Pickup Carries Peace Activist, Fr. Berrigan's Coffin

... our Frankensteinian creation, Pol Pot?

You must be using a mighty big bong.

...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]
Pol Pot returned to Cambodia in 1953 after his scholarship was revoked (due to his poor academic performance) and joined Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh, the antecedent of the Viet Cong. He also became a member of the Kampuchean People’s Revolutionary Party. For the next several years, he earned a living by teaching geography and history at a private school while organizing resistance to Sihanouk, who was the King of Cambodia from 1941-1955, its Prime Minister from 1955-1960, and the country’s head of state (with the title "Prince" thereafter).[7] In 1960, the Paris Student Group took control of the Kampuchean (or Khmer) People’s Revolutionary Party (KPRP), which began to break away from its Vietnamese connections and was renamed the Workers’ Party of Kampuchea (WPK). Within three years, Pol Pot had been named the WPK’s secretary-general.[8]
During 1965-1967, Pol Pot traveled extensively in North Vietnam and China. He entreated North Vietnam to provide him with military assistance to overthrow the Sihanouk regime but was turned down.[9] Officially Cambodia was "neutral" in the Indo-china conflict; this suited North Vietnam, which used Cambodia’s position to advance its own aggression. The North Vietnamese created a "National Liberation Front (Vietcong) in South Vietnam to advance their aggressive designs on the South. In 1968 the Vietcong were wiped out during the Tet Offensive. But the North Vietnamese kept the fiction alive by continuing their infiltration of North Vietnamese army regulars into the South and pretending that they were revolutionary guerrillas representing the population of South Veitnam. The infiltration route was called the "Ho Chi Minh Trail," and part of it ran through "neutral" Cambodia. When the United States attempted to inderdict this line of support, the international Communist community, backed by the Western "anti-war" movement, protested that the United States was "violating" Cambodia’s neutrality. Pol Pot’s strategy of Communist revolution in Cambodia immediately would have undermined this scheme.
Pol Pot’s trip to China, then in the throes of the Cultural Revolution, inspired him to envision an agrarian Communist utopia where the very lifeblood of his nation could be poured entirely into agricultural projects of the grandest scale; this vision would prove to be the inspiration for the notorious "killing fields," to be described below, where many hundreds of thousands of slave laborers perished under the most oppressive conditions imaginable.
By 1968 the Khmer Rouge had gained the support of China and was in control of the Cambodian border with Vietnam. In 1969 the U.S., in an effort to prevent the Vietcong from withdrawing to bases across the Cambodian border, began a campaign of bombing raids against Cambodian targets; these raids, however, failed to achieve their desired ends. In a 1970 coup, Sihanouk’s government was overthrown and the Minister of Defense, Lon Nol, took control of the country. At this point Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, with the assistance of China and North Vietnam, initiated a guerrilla war that would persist for five years.
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 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]...
... While Pol Pot was carrying out his genocide, numerous American leftists functioned as his apologists. Notable among these was the American-hating MIT professor Noam Chomsky, who viewed Pol Pot as a revolutionary hero. When news of the "killing fields" became increasingly publicized, Chomsky’s faith in Pol Pot could not be shaken. He initially tried to minimize the magnitude of Pol Pot’s atrocities (saying that he had killed only "a few thousand people at most").[64] He suggested that the forced expulsion of the population from Phnom Penh was most likely necessitated by the failure of the 1976 rice crop. Wrote Chomsky, "the evacuation of Phnom Penh, widely denounced at the time and since for its undoubted brutality, may actually have saved many lives."[65] In a 1977 article in The Nation, Chomsky attacked those witnesses and writers who were shedding ever-brighter rays of light on Pol Pot’s holocaust; he accused them of trying to spread anti-communist propaganda. In 1980, when it was indisputable that a huge proportion of Cambodia’s population had died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, Chomsky again blamed an unfortunate failure of the rice crop rather than systematic genocide. He also quibbled about the number of dead, saying that most estimates were inflated, and that the actual number could not have exceeded a million. Finally, he concluded that whatever had in fact occurred in Cambodia, the U.S. was to blame.[66]...
------ "Left-Wing Monster: Pol Pot," by John Perazzo, Front Page Magazine, August 8, 2005

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