Never to forget, never to forgive
Calling the barbaric, murderous Khmer Rouge once more to mind.
Remember the Khmer Rouge
Historical ignorance isn’t bliss; it’s suicide.A forgetful society lives on the precipice of history’s abyss. Lloyd Billingsley reminded us of this when he warned, “as ever, the struggle against genocide is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
Billingsley was referencing the Communist Khmer Rouge’s democidal frenzy of 1975-1979 that killed over 2,000,000 people, specifically “Cambodian children were clubbed to death and babies smashed against trees.” He provided a link to an historical, contemporaneous 1977 account of the communist regime and its bloodthirsty Angka Loeu (“organization on high”) leadership’s initial crimes against the Cambodian people and humanity: Murder of a Gentle Land: The Untold Story of Communist Genocide in Cambodia, by John Barron and Anthony Paul. It is a horrific chronicle of how the insidious tactics and crimes into which the murderous ideology of communism metastasizes and, ultimately, consumes a people.
It is a lesson of history that humanity ignores at its peril. Consequently, in the hope of reminding the present about the past to preserve the future, let us delve into Barron and Paul’s reportage of the survivors’ accounts of the Khmer Rouge’s barbarity perpetrated in the name of the very people these communists tortured and killed.
It’s your typical story of what Communist regimes always do, always have done, every time they’re allowed to take power. As such, it makes for some grim, gruesome reading. But as McCotter says, as Amerika v2.0 lapses ever further into its own version of Communist tyranny, Red in tooth and claw, we better damned well make sure we don’t forget. This quote is particularly chilling:
Angka spokesmen attempted to indoctrinate the prisoners at night, repeatedly sounding a basic refrain: ‘All of you are technicians. You are educated men, and the simple village people didn’t dare reeducate you. But we, your brothers from the army, are happy to reeducate and reshape you. In two years’ time, maybe, when you have adapted yourselves to the new regime, you will be allowed to return to Phnom Penh and your former profession. Meanwhile, you have to help Angka produce rice, to defend the country. Never refuse Angka’s orders, and stop thinking about your families.
‘To build a democratic Cambodia by renewing everything on a new basis: to do away with every reminder of colonial and imperialist culture, whether visible or tangible or in a person’s mind; to rebuild our new Cambodia, one million men is enough. Prisoners of war [people expelled from the cities and villages controlled by the government on April 17, 1975] are no longer needed, and local chiefs are free to dispose of them as they please.’ [Emphasis in the original.]
Yeesh. Bad, bad juju, that. But really, how many steps away from precisely that sort of thing can we honestly say we are now? And are those steps big ones, or little ones? The echoes of such bland, casual evil should clang discordantly in Real American ears with every word out of “pResident” Pedo Jaux’s filthy, decrepit maw—a tocsin we cannot, MUST not fail to pay heed to, at cost of our very lives. Thus:
By 1979, the killing fields were stilled. The Khmer Rouge’s tyrannical rule over Cambodia was in history’s dustbin, but its butchers were not before the bar of justice. For those Khmer Rouge who were not internally purged by the regime, the wheels of justice ground far longer than did the “wheel of history” that Angka Loeu claimed compelled the democide. Decades passed. Ultimately, trials were held, though the justice wrought was scant. Given the depths of the Khmer Rouge’s crimes against humanity it is impossible to imagine a justice that would have been comprehensive. Still, one could hope for more than the meager justice meted out to these bloodthirsty bastards.
In Cambodia and some foreign quarters, compassionate people honored the dead and heralded the survivors’ courage, vowing to never let the victims and their suffering be forgotten. Yet most of the world forgot, if they had even paid attention at the time. This lesson of history, paid for by the suffering and slaughter of the Cambodian people, was cavalierly lost in the mists of memory and indifference. So doing, the world only serves to ensure “never again” will be vowed yet again and again over the bodies buried in the latest killing fields by murderers masquerading as their victims’ saviors.
What can one say, really? Commies gonna Commie, whether in Cambodia, China, Cuba, Amerika v2.0, or anyplace else. As in the hoary old tale of the scorpion and the frog, it’s simply in their nature—who they are, what they do, every single time. The lessons are right out there in the open, for all to see and learn—unmistakable, unequivocal, undeniable. Pay attention, or perish.
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