ABSTRACT
Back to the World It was nice to get back to the world, after the June election trip through the islands.'" I don't enjoy feeling distant from my own country, but when I cannot share its definitions and emphases I have no real choice, and this was exactly my feeling during the election. The fighting along the Mekong seemed self-evidently more important, not only to others but to our own future, than those marginal gains and losses. There have been several reports from Cambodia on television, in 24 Hours and in the News. Many reporters have been in danger, in that uncertain and mobile war, and I would not dream of criticising them. But, so far as I have seen, there has been a failure of commentary and analysis back home, and this can't be wholly due to the obvious difficulty of getting reliable overall information. We are told on the News that "the communists" are attacking or being driven out of this or that town. In the direct reports, they become "the Vietcong" or "the North Vietnamese", but never, so far as I have heard, the Cambodian United Front which is also fighting the Cambodian regime. I see news reports, along different channels, giving the United Front control of most of the countryside, and these remind me of the early reports from Vietnam. Of course they may not be true, and the strictly Cambodian resistance to the new regime may be limited, but given the weight and extent of commentary on matters which are not only less important but much easier to check and to understand, I find the absence of any sustained commentary and analysis disturbing. Much of our view of the world, and especially now of Indo-China, comes from United States sources, but even there more is being published and argued about than British television would have us know.
