Sydney Schanberg Discusses His New Book, 'Beyond the Killing Fields'

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via Khmer NZ News Media

James Grady

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Few Americans are more deserving of a movie about them starring an actor with the cinematic moral authority of Sam Waterston than the so deserving Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg, who Waterston portrayed in "The Killing Fields." That was the riveting, Academy Award-winning movie about Schanberg and his translator/assistant Dith Pran, who survived Cambodia's descent into genocide at the hands of the cultish Marxist Khmer Rouge. From 1975 to 1979, Cambodia was a homicidal horror show in which at least 20 percent of that nation's populace was killed – roughly 2 million people.

Schanberg lives in New York city now, and he's just published a book called "Beyond The Killing Fields" -- part memoir, part polemic, and part collection of his previously published articles on an American-influenced tragedy we'd rather forget.

Ironically, Cambodia and its 20th-century travails haunt the edges of today's news, too, with reports that its now far-more-benign official "constitutional monarchy" and multi-party democracy again threatens government-sponsored "forced migration" of segments of its population -- not in the service of yesterday's monstrous Khmer Rouge "killing fields" ideology, but to make way for today's gold mining in that impoverished country.

Schanberg is one of journalism's stars, and five Politics Daily staffers -- Carl Cannon, Melinda Henneberger, Walter Shapiro, David Wood and me -- are joining in an online discussion with him about politics and the press as seen through the prism of his new book.

Sydney, in this election year of 2010, what strikes me as being of most political significance beyond remembering the lessons of history in your new book is how you reveal language as a political weapon. The closest-to-home example that your book touches on is the use by America's Vietnam era politicians and journalists of the German word realpolitik.

How absurd is it that our Vietnam-era political savants embraced a word that allegedly means "politics based on practical considerations" from a culture whose 20th century "practicality" included spawning and then losing World War I and World War II, plus creating a genocidal empire that made the Khmer Rouge's "killing fields" look primitive.

The only "practical" thing in that Realpolitik is that it "practically" destroyed Germany and savaged the rest of the world.

But the most striking example of language being used as a political tool comes in your reporting about the Khmer Rouge, and I'm hoping that you can expand on the concept of language as a political weapon – both back in the Killing Fields era and in our 2010 election year frenzy -- and also talk a bit about some of the truly Orwellian examples of Khmer Rouge "politically correct" speech.