According to this wikipedia page, some leftist academics in the West supported Pol Pot, or resisted the truth for some reasons.
I am more interested in the validity of these lines specifically:
Despite the eye-witness accounts by journalists prior to their expulsion during the first few days of Khmer Rouge rule, and the later testimony of refugees; many academics in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Australia and other countries portrayed the Khmer Rouge favorably or at least were skeptical about the stories of Khmer Rouge atrocities. None of them, however, were allowed to visit Cambodia under Khmer Rouge rule and few actually talked to the refugees whose stories they believed to be exaggerated or false.
Yes, there was a great deal of sympathy for the Khmer Rouge just as there was for the insurgent National Liberation Front in South Vietnam and for the North Vietnamese government. Ben Kiernan, now a Yale professor and foremost historian of the Khmer Rouge, originally supported the Khmer Rouge and downplayed the reports coming from refugees of mass killings. He was not alone. (I want to add that Kiernan spent much of his career thereafter writing on genocide and the Khmer Rouge, and worked to bring the leadership to trial.) Another activist-cum-academic, Gareth Porter, wrote a book denying the massacres and spoke widely, including before Congress, to argue there was no genocide. Noam Chomsky also argued that the Khmer Rouge was not committing genocide or crimes against humanity, and explained it away as propaganda meant to improve opinion of the United States.
This all came crashing to a halt at the end of 1978. Certain western academics who supported the Khmer Rouge were invited to Cambodia to meet Pol Pot. The most enthusiastic supporter, a marxist academic named Malcolm Caldwell, was murdered in the middle of the night just after meeting Pol Pot. Soon thereafter the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia allowed for confirmation of refugees' stories about the killing fields.
This was an era where activism and academics became closely intertwined. Independent of the political outcomes they sought, this had a deleterious effect on scholarship produced during the era. There was on one hand a bit of romantic Orientalism about 'peasant society' and Asian culture, that led to support for insurgent organizations and North Vietnam.
There was also a conviction for many -- and I would say correct -- that some US war policies in Indochina were illegitimate and illegal. Unfortunately, many reflexively embraced the opposition (the Khmer Rouge, NLF, and North VN) and their propaganda as the true version of events or the indigenous perspective. And as was seen in Cambodia and to a much lesser extent in the mass Vietnamese concentration camps, these groups were not humanitarian heroes. Yet at the time they were heralded as being the 'right' side in the war, the natural historical progression, by activist-scholars.
Therefore to critique the Khmer Rouge or communist Vietnam was seen as approving of US war policy. One anti-war leader, Jim Forest, noted that after he mildly criticized the mass incarceration of South Vietnamese, other leaders accused him of being a CIA agent and told him he was 'jeopardizing his career' in the peace movement. In the case of Cambodia, the sheer scale of the violence forced a reflection and reassessment. That same reassessment has not really come about for the communist regime in Vietnam, and many are still hesitant to critically examine its past. As the example above on Chomsky shows, for some, criticism of these regimes is interpreted as endorsing the American wars in Indochina.
This is what made, and still makes, writing about the Indochina Wars so hard. When the writers took a personal role in events, either protesting or fighting, making an historical re-assessment also involves a difficult personal assessment of one's past choices.
^Edited ^to ^add ^more ^detail.
I hear Sartres name ocassionally connected with the regime but I've never heard an explanation. Could anyone here provide one?