nce Sihanouk by a junta of rightist generals closely aligned with the U.S. (Shawcross, 1979, pp. 123ff). This regime proved weak and unstable, and was in turn overthrown in 1975 by the Communist Khmer Rouge regime, which occupied the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh not long before the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese.
The Khmer Rouge communist regime, which ruled Cambodia (or Kampuchea, as they renamed it) between 1975 and 1978, was possibly the most horrific government in the history of the twentieth century (Johnson, 1983, pp. 655-58) an age all too notable for monstrous tyrannies. Although the numerical toll of its victims one to three million, by the conventional estimates is modest compared to the great mid century despotisms of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, the intensity of the slaughter, in a country of only seven million when the Khmer Rouge took power, is without equal. Moreover, their principal victims were not an unpopular minority (as in the case of the Jews in Nazi Germany), but a broad section of Cambodian society.
The rise and character of the Khmer Rouge is of particular concern to Americans, since it bears in a fundamental way on the
morality and wisdom of the American war effort in Vietnam. Broadly speaking, there are two profoundly contradictory ways of interpreting the chain of events that led from the secret U.S. bombing of Cambodia to the rise of the Khmer Rouge.
The conservative view (Johnson, 1983, pp. 630ff, gives an account of the "Vietnam Era" from the conservative perspective). This has been the dominant official and semi official view in the United States in the past decade or more, during the conservative ascendancy of the Reagan and Bush administrations. It holds that a substantial moral burden for the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge upon their own people must be laid at the door of the American anti war movement of the Vietnam years. After all, had the U.S. "won"...