Matthew Yglesias (July 23, 2007) - Pete Seeger, Stalinist (Culture)

So Boaz is totally wrong about the one thing you have personal knowledge of, but you think we should trust him about the other stuff?

Posted by cs | July 23, 2007 9:57 AM

Red-baiting really doesn't become you, Matt.

Posted by lemuel pitkin | July 23, 2007 10:02 AM

Wow. So picking on an actual Stalinist -- as Matt says, not some hippie who's a communist in Rush LImbaugh's imagination, but an actual Stalinist -- is "red-baiting"?

Posted by too many steves | July 23, 2007 10:03 AM

Spellcheck doesn't work for everything, Matt.

In the first paragraph, you need grudge rather than drudge; in the second, you need grew rather than grow.

Sorry to begin the day (or, at least, my day) with nitpicking, but those errors hurt my ears.

Posted by THS | July 23, 2007 10:05 AM

If we're going to bury everyone who was insufficiently enthusiastic about entering World War 2, can we just plough the GOP under and be done with it?

Posted by phil | July 23, 2007 10:12 AM

"Seeger was antiwar during the period of the Nazi-Soviet Pact; pro-war after the Soviet Union was the ally of the United States; and anti-war during the years of the Cold War and Vietnam."

I know nothing about Seeger and have no dog in this fight but that is hardly a damning indictment. While it may have all been motivated by his love for Uncle Joe, this arc of views was not exactly uncommon. Which awesome wars was Seeger supposed to have supported "during the years of the Cold War and Vietnam."

Normally we reserve the hard core Stalinist charge for those who clung with Uncle Joe even after the horrors of his regime were undeniable. Is Seeger in that camp? I have no idea, but Boaz doesn't make the claim.

Posted by Snoopy | July 23, 2007 10:17 AM

Note: No actual evidence for Seeger's supposed Stalinism is presented in Boaz's column. Going from antiwar to prowar and back is not in itself evidence of Stalinism. If Boaz has any examples of Seeger saying stuff like "Gulag was too good for that bastard Solzhenitsyn", he should share them.

Not that this means Seeger wasn't, etc. But the "Stalin's songbird" headline, just like "aging Stalinist" (and, BTW, most of the standard libertarian propaganda) isn't substantiated.

Posted by Sembtex | July 23, 2007 10:18 AM

Two points:

1) My aunt and uncle run Fieldston Outdoors day camp, and likely did when Matt was a camper there. Another instance of the incestuous nature of blogs and their comment threads.

2) When I was a camp counselor there 7ish years ago, the Pete Seeger asthestic still ran strong in the camp's blood--we had the afternoon folk song sessions, plays about the White Men taking the Hudson River area from its Native American habitants, and so on. Also, mandatory swim lessons three days a week.

The one time I actually heard Pete Seeger perform was when he visited a camp field trip and played for us. The kids were able to sing along to his every word, if you catch my drift.

Glad to find another generally satisfied customer of Fieldston Outdoors, though.

Posted by Ben | July 23, 2007 10:20 AM

There is a distinction that both Boaz and MY elide here, i.e., the distinction between being a "Stalinist" in the sense of being supporter of Stalin in Russia, with full knowledge of what was going on there, and being a "Stalinist" in the sense of being a sympathizer in the United States, who didn't have any firsthand knowledge of what was going on and had at least an arguable basis for distrusting the secondhand reports. Obviously neither person is a good thing to be, but the latter type is more accurately described as an person with really bad judgment rather than as an abettor of genocide.

By way of comparison, we regard Himmler and Charles Lindbergh very differently, and rightly so, even if Lindbergh's conduct can't be completely excused. I don't see that there's a difference between Lindbergh and Seeger here (other than Lindbergh was a fully mature adult at the time and Seeger was just out of college).

Posted by alkali | July 23, 2007 10:20 AM

Red-baiting really doesn't become you, Matt.

Actually it seems to me he's engaged in that equally egregious sin, folk-singer-baiting.

Posted by Ryan | July 23, 2007 10:20 AM

This is not exactly a revelation. Here is Pete Seeger commenting on Pete Seeger's Stalinist past:

"My father, Charles Seeger, got me into the Communist movement. He backed out around '38. I drifted out in the '50s. I apologize [in his recent book] for following the party line so slavishly, for not seeing that Stalin was a supremely cruel misleader."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Seeger

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 10:30 AM

This of course matters to Boaz because the American communist movements' down is uppism is something that a good member of the Craniac faction of the libertarian party can really understand at a primal level.

I don't have a brief for seeger other than my son liking to say "low bridge, everybody down" when I carry him on my shoulders. I don't condone membership in CPUSA. But the man appeared before the committee in the '50s and he pled the 1st. Didn't name names. Suffered the consequences. Unless you think we should have locked him up until he did, I'm not sure what the point of all this is.

Posted by benton | July 23, 2007 10:31 AM

"Seeger was antiwar during the period of the Nazi-Soviet Pact; pro-war after the Soviet Union was the ally of the United States" Wow, who knew that F.D.R., was a Communist.

Posted by Carlos | July 23, 2007 10:34 AM

A partial dissent from alkali (like several other commenters, I don't know enough about Seeger to say anything about the main question). Apart from the two types alkali rightly distinguishes, there were people on the left outside the USSR who, above and beyond being soppy over Soviet Communism, were Stalinists in a harder and more blameworthy sense. This usually involved hewing to the ever shifting party line by vilifying other people on the left (Trotskyites, real and imagined and so on). Alkali is right that before we passed judgement on Seeger, we'd have to know more about where he stood at different phases of what was after all an extremely long career.

(Meanwhile--my secret shame--I must confess to a sneaking fondness for folk music. Have listened, and I blush to admit it, to an Ian & Sylvia LP within the last 24 hours.)

Posted by J | July 23, 2007 10:36 AM

My favorite part of that Boaz piece was the obligatory "why won't people understand that Socialism was far worse than Fascism!!!" from the type of guys who think that public transportation and school lunches are unforgivably Stalinist.

I know you're frustrated that so many of your anti-governmental allies turn out to be racist nuts, but Sweden STILL doesn't has Gulags.

As for Seeger, Matt, I'm with the "er, evidence?" guys. Because I didn't actually see any. The best we got was a link to some other guy ranting on FrontPage.

Yeah.

Right.

Posted by Demosthenes | July 23, 2007 10:43 AM

I clicked through to the Boaz piece to see the evidence that Seeger was a "hard-core Stalinist," only to find -- as others have noted -- that it's not there. Indeed, the "hard-core" label seems to be MY's gift. As El Cid suggests, Wikipedia turns out to be more useful:

Seeger is known for his ardent political beliefs and his involvement with leftist political organizations, including the Communist Party. An article written in 2006 by an official of the American libertarian Cato Institute reported that in the early years of World War II, political opponents called him "Stalin's Songbird".[9] His supporters called him "America's Tuning Fork" and "A Living Saint".[10] Seeger's anti-war record Songs for John Doe, released in 1941, took the Communist Party's non-interventionist line after (Hitler and Stalin signed a non-aggression pact in 1939). At that time Seeger was also strongly anti-Franklin D. Roosevelt, owing to what he considered the President's weak support of workers' rights. After Germany’s breaking of the pact and its attack on the Soviet Union, the pacifism of Songs for John Doe were an embarrassment to the new "patriotic" line of the Communist Party and copies were quickly removed from sale. The remaining inventory was reportedly destroyed. Only a few copies exist to this day. After the invasion of the Soviet Union, Seeger and the Communist Party became strong proponents of military action against Germany; he was drafted into the Army, where he served in the Pacific. He did not serve in a combat unit, his job was to entertain the American troops with music. (Originally the Army had trained him as an airplane mechanic.) When people later asked him what he did in the war, he always answered 'I strummed my banjo'. Seeger left the Communist Party in 1950, five years before Nikita Khrushchev's Secret Speech revealed Stalin's crimes and led to an exodus from the Party. "I realized I could sing the same songs I sang whether I belonged to the Communist Party or not, and I never liked the idea anyway of belonging to a secret organization."[11] He became an anti-Stalinist but remained a Socialist.

So if Boaz thinks the New Yorker is deceptive for failing to mention that Seeger was a Communist, what does it say that Boaz omits to mention that Seeger left the Communist Party 57 years ago? That would just get in the way of slamming the NYT.

Posted by Tyrone Slothrop | July 23, 2007 10:44 AM

"Seeger was antiwar during the period of the Nazi-Soviet Pact; pro-war after the Soviet Union was the ally of the United States" Wow, who knew that F.D.R., was a Communist.

Boaz, I'd imagine, were you to get enough liquor into him.

Posted by Demosthenes | July 23, 2007 10:45 AM

I learned to play banjo from Pete Seeger's book, which sold at capitalist prices in bourgeois small businesses 40 years ago. So I was pleased when I ran into him at National Airport (now named after the Master Bourgeois Nemesis, an accident of a temporary setback in the Dictatorship of the Proletariat).

I asked him (having failed to find out elsewhere) if it was true that he had won the Lenin Peace Prize on one of his (many) trips to Moscow, the true center of the universe as well as the wellspring of love for Mother Russia.

"No," he smiled (smirked?) and said.

Perhaps they're waiting so they can do it posthumously. That's when we'll find out whether those "Little Boxes" he used to sing about are actually six feet under, period, or whether they're truly the "Many Mansions" that await the saved in Paradise.

Pete. Paradise. Think about it.

Well they stuffed Lenin, so anything is possible.

Posted by Chris Inwien | July 23, 2007 10:47 AM

What the hell is a "drudge," and how does one harbor one? Is this a typo or a major malapropism?

Posted by Philly | July 23, 2007 10:51 AM

Well, you CAN dredge a harbor...

Posted by Philly | July 23, 2007 10:53 AM

In 1940, the magnitude of the crimes of Hitler and Stalin were not widely known in the west. Indeed, many of the worst crimes of both had yet to be committed. And to suggest that wanting to weaken or abolish the institution of private property, however impractical that might be, is on its face as evil as being a racial supremacist--in effect, positing moral equivalence between American socialists and the KKK--is deeply offensive.

Posted by kth | July 23, 2007 10:59 AM

Pete Seeger was TWENTY-ONE YEARS OLD in 1941. He did join the CP (in 1942)- and he quit in 1950. Unlike David Boaz, he served in the US Army for three years.

In the 1930's, the CP was the only political organization in the US that actively fought for racial equality. Seeger was always at the forefront in that struggle. Among other things, he wrote the version of "We Shall Overcome" that became the anthem of the civil rights movement.

To see how the right red-baits the use of music in progressive politics in America, see
http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_3_urbanities-communist.html
From the original collectors of folk songs like Alan Lomax, to Woody Guthrie and Seeger, to Bob Dylan and on down to Bruce Springsteen - commies and dupes all of them. There were never any reasons to sing out against racism, or unemployment, or unjust wars, or the destruction of the environment. Every progressive cause in the history of the US was just a front for the commies.

Posted by bloix | July 23, 2007 11:05 AM

Matt's grudge against being force-fed folk-songs as a kid seems pretty poorly thoughtout to me. Let's see:

1) empowering dissent from prevailing paradigm;
2) community-based communication;
3) politics as entertainment; and
4) left-wing analysis.

I can't see how any of that helped to shape Matt's personality or contributed to his current line of work.

Posted by Ephus | July 23, 2007 11:08 AM

Demosthenes, that is very funny.

Posted by walt | July 23, 2007 11:11 AM

I saw an excellent new documentary about Seeger at the Silverdocs festival this year... I believe it will eventually air on PBS. It's well worth watching to see both the kernel of truth in Boaz's charge, and to understand why it's also a dirty cheap shot.

Few white Americans did more for the Civil Rights movement than Pete Seeger. His life story is much, much more than campfire songs and card-carrying communism.

Your claim that you hold a "drudge" against him is hilarious, and much more ironic than, say, rain on your wedding day.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | July 23, 2007 11:12 AM

What Sembtex said.

There's no evidence in this column, or anywhere else I can find on the web, that Seeger supported Stalin explicitly, or was in any contact with Stalin's government, or espoused ideals that could be called "Stalinist."

So where does this assertion that he's a "hardcore Stalinist" come from? Just because Boaz uses the phrase doesn't make it in any way remotely true...

Posted by Mr. Noah | July 23, 2007 11:12 AM

"Your claim that you hold a "drudge" against him is hilarious, and much more ironic than, say, rain on your wedding day."

Ironically, though, it's less ironic than ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife.

Posted by Petey | July 23, 2007 11:18 AM

Posted by Philly | July 23, 2007 10:51 AM:"What the hell is a "drudge," and how does one harbor one? Is this a typo or a major malapropism?"

Isn't a drudge someone who is forced to do all the dirty boring jobs for very little money if at all?

Posted by kth | July 23, 2007 10:59 AM:"In 1940, the magnitude of the crimes of Hitler and Stalin were not widely known in the west. Indeed, many of the worst crimes of both had yet to be committed."

I beg to differ. It is true that Hitler was still starting out on his campaign of mass murder in 1940, but everyone knew precisely who and what Stalin was. The Communists were never ashamed of it until later. Stalin certainly was not. It took them a long time to realize that honesty was not the best policy by which time there were hundreds of thousands of eye witnesses in the West and plenty of evidence of mass murder - for those that did not want to believe otherwise.

Posted by kth | July 23, 2007 10:59 AM:"And to suggest that wanting to weaken or abolish the institution of private property, however impractical that might be, is on its face as evil as being a racial supremacist--in effect, positing moral equivalence between American socialists and the KKK--is deeply offensive."

Sure. To the KKK. Anyone who wants to abolish the institution of private property *via* *the* *mass* *murder* of entire classes is vastly more evil than the KKK. Private property really is a right on which all other rights are based. Any attack on it is inherently a call for massive human rights violations. That may not be obvious to you but you are welcome to think about the status of people with no rights to private property we know of - slaves, Soviet citizens etc etc.

Posted by bloix | July 23, 2007 11:05 AM:"Pete Seeger was TWENTY-ONE YEARS OLD in 1941. He did join the CP (in 1942)- and he quit in 1950. Unlike David Boaz, he served in the US Army for three years."

So what? People held it against Pope Benedict that he was a member of the Hitler Youth. If youthful idealism took anyone else into the Nazi Party I doubt we would all be so forgiving. He quit but he did not change his views that much. And of course he may have been drafted. And spent the war playing music as opposed to fighting.

Posted by bloix | July 23, 2007 11:05 AM:"In the 1930's, the CP was the only political organization in the US that actively fought for racial equality."

I am not convinced that is true and even if it was, so what? The fact that they were right on one issue does not change the fact that they were vastly more wrong on vastly more subjects - and of course that their solution to racism would have left everyone vastly worse off.

Posted by bloix | July 23, 2007 11:05 AM:"There were never any reasons to sing out against racism, or unemployment, or unjust wars, or the destruction of the environment. Every progressive cause in the history of the US was just a front for the commies."

But the reasons are not the real issue. The solutions are. To sing out about unemployment is a good thing - but not when the solution is gassing Jews or murdering everyone richer than a middling peasant. It is not enough to say that you are opposed to some contemporary evil, your solution must be an improvement and it must be proportional to the change desired.

Posted by HeiGou | July 23, 2007 11:24 AM

In 1940, the magnitude of the crimes of Hitler and Stalin were not widely known in the west. Indeed, many of the worst crimes of both had yet to be committed. - kth

the distinction between being a "Stalinist" in the sense of being supporter of Stalin in Russia, with full knowledge of what was going on there, and being a "Stalinist" in the sense of being a sympathizer in the United States, who didn't have any firsthand knowledge of what was going on and had at least an arguable basis for distrusting the secondhand reports. - akalai

By the 1930's there was plenty of evidence, for those who were willing to look, of the mass-murder going on in Russia under the soviets - not only under Stalin but from the very beginning under Lenin. The problem wasn't lack of evidence at all - it was the desire of people to ignore unpleasant, inconvenient, truths.

Just like the neocons knew the truth and refused to grant any credibility to the evidence that undermined their "Saddam has WMDs" narrative and automatically rejected it as propaganda spouted by liars at worst or dupes at best, huge numbers of early 20th-century communists in the west simply refused to credit the evidence of the murderous nature of the Soviet regime. The evidence that WAS available was either dismissed out-of-hand as imperialist propaganda or minimized with excuses about how Russia "needs to defend herself" from Western subversion. Western communists who had been to Russia, seen the truth, and spoke up upon their return were vilified by their fellow party members for giving ammo to anti-communists.

The only reason anyone was ignorant about Stalin was because they deliberately closed their eyes.

Posted by r4d20 | July 23, 2007 11:25 AM

By the 1930's there was plenty of evidence, for those who were willing to look, of the mass-murder going on in Russia under the soviets - not only under Stalin but from the very beginning under Lenin. The problem wasn't lack of evidence at all - it was the desire of people to ignore unpleasant, inconvenient, truths.

Really? Cites, please.

Posted by alkali | July 23, 2007 11:39 AM

Many if not most early communists in the U.S. were humanitarians, idealists ("Boy Scouts," as my late uncle, a CPU member at the time who volunteered for the Lincoln Brigade to fight Franco in the Spanish Civil War, later referred to them).

Pete Seeger was one of my childhood heroes and is still one of the very few human beings I would be willing to die for. He's spent his entire life working for the benefit of others. Yes, he's made mistakes, but from the highest of motives.

From his Wikipedia page (undated): "I still call myself a communist, because communism is no more what Russia made of it than Christianity is what the churches make of it. But if by some freak of history communism had caught up with this country, I would have been one of the first people thrown in jail."

How anybody but a right-winger could possibly find his songs "annoying," I simply can't imagine.

Posted by Swift Loris | July 23, 2007 11:41 AM

Those who wished to ignore unpleasant, inconvenient truths including the US government and the mainstream media who rebranded Stalin as kindly Uncle Joe as soon as it was useful.

Our current government is populated by central american death squad supporters. If only Boaz had some bad thoughts about them.

Posted by Snoopy | July 23, 2007 11:42 AM

Compare people like Pete Seeger, whose Stalinist allegiance were eventually abandoned and apologized for, versus people like Michael Ledeen, who truly admire Mussolini-style fascists and instead of being folk singers are directly advising our government.

Of course, it wasn't Pete Seeger who directly aided, armed, funded, and protected actual genocide in Guatemala, that was Reagan, his CIA, and all of his Congressional enablers and their pundit worshippers.

So I'll put Pete Seeger's antiquated and abandoned Stalinism against Reaganite death squads and genocidalists any day.

Also, Pete Seeger didn't carpet bomb Cambodia from 1965 - 1973, handing power directly to the crazy but formerly marginal Khmer Rouge, whom conservatives pretend they hate, as though they cared one whit at any time for any Cambodians' lives.

Once again, that was the product of US hawks, not formerly Stalinist folk singers.

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 11:46 AM

I'm a communist; fuck you.

Posted by Gregorio | July 23, 2007 11:50 AM

How anybody but a right-winger could possibly find his songs "annoying," I simply can't imagine.

Lots of his songs are wonderful, but he's got at least one children's album that's horribly didactic. You keep wishing he'd stop instructing his little pupils and just sing.

Posted by Tyrone Slothrop | July 23, 2007 11:51 AM

Posted by Swift Loris | July 23, 2007 11:41 AM:"Many if not most early communists in the U.S. were humanitarians, idealists ("Boy Scouts," as my late uncle, a CPU member at the time who volunteered for the Lincoln Brigade to fight Franco in the Spanish Civil War, later referred to them)."

As, no doubt, would many Nazi veterans present themselves. However Boy Scouts rarely join parties with explicitly genocidal political programs. Would-be mass murderers do. Your uncle could have joined a mainstream socialist party, as many could have joined a German nationalist party, but chose instead to sign up for a blood bath.

Posted by Swift Loris | July 23, 2007 11:41 AM:"Pete Seeger was one of my childhood heroes and is still one of the very few human beings I would be willing to die for. He's spent his entire life working for the benefit of others. Yes, he's made mistakes, but from the highest of motives."

Working for the benefit of others? So he has not made millions from his records, which no doubt he gives away for free, and he does not campaign to maintain property prices in the area in which he lives? How interesting. Chomsky has adopted a tax minimization scheme to prevent paying taxes he does not have to. Think Seeger has too?

Posted by Snoopy | July 23, 2007 11:42 AM:"Those who wished to ignore unpleasant, inconvenient truths including the US government and the mainstream media who rebranded Stalin as kindly Uncle Joe as soon as it was useful."

Ahh I knew it was only a matter of time before the "Only America is Vile" cheer squad came out.

Even if this is so, and it is about FDR, so what?

Posted by HeiGou | July 23, 2007 11:52 AM

"How anybody but a right-winger could possibly find his songs 'annoying,' I simply can't imagine."

To be fair to Matt, I have heard a recording of Seeger performing "There's a Hole in the Bucket," which is often performed at camps, and it is indeed the most annoying song ever written.

However, he's also the guy who wrote "Turn, Turn, Turn," "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy," and arranged the modern version of "We Shall Overcome." Credit where credit is due.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | July 23, 2007 11:57 AM

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 11:46 AM:"Compare people like Pete Seeger, whose Stalinist allegiance were eventually abandoned and apologized for, versus people like Michael Ledeen, who truly admire Mussolini-style fascists and instead of being folk singers are directly advising our government."

Sorry but when did Seeger ever apologize for it? When has Michael Ledeen ever admired a Mussolini style Fascist? For that matter, in comparison with Stalin, why is your comparison even rational?

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 11:46 AM:"Of course, it wasn't Pete Seeger who directly aided, armed, funded, and protected actual genocide in Guatemala, that was Reagan, his CIA, and all of his Congressional enablers and their pundit worshippers."

Well no it was not. There was no genocide in Guatamala until the US cut off aid. That would have been Carter. Which Reagan did not change. The genocide occurred while Guatamala was getting no US aid at all (and in fact had US aid been available, it probably would not have happened as the Americans would not have let it). Naturally I expect so very little from you, I do not expect an apology for this libel and smear. Instead I'll content myself by thinking smugly about the utter intellectual bankruptcy of the Left that such comments are not only allowed to pass but seem to be approved of.

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 11:46 AM:"So I'll put Pete Seeger's antiquated and abandoned Stalinism against Reaganite death squads and genocidalists any day."

So you'll choose real support for real genocide over a fantasy? See above.

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 11:46 AM:"Also, Pete Seeger didn't carpet bomb Cambodia from 1965 - 1973, handing power directly to the crazy but formerly marginal Khmer Rouge, whom conservatives pretend they hate, as though they cared one whit at any time for any Cambodians' lives."

Nor did anyone else. And that did not hand power directly to anyone - it was aimed at keeping the crazies out of office. It was Seeger who was working hard to get the crazies in the KR into office. And it was the anti-War Left that openly did not care how many Cambodians died as long as America lost.

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 11:46 AM:"Once again, that was the product of US hawks, not formerly Stalinist folk singers."

And once again it was the result of Seeger's folk songs and his friends on the Stalinist left working to undermine America's foreign policies and bring Pol Pot to power.

Posted by HeiGou | July 23, 2007 12:06 PM

"and he does not campaign to maintain property prices in the area in which he lives? How interesting."

This is hilarious. Seeger lives in a small wood-frame house that he built with his own hands, overlooking the Hudson. His children grew up there. At 86, he still cuts firewood with an axe. He has never spent 30 seconds campaigning to do anything about property values - except, of course, that his work in turning the Hudson from a sewer into a living river may have increased waterfront values.

Posted by Bloix | July 23, 2007 12:11 PM

I've been involved with Democratic Socialists of America, and its predecessor organizations DSOC & NAM (among the founders Michael Harrington, Barbara Ehrenreich, Irving Howe) since the Reagan era. Occasionally I still run into unreconstructed Stalinists at anti-war and impeachment demonstrations, organized by World Can't Wait and ANSWER. And, that isn't attendees, it is the speakers!
One of our most energetic members in San Francisco, Betty, is a dual member of the CPUSA. Joined the CPUSA back in the early 50's. At one of our meetings about three yrs. ago, the subject of the
brutal collectivization of agriculture in the USSR, the sham Purge Trials from '36-'38 and the GULAG came up. Within a minute, Betty was shouting all the old, tired lies of the CPUSA and its fellow travellers, during the 30's about Trotsky being a Fascist, a Kulak owning two cows being a Rich, Class Enemy Wrecker. This went on for an hour, in which we were also informed that Norman Thomas of the Socialist Party, was a, "Social Fascist, " worse than a real Fascist, since he gave left-wing cover to a corrupt, phony pseudo-democracy.
On Central American death squads, btw, I was a member of the Committee in Solidarity With The People of El Salvador, which supported the marxist-leninist guerillas of the FMLN during the Reagan era. In CISPES, which was full of M-L's and
naive Christians, it was considered "red-baiting, " to acknowledge the unjustified assasination of communist poet Roque Dalton by his fellow communists in a competing politico-military org. in the FMLN. An alleged dual agent of the Cuban DGI and the CIA!

Posted by Michael Pugliese | July 23, 2007 12:20 PM

How is this post relevant, Matt? If the Atlantic pushing you to be "fair and balanced?" In the midst of all your cogent posts re: the war and the NBA, you shovel out the same old commie baiting I expect from MSM commentators. Pete Seeger is a committed lefty. Read his own words on the subject-- he stresses his belief in personal freedoms and asserts he would be the first in the gulag. Really, did "hard-core Stalinists" take any guff from dirty peace-loving hippies? No. Seeger's Soviet Communism/ Roman Catholicisn analogy is perfect: great ideas can be co-opted and misinterpreted. That said, let me defend Stalin.

Stalin was a brute and an asshole. No one liked him; he was a bully and enforcer who gained power by toadying, coercion and manipulation. He was an isolating drunk with sociopathic and paranoiac tendencies. He also inherited a woefully divided and confused revolutionary party facing the arduous task of GOVERNING and unwieldy state with very little infrastructure and numerous violent factions, not to mention an heritage of repressive autocracy and meat-grinder warfare. It was also the most populous nation in the world and the most non-immigration-based diverse. To govern a nation like this in an entirely unprecedented manner presents challenges to say the least. To industrialize, feed, and rule this nation is nigh impossible; to ready it for war with the most agile and aggressive military in the world is inconceivable. Yet Stalin did so. As a Nabokovian Menshevik, I am no fan of Stalin, but without him, Tweedledum FDR and TweedleeDUMMER Winnie Poo Churchill would have been crushed by Hitler. Stalin made nice with Hitler because the USSR was a fucking mess and unready for any kind of conflict. And yet somehow they prevailed, through collectivism (albeit somewhat coerced collectivism) and sheer sacrifice. He was never Kind Uncle Joe, but he was, at least from 41-45, necessary Uncle Joe.

Posted by Gregorio | July 23, 2007 12:25 PM

@Michael: I found your post informative, but why did it read like a Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap bottle?

Posted by Gregorio | July 23, 2007 12:28 PM

Ironic there is a, "La Follette Progressive, " here as a poster. Guess who opposed La Follette when he ran for re-election vs. Joseph McCarthy when old , "Tail Gunner Joe, " ran for the US Senate and defeated him? The Communist Party, USA and the Wisconsin CIO COPE, which was controlled by the Wisconsin CP. The CPUSA in Wisconsin actively supported McCarthy that yr.! La Follette was a anti-Stalinist so he had to be opposed. You can find corrobotation for this in the university library bookstacks by finding bound volumes of Studies on the Left from 1962, IIRC in a piece by historian Robert Schaeffer, IIRC. Studies on the Left was a New Left journal from Madison, Wisconsin founded by students of William Appleman Williams like James Weinstein, founder of In These Times.

Posted by Michael Pugliese | July 23, 2007 12:29 PM

Gregorio>...@Michael: I found your post informative, but why did it read like a Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap bottle?

Heh, a decade among hippies, Dead Heads and New Age nutters in Santa Cruz can do that!

Posted by Michael Pugliese | July 23, 2007 12:36 PM

For apologetics for the Khmer Rouge by Chomsky, Gareth Porter and others on the Left, back then see,
http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide/cambear3.htm
The Khmer Rouge Canon 1975-1979

Posted by Michael Pugliese | July 23, 2007 12:41 PM

Ironic there is a, "La Follette Progressive, " here as a poster. Guess who opposed La Follette when he ran for re-election vs. Joseph McCarthy when old , "Tail Gunner Joe, " ran for the US Senate and defeated him?

It's really not ironic at all that I showed up on this thread. My name is LaFollette, and I'm a Progressive. I'm familiar with the history.

Robert LaFollette, Sr. was a hero of the anti-communist, anti-war American Left, and Robert Jr. was also committed to progressive social change while strongly opposing the CPUSA. Pete Seeger, unfortunately, can't say the same. He eventually wised up a bit and led, I believe, a mostly admirable life. There's really no excuse at all for Stalin's American apologists during the 1940s and 1950s, except to say that most of them were utopian dreamers who did not actually advocate Stalinist policies in America... they supported a fantasy of communism that Stalin sold them, not the reality of mass purges, slave labor, and artificial famines. It is fortunate that most of the American Left had better sense than Pete Seeger did. His later contributions to American culture, however, speak for themselves.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | July 23, 2007 1:01 PM

Stalin was a brute and an asshole. No one liked him; he was a bully and enforcer who gained power by toadying, coercion and manipulation. He was an isolating drunk with sociopathic and paranoiac tendencies ...

... and is still more popular than Bush!

Posted by justawriter | July 23, 2007 1:01 PM

Posted by Gregorio | July 23, 2007 12:25 PM:"Read his own words on the subject-- he stresses his belief in personal freedoms and asserts he would be the first in the gulag."

Well he would say that wouldn't he? He cannot know who would be first in the Gulag and somehow I don't see Fellow Traveler going first anyway. He is hardly going to admit the truth.

Posted by Gregorio | July 23, 2007 12:25 PM:"Seeger's Soviet Communism/ Roman Catholicisn analogy is perfect: great ideas can be co-opted and misinterpreted."

Indeed. And so can bad ideas. A Communist is someone who rejects the path of democracy and peaceful political change for state-organized terror. Seeger is perfectly clear in what he believes. Why do you distort his record? The analogy sucks as it is possible to implement Catholicism without auto de fe's. It is not possible to be a Communist without a Gulag.

Posted by Gregorio | July 23, 2007 12:25 PM:"That said, let me defend Stalin."

Bizarre.

Posted by Gregorio | July 23, 2007 12:25 PM:"Stalin was a brute and an asshole. No one liked him; he was a bully and enforcer who gained power by toadying, coercion and manipulation. He was an isolating drunk with sociopathic and paranoiac tendencies."

As far as I can see none of those comforting myths have much truth except perhaps that brute bit.

Posted by Gregorio | July 23, 2007 12:25 PM:"He also inherited a woefully divided and confused revolutionary party facing the arduous task of GOVERNING and unwieldy state with very little infrastructure and numerous violent factions, not to mention an heritage of repressive autocracy and meat-grinder warfare."

So you mean because he was such a mass murderer who inherited power from another mass murderer, he was forced to go on being a mass murderer? The Party might not have been so divided and confused if so many people weren't being killed. Russia had excellent infrastructure as it happened. Those factions were in large part so violent because they were being liquidated. Kerensky did not have to murder millions and yet he too had the same problems. Why not?

Posted by Gregorio | July 23, 2007 12:25 PM:"It was also the most populous nation in the world and the most non-immigration-based diverse."

Apart from India on both counts and China on the first. Neither of which, as a matter of fact, required a tenth the deliberate mass murder that Stalin imposed on Russia. Indeed India required none at all - despite a massively smaller infrastructure etc etc.

Posted by Gregorio | July 23, 2007 12:25 PM:"To govern a nation like this in an entirely unprecedented manner presents challenges to say the least."

True. To skin a country alive was a challenge. Of course to rule like Kerensky did not present the same challenges.

Posted by Gregorio | July 23, 2007 12:25 PM:"To industrialize, feed, and rule this nation is nigh impossible"

And yet the Tsars did it and did Kerensky. It is impossible to run it via an utterly unrealistic economic system but why this should justify murdering millions in the fight against reality escapes me.

Posted by Gregorio | July 23, 2007 12:25 PM:"to ready it for war with the most agile and aggressive military in the world is inconceivable."

You mean the Soviet Army was going to fight itself?

Posted by Gregorio | July 23, 2007 12:25 PM:"but without him, Tweedledum FDR and TweedleeDUMMER Winnie Poo Churchill would have been crushed by Hitler."

With no Stalin there would have been no Hitler. It was Stalin's destruction of the Popular Front, his terror which put the fear of God into the Middle Classes, his Faustian Pact with Hitler that made the War possible.

Besides, without FDR Stalin would have lost.

Posted by Gregorio | July 23, 2007 12:25 PM:"Stalin made nice with Hitler because the USSR was a fucking mess and unready for any kind of conflict."

How do you know this isn't retrospective amoral cynical apologetics? I suggest he wanted Hitler to destroy France.

Posted by Gregorio | July 23, 2007 12:25 PM:"And yet somehow they prevailed, through collectivism (albeit somewhat coerced collectivism) and sheer sacrifice."

Somewhat? The Old South had "somewhat coerced" slavery by that measure. Not through. Despite. Stalin junked most of collectivization for the duration. Farmers made a fortune.

Coming up next you'll no doubt tell us about how Hitler made some nice roads.

Posted by HeiGou | July 23, 2007 1:17 PM

So where's the Stalinist part?

For Seeger to prefer the Soviet Union over Hitler was not an unusual position for that time. The extent of Stalins repression was not known for some time.

Doing the work of right wing hatchet men seems unlike you, Matt. But then folk music is awfully annoying.

Posted by Horatio Parker | July 23, 2007 1:31 PM

Soviet Union > Nazi Germany P.E.R.I.O.D.

Unless, of course, you're Winston Churchill. Then it's a tossup.

Posted by Gregorio | July 23, 2007 1:34 PM

I don't have a dog in this fight. I have a similar loathing of folk music, especially of the Pete Seeger variety but I don't think charges of stalinism are warranted. For me, the term stalinist only applies to those people who actively engaged in apologetics on behalf of Stalin after the public revelations by Khrushchev of his crimes. That doesen't apply to old Pete.

But these threads are always fun to read for the colorful reactions they bring. I love watching (presumably) modern urbane, at peace with capitalism, social democrat-lite American liberals - who are not the commie sympathizers or the 5th column boogeymen McCarthyites and other reactionaries make them out to me - squirm and turn on the defensive whenever the honor of some old Red, even a particularly brutal and sociopathic one is besmirched. I've seen a lot of these discussions on politically oriented blogs over the last couple of years and the reaction is always the same. I don't know what that means exactly, I was just always struck by it.

Posted by DRR | July 23, 2007 1:44 PM

I think we're missing the real point here, which is that folk music sucks.

Posted by too many steves | July 23, 2007 1:55 PM

The only girl I've ever loved
Was born with roses in her eyes
But then they buried her alive
One evening 1945
With just her sister at her side
And only weeks before the guns
All came and rained on everyone
Now she's a little boy in Spain
Playing pianos filled with flames
On empty rings around the sun
All sing to say my dream has come

But now we must pick up every piece
Of the life we used to love
Just to keep ourselves
At least enough to carry on

And now we ride the circus wheel
With your dark brother wrapped in white
Says it was good to be alive
But now he rides a comet's flame
And won't be coming back again
The Earth looks better from a star
That's right above from where you are
He didn't mean to make you cry
With sparks that ring and bullets fly
On empty rings around your heart
The world just screams and falls apart

But now we must pick up every piece
Of the life we used to love
Just to keep ourselves
At least enough to carry on

And here's where your mother sleeps
And here is the room where your brothers were born
Indentions in the sheets
Where their bodies once moved but don't move anymore
And it's so sad to see the world agree
That they'd rather see their faces fill with flies
All when I'd want to keep white roses in their eyes

Posted by Jeff Mangum | July 23, 2007 2:01 PM

I have to side with the anti-folkies. Seeger's real crime is that he is a folk singer - no one cares that Aaron Copland was a communist, the man could write real music. And I'm sorry "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy" is a trite annoying song. Folk music gave the left a black eye for a long time and really bears a lot of the blame for making being liberal "uncool" among Generation Xers. Even the name is a misnomer, it's not "folk", since it's usually written and performed by overeducated children of the middle class, and it's barely music. If it hadn't been for the saving grace of the Clash and punk rock in the 70s, folk music alone probably would have forced me to become a conservative.

Posted by vanya | July 23, 2007 2:08 PM

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 11:46 AM:"Also, Pete Seeger didn't carpet bomb Cambodia from 1965 - 1973, handing power directly to the crazy but formerly marginal Khmer Rouge, whom conservatives pretend they hate, as though they cared one whit at any time for any Cambodians' lives."
Nor did anyone else. And that did not hand power directly to anyone - it was aimed at keeping the crazies out of office. It was Seeger who was working hard to get the crazies in the KR into office. And it was the anti-War Left that openly did not care how many Cambodians died as long as America lost.

You're absolutely wrong and an absolute idiot. You know absolutely zero about anything which affected Cambodia or Cambodian power.

The one and over-riding factor which gave the Khmer Rouge the opportunity for power was nearly a decade of U.S. carpet bombing.

The one academic institution closely studying the issue -- and you are supposedly the one concerned with "best" arguments -- is Yale's Cambodian Genocide Project. Check out both the bombing data as well as the primary documents, in English and local languages.

Feel free to issue insane theories on how carpet bombing was actually somehow not driving the rural population to support the Khmer Rouge.

It was the US hawks and their bombing campaign which handed power directly to the Khmer Rouge. (And you can rant and rave like your fellows over at FrontPageMag about how every scholar in the world who wasn't cheering the bombing was some Maoist whose conclusions are compromised.)

It was the US hawks and their carpet bombing for nearly a decade which gave power to the Khmer Rouge.

http://www.yale.edu/cgp/us.html

Noam Chomsky didn't do it. Pete Seeger didn't do it. Leagues of Berkeley students didn't do it.

And not one hawk had any suggestion of what to do once the Khmer Rouge (to whom they handed power via nearly a decade of carpet bombing) took over, other than what actually happened, that is, Viet Nam invaded and tossed out the regime.

So you can try and hawk your wares that it was those U.S. commies and Maoists what loved them some Khmer Rouge, but it was you and your ilk who thought that by bombing the hell out of an entire nation that somehow it would keep nice people in charge.

Shockingly, a near decade's worth of carpet-bombing left nasty people in charge.

Not Pete Seeger. Not Noam Chomsky arguing about how many were or weren't dying under the Khmer Rouge.

Nope, it was LBJ's and Nixon's bombing of Cambodia which loved, cherished, favored, supported, nourished the genocide.

That's right -- not hordes of anti-American folk singers, nor riots in Paris, but good old fashioned US hawks. They were the *real* friends of the Khmer Rouge, without whom the Khmer Rouge could never have seized power.

And the Guatemala genocide was real -- not fictional, not made up, no, good real Christian conservatives favored and personally endorsed by Reagan who roamed the hillsides murdering entire Mayan communities.

Seer Taak indeed my ass.

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 2:22 PM

I actually like Pete Seeger's music and don't really care much about his politics. His performance of children's songs can be annoying, but he also recorded a lot of good stuff!

For example, check out "We Shall Overcome: Complete Carnegie Hall Concert." It's great. You won't be disappointed!

Posted by blah | July 23, 2007 2:23 PM

Since 1994, the award-winning Cambodian Genocide Program, a project of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University's MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, has been studying these events to learn as much as possible about the tragedy, and to help determine who was responsible for the crimes of the Pol Pot regime. In Phnom Penh in 1996, for instance, we obtained access to the 100,000-page archive of that defunct regime's security police, the Santebal. This material has been microfilmed by Yale University's Sterling Library and made available to scholars worldwide. As of January 2006, we have also compiled and published 22,000 biographic and bibliographic records, and over 6,000 photographs, along with documents, translations, maps, and an extensive list of CGP books and research papers on the genocide, as well as the CGP's newly-enhanced, interactive Cambodian Geographic Database, CGEO, which includes data on: Cambodia’s 13,000 villages; the 115,000 sites targeted in 231,00 U.S. bombing sorties flown over Cambodia in 1965-75, dropping 2.75 million tons of munitions; 158 prisons run by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime during 1975-1979, and 309 mass-grave sites with an estimated total of 19,000 grave pits; and 76 sites of post-1979 memorials to victims of the Khmer Rouge.

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 2:25 PM

Provide proof Seeger was specifically a "Stalinist". If there is no proof then labeling someone a "Stalinist" is called "smearing". I expect this from the Right, not from Mr Yglesias.

Posted by RationalDem | July 23, 2007 2:25 PM

And who can deny the greatness of a song like "The Bells of Rhymney"?

Posted by blah | July 23, 2007 2:31 PM

Hey, you folk haters, Pete Seeger wrote "We Shall Overcome." Anyone here want to tell us what a crime that was?

The problem with you kiddies is that you think music is something you plug into your ears with little white buds so you can be all alone no matter where you are.

Pete Seeger didn't sing to people. He taught people to sing for themselves. If you don't sing, you won't like Pete Seeger. But how many of you can sing without the assistance of a machine?

And Vanya, Waist Deep in the Big Muddy was a powerful song in 1967 - when everyone understood just who that "tall man" was. Not every song has to appeal to every generation.

PS- Seeger was a college dropout. You're more over-educated than he is.

Posted by Bloix | July 23, 2007 2:31 PM

Out of curiousity, I went looking for the New Yorker piece that was the ostensible spur for the Boaz piece, and I can't find it. Boaz doesn't link to it>, and a search on the New Yorker's site for "seeger" pulls up nothing in the two years prior to April 2006, when Boaz was writing. WTF?

[An earlier version of this comment with links included seems to have been screened by The Atlantic's software, so I'm trying again sans links.]

Posted by Tyrone Slothrop | July 23, 2007 2:35 PM

"In this day of materialist culture, the most revolutionary song is one you sing yourself."

- Utah Phillips

Posted by justawriter | July 23, 2007 2:36 PM

Bombs Over Cambodia: New Light on US Air War Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan
...In 1975, Pol Pot’s genocidal Khmer Rouge forces took power in Cambodia after a massive U.S. bombing campaign there. New information reveals that Cambodia was bombed far more heavily during the Vietnam War than previously believed — and that the bombing began not under Richard Nixon, but under Lyndon Johnson.

In the fall of 2000, twenty-five years after the end of the war in Indochina, Bill Clinton became the first US president since Richard Nixon to visit Vietnam. While media coverage of the trip was dominated by talk of some two thousand US soldiers still classified as missing in action, a small act of great historical importance went almost unnoticed. As a humanitarian gesture, Clinton released extensive Air Force data on all American bombings of Indochina between 1964 and 1975. Recorded using a groundbreaking IBM-designed system, the database provided extensive information on sorties conducted over Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Clinton’s gift was intended to assist in the search for unexploded ordnance left behind during the carpet bombing of the region. Littering the countryside, often submerged under farmland, this ordnance remains a significant humanitarian concern. It has maimed and killed farmers, and rendered valuable land all but unusable. Development and de-mining organizations have put the Air Force data to good use over the past six years, but have done so without noting its full implications, which turn out to be staggering.

The Bombing Database

The still-incomplete database (it has several “dark” periods) reveals that from October 4, 1965, to August 15, 1973, the United States dropped far more ordnance on Cambodia than was previously believed: 2,756,941 tons’ worth, dropped in 230,516 sorties on 113,716 sites. Just over 10 percent of this bombing was indiscriminate, with 3,580 of the sites listed as having “unknown” targets and another 8,238 sites having no target listed at all. Even if the latter may arguably be oversights, the former suggest explicit knowledge of indiscretion. The database also shows that the bombing began four years earlier than is widely believed — not under Nixon, but under Lyndon Johnson. The impact of this bombing, the subject of much debate for the past three decades, is now clearer than ever. Civilian casualties in Cambodia drove an enraged populace into the arms of an insurgency that had enjoyed relatively little support until the bombing began, setting in motion the expansion of the Vietnam War deeper into Cambodia, a coup d’état in 1970, the rapid rise of the Khmer Rouge, and ultimately the Cambodian genocide. The data demonstrates that the way a country chooses to exit a conflict can have disastrous consequences. It therefore speaks to contemporary warfare as well, including US operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Despite many differences, a critical similarity links the war in Iraq with the Cambodian conflict: an increasing reliance on air power to battle a heterogeneous, volatile insurgency.

“We heard a terrifying noise which shook the ground; it was as if the earth trembled, rose up and opened beneath our feet. Enormous explosions lit up the sky like huge bolts of lightning; it was the American B-52s.”
—Cambodian bombing survivor, Kampong Thom

In the years since the Vietnam War, something of a consensus has emerged on the extent of US involvement in Cambodia. The details are controversial, but the narrative begins on March 18, 1969, when the United States launched the Menu campaign. The joint US–South Vietnam ground offensive followed. For the next three years, the United States continued with air strikes under Nixon’s orders, hitting deep inside Cambodia’s borders, first to root out the Viet Cong (VC)/North Vietnam Army (NVA) and later to protect the Lon Nol regime from growing numbers of Cambodian Communist forces. Congress cut funding for the war and imposed an end to the bombing on August 15, 1973, amid calls for Nixon’s impeachment for his deceit in escalating the campaign...

The Secret Bombing of 1965

Thanks to the Air Force database, we now know that the US bombardment started three-and-a-half years earlier, in 1965, under the Johnson administration. What happened in 1969 was not the start of bombings in Cambodia but the escalation into carpetbombing. From 1965 to 1968, 2,565 sorties took place over Cambodia, with 214 tons of bombs dropped. These early strikes were likely designed to support the nearly two thousand secret ground incursions conducted by the CIA and US Special Forces during that period. B-52s — long range bombers capable of carrying very heavy loads — were not deployed, whether out of concern for Cambodian lives or the country’s neutrality, or because carpet bombing was believed to be of limited strategic value...

...The Cambodian bombing campaign had two unintended side effects that ultimately combined to produce the very domino effect that the Vietnam War was supposed to prevent.

First, the bombing forced the Vietnamese Communists deeper and deeper into Cambodia, bringing them into greater contact with Khmer Rouge insurgents. Second, the bombs drove ordinary Cambodians into the arms of the Khmer Rouge, a group that seemed initially to have slim prospects of revolutionary success.

Pol Pot himself described the Khmer Rouge during that period as “fewer than five thousand poorly armed guerrillas . . . scattered across the Cambodian landscape, uncertain about their strategy, tactics, loyalty, and leaders.”

Years after the war ended, journalist Bruce Palling asked Chhit Do, a former Khmer Rouge officer, if his forces had used the bombing as anti-American propaganda. Chhit Do replied:

"Every time after there had been bombing, they would take the people to see the craters, to see how big and deep the craters were, to see how the earth had been gouged out and scorched . . . . The ordinary people sometimes literally shit in their pants when the big bombs and shells came. Their minds just froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four days. Terrified and half crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told.

"It was because of their dissatisfaction with the bombing that they kept on co-operating with the Khmer Rouge, joining up with the Khmer Rouge, sending their children off to go with them. . . . Sometimes the bombs fell and hit little children, and their fathers would be all for the Khmer Rouge."

A Cambodian witness responded to an earlier publication of this article by writing:

“I could not agree with you more based on my experiences during the bombing in Takeo around 1972. The bombings were [spreading] further into towns and villages. My parents’ house was hit by the bombs, and we had to move to the opposite side of the country. We had known [that] almost the entire village that survived from the bombings had joined forces with the Khmer Rouge.”

The Nixon administration knew that the Khmer Rouge was winning over peasants. The CIA’s Directorate of Operations, after investigations south of Phnom Penh, reported in May 1973 that the Communists were “using damage caused by B-52 strikes as the main theme of their propaganda,” and that such propaganda was “effective.” But this does not seem to have registered as a primary strategic U.S. concern.

“They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in our way”

...If the Cambodian experience teaches us anything, it is that miscalculation of the consequences of civilian casualties stems partly from a failure to understand how insurgencies thrive. The motives that lead locals to help such movements don’t fit into strategic rationales like the ones set forth by Kissinger and Nixon. Those whose lives have been ruined don’t care about the geopolitics behind bomb attacks; they tend to blame the attackers. The failure of the American campaign in Cambodia lay not only in the civilian death toll during the unprecedented bombing, but also in its aftermath, when the Khmer Rouge regime rose up from the bomb craters, with tragic results. The dynamics in Iraq, or even Afghanistan, could be similar.

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 2:37 PM

"Pete Seeger didn't sing to people. He taught people to sing for themselves."

That's great politics and great up-with-people stuff, but it's bad music. Most people shouldn't sing.

Posted by too many steves | July 23, 2007 2:37 PM

Link for above:

http://www.japanfocus.org/products/details/2420

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 2:40 PM

"I still call myself a communist, because communism is no more what Russia made of it than Christianity is what the churches make of it. But if by some freak of history communism had caught up with this country, I would have been one of the first people thrown in jail."

Posted by Pete Seeger | July 23, 2007 2:46 PM

Actually, when Seeger got all of Carnegie Hall to sing "We Shall Overcome," it was pretty amazing musically. It sounds very haunting and beautiful.

Posted by blah | July 23, 2007 2:46 PM

"Pete Seeger didn't sing to people. He taught people to sing for themselves."

That's great politics and great up-with-people stuff, but it's bad music. Most people shouldn't sing.

"Never be afraid to sing out. If it sounds good, it's harmony. And if it doesn't, it's jazz."

- Pete Seeger

Posted by justawriter | July 23, 2007 2:56 PM

parties with explicitly genocidal political programs

There are a lot of negative things you can justly say about communism, but calling it "explicitly genocidal" isn't one of them.

Posted by rea | July 23, 2007 3:39 PM

"Most people shouldn't sing."

What a pathetic thing to say. I suppose you think most people shouldn't dance, either. Or cook, I suppose. Or sew, or play soccer, or write, or do anything other than consume.

Posted by Bloix | July 23, 2007 3:43 PM

Re: Ben Kiernan on the bombing of Cambodia. Yup, read that a few weeks ago. Don't dispute the research...as I read the William Shawcross book on Cambodia, Nixon and Henry K. long ago.
However on Kiernan, read the Cal Berkeley dissertation I posted the URL of, above. Another apologist for Third World Stalinism and Maoism, when it mattered. (He has repented, ran the Yale Genocide Project for a while...has Chomsky and Edward Herman? Nope.)
http://www.google.com/search?q=Ben+Kiernan+Chomsky

Posted by Michael Pugliese | July 23, 2007 4:03 PM

http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide/cambear2.htm
Starvation and Revolution

At Cornell, George McTurnan Kahin, director of the Southeast Asia program from 1961 to 1970, and professor of international relations at the University since 1951, became an expert on the Vietnam conflict. One of his students was Gareth Porter, soon to become a leading "scholar" on both Cambodia and Vietnam. Kahin's foreword to Gareth Porter's and George C. Hildebrand's book, Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution (1976), praises it for "what is undoubtedly the best informed and clearest picture yet to emerge of the desperate economic problems brought about in Cambodia largely as a consequence of American intervention, and of the ways in which that country's new leadership has undertaken to meet them."[64] Porter, who was probably a classmate of Laura Summers, co-authored the most famous book of all Khmer Rouge defenses published.

The Khmer Rouge Canon's Sine Qua Non

Nowhere was the war so brutal, so devoid of concern for human life, or so shattering in its impact on a society as in Cambodia. But while the U.S. government and news media commentary have contrived to avoid the subject of the death and devastation caused by the U.S. intervention in Cambodia, they have gone to great lengths to paint a picture of a country ruled by irrational revolutionaries, without human feelings, determined to reduce their country to barbarism. In shifting the issue from U.S. crimes in Cambodia to the alleged crimes of the Cambodian revolutionary government, the United States has offered its own version of the end of the Cambodian war and the beginning of the new government.

--Porter and Hildebrand, 1976[65]

In 1976, SEAP graduate Gareth Porter, and his colleague George C. Hildebrand published a small, unread, but important book entitled Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution. It is important for two reasons: first, it was the first English-language book of the events unfolding in Cambodia (becoming the sine qua non for proponents of the standard total academic view).[66] Second, it rationalized everything the Khmer Rouge did and were doing (from the evacuation of Phnom Penh residents and hospital patients to the forcing of monks into hard labor). It became a veritable bible for defending the Khmer Rouge. Kiernan, Chomsky, Herman, and Caldwell all referred to the book favorably. In Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, Porter and Hildebrand offer what appears to be insurmountable evidence contrary to the reports of atrocities taking place in revolutionary Cambodia, renamed Democratic Kampuchea.

Porter and Hildebrand's Sources

Using "suppressed" documents and "official" bulletins courtesy of the Government of Democratic Kampuchea, they argue that the April 17th, 1975 evacuation of Phnom Penh, was due to the U.S. war on the people of Cambodia, which resulted in the overpopulation of Phnom Penh (from 600,000 to 2-3 million between 1970 and 1975) and therefore its necessary evacuation. Furthermore, they argue that the explosion of corruption under the Lon Nol regime was the direct result of U.S. foreign aid, and that in turn, it exacerbated death, malnutrition, and disease in Phnom Penh, making it uninhabitable. Curiously, Porter and Hildebrand in their 100 plus pages book refer to the Khmer Rouge only by their more palatable coalition name of NUFK (National Front for a United Kampuchea, also known as "FUNK" in French acronyms).[67] They pepper their book with propaganda photos directly from the new regime.

In chapter 2, titled "The Politics of Starvation in Phnom Penh" Porter and Hildebrand attack the media reports of atrocities, as did Summers in Current History, because they were based on a single account written by Sydney Shandberg for the New York Times three weeks after the evacuation while cooped up in the French embassy. Porter and Hildebrand write, "The article was a weak foundation for the massive historical judgment rendered by the news media. It contained no eyewitness reports on how the evacuation was carried out in terms of food, medical treatment, transportation, or the general treatment of evacuees."[68] While it is true that Shandberg could not venture outside the embassy, from his vantage point he see more than Porter and Hildebrand could have, while in the United States. The point of not having eyewitnesses to corroborate or contradict reports of atrocities will becomes important when the Chomsky-Herman book is discussed at length in the following chapter. Continuing their critique of the mass media, Porter and Hildebrand write, "Nor was there any extensive analysis of the reasons Shandberg attributed to the revolutionary leadership for the action."[69] Here, Porter and Hildebrand refer to the circumstances of postwar Cambodia, circumstances which they insist were deplorable because of U.S. actions that prompted the evacuation. Like Chomsky-Herman, they assert the evacuation saved lives.

Porter and Hildebrand discount stories similar to New York Times journalist Sydney Shandberg's as sensational (by of their titles alone) and write "commentators and editorialists expected revolutionaries to be `unbending' and to have no regard for human life, and because they were totally unprepared to examine the possibility that radical change might be required in that particular situation."[70] Nowhere is the romance with revolutions more obvious than it is here. Porter and Hildebrand expect revolutionaries to bend and to be humanitarian because their indoctrination had taught that revolutions were good. Phnom Penh was in the jaws of starvation when the Khmer Rouge "liberated" it, so they argued, and that there was no other alternative than to evacuate everyone. By defending the Khmer Rouge, via justification of their policies, Porter and Hildebrand resort to official explanations and sources of information. Revolutions notwithstanding, there is no mention of any crime committed by the Khmer Rouge during the evacuation. On the other hand, numerous counterexamples of reasonable, if not caring Khmer Rouge behavior and demeanor, are forwarded.

More rigorous analyses supported by actual evidence suggests a rather more cynical desire to shut the economy down, reverse class order, and enslave the urban population. The controversy over the evacuation continues despite compelling evidence that suggests it was unnecessary and provoked numerous deaths. The Khmer Rouge's contempt for city dwellers is self-evident in one of their post-liberation broadcasts:

Upon entering Phnom Penh and other cities, the brother and sister combatants of the revolutionary army . . . sons and daughters of our workers and peasants . . . were taken aback by the overwhelming unspeakable sight of long-haired men and youngsters wearing bizarre clothes making themselves undistinguishable [sic] from the fair sex. . . . Our traditional mentality, mores, traditions, literature, and arts and culture and tradition were totally destroyed by U.S. imperialism and its stooges. Social entertaining, the tempo and rhythm of music and so forth were all based on U.S. imperialistic patterns. Our people's traditionally clean, sound characteristics and essence were completely absent and abandoned, replaced by imperialistic, pornographic, shameless, perverted, and fanatic traits. (FBIS IV, May 15, 1975:H4)[71]

The anti-American theme was nothing new. After all, the FUNK fought U.S. imperialism. Perhaps, because of this, the followers of the standard total academic view were especially drawn to it. Ben Kiernan, who followed the STAV, interpreted this as forgivable nationalism. Porter and Hildebrand maintain that the evacuation was a reasonable course of action given low food reserves without American aid in sight. In retrospect, however, food supplies in Phnom Penh were not sufficiently low as to justify an evacuation to the countryside. If anything, it was the two month long shelling of the capital by the FUNK that resulted in the stranglehold on Phnom Penh. Furthermore, evidence that the evacuation was planned well before April suggests that strategic advantage, not the well-being of the citizens mattered to the Khmer Rouge. Hou Youn's dissertation had sufficiently maligned cities as to make them appear useless to the country. Not only was class order reversed, but city dwellers would be made to farm the land, in a complete occupational reversal. Charles Twinning explains:

An extraordinary [Cambodian communist] party congress held in February 1975, reportedly presided over by Khieu Samphan, is generally thought to have made the decision to evacuate cities and abolish all currency after the takeover. The fact that the cities were all emptied within several days of the fall, with the people knowingly directed to spots in the countryside where they camped at least temporarily, does not give the impression of a sudden, knee jerk action. This had all been organized before hand.[72]

Another Porter and Hildebrand justification for Phnom Penh's evacuation is that since 5/6 of the population of Phnom Penh were refugees from the countryside, they were simply being returned to the countryside. This explanation sounds, oddly enough, reasonable. But why then, would over 800,000 peasants turn up dead?

Moreover, Porter and Hildebrand were concerned about the image of the Khmer Rouge as somehow inhumane. A romance with revolution dictates that it be humanitarian and just. Porter and Hildebrand describe the difficult choices the Khmer Rouge faced, and how their actions were rational.

Above all else, the NUFK [FUNK] leadership had to be concerned with food and health. The concentration of a large part of the population in the cities, where they were unproductive and totally dependent on foreign aid, posed grave dangers. On the one hand, attempt to maintain an adequate supply of rice for the urban population would have disrupted the existing highly organized system of agricultural production; on the other hand, extremely overcrowded conditions, combined with the breakdown of all normal public services, made the outbreak of a major epidemic highly probable.[73]

With this in mind, the evacuation made sense to Porter and Hildebrand. The reasoning followed that: first, the conversion of unproductive labor to productive labor (from city to countryside) would prevent starvation and second, epidemics necessitate evacuations. Porter and Hildebrand assert that the 600,000 city dwellers of Phnom Penh (i.e., those who were supposed to be there to begin with) were justifiably taken into the countryside because their labor was needed for the task of cultivating rice. The claim becomes nothing short of utopian fantasy when they write, "The 500,000 to 600,000 urban dwellers would by growing their own food, by freeing others from the task of getting food to them, substantially increase the total produced. By remaining unproductive during the crucial months, on the other hand, they would reduce the amount of food available to everyone."[74] Their logic is devoid of realistic consideration for the human toll, just as Summers' nonchalance reigned over the idea of evacuating millions away from home. When they take at face value Khmer Rouge vice-chairman Ieng Sary's claim that, "By going to the countryside, our peasants have potatoes, bananas, and all kinds of foods,"[75] they lose all sense of reality or objectivity. Stephen Morris said it best, "Serious students of communist regimes know that public utterances by communist officials and their media may or may not be true. But they are always made to serve a political purpose."[76] Porter and Hildebrand accept all the positions and policies of the new regime, re-printing without reservation propaganda pictures of postwar Cambodian workers in the fields and factories working "happily".

Countering charges that the print media's characterization of the evacuation as a "death march," is another falsehood Porter and Hildebrand dispel. They argue that such untruths were "fostered by U.S. government statements, including `intelligence documents,'"[77] They cite accounts contradicting claims of untoward behavior by the Khmer Rouge onto the population of Phnom Penh shortly after April 17. Most were from Phnom Penh Libere: Cambodge de l'autre sourire (1976), the very first book that favorably treated the Khmer Rouge evacuation of Phnom Penh. Gunn and Lee call it a "studied" account as opposed to the "banalized" version seen in the motion picture "The Killing Fields". Porter and Hildebrand conclude from this that the "death march" characterization was "unfounded."

Finally, leaving nothing to chance, Porter and Hildebrand hold that "the temporary clearing of most hospitals, far from being inhumane, was an act of mercy for the patients."[78] They argue that the hospitals of Phnom Penh had become overcrowded and unhealthy. It was thus necessary, for the well-being of the patients, to evacuate them. And what could they expect onto the elsewhere? Porter and Hildebrand offer as an alternative a propaganda photo of a Khmer Rouge surgical team operating in 1974 as proof that better care was just a countryside away. Jean Lacouture retells an encounter he had with a Khmer Rouge supporter in which the former argued that "under the Lon Nol regime, medical practice was in the hands of the Americans, corrupt and decadent. These poor souls had to be ripped out, at all cost, from this alienating medical facility. [To which I replied:] A new `conspiracy of white coats.'"[79] Porter's and Hildebrand's falls near the Norwegian journalist's.

The shameless propagandizing continued without refrain. Having rationalized the more gruesome Khmer Rouge actions, Porter and Hildebrand legitimize the leadership and sing its praises. They conclude the second chapter of Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, rather self-assuredly, by claiming that:

A careful examination of the facts regarding the evacuation of Cambodia's cities thus shows that the description and interpretation of the move conveyed to the American public was an inexcusable distortion of reality. What was portrayed as a destructive, backward-looking policy motivated by doctrinaire hatred was actually a rationally conceived strategy for dealing with the urgent problems that faced postwar Cambodia.[80]

In chapter 3, Porter and Hildebrand explain the reasons behind Cambodia's agricultural revolution by legitimizing the Khmer Rouge leadership. In a juxtaposition of academic and peasants, they assert that because some of the Khmer Rouge leaders are doctors of philosophy, namely Khieu Samphan, Hou Youn and Hu Nim, which makes their policies well-thought out and legitimate. This romanticization seen not just here but elsewhere in Malcolm Caldwell's, Laura Summers' and Ben Kiernan's contributions to the STAV on Cambodia.[81] In a recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal opposing the U.S. State Department's half-million dollar grant to Yale University for the creation of database on Khmer Rouge crimes to be headed by Ben Kiernan, Stephen Morris writes, "Mr. Kiernan wrote that `Khieu Samphan's personality--particularly his assuming manner, ready smile and simple habits--endeared him to Khmer peasants. Himself a peasant by birth, he is said to have been somewhat ascetic in his behavior, but never fanatical and always calm.'"[82]

Expectations of famine by Western intelligence sources for 1977 were dismissed by Porter and Hildebrand in light of FUNK broadcasts that claimed superb rice harvests due to superior two-cycle rice-farming under Khmer Rouge leadership. They write:

Tiev Chin Leng, former director of the port of Sihanoukville and a member of the NUFK [FUNK] residing in Paris, the 1975 crop amounted to 3.25 million tons of paddy, or about 2.2 million tons of rice. For the Cambodian people this bumper harvest represents 250 grams of rice per meal per adult, and 350 grams per meal doe worker on the production force.... In addition meat eating has increased, In the past, under the influence of Buddhist tradition, the peasants took little part in the slaughtering of animals, and ate very little meat.[83]

Both points (including the statistics) reappear in Malcolm Caldwell's posthumously published essay turned book Kampuchea: Rationale for a Rural Policy (1979) reviewed in the following section. The unending gullibility of Porter and Hildebrand is itself incredible. However, that was not the end of it. For instance, Porter and Hildebrand believed that forcing monks to work was not an act that could "fairly be represented as religious persecution,"[84] because everyone else, they argued, old and young was forced to work, too.

Although Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution is about Cambodia, a good portion of it is devoted to blaming America for the starvation which, as it turns out, was tampered by the Khmer Rouge's liberation of Phnom Penh. Porter and Hildebrand leave no stone unturned in their critique of U.S. intervention and its destruction of Cambodia. Porter and Hildebrand describe a scissors-like extraction mechanism curiously like the Soviet law of primitive socialist accumulation, when they explain that modern industry would be fueled by "capital raised by the expansion of agricultural production."[85] Their conclusion makes Cambodia the victim not of the Khmer Rouge, but of the Americans and the half decade of underdevelopment and destruction by U.S. bombs. In addition, the U.S. media, according to Porter and Hildebrand, was a co-conspirator in this cover-up, by not doing justice to Cambodia. Porter and Hildebrand fastidiously conclude that:

Cambodia is only the latest victim of the enforcement of an ideology that demands that social revolutions be portrayed as negatively as possible, rather than as responses to real human needs which the existing social and economic structure was incapable of meeting. In Cambodia--as in Vietnam and Laos--the systematic process of mythmaking must be seen as an attempt to justify the massive death machine which was turned against a defenseless population in a vain effort to crush their revolution.[86]

As Porter and Hildebrand romanticize the "social revolutions," they reveal their motive: defending the Khmer revolution. Far from being scholarly or objective, they make evident their biases by citing, without so much as a pathetic reservation or qualification, the propaganda which forms their defense of the Khmer revolution ergo the Khmer Rouge. What they achieved, unquestionably, was the temporary confounding of the events in the new Kampuchea, perched from half the globe away, they played a role in legitimizing it for another three years. Next, we canonize the significant contributions of Malcolm Caldwell. Caldwell was an author, STAV scholar, tireless Khmer Rouge defender, and finally a victim of the Khmer Rouge themselves.

Malcolm Caldwell's Kampuchea

Another academic who romanticized the Khmer revolution and its revolutionaries was Malcolm Caldwell, a lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He was an economic historian "committed to the struggle of the colonized, oppressed, and impoverished against imperialism and neo-colonialism."[87] In short, Caldwell became the leading academic supporter of the Khmer Rouge. His colleagues write upon his assassination that he "would not have liked to have gone down in history as an academic in the usual sense of the term. He would have wanted to be remembered as an activist on the British Left and an anti-imperialist fighter."[88] Caldwell published a number of articles[89] before submitting the draft of a paper titled "Cambodia: Rationale for a Rural Policy" was published after his death in 1979 under the auspices of James Cook University of North Queensland.[90]

The introductory note by Hering and Utrecht in Malcolm Caldwell's South-East Asia echo similar points gathered from Porter and Hildebrand (1976) as well as Summers (1975 and 1976),

The Western Press, apparently feeling insulted and being outraged, excelled in negative reporting on developments in Kampuchea under the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary regime. Not only did strongly exaggerated reports on the mass killings in the regime appear in the Western mass media, but also reports of crop failures and hunger in Kampuchea. Contrary to this unfavorable reporting in the Western newspaper, Malcolm was able to find more reliable data and compose a much more favorable account of economic development in Kampuchea in the last two years before the Vietnamese invasion of January 1979. [Emphasis added.][91]

As the STAV scholars mobilized against the media's "negative reporting on developments in Kampuchea" they joined by one of their elder statesmen, Malcolm Caldwell. Although negative coverage did appear from various newspapers and magazines, it was never as concerted or organized as the editors assert, at least not until 1979. If anything, these reports were "fragmentary" according to analysis done for 1976 by Accuracy in the Media.[92] Hering and Utrecht furthermore add,

Malcolm showed much concern about the incessant stream of disturbing reports on the high number of Kampucheans killed by their own leaders. There were, for Malcolm, two questions to be answered properly. The first was the likelihood or unlikelihood of the very high figures indicating 2 or 3 million people being killed. He made some investigations into the reliability of reports such as the ones distributed by the French priest Ponchaud. It was Noam Chomsky who drew Malcolm's attention to the fact that Ponchaud had heavily corrupted the newsreel broadcast by Radio Phnom Penh. Also some studies by Ben Kiernan convinced Malcolm of the serious fraud committed by Ponchaud, Barron and Anthony [Paul] in their reporting on Kampuchea after April 1975.[93]

Caldwell's dramatized concern for these "disturbing reports" resulted in his own attack on the media and his further determination to prove them wrong. On the very night he was killed, December 23, 1978, Caldwell was in Phnom Penh at the invitation of the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary regime. Having visited the country on a guided "tour" and interviewed Pol Pot, he became even more convinced that the allegations against the Khmer Rouge by refugees were false. Furthermore, the connection to Chomsky and Ponchaud's ballyhooed erratas is elaborated upon in chapter 3 regarding the Chomsky-Lacouture Controversy.[94] Caldwell, like his STAV colleagues, Summers, Porter, and Hildebrand have in some fashion or another quoted one another (circulating references). Leaving original inquiry much to be desired, they seek the truth from the ivory towers of their Universities. The preface to the Janata Prachuranalu published book Kampuchea: Rationale for a Rural Policy, likewise admonishes the Western press:

Caldwell's paper nails the lie to another aspect of the propaganda, viz. that the Kampuchean revolutionaries were following a mad path of building a socialist society. He has not only shown this path is correct but that it is the best-suited, not only for Kampuchea, but also for most of the underdeveloped Third World countries in the age of imperialism.[95]

To the contrary, the New York Times, Washington Post, and all three television networks in 1976 were reticent about human rights in Cambodia. As we will see in chapter 4, Accuracy in Media found that very few stories relative to those on South Korea and Chile appeared in this mass medium.

Yet the editors, in considering the prospects for Cambodia since the January 1979 invasion by Vietnam, contend that "Already within six months after its outbreak [the invasion] it has turned Kampuchea from a rich exporting country into a deadly place of hunger. It has rapidly annihilated the hard-won results of a unique development-model."[96] What is remarkable here is the blame placed on everyone except the Khmer Rouge. For instance, we saw that America had caused starvation to beset Phnom Penh, thus causing the need for an evacuation. Hering and Utrecht forthrightly inform the readers of Malcolm Caldwell's Southeast Asia that Malcolm told Ernst Utrecht: "If it is true that Pol Pot has also killed Khmer Peasants, I have to make a different evaluation of Kampuchea's development-model. Killing an innocent peasant is a token of fascism."[97] More transference--from calling the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary regime communist and "good" to fascist and "bad". Where will it end? No one knows.

In the first of three articles in Malcolm Caldwell's South-East Asia, written for the China Policy Study Group in London Caldwell chastises the media and the Barron-Paul book Murder of a Gentle Land (1977) for perpetuating lies about the Khmer Rouge and their intentions. Caldwell writes:

Faced with determined attempts on the part of both the Western and the Soviet media to portray it as a crazed pariah, Kampuchea has--without abandoning its policy of "first things first" (i.e., irrigation and rice)--succeeded in convincing many of its Asian neighbours and other Third World countries that the calumny is unwarranted. Two things are of note here: first, much of the Moscow/Hanoi propaganda is drawn from the notorious Reader's Digest book by Barron and Paul, Murder of a Gentle Land, Which has long since been refuted and discredited in the West (it was serialized in Hanoi radio); second the wilder allegations against Kampuchea current in the West never gained much popular credence or currency in neighbouring countries (in Thailand because it is common how refugee stories are selected and magnified). [Emphasis is Caldwell's.][98]

Caldwell's ad hominem attack on Barron's and Paul's book is of particular note, again, because Chomsky and Herman deploy their resources against it too. In addition, Ponchaud's Cambodia: Year Zero, was also assaulted by Caldwell and his STAV colleagues (Porter, Kiernan,[99] Chomsky, and Herman) as a cesspool of hearsay and falsehoods. Because the Barron-Paul gained early popularity in the U.S., and was the more vulnerable of the two, Caldwell and friends worked tirelessly to undermine that one, particularly. Caldwell dismisses them based on their conclusion that "the revolutionary regime is atavistic, anachronistic, barbaric, rustic ascetic, anarchic, cruel, irrational, and intent upon commanding a forced march back to the Dark Ages."[100]

In that essay, "Cambodia: Rationale for a Rural Policy" or Kampuchea: Rationale for a Rural Policy, Caldwell begins reasonably enough:

To most of the outside world, events in Cambodia (Democratic Kampuchea) since its liberation in 1975 appear totally outlandish and incomprehensible. Most commentators conclude that the charitable explanation for them list in bungled and inept improvisation by ignorant and ill-organised cadres floundering in disastrous circumstances and sustained only by opportune callousness and monopoly of firearms. This study argues that, on the contrary, the leaders of the Cambodian Revolution had evolved both short-term tactics and long-term socio-economic strategy, based upon a sound analysis of the realities of the country's society and economy, in the years before liberation; that in the face of great difficulties they have attempted with some successes to implement these in the last three years; and the chosen course is a sound one whether one judges it in terms of its domestic appositness or in terms of its reading of the future international economy.[101]

This thesis forces him to reach back into the economic dissertations of Khieu Samphan and leads him as well to the unreserved use of Government of Democratic Kampuchea bulletins and official explanations--just as the sine qua non of the Khmer Rouge Canon, Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution by Porter and Hildebrand resorted to in 1976. For example, Caldwell quotes favorably from the translation of Pol Pot's "17th Anniversary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea" speech as well as Ieng Sary's assertion in front of the U.N. general assembly that "Our objective is to make our country a modern agricultural and industrial country."[102] In addition, by quoting extensively from Khieu Samphan's thesis "Cambodia's Economy and Problems of Industrialization," Caldwell asserts that it is the backbone to the development-model being used by Democratic Kampuchea. Hence, further indication that the STAV was that the dissertation was a master plan. Like Laura Summers, Porter, and Hildebrand, Caldwell is quick to report the observations of the ambassador Kaj Bjork and other invited emissaries without reservation. In addition, he cites Porter's and Hildebrand's Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution over 15 times[103] and has this to say of their book,

[It] compensates to some extent for the dereliction of the vast majority of Western scholars, "experts" and journalists reputed to have, or who themselves profess to have an interest in Cambodia (an interest, that is, aside from being paid to read about it and to comment on it). In what follows in this section I draw heavily upon Porter and Hildebrand. But I would like to stress that their book is indispensable and should be read by everyone.[104]

"Birds of a feather," it is said, "flock together." Caldwell could not have found a more authoritative book to reference his own work. From his perch in England, he looked not Cambodians, but his colleagues for what made the Khmer Rouge tick.

The similarities do not end there, however. Caldwell did not excel at hiding his admiration for the Khmer Rouge leadership. Hence, like his STAV colleagues, he romanticized about the revolutionaries who were both peasants, but academics too. These were theoretician who were not afraid of a little hard work. He writes:

It should be emphasized that radicals like Khieu Samphan and the others were not "theoretical leftists". On the contrary, they always not only stressed the importance of cadres throwing themselves into manual labour alongside peasants, but set a personal example. They scorned material rewards and comforts, fully sharing the lives of the poor. Phnom Penh had no attractions for them, and since liberation they have continued to retain their working offices deep in the rural areas and to take turn at field work. They thus understood and understand peasant problems infinitely better than those western scholars who now appoint themselves to pass judgment on them from afar.[105]

Caldwell's description of Khieu Samphan sound strikingly similar to Ben Kiernan's "ascetic" characterization as quoted by Stephen Morris.[106]Moreover he makes an excellent point about the "western scholars" who "pass judgment from afar." The lesson remain unlearned.

Summers, Porter, Hildebrand were fond of the superior farming abilities of the new Cambodia. The double or triple rice-cropping methods of the Khmer Rouge were indeed incredible. It became, however, a source of objections when the fact that double rice-cropping, as pointed by David Chandler, was "an achievement unequaled since the days of [12th c.] Angkor."[107] In awe of such a feat, Caldwell rationalizes the "close" supervision of city dwellers who were sure not to share these goals. He writes:

Urban dwellers re-settled from Phnom Penh in 1975 could not possibly have at once shared that outlook and it need occasion us no surprise that to begin with they required close supervision when put to work shifting earth and collecting boulders; we should bear this in mind when evaluating refugee stories, particularly those referring to the immediate post-liberation period.[108]

Caldwell, like Summers, considers the hardships that city-dwellers faced, yet like her, his facade wears thin. From justification, Caldwell turns to apologia for Khmer Rouge. He is shameless in singing the praises of what Prince Sihanouk has compared to propaganda that outstripped Joseph Goebbels. Caldwell's romanticization of the Khmer revolution is apparent when he describes that,

The forethought, ingenuity, dedication and eventual triumph of the liberation forces in the face of extreme adversity and almost universal foreign scepticism, detachment, hostility and even outright sabotage ought to have been cause for worldwide relief and congratulation rather than the disbelief and execration with which it was in fact greeted. . . But if manipulators have a very good reason to distort and obscure the truth we do not. Indeed we have a clear obligation to establish and propagate it with every resource at out command.[109]

With "forethought," "ingenuity," and "dedication" too, Caldwell triumphs over his colleagues as the "leading academic supporter of the Khmer Rouge."[110] He is mistaken when he asserts that there was universal foreign skepticism of the winning side, since most of the negative reporting was fragmentary even in 1977. The real media campaign began, according to Shawcross after the invasion of Cambodia by Vietnam in 1979, at the time ex-STAV scholars like Ben Kiernan switched to the Vietnamese side. Caldwell's assertion that "manipulators" are behind the propaganda campaign against the Khmer revolution is not original. Summers explored that idea approvingly, while Chomsky and Herman will develop it to absurdity in their theory of the Free Press covered in the next chapter.

In the second-half of his paper-turned-book, Caldwell places the Khmer revolution in the context of international and historical perspective. Being somewhat more enthusiastic than his colleagues or perhaps more openly so, Caldwell proposes a counterfactual cloaked in a reprimand,

Those who orchestrate the chorus of vilification and scurrility against Democratic Kampuchea do not accept that have responsibility to let us know what they think the country might have looked like today [1978] had the Revolution been crushed; what they would do even today were they to be by some miracle vested with absolute power in Phnom Penh; and what the prospects of the country would be were either of these conditions fulfilled in contrast to the prospects that clearly open out to it now under its present revolutionary government.[111]

His tour de force reaches its nadir with this baseless comparison. The opposite is what one often wonders, when looking back at the years 1975-1979 for Cambodia. Upon reflection, in what must appear to be an entirely unfounded argument, Caldwell asserts that Cambodia is better off with the Khmer revolution. Sheer fantasy? Not to the STAV. Porter and Hildebrand went so far as to justify the evacuation because it had, in their opinion, saved lives. Chomsky and Herman allude to that and more when they compare postwar Cambodia to the horrid American devastation of the country during the war, as the reader will discover in the next chapter.

The conclusions, which Caldwell draws are so distanced from reality as to make them unrecognizable. He predicts that the revolution in Kampuchea marks the beginning of "the greatest and necessary change beginning to convulse the world in the later 20th century and to shift it from a disaster-bound course to one holding out promise of a better future for all."[112] With this in mind, however, he does feels that the alternative to the Kampuchean solution, inverting the World-System, "would not be a good option, in either sense (moral or rational): even the richest countries of the world today are still disfigured by poverty and gross inequalities."[113] For that assertion to be made, the "poverty and gross inequalities" in the First World would have to be equal to greater than those in the new Kampuchea. To it, one might wonder whom Ponchaud had mind when he pointedly asked, "How many of those unreservedly in support of the Khmer revolution would consent to endure one-hundredth part of the current suffering of the Cambodian people?" Whether they would consent is dubious, but we know form this chapter who four of them are: Malcolm Caldwell, Laura Summers, Gareth Porter, and George C. Hildebrand. Speaking for the peasants of the world, Lecturer Malcolm Caldwell of the University of London writes that there can be no doubt, "that the lesson [of the Khmer revolution] will not long be lost upon the as yet unliberated peasants."[114]

Conclusion

We know that the Cambodianists who wrote in support of the Khmer Rouge used similar arguments. That much was self-evident of Laura Summers, Gareth Porter, and George C. Hildebrand. Malcolm Caldwell, whose impact was equally impressive while in England with Summers, but nowhere near Cambodia, upheld the STAV on Cambodia. As exemplary STAV scholars, they have earned their place in the "Khmer Rouge Canon 1975-1979." These defenders of the Khmer revolution were influenced to some degree or another by the charisma or intellect of some of the Khmer Rouge leadership, namely, Khieu Samphan and Hou Youn, as evidenced in Caldwell's note that Khieu Samphan was truly a man who practiced what he preached. They romanticized the Khmer revolution and its revolutionaries by rationalizing the policies of the Khmer Rouge and believing that all contrary evidence was the work of manipulators and counter-revolutionary agitators. Furthermore, they convinced themselves of the Khmer Rouge mission to liberate peasants from the domineering urban parasites. But at what costs, one wonders, to the peasants themselves? Fully half if not more of the casualties of revolution were rural Khmer. They were fascinated by the idea that according to the Constitution, "exploiter and exploited" would no longer exist, and that "justice and harmony" for all would prevail in happy Kampuchea.

After the Vietnam War, these scholars were inclined to disbelieve refugees who had a vested interest in vilifying Democratic Kampuchea and its rulers, the Khmer Rouge, since they were running away from something or another to begin with. As this logic was picked-up by Chomsky and Herman, it became the central argument against the mounting refugee reports of atrocities as will be seen in the next chapter.

Another major point reiterated in the works of all four authors is that America must be held accountable for most of the postwar problems, since, they argue, it had created the deplorable pre-liberation conditions. But this was a two pronged argument, not only was America to blame for the annihilation of a country, but it was the Khmer Rouge who were the protagonists, heroic in their effort to stave off starvation by evacuating the cities. It is expounded upon repeatedly by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in the Chomsky-Lacouture Controversy, a controversy tackled in chapter 3. Summers, Caldwell, Porter and Hildebrand saw themselves through the prism of a struggle against neo-colonialism.

Their complete trust in the righteousness of Khmer Rouge actions was shown at its extreme when Porter and Hildebrand argued that the evacuation of even hospitals was an act of mercy. The consistent threads encountered in the works reviewed is the result of complete and utter naiveté in quoting the claims the Khmer Rouge. Sihanouk knew as much even while a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge. No hesitation nor reservation to quote Ieng Sary or Khieu Samphan's explanations was expressed by any of the four STAV scholars reviewed. It seems clear, therefore, that the mistakes which led each author to reach his/her respective conclusion was in fact academic. To be sure, there were judgments colored by ideology, but even a Marxist who possessed some objective fibers could see that speaking to common people might help. Peer review is a cornerstone of academia, but when the standard total academic view is to sing the praises of the Khmer revolution, what next? The STAV's methods led them to generate conclusions that were simply implausible when stacked on top of one another. Had they thought more critically, perhaps, they would not be canonized.

Posted by Michael Pugliese | July 23, 2007 4:07 PM

Vanya makes an excellent point:

Folk music gave the left a black eye for a long time and really bears a lot of the blame for making being liberal "uncool" among Generation Xers.

I actually think he's on to something. Nice messages of inclusiveness and peace are good and well in the sphere of politics, but they really do make for very bad art. As a rule, anyway. And though Pete Seeger was often poetic in his folk songs, still the meaning was always overt because that was whole point.

I think the academic left also gets some of the credit for turning liberalism into the dull goody-goody schoolmarm of the world. But some of the problems are inherent in the liberal message. Being nice and helping people is for sissies. Being mean and selfish somehow makes you much harder to mock.

Posted by Rob Mac | July 23, 2007 4:11 PM

Pattern repeated once again.

Faced with an accurate, documented history of how U.S. hawks handed power to the Khmer Rouge through intense bombardment of civilians...

...the right responds that at the time there were apologists for the Khmer Rouge.

Once again, though, a bit of reality peeks through.

If every single, solitary academic on the planet and every living soul in the U.S., Britain, and France had jumped up and down 24 hours a day for the entirety of the Khmer Rouge's rule; had they named every single child born as Pol Pot; had every large building of every major city been covered in giant posters extolling Khmer Rouge values...

...it still wouldn't have given power to the Khmer Rouge like the U.S. bombs did.

Noam Chomsky and Porter and Hildebrand could have written volumes, entire libraries full of praise poetry for Khmer Rouge proletarianism.

And yet it didn't have the propaganda power to give victory to the Khmer Rouge.

Nope, just the tremendous U.S. bombardment had that.

The cowardly right would really, really like to somehow blame some small group of intellectuals for the Khmer Rouge atrocities, but in the real world, as opposed to "one world government" lunacies, what really gave them power were the hawks' bombs, not praise poetry from any number of Western intellectuals ranging from zero to unity.

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 4:20 PM

By the way, I guess the CIA which I quoted above were secretly Maoist Khmer Rouge apologists too.

That's it!!! It's never, ever our stupid hawkish policies which cause calamities! It's not the bombs we drop and the societies we destroy which lead to slaughter!

It's those darn intellekshuls stabbin' us in the back!

Yeah, and the hawks woulda saved Cambodia, too, if it hadn'a been for those meddlin' professors!

Finally, the Scooby-Doo defense is employed by the apologists of carpet bombing peasant societies.

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 4:24 PM

he's also the guy who...and arranged the modern version of "We Shall Overcome."

Actually, that was Guy Carawan, who, with his wife and son, sang and played beautifully at my wedding (no "We Shall Overcome", though, of course :)

The Carawans were very active in the Civil Rights movement, and The Highlander Center in particular. (The Highlander Center was/is a site for training of various and sundry social change organizations. MLK spent time there, and, most notably, Rosa Parks was there prior to the Montgomery bus boycott)

Posted by Steve K. | July 23, 2007 5:00 PM

Urp. That doesn't make sense. Anyway, Guy Carawan, not Pete Seeger, first did the version of "We Shall Overcome" that everyone knows today.

Posted by Steve K. | July 23, 2007 5:06 PM

Ok, after googling, it turns out the story behind We Shall Overcome is a lot more complicated than I thought. If anyone here cares:

http://www.metropulse.com/articles/2005/15_15/gamut.shtml

Posted by Steve K. | July 23, 2007 5:17 PM

"We Shall Overcome" epitomizes the passivity and the martyr-complex of the 60's liberals. No self-respecting Stalinist or any left-wing revolutionary would have ever sung a song like that. You're not going to fight, just "overcome"? Well, when? "Some day"? What the hell is that? What happened to breaking the chains, workers of the world uniting in violent revolution, rioting in the streets, etc., etc.

To most under 40s that song is a cliche for liberal inaction, as mocked in yesterday's Fuzzy:
"Bucky: How many degenerate liberals does it take to change a lightbulb?
Satchel: Well, with the proper funding-
Bucky: They never change anything, they just cry over the broken bulb!"

Posted by vanya | July 23, 2007 5:28 PM

Typical Old Left binary thinking El Cid. More options in this world than either neo-conservatism or Stalinism. Try some third camp socialism,
http://www.wpunj.edu/newpol/issue23/jjacob23.htm
The Russian Question And American Socialism

Posted by Michael Pugliese | July 23, 2007 5:30 PM

Stuart is a longtime DSA member. To El Cid, would that mean he is a, "Social Fascist."?!

Americans Still Traveling Down the Ho Chi Minh Trail

Stuart Elliott,
New America,
November 1977

Three thousand Americans including Ramsey Clark and ACTION director Sam Brown, crowded the Beacon Theater, a spacious New York rock concert hall, recently to give a cheering welcome to Vietnam’s delegation to the United Nations. While Cora Weiss, an organizer of the reception, was shouting, “Welcome in the name of the American people,” outside in a driving rain, three hundred Vietnamese protested the suppression of the Buddhist church in Vietnam, forced migration to the “new economic zones” and re-education camps, and they called upon the United Nations to force the new Vietnamese government to respect human rights.

Although the protest was largely organized by Buddhist Third Force leaders in the United States, Pranay Gupte of the New York Times nonetheless labeled them as former Thieu supporters. The tendency to characterize all Vietnamese critics of the new Communist dictatorship as Thieu supporters is an all too prevalent myth that is frequently accompanied by the related myth that those inside the Beacon Theater represented a peace movement. David Dellinger, the master of ceremonies for the reception, bragged to thunderous applause that when he visited Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), a North Vietnamese officer told him that the American peace movement had “inspired” the forces fighting in the jungle when they had almost given up hope. When the North Vietnamese delegation was introduced, they were greeted by what one reporter called an “emotional explosion.” With their hands clasped “above their heads, the Vietnamese acknowledged the tumultuous applause. The overwhelming majority of those inside the theater seemed not to be celebrating peace in Vietnam, but reveling the triumph of Communist totalitarianism in Indochina.

The reception was only a small part of a weekend designed to revive the antiwar movement in order to launch a campaign to win recognition and reconstruction aid for Vietnam. A more important event was a two-day conference sponsored by Friendshipment, a coalition of religious and political organizations which has sent over $5 million in aid to Vietnam. Billed as “Healing the Wounds of the War,” the theme of the conference was more accurately reflected by the words of the song that immediately preceded Saturday’s opening sessions:

Ho Chi Minh we sing your name
Through eternity no death will claim you
You’ll live forever though your heartbeat is gone
As we travel down the path you traveled on.

The keynote speaker for the conference was, Dinh Ba Thi, the new Vietnamese ambassador to the United Nations. He emphasized that the Vietnamese “are determined to struggle for full human rights which are fundamentally the right to independence of all nations, the economic and social rights of all men and women” and pledged that the Vietnamese are “determined not to be deceived by wreckers and rumor-mongers who shout about human rights.” Pressing business forced the ambassador to leave after concluding his speech, but he could have safely remained for there was no reason to fear shouting about human rights violations in Vietnam at the Friendshipment conference.

Over two hundred people from eighteen states attended the conference, representing seventy five organizations, with the largest delegations coming the United Methodist Church, the American Friends Service Committee, Church World Services, an agency of the United Church of Christ. The involvement of so many churchmen does not mean that the campaign for recognition and reconstruction aid is motivated by simple humanitarianism. In fact, the conference was highly political.

A primary focus was the need to play down the campaign’s underlying politics so as to make it palatable to the American people. Thus, the slogan adopted was “Heal the Wounds of the War,” not “Reparations for American War Crimes.” The latter, however, is closer to the real goal of the conference organizers. Cora Weiss, the coordinator of Friendshipment, told the conference that “The war in Vietnam was not a mistake... not a tragedy... not a conflict... not an unfortunate accident on the path of history. The war in Vietnam was a crime.” She also declared that “the legitimate struggle for independence and freedom from colonial rule waged by the people of Vietnam would not have proceeded so quickly without support from Americans who rejected the criminality of the White House and the Pentagon.”

So total was the identification of the conference with the Vietnamese Communists that when questions arose about strategy and tactics in the post-war period, the attitudes of the Vietnamese were constantly cited as grounds for adopting a certain approach.

Pat McCleary, executive director of Church World Service and a recent and friendly visitor to Vietnam, presented an argument that will undoubtedly be used in selling recognition and reconstruction aid. He assured the conference that not only were the re-education camps extremely successful in rehabilitating prostitutes, but that Vietnamese communism is “moderate,” “unique,” and based “on the Asian culture, the Asian value system.” Moreover, he argued that if the United States plays its cards right, that is, provides reconstruction aid, Vietnam will become an Asian Yugoslavia.

The conference gathered the leading ideologues and activists of the wing of the antiwar movement which is not bothered by gross human rights violations in Indochina. Among the most prominent were Gareth Porter, former head of the Indochina Resource Center and a leading American defender of the new Cambodian government; Noam Chomsky, another defender of the Cambodian government; Marcus Raskin, head of the Institute for Policy Studies; Richard Falk, David Dellinger, Barry Commoner, Don Luce of Clergy and Laity Concerned, Methodist Bishop James Armstrong, Henry Foner, of the Fur, Leather and Machine Workers Union, and Peter Weiss.

The conference was no more disturbed by the substantiated reports of what Jean Lacouture, the French biographer of Ho Chi Minh, describes as “auto-genocide” in Cambodia than it was by the mounting evidence of massive human rights violations in Vietnam. Official conference speakers generally skirted the issue of Cambodia. When the question was raised from the floor as to whether Friendshipment would do any “work on Kampuchea” (Cambodia), the answer was that “Kampuchea is a special problem in that their own interests in having the kind of relationships, in inviting Americans to visit, and so on has not been the same” as the Vietnamese. Friendshipment has sent one aid shipment to Cambodia, but the Cambodians would not provide an accounting of how the aid was distributed or even acknowledge receipt. Friendshipment believes it the “responsibility to counter the political propaganda in the media about Cambodia,” but tactically it would prefer to separate Cambodia and Vietnam.

One of the first actions of the Friendshipment conference was to go on record in support of sentence reduction for Karen Armstrong, whose “antiwar” bombing of a mathematics building at the University of Wisconsin killed a young researcher.

Friendshipment’s program for healing the wounds of the war is directed exclusively towards the American government. Their major goals include a campaign for food relief for Vietnam and Laos, lifting of the trade embargo, reconstruction aid, and full diplomatic recognition and normalization of relations.

There has been periodic speculation in the press about what happened to the antiwar movement. The Friendshipment conference and the reception for the Vietnamese United Nations delegation demonstrate that a segment of what was described as the antiwar movement is still alive. It also demonstrates that the Cora Weiss-Gareth Porter-David Dellinger crowd are not antiwar or peace activists. They have become partisans of the Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian Communists and apologists engaged in the systematic cover-up of genocide and gross violations of human rights.

Posted by Michael Pugliese | July 23, 2007 5:34 PM

From Collective Guilt to Collective Silence

Stuart Elliott,
New America,
June 1976

American peace groups have reacted with silence, confusion, or apology to the reports that up to 600,000 Cambodians, one-tenth of that nation’s population, have died from mistreatment at the hands of the Communist Khmer Rouge. None of the peace groups contacted by New America has issued public statements condemning the harsh oppression in Cambodia. Thus organizations and individuals which once demanded that Americans accept collective guilt for the Vietnam war have now themselves adopted positions of collective silence on one of the most brutal bloodbaths of modern history.

Clergy and Laity Concerned, a moderate peace group which aimed its appeal at the middle-class conscience constituency, is apparently unconcerned about Cambodia. The CALC has issued no statement on the Cambodian slaughters, either condemning or denying. The group, according to staffer Janice Stern, is convinced that the stories were intended to propound a bloodbath theory which CALC does not accept.

Women Strike for Peace has washed its hands of Cambodia. WSP is “not into that area anymore” and has not issued any national statement on Cambodia or Vietnam. Yet at its public events and in ads in radical journals, WSP has continued to promote posters celebrating the “victories of the Vietnamese people” which include a quote from Ho Chi Minh, “We will rebuild our country ten times more beautiful.”

Friends of Indochina, formerly the Indochina Peace Campaign, takes its line, as does CALC, from the Indochina Resource Center. That group published a study in 1975 whitewashing the Khmer Rouge’s forced evacuation of Phnom Penh. Its monthly publication, US/Indochina Report, is little more than a propaganda organ for the Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian Communists. The April 30 issue assures us the Cambodian government “has extended a policy of ‘broad national union’ towards those who served on the other side. All Khmers, irrespective of their [role] during the war, were eligible to vote in the Assembly elections.” Of course, the story does not mention that the elections were uncontested. It does praise the new constitution, “its paramount stress on the role of the people...” but Cambodia’s peasants, 85 percent of the population, received only 60 percent of the seats in the People’s Representative Assembly. The same issue dismisses reports of a reign of terror as “a US propaganda campaign.”

The more established peace groups are less [adept] at dismissing the reports of a Cambodian bloodbath. Dave Elder, Southeast Asia area coordinator for the American Friends Service, said that he was sorry to see such reports, but was suspicious of their accuracy. Elder [admitted] that it was hard to shake the image of “extreme order” in Cambodia, but he maintained that there was a need to be very careful in evaluation of evidence about Cambodia and he characterized the reports of the Cambodian refugees as “self-serving.” Elder said that until the US pursued a more open policy toward Indochina, including the lifting of aid prohibitions to Cambodia and Vietnam, it would be impossible to know what was happening in Cambodia. According to Elder, the AFSC has an unconditional offer to provide aid to Cambodia. But he said it would be helpful in raising money if Cambodia would open up.

David McReynolds of the War Resisters League said that his organization has not yet seen any reports which are substantial enough to take a position condemning Cambodia. SANE, a non-pacifist peace group, explained that it naturally deplored any bloodletting, but it has not yet issued a national statement. According to Washington staffer Nan Randell, SANE places some credence in the reports about a bloodbath in Cambodia.

The double standard deploring violence except in cases where it is conducted by revolutionaries is still intact, but it does show some evidence of cracking. The more principled peace groups are disturbed by the reports coming from Cambodia, though they are still more reluctant to accept evidence about Communist atrocities than about the mythical American bombing of North Vietnamese dikes. Even the peace constituency which follows the lead of pro-Communist groups is apparently bothered by the fact that so little news is coming from Cambodia. The Indochina Resource Center reports that it has had an unusually high number of requests for its reply to the Time article.

In coming months it will become more and more difficult for the peace groups and American liberals to avoid the Cambodia issue. The broad outlines of Time’s allegations have been repeated by the highly respected Le Monde, which puts the death toll at 800,000. Just as significantly, it is now clear that Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who served as nominal chief of state during and after the civil war, is a virtual prisoner of the totalitarian regime.

Sihanouk resigned his honorary post a month ago, and since then has been allowed to contact no-one outside of his family and his guards. The imprisonment of Sihanouk reveals the limited popular support for the Khmer Rouge. He is the one authentic national figure in Cambodia and is still capable of rallying opposition to the existing regime.

One of the most total dictatorships in history has been imposed upon the Cambodians, and the evidence of a bloodbath, while not incontrovertible, is as substantial and convincing as one could expect under the circumstances. The refusal of the peace groups and American liberals to condemn the terror, or at least to demand that the Cambodians allow an impartial international group to investigate the charges, is a betrayal or moral and political responsibility. The time has surely come to condemn the Gulag Archipelago in Cambodia.

Posted by Michael Pugliese | July 23, 2007 5:35 PM

http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110010372
In 2001, California's Orange County Register published an investigation of communist re-education camps in postwar Vietnam:

To corroborate the experiences of refugees now living in Orange County, the Register interviewed dozens of former inmates and their families, both in the United States and Vietnam; analyzed hundreds of pages of documents, including testimony from more than 800 individuals sent to jail; and interviewed Southeast Asian scholars. The review found:

* An estimated 1 million people were imprisoned without formal charges or trials.

* 165,000 people died in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam's re-education camps, according to published academic studies in the United States and Europe.

* Thousands were abused or tortured: their hands and legs shackled in painful positions for months, their skin slashed by bamboo canes studded with thorns, their veins injected with poisonous chemicals, their spirits broken with stories about relatives being killed.

* Prisoners were incarcerated for as long as 17 years, according to the U.S. Department of State, with most terms ranging from three to 10 years.

* At least 150 re-education prisons were built after Saigon fell 26 years ago.

* One in three South Vietnamese families had a relative in a re-education camp.

According to John Kerry, "it didn't happen."

Things were even worse in Cambodia, as the Christian Science Monitor reported in 2005:

When the Khmer Rouge victoriously entered Phnom Penh 30 years ago, many people greeted the rebels with a cautious optimism, weary from five years of civil war that had torn apart their lives and killed hundreds of thousands of Cambodians. . . .

During the nearly four years following that day--April 17, 1975--Cambodia was radically transformed. . . .

Everyday freedoms were abolished. Buddhism and other forms of religious worship were banned. Money, markets, and media disappeared. Travel, public gatherings, and communication were restricted. Contact with the outside world vanished. And the state set out to control what people ate and did each day, whom they married, how they spoke, what they thought, and who would live and die. "To keep you is no gain," the Khmer Rouge warned, "To destroy you is no loss."

In the end, more than 1.7 million of Cambodia's 8 million inhabitants perished from disease, starvation, overwork, or outright execution in a notorious genocide.

Posted by Michael Pugliese | July 23, 2007 5:38 PM

Actually, Vanya, "We Shall Overcome" was based on an African American gospel song and became a sort of theme song for the Civil Rights movement, which was probably one of the better liberal success stories of the 20th Century.

Posted by blah | July 23, 2007 5:39 PM

Boaz owes Seeger an apology. What a fucking evil lying sack of shit Boaz is. I'll never read anything by him again.

Posted by LarryM | July 23, 2007 5:45 PM

And Matthew, how about an update to this post? I wouldn't like to think that you would want to associate yourself with this garbage.

Posted by LarryM | July 23, 2007 5:47 PM

And still, right wing apologists seek desparately, fearfully, pleadingly to somehow blame U.S. academics and leftists for the Khmer Rouge genocide which their hawk bombs caused.

And then they seek to blame those same groups for somehow failing to fix the problem caused by the hawks' having given power to the Khmer Rouge via their carpet bombing.

But most humiliating of all was how the ones who toppled the Khmer Rouge, once given power by the hawks' bombing campaigns, were those in the Vietnamese government next door.

Humiliating because of course there was nothing which US hawks, nor leftists, nor aid groups could possibly have done once the US hawks had helped the Khmer Rouge attain power.

Strangely enough, they are unwilling to even remember the US' hawks' turn to support (ooh, excuse me, *wink* at Chinese support for) the Khmer Rouge once they had been tossed out of power.

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 5:59 PM

Actually, Vanya, "We Shall Overcome" was based on an African American gospel song and became a sort of theme song for the Civil Rights movement, which was probably one of the better liberal success stories of the 20th Century.

Oh, I'm quite aware of that. Unfortunately part of the reason the success of the Civil Rights movement doesn't resonate with young people (of any race) as much as it should is probably the general impression people have that it is was a movement of passive rather than active resistance. The choice of that song as a theme just reinforces that impression.

Posted by vanya | July 23, 2007 6:42 PM

Am I the only one who thinks that posting extremely long articles in a comments thread is really uncool? I thought El Cid was off the rails, but then Michael Pugliese really showed him how a thread is hijacked! How about a link and just a choice quote or two, guys?

Posted by Rob Mac | July 23, 2007 7:35 PM

Michael Pugliese @ 4:07 pm gets Asshole Post of the Day.

Posted by blah | July 23, 2007 7:46 PM

"To most under 40s that song is a cliche for liberal inaction..."

People sang that song while they were being arrested and beaten. The civil rights protesters sang it as they marched in Birmingham and the Freedom Riders sang it when they were arrested and dragged from their buses off to jail. It provided the theme of Martin Luther King's greatest speech, and it was picked up by Lyndon Johnson in his breathtaking 1965 message to Congress urging passage of the Voting Rights Act, a moment that transformed America forever. It was an anthem of the anti-apartheid activists in South Africa. It was sung by the ANC activist John Harris on his way to the gallows. The hangman reported that he sang it as he dropped. It has been translated in languages across the Indian subcontinent and is sung today by activists in India and Bangladesh. It is far and away the most important song ever sung in the history of America. Nothing even comes close.

Liberal inaction? Tell me, Vanya, what have you ever done, other than insult your betters from the comfort of your computer chair? You are an ignorant dolt, Vanya, and you are offensive far beyond your wildest imaginings.

Posted by Bloix | July 23, 2007 8:09 PM

Michael Pugliese @ 4:07 pm gets Asshole Post of the Day.

If you ever read LBO mailing list, you should have known he was going to materialize. He's got to have some sort of crawler out there constantly searching "Stalist" or "WWP".

I've always been less interested in peoples political opinions than what seems to drive them, and Pugliese's passion is to be some sort of outdated Cold War snitch.

Posted by Ed Marshall | July 23, 2007 9:43 PM

Well, I don't want to trivialize Bloix' masterful response, and the term isn't even from my generation, but I've never seen a better example:

Pwned.

Posted by LarryM | July 23, 2007 9:43 PM

I thought El Cid was off the rails

Fair enough. Also, off my meds, off my rocker, off the mark.

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 10:23 PM

There's really no excuse at all for Stalin's American apologists during the 1940s and 1950s, except to say that most of them were utopian dreamers who did not actually advocate Stalinist policies in America.

Well that is an excuse isn't it? And if someone didn't really advocate the actual policies and ruthless style of government that we have come to know as "Stalinism", but only some more benign utopian form of socialism or communism that they imagined were the policies of Stalin, then it is not really accurate to call them a "Stalinist", is it?

Posted by Dan Kervick | July 24, 2007 1:33 AM

Also Pete Seeger was "desperately" (according to music producer Joe Boyd) trying to get the sound turned down when Dylan went electric at Newport in '65. Seeger is a weenie.

Posted by vanya | July 24, 2007 10:36 AM

I am always very wary of the sloppy use of the term Stalinist, which is too often just a slur for socialist. The article you link to is a prime example of low-grade "socialism = mass murder" garbage.

Matt, I think your biggest problem is that you try too hard to seem reasonable, you bend over backwards to meet the other side halfway, you give the right way more credit than it deserves. I don't think one in ten of them argues in good faith, but you accommodate them in a misguided attempt to prove you are open-minded.

You rely too much on reason instead of experience, thinking like a philosophy or economics major rather than a historian or someone who has at least lived through enough history personally to be properly disillusioned. You take too much rhetoric at face value. I hope you wise up sooner rather than later.

Posted by Said Shirazi | July 24, 2007 11:00 AM

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 2:22 PM:"The one and over-riding factor which gave the Khmer Rouge the opportunity for power was nearly a decade of U.S. carpet bombing."

And the massive support from the North Vietnamese soldiers who were in Cambodia had nothing to do with it? This is nonsense. The bombing was aimed at keeping the Khmer Rouge out of power. It is asinine Double Think to claim, as you did, that the Americans handed power to them. They did not.

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 2:22 PM:"The one academic institution closely studying the issue -- and you are supposedly the one concerned with "best" arguments -- is Yale's Cambodian Genocide Project. Check out both the bombing data as well as the primary documents, in English and local languages."

Find me the slightest evidence in that material that the American bombing handed power over to the Khmer Rouge.

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 2:22 PM:"Feel free to issue insane theories on how carpet bombing was actually somehow not driving the rural population to support the Khmer Rouge."

It may have driven whatever small percentage of the Khmer rural population that was actually bombed into the arms of KR, but who knows? It may have driven some from them as well. Either way the bombing was not aimed at the rural population. Indeed the majority of the Cambodian population probably never saw so much as a bomb crater. The Americans were bombing KR positions and bases in the mountains and jungles - well away from major population sites. Which is why all that evidence Ben Keirnan has spent so much time accumulating does not show massive casualties from the bombing.

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 2:22 PM:"It was the US hawks and their bombing campaign which handed power directly to the Khmer Rouge."

That is simply a flat out lie. It was after all the end of the bombing that allowed the KR to come to power and you continue to ignore the massive aid given to the KR by the North Vietnamese and the PRC.

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 2:22 PM:"Noam Chomsky didn't do it. Pete Seeger didn't do it. Leagues of Berkeley students didn't do it."

Well yes they did. Had they not forced a US withdrawal the KR would never have come to power.

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 2:22 PM:"Shockingly, a near decade's worth of carpet-bombing left nasty people in charge."

If that was true, and it is not, it would be an almost unique case as similar levels of bombing in Germany and Japan - but this time aimed at civilians - did not leave nasty people in charge. A US defeat left nasty people in charge. As it usually does.

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 2:22 PM:"Not Noam Chomsky arguing about how many were or weren't dying under the Khmer Rouge."

That is not what Chomsky was doing. He was continuing a long campaign of defending people he had supported and hence had a need to rationalize what he had done.

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 2:22 PM:"Nope, it was LBJ's and Nixon's bombing of Cambodia which loved, cherished, favored, supported, nourished the genocide."

No matter how many times you repeat a lie it will not become true.

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 2:22 PM:"And the Guatemala genocide was real -- not fictional, not made up, no, good real Christian conservatives favored and personally endorsed by Reagan who roamed the hillsides murdering entire Mayan communities."

I don't see anyone calling it fictional. Nor do I see one shred of evidence that Reagan favored and personally endorsed any of it - if indeed he even knew. But of course truth won't stop you libeling the dead will it?

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 5:59 PM:"And still, right wing apologists seek desparately, fearfully, pleadingly to somehow blame U.S. academics and leftists for the Khmer Rouge genocide which their hawk bombs caused."

The only person I see "desparately, fearfully, pleadingly" seeking anything is you - to rewrite the historic record to claim that what the US was trying to prevent it actually caused, and what the Left worked so hard to achieve - the KR in power - was not what they really wanted. This is Topsy Turvy land. It is insane fantasy.

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 5:59 PM:"And then they seek to blame those same groups for somehow failing to fix the problem caused by the hawks' having given power to the Khmer Rouge via their carpet bombing."

Sorry but fix what problem? The Left wanted the KR in power. Only the US could have kept them out. The Left forced a US withdrawal. Where is the problem for the Left to fix? They got what they wanted. And of course the Hawks did not give power to the KR - Sianouk did when he struck a devil's bargain with the Vietnamese to allow them to use Cambodia to attack South Vietnam.

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 5:59 PM:"But most humiliating of all was how the ones who toppled the Khmer Rouge, once given power by the hawks' bombing campaigns, were those in the Vietnamese government next door."

What is humiliating about that? The KR was insane so much so that they attacked Vietnam. Big deal.

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 5:59 PM:"Humiliating because of course there was nothing which US hawks, nor leftists, nor aid groups could possibly have done once the US hawks had helped the Khmer Rouge attain power."

I agree once the Left forced the US out of Cambodia there was nothing to be done given the enormous amount of aid flowing to the KR from China and the Vietnamese. Of course one thing that could have been done was to allow the US Army back in - but most of the Left did not care how many Cambodians died as long as America lost the War.

Posted by El Cid | July 23, 2007 5:59 PM:"Strangely enough, they are unwilling to even remember the US' hawks' turn to support (ooh, excuse me, *wink* at Chinese support for) the Khmer Rouge once they had been tossed out of power."

Sorry? Wink at? Please. Desperate times call for more smears and innuendos?

Posted by HeiGou | July 24, 2007 11:07 AM

If you insist on typing this dreck out, HeiGou, please take the five minutes it would take to learn a couple basic HTML tags for formatting. I'm masochistic enough to read a bunch of drivel but not enough to have to work to do it.

Posted by Ed Marshall | July 24, 2007 11:13 AM

So let me get this straight . . . a simple-minded right-wing rant over a year old, cherry-picked in order to provide support for a childhood "drudge," leads to endless bitching back and forth over conflicts that were over and done with 30, or even 60 years ago? Shit like this is why conservatives keep winning.

Posted by Nate | July 24, 2007 12:03 PM

HeiGou, you can keep desperately trying to argue that somehow carpet bombing Cambodia didn't hand power to the Khmer Rouge, over and over, and you can keep trying to blame it on Noam Chomsky or any other one of your left intellectual enemies.

You can keep trying. You're welcome to do so.

But it just isn't holding any more. The right wing can try to blame every one of its catastrophes on liberals and leftist intellectuals stabbing them in the back, and if only the military had been allowed to really, really fight, if maybe they had increased carpet bombing to 100% of Cambodian territory it would have stopped the nasty, Noam-Chomsky directed Khmer Rouge.

You know it. It bugs the crap out of you. You hate it.

But people aren't as retarded as you.

They've seen the same thing in Iraq. You deranged and retarded hawks go in to a country and rip it to shreds in the guise of saving it. Shortly it ends up even more of a nightmare than it ever was. (But Germany! you cry, But Japan!, you squeal, and yet, silence, and echoes.)

Once again you try eagerly, energetically to blame your hawkish catastrophes on liberal and left intellectuals.

It's just not flying like it used to. In the good old days when the Reaganite right was in its ascendancy, it felt good, and you could throw around the dolchstosslegende in every single scenario.

And now that the entire Reaganite ideology is falling back down again, you try, and you try harder, and you try even harder.

But you know that the next time you recommend bombing the hell out of some country for its own good, or having your right wing lunatic politicians invade it and occupy it in order to bring light and goodness and peace and democracy to the world, it won't work as well.

No one, no one at all, outside the stinky remnants of FrontPageMag ex-Communists or ex-Maoists, argues that the carpet bombing of Cambodia did anything other than destroy it and hand power to the Khmer Rouge.

And you can scream like a baby for the rest of your life and the rest of your children's and grandchildren's lives, and no one outside your stinky little enclaves will ever, ever believe you.

Posted by El Cid | July 24, 2007 12:42 PM

Posted by El Cid | July 24, 2007 12:42 PM:"you can keep desperately trying to argue that somehow carpet bombing Cambodia didn't hand power to the Khmer Rouge, over and over, and you can keep trying to blame it on Noam Chomsky or any other one of your left intellectual enemies."

Well I'd have to be desperate first and I am not because what I say is true and it will go on remaining true for the indefinite future.

The bombing did not hand power over to the KR. It was aimed at keeping them out of power. Forcing the US Army to withdrawal from Indochina handed power over to the Khmer Rouge. This is not trying to blame anyone. It is stating an obvious fact.

Posted by El Cid | July 24, 2007 12:42 PM:"The right wing can try to blame every one of its catastrophes on liberals and leftist intellectuals stabbing them in the back, and if only the military had been allowed to really, really fight, if maybe they had increased carpet bombing to 100% of Cambodian territory it would have stopped the nasty, Noam-Chomsky directed Khmer Rouge."

The Right has its own share of screw ups. The Left has its share of triumphs. It is not about blaming Left or Right. It is about the facts. There was and is nothing inevitable in the world. Had the US Army remained in Indochina I don't see how things would have gone on the same. Some sort of diplomatic deal could have been done with China. The Communists may have given up. Who knows? Despair is rarely a good council.

Posted by El Cid | July 24, 2007 12:42 PM:"In the good old days when the Reaganite right was in its ascendancy, it felt good, and you could throw around the dolchstosslegende in every single scenario."

Nice use of a German word.

Posted by El Cid | July 24, 2007 12:42 PM:"No one, no one at all, outside the stinky remnants of FrontPageMag ex-Communists or ex-Maoists, argues that the carpet bombing of Cambodia did anything other than destroy it and hand power to the Khmer Rouge."

If that were so it would only reflect badly on the mainstream. Cambodia was not destroyed by the bombing. A lot of trees and rocks were, but the Americans did not bomb Cambodia, they bombed the Khmer Rouge. Not one city got bombed that I know of. Not one major town. They made a major assault on the rain forest. This too is a fact. Even if you go on denying it and trying to pretend that the blood on you and your friends' hands is not in fact something you wanted.

Posted by HeiGou | July 24, 2007 12:58 PM

Keep at it Seer Taak. Keep trying. Oh, the bombs dropped only on forests and were keeping the guerrillas from power. Oh, we could have kept bombing them into safety if only those meddlin' perfessers hadn't gotten in the way!

Kiernan and the Yale project are actual scholars, working with real and primary research, no matter how much you call them Maoists and try to ignore data from the U.S. military itself. And every time someone documents where the bombs fell, and who were killed by them, you can keep crying that only forests and guerrillas were hit! Nowhere! There's no proof, at least, none you'll ever accept!

Somehow, even though no cities or villages or people were ever bombed, the bombing appears to have killed somewhere between 150,000 and 750,000 people, though of course no one cared to look or count, since only trees and forests and guerrillas were bombed.

And no less impeachable a source then Henry Kissinger declared the safety of Cambodian civilians:

Air operations were subject to rules of engagement that prohibited the use of B-52s against targets closer than one kilometre to friendly forces, villages, hamlets, houses, monuments, temples, pagodas, or holy places. — Henry Kissinger, _Ending the Vietnam War_

Hundreds of examples of villages being bombed can be extrapolated from the database, countering Kissinger’s claim. The “after” map shows the destruction of villages in Kandal Province, southwest of Phnom Penh, by 6,418 tons of ordnance dropped between Nov. 7, 1972, and Aug. 14, 1973. Black dots represent huts, red dots are bombing points, and red circles are areas carpet bombed by B-52s.

http://www.yale.edu/cgp/Walrus_CambodiaBombing_OCT06.pdf

Yes, of course it reflects badly on the mainstream that they no longer accept the lunacy of carpet bombing the peasants into safety and freedom. Sure it does.

And you can maintain your sense of superiority along with that growing sense of bitterness that no one outside the stinky little circles of hawkish loonies believes that the US carpet bombing of Cambodia didn't hand power to the Khmer Rouge -- not solely, not the only factor, but without which the Khmer Rouge victory would not have been assured.

Posted by El Cid | July 24, 2007 2:07 PM

Please don't be a moron, Matt. Please.

Posted by Mr. X | July 24, 2007 5:13 PM

Thanks, Bloix, you said what I wanted to say to Vanya more eloquently than I could have. People who attack CPUSA members of the '40s as complicit in Stalin's crimes are flat ignorant of history, and incapable of digesting nuance. We should study why people made the choices they did in the context of the times, rather than with the benefit of hindsight. After all, we don't disown Jefferson and Washington because they were slaveowners.

Posted by Gus | July 24, 2007 5:56 PM

Also, saying you bear a grudge against folk music reveals a deep ignorance of America's cultural history, not to mention a sad lack of musical taste. I'm not a big fan of Pete Seeger's music particularly, nor of that of Peter, Paul and Mary or the Kingston Trio, but to make a blanket condemnation of folk music is ignorant. Maybe you just didn't define your term sufficiently, and I'm reading too much into it. Is Doc Watson folk? Chris Smither? Mississippi John Hurt? Between the historically ignorant redbaiting and the silly remark about folk music, this is one of the worst posts I've ever read on a liberal blog. I would have though such a post beneath you. I'll chalk it up to callow youth. I'll still read your blog, but man have I lost a good deal of respect for you.

Posted by Gus | July 24, 2007 11:05 PM

Pete Seeger is an American hero, to call him a Stalinist is defamation of the worst sort, but to criticize someone who is largely responsible for keeping the folk culture of the past alive through his music is reprehensible. Whether it was working to help organize unions, fight fascism, racism or promote civil right and environmentalism, Seeger's spent more hours working to make the world a better place than you've had hot meals. And he wrote "Turn, Turn, Turn" "If I had a Hammer", "Waist deep in the Big Muddy" and preserved and popularized great music from America's past and from around the world. He is owed an enormous debt by the Western world.
Matt, you should be ashamed of yourself.

Posted by rev.paperboy | July 26, 2007 4:02 AM

Posted by El Cid | July 24, 2007 2:07 PM:"Oh, the bombs dropped only on forests and were keeping the guerrillas from power. Oh, we could have kept bombing them into safety if only those meddlin' perfessers hadn't gotten in the way!"

Good to see you're coming around to the real world.

Posted by El Cid | July 24, 2007 2:07 PM:"Kiernan and the Yale project are actual scholars, working with real and primary research, no matter how much you call them Maoists and try to ignore data from the U.S. military itself."

No matter how many times you lie about what I say, you will not win this argument. Kiernan was a Maoist and a strong friend of the Khmer Rouge until he started asking where all his wife's relatives were, but I have never accused him of being one up to now nor is it contradictory to be both a Maoist and a scholar. What data? The data supports me.

Posted by El Cid | July 24, 2007 2:07 PM:"And every time someone documents where the bombs fell, and who were killed by them, you can keep crying that only forests and guerrillas were hit! Nowhere! There's no proof, at least, none you'll ever accept!"

I have never said that only forest and guerillas were hit. Keep trying. One day you may actually make a valid response to what I have said. What I have said is that given they were aimed at the KR who were in the mountains and jungles, it is absurd to claim that the country was destroyed.

Posted by El Cid | July 24, 2007 2:07 PM:"Somehow, even though no cities or villages or people were ever bombed, the bombing appears to have killed somewhere between 150,000 and 750,000 people, though of course no one cared to look or count, since only trees and forests and guerrillas were bombed."

Why not claim 1.7 million? Why so shy? Your own source gives a lower figure of 50,000. From over 2.75 million tons of bombs. If you had any sort of, well I can't think of the right word, you would recognise how this proves my point. Even their high end figure is your low end figure 150,000. In a country like Cambodia even the tragic killing of 150,000 peasants does not destroy the country. So why are you inventing numbers? Why are you dishonestly trying to conflate cities and villages? Look at the map your source provides - notice the pattern of the bombing. This simply proves my point.

Posted by El Cid | July 24, 2007 2:07 PM:"Hundreds of examples of villages being bombed can be extrapolated from the database, countering Kissinger’s claim. The “after” map shows the destruction of villages in Kandal Province, southwest of Phnom Penh, by 6,418 tons of ordnance dropped between Nov. 7, 1972, and Aug. 14, 1973. Black dots represent huts, red dots are bombing points, and red circles are areas carpet bombed by B-52s."

Extrapolated. Kissinger is talking about SIOPs. Bombs do not always fall where they are intended to go. I don't think that these authors "counter" what he says at all. Notice that you get any sort of point at all you have to reduce the bombing down to individual huts. This is proof of how few civilians were bombed.

Posted by El Cid | July 24, 2007 2:07 PM:"And you can maintain your sense of superiority along with that growing sense of bitterness that no one outside the stinky little circles of hawkish loonies believes that the US carpet bombing of Cambodia didn't hand power to the Khmer Rouge -- not solely, not the only factor, but without which the Khmer Rouge victory would not have been assured."

Actually the only bitterness I see here is yours. You are ranting and throwing insults. Not me. No one in their right mind believes that US bombing handed Cambodia over to the KR much less the long string of more extreme claims you have made. The simple fact is that several hundred thousand Northern Vietnamese soldiers in Cambodia meant that Cambodia was going to become a Communist country. As Laos did when, as with Cambodia, the Royalist government made a secret deal to allow the Vietnamese access which soon became de facto annexation - a fate Cambodia only escaped because of the Sino-Soviet split.

So keep the Faith. Continue to insult and rant. You will not be able to change a single fact.

Posted by HeiGou | July 26, 2007 7:11 AM

Posted by rev.paperboy | July 26, 2007 4:02 AM:"Pete Seeger is an American hero, to call him a Stalinist is defamation of the worst sort, but to criticize someone who is largely responsible for keeping the folk culture of the past alive through his music is reprehensible.

Sorry but hero? What exactly did Seeger do that would make him a hero? He strummed a banjo for the Services? Bob Hope is a hero by that standard. Let's do debase a fine word. Heroes are people who rescue other people from burning buildings, who take a bullet in the chest to protect their friends, who leap into flooding rivers to save small children, who suffer in pain in hospices as are those who work with them. Seeger made a lot of money doing very little hard work singing songs.

As for keeping folk culture alive, please! Most folk culture ought to die.

Posted by rev.paperboy | July 26, 2007 4:02 AM:"Whether it was working to help organize unions, fight fascism, racism or promote civil right and environmentalism, Seeger's spent more hours working to make the world a better place than you've had hot meals."

So what do you think about all those years that Seeger worked to prevent anyone fighting Fascism? You know, back when Stalin was friends with Hitler and Seeger loudly opposed Roosevelt's opposition to Hitler?

Posted by HeiGou | July 26, 2007 7:48 AM

Why are you dishonestly trying to conflate cities and villages? Look at the map your source provides - notice the pattern of the bombing. This simply proves my point.

Once again, no point of yours was proven. Not one. Not by my posts, not by the source material, not by your comments. Keep on wishing they did -- no one agreed on 50,000, and if you read the source documents, you'd see why that was.

But feel free to keep looking at maps showing bombs falling on villages, which of course are empty and only contain "rain forests" and "guerrillas", and keep reading the testimonies of all the Cambodians who describe the effects of the carpet bombing, and those who trace each one.

(For that matter, why not argue that the bullets fired by the Khmer Rouge guerrillas, especially once given power by the US' carpet bombing, didn't actually strike any human targets, but instead were far, far more statistically likely to hit "rain forests" than human flesh? And, by the way, your client is no doubt innocent of murder charges because you believe the victim died of a heart attack before the bullet entered the chest cavity.)

I know, I know, I know, you want everyone to be frightened away from the truth when you and other little turds keep repeating that anyone who cares about what happened in Cambodia were Maoists etc., and that the way to save peasant societies from guerrilla movements is to carpet bomb them.

But you know I'm right, and it bugs the hell out of you, that the Scooby-doo defense of carpet-bombing Cambodia, that it would have saved them from the guerrillas if it weren't for those meddlin' perfessers, is fading, fading, fading.

Posted by El Cid | July 26, 2007 11:16 PM

And since the primary source researchers in the effects of the US' carpet bombing of Cambodia aiding the Khmer Rouge to power are being misinterpreted by our resident Scooby-doo theorist (i.e., this was just bombing of a "rain forest"), here are some of their words:

Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan respond to a letter about their article “Bombs Over Cambodia” (October): [Letter writer] J. K. Halligan suggests that the new US Air Force data we presented on the bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War, which revealed the total payload to have been far greater than previously believed, would not necessarily have translated into higher casualty figures for Cambodians. Halligan also casts doubt on our thesis that the bombing drove survivors to support the fledgling Khmer Rouge insurgency.
While it’s true that “vast areas” of rural Cambodia and the Ho Chi Minh Trail are indeed “sparsely inhabited,” those were not the only targets of the US carpet bombardments from 1969 to 1973. Our extensive maps show that the Air Force heavily targeted most of the populated lowlands of Cambodia. Matching detailed topographic base maps with the Pentagon’s bombing data shows hundreds of Cambodian villages included in B-52 target “boxes.”

Of course, the Khmer Rouge also profited from their alliance with Prince Sihanouk and from aid they received from China and Vietnamese Communists, but the role of the US bombardment in helping bring this genocidal regime to power is undeniable. There is no reason to ask the former Khmer Rouge head of state to confirm the fact; it is well documented in contemporary US official reporting and by numerous peasant witnesses. To take one example, the following response to our Walrus article was posted on my website, taylorowen.com:

I could not agree with you more based on my experiences during the bombing in Takeo around 1972. The bombings were [spreading] further into towns and villages. My parents’ house was hit by the bombs, and we had to move to the opposite side of the country. We had known [that] almost the entire village that survived from the bombings had joined forces with the Khmer Rouge.

Kissinger and Nixon did not plan this, but they likely knew it was happening. The same May 1973 [C.I.A.] report we quote in our article as stating that the Khmer Rouge were using the bombing as propaganda also confirmed that the propaganda campaign had been effective. And yet, the US bombing campaign continued until Congress prohibited it.

After the Khmer Rouge victory in April 1975, the burgeoning US-China alliance led Washington to quietly support the Pol Pot regime. Kissinger told Thailand’s foreign minister on November 26, 1975, “You should also tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in our way.”
http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2007.02-letters-february-2007/3/

But, again, I'm sure the Scooby-Doo mystery van will pop up to say that, no, carpet bombing Cambodia didn't help a lunatic Maoist guerrilla movement take over, it was Noam Chomsky and the city of Paris what did it.

Posted by El Cid | July 27, 2007 12:34 AM

Pete Seeger, Stalinist

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