After the Cataclysm

Volume two of the influential study of US foreign policy during the Cold War—and the media’s manipulative coverage—by the authors of Manufacturing Consent.

First published in 1979, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s two-volume work, The Political Economy of Human Rights, is a devastating analysis of the United States government’s suppression of human rights and support of authoritarianism in Asia, Africa and Latin America during the 1960s and 70s. Still one of the most comprehensive studies of the subject, it demonstrates how government obscured its role in torture, murder and totalitarianism abroad with the aid of the news media.

In the first volume, Chomsky and Herman focus on US terror in Indochina. In volume two, After the Cataclysm, the authors examine the immediate aftermath of those actions, with special focus on the Khmer Rouge takeover of Cambodia. Throughout, the authors track the media response to the US interventions—a mixture of willful silence and Orwellian misrepresentation.