A Problem from Hell. Samantha Power
1976, he declared:
[If estimates of 1 million killed are] true, approximately one-fifth of the Cambodian population has been annihilated—a record of barbarous butchery which is surpassed in recent history only by the Nazi atrocities against the Jews during World War II…I am amazed that so little has been done to investigate and condemn what is happening in Cambodia. The UN Human Rights Commission has so far ignored the situation in that country.105
By 1977, Solarz, Pell, and others had finally generated enough interest to stage hearings on Capitol Hill devoted exclusively to Cambodian atrocities. In one of those hearings, much of Solarz’s frustration over the U.S. policy of silence and the ongoing squabbles over numbers of dead burst forth. Indochina specialist Gareth Porter testified, again denouncing the “wild exaggeration and wholesale falsehood” of allegations of KR terror. Porter insisted that it was a “myth” that “one-to-two million Cambodians [had] been the victims of a regime led by genocidal maniacs.” Solarz exploded. “It is beyond belief to me that anyone could seriously argue that this hasn’t been going on,” he exclaimed.106 For the next year and a half, Solarz attempted to get the House to pass a resolution calling on President Carter to turn his attention to curbing the killings.
Solarz was one of several Americans who, in drawing attention to the KR horrors, linked his advocacy to the Holocaust. Seated more than two decades later in a study lined with shelves filled with 123 books on the Holocaust and another fifty-two on Hitler and Nazi Germany, Solarz reflects, “The Holocaust is the key to the whole thing. It is the Rosetta stone. For me, the Holocaust was the central fact of the twentieth century and has had more of an influence on my view of the world and America’s role in it than anything else.”
By the mid- and late-1970s, Hitler’s destruction of the Jews was at last becoming the subject of scholarly and public focus. The term “Holocaust” had not entered into popular usage until the late 1960s, but in 1970 two books analyzed the U.S. indifference to the Holocaust for the first time: Arthur Morse’s While Six Million Died:A Chronicle of American Apathy and Henry Feingold’s Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration, 1939– 1945. One of the most pivotal instruments for “popularizing” the Final Solution was the four-part, nine-and-a-half-hour television dramatization Holocaust, starring James Woods and Meryl Streep, which some 120 million viewers watched in 1978. The same year President Carter appointed a special commission on Holocaust remembrance and education and decided to build a monument to the horror on the National Mall in Washington,D.C.
By 1977, because it had become widely accepted that a bloodbath was indeed taking place in Cambodia, advocates of U.S. engagement tried to jar decisionmakers and ordinary citizens by likening Pol Pot’s atrocities to those of Hitler. Syndicated columnists Jack Anderson and Les Whitten published a total of fifteen opinion pieces on Cambodia, most of which invoked the Holocaust.107 On July 21, 1977, they wrote, “The uproar over human rights has ignored the world’s most brutal dictatorship. Adolf Hitler at his worst was not as oppressive as the Communist rulers of tiny Cambodia.”108 Several months later, Anderson and Whitten called the KR terror “the greatest atrocity since the Nazis herded Jews into the gas chambers.”109When the Holocaust docudrama aired in 1978, Anderson noted that “another Holocaust story, every bit as stark as the recent TV saga” was ongoing. The Nazis had disguised their crimes with euphemisms such as “resettlement,”“removal,” and “special action,” Anderson wrote. So, too, the Khmer Rouge had introduced a sanitized language. “The Khmer word for ‘kill, assassinate, execute’ was never spoken when the annihilation policy was discussed,” he noted. “The Khmer term used was ‘baoh, caol,’literally ‘sweep, throw out’ or ‘sweep, discard.’”110 The next day Anderson penned another column, entitled “Cambodia: A Modern-Day Holocaust,” in which he condemned President Carter for averting his gaze from the extermination of Cambodians.111
Others chimed in, also adopting the analogy. The Economist described “brutality that would make Hitler cringe.”112 In an April 1978 New York Times editorial, “Silence is Guilt,” William Safire also referred to the Holocaust miniseries and asked why the world was doing nothing. “In terms of numbers of people killed,”Safire wrote, “this generation’s rival to Adolf Hitler is the leader of Communist Cambodia, Pol Pot.”113 Leo Cherne of the International Rescue Committee and Freedom House wrote in the Wall Street Journal on May 10, 1978, that “the ruthlessness in each country has come about in service to an ideal—of racial purity in Nazi Germany, of political purity in Democratic Kampuchea.” A May 1978 front-page New York Times story said that refugees in Thailand “recall concentration camp survivors in Europe of 1945.”
As the months passed, Capitol Hill became more engaged. Senator Bob Dole (R.–Kans.) was moved by the story of a Cambodian refugee who had visited him. He compared the Cambodian crisis to “the death camps in Nazi Germany, and the excesses of Stalinist Russia.”114 Pleading as always for the ratification of the genocide convention and denouncing the KR, Proxmire noted the parallels with the destruction of the Jews:“This is no ordinary genocide. There are no concentration camps and gas chambers disguised as showers. This is genocide without technology.”115
Donald Fraser (D.–Minn.), the Hill’s most vocal human rights advocate, chaired a House International Relations Subcommittee hearing in July 1977. Ken Quinn, who in 1977 was tapped as special assistant to the new assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs, Richard Holbrooke, told his boss, “This is a chance to go public with all we know.” Holbrooke and Twining appeared on Capitol Hill and ended the State Department’s two-year policy of silence. Holbrooke noted that “journalists and scholars guess that between half a million and 1.2 million have died since 1975.” U.S. intelligence indicated that “for every person executed several have died of disease, malnutrition, or other factors, which would have been avoidable if the Government itself had not followed…a policy which seeks to completely transform the society by the most Draconian measures possible.”116 Holbrooke concluded that “we should speak out,” even though, as he admitted, he was unsure “what the impact of our words” would be.117 This was the first time Twining had been publicly summoned to relay his graphic findings. The U.S. government had detailed knowledge of Pol Pot’s atrocities. A February 13, 1978, State Department cable reported plainly, “A renewed emphasis was placed on completely eliminating all vestiges of the former government and completing the executions of all people who were not from the poor farmer-working class.”118 Still, twining recalls his attitude at the time of the hearing. “It was easy to come before Congress because I was so sure about what was going on,” he says. “When it came to ‘what to do,’ though, I just had this overwhelming feeling of helplessness.”
With American editorial writers weighing in on the subject with some frequency in 1978, and with congressional pressure mounting, the daily press coverage of human rights abuses finally expanded. In the summer of 1978, the Washington Post and New York Times began running two to three news stories a month on human rights in Cambodia, still a small number but far more than the two or three per year they had run in 1975, 1976, and 1977. By late 1978 death estimates that had earlier been referred to as “reports of mass death” became “hundreds of thousands, possibly 2 1/2 million” and “one to three million killed.”119
Not until 1978 did nongovernmental actors urge that trying and failing to influence the KR would be preferable to making no effort at all. “One may not be able to triumph over evil, but one need not remain silent in its presence,” syndicated columnist Smith Hempstone wrote in the Washington Post in May 1978. “President Carter might speak up more than once on the subject. He might instruct Andrew Young to walk out of the United Nations General Assembly whenever the representative of ‘Democratic Kampuchea’ rises to speak. At every time and in every available forum, those who speak for the United States could call on the conscience of the world to condemn those who commit such atrocities.”120 None of these steps were taken.
President Carter’s first firm public denunciation came in April 1978 when he sent a message to an independent commission examining the atrocity reports in Oslo:
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