Keyword: khmerrouge
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Forty-five years ago last Sunday, Vietnamese troops seized Phnom Penh and ended Cambodia's 45-month reign of terror known as the "killing fields." Under the leadership of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge government implemented policies—forced labor, resettlements, torture, starvation—that led to the death of 1.7-to-3 million people, or at least 20 percent of the nation's population. The regime destroyed the country, caused untold suffering, and left permanent scars. Painful as it is, we should not let these grim anniversaries go unremembered. For context, imagine a "political experiment" that obliterated our society and left a quarter of our 331-million population dead. It's...
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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...
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While the radical Islamists held a scimitar to the throat of freedom of expression over cartoons, Hun Sen, Cambodia’s dictator, was throttling those who dared speak out against his misdeeds and Vietnam’s grab of a good portion of Cambodia’s border. Prime Minister Hun Sen is the epitome of the old adage that a tiger never changes his stripes. First by a coup d’état in 1997 in which over 100 members of the Royalist Party democrats were murdered, then through rigged elections, and now through his kangaroo courts, Hun Sen has managed to intimidate and silence all opposition to his fascist...
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About two years ago I visited Cambodia. While there I wrote this January 2019 post, which focused on the “killing fields” genocide that swept Cambodia in 1975-79, during the rule of the Khmer Rouge and their leader Pol Pot. In connection with my trip, I bought the Ben Kiernan history titled “The Pol Pot Regime,” which I have just now gotten around to reading. Why my fascination with Cambodia in the day of the Khmer Rouge? It is one of the clearest modern instances of leftist/socialist ideology put into practice and then pushed to its logical conclusion. Highly educated elitists...
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The idea behind Year Zero is that all culture and traditions within a society must be completely destroyed or discarded and a new revolutionary culture must replace it, starting from scratch. All of the history of a nation or people before Year Zero is largely deemed irrelevant, because it will ideally be purged and replaced from the ground up. In Democratic Kampuchea, so-called New People—intellectuals and members of the old governments—were especially singled out and executed during the purges accompanying Year Zero.
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The former chief interrogator and top torturer for Cambodia's genocidal Khmer Rouge regime died early Wednesday in hospital in Phnom Penh. He was 77.Kaing Guek Eav, better known by his alias Duch, had served as the head of the infamous Tuol Sleng prison and was later convicted of crimes against humanity by a UN-backed war crimes tribunal for his role in the "Killing Fields" regime.
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Clive James's 2007 book titled Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts is a collection of artists and thinkers. They are largely concerned with responses to "threats against freedom, mostly in the 20th century." As I leaf through it, I am astonished at the echoes of my own qualms as this country stands on the precipice of either remaining free or not. I see Democrats and leftists invoking Nazism to describe conservatives in America, and I am reminded of Jean-François Revel's words that "one insults the memory of the victims of Nazism if one uses them to bury...
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(PHNOM PENH, Cambodia) — Nuon Chea, the chief ideologue of the communist Khmer Rouge regime that destroyed a generation of Cambodians, died Sunday, the country’s U.N.-assisted genocide tribunal said. He was 93. Nuon Chea was known as Brother No. 2, the right-hand man of Pol Pot, the leader of the regime that ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. The group’s fanatical efforts to realize a utopian society led to the death of some 1.7 million people — more than a quarter of the country’s population at the time — from starvation, disease, overwork and executions. Researchers believe Nuon Chea was...
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Tribal conflicts, steadily diminishing in the West under capitalism, will rise again to threaten the peace and prosperity of humanity. In 1975, when the Khmer Rouge took over, they quickly emptied the capital of Cambodia, Phnom Penh. This was to be year Zero; a rebirth of Cambodia as an engineered egalitarian, classless rural society with “the corruption and parasitism of city life” eliminated. Several million had to leave at once, including hospital patients. Those who refused were summarily executed. Those who left were forced to work in fields, where many died while being fed starvation rations.Dehumanizing those you murder is...
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Lim Pengkhun was born in 1980 near the Cambodian-Vietnamese border. The possibility he’d one day manage his own business would have been quite literally beyond imagination for his parents at the time. Just five years prior, the Khmer Rouge, led by communist revolutionary Pol Pot, had seized absolute political and economic control of Cambodia. Following the examples of Stalin and Mao, Pol Pot brutally murdered more than one million Cambodians in the infamous Killing Fields of 1975-1979 as he implemented his vision of communist utopia. He abolished private property, money, prices, commerce, and even cities—a full descent into barbarism. In...
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**SNIP** Now the Sunrise Movement, likely the nation’s fastest-growing climate advocacy group, is planning a 14-stop tour meant to drum up grassroots support for a Green New Deal across multiple states, HuffPost has learned. It’s the first leg of the group’s effort to make the policy the defining issue of the 2020 election. “We’re launching the Road to a Green New Deal Tour to activate the millions of Americans who are ready to fight for a Green New Deal but haven’t heard of it yet,” Varshini Prakash, co-founder of Sunrise Movement, said by email. “When you come out to a...
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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y, the self-described democratic socialist who has become a media sensation, is pushing for enactment of a radical plan called the Green New Deal that would ban the use of all fossil fuels from U.S. electricity generation, agriculture and manufacturing by 2030. The Green New Deal would dramatically reshape the U.S. economy and add tens of trillions of dollars to the national debt. The radical plan would force families to pay more to heat, cool and provide electricity to their homes. It would raise the same costs for businesses, farmers, government and organizations, driving up their operating...
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As democracy is dismantled, will Cambodians return to the streets?When tens of thousands of opposition supporters took to the streets of Phnom Penh shouting “Hun Sen, step down!” in wake of the disputed 2013 general election, it was the biggest threat to the prime minister’s power in a generation. The protests quickly gained momentum as opposition leader Sam Rainsy called for “non-stop” demonstrations, culminating in around 50,000 taking to the streets by December to call upon the premier step down or announce a new election, along with other demands including a hike in minimum wages. With the government rattled, the...
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In the 1920s, Nazis and Communists frequently battled in pubs and streets as they fought for supremacy in Germany. After the prolonged battle, the Nazis won out and the Communists were outlawed in Germany the day Hitler took power. That was the beginning of the rise of the Nazis becoming the most hated group in world history. The battle between the two groups did not end there as Stalin took control of Communist Russia, renamed the Soviet Union. In the 1930s, while Hitler was consolidating power and beginning to eradicate his enemies, Stalin was throwing thousands into the Gulag and...
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The United States has renewed its demand for Cambodia to repay a war debt of $500m amid President Donald Trump's push to improve the state budget. Such a demand has met with an outcry from Cambodian political leaders and their people, who have consistently called the debt "dirty" and "blood-stained". Clearly, the memory of the United States' war in Indochina continues to shape Cambodian perceptions of and foreign policy towards the US. Cambodia is reluctant to pay the debt. However, should the US keep forcing Cambodia to service the debt, its moral high ground may be adversely affected. "I have...
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A Frightening History of the Militant Greens Robert Zubrin’s book, Merchants of Despair, shows how some of the most tragic events of the 19th and 20th centuries were inspired by radical environmentalists who used the “green†agenda to mask scary ambitions.
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In the wonderfully funny movie “Mom and Dad Save the World,” one of the heroes admits that his people are not so bright. “But what we lack in brains,” he says, “we make up for in ...good intentions.” Gentle mocking here of the frequent appeal of the incompetent for tolerance of their mistakes: How can you blame us if our intentions are good? The trouble is that much of what's really rotten in the world is due to people who thought that their good intentions would ensure a favorable result. Maybe the best example of this: former president Jimmy Carter....
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Last month marked the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, a moment vividly encapsulated by the frenzied scene of South Vietnamese desperately trying to reach the last helicopter on the roof of the American embassy. April was also the 150th anniversary of the surrender at Appomattox, when Robert E. Lee capitulated to Ulysses S. Grant, bringing the bloodiest fighting of the Civil War to an end.The two episodes seemingly have little to do with each other. But each, in its way, illustrates one of the bleakly recurring themes of US military history: When America's armed forces prematurely abandon the...
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The newly established Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency has dispatched a remains recovery team to the Cambodian island of Koh Tang, where three Marines were left behind following the final battle of the Vietnam War. The excavation site is believed to hold the remains of Lance Cpl. Joseph Hargrove, Pfc. Gary Hall or Pvt. Danny Marshall, according to official documents from DPMAA’s predecessor, the Joint Prisoners of War, Missing in Action Accounting Command. The three-man gun team was left behind in the confusion of a troop withdrawal following a brutal May 15, 1975, battle between about 200 U.S. Marines and entrenched...
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Cambodia's UN-backed Khmer Rouge court was Wednesday set to begin a second trial of two former regime leaders on charges including genocide of Vietnamese people and ethnic Muslims, forced marriages and rape. The complex case of the regime's two most senior surviving leaders has been split into a series of smaller trials, initially focusing on the forced evacuation of people into rural labour camps and related crimes against humanity. The first trial against "Brother Number Two" Nuon Chea, 88, and former head of state Khieu Samphan, 83, was completed late last year, with the verdict -- and possible sentences --...
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