Two things happened this week that should put paid forever to any notion that the left are our moral superiors. One was the 50-year anniversary of something the left today act like they never did, the other was something they’ll act like they never did in another 50 years.
Fifty years ago, Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge communists and Cambodia became, for 14 blood-soaked years, ‘Kampuchea’. As sure as night follows day, a communist regime translated immediately into mass-murder on an unimaginable scale. While the ‘scoreboard’ for Pol Pot’s communists might seem Little League compared to the big killers like Stalin and Mao – a ‘mere’ two to three million* – in relative terms that amounted to nearly one-third of the country’s entire population. Even Mao could only brag of ‘cutting off one finger’ and still having nine left.
The entire city of Phnom Penh was emptied, in line with Pot’s communist doctrine. Its entire population, including hospital patients, were herded into the countryside, supposedly to learn the virtues of peasantry and to build an agrarian communist utopia.
The reality was that the entire country was turned into a prison camp – and a death machine.
In late 1976, a decision on “Smashing (people) Inside and Outside the Ranks” instructed the secret police to torture prisoners, including through whippings with electric wire, regardless of age or health. Two years later, prison administrators were recording “experiments”, in which young women were stabbed or bashed, then had their stomachs slashed open and ripped out, before being placed in water to see how long it took until “the body floats to the top”.
Meanwhile, in the countryside, victims were butchered as the party’s cadres struggled to meet targets for the elimination of human “vermin”. The party announced, for example, that in just one district, 40,000 of the 70,000 citizens were or had been traitors: no matter how impossible it was to identify them correctly, they all had to be “purified”.
How did the comfortable left in rich, safe, Western countries react? With celebration.
Marxist academic Malcolm Caldwell called it “promise of a better future for all”. His close friend Noam Chomsky wittered about “a new era of economic development and social justice” in Cambodia. Gareth Porter, who co-authored a book on the Khmer Rouge in 1976, wrote that “The evacuation of Phnom Penh undoubtedly saved the lives of many thousands of Cambodians.”
Compare that with the reports of eyewitnesses:
I shall never forget one cripple who had neither hands nor feet, writhing along the ground like a severed worm, or a weeping father carrying his 10-year-old daughter wrapped in a sheet tied around his neck like a sling, or the man with his foot dangling at the end of a leg to which it was attached by nothing but skin.
Porter’s book contains not a single word of criticism of the Khmer Rouge. Almost to a man, the Western left steadfastly denied the reports of atrocities and mass-murder pouring out of ‘Kampuchea’. One leftist academic, who had certainly never laboured a day in his life, sneered, “What the urban dwellers consider ‘hard’ labor may not be punishment or community service beyond human endurance.”
In February 1977, François Ponchaud, a French Catholic missionary who had a deep knowledge of Cambodia, published his now classic Cambodia Year Zero, which documented the massacres. Leading the left’s response, Libération, the daily paper of Paris’s gauchistes, rushed out a review accusing Ponchaud of being a mendacious tool of the CIA.
Not to be outdone, Noam Chomsky, who was never slow in accusing the US and Israel of hideous crimes, asserted – without giving any evidence of his own – that Ponchaud’s “evidence begins to crumble when one looks at it carefully”. Loudly backing Chomsky’s allegations were, among many other “progressive” Australians, the academics Ben Kiernan (who later regretted his stance) and Gavan McCormack, whose arguments Robert Manne forcefully rebutted in Quadrant.
The support the global left gave the Khmer Rouge was not without consequences. In his memoirs of the period, Ponchaud argues that it encouraged the Khmer Rouge in their madness – and hence bears its share of responsibility for the atrocities they were committing.
Only one left-wing academic ever got his comeuppance – in the most hilariously ironic way possible. Caldwell jumped at what, by his lights, was the opportunity of a lifetime: a personal invitation from his hero Pol Pot to take a guided tour of ‘Kampuchea’.
After two weeks of touring the country, Caldwell scored an even bigger coup: a personal interview with Pol Pot himself.
Within hours of the meeting, Caldwell was shot in his hotel room by Khmer Rouge soldiers.
Unfortunately, his lefty fellow travellers have never paid in the slightest for their sins, not even in reputation. Chomsky is still a doyen of the left.
A left that has indulged in one of its many outbursts of mass amnesia, in order to maintain the conceit of their untouchable moral superiority.
Even as they repeat the sins of their past.
That willingness to ignore reality has hardly disappeared. Displaying the same Manichean logic that whitewashed the destruction of Cambodia, the Greens and their sympathisers unhesitatingly damn Israel. But they refuse to recognise that the goal of Hamas, whose exterminationist rhetoric of “purification” mirrors that of the Khmer Rouge, is to erase “the poison of Jewry (from) the body of the world”. Nor do they have any qualms about Hezbollah’s vow to “annihilate the (Jewish) rats from the face of the Earth”.
The “progressives” have, in other words, learnt nothing and forgotten everything. But five decades on, there is one big thing they still know all too well: how to keep their eyes tight shut.
And how to turn their backs – literally – on those who genuinely are being oppressed: the people who, as ever, are the canaries in the coalmines of left-approved murderousness.
Scores of students at the nation’s oldest university turned their backs on Jewish peers who were pleading for support to stamp out anti-Semitism on campus and defending the existence of a Jewish state.
The meeting of Sydney University students ultimately rejected a new definition of anti-Semitism adopted by Australia’s universities and called for the elimination of Israel, leading to fierce condemnation by peak Jewish groups […]
The motions moved on Wednesday night by anti-Israel activist group Students Against War, which passed almost unanimously, will lead to the Students’ Representative Council rejecting in full the university’s definition of anti-Semitism, declaring it was “not anti-Semitic to call for the elimination of the apartheid state of Israel”.
The second student general meeting held on campus in under a year also reaffirmed previous calls, backed by the SRC, for a “single secular democratic state across all of historic Palestine, from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea”.
Perhaps we ought to pool our resources and fund them on a free, Caldwell-style trip, to Gaza and let their Hamas heroes’ nature take its course.
Failing that, every single one of them should have their faces and names published, for all to see. So that, in the coming decades, they cannot slink back into the shadows and pretend they never cheered on genocidal anti-Semitism.
*When millions of deaths are a rounding error, it can only mean communism.
