10 Despicable War Crimes That Were Shamefully Denied

2. Cambodian Genocide Denial Controversy

There is no dispute that scores of people died under the reign of the exceptionally vicious tyrant Pol Pot. The problem with this conflict is that some politicians and academics have commended the regime rather than condemned it and therefore whitewashed the genocide. American hawks point to Cambodia to justify their wars in Asia and their fight against communism, and left wing intellectuals praised the Khmer Rouge for liberating Cambodia from the shackles of colonialism and capitalism. This is despite the fact that no Westerners were allowed into Cambodia during all of the butchery so how could they assess the regime? In fact, a Cambodian scholar coined the term "Standard Total Academic View on Cambodia" (STAV) to describe Western scholars' infatuation with the revolution and the Khmer Rouge. They had a rather romantic view of the situation - of peasants liberating themselves against a barbaric regime. They did not recognise the extent of Pol Pot's callous killing of his native men until the book Cambodia: Year Zero which told of 1.2 million fatalities in the small country of 7 million people. However, Cambodia continued to divide opinion in the West. A hearing in Congress came to the conclusion refugees' witness was unreliable. America's intellectual elite - like Noam Chomsky - threw their lot in with the Khmer Rouge. Eventually after the Cold War petered out and everyone woke up to the fact that Pol Pot was a particularly malignant despot, attitudes changed towards the Khmer Rouge and many former supporters in the West changed their minds. They claimed that they had been caught up in the whirlwind of Communist idealism and propaganda. Pockets of pro-Khmer Rouge academics still remain convinced that death rates under the regime of Pol Pot have been vastly inflated, but thankfully most see him for the genocidal toad he was.