Cambodia was to return to ‘Year Zero,’ and recover its former glory, removed from the modern world and the unnecessary corruption of its influences. In order to facilitate the eradication of capitalism, the National Bank was blown apart and all forms of money were banned. Marriages were now arranged by the state, and children were taught to obey the government instead of their parents… By May 1978, the effort to produce a communist system of agriculture had failed utterly and the population was starving… Throughout this period, the emptied city of Phnom Penh stood as a ghost town, a reminder of a lost civilisation of business and commerce.
Matthew Blackwell on the megalomaniacal horrors of the Khmer Rouge. One of these.
Cambodia is being sold out to Chinese communism by the current government with a PM who was a member of the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge isn’t dead and coming around for a second pass. The populace is not happy.
http://www.chinauncensored.tv/june-22-2018-full-episode/ Interview with the opposition leader begins at 7:30
I read a book on the trial of one of Pol Pot’s main executioners. His camp specialized in officials who had been important until they were denounced by their comrades. And he was busy.
The court questioned him about forced confessions. Why would that be done, since they were likely false? He just kept smiling and explaining patiently about “revolutionary truth”. If it serves the cause, then it’s true.
Frequently i have thought about that man and his definition of truth when i see what’s happening on the left.
Logic has always kept these people on the fringes – they figured out a way to fight it.
totalitarian states are just sooo good that Canada would like to emulate them.
I was a 1960s left-wing radical, I am ashamed to say, protesting the Vietnam War, and engaging in many other unsavoury protests. The one major thing that led me towards activist conservatism was the Cambodian genocide. From the late 1970s to the late 1990s I subscribed to Commentary magazine, and that neoconservative monthly helped me solidify my new conservatism. (Still a great magazine, by the way).
One article I remember reading from Commentary magazine was a detailed description of how the liberal-left media complex at first denied the the existence of the Cambodian genocide, then, with the publication of William Shawcross’s horrid book, blamed the United States for the genocide. Shawcross was lionized by the media for that lurid charge, but when Shawcross backtracked from his book’s lie, the dominant media ignored him. Eventually in later years the corporate media belately blamed the genocide on Pol Pot’s communist party, but the whole charade left me embittered.
Only a communist educated in France can dream up something this evil.
“The new regime tried to eliminate every vestige of the old government—and every vestige of society they considered a threat, including people who had committed no crime besides wearing reading glasses.”
Keep in mind—mass murder is never just an unhappy side-effect of communism. Expropriation and mass murder of everybody posing a meaningful threat to the communists and their globalist paymasters is the entire point of communism.
I respectfully disagree with Mr. Murrell. The Khmer Rouge’s conquest of Cambodia was thought by our betters to be a good thing, for two reasons.
First, it was a small price to pay to maintain good relations with communist China and access to the newly opened pool of cheap Chinese labour.
Second, it served as a lab experiment whose results, it was hoped, would prove useful on the happy day when America’s “bourgeoisie” were to be finally liquidated. The Khmer Rouge managed to kill a quarter of their own people in three years, and another quarter were staring death in the face by 1979. The Khmer Rouge demonstrated that, once the American people were disarmed, it would take maybe five years for a globalist-controlled government, backed by terrorists recruited from the most “diverse and vibrant” parts of America’s cities and thirsty for “cracker” blood, to utterly destroy them.
What is the difference between the Khmer Rouge liberating Cambodia (1975) and the glorious Red Army liberating Europe (1945)?
A better analogy would be the Vietnamese conquest of “Democratic Kampuchea.” Pol Pit, like Hitler before him, got too big for his britches and turned on his socialist brothers in Vietnam, as Hitler had turned on Stalin.
The Vietnamese, like the Russians, were understandably determined to save their country from destruction at the hands of some foreigners’ runaway attempt at a bugfix for Soviet or Chinese communism, and (thankfully for all concerned) succeeded.
Next question?
Hmmm. Cambodian commies killing non-commie Cambodians in Cambodia vs. Soviet commies in 1945 killing Axis troops primarily in Poland and eastern Germany, and then later being handed most of Eastern Europe at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences.
Yeah, totally the same.
Except that they weren’t just killing axis troops.
As for rape… no barnyard animal was spared.
Both stories repeated themselves every time Siberian Mongols get to invade someone.
Exactly.
My mother had some interesting stories to tell about the Red Army after it came to Berlin at the end of WW II.
What is the difference between communism and communism?
You see communism relies on subjugation of people by people. As for communism the opposite is the case.
The utterly wrong and disgusting Noam Chomsky with his belligerent hostility to truth should have been rendered unto the scrapheap of history and yet even today he is still feted on western colleges as this giant of leftist intellectual might.
https://quillette.com/2018/07/15/devastation-and-denial-cambodia-and-the-academic-left/
That’s because he is a giant of leftist intellectual might. And should always be held up as an example of leftist intellectual might. A man so intelligent he is capable of convincing himself that reality is not true and the truth is not real, that his own sh*t doesn’t stink.
There are also parallels between Cambodia and Venezuela.
“By May 1978, the effort to produce a communist system of agriculture had failed utterly and the population was starving”
Isn’t that interesting? Efforts to produce a communist system of agriculture always result in famine. It was so in the Soviet Union in the early 1920’s. They killed millions of Kulaks and turned Ukraine and other areas into wasteland. Heretofore, Ukraine had been the breadbasket of Europe. Millions more died in the famine. It was so in China in the 1960’s, after they “successfully” nationalized all the farms. Millions died in the resulting famine. Serials made in Communist China itself document the famine, if not the cause. (Inside Chicom, the famine may no longer have happened, with the ascension of Mao II, i.e. Xi.) There was a famine in North Korea in the 1990’s that may have killed millions in a country of 22 million. In fact, in the first year of the Plymouth Colony, they practiced essentially a communist system of agriculture. Couple the resultant lack of harvest with a harsh winter, a third of that colony succumbed. Fortunately, it was only for one year, as the Governor wisely reverted to private farms, which then prospered.
Will they never learn?
You have corrected me more than once on the finer points of history, OldBruin. For that I am actually grateful.
Let’s see if we agree on this much:
No, they’ll never learn.
Experience keeps a dear school. Fools learn in no other—and only then when they’re forced to face the consequences of their actions.
Our betters will only see the error of their ways when the consequences start to inconvenience them personally. By then it’ll be far too late to prevent catastrophe.
It will never change, and the lessons of history will never ‘sink in’. Why? Because on the surface of it, ‘collectivism’ … SOUNDS … like a such great idea! All the happy hippies, working together in peace and harmony loving and supporting one-another in an economy built on ‘equality’. What’s not to like about that? And what’s the alternative? Me FIRST, greed, and stingy olllld olllld bankers who sneer at their lessers. And ewwww ‘competition’ instead of ‘cooperation’.
Marxism, Socialism, and Communism will always ‘sound’ WONDERFUL. Therefore, the streets will always be filled with young heads full of mush (see video Kate posted above) who lack the life experience that reveals how dangerous and dysfunctional those ‘ism’s’ are in reality.
In the 70’s the counterculture hippies fled back to the land, throwing off the chains of their father’s capitalist rat race, to live in communes and collectives. Of course, it was WONDERFUL … at first. Free love, no stress, growing their own organic produce. But then, one by one … the communes collapsed. Why? Basic human nature. Sorry, but for all our good qualities … humans are at our core, selfish, greedy, lazy, nasty pieces of work. We are “fallen” creatures of God.
For a short while, I lived in one of those communes … a suburban commune, a Christian commune. And for all the positives, it was no better a living (and commerce) arrangement than the dog eat dog REAL world of our “greedy”, “me first” capitalist world. Because within this loving arrangement of Christian men and women ‘similarly yoked’ … there existed the politics of personalities … and power struggles … and lazy freeloaders … and resentment … and recrimination … and a very concentrated power structure who ran everything according to their narrow self interest. This is how EVERY “collectivist” structure crumbles … into pieces of selfish, greedy, power-hungry, elites. In other words … man’s inherent DNA structure triumphs over the shallow ‘feelings’ of how … wonderful … collectivist systems … sound.
Capitalism actually accepts and exploits man’s inherent ‘selfish’ (says that like it’s a ‘bad’ thing … it’s not, when appropriately tempered and restrained) character. When man’s ‘selfishness’ (read: creativity and RISK) is unleashed and rewarded … great things happen. History has taught this over and over and over … yet … the ‘narrative’ of ‘selfishness’ … sounds … bad. Therefore, young collectivist FOOLS will continue to ‘believe’ that collectivism … “just hasn’t been done ‘right’ yet”. But THEY can usher in the utopian nirvana of our ‘evolved’ societies.
Yeah … riiiight
2The “Killing Fields” was pure, left-wing Hollywood propaganda.
Sorry, this post was intended to reply to B.A.D.R.’s post below.
I doubt Haing S. Ngor would appear in something so decidedly partisan.
One-sided in its view of the American involvement, perhaps.
Graphically accurate of what the killing fields were.
Collectivism works in a very specific set of circumstances which always must include that everyone involved shares the goal of eliminating the circumstances that require collectivism. E.g. war and other natural disasters.
No, and this is what they ultimately want for us.
Cambodia was an example of communism in full force,
You are with us or you die.
If you appear not to be with us, you die.
If you’re looking and your face does not seem to agree with what you see, you die.
If you’re apparatchik and don’t understand your post, you die,
Hey, the one in charge sez you die because ….. you die,
It would appear bizarre if it was not real
That is metamorphosis from socialism into communism and people die.
With collectivism, including its slow and fat cousin progressivism, the question of failure is not if or when, but how bad.
Progressivism with its transactions of decline ends up resorting to totalitarian thug tactics, but since it works within a prosperous society, the decline, and thus the gulags and “disappearances” take longer to manifest, means it simply has more other peoples’ money to run out of before unleashing state power on the slightest deviation from deference to socialist genius.
IOW, there is no such thing as “democratic socialism,” only a to discarded phase on the inevitable march of communist statism.
With the useful idiots the first against the wall as Lenin proudly stated, with the current version known as the intellectual yet idiots (IYI), who’s tenure will end so abruptly when no longer required to maintain the false narratives of vengeful but utopian socialism.
After the KR took over in Cambodia, there wasn’t much news out of that country. It wasn’t until the Vietnamese invaded and ousted them that a proper picture of what went on emerged. That’s when we heard about the killing fields and how the government turned on its people.
The movie The Killing Fields, on the other hand, would have the viewer believe that it was all the fault of the Americans, particularly after the coup led by Lon Nol. The fact of the matter was that Sihanouk was cozying up to the Chicoms well before he was punted from power.
It is too bad that Naom Chomsky et al can not be sentenced to 5 year terms in a Soviet style labour camp in order for them to experience the end result of what they are trying to indoctrinate into western society.
Maxim Gorky discovered his error rather early.