This partial Canon offers a glimpse into the assumptions and logic, evidence and arguments that a generation of Western scholars used to defend the Khmer Rouge or rationalize their policies during the mid-to-late 1970s. Together, they created the standard total academic view. This glimpse, whether representative or not, is in and of itself a testament to Khmer Rouge's charm over academia.

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In chapter 3, the Chomsky-Lacouture Controversy is reconstructed. It is more a Ponchaud- Barron-Paul-Lacouture-Chomsky-Herman Controversy, to be sure, but that would sound tediously long. In early 1977, François Ponchaud wrote the first book detailing the struggle, under socialism, of the Cambodian people. That year, Barron and Paul published their own book, Murder of a Gentle Land (1977) an equally if not more damning broadside against the Khmer revolution and the Khmer Rouge. Ponchaud and Barron-Paul were among the first to see to sound the alarm on Cambodia. In 1976, Ponchaud had written in Mondes Asiatiques about the nature of the Khmer revolution.[19] After publishing his book, it was reviewed favorably by Jean Lacouture, but that review got a broadside from the leading, most intellectually formidable member of the antiwar movement, Noam Chomsky. At the May Hearings in 1977 on Human Rights in Cambodia, Gareth Porter trashed Ponchaud his uncritical use of refugees in Cambodia: Year Zero. A polemical exchange ensued among Chomsky, Lacouture, Ponchaud, and Bob Silvers, then editor of the New York Review of Books which had translated the Lacouture review titled "The Bloodiest Revolution."

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The Porter-Chomsky-Herman objections were numerous, but still Chomsky and Herman admitted that Ponchaud's book was "serious and worth reading" though full of discrepancies and unreliable refugee reports which were contradicted by other refugees (who, for instance, had said that they had walked across the country and seen no dead bodies). This was vindication of the Khmer Rouge--reports of having seen no evil nor heard any evil. The Porter-Chomsky-Herman logic in a nutshell: Refugees are run away because they are displeased, thus will exaggerate, especially over time, if not lie about "alleged atrocities" altogether. Chomsky and Herman call for "care and caution," nothing short of patronizing to today's refugees from Guatemala, or El Salvador, or yesterday's from Auschwitz. Chomsky and Herman latched onto a number of media mistakes which include three fake photographs, a fake interview with Khieu Samphan, and a handful of misquotations. A little more fairly treated was Ponchaud's book, but the erratas first discovered by Ben Kiernan were blown out of proportion in Chomsky and Herman's review of the Ponchaud book for the Nation and repeated verbatim two years later in After the Cataclysm (1979).

The Standard Total Academic View on Cambodia