And those of us who had been critics of the war may have felt skeptical about some of the Cambodian reports because they came from right‐wing quarters that had been indifferent to the misery inflicted on Cambodia by American bombers. Americans generally were weary of everything about Indochina. The reports from a sealed country were necessarily second‐hand-largely from refugees-and may have seemed exaggerated. But in this country, and the West generally, there has been less outcry about the savagery in Cambodia than its dimensions might have suggested. The smell of horror was too strong to be ignored by any fair‐minded person, and it has not been ignored. A book on the subject, “Murder of a Gentle Land” by John Barron and Anthony Paul, was condensed in the February Reader's Digest. There have been many reports of mass killing and brutality in Cambodia since the Khmer Rouge took over in April, 1975. And proclaiming these ideals, they are systematically massacring, isolating and starving city and village populations whose crime was to have been born when they were.” “A group of modern intellectuals, formed by Western thought, primarily Marxist thought, claim to seek to return to a rustic Golden Age, to an ideal rural and national civilization. After Auschwitz and the Gulag, we might have thought this century had produced the ultimate horror, but we are now seeing the suicide of a people in the name of revolution worse: in the name of socialism. The new masters of Phnom Penh have invented something original -auto‐genocide.

“Genocide,” Lacouiure writes, “usually has been carried out against a foreign population or an internal minority. It is an article whose painful honesty lends ghastly conviction to its terrible conclusions. That description of Cambodia today comes from an article by Jean Lacouture in the March 31 issue of the New York Review of Books. It was a decision to be expected from “the most tightly locked up country in the world, where the bloodiest revolution in history is now taking place.” BOSTON, March 20-Communist Vietnam and Laos welcomed President Carter's commission on Americans missing in Indochina, but the Government of Cambodia would not allow a visit.

Cambodia by François Ponchaud