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The dead speak
The Washington Times ^ | 4-10-08 | Paul Greenburg

Posted on 04/10/2008 12:09:43 PM PDT by JZelle

There are some names in the obituary columns that say more than the voices of the living.

Such is the name of Dith Pran, who died in New Brunswick, N.J., March 30 at age 65. He was the Cambodian photographer who somehow survived the collection of killing fields that his country became after the Americans abandoned it. And who somehow made his way to the United States to tell the world about it.

Millions of his countrymen lost their lives after the Khmer Rouge swept into Phnom Penh and began rounding up unreliable types — i.e., just about anyone who could read and write. Literacy is dangerous. It gives people ideas, and only the party's ideas were allowed in the Khmer Rouge's new Cambodia. Holding others could prove a capital offense.

The toll of the Khmer Rouge's brief but fatal reign of terror in Cambodia (1975-78) is uncertain — a million, two? Maybe a quarter, maybe a third of the country's pre-communist population. The numbers can only be estimated, but the pictures of pyramids of skulls are well-known. They have become emblematic of that bloody time.

Cambodia got a new name (Democratic Kampuchea) and a new calendar, beginning with the Year Zero. Not just hundreds of thousands of people were to be wiped out but the past itself. The Marxist dream of creating the New Man never got so close to awful reality.

It wasn't supposed to happen that way, not according to the sophisticates who advocated an American withdrawal from Indochina in the 1970s. They blithely dismissed all the warnings that a bloodbath would follow once the United States abandoned its allies in Southeast Asia:

(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Foreign Affairs
KEYWORDS: cambodia; dithpram; killingfields; paulgreenberg; paulgreenburg; tribute; vietnamwar

1 posted on 04/10/2008 12:09:43 PM PDT by JZelle
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To: JZelle

bump


2 posted on 04/10/2008 12:45:20 PM PDT by lesser_satan (Vote McCain - The Choice who Sucks Less!)
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To: JZelle
This is a great article - RIP, Dith Pran.

This is EXACTLY what the libs do - suck their teeth at basic concepts of defending people (not that they don't have to also defend themselves), and then show amnesia about the last time abandonment led to disastrous, murderous, and predictable results.

3 posted on 04/10/2008 1:25:41 PM PDT by Yossarian (Everyday, somewhere on the globe, somebody is pushing the frontier of stupidity...)
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To: JZelle

The libs have millions of peoples blood on their hands. If I was one of them, I’d do everything I could to stay alive as long as I could, ‘cause they ain’t gonna like the after effects of their actions.


4 posted on 04/10/2008 1:52:58 PM PDT by Edgerunner (At the heart of every absurdity, lies a liberal lie)
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