The End of History and the Last Man is a 1992 book of political philosophy by American political scientist Francis Fukuyama which argues that with the ascendancy of Western liberal democracy—which occurred after the Cold War (1945–1991) and the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991)—humanity has reached "not just... the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history
as such: That is, the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and
the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of
human government." For the book, which is an expansion of his essay "The End of History?" (published in the summer of 1989, months before the fall of the Berlin Wall), Fukuyama draws upon the philosophies and ideologies of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx, who define human history as a linear progression, from one socioeconomic epoch to another.
Overview
Fukuyama argues that history
should be viewed as an evolutionary process, and that the end of
history, in this sense, means that liberal democracy is the final form
of government for all nations. According to Fukuyama, since the French Revolution,
liberal democracy has repeatedly proven to be a fundamentally better
system (ethically, politically, economically) than any of the
alternatives,
and so there can be no progression from it to an alternative system.
Fukuyama claims not that events will stop occurring in the future, but
rather that all that will happen in the future (even if totalitarianism returns) is that democracy will become more and more prevalent in the long term.
Some argue
that Fukuyama presents "American-style" democracy as the only "correct"
political system and argues that all countries must inevitably follow
this particular system of government. However, many Fukuyama scholars claim this is a misreading of his work. Fukuyama's argument is only that in the future there will be more and more governments that use the framework of parliamentary democracy and that contain markets of some sort. He has said:
The End of History was never linked to a specifically American model of social or political organization. Following Alexandre Kojève, the Russian-French philosopher who inspired my original argument, I believe that the European Union
more accurately reflects what the world will look like at the end of
history than the contemporary United States. The EU's attempt to
transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a
transnational rule of law is much more in line with a "post-historical" world than the Americans' continuing belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military.
Arguments in favour
An argument in favour of Fukuyama's thesis is the democratic peace theory, which argues that mature democracies rarely or never go to war with one another. This theory has faced criticism,
with arguments largely resting on conflicting definitions of "war" and
"mature democracy". Part of the difficulty in assessing the theory is
that democracy as a widespread global phenomenon emerged only very
recently in human history, which makes generalizing about it difficult.
(See also list of wars between democracies.)
Other major empirical evidence includes the elimination of
interstate warfare in South America, Southeast Asia, and Eastern Europe
among countries that moved from military dictatorships to liberal
democracies.
According to several studies, the end of the Cold War and the subsequent increase in the number of liberal democratic states were accompanied by a sudden and dramatic decline in total warfare, interstate wars, ethnic wars, revolutionary wars, and the number of refugees and displaced persons.
Criticisms
Critics of liberal democracy
In Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (1993), Jacques Derrida criticized Fukuyama as a "come-lately reader" of the philosopher-statesman Alexandre Kojève (1902–1968), who "in the tradition of Leo Strauss"
(1899–1973), in the 1950s, already had described the society of the
U.S. as the "realization of communism"; and said that the
public-intellectual celebrity of Fukuyama and the mainstream popularity
of his book, The End of History and the Last Man, were symptoms
of right-wing, cultural anxiety about ensuring the "Death of Marx". In
criticising Fukuyama's celebration of the economic and cultural hegemony of Western liberalism, Derrida said:
For it must be cried out, at a time
when some have the audacity to neo-evangelize in the name of the ideal
of a liberal democracy that has finally realized itself as the ideal of
human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and
thus economic oppression
affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of
humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal
democracy and of the capitalist market
in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the 'end
of ideologies' and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us
never neglect this obvious, macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable,
singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore
that never before, in absolute figures, have so many men, women and
children been subjugated, starved or exterminated on the earth.
Therefore, Derrida said: "This end of History is essentially a Christian eschatology.
It is consonant with the current discourse of the Pope on the European
Community: Destined to become [either] a Christian State or [a]
Super-State; [but] this community would still belong, therefore, to some
Holy Alliance"; that Fukuyama practised an intellectual
"sleight-of-hand trick", by using empirical data whenever suitable to
his message, and by appealing to an abstract ideal whenever the
empirical data contradicted his end-of-history thesis; and that Fukuyama
sees the United States and the European Union as imperfect political
entities, when compared to the distinct ideals of liberal democracy and
of the free market, but understands that such abstractions (ideals) are
not demonstrated with empirical evidence, nor ever could be empirically
demonstrated, because they are philosophical and religious abstractions
that originated from the Gospels of Philosophy of Hegel;
and yet, Fukuyama still uses empirical observations to prove his
thesis, which he, himself, agrees are imperfect and incomplete, to
validate his end-of-history thesis, which remains an abstraction."
Radical Islam, tribalism, and the "Clash of Civilizations"
Various Western commentators have described the thesis of The End of History
as flawed because it does not sufficiently take into account the power
of ethnic loyalties and religious fundamentalism as a counter-force to
the spread of liberal democracy, with the specific example of Islamic fundamentalism, or radical Islam, as the most powerful of these.
Benjamin Barber wrote a 1992 article and a 1995 book, Jihad vs. McWorld, that addressed this theme. Barber described "McWorld" as a secular, liberal, corporate-friendly transformation of the world and used the word "jihad" to refer to the competing forces of tribalism and religious fundamentalism, with a special emphasis on Islamic fundamentalism.
Samuel P. Huntington wrote a 1993 essay, The Clash of Civilizations, in direct response to The End of History; he then expanded the essay into a 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.
In the essay and book, Huntington argued that the temporary conflict
between ideologies is being replaced by the ancient conflict between
civilizations. The dominant civilization decides the form of human
government, and these will not be constant. He especially singled out Islam, which he described as having "bloody borders".
After the September 11, 2001, attacks, The End of History
was cited by some commentators as a symbol of the supposed naiveté and
undue optimism of the Western world during the 1990s, in thinking that
the end of the Cold War also represented the end of major global conflict. In the weeks after the attacks, Fareed Zakaria called the events "the end of the end of history", while George Will wrote that history had "returned from vacation".
Fukuyama did discuss radical Islam briefly in The End of History. He argued that Islam is not an imperialist
force like Stalinism and fascism; that is, it has little intellectual
or emotional appeal outside the Islamic "heartlands". Fukuyama pointed
to the economic and political difficulties that Iran and Saudi Arabia face and argued that such states are fundamentally unstable: either they will become democracies with a Muslim society (like Turkey) or they will simply disintegrate. Moreover, when Islamic states have actually been created, they were easily dominated by the powerful Western states.
In October 2001, Fukuyama, in a Wall Street Journal
opinion piece, responded to criticism of his thesis after the September
11 attacks and supported his views by saying, "I believe that in the
end I remain right". He further explained that what he meant by "End of
History" was the evolution of human political system, toward that of the
"liberal-democratic West". He also noted that his original thesis "does
not imply a world free from conflict, nor the disappearance of culture
as a distinguishing characteristic of societies".
The resurgence of Russia and China
Another challenge to the "end of history" thesis is the growth in the economic and political power of two countries, Russia and China. China has a one-party state government, while Russia, though formally a democracy, is often described as an autocracy; it is categorized as an anocracy in the Polity data series.
Azar Gat, Professor of National Security at Tel Aviv University, argued this point in his 2007 Foreign Affairs
article, "The Return of Authoritarian Great Powers", stating that the
success of these two countries could "end the end of history".
Gat also discussed radical Islam, but stated that the movements
associated with it "represent no viable alternative to modernity and
pose no significant military threat to the developed world". He
considered the challenge of China and Russia to be the major threat,
since they could pose a viable rival model which could inspire other
states.
This view was echoed by Robert Kagan in his 2008 book, The Return of History and the End of Dreams, whose title was a deliberate rejoinder to The End of History.
In his 2008 Washington Post opinion piece, Fukuyama also
addressed this point. He wrote, "Despite recent authoritarian advances,
liberal democracy remains the strongest, most broadly appealing idea out
there. Most autocrats, including Putin and Chávez, still feel that they have to conform to the outward rituals of democracy even as they gut its substance. Even China's Hu Jintao felt compelled to talk about democracy in the run-up to Beijing's Olympic Games."
His "ultimate nightmare", he said in March 2022, is a world in which China supports Russia's invasion of Ukraine
and Russia supports a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. If that were to
happen, and be successful, Fukuyama said, "then you would really be
living in a world that was being dominated by these non-democratic
powers. If the United States and the rest of the West couldn't stop that
from happening, then that really is the end of the end of history."
Failure of civil society and political decay
In
2014, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the publication of the
original essay, "The End of History?", Fukuyama wrote a column in The Wall Street Journal
again updating his hypothesis. He wrote that, while liberal democracy
still had no real competition from more authoritarian systems of
government "in the realm of ideas", nevertheless he was less idealistic
than he had been "during the heady days of 1989". Fukuyama noted the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the Arab Spring, both of which seemed to have failed in their pro-democracy goals, as well as the "backsliding" of democracy in countries including Thailand, Turkey and Nicaragua.
He stated that the biggest problem for the democratically elected
governments in some countries was not ideological but "their failure to
provide the substance of what people want from government: personal
security, shared economic growth and the basic public services ... that
are needed to achieve individual opportunity." Though he believed that
economic growth, improved government and civic institutions all
reinforced one another, he wrote that it was not inevitable that "all
countries will ... get on that escalator".
Twenty-five years later, the most
serious threat to the end-of-history hypothesis isn't that there is a
higher, better model out there that will someday supersede liberal
democracy; neither Islamist theocracy nor Chinese capitalism cuts it.
Once societies get on the up escalator of industrialization, their
social structure begins to change in ways that increase demands for
political participation. If political elites accommodate these demands,
we arrive at some version of democracy.
Fukuyama also warned of "political decay", which he wrote could also
affect established democracies like the United States, in which
corruption and crony capitalism
erode liberty and economic opportunity. Nevertheless, he expressed his
continued belief that "the power of the democratic ideal remains
immense".
Following the United Kingdom's decision to leave the European Union and the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States in 2016, Fukuyama feared for the future of liberal democracy in the face of resurgent populism, and the rise of a "post-fact world",
saying that "twenty five years ago, I didn't have a sense or a theory
about how democracies can go backward. And I think they clearly can." He
warned that America's political rot was infecting the world order to
the point where it "could be as big as the Soviet collapse". Fukuyama also highlighted Russia's interference in the Brexit referendum and 2016 U.S. elections.
Fukuyama has also stated that his thesis was incomplete, but for a
different reason: "there can be no end of history without an end of
modern natural science and technology" (quoted from Our Posthuman Future). Fukuyama predicts that humanity's control of its own evolution will have a great and possibly terrible effect on liberal democracy.
Split between democracy and capitalism
Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek
argues that Fukuyama's idea that we have reached the end of history is
not wholly true. Žižek points out that liberal democracy is linked to
capitalism; however, the success of capitalism in authoritarian nations
like China and Singapore shows that the link between capitalism and democracy is broken. Problems caused by the success of capitalism and neo-liberal
policies, such as greater wealth inequality and environmental hazards,
manifested in many countries with unrest towards elected governments. As
a result liberal democracy has struggled to survive many of the
problems caused by a free market economy and many nations would see a
decline in the quality of their democracy.
Cambodian genocide denial was the belief expressed by many Western academics that claims of atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge government (1975–1979) in Cambodia were much exaggerated. Many scholars of Cambodia and intellectuals opposed to the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War denied or minimized the human rights abuses of the Khmer Rouge, characterizing contrary reports as "tales told by refugees" and U.S. propaganda. They viewed the assumption of power by the Communist Party of Kampuchea as a positive development for the people of Cambodia who had been severely impacted by the Vietnam War and the Cambodian Civil War. On the other side of the argument, anti-communists in the United States
and elsewhere saw in the rule of the Khmer Rouge vindication of their
belief that the victory of Communist governments in Southeast Asia would
lead to a "bloodbath."
Scholar Donald W. Beachler, writing of the controversy about the
range and extent of Khmer Rouge atrocities, concluded that "much of the
posturing by academics, publicists, and politicians seems to have been
motivated largely by political purposes" rather than concern for the
Cambodian people. Cambodian scholar Sophal Ear has titled the pro-Khmer Rouge academics as the "Standard Total Academic View on Cambodia" (STAV).
With conclusive evidence, including the discovery of over 20,000 mass graves,
of a large number of deaths—estimated at between one and three
million—of Cambodians caused by the Khmer Rouge, denials, deniers, and
apologists largely disappeared, although disagreements concerning the
actual number of Khmer Rouge victims have continued.
The Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh,
the capital of Cambodia, on 17 April 1975, and immediately ordered all
the residents to evacuate the city. Between 2 and 3 million residents of
Phnom Penh, Battambang,
and other large towns were forced by the Communists to walk into the
countryside without organized provision for food, water, shelter,
physical security, or medical care. The evacuation probably resulted in at least 100,000 deaths. The dispossessed
urban dwellers were assigned to re-education camps or "New
Settlements." Former government employees and soldiers were executed.
Soon, according to journalists, Cambodia resembled "a giant prison camp
with the urban supporters of the former regime being worked to death on thin gruel and hard labor."
The Khmer Rouge guarded the border with Thailand and only a few thousand refugees were able to make their way to safety in Thailand. As virtually no Westerners
were allowed to visit Cambodia, those refugees plus the official news
outlets of the Khmer Rouge were the principal sources of information
about conditions in Cambodia for the next four years.
Within one day of the Communists taking power, Fernand Scheller, chief of the United Nations
development project in Phnom Penh stated, "What the Khmer Rouge are
doing is pure genocide.... What is going on now is an example of demagoguery that makes one vomit."
"Standard Total Academic View on Cambodia"
Donald W. Beachler has described the late 1970s debate about the character of the Khmer Rouge as follows:
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 eye-witness accounts by journalists prior to their expulsion during
the first few days of Khmer Rouge rule, and the later testimony of
refugees; many academics in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Australia,
and other countries portrayed the Khmer Rouge favorably or at least
were skeptical about the stories of Khmer Rouge atrocities. None of
them, however, were allowed to visit Cambodia until the final few days
of Khmer Rouge rule (except Gunnar Bergstrom, president of the Sweden-Kampuchea Friendship Association) and few actually talked to the refugees whose stories they believed to be exaggerated or false.
Some Western scholars believed that the Khmer Rouge would free Cambodia from colonialism, capitalism, and the ravages of American bombing and invasion during the Vietnam War. Cambodian scholar Sophal Ear has titled the pro-Khmer Rouge intelligentsia
as the "Standard Total Academic View on Cambodia" (STAV). The STAV,
which he said included among its adherents almost all Cambodian scholars
in the Western world, "hoped for, more than anything, a socialist success story with all the romantic ingredients of peasants, fighting imperialism, and revolution." Author William Shawcross
was another critic of the STAV academics. Shawcross's views were
endorsed and summarized by human-rights activist David Hawk: the West
was indifferent to the atrocities taking place in Cambodia 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."
The controversy concerning the Khmer Rouge intensified in February 1977 with the publication of excerpts in Reader's Digest magazine from a book by John Barron and Anthony Paul called Peace With Horror: The Untold Story of Communist Genocide in Cambodia (printed in the US as Murder Of A Gentle Land).
Based on extensive interviews with Cambodian refugees in Thailand,
Barron and Paul estimated that, out of a total population of about 7
million people, 1.2 million Cambodians had died of starvation,
over-work, or execution during less than two years of Khmer Rouge rule. Published about the same time was the book Cambodge Année Zéro (Cambodia: Year Zero) by François Ponchaud, a French priest who had lived in Cambodia and spoke Khmer.
He also painted a picture of mass deaths caused by the Khmer Rouge, and
asked: "How many of those who say they are unreservedly in support of
the Khmer revolution would consent to endure one hundredth part of the
present sufferings of the Cambodian people?"
French scholar, Jean Lacouture, formerly a fervent sympathizer of the Khmer Rouge, reviewed Ponchaud's book favorably in The New York Review of Books on 31 March 1977. In 1978, Lacouture wrote Cambodians Survive!, in which he said:
The
shame, alone, would have justified that this book be written—which is
firstly a cry of horror. The shame of having contributed, even as little
as it was, as weak as its influence could have been on the mass media,
to the establishment of one of the most oppressive powers history has
ever known.
The academic left in the West dismissed and/or opposed both Ponchaud's and Barron and Paul's books; Noam Chomsky called the latter book a "third rate propaganda tract." Gareth Porter was the most outspoken of the dissenting academics. In 1976, he and George Hildebrand co-authored Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, in which Porter characterized the accounts of a million-or-more dead Cambodians as wildly exaggerated. Testifying before the U.S Congress
in 1977, Porter stated, "I cannot accept the premise…that one million
people have been murdered systematically or that the Government of
Cambodia is systematically slaughtering its people."
Regarding Porter and Hildebrand's 1976 book, Shawcross wrote a review
in which he stated that the authors' "use of evidence can be seriously
questioned," and that "their apparent faith in Khmer Rouge assertions
and statistics is surprising in two men who have spent so long analyzing
the lies that governments tell."
In addition to Chomsky, Porter, and Hildebrand, the atrocities of
the Khmer Rouge have also been denied and/or whitewashed by such
academics as Marxist scholar Malcolm Caldwell, Laura Summers, Edward S. Herman, and Torben Retbøll.
Samir Amin
Egyptian-French economist Samir Amin
was long an influence on and supporter of the leaders of the Khmer
Rouge regime, becoming acquainted with the Khmer Rouge's future leaders
in post-World War II Paris, where Pol Pot, Khieu Samphan,
and other Cambodian students were studying. Khieu Samphan's doctoral
thesis, which he finished in 1959, noted collaborations with Amin and
claimed to apply Amin's theories to Cambodia. In the late 1970s, Amin praised the Khmer Rouge as superior to Marxist
movements in China, Vietnam, or the Soviet Union, and recommended the Khmer Rouge model for Africa.
Amin continued to actively praise the Khmer Rouge into the 1980s. At a
1981 talk in Tokyo, Amin praised Pol Pot's work as "one of the major
successes of the struggle for socialism in our era" and as necessary
against "expansionism" from the Soviet Union or from Vietnam. Some scholars, such as Marxist anthropologist Kathleen Gough,
have noted that Khmer Rouge activists in Paris in the 1950s already
held ideas of eliminating counter-revolutionaries and organizing a party
center whose decisions could not be questioned.
Despite contemporary reports of mass killings committed by the Khmer
Rouge, Amin argued in 1986 that "the cause of the most evil to the
people of Kampuchea" lay elsewhere:
The humanitarian
argument is in the final analysis the argument offered by all the
colonialists... Isn't [the cause of evil] first of all the American
imperialists and Lon Nol? Isn't it today the Vietnamese army and their project of colonizing Kampuchea?
Solarz hearing
On 3 May 1977, Congressman Stephen Solarz led a hearing on Cambodia in the United States House of Representatives. The witnesses were John Barron and three academics who specialized in Cambodia: David P. Chandler, who would become perhaps the most prominent American scholar of Cambodia; Peter Poole; and Gareth Porter. Chandler believed that "bloodbath" was an accurate description of the situation and by no means an exaggeration.
Porter again stated that the tales of Khmer Rouge atrocities were
much exaggerated: "I cannot accept the premise…that one million people
have been murdered systematically or that the Government of Cambodia is
systematically slaughtering its people."
Porter described the stories by refugees of Khmer Rouge atrocities
collected by Barron and others as second-hand and hearsay. Asked for his
sources, Porter cited the works of another adherent of the STAV, Ben Kiernan,
who as a student was an editor for a pro-Khmer Rouge publication in
Australia. Porter never mentioned having spoken to any Cambodian
refugees to evaluate their stories personally.
Solarz, who had visited Cambodian refugee camps and listened to
refugees' stories of Khmer Rouge atrocities, characterized
justifications and explanations during the hearing about the Khmer Rouge
as "cowardly and contemptible" and compared them to the justifications
of the murder of Jews by Adolf Hitler during World War II.
We
do not pretend to know where the truth lies amidst these sharply
conflicting assessments; rather, we again want to emphasize some crucial
points. What filters through to the American public is a seriously
distorted version of the evidence available, emphasizing alleged Khmer
Rouge atrocities and downplaying or ignoring the crucial U.S. role,
direct and indirect, in the torment that Cambodia has suffered.
Chomsky and Herman had both faint praise and criticism for Ponchaud's book Cambodia: Year Zero,
writing on the one hand that it was "serious and worth reading, as
distinct from much of the commentary it has elicited", and on the other
that "the serious reader will find much to make him somewhat wary."
They wrote that the refugee stories of Khmer Rouge atrocities "must be
considered seriously", but should be treated with great "care and
caution" because "refugees are frightened and defenseless, at the mercy
of alien forces. They naturally tend to report what they believe their
interlocuters wish to hear."
Chomsky and Herman mentioned information in the accounts conflicted, and
suggested that after the "failure of the American effort to subdue South Vietnam
and to crush the mass movements elsewhere in Indochina," there was now
"a campaign to reconstruct the history of these years so as to place the
role of the United States in a more favorable light." According to the
two men, this rewriting of history by the establishment press was served
well by "tales of Communist atrocities, which not only prove the evils
of communism but undermine the credibility of those who opposed the war
and might interfere with future crusades for freedom." In support of
their assertion, Chomsky and Herman criticized Barron and Paul's book Murder of a Gentle Land for ignoring the U.S. government's role in creating the situation, saying,
When they speak of 'the murder of a gentle land,' they are not referring to B-52
attacks on villages or the systematic bombing and murderous ground
sweeps by American troops or forces organized and supplied by the United
States, in a land that had been largely removed from the conflict prior
to the American attack.
They
suggest, using examples, Barron and Paul's "scholarship collapses under
the barest scrutiny," concluding that, "It is a fair generalization
that the larger the number of deaths attributed to the Khmer Rouge, and
the more the U.S. role is set aside, the larger the audience that will
be reached. The Barron-Paul volume is a third-rate propaganda tract, but
its exclusive focus on Communist terror assures it a huge audience."
Later comments
In Manufacturing Consent
(1988), Chomsky and Herman discussed the media reaction to their
earlier writings on the Cambodian genocide. They summarised the position
which they had taken in After the Cataclysm (1979):
As
we also noted from the first paragraph of our earlier review of this
material, to which we will simply refer here for specifics, “there is no
difficulty in documenting major atrocities and oppression, primarily
from the reports of refugees”; there is little doubt that “the record of
atrocities in Cambodia is substantial and often gruesome” and
represents “a fearful toll”; “when the facts are in, it may turn out
that the more extreme condemnations were in fact correct,” although if
so, “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.”
Responses to Chomsky and Herman
In the introduction to the American edition of his book, Ponchaud responded to a personal letter from Chomsky, saying,
With the responsible attitude and precision of thought that are so
characteristic of him, Noam Chomsky then embarked on a polemical
exchange with Robert Silvers, Editor of the NYR, and with Jean
Lacouture, leading to the publication by the latter of a rectification
of his initial account. Mr. Chomsky was of the opinion that Jean
Lacouture had substantially distorted the evidence I had offered, and,
considering my book to be "serious and worth reading, as distinct from
much of the commentary it has elicited," he wrote me a letter on October
19, 1977 in which he drew my attention to the way [Year Zero]
was being misused by anti-revolutionary propagandists. He has made it my
duty to 'stem the flood of lies' about Cambodia -- particularly,
according to him, those propagated by Anthony Paul and John Barron in Murder of a Gentle Land.
Ponchaud wrote a different response to Chomsky in the British introduction to his book:
Even before this book was translated it was sharply criticized by Mr.
Noam Chomsky...and Mr. Gareth Porter....These two 'experts' on Asia
claim that I am mistakenly trying to convince people that Cambodia was
drowned in a sea of blood after the departure of the last American
diplomats. They say there have been no massacres, and they lay the blame
for the tragedy of the Khmer people on the American bombings. They
accuse me of being insufficiently critical in my approach to the
refugee's accounts. For them, refugees are not a valid source...it is
surprising to see that 'experts' who have spoken to few if any refugees
should reject their very significant place in any study of modern
Cambodia. These experts would rather base their arguments on reasoning:
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?
Cambodia scholar Bruce Sharp criticized Chomsky and Herman's Nation article, as well as their subsequent work After the Cataclysm
(1979), wrote that while Chomsky and Herman added disclaimers about
knowing the truth of the matter, and about the nature of the regimes in
Indochina, they nevertheless expressed a set of views by their comments
and their use of various sources. For instance, Chomsky portrayed Porter
and Hildebrand's book as "a carefully documented study of the
destructive American impact on Cambodia and the success of the Cambodian
revolutionaries in overcoming it, giving a very favorable picture of
their programs and policies, based on a wide range of sources." Sharp,
however, found that 33 out of 50 citations in one chapter of Porter and
Hildebrand's book derived from the Khmer Rouge government and six from
China, the Khmer Rouge's principal supporter.
Cambodia correspondent Nate Thayer said of Chomsky and Herman's Nation
article that they "denied the credibility of information leaking out of
Cambodia of a bloodbath underway and viciously attacked the authors of
reportage suggesting many were suffering under the Khmer Rouge."
Journalist Andrew Anthony in the London Observer,
said later that the Porter and Hildebrand's book "cravenly rehashed the
Khmer Rouge's most outlandish lies to produce a picture of a kind of
radical bucolic idyll." Chomsky, he said, questioned "refugee
testimony," believing that "their stories were exaggerations or
fabrications, designed for a western media involved in a 'vast and
unprecedented propaganda campaign' against the Khmer Rouge government,
'including systematic distortion of the truth.'"
Donald W. Beachler cited reports that Chomsky's attempts to counter
charges of Khmer Rouge atrocities also consisted of writing letters to
editors and publications. Beachler said:
Examining
materials in the Documentation Center of Cambodia archives, American
commentator Peter Maguire found that Chomsky wrote to publishers such as
Robert Silver of The New York Review of Books
to urge discounting atrocity stories. Maguire reports that some of
these letters were as long as twenty pages, and that they were even
sharper in tone than Chomsky’s published words.
Journalist Fred Barnes also mentioned that Chomsky had written "a letter or two" to The New York Review of Books.
Barnes discussed the Khmer Rouge with Chomsky and "the thrust of what
he [Chomsky] said was that there was no evidence of mass murder" in
Cambodia. Chomsky, according to Barnes, believed that "tales of
holocaust in Cambodia were so much propaganda."
In 1978, French scholar Jean Lacouture,
formerly a fervent sympathizer of the Khmer Rouge, said: "Cambodia and
Cambodians are on their way to ethnic extinction.… If Noam Chomsky and
his friends doubt it, they should study the papers, the cultures, the
facts."
Journalist Christopher Hitchens
defended Chomsky and Herman in 1985. They "were engaged in the
admittedly touchy business of distinguishing evidence from
interpretations."
Chomsky and Herman have continued to argue that their analysis of the
situation in Cambodia was reasonable, based on the information available
to them at the time, and a legitimate critique of the disparities in
reporting atrocities committed by Communist regimes relative to the
atrocities committed by the U.S. and its allies. However, Bruce Sharp
asserted that Chomsky continued to claim much lower numbers of Khmer
Rouge victims long after the large number of dead was proven by mass
graves.
Sweden
The Indochinese revolutionary movements enjoyed widespread support in Swedish society, particularly among supporters of the Swedish Social Democratic Party.
When the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh and expelled its inhabitants,
15,000 Swedes greeted their victory by spontaneously celebrating in the
center of Stockholm. Claes-Göran Bjernér, a cameraman for the Swedish
state broadcaster Sveriges Television,
described the jubilant mood among Swedish journalists saying, "at the
time most of us considered the Red Khmers as a liberation army and Pol
Pot as no less than a Robin Hood". One journalist for Expressen cried with joy, calling the fall of Phnom Penh the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Swedish author and journalist Per Olov Enquist defended the emptying of what he called "that whorehouse, Phnom Penh".
Prime Minister Olof Palme issued a joint declaration with Fidel Castro
congratulating the Khmer Rouge on their victory and immediately
extended diplomatic recognition to the new rulers of Cambodia.
Parliamentarian Birgitta Dahl
became the driving force in the Social Democratic government for
providing foreign aid to Democratic Kampuchea, an offer which the Khmer
Rouge would eventually decline. In 1976, she vigorously denied
allegations of Khmer Rouge atrocities during a discussion on Swedish
radio.
We all know that much,
well—probably most of what has been said and written about Cambodia is
lies and speculation. It was absolutely necessary to evacuate Phnom
Penh. It was a necessity to immediately get food production going and it
would require enormous sacrifices of the population. But that is not
our problem just now. The problem is that we don't actually have the
knowledge—direct testimony—in order to dismiss all the lies that are
spread by Cambodia's enemies.
Her skepticism was shared by Gertrud Sigurdsen, the Minister for International Development Cooperation, who dismissed the allegations as "exaggerated horror stories".
In recognition of the Swedish government's "special relationship" with the Khmer Rouge, Kaj Björk,
the Swedish diplomat stationed in Beijing, became the first diplomat of
any western country to be invited to visit Democratic Kampuchea in
1976. A Social Democrat, Björk had been an fervent admirer of Maoist
China, where he developed a friendship with Ieng Sary,
the third-most senior official in the Khmer Rouge. Now serving as the
Swedish government's official source of information about Cambodia, he
wrote glowing diplomatic reports extolling the new regime. When a member
of the Palestinian delegation observed that he had detected fear on the
faces of Cambodians, Björk instead attributed their countenance to the
natural modesty of the Cambodian people.
Also accompanying Björk on his strictly guided tour of the country was Jan Lundvik, an official from Sweden's Ministry for Foreign Affairs,
who dismissed concurrent reportage in the French press alleging 800,000
deaths under the Khmer Rouge as unimaginable. They were lodged in one
of Phnom Penh's abandoned mansions where Björk enjoyed the desolation of
the empty city, remarking, "Being a privileged prisoner in Phnom Penh's
deserted upper-class quarter is a great opportunity for quiet
concentration. What could then be more appropriate than to immerse
oneself in Friedrich Engel's Anti-Dühring?"
Their reluctance to say anything critical about Cambodia was also
informed in part by electoral concerns—it was feared that scrutiny of
the Swedish government's plans to offer foreign aid to the Khmer Rouge
could hamper the Social Democrat's fortunes in the upcoming 1976 Swedish general election.
In 1977, a third Swedish diplomat would be invited to visit Cambodia. Jean-Christophe Öberg,
a radical Social Democrat who had been stationed in Hanoi and Bangkok,
made a two-day tour of the country and upon his return, conveyed his
uncritical impressions to the media. Although he had made an effort to
personally interview Cambodian refugees, he dismissed their testimony as
false because he felt their accounts were suspiciously consistent with
what had been reported by John Barron and Anthony Paul in Reader's Digest.
Well, the refugee's stories are, in
their very nature, highly coloured. Their accounts are made with their
own interest before their eyes. Partly, they want to get out of the
camps as soon as possible… and to make it possible to obtain status as a
political refugee, you have to prove you have been subject to
persecution!
[…] what is so striking about this, is that when I went around
and talked to people in the camp, they described the situation in
Cambodia just as it had been reported in Reader's Digest. And
this cannot be taken very seriously! It would have been more interesting
to listen to what the Cambodians had to say about the situation in
Cambodia, according to their own experiences, rather than what was said
in [Reader's Digest] in February. And I would like to emphasize
how exaggerated and biased the reports from Cambodia have been in the
international news media. And that brings us back to what we said
earlier. "Why is it like this? Who is behind it?" But apparently there
are those who have an interest in continuing to portray the regime in
Phnom Penh as a reign of murder. One can say that the best way to deny
this is to let the journalists come there and see for themselves.
The uncritical accounts of Swedish diplomats would later be cited by
other skeptics trying to present a more benign image of the Khmer Rouge.
Sweden–Kampuchea Friendship Association
In August 1978, four members of the Sweden–Kampuchea Friendship Association
(SKFA) were invited to visit Cambodia. Among them were its chairperson
Hedvig Ekerwald, Gunnar Bergström, the editor of the magazine Kampuchea, Jan Myrdal, the son of Gunnar and Alva Myrdal
and one of Sweden's most internationally renowned left-wing activists,
and Marita Wikander, who was married to a Khmer Rouge diplomat who had
been stationed in East Germany before he was recalled to Cambodia. During their visit, they would have a lavish dinner with Pol Pot.
Wikander asked their hosts if she could see her husband, but her
request was denied. Unbeknownst to her, her husband had been executed by
the Khmer Rouge after his return to Cambodia in 1977, one year earlier.
Her son would later find records of his death at Tuol Sleng.
At that time, aged 27, Bergström believed that the reports about
overwork, starvation, and mass killings in Cambodia were just "Western
propaganda."
The four saw "smiling peasants" and a society on its way to become "an
ideal society". When they came back to Sweden, they "undertook a
speaking tour and wrote articles in support of the Democratic Kampuchea regime."
Evidence that emerged after the fall of the regime shocked
Bergström, forcing him to change his views. He said that it was "like
falling off the branch of the tree" and that he had to re-identify
everything he had believed in.
In later interviews, he acknowledged that he had been wrong, that it
was a "propaganda tour" and that they were brought to see what the Khmer
Rouge wanted them to see. Bergström would later return to Cambodia for a "big forgiveness tour." In a speech with high school students in Phnom Penh on 12 September 2016, he recommended that everybody should learn history.
Jan Myrdal never abandoned his support for the Khmer Rouge.
Malcolm Caldwell
British Marxist academic Malcolm Caldwell, an associate of Noam Chomsky, wrote extensively about Cambodia, including an article in The Guardian called "The Cambodian defence" denying reports of Khmer Rouge genocide, and was regarded as one of "the staunchest defenders of the Pol Pot regime in the West."
For Caldwell, who wrote the essay "Cambodia: Rationale of a Rural
Policy", the Communist regime in Cambodia represented the "promise of a
better future for all." In his writings, Caldwell heavily cited information from Kampuchean Information Minister Hu Nim, perhaps not being aware that Hu Nim had been removed from the position, and ordered by Pol Pot to be tortured and executed at Tuol Sleng prison.
Caldwell concluded that, in time,
[T]he Kampuchean
revolution will appear more and more clearly as one of the most
significant early indications of the great and necessary change
beginning to convulse the world in the later 20th century and shifting
from a disaster-bound course to one holding out the promise of a better
future for all.
Caldwell
also wrote that, "The evacuation of Phnom Penh was not, therefore, an
unpremeditated act of savagery (as portrayed in the Western press), but a
well-thought-out operation to feed its starving people." Shortly before departing for Cambodia, Caldwell delivered a speech to the Institute of Race Relations
where he promoted the Pol Pot regime, concluding that "the Kampuchean
experiment, which may appear to the Western media and to the Vietnamese
and Russians as totally irrational, reactionary and backward, is a very
valid and valuable experiment." He argued that "it would be a great
pity" and"‘a very great tragedy" if "the Kampuchean experiment were to
be extinguished.
Death
Caldwell was a member of the first delegation of three Western writers—two Americans, Elizabeth Becker and Richard Dudman,
and Caldwell—to be invited to visit Cambodia in December 1978, nearly 4
years after the Khmer Rouge had taken power. The invitation was
apparently an effort by Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge, to improve
the image of the Khmer Rouge in the West, now questioned by some of its
former academic sympathizers.
On 22 December, Caldwell had a private meeting with Pol Pot and returned "euphoric" to the guest house in Phnom Penh
where the three members of the delegation were staying. During the
night, Becker awoke to the sound of gunfire and saw a Cambodian man with
a gun in the guest house outside her room. Later that night, she and
Dudman were allowed by guards to venture out of their rooms and they
discovered Caldwell's body. He had been shot. The body of a Cambodian
man was also in his room.
The murder of Caldwell has never been fully explained. Four of the
Cambodian guards were arrested and two "confessed" under torture, saying
We
were attacking to ruin the Khmer Rouge Party's policy, to prevent the
Party from gathering friends in the world ... it would be enough to
attack the English guest, because the English guest had written in
support of our Party ... Therefore, we must absolutely succeed in
attacking this English guest, in order that the American guests would
write about it.
Whatever
the motive behind Caldwell's murder, it seems highly unlikely that it
could have occurred in tightly controlled Cambodia without the
involvement of high-level Khmer Rouge officials. According to Becker later on, "Caldwell’s death was caused by the madness of the regime he openly admired."
The impact of Caldwell's visit to Cambodia and his murder was muted by the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia
three days later on 25 December 1978, which soon ended the rule of the
Khmer Rouge. Support for the Khmer Rouge in the Western academic
community of Cambodian scholars quietly faded away. Peter Rodman, an American foreign policy expert and public official, stated that "When Hanoi
[Vietnam] turned publicly against Phnom Penh, it suddenly became
respectable for many on the Left to 'discover' the murderous qualities
of the Khmer Rouge — qualities that had been obvious to unbiased
observers for years."
Recanting
With
the takeover of Cambodia by Vietnam in 1979 and the discovery of
incontestable evidence of Khmer Rouge atrocities, including mass graves,
the "tales told by refugees," which had been doubted by many Western
academics, proved to be entirely accurate. Some former enthusiasts for
the Khmer Rouge recanted their previous views, others diverted their
interest to other issues, and a few continued to defend the Khmer Rouge.
In an exchange with William Shawcross in an issue of The New York Review of Books dated 20 July 1978, Gareth Porter wrote that
It
is true, as Shawcross notes from my May 1977 Congressional testimony,
that I have changed my view on a number of aspects of the Cambodian
situation. I have no interest in defending everything the Khmer
government does, and I believe that the policy of self-reliance has been
carried so far that it has imposed unnecessary costs on the population
of Cambodia. Shawcross, however, clearly does have an interest in
rejecting our conclusions. It is time, I suggest, for him to examine it
carefully, because it does not make for intellectual honesty.
Shawcross responded,
I
was glad to acknowledge in my article that Mr. Porter had changed his
views on the Khmer Rouge and it is a tribute to his own integrity that
he now agrees that the Khmer Rouge have imposed 'unnecessary costs' on
the Cambodian people. He should, however, be a little more careful
before he accuses others of deliberately falsifying evidence and of
intellectual dishonesty.
In
2010, Porter said he had been waiting many years for someone to ask him
about his earlier views of the Khmer Rouge. He described how the
climate of distrust of the government generated during the Vietnam War
carried over to Cambodia. "I uncovered a series of instances when
government officials were propagandizing [about the Vietnam War]. They
were lying," he explained. "I've been well aware for many years that I
was guilty of intellectual arrogance. I was right about the bloodbath in
Vietnam, so I assumed I would be right about Cambodia."
Australian Ben Kiernan
recanted after interviewing 500 Cambodian refugees in 1979. He admitted
that he had been "late in recognizing the extent of the tragedy in
Cambodia ...and wrong about ...the brutal authoritarian trend within the
revolutionary movement after 1973."
In the opinion of Donald W. Beachler, the genocide deniers and
doubters among academics may have been motivated more by politics than a
search for the truth, but conservatives who "embraced the reports" of
Khmer Rouge atrocities had no less "cynicism or naiveté" in later
downplaying reports of atrocities by anti-communists in Central America.
He noted that the supportive attitude towards the Khmer Rouge had also
been expressed by the U.S. government and politicians for a dozen years
after the regime was toppled in January 1979, as part of the denigration
against the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia in the 1980s. In fact,
the U.S. was one of the countries that had voted for the retainment of
the Democratic Kampuchea's seat at the United Nations until 1991.
Bruce Sharp, who points out many errors of Chomsky's analysis, also
says that "While Chomsky's comments on Cambodia are misleading and
inaccurate, one important point must be borne in mind: The actions of
the United States were largely responsible for the growth of the Khmer
Rouge."
In 2013, the Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen
passed legislation which makes illegal the denial of the Cambodian
genocide and other war crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge. The
legislation was passed after comments by a member of the opposition, Kem Sokha, who is the deputy president of the Cambodian National Rescue Party.
Sokha had stated that exhibits at Tuol Sleng were fabricated and that
the artifacts had been faked by the Vietnamese following their invasion
in 1979. Sokha's party have claimed that the comments have been taken
out of context.
Continued downplaying
Certain authors have continued to downplay Khmer Rouge atrocities in recent years. Richard Dudman,
who accompanied Caldwell to Cambodia, challenged the "conventional
wisdom that Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge are irrational fanatics who
practiced deliberate genocide [and] slaughtered more than one million
Cambodians" in a 1990 editorial in The New York Times, arguing
that "The evidence for these fixed beliefs consists mainly of poignant
though statistically inconclusive anecdotes from accounts of mass
executions in a few villages. It comes mostly from those with an
interest in blackening the name of the Khmer Rouge: From Cambodian
refugees, largely the middle- and upper-class victims of the Pol Pot
revolution, and from the Vietnamese."
New Cambodia (or Kampuchea, as it was called) under Pol
Pot and his comrades was a nightmare for the privileged, for the wealthy
and for their retainers; but poor people had enough food and were
taught to read and write. As for the mass killings, these are just
horror stories, averred my Cambodian interlocutors. Surely the
victorious peasants shot marauders and spies, but many more died of
American-planted mines and during the subsequent Vietnamese takeover,
they said ... Noam Chomsky assessed that the death toll in Cambodia may
have been inflated 'by a factor of a thousand'... To me, this recalls
other CIA-sponsored stories of Red atrocities, be it Stalin's Terror or the Ukrainian Holodomor ... [The Vietnamese] supported the black legend of genocide to justify their own bloody intervention.
Disputing the number of victims
Estimates
of the number of Cambodians who died during the four years of Khmer
Rouge rule have been controversial and range from less than one million
to more than three million. Ben Kiernan, head of the Cambodian Genocide Project at Yale University,
estimated that the Khmer Rouge were responsible for 1.5 million deaths
and later raised that estimate to 1.7 million, more than 20% of the
population. His deputy, Craig Etcheson, undertook the most complete
survey of mass graves and evidence of executions in Cambodia and
concluded in 1999 that the Khmer Rouge may have executed as many as 1.5
million people and as many as another 1.5 million may have died of
starvation and overwork. Kiernan criticized Etcheson for "sloppiness,
exaggerating a horrific death toll," and "ethnic auctioneering."
Etcheson's report was removed from the web site of the Cambodian
Genocide Project.
Kiernan had earlier been cited by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman
in 1979, saying that "[Kiernan] notes that most of the atrocity stories
come from areas of little Khmer Rouge strength, where orders to stop
reprisals were disobeyed by soldiers wreaking vengeance, often drawn
from the poorest sections of the peasantry."
Kiernan has since completely rejected his own previous explanation,
saying in 1996 that: "Despite its underdeveloped economy, the regime
probably exerted more power over its citizens than any state in world
history. It controlled and directed their public lives more closely than
government had ever done."
The United States (U.S.) voted for the Khmer Rouge and the Khmer Rouge-dominated Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK) to retain Cambodia's United Nations (UN) seat until as late as 1993, long after the Khmer Rouge had been mostly deposed by Vietnam during the 1979 Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia and ruled just a small part of the country. It has also been reported that the U.S. encouraged the government of China to provide military support for the Khmer Rouge. There have also been related allegations by several sources, notably Michael Haas, which claim that the U.S. directly armed the Khmer Rouge in order to weaken the influence of Vietnam and the Soviet Union in Southeast Asia. These allegations have been disputed by the U.S. government and by journalist Nate Thayer, who argued that little, if any, American aid actually reached the Khmer Rouge.
The Khmer Rouge, the communist party led by Pol Pot, came to power in 1975 during the Cambodian Civil War, which was linked to the Vietnam War. They defeated the Khmer Republic,
who were heavily supported by the U.S., including a massive bombing
campaign against the Khmer Rouge until 1973. North Vietnam, who had many
soldiers in Cambodia, and China were the primary backers of the Khmer
Rouge during the civil war. Between 1975 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge
perpetrated the Cambodian genocide, which killed between 1.5 and 2 million people, nearly 25% of Cambodia's population. During the genocide, China
was the main international patron of the Khmer Rouge, supplying "more
than 15,000 military advisers" and most of its external aid.
Vietnamese invasion
Vietnaminvaded Cambodia in late 1978 and established the People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) led by Khmer Rouge defectors.
Vietnam's invasion was motivated by repeated cross-border attacks by
the Khmer Rouge that targeted Vietnamese civilians, including the Ba Chúc massacre—in
which the Khmer Rouge systematically killed the entire population of a
Vietnamese village of over 3,000 people, with the exception of one woman
who survived being shot in the neck and clubbed, causing her to suffer
painful headaches for the rest of her life; before being killed, many of
the victims were "barbarously tortured." These attacks killed over 30,000 Vietnamese in total.
Vietnam ousted the Khmer Rouge and ended the genocide in a mere
17 days, and Vietnamese troops occupied Cambodia for the next eleven
years. Following the invasion, Vietnam attempted to publicize the crimes of the Khmer Rouge, establishing an ossuary
for the victims at Ba Chúc and convincing the PRK to do the same for
the Khmer Rouge's Cambodian victims; the Khmer Rouge's most notorious
prison, S-21—which held 20,000 prisoners, "all but seven" of whom were
killed—was revealed in May 1979 and eventually turned into the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, although there were well over 150 Khmer Rouge death camps "on the same model, at least one per district."
China trained Khmer Rouge soldiers on its soil during 1979—1986
(if not later), "stationed military advisers with Khmer Rouge troops as
late as 1990," and "supplied at least $1 billion in military aid" during the 1980s. After the 1991 Paris Peace Accords, Thailand
continued to allow the Khmer Rouge "to trade and move across the Thai
border to sustain their activities ... although international criticism,
particularly from the U.S. and Australia ... caused it to disavow passing any direct military support."
Cambodia's UN seat
As
a result of Chinese and Western opposition to the Vietnamese invasion
and occupation of Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge, rather than the PRK, was
allowed to hold Cambodia's United Nations (UN) seat until 1982. After 1982, the UN seat was filled by a Khmer Rouge-dominated coalition—the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK).
Owing to Chinese, U.S., and Western support, the Khmer Rouge-dominated
CGDK held Cambodia's UN seat until 1993, long after the Cold War had
ended.
U.S. diplomatic support
In 1998 former U.S. National Security Advisor (NSA) Zbigniew Brzezinski
acknowledged that "I encourage[d] the Chinese to support Pol Pot ... we
could never support him, but China could." However, Brzezinski
subsequently stated: "The Chinese were aiding Pol Pot, but without any
help or arrangement from the United States. Moreover, we told the
Chinese explicitly that in our view Pol Pot was an abomination and that
the United States would have nothing to do with him—directly or
indirectly."
In late 1975, U.S. NSA and Secretary of StateHenry Kissinger
told the Thai foreign minister: "You should tell the Cambodians that we
will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs but we won't let
that stand in our way." In 1998 Kissinger elaborated: "The Thais and the Chinese did not want a Vietnamese-dominated Indochina. We
didn't want the Vietnamese to dominate. I don't believe we did anything
for Pol Pot. But I suspect we closed our eyes when some others did
something for Pol Pot."
Cambodian leader Norodom Sihanouk, when asked about charges of opportunism in May 1987 ("your critics would say ... that you would sleep with the Devil to achieve your end"),
replied: "As far as devils are concerned, the U.S.A. also supports the
Khmer Rouge. Even before the forming of the Coalition Government in
1982, the U.S. each year voted in favor of the Khmer Rouge regime. ...
The U.S.A. says that it is against the Khmer Rouge, that it is
pro-Sihanouk, pro-Son Sann. But the devils, they are there [laughs] with Sihanouk and Son Sann."
Allegations of U.S. military support
According
to Tom Fawthrop, U.S. support for the Khmer Rouge guerrillas in the
1980s was "pivotal" to keeping the organization alive, and was in part
motivated by revenge over the U.S. defeat during the Vietnam War. A WikiLeaks dump of 500,000 U.S. diplomatic cables from 1978 shows that the administration of President Jimmy Carter
was torn between revulsion at the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge and
concern with the possibility of growing Vietnamese influence should the
Khmer Rouge collapse.
According to Michael Haas,
despite publicly condemning the Khmer Rouge, the U.S. offered military
support to the organization and was instrumental in preventing UN
recognition of the Vietnam-aligned government. Haas argued that the U.S. and China responded to efforts from the Association of South East Asian Nations
(ASEAN) for disarming the Khmer Rouge by ensuring the Khmer Rouge
stayed armed, and that U.S. efforts for merging the Khmer Rouge with
allied factions resulted in the formation of the CGDK. After 1982, the
U.S. increased its annual covert aid to the Cambodian resistance from $4
million to $10 million. Haas's account is corroborated by Singaporean diplomat Bilahari Kausikan,
who recalled: "ASEAN wanted elections but the U.S. supported the return
of a genocidal regime. Did any of you imagine that the U.S. once had in
effect supported genocide?" Kausikan described the disagreement between
the U.S. and ASEAN over the Khmer Rouge as reaching the threshold that
the U.S. threatened Singapore with "blood on the floor".
By contrast, Nate Thayer
recounted that "The United States has scrupulously avoided any direct
involvement in aiding the Khmer Rouge", instead providing non-lethal aid
to non-communist Khmer People's National Liberation Front
(KPNLF) and Armee Nationale Sihanouk (ANS) insurgents, which rarely
cooperated with the Khmer Rouge on the battlefield, despite being
coalition partners, and which fought with the Khmer Rouge dozens of
times prior to 1987. According to Thayer, "In months spent in areas
controlled by the three resistance groups and during scores of
encounters with the Khmer Rouge ... I never once encountered aid given
to the [non-communist resistance] in use by or in possession of the
Khmer Rouge."
State Department investigation
Although U.S. policy was to provide support to "15,000 ineffective 'noncommunist' rebel fighters", Joel Brinkley
stated that "charges made the rounds that some of the American aid,
$215 million so far, was finding its way to the Khmer Rouge." A
subsequent investigation led by Thomas Fingar of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research
(INR) "found some leakage—including sharing of ammunition, joint
defense of a bridge, and using one truck to transport both
'noncommunist' and Khmer Rouge fighters to a fight." Fingar was
dismissive of his own investigators's report, which he characterized as
an "epiphenomenon in a flea circus": "Isn't the larger objective here
defeating the Vietnamese puppets in Phnom Penh?"
Later the party changed its name to the Indochinese Communist Party as the Comintern, under Joseph Stalin, did not favour nationalistic sentiments. Nguyễn Ái Quốc was a leftist revolutionary who had been living in France since 1911. Participating in the founding of the French Communist Party, in 1924 he traveled to the Soviet Union to join the Comintern and, in the late 1920s, acted as a Comintern agent to help build Communist movements in Southeast Asia.
During the 1930s, the Vietnamese Communist Party was nearly wiped
out due to French execution of its top leaders such as Phú, Lê Hồng
Phong, and Nguyễn Văn Cừ.
In 1941 Nguyễn Ái Quốc, now known as Hồ Chí Minh, arrived in northern Vietnam to form the Việt Minh Front, short for Việt Nam Độc Lập Đồng Minh Hội
(League for the Independence of Vietnam). The Việt Minh Front was to be
an umbrella group for parties fighting for Vietnam's independence from
French and Japanese occupation, but was dominated by the Indochinese Communist Party. The Việt Minh had an armed force and, during the war, worked with the American Office of Strategic Services to collect intelligence on the Japanese.From China, other non-Communist Vietnamese parties also joined the Việt Minh and established armed forces with backing from the Kuomintang.
North Vietnam
Between 1953 and 1956, the North Vietnamese government instituted various agrarian reforms, including "rent reduction" and "land reform",
which resulted in the execution of thousands of accused landlords.
During the land reform, testimony from North Vietnamese witnesses
suggested a ratio of one execution for every 160 village residents,
which extrapolated to a nationwide total of almost 100,000 executions.
Because the campaign was mainly concentrated in the Red River Delta
area, a lower estimate of 50,000 executions was accepted by many
scholars at the time.
However, declassified documents from the Vietnamese and Hungarian
archives indicate the number of executions was much lower than reported
at the time, although likely greater than 13,500.
North Vietnam established the National Liberation Front
(NLF) on December 20, 1960, to foment insurgency in the South. Many of
the Việt Cộng's core members were volunteer "regroupees", southern Việt
Minh who had resettled in the North after the Geneva Accord (1954).
Hanoi gave the regroupees military training and sent them back to the
South along the Ho Chi Minh trail
in the early 1960s. The NLF called for Southern Vietnamese to
"overthrow the camouflaged colonial regime of the American Imperialists"
and to make "efforts towards the peaceful unification". The PLAF's
best-known action was the Tet Offensive, an assault on more than 100
South Vietnamese urban centres in 1968, including an attack on the U.S.
embassy in Saigon. The offensive riveted the attention of the world's
media for weeks, but also overextended the Việt Cộng. Later communist
offensives were conducted predominantly by the North Vietnamese. The
organisation was dissolved in 1976 when North and South Vietnam were
officially unified under a communist government.
The Viet Cong are estimated to have killed about 36,725 South Vietnamese
soldiers between 1957 and 1972. Statistics for 1968–72 suggest that
"about 80 percent of the victims were ordinary civilians and only about
20 percent of them were government officials, policemen, members of the
self-defence forces or pacification cadres." In the former capital city of Huế, Viet Cong troops captured the Imperial Citadel and much of the city, which led to the Battle of Huế. During the interim between the capture of the Citadel and the end of the "Battle of Huế", the occupying forces Massacre at Huế.
Post Vietnam War
In 1975, Vietnam was officially reunified and renamed the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRVN), with its capital in Hà Nội.
The Vietnamese Communist Party dropped its front name "Labor Party" and
changed the title of First Secretary, a term used in China, to Secretary-General, used in the Soviet Union, with Lê Duẩn
as its Secretary General. The National Liberation Front was dissolved.
The Party emphasised the development of heavy industry and the collectivisation of agriculture.
Over the next few years, private enterprises and private homes were
seized by the government and their owners were often sent to the New Economic Zones to clear land, often to uninhabited forested areas. Members of the Vietnamese Communist Party,
the North Vietnamese military or the former Viet Cong and their
families were often the recipients of the confiscated properties, often
in downtown areas of cities and towns. The farmers were coerced into
state-controlled cooperatives.
All food production was collectivised as it was in the North, forcing
farmers and fishermen to sell their goods to the government at very low
prices, otherwise farmers and fishermen couldn't purchase farming
supplies and fishing equipment. Transportation of food and goods between
provinces was deemed illegal except by the government. Within a short
period of time, Vietnam was hit by severe shortages of food and basic
necessities.
In foreign relations, the SRVN became increasingly aligned with
the Soviet Union by joining the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON),
and signing a Friendship Pact, which was in fact a military alliance,
with the Soviet Union. Tensions between Vietnam and China mounted along
with China's rivalry with the Soviet Union and conflict erupted with Cambodia, then China's ally. Vietnam was also subject to trade embargoes by the U.S.
and its allies. Many of those who held high positions in the old South
Vietnamese government and military, and others who profited from the
colonial regime were sent to reeducation camps, which were actually hard labor prison camps.
The SRVN government implemented a Stalinistdictatorship of the proletariat in the South as they did in the North. All religions had to be organised into state-controlled churches. Any negative comments about the Party, the government, Ho Chi Minh,
or anything else that was critical of Communism might earn the person
the tag of Phản Động (Reactionary), with consequences ranging from
harassment by the police, to expulsion from one's school or workplace,
or imprisonment. Nevertheless, the Communist authority failed to
suppress the black market,
where food, consumer goods, and banned literature could be bought at
high prices. The security apparatus also failed to stop a clandestine
nationwide network of people from trying to escape the country. In many
cases, the security officers of whole districts were bribed and they
even got involved in organising the escape schemes.
These conditions resulted in an exodus of around 2.5 million Vietnamese (approximately 5% of the population) secretly escaping the country either by sea or overland through Cambodia. Some were successful in fleeing the region and large numbers of them landed in Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Hong Kong, only to wind up in United Nations refugee camps. Some famous camps were Bidong in Malaysia, Galang in Indonesia, Bataan in the Philippines and Songkla in Thailand. Some managed to travel as far as Australia in crowded, open boats (see Boat People).
While most refugees were resettled in other countries within five
years, others languished in refugee camps for over a decade. In the
1990s, refugees who could not find asylum were deported back to Vietnam.
Communities of Vietnamese refugees arrived in the US, Canada, Australia, France, West Germany, and the UK.
Vietnam's third Constitution, based on that of the USSR,
was written in 1980. The Communist Party was stated by the Constitution
to be the only party to represent the people and to lead the country,
according to Communist ideals.
In 1980, cosmonautPhạm Tuân became the first Vietnamese person and the first Asian to go into space, traveling on the Soviet Soyuz 37 to service the Salyut 6 space station.
During the early 1980s, a number of overseas Vietnamese
organisations were created with the aim of overthrowing the Vietnamese
Communist government through armed struggle once peaceful protesting was
no longer a viable option. Most groups attempted to infiltrate Vietnam
but they were eventually executed by Vietnamese security and armed
forces. Most notable were the organisations led by Hoàng Cơ Minh from the US, Võ Đại Tôn from Australia, and Lê Quốc Túy from France. Hoàng Cơ Minh was killed during an ambush in Laos.
Võ Đại Tôn was captured and imprisoned until his release in December
1991. Lê Quốc Túy stayed in France so he could undergo kidney treatment
while his allies were arrested and executed in Vietnam. These
organisations gained massive funding from US-aligned interest groups as
from their eyes, transitioning modern-day Vietnam into a democratic
system would be a superior economic and social alternative and would
improve the lifestyle of many of those living under the current
socialist system (which utilises many capitalist-style marketing
techniques anyway), whereas Pro-Socialists in Vietnam may unwittingly
see this act, even if it is viewed as benign by pro-democratic, as an
act of reopening unhealed wounds. Additionally, a drastic shift in
governance ideology would produce a change too vast for the Vietnamese
to cope with, as evident with how Russia suffered immense drops in
economic and social conditions when USSR dissolved in 1991. In the
following decades of the dissolution of the USSR, only five or six of
the post-communist states are on a path to joining the wealthy
capitalist West
while most fell behind, some to such an extent that it will take over
fifty years to catch up to where they were before the fall of the Soviet
Bloc, justifying that Vietnam did not need to transition to democracy
anytime soon.
However, throughout the 1980s, the voices of the Overseas
Vietnamese and those struggling under the socialist system were not left
unheard, as Vietnam made the transition from a centrally planned
economy to a market economy.
It had also received nearly $3 billion a year in economic and military
aid from the Soviet Union. Most of its trade was conducted with the USSR
and other COMECON
(Council for Mutual Economic Assistance) countries during this time.
Some cadres, realizing the economic suffering of the people, began to
break the rules and experiment with market-oriented enterprises, thus,
following models inspired by Western World
values. This was tolerated by most local authorities before becoming
widespread and popular after small business regulations loosened in the
1990s - around same the time the USSR started to dissolve. It was around
this time in which Vietnam's economy started to recover and poverty
levels gradually declined.
The Socialist Republic of Vietnam is a one-party state. A new state constitution
was approved in April 2013, replacing the 1980 version. The central
role of the Communist Party was reasserted in all organs of government,
politics and society. Only political organizations affiliated with or
endorsed by the Communist Party are permitted to contest elections.
These include the Vietnamese Fatherland Front, worker and trade unionist parties. The President of Vietnam is the titular head of state and the nominal commander-in-chief of the military of Vietnam, chairing the Council on National Defense and Security. The Prime Minister of VietnamPhạm Minh Chính is the head of government, presiding over a council of ministers composed of three deputy prime ministers and the heads of 26 ministries and commissions.
The National Assembly of Vietnam is the unicamerallegislature
of the government, composed of 499 members. It is superior to both the
executive and judicial branches, but not to the Communist Party. All
members of the council of ministers (executive branch) are derived from
the National Assembly. The Supreme People's Court of Vietnam, which is the highest court of appeal in the nation, is also answerable to the National Assembly. Beneath the Supreme People's Court stand the provincial municipal courts and the local courts. Military courts
are also a powerful branch of the judiciary with special jurisdiction
in matters of national security. All organs of Vietnam's government are
controlled by the Communist Party. Most government appointees are
members of the party. The General Secretary of the Communist Party is
perhaps one of the most important political leaders in the nation,
controlling the party's national organization and state appointments, as
well as setting policy.
