In a caustic exchange with William Shawcross in '' The New York Review of Books '' on July 20 , 1978 , Gareth Porter wrote that , " It is true , as Shawcross notes from my May 1977 Congressional testimony , that I have changed my view on a number of aspects of the Cambodian situation . I have no interest in defending everything the Khmer government does , and I believe that the policy of self-reliance has been carried so far that it has imposed unnecessary costs on the population of Cambodia . Shawcross , however , clearly does have an interest in rejecting our conclusions . It is time , I suggest , for him to examine it carefully , because it does not make for intellectual honesty . " Shawcross responded , " I was glad to acknowledge in my article that Mr. Porter had changed his views on the Khmer Rouge and it is a tribute to his own integrity that he now agrees that the Khmer Rouge have imposed ' unnecessary costs ' on the Cambodian people . He should , however , be a little more careful before he accuses others of deliberately falsifying evidence and of intellectual dishonesty . " In 2010 , Porter said he had been waiting many years for someone to ask him about his earlier views of the Khmer Rouge . He described how the climate of distrust of the government generated during the Vietnam War carried over to Cambodia . " I uncovered a series of instances when government officials were propagandizing about the Vietnam War . They were lying , " he explained . " I 've been well aware for many years that I was guilty of intellectual arrogance . I was right about the bloodbath in Vietnam , so I assumed I would be right about Cambodia . " Australian Ben Kiernan recanted after interviewing 500 Cambodian refugees in 1979 . He admitted that he had been " late in recognizing the extent of the tragedy in Cambodia ... and " wrong about ... the brutal authoritarian trend within the revolutionary movement after 1973 . " In the opinion of Donald W. Beachler , the genocide deniers and doubters among academics may have been motivated more by politics than a search for the truth , but conservatives who " embraced the reports " of Khmer Rouge atrocities had no less " cynicism or naiveté " in later downplaying reports of atrocities by anti-communists in Central America . He noted that the supportive attitude towards the Khmer Rouge had also been expressed by the U.S. government and politicians for a dozen years after the regime was toppled in January 1979 , as part of the denigration against the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia in the 1980s . In fact , the U.S. was one of the countries that had voted for the retainment of the Democratic Kampuchea 's seat at the United Nations until 1991 . Bruce Sharp , who points out many errors of Chomsky 's analysis , also says that " While Chomsky 's comments on Cambodia are misleading and inaccurate , one important point must be borne in mind : The actions of the United States were largely responsible for the growth of the Khmer Rouge . " Certain authors have continued to downplay Khmer Rouge atrocities in recent years . Richard Dudman , who accompanied Caldwell to Cambodia , challenged the " conventional wisdom that Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge are irrational fanatics who practiced deliberate genocide and slaughtered more than one million Cambodians " in a 1990 '' New York Times '' editorial , arguing that " The evidence for these fixed beliefs consists mainly of poignant though statistically inconclusive anecdotes from accounts of mass executions in a few villages . It comes mostly from those with an interest in blackening the name of the Khmer Rouge : From Cambodian refugees , largely the middle - and upper-class victims of the Pol Pot revolution , and from the Vietnamese " . In 2012 , journalist Israel Shamir wrote an article titled " Pol Pot Revisited " for the American left-wing newsletter '' CounterPunch '' in which he argued : " New Cambodia ( or Kampuchea , as it was called ) under Pol Pot and his comrades was a nightmare for the privileged , for the wealthy and for their retainers ; but poor people had enough food and were taught to read and write . As for the mass killings , these are just horror stories , averred my Cambodian interlocutors . Surely the victorious peasants shot marauders and spies , but many more died of American-planted mines and during the subsequent Vietnamese takeover , they said ... Noam Chomsky assessed that the death toll in Cambodia may have been inflated ' by a factor of a thousand ' ... To me , this recalls other CIA-sponsored stories of Red atrocities , be it Stalin 's Terror or the Ukrainian Holodomor ... The Vietnamese supported the black legend of genocide to justify their own bloody intervention . " In 2013 , the Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen passed legislation which makes illegal the denial of the Cambodian genocide and other war crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge . The legislation was passed after comments by a member of the opposition , Kem Sokha , who is the deputy president of the Cambodian National Rescue Party . Sokha had stated that exhibits at Tuol Sleng were fabricated and that the artifacts had been faked by the Vietnamese following their invasion in 1979 . Sokha 's party have claimed that the comments have been taken out of context
Stalin 's Terror
Great Purge
Cambodian genocide denial