Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media Page #10

as the great protest of outrage over Cambodia.

The level of atrocities was comparable.

In relative terms

it was probably considerably higher in Timor.

It turns out that right in Cambodia in the

preceding years, 1970 through 1975,

there was also a comparable atrocity

for which we were responsible.

The major US attack against Cambodia

started with the bombings of the early 1970s.

They reached a peak in 1973,

and they continued up till 1975.

They were directed against inner Cambodia.

Very little is known about them,

because the media wanted it to be secret.

They knew it was going on. They just

didn't want to know what was happening.

The CIA estimates about 600,000 killed

during that five-year period,

which is mostly either US bombing,

or a US-sponsored war.

So that's pretty significant killing.

Also, the conditions

in which it let Cambodia were such

that high US officials predicted that about

a million people would die in the atermath

just from hunger and disease

because of the wreckage of the country.

Pretty good evidence

from US government and scholarly sources

that the intense bombardment

was a significant force - maybe a critical force -

in building up peasant support for the Khmer

Rouge who were a pretty marginal element.

Well, that's just the wrong story.

Ater 1975,

atrocities continued,

and that became the right story -

now they're being carried out by the bad guys.

Well, it was bad enough.

In fact, current estimates are... well, they vary.

The CIA claim 50,000 to 100,000 people killed,

and maybe another million or so

who died one way or another.

Michael Vickery is the one person

who's given a really close, detailed analysis.

His figure is maybe

Others like Ben Kiernan suggest higher figures,

but so far without a detailed analysis.

Anyway, it was terrible.

No doubt about it.

Although the atrocities - the real atrocities -

were bad enough,

they weren't quite good enough

for the purposes needed.

Within a few weeks

ater the Khmer Rouge takeover,

The New York Times

was already accusing them of genocide.

At that point, maybe a couple of hundred

or a few thousand people had been killed.

And from then on,

it was a drum beat, a chorus of genocide.

The big bestseller on Cambodia and Pol Pot

is called Murder of a Gentle Land.

Up until April 17th, 1975,

it was a gentle land of peaceful, smiling people,

and ater that some horrible holocaust

took place.

Very quickly,

a figure of two million killed was hit upon.

In fact,

what was claimed was that the Khmer Rouge

boast of having murdered two million people.

Facts are very dramatic.

In the case of

atrocities committed by the official enemy,

extraordinary show of outrage,

exaggeration, no evidence required.

Faked photographs are fine, anything goes.

Also a vast amount of lying.

I mean, an amount of lying

that would have made Stalin cringe.

It was fraudulent,

and we know that it was fraudulent

by looking at the response

to comparable atrocities

for which the United States was responsible.

Early '70s Cambodia, and Timor too -

very closely paired examples.

Well, the media response was quite dramatic.

Back in 1980,

I taught a course at Tuts University.

Well, Chomsky came around to this class,

and he made a very powerful case

that the press underplayed the fact

that the Indonesian government annexed

this former Portuguese colony in 1975,

and that if you compare it for example with

Cambodia where there was acreage of things,

this was a communist atrocity, whereas

the other was not a communist atrocity.

Well, I got quite interested in this,

and I went to talk to

the then deputy foreign editor of The Times,

and I said, "You know,

we've had very poor coverage on this".

He said, "You're right. There are a dozen

atrocities around the world we don't cover.

This is one for various reasons", so I took it up.

I was working as a reporter and writer for

a small alternative radio programme

in upstate New York,

and we received audio tapes

of interviews with Timorese leaders,

and we were quite surprised

that given the level of American involvement

that there was not more coverage,

indeed practically any coverage,

of the large-scale Indonesian killing

in the mainstream American media.

We formed a small group of people

to try to monitor the situation

and see what we could do over time

to alert public opinion

to what was actually happening in East Timor.

There were literally about half a dozen people

who simply dedicated themselves

with great commitment to getting this story

to break through.

And they reached a couple of people

in Congress.

They got to me, for example. I was able

to testify at the UN and write some things.

They kept at it, kept at it, kept at it.

Whatever is known about the subject

mainly... essentially comes from their work.

There's not much else.

I wrote first an editorial

called An Unjust War in East Timor.

It had a map,

and it said exactly what had happened.

We then ran a dozen other editorials on it.

They were read,

entered in the Congressional Record,

several Congressmen took up the cause, and

something was done in Congress as a result.

The fact the editorial page

of The New York Times on Christmas Eve

published that editorial

put our work on a very different level,

and it gave a great deal of legitimacy

to something that we were trying to...

advance for a long time,

and that was the idea and the reality

that a major tragedy

was unfolding in East Timor.

If one takes literally various...

theories that Professor Chomsky puts out,

one would feel that there is a tacit conspiracy

between the establishment press

and the government in Washington

to focus on certain things,

and ignore certain things.

So that if we broke the rules that we would

instantly get a reaction, a sharp reaction

from the overlords in Washington

who would say, "Hey, what are you doing

speaking up on East Timor?

We're trying to keep that quiet".

We didn't hear a thing.

What we did hear, and this was quite

interesting,

is that there was a guy named Arnold Kohen,

and he became a one-person lobby.

I appreciate the nice things

that Karl Meyer said about me in his interview,

but I object to the notion that a one-man lobby

was formed, or anything like that.

I think that if there weren't a large network

composed of

the American Catholic Bishops' Conference,

composed of other church groups,

human rights groups,

composed of simply concerned citizens,

and others, and a network of concern

within the news media,

I think it would have been impossible

to do anything at all at any time,

and it would have been impossible to sustain

things for as long as they've been sustained.

Professor Chomsky and many people

who engage in this kind of press analysis

have one thing in common - most of them

have never worked for a newspaper,

many of them know very little

about how newspapers work.

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