Pol Pot and the left.

I pulled up to my house one day but I didn't get out of the car for five minutes. I was listening to WORT, Madison's invaluable community station, and there was an interview on with a survivor of the Khmer Rouge. I couldn't turn it off. He was describing what had happened to him and his family on April 17, 1975, the day the Khmer Rouge took over. He told of hearing shots, of seeing bodies by the side of the road. And he told of seeing his own mother shot dead by the Khmer Rouge a few days later.

I called up my friends at WORT to praise the program and to find out who the guest was. They told me his name is Sophea Mouth, and he lives right here in town. I decided to invite him in for a half-hour Second Opinion interview. The encounter has stayed with me ever since, and I thought you might be interested in his views on the need to bring Pol Pot before an international tribunal (see page 11).

A few weeks after I spoke with Sophea Mouth, Anthony Lewis wrote a column in The New York Times about Pol Pot and the left. "A few Western intellectuals, notably Professor Noam Chomsky, refused to believe what was going on in Cambodia," he wrote. "At first, at least, they put the reports of killing down to a conspiratorial effort by American politicians and press to destroy the Cambodian revolution."

Was this true? I felt compelled to find out. I have to conclude it wasn't Chomsky's finest hour. Writing in the June 25, 1977, issue of The Nation, he and Edward S. Herman tried to poke holes in books that warned of Khmer Rouge atrocities. Though one of these books was "serious and worth reading" and did include a "grisly account" of Khmer Rouge "barbarity," they cited "repeated discoveries that massacre reports were false." They also gave short shrift to accounts from Cambodians who had fled, citing the "extreme unreliability of refugee reports."

Of course, Chomsky and Herman had reason to be skeptical. The American people had been fed lies about the situation in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia for twenty years. They were also correct to point out how the massive destruction of Cambodia by U.S. bombing paved the way for the Khmer Rouge. And they were right that the U.S. media tend to be much more interested in communist atrocities than in the atrocities that U.S. allies commit.

But they were wrong to suggest that Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge may have been "more similar to France after liberation" than to Germany under the Nazis. Chomsky and Herman did equivocate, however: "We do not pretend to know where the truth lies amidst these sharply conflicting assessments," they wrote.

And what of The Progressive? This magazine didn't exactly shower itself with glory, either. In a November 1978 editorial, The Progressive expressed skepticism about the reports of genocide in Cambodia and scolded Senator George McGovern for being "taken in." McGovern had warned that "something horrible is now transpiring in Cambodia" and called for an international intervention.

In the issue that followed, Milton Mayer, the longtime "roving editor" of The Progressive, mocked a UPI dispatch that concerned Cambodia. Mayer quoted the dispatch as follows: "A refugee from Siem Reap recalled a friend who was discovered having intercourse. The communists beat him to death, forcing his girlfriend to watch." Mayer then added this commentary: "Did the refugee from Siem Reap witness the intercourse? If so, he may have been a dirty old man. If not, how (and how reliably) was he informed of it? Did he witness the beating to death of his friend and, if so, why didn't he intervene (the cad), and if not, how does he know that it wasn't the communists who were having intercourse with the girlfriend and the friend who beat the communists to death -- in accord with the best anti-communist scenario?"

Only in August 1980, when William Steif wrote an excellent report for The Progressive from the Cambodian refugee camps in Thailand, did readers of this magazine receive a glimpse of the Khmer Rouge holocaust.

What lessons do I draw from all this? First, we on the left need to recognize that the United States does not commit every evil in the world; there is plenty to go around.

Second, the Khmer Rouge prove, once and for all, the horrific potential of violent revolutions, followed by vanguard dictatorships, suffused with romantic Marxist and Rousseauian notions about creating a new man, a "species being."

Third, our anti-interventionism and pacifism can blind us to the grossest human-rights abuses abroad.

And, on a personal note, I have a renewed sense of caution about issuing pronouncements.