Khmer Rouge
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The Khmer Rouge (Khmer: Kmae Krahaam; French for "Red Khmer") was a Marxist–Leninist militant group in Cambodia. They took over Cambodia in 1975 and lost power in 1979. Under the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia became a totalitarian state. The Khmer Rouge committed the Cambodian genocide,[1] killing as many as 3,000,000 (1⁄3 of the Cambodian population).[1]
History
[change | change source]The Khmer Rouge took over the capital city of Cambodia, Phnom Penh, on 17 April 1975. They named the country Democratic Kampuchea. Their leader was Pol Pot (formerly called Saloth Sar). Immediately, they forced everyone out of the cities and effectively turned the whole country into a giant labor camp.[1]
The Khmer Rouge were defeated by the Vietnamese in January 1979. However, the international community continued to recognize the Khmer Rouge as the government of Kampuchea for a decade after they were defeated. Therefore, the Khmer Rouge held a seat in the United Nations until 1989. In 1999, the Khmer Rouge disbanded.[1]
As per Henri Locard:[2]
The Khmer Rouge regime [was] the ultimate twentieth-century [example] of the totalitarian state. Using sheer violence and terror, a small clique [took] power. [It saw itself as] messianic [with a] mission to bring happiness and prosperity faster than any of its revolutionary model and competitors. It came to control every aspect of social and private life. No one was allowed to [hold or] express any form of opposition.
On 17 April 1975, the Khmer Rouge captured Cambodia's capital city, Phnom Penh, and took control of the country.[1][3] They renamed the country as the Democratic Kampuchea and began the Cambodian genocide.[1][3]
Beliefs
[change | change source]The Khmer Rouge were a "fanatical Communist movement ... which imposed a ruthless agenda of forced labor, thought control and mass execution" across Cambodia.[1][4] Most members were teenage peasant boys.[5]
The Khmer Rouge believed the people in Cambodia's cities had been poisoned and corrupted by the ideas of Western capitalism.[1][6] They wanted to return Cambodia to "Year Zero," a time when everybody in the country was a rural farmer. They thought this would create an agrarian socialist utopia - a perfect, farm-based society without social classes, where people would share everything.[1][6]
They objected to the existence of money, free markets or educated professions (e.g. medicine, engineering, law and teaching).[1] To the Khmer Rouge, being a poor farm worker was the only acceptable lifestyle. They viewed educated people as a fundamental threat to communism.[1][6]
Victims
[change | change source]Historians cannot say exactly how many people were killed in the Cambodian genocide. Most estimates say that between 1,400,000 and 3,000,000 Cambodian people were killed. This was between 20% and 33% of Cambodia's population back then.[1] In his 2005 article, Henri Locard wrote:[2]
Between 17 April 1975 and 7 January 1979 the death toll was about 25% of a population of some 7.8 million; 33.5% of men were massacred or died unnatural deaths [and so did] 15.7% of the women ... 41.9% of the population of Phnom Penh [was killed].
Cambodian genocide denial
[change | change source]Academia
[change | change source]
On the debate about the Cambodian genocide, American political scientist Donald W. Beachler remarked,[7]
Many of those who had been opponents of U.S. military actions in Vietnam and Cambodia feared that the tales of murder and deprivation under the Khmer Rouge regime would validate the claims of those who had supported U.S. government actions aimed at halting the spread of communism. Conservatives pointed to the actions of the Khmer Rouge as proof of the inherent evils of communism and evidence that the U.S. had been right to fight its long war against communists in Southeast Asia.
Despite the abundance of verified testimonies from Cambodian refugees and foreign witnesses, Cambodian genocide denial within academia was widespread in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Australia etc.[8][9]
Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman
[change | change source]With the transnational academic-cultural network tied to their prominence in Western academia, American scholars Noam Chomsky (1928 – ) and Edward S. Herman (1925 – 2017) published several books discrediting the survivors, objecting to the genocide classification and the confirmed death toll of the Cambodian genocide,[10] which influenced hundreds of millions worldwide into doing the same.[10]
Gareth Porter
[change | change source]In 1976, American historian Gareth Porter (1942 – ) co-authored the book Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution with George Hildebrand in which he denied that one million Cambodians had already been killed by the Khmer Rouge. On May 3, 1977, Porter repeated his denial at the Solarz hearing in the U.S. Congress.[11]
Historians have been critical of Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution. Particularly, historian Bruce Sharp conducted an in-depth research on the citations of that book. Of the 50 citations in a chapter of that book, 33 were traced to the state propaganda of the Khmer Rouge, while 6 from that of the CCP,[12] which served as a proof of their confirmation bias and intellectual dishonesty.[12]
Recalling the encounter later in his life, Solarz called Porter's Cambodian genocide denial "cowardly and contemptible," comparing him to those who denied the Holocaust.[13]: 40
Samir Amin
[change | change source]Egyptian-French economist Samir Amin had been a good friend of Pol Pot and Khieu Samphan since they were studying in France in the Cold War's early years.[14] When the Cambodian genocide was exposed, Amin continued to hail the Khmer Rouge as the most superior communist model.[15] When asked again about the Cambodian genocide in 1986, Amin retorted with an inversion of reality by blaming the "American imperialists," Vietnamese communists and Lon Nol for the suffering of the Cambodians.[16]
Responses
[change | change source]François Ponchaud
[change | change source]François Ponchaud (1939 – ) is a French priest who lived in Cambodia during the genocide. As a witness, he documented the genocide in his book Cambodge Année Zéro (Cambodia: Year Zero), which attracted biased criticism from Noam Chomsky and Gareth Porter who denied the genocide. In response, Ponchaud called out their intellectual dishonesty,
They say there have been no massacres [...] blame for the tragedy of the Khmer people on the American bombings. [...] For them, refugees are not a valid source [. ...] if something seems impossible to their personal logic, then it doesn't exist. Their only sources for evaluation are deliberately chosen official statements. Where is that critical approach which they accuse others of not having?
Sophal Ear
[change | change source]Cambodian-American historian Sophal Ear satirically referred to the biased narrative of pro-Khmer Rouge Western academic leftists as the Standard Total Academic View on Cambodia (STAV),[17]
[They] hoped for, more than anything, a socialist success story with all the romantic ingredients of peasants, fighting imperialism, and revolution.
William Shawcross
[change | change source]British journalist William Shawcross criticized the STAV academics as well. His criticism was endorsed by human rights activist David Hawk who pointed out that
Western governments were indifferent to the Cambodian genocide due to the influence of anti-war academics on the American left who obfuscated Khmer Rouge behavior, denigrated the post-1975 refugee reports, and denounced the journalists who got those stories.
Jakob Guhl
[change | change source]Jakob Guhl, the Senior Manager, Policy and Research of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), said that Cambodian genocide denial among Western academic leftists was rooted in their dogmatic rejection of liberal democracy,[18] presumption of "moral superiority" of anti-capitalist regimes and division of political actors into binary categories (oppressors vs. oppressed) to justify "anti-hierarchical aggression" towards hypothetical oppressors, who are dehumanized to have their suffering denied.[18]
Related pages
[change | change source]References
[change | change source]- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11
- Hinton, Alexander Laban (1998). Why Did You Kill?: The Cambodian Genocide and the Dark Side of Face and Honor. Cambrdige University Press. Retrieved December 10, 2024.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 March 2010
- Hannum, Hurst (2001). "International Law and Cambodian Genocide: The Sounds of Silence". Cambodia (1 ed.). Routledge. ISBN 9781315192918. Retrieved December 10, 2024.
- Kiernan, Ben (2012). "The Cambodian Genocide, 1975–1979". Centuries of Genocide (4 ed.). Routledge. ISBN 9780203867815. Retrieved December 10, 2024.
- Tyner, James A.; Henkin, Samuel; Sirik, Savina; Kimsroy, Sokvisal (January 1, 2014). "Phnom Penh during the Cambodian Genocide: A Case of Selective Urbicide". Sage Journals. 46 (8). doi:10.1068/a130278p. Retrieved December 10, 2024.
- Tyner, James A. (January 18, 2014). "Dead labor, landscapes, and mass graves: Administrative violence during the Cambodian genocide". Geoforum. 52. Ohio, USA: 70–77. doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.12.011. Retrieved December 10, 2024.
- Hinton, Alexander Laban (1998). Why Did You Kill?: The Cambodian Genocide and the Dark Side of Face and Honor. Cambrdige University Press. Retrieved December 10, 2024.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Locard, Henri 2005. State violence in Democratic Kampuchea (1975-1979) and its retribution (1979-2004). European Review of History 12, 1, 121-143. The quotation includes some changes to the published summary. These changes were made to make the quotation readable in Simple English; the sense of the summary has not been changed. [1] Archived 2021-10-31 at the Wayback Machine
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 "Day One: April 17, 1975". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 2024-10-23.
- ↑ "Cambodia 1975-1979". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. April 2018. Retrieved 2024-10-23.
- ↑ "The Cambodian Genocide: Origins, Genocide, and Aftermath" (PDF). Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center. Retrieved 2024-10-25.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 "Khmer Rouge Ideology". Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. Retrieved 2024-10-24.
- ↑ Beachler, Donald W. (2009) "Arguing about Cambodia: Genocide and Political Interest" Holocaust and Genocide Studies 23(2):214–38.
- ↑ Ear, Sophal (May 1995). The Khmer Rouge Canon 1975–1979: The Standard Total Academic View on Cambodia (PDF) (BA thesis). Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley. Archived from the original (PDF) on 17 August 2014. Retrieved 6 June 2021.
- ↑ Sharp, Bruce (2023) [2003]. "Averaging Wrong Answers: Noam Chomsky and the Cambodian Controversy". Mekong Network. Retrieved 21 July 2023.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1
- "Chomsky and the Khmer Rouge". The New York Times. 1988. Retrieved December 18, 2024.
- Brinkley, Joel (2011). Cambodia's Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land. Public Affairs. pp. 48–49.
Khmer Rouge apologists easily outnumbered those who believed a tragedy was under way. These people had been vociferous opponents of the Vietnam War [. ...] whatever the US government had to say now was per force a lie [. ...One of the deniers Gareth] Porter said simply that it was 'a myth that between one million and two million Cambodians have been victims of a regime led by genocidal maniacs [. ...] A few weeks earlier Noam Chomsky [...] offered an article in the Nation that conflated the American bombing and the Khmer Rouge horrors [. ...] He cited 'highly qualified specialists' [...] concluded that executions numbered at most in the thousands.'
- Smith, Harrison (November 16, 2017). "Edward S. Herman, media critic who co-wrote 'Manufacturing Consent,' dies at 92". The Washington Post. Retrieved December 18, 2024.
Dr. Herman was championed by many on the left [...] but his writings on genocides in Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda were criticized for [...] belittling the testimonies of survivors.
- Blackwell, Matthew (July 15, 2018). "Devastation and Denial: Cambodia and the Academic Left". Quillette. Retrieved December 18, 2024.
Amazingly, even as Cambodia disintegrated, the Khmer Rouge benefitted from unsolicited apologetics from intellectuals at the West's august universities.
- ↑ Human Rights in Cambodia." Hearing Before the Subcommittee on International Organizations of the Committee on International Relations, House of Representatives, 95th Congress, 1st Session. 1977 May 3. Also available via Google Books.
- ↑ 12.0 12.1 Cite error: The named reference
MKwas used but no text was provided for refs named (see the help page). - ↑ Thompson, Larry Clinton. 2010. Refugee Workers in the Indochina Exodus, 1975–1982. Jefferson, NC: MacFarland.
- ↑ "Specters of Dependency: Hou Yuon and the Origins of Cambodia's Marxist Vision (1955–1975) | Cross-Currents". cross-currents.berkeley.edu. Archived from the original on 25 November 2020. Retrieved 27 June 2020.
- ↑ Jackson, Karl (2014). Cambodia, 1975–1978: Rendezvous with Death. Princeton University Press. p. 246. ISBN 9781400851706.
- ↑ Gough, Kathleen (Spring 1986). "Roots of the Pol Pot Regime in Kampuchea". Contemporary Marxism (12/13).
- ↑ Ear, Sophal (May 1995). The Khmer Rouge Canon 1975–1979: The Standard Total Academic View on Cambodia (PDF) (BA thesis). Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley. Archived from the original (PDF) on 17 August 2014. Retrieved 6 June 2021.
- ↑ 18.0 18.1 Guhl, Jakob (January 8, 2025). "Left Wing Extremism". Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD). Retrieved January 14, 2025.
[H]igh-profile far-left writers [...] downplayed the severity of the Holodomor [...] Decades later [...] Noam Chomsky argued that reports based on refugee testimony about the Cambodian genocide [...] were exaggerated propaganda [. ...] antisemitism on the far-left has a long history, including the persecution [...] against Soviet Jews [...] targeting Jewish institutions [. ...] prevalence of [...] conspiracy mentality provide two major openings to antisemitism.