Sad news today:
While he deserves credit for helping to expose what happened in Cambodia to a larger audience, Sydney Schanberg also suffered from
faulty imagination concerning what what would happen when the United States pulled out of Cambodia and essentially let the Khmer Rouge win:
But these concepts mean nothing to the ordinary people of Indochina and it is difficult to imagine how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone. For the American presence. meant war to them, not paternal colonialism. The Americans brought them planes and Napalm and B-52 raids, not schools and roads and medical programs.
This is not to say that the Communist-backed governments which will replace the American clients can be expected to be benevolent. Already in Cambodia, there is evidence in the areas held by the Communist-led Cambodian insurgents that life is hard and inflexible, everything that Cambodians are not.
The insurgents have committed several village massacres In their present offensive, and the Americans have predicted a “bloodbath” when the rebels take over. On the other hand, Government troops who recently emerged from a besieged provincial town southwest of Phnom Penh reported matter of factly that they had cooked and eaten the bodies of dead insurgents when they ran short of food and that they had grown to enjoy it.
Wars nourish brutality and sadism, and sometimes certain people are executed by the victors but it would be tendentious to forecast such abnormal behavior as a national policy under a Communist government once the war is over.From
an interview with historian Stephen Morris about his book Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia from a Cambodian newspaper in 2000:
Q. You're suggesting that all academics and all journalists were conspiring to bury the story about Khmer Rouge atrocities. But there were people here who reported on it from the beginning.
A. [Yes, there] were people who were open-minded about this [but] you wouldn't find any such reports [by New York Times reporter Sydney] Schanberg, for instance. Schanberg only started to write negatively—file reports which cast negative images-in early 1975, and what he was reporting was the rocket attacks in Phnom Penh.Schanberg himself described his decision to stay in Cambodia:
Our decision to stay was founded on our belief—perhaps, looking back, it was more a devout wish or hope—that when they won their victory, they would have what they wanted and would end the terrorism and brutal behavior we had written so often about. We all wanted to believe that, since both sides were Khmers, they would find a route to reconciliation(Quote taken from
this partisan review.)
But let's not forget that the stories of the fully scope of Khmer Rouge atrocities were already being reported fairly early, including
this April 1976 Time Magazine report. So why did people still need proof of what was going on?
This undergraduate thesis by a student who fled the killing in Cambodia with his family as an infant provides some suggestions.
Several online reviews of
The Killing Fields comment on the irony of playing John Lennon's
Imagine at the end of the movie given not only Sydney Schanberg failure to "imagine how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone" but also because the Khmer Rouge tried to implement, by force and murder,
exactly the sort of utopia that John Lennon envisioned in that song.
Why does learning the right lessons from Cambodia (and Southeast Asia in general) matter today? From
a column by William Shawcrosson:
The Killing Fields illustrates brilliantly part of the long disaster that has been Cambodia over recent decades. It is a compelling film that follows the story of a young Cambodian, Dith Pran, who worked for the New York Times reporter Sidney Schanberg in Cambodia during the brutal five-year war that resulted in the communist Khmer Rouge victory in April 1975.
At that moment all the foreigners and their Cambodian friends took refuge in the French Embassy, hoping for safe passage out of the country. They had not reckoned with the horrific total revolution that the communists planned to impose. They demanded that all the Cambodians, including Pran, surrender, while the foreigners were trucked out of the country. In tears, the foreigners, including Schanberg, let their friends go. Many were murdered at once as “Western agents”.
For the next three and a half years Pran had to conceal his past as he worked in the fields. The communists under Pol Pot shut Cambodia off and imposed one of the most vicious totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. Up to two million of the seven million people died, either murdered by the Khmer Rouge or from starvation and disease as a result of the draconian agrarian policies they imposed. Pran survived.
At the end of 1975 I went to the Thai-Cambodian border to talk to refugees. Their horrific stories of people with glasses being killed as “intellectuals” and of “bourgeois” babies being beaten to death against trees were being dismissed as CIA propaganda by the antiAmerican Western Left, but it seemed obvious to me that they were true. I wanted to discover how the Khmer Rouge had grown and come to power; I wrote a book called Sideshow, which was very critical of the way in which the United States had brought war to Cambodia while trying to extricate itself from Vietnam.
But horror had engulfed all of Indo-China as a result of the US defeat in 1975. In Vietnam and Laos there was no vast mass murder but the communists created cruel gulags and, from Vietnam in particular, millions of people fled, mostly by boat and mostly to the US. Given the catastrophe of the communist victories, I have always thought that those like myself who were opposed to the American efforts in Indochina should be very humble. I also think it wrong to dismiss the US efforts there as sheer disaster. Lee Kuan Yew, the former longtime Prime Minister of Singapore, has a subtler view. He argues that, although America lost in IndoChina in 1975, the fact that it was there so long meant that other SouthEast Asian countries had time to build up their economies to relieve the poverty of their peasants and thus resist communist encroachment — which they probably could not have done had IndoChina gone communist in the 1960s.
That long view seems to me to be the one that has to be applied to Iraq. [...]So while Dith Pran was a courageous guy and Schanberg worked to redeem himself, don't forget the optimism that could just as easily have gotten Dith Pran killed and which helped lead policy makers to just let the Khmer Rouge take over in the first place. And if someone tells you that Iraq can't possibly be any worse than it is now with the US there, that's not necessarily true. And even if the United States is to blame for the chaos in Iraq as people argue it was to blame for the chaos in Cambodia, pulling out the troops won't necessarily make things better and could make things a whole lot worse.
(As an aside, while doing research for this reply, I ran into even more evidence of what a swell guy Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was and the sorts of policies the future Nobel Peace Prize winner's administration was up to other than encouraging the Soviets to invade Afghanistan:
And to insure that Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge would fight the Vietnamese occupiers, the Carter Administration helped arrange continued Chinese aid. ''I encourage the Chinese to support Pol Pot,'' said Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser at the time. ''The question was how to help the Cambodian people. Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him, but China could.'')