Found while researching academic support for totalitarianism: a paper discussing the academic apologists for Pol Pot during the obliteration of a large fraction of the Cambodian population. Note the prominent mention of present-day leftist guru Noam Chomsky, and the resistance of academics to accepting the truth about yet another Marxist regime, even after the truth was rammed down their throats.

...The idea for this thesis grew from research into Cambodia's economic development and history for a simultaneous economics honors thesis. In particular, a 1979 book entitled Kampuchea: "Rationale for a Rural Policy" by Malcolm Caldwell, was my first glimpse into a community of academics I had no idea existed. To be sure, this community was not some extreme "fringe" faction of Cambodian scholars, but virtually all of them. In other words, their view of
the Khmer revolution ergo the Khmer Rouge, became the Standard Total Academic View on Cambodia or the STAV.



These scholars, many of whom worked for the Berkeley-based antiwar Indochina Resource Center, became the Khmer Rouge's most effective apologists in the West. While they expressed unreserved support for the Khmer revolution, fully twenty percent of the Cambodian population may have perished due to execution, forced labor, illness, and malnutrition during the period 1975-1979. From periodicals such as the "Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars" and "Current History" to books like "Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution" and "Kampuchea: Rationale for a Rural Policy," an unequivocal record of complicity existed between a generation of academics who studied Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge.