AOL News has a new home! The Huffington Post.

Click here to visit the new home of Politics Daily!

Hot on HuffPost:

See More Stories
Politics Daily

Beyond the Killing Fields? Not as Long as Brutal Wars Remain a Growth Industry

1 year ago
  0 Comments Say Something  »
Text Size
Walter Shapiro
Walter Shapiro
Senior Correspondent
Author Bio »
Contact Author »
Subscribe :
Five Politics Daily staffers -- Carl Cannon, Melinda Henneberger, Walter Shapiro, David Wood and James Grady -- are joining in an online discussion with Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg about politics and the press as seen through the prism of his new book, "Beyond The Killing Fields."

In today's essay, Walter Shapiro notes that more than three decades after the genocide in Cambodia, all of us are still grappling to find a larger meaning embedded in the horrors of the Killing Fields.

Decades from now when, alas, The New York Times is a distant memory and long-form reporting and writing have become synonymous with Tweets, I hope that the lonely keepers of the journalistic flame will still revere the remarkable Telex that Sydney Schanberg sent from a dying Phnom Penh on April 14, 1975.

With the Khmer Rouge encircling the Cambodian capital and with the last planes filled with foreign nationals about to take off, Schanberg cabled the Times: "I HAVE MADE JUDGEMENT TO STAY. I WOULD APPRECIATE YOUR SUPPORTING THAT JUDGEMENT RATHER THAN SENDING ME ALARMIST CABLES WHICH WILL ONLY MAKE A DIFFICULT DECISION MORE DIFFICULT...I MADE MY JUDGEMENT SANELY AND I WILL DO MY BEST FOR THE PAPER. I WILL FILE WHATEVER AND WHENEVER I CAN."
Sydney Schanberg's book, Beyond the Killing FieldsAs a young political reporter in Washington -- whose idea of journalistic bravery was coping after missing a press bus in Iowa -- I was awed that the Times had a reporter who had decided to remain in Phnom Penh. Rereading Schanberg's final dispatches from Cambodia, now collected in "Beyond the Killing Fields," I still respect and admire his decision to remain behind to await the Khmer Rouge. But considering his words now, with the passions of the Indo-China wars behind us, I also detect parallels with another doomed city.

What stays with me are not the war scenes themselves, but the glimpses of civilians stubbornly clinging to the remnants of normal life as the apocalypse approaches. With a novelistic eye, Schanberg noticed the driver for hire, who "leaned on the fender of his Land Rover, a mirror in one hand and tweezers in the other, pulling stray hairs from his chin." And he reported, "An elderly French woman, a teacher who is a legendary figure at the Hotel Le Phnom, sat in her regular chair at poolside this morning, wearing a white dress as always, with a white shawl over her shoulders."

What I kept thinking about was "Suite Française," Irène Némirovsky's tragically unfinished novel about the fall of Paris and the Nazi takeover of France. The difference, of course, is that the Parisians (from would-be collaborators to assimilated, but imperiled, Jews like Némirovsky) should have possessed a blunt understanding of what awaited them with the arrival of Nazi jackboots.

In contrast, the crazed genocidal fury of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge was unfathomable. Typical was the reassuring rumor, passed on to Schanberg by a Cambodian journalist, that the Khmer Rouge had been saying on their way to Phnom Penh, "Don't worry. We will not harm Cambodians. We have come to kill all the Americans." Just days later, the Khmer Rouge forced everyone (including the sick and dying in hospitals) to march out of Phnom Penh for supposed purification in the countryside. "A once throbbing city became an echo chamber of silent streets lined with abandoned cars and gaping, empty shops," Schanberg wrote in his final dispatch from Cambodia. "Street lights burned eerily for a population that wasn't there."

Thirty-five years later, all of us are still grappling to find a larger meaning embedded in the horrors of the Killing Fields. You can begin with Schanberg's own simple but dead-on justification for the retelling: "We Americans are notoriously difficult about taking lessons from our own history. So perhaps this book will remind people what war is really like."

Despite the crazed hawkishness that led to the invasion of Iraq and the jingoistic rituals of our day like the incessant playing of "God Bless America" at baseball games, Americans, for the most part, are not war lovers. Rather we are a well-intentioned -- but heedless and easily distracted -- people who treat small countries like Cambodia as playthings and then move on. Henry Kissinger's destabilization of Prince Sihanouk's neutral Cambodia was, in geopolitical terms, the equivalent of taking a single pawn in a lengthy chess game. But it led to the slaughter of roughly 2 million people, a quarter of an entire nation.

We fight wars for a while and then move on, as the Afghan people learned in 1989. These days who thinks about Granada, Panama, Somalia or even Iraq? Drone missiles are the perfect 21st century American weapon -- deadly, technologically advanced and not requiring any real-world connection with the civilian population. Sometimes it seems, American foreign policy begins and ends on the Potomac River -- designed totally for domestic consumption but with tragic global consequences.

As Schanberg reminds us in a 1997 Vanity Fair article included in this collection, the United States added to its shame all through the 1980s by supporting the Khmer Rouge's dubious (both practically and morally) claim to Cambodia's UN seat because the alternative would have empowered Vietnam. Reading that passage, I wanted to shout, "What part of genocide do you not understand?"

My colleague David Wood, in a prior installment in this bookish chain letter, mourned the passing of the era when the media marketplace unhesitatingly paid for battlefield reporting: "Great newspapers that once maintained foreign bureaus and sent forth aggressive journalists...are going or gone. Where are the Sydney Schanbergs of the future?" The sad-eyed future is almost certain to bring new and depraved versions of genocide and the Killing Fields. Brutal wars remain a growth industry even if war reporting itself is in bitter retreat.

Faced with a future Pol Pot -- a megalomaniac willing to slaughter his own people -- the civilized world is likely to do...well...a little public hand-wringing. The notion of the kind of humanitarian military intervention that belatedly forced a negotiated settlement in Bosnia and ended ethnic cleansing in Kosovo is so 1990s. After Iraq and Afghanistan, the American people are unlikely to support any military action that is not narrowly grounded in immediate U.S. self-interest. And after the worldwide economic collapse, the Europeans are too tight-fisted to send new troops or pay their bills.
The lamentable truth is that as long as the governments of the major powers are feckless -- even if reporters like Sydney Schanberg are brave -- we will never truly move beyond the Killing Fields.
Filed Under: Iraq, Media, Foreign Policy, Afghanistan, Military
Tagged: Afghanistan war, cambodia, khmer rouge, killing fields, New York Times, phnom penh, pol pot, Sydney Schanberg, war correspondents
More articles from Walter Shapiro »

Our New Approach to Comments

In an effort to encourage the same level of civil dialogue among Politics Daily’s readers that we expect of our writers – a “civilogue,” to use the term coined by PD’s Jeffrey Weiss – we are requiring commenters to use their AOL or AIM screen names to submit a comment, and we are reading all comments before publishing them. Personal attacks (on writers, other readers, Nancy Pelosi, George W. Bush, or anyone at all) and comments that are not productive additions to the conversation will not be published, period, to make room for a discussion among those with ideas to kick around. Please read our Help and Feedback section for more info.

Add a Comment

Sign in »
*0 / 3000 Character Maximum Comment Moderation Enabled. Your comment will appear after it is cleared by an editor.

5 Comments

Filter by:
jbowenfamily

The easy anti-American slur . . . "Henry Kissinger's destabilization of Prince Sihanouk's neutral Cambodia" . . . equals the big lie. There was nothing neutral about Cambodia. The Ho Chi Minh Trail ran through Cambodia to South Vietnam. The North Vietnamese Army had large supply depots across the border in Cambodia, and used Cambodia as a base of operations, long before Kissinger. Perhaps the government in Phnom Penh was powerless to prevent it, as some argue. But one thing it certainly was not, was neutral.

July 11 2010 at 5:46 PM Report abuse +1 rate up rate down Reply
punnster

Diplomacy has never won a war or prevented a country from being defeated, only will, determination, strategy and means wins wars or prevent being conquered.

July 11 2010 at 5:13 PM Report abuse +1 rate up rate down Reply
xchemguyx

Wow, Mr Shapiro wants it both ways. He criticizes the US for being too quick to go to war with other countries, yet we should be willing to go to war with other countries, if Mr Shapiro thinks we should!

July 11 2010 at 4:33 PM Report abuse +2 rate up rate down Reply
jarsd43

This article is so sadly true and very moving. This is the kind of reporting that changes hearts and minds and has a chance at making this a better world.

July 11 2010 at 1:20 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
turkeywrld

since we are not great self examiners in any area..particularly history and particularly the history of OTHER nations the impact of what went down in Cambodia has little effect..much time has passed and since it is not on our front porch, as a people we dont seem to have any knowledge or awareness about it.. football is a far more exciting distraction.. this is and has always been a 'warrior' nation..and since WW2 constantly at war ..because ..wars are very profitable for a country geared up to create and fight wars funded by the unwitting taxpayer for the benefit of corporate profit .. a country with (oddly enough..hard to get accurate info on this )approx 1,000 offshore military bases is NOT a 'republic' ;- its an 'Empire' ..historically, Empires eventually fizzle out or self distruct due to the burdonsome expense of military overeach ..currently we have a world economic crisis ..and currently we spend 50% of taxpayers funds on what we are told is 'defence' .. this is completely unsustainable ..as unsustainable as our wasteful consumption and the planetary pollution that results from and fuels this idiocy ..(or is it just plain insanity ?)...we have 2 longterm choices.:- work to boost our greatest rescource ,which is EDUCATION..or carry on as is and face either irrelevancy or self destruction..

July 11 2010 at 12:33 PM Report abuse +1 rate up rate down Reply

Follow Politics Daily

  • Comics
%PostTitle%
robert-and-donna-trussell
CHAOS THEORY
Featuring political comics by Robert and Donna TrussellMore>>
  • Woman UP Video
politics daily videos
Weekly Videos
Woman Up, Politics Daily's Online Sunday ShowMore»
politics daily videos
TV Appearances
Showcasing appearances by Politics Daily staff and contributors.More>>

News From Our Partners