Ray Cavanaugh: Scholars failed to tell the truth about the genocidal Khmer Rouge

Chicago Tribune

03-04-2025

People who start their regime by vacating a capital city probably have some disturbing plans.
Fifty years ago, in April 1975, the Khmer Rouge forcibly evacuated all residents (including bedridden hospital patients) of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and all other sizable population centers.
Those who survived the evacuation were sent to do agrarian work at labor camps in rural areas. This unusual and alarming development elicited a very strange reaction, though, from relevant scholars in such countries as the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, France and Sweden, which seemed to think the forcible relocation was a positive step forward.
In ensuing months, emaciated Cambodian refugees began to surface at the border with Thailand. These refugees largely gave reports of forced labor, starvation and appalling savagery.
And yet positive views of the Khmer Rouge remained prevalent among Western scholars who — embracing revolution from thousands of miles away — dismissed the myriad Cambodian refugee reports and pounced on anyone who wrote stories that corresponded with refugee accounts.
Cambodia, also known in that period by the euphemistic name Democratic Kampuchea, had basically ended all contact with the outside world. But it might have been fruitful to visit the Thai side of the Cambodian border, where thousands of emaciated and traumatized refugees had gathered. This type of setting could have helped even the most intransigent of scholars realize that reports of Khmer Rouge atrocities likely had validity.
Among those who took up the cause of minimizing Khmer Rouge misdeeds was Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguist and all-around guru Noam Chomsky, who contended that reports of atrocity were part of a 'vast and unprecedented propaganda campaign' perpetrated by Western media.
Though Chomsky was the most prominent Khmer Rouge apologist, he was by no means the only significant one. Far from being the pursuit of a kooky fringe, the defense of the Khmer Rouge came to represent a mainstream view among relevant scholars.
This viewpoint was so prevalent in the West that it was labeled the 'standard total academic view' (STAV) on Cambodia by Sophal Ear, a Cambodian refugee who became a political scientist in the U.S. and is now an associate professor in the Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University.
'Many academics indeed treated Cambodia as a testing ground for their theories,' Ear said. He said they were also enamored with the concept of peasant revolutions and the Khmer Rouge policies of self-reliance, which they viewed as 'an authentic anti-colonial stance.'
Additionally, it was feared that acknowledgment of Khmer Rouge atrocities would validate the U.S. military endeavors in Indochina, which many people — especially leading scholars — had come to excoriate.
In their 1976 book 'Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution,' co-authors George C. Hildebrand and Gareth Porter stated, 'Cambodia is only the latest victim of the enforcement of an ideology that demands that social revolutions be portrayed as negatively as possible.'
But perhaps no one was drawn to Pol Pot as much as Scottish scholar Malcolm Caldwell. Caldwell had written that the Khmer Rouge revolution 'opens vistas of hope not only for the people of Cambodia but also for the peoples of all other poor third world countries.'
Caldwell received a rare invite to visit the utopia and even scored a private meeting with Pol Pot on Dec. 22, 1978. But hanging out with 'Brother Number One' was always rather risky, and later that night, the visiting scholar was gunned down. It is likely this case would have received more interest from Western media, but less than three days after Caldwell's murder, Vietnam invaded Cambodia.
The Vietnamese were fed up by that point: In addition to committing a genocide against Cambodians of Vietnamese ancestry, the Khmer Rouge had launched repeated attacks on Vietnamese soil, including the massacre of an entire village.
Vietnam's military was superior in size, organization and morale. Troops easily invaded Phnom Penh, causing high-ranking Khmer Rouge to flee to western Cambodia's mountainous terrain along the Thai border.
With Cambodia's door forcibly opened, the ensuing revelations of killing fields and grisly interrogation centers was about as close as you can get to incontrovertible proof of widespread atrocity. Among Western scholars, some former supporters emerged to recant their previous statements. Other supporters quietly withdrew from the now-obvious horror they had spent several years denying. However, some scholars remained as unrepentant as the war criminals, unmoved by any amount of ghastly hard evidence, or at least not sufficiently moved to forsake the revolution.
'Saying, 'I'm sorry, I was wrong,' is just too much for some people,' Ear said. 'They want to be correct in their minds, always.'
Even in 1981, after the consequences became grotesquely clear, Egyptian-French scholar Samir Amin described the Khmer Rouge period as 'one of the major successes of the struggle for socialism in our era.' Not only did Amin express approval for what happened in Cambodia, but he also recommended that African nations adopt the Khmer Rouge model. As if Africa had not endured enough, what it really needed, according to Amin, was its own Khmer Rouge.
Meanwhile, the real Khmer Rouge was not dead yet. Although forced out of Phnom Penh very quickly, the group still controlled much of Cambodia, particularly in the geographically rugged western part of the country. Along with holding significant military resources, the Khmer Rouge enjoyed a degree of international legitimacy: Into the early 1990s, the party of Pol Pot managed to hold Cambodia's seat at the United Nations.
Moreover, many Cambodians thought the Khmer Rouge was going to make a comeback in the 1990s, regain control of the country and repeat the nightmare. Ear said, 'This fear persisted until the Khmer Rouge's final dissolution,' which did not occur until the end of the millennium.
Now 50 years since the invasion, both the Khmer Rouge and their Western apologists serve as a cautionary tale of the depths to which people can sink for their ideals.
Ray Cavanaugh is a freelance writer with an interest in Cambodian history.