During the Vietnam era Pol Pot was one of the heroes of the student anarchists who today are the leading lights of left-wing liberalism. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the spin-off Weatherman group of armed robbers and bomber-assassins proclaimed themselves and their fellow “freedom fighters” like Pol Pot to be moral exemplars for the American people.
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American liberals during the Vietnam War demanded that we unilaterally pull our troops out of the battlefield and allow “freedom fighters” like Pol Pot to institute a good socialist regime to benefit the people. Today’s liberal-socialist politicians, journalists, and educators at the time proclaimed allegiance to our enemies and to what they called the Black Colony within the United States. Their slogan was, “Death to Amerika! Bring the war home, kill your parents, and ice the pigs!”
The Baby-Boomer radicals got their wish. The result was either what they expected and desired, or one that they conveniently chose to ignore.
The Wikipedia entry informs us:
“Pol Pot and his army, called the Khmer Rouge, came to power in Cambodia (Kampuchea) in 1975. He was named prime minister of the new communist government in 1976 and began a program of violent reform. The Khmer Rouge abolished currency, religion and private property and evacuated cities in the hopes of creating a Maoist agrarian society free of Western influence (though, like Mao, Pol Pot had studied the works of V. I. Lenin and Karl Marx in Europe). Under his regime, forced labor, executions and famine killed between 1.5 and 2 million Cambodians (more than 20% of the population).”
The spirit of Pol Pot lives among today’s liberals, who still believe themselves above the law and entitled to make the rules to their advantage, paying no heed to the Bill of Rights.
An irate reader recently posted a comment of the sort that is frequently delivered to me by email. One part of his comment is typical of liberals’ readiness to impose their convictions upon society by any means necessary, precisely as Pol Pot did:
“There’s no moral foundation for selfish, me-first, let-the-poor-starve (or worse, drown) policies arch-conservatives like Mr. Brewton claim to be our founding princples. When their time comes, we’ll clap them in irons, mourn our collective stupidity for ever listening to them, and move on to better things.”
Liberals, since the dawn of the socialist era in the French Revolution, have been prepared to resort to mass imprisonment and murder, believing that their actions will lead to perfection of an abstraction called “humanity.” My reader is ready to clap me in irons; the French revolutionaries suspended democracy to impose the Reign of Terror in order, as they said, to preserve democracy; Lenin said that justice emanates from the muzzle of a rifle pointed at the capitalist’s head.
The same cock-sure certainty of conviction animates people like the reporting staff and editorial board of the New York Times. Among that company, the spirit of Vietnam opposition remains a vibrant, all-consuming preoccupation. So sure are they that the Iraq war is simply a repeat of Vietnam, an excrescence of capitalist imperialism, that, as in the 1960s, any measures are permissible, indeed required, to block American foreign policy.
The Times’s repeated disclosures of the administration’s anti-terror intelligence programs can be explained, at least in part, by their conviction that risking the lives of American civilians and servicemen is a small price to pay for destroying a hated President of the United States who has the poor taste to be a Christian.
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