Murder of a Gentle Land, by John Barron & Anthony Paul and Cambodia: Year Zero, by François Ponchaud
Murchison, William
BOOKS IN REVIEW - Murder of a Gentle Land John Barron and Anthony Paul / Reader's Digest Press / $9.95 Cambodia: Year Zero Francois Ponchaud / Holt, Rinehart and Winston / $8.95 On August 21, 1978,...
...At this time, Palmer writes, arose the question of who would back down: Hanoi, as a result of our rising military assault, or the United States, be-cause of the national dissent movement...
...It is a distinguished history of those strange and confusing years at the end of which our great nation suffered its first (and hopefully last) strategic defeat, at the hands of an eighth-rate nation which simply demonstrated one of the priceless ingredients needed for success in war—a national will to win...
...It is important to note that the results of the Ap Bac battle were not accurately reported at the time to CINCPAC and presumably the JCS...
...Today, even after three years, the killing and oppression go on...
...This stands to -reason, Ponchaud being a French priest resident ten years in Cambodia at the time of its fall —a man with prior understanding of the country and its complex people...
...Only there is no theatre here...
...But where are the protest marches, the waving banners and shrieks of outrage, that once enlivened Pennsylvania Avenue and the Berkeley campus...
...How harmless they had looked in bygone days—Khieu Samphan, the bicycle-riding ascetic...
...Here you have a group of fanatics killing their own people...
...The masters of Cambodia have, notwithstanding, the luck to be men of the Left...
...The United Nations would invoke sanctions...
...The hapless townsmen driven out into the countryside fared only a little better than the more obvious class enemies...
...For answers, Ponchaud turns to the Cambodian character—unforgiving of enemies...
...BOOK REVIEW Murder of a Gentle Land John Barron and Anthony Paul / Reader's Digest Press / $9.95 Cambodia: Year Zero Francois Ponchaud / Holt, Rinehart and Winston / $8.95 On August 21, 1978, Senator George S. McGovern, whose capacity to shock has never been underrated, innocently inquired during a Foreign Relations Committee hearing whether anyone had given thought to the dispatch of an inter-national force that would stop the genocide in Cambodia...
...McGovern did not say whether he has read either of these books...
...Like Barron and Paul, Ponchaud has stitched together his narrative from inter-views with refugees (the little people were the ones to whom he gave the most credence), the broadcasts of Radio Phnom Penh, and such other scanty sources as could be found...
...This book begins by describing United States activities in the so-called "Advisory Decade," 1954-1961, which came hard on the heels of the Korean War...
...civilians, including women and children, slaughtered as pitilessly as though they were insects...
...1 dove, to all appearances, had unzipped his outer garments, exposing for a startling instant the bristling feathers of a hawk...
...For a book so full of horrors, Cambodia: Year Zero is written with a curious kind of detachment, as if, even in his nightmares, Ponchaud has been unwilling or unable to drop the scholarly manner...
...Based on the percentage of the population," he said, "that makes Hitler's operation seem tame...
...but crimes so ghastly as theirs are not to be hidden...
...No sooner were the victorious Communists in possession of Phnom Penh—they entered on April 17, 1975, to the cheers of fellow Khmers sick of the long, brutal war—than they began enforcing the city's total evacuation...
...Thus, with Palmer's negative appraisal of Vann I must disagree...
...There is less Southeast Asian Grand Guignol, more studious analysis of Angka (or Angkar, as Ponchaud spells it) and its objectives...
...disease and famine and meaningless brutality let loose on a land of William Murchison is an editorial writer for the Dallas Morning News...
...Three or four million people, driven out of all the country's cities into the countryside...
...all too plainly, the vast majority of his brethren haven't...
...His abhorrence of the Communist regime (which threw him out of the country) is plain enough all the same...
...It was the boast of Radio Phnom Penh, a year after the conquest, that "medicines are be-coming increasingly scientific...
...Hu Nim, a lawyer...
...American Enterprise Institute Cetvi:D Department 645 1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W...
...He had commanded a ranger company in Korea (in the early days), and literally symbolized the energetic, professionally motivated, and capable soldier so badly needed today...
...About John Barron and Anthony Paul's Murder of a Gentle Land, there is almost the aura of the Grand Guignol: Necks broken with hoes, children battered against trees, whole families shot down in a twinkling...
...Life in Kampuchea is geared to "struggle," a favorite word of the regime...
...He then carefully analyzes the gently-shifting strategy of Hanoi and its great revolutionary leader, Ho Chi Minh, into a protracted war-fare scenario...
...Ieng Sary, a teacher...
...We served together in 1962 when I first arrived in Vietnam and he was assigned as Senior Advisor, 7th ARVN Division, in the Mekong Delta...
...For the "totality and barbarity" with which the experiment was going forward, the authors could find no "precise precedent...
...Had some of his words been heard by more important and influential listeners in 1963, it is my view that our nation would be better off today...
...Several battles, such as the Ia Drang Valley and Cedar Falls, are described in detail, and the evolution of our tactics in accordance with the strategy of "graduated response" is fully explained...
...The THE NEW AMERICAN POLITICAL SYSTEM Edited by Anthony King Ten prominent political scientists describe the important changes in the American political system since 1960 and assess the significance of those changes...
...Chou En-lai him-self is said to have urged restraint on Khieu Samphan...
...after-action report, which I prepared, was "sanitized" after the battle by a senior staff officer in HQ MACV...
...They concluded that a coterie of fanatics had "converted all Cambodia into a social laboratory and all Cambodians into experimental specimens...
...g. , Buddhism—are specifically outlawed by the Kampuchean constitution...
...Three years later he was killed as a result of enemy action...
...dissertations deposited at the Sorbonne by Khieu Samphan and his fellow revolutionary, Hou Youn...
...Hospital beds were trundled through the streets, I-V's dangling from patients' arms...
...His prediction was correct...
...To say the least, it is no pleasant kind of society...
...This strategy discounted time, and correctly perceived an inherent weakness of our society—our passion for quick victories in war...
...dissertations...
...From this developed our strategy of the mid-sixties, known as "graduated response...
...Perhaps the most scholarly section of the book is that which deals with operation "Rolling Thunder," the orchestrated bombing of North Vietnam intended to convince Hanoi to cease its aggressive acts...
...Were they men of the Right—Chilean generals, say—there would be worldwide protests against them...
...The fanatics turned out to be the worst specimens of the breed—left-wing intellectuals run amok...
...Various of them had been educated at the Sorbonne...
...The next several chapters relate to the vast military build-up which commenced during the spring of 1965 and continued through Tet, 1968...
...20036 The American Spectator December 1978 33 people live on cooperatives and state farms and toil unendingly...
...Horrific they must be, or George McGovern would hardly have noticed...
...What we seem to have in Cambodia, said the senator, is "a clear case of genocide...
...When I last saw him in March 1969, he told me that he knew he was to die in Vietnam...
...The Cambodians must be less than animals, then, since nobody can be bothered to defend them...
...and human relations, in-cluding the upbringing of children, have become the care of the state...
...BOOK REVIEW Summons of the Trumpet Dave R. Palmer / Presidio Press / $12.95 George S. Patton Summons of the Trumpet is "the story of American military involvement in Vietnam—why we entered, what we did, and how we left...
...In so tautly organized a society there is obviously no room for dissentient attitudes...
...Washington, D.C...
...How Angka could have expected success under such conditions defies explanation—except the explanation that Angka cared only for the success of its demonical plan...
...The chapter, "Rolling Thunder," is a must, particularly Palmer's discussion of the selection of targets by OSD civilians in the Pentagon—the centralized controls of a time when "policy makers...seemed to do everything but actually fly the aircraft...
...On a per capita basis, the basis that rightly impresses Senator Mc-Govern, the Cambodian carnage is al-most certainly the crime of the century...
...When the first such stories began seep-ing out of Cambodia, Barron and Paul, who are editors of Reader's Digest, undertook to check them out...
...There can be no bleaker land anywhere...
...I have personal knowledge that the immediate Major General George S. Patton is Deputy Commander, HQ VII Corps, New York...
...Barron and Paul would like to know...
...Cambodia dies in agony, and the world tip-toes silently by on the other side...
...Why so thoroughgoing a transformation —such a transformation as not even China or Russia experienced...
...Meanwhile, the guerrillas turned on the visible signs of effete Western culture, burning money, smashing up pharmacies, destroying libraries...
...Further, he had the guts to get up and say what he believed...
...Its fanaticism burns with a hard and perdurable flame...
...No use to venture that Western opinion-makers lack the hard facts, the raw data, to develop an indictment of the bloody work going forth in Cambodia...
...America's No...
...The professed ideals are lofty enough—"genuine happiness, equality, justice, and democracy, without rich or poor and without exploiters or exploited" —but the practice is utterly at variance with the rhetoric...
...The vanquished officer corps of Lon Nol's army was the first to go (so had Stalin, at the Katyn Forest, tried to eliminate intelligent resistance by massacring officers), along with civil servants, businessmen, and other running dogs of the regime...
...v Sarkes Tarzian Inc...
...McGovern's would be far from the only voice muttering, or shouting, of the need to invade...
...This was a crucial turning point because it demonstrated that the Viet Cong were tough, that they could inflict serious damage, and, most important, that the United States had a long way to go before it could put its stamp of approval on a truly combat-ready South Vietnamese Army...
...All were to leave, even the sick, even There is opportunity in America...
...I welcomed the revolutionaries' victory," he writes, "as the only possible means of bringing Cambodia out of its misery," imposed by the corrupt governments of .Prince Sihanouk and General Lon Nol...
...The escalation of the advisory effort is examined and the milestones of that involvement—such as General Maxwell Taylor's visit of November 1961 and the establishment of the Military Assistance Command Vietnam (of which I was an early member)—are accurately recounted...
...They call their tightly-knit command structure Angka Loeu (roughly "the organization on high...
...34 The American Spectator December 1978...
...Reactionary religions"—e...
...Since the senator's confession, Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda have also expressed their concern...
...Ponchaud also blames the feu-dal nature of postcolonial Cambodia for creating a revolutionary atmosphere...
...Out of this battle emerged one of the great characters of the period, John Paul Vann...
...Jaws dropped, suspender buttons popped, spectators swooned...
...He troubled even to read the Ph.D...
...Colonel Palmer takes us through the overthrow and execution of President Diem, recalling the political turbulence and unstable leadership that afflicted the Vietnamese republic in the early 1960s...
...So would Ponchaud...
...They interviewed refugees in Thailand, examined Radio Phnom Penh's daily broadcasts, and consulted scholars on Cambodia...
...one or two had actually produced Ph.D...
...All is warfare against nature and the elements, not to say the reactionaries...
...We became fast friends...
...When the French journalist jean Lacoutre, himself a leftist, albeit an honest one, favorably reviewed the book's French edition in the New York Review of Books, he was castigated straightaway by Noam Chomsky...
...Mc-Govern cited estimates that as many as 2.5 million Cambodians—in a population of only seven million—may have died in the holocaust...
...He was a great soldier, thoroughly dedicated to what he believed to be right for both Vietnam and the U.S...
...What the Communists were up to became brutally plain—nothing less, Barron and Paul explain, than "to annul the past and obliterate the present so as to fashion a future uncontaminated by the influences of either...
...For Cambodia the world has turned upside down...
...Bloomington, Indiana 32 The American Spectator December 1978 mothers in childbirth...
...Thus that which we husband the most carefully, they [the North Vietnamese] expend the most liberally...
...It was only part of the plan to eradicate visible evidence of past and present...
...It is precious enough,...to be valued, but because it is of unlimited abundance, one can hardly use too much of it...
...Thus the higher levels of command were denied knowledge of what really happened at Ap Bac...
...The slow and the balky were killed without second thought...
...There are no criminal socialist regimes, it would appear—only decent ones gone momentarily, and probably pardonably, astray...
...The horror is real and far too large for any stage...
...More urgent was the need to eradicate all those who might offer resistance, or even mild criticism...
...William Murchison grace and plenty—such is the Cambodian revolution...
...Once the tale of the evacuations and initial slaughter is done, Ponchaud turns to the kind of society that Cambodia, now "Democratic Kampuchea," has become...
...The country's rulers may have sealed their borders against the contamination, and the prying eyes, of foreigners...
...There was no medicine in the "new villages" and there were only the crudesttools...
...The word is out—at least in these two books, each excellent, each full of authentic, not to say stomach-churning, detail...
...On Christmas Day, 1975, a Khmer friend said to him: "In France there are societies for the protection of animals and factories which manufacture special food for dogs and cats...
...So it does...
...Here, with modern society smashed to pieces, the wheel is continually being reinvented...
...prone to take a simple idea and push it "to the limits of its internal logic and often to the point of absurdity, without any regard for realities or any forethought for practical consequences...
...I first met Vann in the fall of 1957 when he and I were classmates at the Command and General Staff College in Leaven-worth, Kansas...
...From "struggle" a new race is to be born, though, as Ponchaud notes, "only by killing an old art of living compounded of freedom, tolerance, and respect for life...
...They were thrown without preparation onto the land, told to grow rice or die...
...He faults the erratic policies of Prince Sihanouk, the country's leader from 1941 to1970, for having undercut its stability and made possible the Communist triumph...
...Although they were to glorify manual labor as the highest of endeavors," observe Barron and Paul, "none had ever earned a living with his or her hands...
...Indeed, when the book appeared in France it created a scandal, with leftistsdriven to discredit it in order that a supposedly sincere leftist government should not be calumniated...
...The emphasis of Francois Ponchaud's Cambodia: Year Zero is somewhat different...
...By the hundreds of thousands they died, if not of starvation, then of the numberless diseases that ravish the weak and the frightened...
...It is well to remember that during this period (1966-1968), anti-war movements in the United States were daily gaining in intensity...
...Democratic Kampuchea is organized on military lines, a place for everyone and everyone in his place...
...Colonel Palmer next turns to one of the vital episodes of the war, the battle of Ap Bac on 2 January 1963...
...Ponchaud was in fact sympathetic to the Khmer Rouge at the outset of the revolution...
...Writes Palmer, time `is an endless stream flowing from an in-finitely regenerating source...
...With chapters by: Samuel H. Beer • Fred I. Greenstein • Hugh Heclo Samuel C. Patterson • Martin Shapiro • Austin Ranney Jeane J. Kirkpatrick • Richard A. Brody Leon D. Epstein • Anthony King 407 pages / $6.75 Name Address City State Zip, Payment must accompany orders under $10...
Vol. 11 • December 1978 • No. 12
