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."
As 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.
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.
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