Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia

[nam78_two]

An old but excellent documentary:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13769.htm

[Greeby]

1. From one of his articles

Pilger describes the British public's reaction to Year Zero:

http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=409

-snip- the political documentary is indeed dangerous, because it can circumvent the club that unites and dominates establishment politics and journalism. Moreover, the documentary as a television "event" can send ripples far and wide. Year Zero: the silent death of Cambodia, which I made with David Munro in 1979, did that. Year Zero not only revealed the horror of the Pol Pot years, it showed how Nixon's and Kissinger's "secret" bombing of that country had provided a critical catalyst for the rise of the Khmer Rouge. It also exposed how the west, led by the United States and Britain, was imposing an embargo, like a medieval siege, on the most stricken country on earth. This was a reaction to the fact that Cambodia's liberator was Vietnam - a country that had come from the wrong side of the cold war and that had recently defeated the US. Cambodia's suffering was a wilful revenge. Britain and the US even backed Pol Pot's demand that his man continue to occupy Cambodia's seat at the UN, while Margaret Thatcher stopped children's milk going to the survivors of his nightmare regime. Little of this was reported.

Had Year Zero simply described the monster that Pol Pot was, it would have been quickly forgotten. By reporting the collusion of "our" governments, it told a wider truth about how the world was run. Until George W Bush and Tony Blair pushed their luck in Iraq and Lebanon, this remained a taboo.

"A solidarity and compassion surged across our nation," wrote Brian Walker, director of Oxfam. Within two days of Year Zero going to air, 40 sacks of post arrived at ATV (later Central Television) in Birmingham - 26,000 first-class letters in the first post alone. The station quickly amassed £1m, almost all of it in small amounts. "This is for Cambodia," wrote a Bristol bus driver, enclosing his week's wage. Entire pensions were sent, along with entire savings. Petitions arrived at Downing Street, one after the other, for weeks. MPs received hundreds of thousands of letters, demanding that British policy change (which it did, eventually). And none of it was asked for.

For me, the public response to Year Zero gave the lie to clichés about "compassion fatigue", an excuse that some broadcasters and television executives use to justify the current descent into the cynicism and passivity of Big Brotherland. Above all, I learned that a documentary could reclaim shared historical and political memories, and present their hidden truths. The reward then was a compassionate and an informed public; and it still is.

[nam78_two]

2. Thanks for posting that

Great read! :thumbsup:

Off topic-this again reminded me that Kissinger has won the Nobel Peace Prize :eyes:
Yeah-this guy sure deserves it:

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1295/is_5_63/ai_54468923

Kissinger DECLASSIFIED - document shows Secretary of State supported Pinochet

Progressive, The, May, 1999 by Lucy Komisar
I recently got hold of a declassified memorandum about Henry Kissinger's only meeting with Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. The meeting occurred on June 8, 1976, in Santiago, and the internal State Department memorandum shows how hard Kissinger tried to shield the Chilean general from criticism and assure him that his human rights violations were not a serious problem as far as the U.S. government was concerned.

I had been trying since 1995 to get the memorandum, which was stamped SECRET/ NODIS (No Distribution). My initial request was refused, but suddenly, to my surprise, the State Department "memorandum of conversation" arrived in the mail in October, shortly after Pinochet's arrest, with a note explaining that, on re-review, it had been opened in full.

The memo describes how Secretary of State Kissinger stroked and bolstered Pinochet, how--with hundreds of political prisoners still being jailed and tortured--Kissinger told Pinochet that the Ford Administration would not hold those human rights violations against him. At a time when Pinochet was the target of international censure for state-sponsored torture, disappearances, and murders, Kissinger assured him that he was a victim of communist propaganda and urged him not to pay too much attention to American critics.

:eyes: