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Safety Biscuits posted:The figures he endorses in Manufacturing Consent 6.2.2 (1988) are 600-750,000 dead due to the Khmer Rouge, which is rather late to the party... He seems to be very touchy about admitting that he was wrong, but definitely doesn't deny it. Anyway, it's a single stain on an interesting book, although on thinking about it some more they push the propaganda model a bit far. While on the lower end of most estimates, those figures aren't ridiculous in terms of the academic literature on the topic - they're pretty similar to the figures Michael Vickery gives in 'Cambodia 1975-1982' (though note that he does so while also saying that he doesn't think it's actually possible to give a reliable estimate because there simply isn't any data for Cambodia's population in 1975). I think some of the recent archaeological work on mass grave sites may have enabled the calculation of more accurate figures although I'm not sure really. Vickery also points out that initial media coverage of the country was slanted and wrong, in the sense that they reported mass killings and atrocities in every part of the country from the moment the CPK took power, when in fact mass killings only really got going on a wide scale in 1976 and particularly in 1977 as the state began to collapse because of different factions in the party basically waging open war against each other, and the extent of mass killings varied by area depending on factors like the disposition of the cadres in the area and the factions they were associated with. So the media reports were slanted towards American interests even though significant aspects of what they were saying was true, or became true. The US media also mysteriously stopped saying anything bad about Pol Pot after he was ousted from power and became a US backed contra, at the same time as there were some genuinely ridiculous stories of Vietnamese atrocities in the country in the 80s, which I think gives you an idea of what was motivating their reporting.
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Sep 16, 2020 07:21
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fez_machine posted:Unfortunately, there's much less good Leftist fiction than liberal or conservative because if you're politicly alert enough to have the right politics, why write fiction? There's far more practical things to be doing. I don't think this is particularly true, and it seems vaguely stupid, as if there aren't left wing writers who see the inherent value in fiction as a thing in itself.
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Jul 30, 2021 13:52
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