A Dot On A Domino
By streiff Posted in War — Comments (37) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
"Ta Mok, known as "The Butcher" for his brutality as military chief of the communist Khmer Rouge, died July 21 in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, his lawyer said. He was believed to be 80.
Ta Mok had been in and out of consciousness since last week at the military hospital in the capital, where he was being treated for high blood pressure, tuberculosis and respiratory complications, attorney Benson Samay said. Ta Mok had been in government custody since 1999.
Ta Mok, who briefly led the Khmer Rouge during its final days, was one of two former senior officials of the movement in detention awaiting trial on charges of crimes against humanity committed during a 1975-1979 reign of terror, when an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians died of starvation, overwork, diseases and execution."
One point seven million dead from a population of about seven million. And while Ta Mok died awaiting trial those who enabled his atrocities did not, many received international acclaim, and today the spiritual descendants of the political architects of the Cambodian genocide are actively at work trying to recreate their success in the Middle East.
Read on.
Vince Lombardi is credited with saying “Fatigue makes cowards of us all.” If so, that really explains Cambodia.
By 1973, we were tired. We were at the tail end of a decade old war in Vietnam. The social fabric of the nation was rent. Our will was sapped. Communism was ascendant; we were mired in political crisis and indecision. So, as losers often do, we convinced ourselves that losing just didn’t matter.
It became faddish to poke fun at the idea of a Domino Theory. It really became faddish; a fad still exists on the left, to view the Soviet Union and the Communist Chinese as benign players on the international stage. Players who only seemed menacing because of the propaganda fed to the US public by McCarthyites and John Birchers and who, themselves, rightfully felt threatened by US conventional and nuclear forces.
But the dominos did fall. On April 17, 1975 Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia. On April 30, 1975 South Vietnam fell and was immediately absorbed by the victor. On December 2, 1975 the Pathet Lao forced the abdication of Laotian King Savang Vatthana and sent him, his wife, and son off to die in a reeducation camp. Vietnam and Laos remain under repressive communist regimes thirty years later.
The architects of the slaughter, Senators Mike Mansfield, J. William Fulbright, Mark Hatfield, among others, were feted as heroes for consigning millions of Asians to death. Others went on to run for president or to prominence in the arts and literature.
Today the same fatigue gathers like a heavy, gray cloud on the national psyche.
We hear the siren voices counseling withdrawal from Iraq, the abandonment of that people. We must make them take responsibility, we’re told. They’ve got to stand on their own, we hear. Hell, we can just put our troops in Okinawa and all will be fine, they thunder. They fail to see the network of extraordinarily brittle regimes surrounding Iraq which would probably fall, in short order, under Iranian suzerainty or to Wahhabi revolution.
Maybe they have lost faith in our ability to be a force for good. Or maybe they just don’t care so long as they can avert their eyes from the slaughter and proceed to aggrandize more power to themselves by creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure.
Meanwhile, Ta Mok checks in and gets comfortable with his roommate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi down in Circle Seven, a river of boiling blood is familiar territory to both of them, they actually like the ambiance. Management is nonplussed and convenes an urgent conference to review Circle Assignment Policy. The whole idea is punishment so this just isn't right.
Ta Mok calls a cheery hello down to a familiar face in Circle Nine. The playwright absently acknowledges the greeting but he is preoccupied. He’s armpit deep in ice which makes it really hard to move and Management has been on his butt to clean up his area because space is already at a premium and a lot of reservations have been made for Circle Nine. They will be checking in soon. And the Zamboni driver is getting impatient.
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A Dot On A Domino 37 Comments (0 topical, 37 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
But so what. There is no real channel for our outrage, no realist way to achieve justice for those who were murdered in the genocides that were approved by the left. Will Chomsky, Kennedy, Mailer, Carter or Kerry ever see - in this life - justice for their acquiescence to Evil? I wish. I hope. But I think not...
then that is fair, as long as it is clear.
at the diary I actually wrote here on Redstate. May give you a little clearer idea of why I overcame some preconceptions, perhaps misconceptions perhaps not, and ventured in.
that's why you are still here.
Post away, you aren't banned yet. Just wanted to clarify your intents.
Well, I am a campaign treasurer in my state for a county prosecutor candidate who is a red-meat, Club-for-Growth member, 2nd-Amendment advocate and former NRA staffer who ran 2 years ago from the right against Wayne Gilchrest (MD-R) in the primary. He is my old law school roommate, and it's looking very good. He tolerates my sometimes liberal views with good humor.
As for Moby, I guess I don't do techno, don't think I am missing much. Be what you are. I am a registered Libertarian and I support gun rights strongly. Free people should be well-armed at their choice. But on some issues, I'm where you'd predict a moderate Libertarian would be.
the response addressed to Hunter, but for you as well.
Thanks!
Socrates. Many on the left do seem to desire a leftist dictator. Wish it were not true, but it is. Not to engage in paranoia, but such desires have led me to even stronger support of gun ownership rights, much to the dismay of some of my Democratic friends. Frankly, I think we are a loooong way from having a dictatorship in this country--and we certainly do not have one now, despite the howls of some of my leftist friends--but today's lesson about the evils of collectivism and communism remind us that totalitarianism is something we always must guard against (sorry for all the -isms).
To be fair, I think many who wear those idoitic T-shirts are just ignorant and are seeking some "hip" fashion statement. But that is dangerous, too: Those who are so ignorant about history are easily recruited by leaders who would dispense with democracy.
Some men are great by birth, others by will, and others choose mere infamy, their memory despoiling entire generations.
I am a student of history, and have had opportunity to travel. The Verdun Battlefield, Dachau, and Tuol Sleng are the most impressive and harrowing of sites, demonstrating the folly and murderous intensity of totalitarian governments.
Estimates differ, but about 17,000 people were processed through Tuol Sleng, including 2000 children and women with babies. The Khmer Rouge kept meticulous (and incriminating) records, the way totalitarians do (think Saddam's files that are just coming to light, and which make obvious the leftists' willful dishonesty about WMD and Saddam's association with al-Qa'eda). The processing at Tuol Sleng included preliminary file establishment with photo, incarceration, starvation, torture, confession (confession was essential, and the prisoner's files always had a record of the confession), and execution, usually at Cheoung Ek, the Killing Fields.
File pictures of the victims are haunting:
According to the data provided at the Tuol Sleng Museum, by far the majority of the victims of Tuol Sleng were low-level Khmer Rouge cadre. According to Marxist theory, the leaders of socialist revolutions have a perfect understanding of the forces of history, and the peasants are perfectible in their urge for socialist enlightenment. So how do you account for the many imperfections on the road to socialist utopia? Somebody betrayed the revolution, obviously, and the lower level communist cadre must be the guilty parties. This phenomenon was first observed in the Soviet Union purge trials, when staunch communists were made to confess their errors, and executed. It was probably just a coincidence that Stalin might have perceived Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Rykov, and Red Army General Tukhachevsky as possible rivals.
"Of 1,966 delegates to the 17th Communist Party congress in 1934 (the last congress before the trials), 1,108 were arrested and nearly all died."
- Wikipedia
Recalling my experiences in Cambodia, and watching the current leftist folly in our country, I keep seeing the faces of Kos and Soros in the pictures of the Tuol Sleng victims; Kos and Soros are certainly the perfect useless idiots in the communist pantheon of heroes/victims.
But American democracy has faced down totalitarian murder and folly in the past, and will do so again. The only time we failed to do so was the leftists willful defeat and retreat in Vietnam.
I will do everything in my power to keep American democracy and values supreme, and defeat the totalitarians, whatever their motivation.
Corporations are very much like sharks. They are mindless efficient and utterly without scruple. Sharks live to eat, Corporations exist to profit. So yes corporations associate with democrats and tyrants withoud regard to politics but with regard to profit.
Lefties are however individual Human actors. When you have Lincoln Steffens go to russia and " I ahve seen the future and it works" This is not an economic statement it is a promotion of a philosophy and a moral choice.
When you have people in this country endorse and support traitors this is not the same as a corporation making a profit. What was the upshot of Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs ?
I don't claim to have insight into what drives a lefty to sympathize with the garbage of history. I have a much better chance of understanding a suicide bomber as their motivations are at least comprehensible. But for whatever underlying reason they do seem to sympathize with and promote the most vile filth of history.
Lenin, Stalin, Mao, HoChi Minh, Pol Pot, Trotsky all had their supporters on the Left.(Who by the way arent unpatriotic) Why who knows but I gaurantee you it wasnt for a profit.
"educational system" when it produces product (I refuse to refer to them as people) who don't know or care that in the period just preceding to just after WWII some 50 million people were killed. About 35 million of them were Russians or from the states that made up the USSR and at least 20 million of those were killed by order from Stalin. Pol Pot wiped out nearly 1/3 of the population of Cambodia. Then there's Mao and I'm not sure anyone can count high enough to tally the butchered Chinese who died for Communism.
Reagan's "Evil Empire" speech was probably the truest statement of political reality ever put forth by a major politician.
Yet we are still sullied with trash who choose to promote the idea that Walter Duranty was right and Reagan was a doddering old cowboy. And I thought I thought I'd seen everything...
I don't even know what a moby is, but I gather I don't want to be one. As for trolls, you need not worry. If I wanted to hide and play some psychological game, I would choose a name a little more creative than ... my name.
This is your (Republican/conservative) house, and I am here at your sufferance.
be surprised and the low quality trolls we get. I know I am.
Moby... from the singer who encouraged and audience to call talk shows and pretend they were Republicans.
understand what I'm getting at when I tell you we don't particularly care for trolls and mobys. Keep that in mind when you post.
that your defininition of trolls and mobys has slipped a bit of late. After reading his deeply intellectual analysis that you linked to on Kos I found a distinctly unpleasant smell in the air.
I assume he writes like that on Kos because thats what the audience there demands. He seems capable of better, if he has to.
And these people think that Republicans have a hang-up on homosexuality.
Hunter and Joliphant, you both make the same good point regarding many individuals not necessarily being oligarchs. For one thing, there's not a lot of room at the top for mega-predators. And I agree that if you looked at the admirers of Fidel, you wouldn't find a breeding pair of non-lefties.
I know, though, that there were plenty of individual Americans who really liked Adolph Hitler before WWII. And we know that that there are still some--blessedly, not many--in America today who treasure his picture, his books, and Nazi paraphernalia. More than a breeding pair of them are right-wingers.
And some folks flip: witness James Burnham, of National Review fame, Trotskyite cum apologist for European fascism.
I concede those points. And, since I asserted that finger-pointing was a distraction, I shall now cease.
Why do some lefties love some of those tyrants you named? Justice, idealism and romance, I suspect. I don't think you would argue that the people of pre-revolutionary France, Russia, or China were not oppressed. Anyone with a sense of justice would want to overthrow the tyrants, and not everyone who stormed the barricades anticipated the Reign of Terror, or Lenin, or Stalin, or Mao. Or Castro. Many of the revolutionaries in those places believed in ideals you and I share (as did American revolutionaries in the 1770's).
Why do some cling to the tyrants? For the same reason some people hang on to old love letters--they are reminders of when we were young, and brave, and had hopes and dreams. Even when the authors of those letters have grown old and fat and their once-young hearts have grown as old and hard and cold as our own.
Oh, I agree that carrying a torch for Fidel or for Che--and keeping his poster, too!--is dangerous. So is keeping love letters from an old flame. But it's understandable. And the current cozying-up is pathologically more akin to stalking than it is to storing a pile of ancient cellulose. Yep.
Hunter: I have NO idea why anyone would love Arafat or the PLO. Was I wrong about Spanish history?
Joliphant: agree about behavior of corporations. Contrast predatory Microsoft and philanthropic Bill Gates. Disagree about sharks; all successful animals live to breed; eating is merely a means to that end.
Thank you both.
Joe
I am ABSOLUTELY in solidarity with any RedStater who mocks the Commie Chic of some of these folks. I cannot fathom the ignorance of these unshaven buffoons.
When I was 16, I saw the Berlin Wall, which fortunately fell 4 years later. I got to see it from the other side in an afternoon in East Berlin. A daunting experience, all gray, brown, white and black, nobody smiling, empty streets (and, as I would learn later, a lot of destroyed building with ugly Potemkin facades but better looking than the reality.) Any pro-Communist sympathizer with a Che shirt or that CCCP ... [trying to find clean, family-friendly word] ordure on his hat should have to spend 10 days in such a society. I mean socialist apartment, socialist food lines, socialist toilet paper, socialist police surveillance, socialist censorship, socialist poverty. The whole thing.
I could see one solid reason for lifting the embargo against Cuba. Let U.S. citizens go there and see the reality. Let them see it. Trouble is, the Americans would be mostly tourists as go from Canada now, and they don't see Cuba, they see a hotel, a beach and some ladies of ill fame that happen to be adjacent to the real Cuba. A few would go to see family but they are not the ones with the mancrush on Che and Fidel, let alone the horrors of this mass murderer recently rendered to ambient room temperature.
I am one of the more liberal posters here - fair disclosure - particularly on social issues. But in my mind, it should be even more reprehensible to wear Communist paraphenalia than it is to burn a US flag. Burning the flag is terrible (unless done reverently in accordance with the Flag Code), but giving symbolic aid and comfort to the worst tyrants of the last 60 years is unspeakable.
which has never happened. Holding those Fellow travelers in the West responsible for the deaths caused by the bloody tyrants they encouraged or aided by benign neglect.
Chomsky, Kennedy, Mailer, Carter, I am naming YOU! and many others. Blood is on your hands!
who would wear T-shirts with CCCP or the hammer-and-sickle knew how many people were killed by the communists.
I live in a big city (Chicago) where, I would estimate, I see these shirts at least one a month. It is sickening. You almost want to grab the person and ask: "Would you wear a swastika?"
I don't understand why we have Holocaust survivors speaking often in schools and to community groups, but relatively few survivors of Communist massacres speaking as well. In my city there are large numbers of Russians, Cambodians and Chinese. I am sure the Polish population in my city would have some good stories to tell as well, as would the Ukranians and Lithuanians.
I guess one bit of good news is that our mayor has this city wide book program, and he recently encouraged people to read "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," a great book about the gulags. Apparently, that means teachers are encouraged to teach the book to their students. Still, I don't know what it will take to show people that totalitarianism didn't begin or end with the Nazis.
Anyway, from a person more to the left than most of you, thanks for this reminder of what communism really was (is).
are what lead many on the Right to fear a Leftist government. We know the Left is vigilantly opposed to a right-wing dictator, but they seem to pine for a left-wing one.
There are more survivors, and more surviving perpetrators of communist atrocities.
Sheer passage of time means that the small number of surviving Nazi war criminals were at the bottom of the chain of command. "Only obeying orders" is not an excuse, but in the case of communist crimes, many of those who issued the orders are still alive.
The dems flocking for decades to kiss castro's rear are oligarchs? And the dem leadership protecting the Sandinistas were oligarchs? And good ol' Dan giving softball interviews to saddam makes rather an oligarch?
And those who loved Arrafat, and wear PLO colors today are just oligarchs?
Odd how they are all dems and socialists, no?
I came here into this thread to express hostility to a mass murderer and indignation at the faux cool who think communist symbols are fashionable. Done.
If you would like to see what a hard-core conservative running in a light blue district and a deep blue state looks like, you may check out Citizens for Dave Fischer. Peace be with you.
Ta Mok. Enjoy his hospitality throughout eternity.
Well, its not my call, but the item on Kos was pretty crude.
I'll go back to sleep I guess.
because I personally found your item on Kos to be as crude as Kos in general.
This isn't my site, I'm a guest here too; I have no say so I'll just shut up.
of people who are amazingly ignorant about history, mbecker908, and the failures of our society in educating people about communism. I get off the train, however, when call your fellow human beings "trash" or "product." That's because such an attitude of dehumanization makes for an easier path to totalitarianism. I think both sides need to avoid dehumanization and its associated attitudes.
Don't mistake me for some brotherhood-of-humanity type of guy. I'm not. I think we need to guard against totalitarian attitudes both in our own hearts as well as those of our fellow citizens. We can hate our enemies, and we may need to kill large numbers of them in order to protect our civilization, but once a person stops thinking of them as human, then that person ceases to have a morality I can agree with, or which is even useful to a democratic society. Yes, it's a very fine line, but most things in life involve fine lines.
However, I have to say that those who would justify the "excess" of Communism because they hold some fuzzy allegiance to Marxist, Leninist, Stalinist, Maoist, etc. principles do not understand even the most basic concept of "morality". They are neither moral or immoral, they are amoral and are sociopaths. Hence my use of the term "trash".
I am perfectly willing to refine the term, but in fact I have no problem viewing them as less than human. I find no perceptible difference between John Gacy, who was willing and able to torture and murder some 30+ young men, and a University Professor who is willing to "overlook" 50+ million people murdered by Communist states in the name of collective good. On second thought, Gacy is probably the better (or less bad) man.
I hope Asmodeus is doing warmup exercises for his pelvic muscles.
He's probably pretty close to done with Frank Church by now. Sam Ervin is in a state of afterglow.
like ducks to water, I think it's fairer to say. I think you'd find as many rich conservatives cozying up to Hitler (Henry Ford comes to mind) as did presumed liberals. And who is making deals today with the Communist regime of China? With Salafists?
(I'm not sure nasty old Joe Kennedy was a `liberal'-he was pro-Roosevelt, pro-New Deal, a great friend of Joseph McCarthy, anti-Semitic friend of Felix Frankfurter; just too complex for an easy label.)
I think "But then, much of the DNC leadership of the period just prior to WWII, and Spain all through WWII, was very pro-fascist" is an inversion of history. Liberals in this country were branded as Communists for opposing Franco. (When I first joined the Army, I had to sign a statement that I had never belonged to a whole list of `Commie' organizations, among them the Abraham Lincoln Brigade) But Spanish politics from that era is more complicated than French verbs, so I may well be wrong.
I believe that moral people will oppose tyranny. Arguing over whether liberals or conservatives are tyrants' better allies is a distraction.
like Ducks to water.
I remember how lefties praised the abandonment of Cambodia and Vietnam and Laos by America.
I will never, in fact, forget it.
Yet even now, the relentless rationalizations of the left to abandon Israel to people who have raised their children for generations to hate and kill all Jews is filling the public square.
I see the Howard Dean wearing the PLO scarf, and I wonder why he shouldn't be wearing a KKK hood? At least that expresses a domestic version of what the PLO is after.
I see that Spanish PM wearing some Islamic scarf, and I wonder why he doesn't just wear an armband wwth a swastika on the sleeve of his brown shirt?
But then, much of the DNC leadership of the period just prior to WWII, and Spain all through WWII, was very pro-fascist.
It is well known that the partriarchof the Kennedy family was openly against Britain and pro-German prior to PEarl Harbor. Even when he was Ambassador to the Court of St. James.
There were other prominent leaders.
The storm clouds gather. I hope we have sense to prepare.