Remember the Khmer Rouge

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.

When he was deposed and in temporary exile in Mao’s China, in his attempt to return to power Prince Norodom Sihanouk became the titular leader of Cambodia’s Royal Government of National Union. It was not long until the communists controlled this organization.

Thus, through little enterprise of their own, the Cambodian communists almost overnight achieved a textbook objective of communists everywhere—a coalition that cloaked them with respectability and put at their disposal the resources of others. Stigmatized as foreign agents, they could not attract popular support. Now, with their real identity and aims obscured in the coalition, they would appeal to the people in the name of a prince trusted and esteemed by much of the populace.

Having taken power in now “Democratic Cambodia,” the Khmer Rouge regime and its Angka Loeu leadership immediately went about emptying the cities and purging the populace.

In assaulting the material manifestations of Cambodian culture and civilization, the communists were striking at the concepts the objects of their fury symbolized. And the assaults presaged systematic attempts to undermine or eliminate entirely the traditional concepts of family, home, religion, education, commerce, and technology that formed the foundations of society . . . Having emptied and vandalized the cities, Angka Loeu proclaimed the birth of ‘Democratic Cambodia’ and proudly declared, ‘More than 2,000 years of Cambodian history have virtually ended.’ It is difficult to dispute that claim.

Human dignity and core liberties were immediately ended by the communist regime, as the cities and large villages were arbitrarily emptied and their residents forced into the countryside and jungles. No dissent was too small to go unpunished.

[A man said] ‘your order won’t work . . . How will we get to our destination without a car?’ ‘Now is the time of revolution! And you don’t talk back to Angka!’ the soldier shouted in response. Then he sprayed the man with bursts of machine-gun bullets. The man immediately crumpled to the ground, and several others around him also fell.

Indeed, all free speech brought a death sentence. How eerily familiar to present ears echoes the edict of a Khmer Rouge communist officer who, after shooting a vocal dissident, shouted, “In times of revolution, protest is forbidden!”?

And children were singled out for the most intensive brainwashing, calculated to estrange them further from their parents and transfer their loyalty from family to Angka Loeu. In the village of Khna Sar university student Ung Sok Choeu observed: ‘The only subjects the students were being taught were revolutionary thinking and the aims of the Khmer Rouge struggle and how to detect the enemies of both. As a result, all the children turned into little Khmer Rouge spies, reporting everything that was said at home.’

Angka Loeu directed Khmer Rouge soldiers to lead reeducation sessions for those who were not starved, shot, or dying of treatable diseases that the communist regime deemed potentially useful to their new “Democratic Cambodia.”

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.

Yet, the Cambodian people did keep thinking about their families, at least those they hoped were still alive, wherever the Khmer Rouge sent them. For these heartbroken family members, and those who recalled life before the regime, Angka Loeu declared them afflicted by a mental condition:

Simultaneously, Angka identified and proclaimed the existence of a dreaded new malady—chhoeu sattek aram, literally, ‘memory sickness.’ Angka considered that a person was suffering from ‘memory sickness’ if he or she thought too much about life in precommunist Cambodia . . . Angka attempted to cure the ailment by halving the rice ration of the afflicted. Sometimes the punishment for presumed malingering was more swift and direct.

Overall, the Khmer Rouge’s aim was to create “true communism” by eradicating everything:

An Angka official in the Mongkol Borei district declared, ‘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.]

The commander of a thirty-man communist detachment stationed at a large farm 8 kilometers west of Sisophon summoned New Villagers and warned: ‘Everything which belonged to the old society must be banished.’ All behavior henceforth had to be ‘revolutionary’: all conversation was to be conducted in ‘revolutionary terms;’ any lapses into ‘old ways’ would be severely punished.

During its heinous reign, by its own admission what were the achievements of Democratic Cambodia under the communist Khmer Rouge?

After the destruction of more than 1,000,000 human beings, a once happy country and a whole civilization, the premier of Democratic Cambodia sums up the accomplishments of Angka Loeu: In short, we have not made any noteworthy achievements except the revolutionary movement of the masses.

As Pol Pot indicated in the interview, Cambodia today is a land without universities. It also is a land without cities, commerce, art, music, literature, science or hope. And as the young refugee said, ‘There is no love anywhere.’

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.

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...”

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