(snip)...Pol Pot was born Saloth Sar in what is now the province of Kompong Thong, Cambodia in 1925. He came from a prosperous farming family that in 1931 moved to the capital, Phnom Penh, where the young Pol Pot learned some of the rudiments of Buddhism and was subsequently educated in a series of French language schools. In 1946 he joined Ho Chi Minh’s Indochinese Communist Party and three years later was awarded a scholarship to study radio engineering in Paris.
While in Paris, Pol Pot joined with other Cambodian students to create the Paris Student Group, forerunner to the Khmer Rouge. He also authored the pamphlet Monarchy or Democracy, in which he openly challenged the legitimacy of Prince Norodom Sihanouk’s Cambodian government and pledged to someday institute a democracy "pure as a diamond."[3]
In 1952 he joined the French Communist Party, a move that would prove to have a profound influence on the rest of his political life. Nearly all of his fellow Khmer Rouge leaders of the 1970s were educated in France and were members of the French Communist Party.[4] The professed goal of these leaders was to bring "real socialism" to Cambodia.[5] Vietnamese Communism exerted an even greater influence on the Khmer Rouge during its formative years; the CPK was originally part of the Vietnamese-controlled Indochinese Communist Party.[6]...
...In November 1970, President Nixon asked the U.S. Congress to provide the Cambodian government of Lon Nol with $155 million in aid, of which $85 million would be earmarked for military assistance to help prevent the Khmer Rouge from taking power. American leftists, however, were adamantly against this proposal. One opponent of the policy was Anthony Lake, who in 1969 had become an aide to then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, but who – because he opposed Nixon’s bombing raids (designed to support Lon Nol against Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge) in Cambodia – soon parted political company with Kissinger and the President.
By 1972 [Anthony] Lake was an activist in the McGovern presidential campaign, whose platform was founded upon the axiom that the military conflicts of Southeast Asia were rooted in the "arrogance of American power" rather than in Communist aggression.[10]...
...During this period, many American leftists openly supported a Communist takeover in Southeast Asia. Among the most notable spokespeople of this position was the popular actress Jane Fonda and her husband Tom Hayden, whose public comments were unambiguous in their expressions of contempt for America and sympathy for the Communists. On November 21, 1970, Fonda told a large University of Michigan audience, "If you understood what Communism was, you would hope, you would pray on your knees that we would some day become Communist."[11] At Duke University, she elaborated, "I, a socialist, think that we should strive toward a socialist society, all the way to Communism." The dual villains of Southeast Asian conflicts were, in her view, "U.S. imperialism" and "a white man’s racist aggression."[12]
Fonda’s husband Tom Hayden in the early 1970s organized an "Indo-China Peace Campaign" (IPC) to lobby Congress to cut off American aid to the regimes in Cambodia and South Vietnam. Assisted by radical Democrats in Congress like Ron Dellums, Bella Abzug, Robert Drinan, Elizabeth Holtzman, Pat Schroeder, and David Bonior, Hayden established a caucus in the Capitol, where he lectured and agitated for an end to anti-Communist efforts in South Vietnam and Cambodia. The IPC worked tirelessly to help the North Vietnamese Communists and the Khmer Rouge emerge victorious. Hayden and Fonda took a camera crew to Hanoi and to the "liberated" regions of South Vietnam to make a propaganda film called Introduction to the Enemy, whose purpose was to persuade viewers that the Communists were going to create an ideal new society based on justice and equality, when the Americans left.[13]...
(/snip)
------ "Left-Wing Monster: Pol Pot," by John Perazzo, Front Page Magazine, August 8, 2005
Yep, some familiar names.
I wonder how many are going to the inaugural?
An Ron Dellums was recently up to his ears in ...