Posted on 06/10/2023 4:48:08 AM PDT by MtnClimber
My friends was it the NORTH Vietnamese Communists that got rid of them?
Yes it was. The southern Communists were almost all dead or surrendered. I was a radio op in c-47s listening to the NVA ops on the ground after the Tet fiasco and the accents were all northern and desperate for help and instructions. Some was in clear speech because the radio ops with the codes were dead. They got back instructions to hide their weapons and try to get back to the North.
I agree in many cases.
In some cases they are just young commies. (a graduating 8th grader could be 15…often old enough to know)
absolutely. I have 2 nephews who would have my hubby and i arrested. they are in their 50’s btw, so not young and dumb.
Middle aged and dumb as hell.
Relative to the small country size, this was the worst genocide in modern history!
They are no longer hiding who they plan to target when they have completely taken control. The foundation is close to be complete and 2024 will probably show our fate.
Just like the tactic being used by American communists today.
Overall, the Khmer Rouge’s aim was to create “true communism” by eradicating everything
Yes. We don’t know what real tyranny is, we haven’t had to live under it. But I think that America has the potential to be the most horrible in history. Those who think we won’t go down that road are simply ignorant of history, and/or are not paying attention.
My brother and I had a long conversation the other night, and in talking about tyranny, I mentioned that I tend to stratify tyrannies, because they were different in many ways. He asked “Well, what is the worst in the 20th Century, then?
I thought everyone tends to rank the Soviets up there, and I opined there was something absolutely bureaucratic, smothering, and almost tediously commonplace about the dull, wholly impersonal tyranny of the Soviets. When they came to your house to take you away, they were bureaucrats with guns. They didn’t really care. They had orders. If they had to take you away from your family or shoot you in your head so you would fall down a flight of stone stairs clotted with bodes sporting holes in their heads, it was just a job. They might have elicited the same bored response having to fill out the paperwork on what they did. They didn’t hate YOU per se. They just loved control. And everyone had to be controlled and in fear. You had no value past serving as an example to someone else who might have had disagreements. I have probably read “The Gulag Archipelago” maybe five times over the years, and the boring banality of arrest, torture, imprisonment, and starvation strikes me every time.
Then I thought about the Nazis. They were bureaucrats too, but highly efficient ones, which is probably why they stick in people’s heads. That fabled teutonic efficiency bent to the purpose of murder. Finding the most efficient way. Not wasting anyone. If they could perform experiments on them and kill them at the same time there might be knowledge gained or useful utility made of the process. We are going to kill you anyway. But, if we immerse your body in a tub of ice water, we can find out more about the effects of hypothermia so we can make our sailors and U-Boat personnel more efficient and long lived. That kind of thing. But the Nazis were fixated on race, then on those that opposed them. That was their hierarchy. they weren’t bored. They were actively pursuing, and seemed entertained by the hunt, for rooting out and murdering people. The fictional Nazi officer portrayed in the movie “Inglorious Basterds” was the cinematic expression of that.
Then there were the East Germans. The East Germans were, in my estimation, the living embodiment of Orwell’s “1984”. They actively wanted to control people. Control everything. Control everything about everything. It seemed almost more important to control people than it was to eliminate them. They had a vast, highly organized network of people working towards that end. Any unorthodoxy was sniffed out by this huge body of unwilling spies who were blackmailed and threatened by the government to ensure compliance and efficiency. They were well versed in the use of technology to achieve these ends, and kept meticulous records of all of it. One of the things I found most oddly chilling was the account of their interrogation process. People were brought in for interrogation all the time, it was routine. They had a chair the subject would sit in that a removable fabric could be attached to. They would put a fresh fabric on for each interrogation, and the person being interrogated would sit on it. When the interrogation was done, they would remove the fabric from the chair and place it in a hermitically sealed glass jar, meticulously label it with all kinds of information and store it in a specific way on a vast array of highly organized floor to ceiling shelves so the jar containing the seat fabric for any given person could be more easily and efficiently found by retrieving the fabric from a person’s interrogation and exposing bloodhounds to it.
The Khmer Rouge was oddly, at the top of my list. They were a tyranny. But they didn’t seem to care about anything, even power itself. They seemed to be interested only in murder as a mechanism to obtain and exert control. They would just outright murder people. Very little questioning, even pro-forma questioning. They would just go to a village, find out who the village leaders were, and kill them. Then and order the people to identify the teachers. Then they would kill them. Then, they would get the medical personnel, doctors, round them up, and just kill them. Next, anyone with a college degree. And they would kill them. Basically, anyone who was not a farmer. Then they would use anyone remaining as a farmer. They didn’t seem to care if you agreed or disagreed, from what I could tell. They were just as happy to make you a farmer as they were to murder you and cut your head off. By all accounts, they murdered up to one-third of a population of 6 million. This quote I saw titled “Khmer Rouge Warning” seems to sum up the Khmer Rouge philosophy between 1975-1979: “To keep you is no gain; to lose you is no loss.”
And the Communist Chinese? Life has no meaning. None. They have murdered in cold blood between 40-120 million of their own people. When I argue points, I use the 40 million because even Leftists will agree on that, though I believe the 120 million is closer to reality. Each Chinese individual is useful only in what that person can contribute to the party. Everything else is irrelevant. One of the most knowledgable Americans on Communist China is General Robert Spalding (Ret.) who thought (while he lived and studied there as a commissioned major in the US Air Force) that the Chinese Communists actually had the purest and most cut-throat brand of capitalism that exists today. You can steal from people as long as they aren’t Party Members or likely to bring the attention of Party Members. You can poison them if they aren’t Party Members or likely to bring the attention of Party Members. You don’t need a license to start a business. You can steal ideas and plans from other businesses...as long as they aren’t Party Members or likely to bring the attention of Party Members. And when killing their own citizens, they put even the Soviets to shame, now, they want to use the organs of dissidents, criminals, political enemies, or even people who might have made a joke about communism, as a way to obtain donor organs for both their own upper party and foreigners who want to pay cash. They put these people on ECMO machines, and slowly, over a period of months, extract organs from them to transplant into Party Members or those foreigners who are willing to pay in hard currency. Today, with their embrace of technology, AI, data, surveillance, etc. it is hard not to think that they, in the words of Winston Churchill, are the ones leading the way in creating and mining “the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science”.
I knew a Vietnamese immigrant who worked on machinery for us a few years back, and I had a difficult relationship with him.
He was extremely difficult and obstreperous, and grew to dislike him. He was difficult to understand, stubborn, and refused to work with you to resolve issues.
Then, I was forced to work with him closely for several days in a row where we had to spend many long hours in waiting and observation, so I asked him where he was from and when he came to America.
He said he was Vietnamese, and had been a junior ARVN officer when Vietnam fell. He came to America in 1979, and when I asked what he did between the fall of Vietnam and his immigration to America, he said that he had been in a “re-education” camp in the jungle up until 1978.
I asked if they had finally released him and allowed him to emigrate, and he said no...he had escaped the camp and made his way to the coast, stolen a boat and made it out to sea where he was rescued after a few weeks, then ended up in Australia for some reason. After a little while there, he came to America. (This was quite a few years back, so I can’t remember his exact words)
I was stunned. All the time I knew this guy, I knew nothing about him or his past, and resolved to never take for granted what a person may be or where they had come from.
But the thing that I will never forget, when I asked him what it had been like in the re-education camp, he didn’t say anything. He just got a very far away look in his eyes, and said almost inaudibly “The things we had to do...” and said no more.
It reminded me of a college history professor, a somewhat elderly gentleman who was telling us one day in class about having kidney stones, which is an odd subject to discuss with a class. Years later, after I went through several months of acute and painful kidney stones, I understood completely (I had to command myself to shut up about them, even to my poor wife) and I remembered that “far away” look the professor got in his eyes when he was talking about it.
It was clear the professor was far away too at that point, and I recall thinking “Holy crap. Whatever kidney stones are like, I don’t want them because they must really suck!”
That was the exact same look the Vietnamese guy had in his eyes when he said those words “The things we had to do...”
Noam Chomsky thought the Khmer Rouge were the Second Coming.
That’s an excellent short essay, RL. I don’t think I’ve ever before read a comparison of the tyrannies of the 20th century and their differences. You should expand that into an article.
My neighbor for a time was a Vietnamese boat person. She was Chinese from Saigon, so after the North Vietnamese communists took over, they were persecuted. She was only 8, but remembers pirates taking the boat and robbing everyone of all the meagre possessions they managed to escape with. She also remembers being thirsty as hell the entire time at sea, and several old people dying on the boat - their bodies were dumped overboard.
Wound up on Palawan in Philippines, and then - Swizterland, of all places.
Being good, hardworking people - of course her family now owns a chain of restaurants and a number of apartment buildings in Eastern Switzerland.
There was a kid in our college dorm who was the only living member of his extended family - rest were slaughtered in Cambodia.
When my few liberal friends and a couple in the extended family bring up issues which shoehorn nicely in the larger subject, I start by removing the Left-Right model. I replace it with the "big and powerful" versus the "small and far less powerful." When they agree, as some have, it becomes simple to gather the Mao, Stalin and Hitler murderous regimes alongside Pol Pot and so many others.
The comes the interesting challenge. List the "small and far less powerful" after having parsed away the murderers and psychopaths. It becomes very difficult when one thinks this through only a short while, and then queries which direction governments are heading. Towards the big and powerful? Away from....?
That's been my wee strategy in debates and discussions. It works and often flummoxes the closet "big and powerful" believers, as the mask is removed.
Best wishes.
If you haven't read it, take the time to do so. It's what is happening right now across this nation.
Just my two cents - I never lived in the Soviet Union, or Cambodia, but have visited them. I know many people who did.
I won’t say one was worse than the other, but at least in the Soviet Union and East Germany, these people were still under the influence of Christian/Western civilization. Of course the communist ideologues grasped this, hated it, and suppressed it - but the masses still operated unwittingly according to a millenia of this imperceptible influence in their cultural DNA.
There were no such limitations in the Chinese or Cambodian tyrannies.
I have worked with Cambodians and they always are smiling and outside of extreme conditions happy.
What to me was freezing monsoon rain was simply weather that comes and goes, nothing to be concerned about. Always flashing a smile.
RVN 1968-70.
Thanks for saying so...it weighs heavily on my mind for some time now. I am terrified that my beloved country should become a tyranny, because I feel it has the potential to be the worst in history.
Yes. I feel great black stain as an American at abandoning them to the tender mercies of the Communists.
I gave up the “Left<>Right” model some years ago, as I believe the “Total Control<>Anarchy” model is a more accurate and descriptive one.
It bunches Communism and Fascism at one end (Total Control, which is undesirable) and puts Anarchy (total lack of control or protection at the other)
The optimal solution is somewhere on the continuum between those two, which I think is consistent with our current form of big “C” Conservatism. Where, exactly, is still contentious with the Libertarians tending towards the side of Anarchy, and the Leftists tending towards total control.
That is an interesting “Challenge” you pose. I’m going to think on that.
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