 yearbooks of the FEER, the latter reducing the estimate from 8. 2 to 4. 2 million, the actual figure apparently being in the neighborhood of 6. 5 million); in the U. S. government journal Problem~ of Communism (May-June 1981), Australian Indochina specialist Carlyle Thayer suggests a figure of deaths from all causes at 500,000, of which 50,000 to 60,000 were executions. At the high end, estimates range to three million or more, but without any available analysis. As all serious observers emphasize,
the range of error is considerable at every point.
33. George Hildebrand and Gareth Porter, Cambodia: Starvation and Revolu- tion (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976), based on U. S. and international aid reports, cited by Vickery, Cambodia, p. 79; FEER correspondent Nayan Chanda in several articles, cited in PEHR, 1. 6, 229f. ; Western doctor is Dr. Penelope Key, of the World Vision Organization, cited by Hildebrand and Porter, along with similar reports from Catholic Relief Services and Red Cross observers; Shawcross, Sideshow, pp. 370f. Hildebrand and Porter's book, the only extensive study of the situation at the war's end, was highly praised by Indochina scholar George Kahin but ignored in the media, or vilified. See PEHR, 11. 6, 232f. , for a particular egregious example, by William Shawcross in the New York Review ofBooks. When PEHR, 11. 6 was circulating to Cam- bodia scholars and journalists in manuscript, we received a letter from Shaw- cross demanding that references to him be eliminated. We responded that we would be glad to consider any specific case that he found wrong or misleading
and delayed publication of the book awaiting his response, which never ar- rived. On his public response, see below.
34. Milton Osborne, Before Kampuchea (London: Allen & Unwin, 1980), p. 191; David Chandler, Pacific Affairs (Summer 1983); Philip Windsor, The Listener, BBC (London), July II, 1985.
35. David Chandler and Ben Kiernan, eds. , Revolution and Its Aftermath in Kampuchea, Monograph 25/Yale University Southeast Asia Series (1983), p. I.
36. See note 32, above; FEER, January 19, 1979?
37. Douglas Pike, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 29, 1979, and Chn'stian Science Monitor, December 4, 1979; cited by Vickery, Cambodia, p. 65. On the Freedom House and Times assessments of Pike's work, see p. p. 324,326; Fox Butterfield, "The New Vietnam Scholarship," New York Times Magazine cover story, February 13, 1983, where Pike is regarded as the exemplar of the "new breed" of dispassionate scholars.
38. Nayan Chanda, Brother Enemy (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), pp. 329, 394, for a detailed analysis of the maneuverings during this period. See also Grant Evans and Kelvin Rowley, Red Brotherhood at War (London: Verso, 1984).
39. Derriere Ie sourire khmer (Paris: PIon, 1971); see FRS, chapter 2, section 2. 40. Vickery, Cambodia, pp. 7, 17, 5-6, 17, 43; ViCKery, "Looking Back at Cambodia," Westerry (Australia) (December 1976). See PEHR, 11. 6 for ex- cerpts from the latter study.
41. See FRS, pp. 192ft'. , and sources cited, particularly the fall 1971 studies by T. D. Allman, based on interviews with members of the Cambodian elite. 42. See Elizabeth Becker, When The War Was Over (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), p. 28, citing a 1963 U. S. embassy cable quoting Sihanouk; Chanda, Brother Enemy, pp. 61f. See A WWA and FRS on contemporary studies of the Sihanouk period that provide more detail.
43. Michael Leifer, "Cambodia," Asian Survey (January 1967). Becker, When the War Was Over, p. 27, asserts that the CIA was behind the 1959 plot. For sources on these developments here and below, largely French, see A WWA and FRS. See Peter Dale Scott in Pp, V, on the regional context of the 1963 escalation.
44. See A WWA and FRS for references and other examples.
45. Bombing in Cambodia, Hearings before the Committee on Armed Services, U. S. Senate, 93d Cong. , 1st sess. , July I August 1973, pp. 158-60, the primary source on the "secret bombings. "
46. See PEHR, 11. 6,288.
47? PEHR, 11. 6, 380; also 383. Shawcross, Quality ofMercy, p. 49, referring solely to B-52 bombings of Vietnamese "sanctuaries" in the border areas, the standard evasion of the issue.
48. See PEHR, 11. 6, 383, where the same point is noted, and its irrelevance discussed. These matters had been specifically brought to Shawcross's atten- tion during the period when he was working on his Sideshow, in commentary (which he had requested) on earlier articles of his on the topic in the British press.
49. William Beecher, New York Times, May 9, 1969; PEHR, 11. 6, 271, 289, 383.
50. Elterman, State-Media-Ideological Hegemony, p. 344. Note that the post- Tet operations were in part reported at the time, although often in the highly distorted framework already discussed. For samples, see A WWA. On media coverage of the Laos bombings in 1969, see "Laos" (p. 253).
51. T. D. Allman, FEER, April 9, 1970; Manchester Guardian, September 18, 1971. See note 41.
52. See FRS, p.
