Posted on 08/08/2005 6:30:33 PM PDT by Cecily
Pol Pot was the leader of the Khmer Rouge, the Communist Party that ruled Cambodia from 1976-1979. "Khmer Rouge" (or Khmer Reds) was the French rendering of the organization’s official name: the "Communist Party of Cambodia," later the "Party of Democratic Kampuchea" and also the "Communist Party of Kampuchea," or CPK. (Kampuchea is the local name for Cambodia.)
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at frontpagemag.com ...
Dickie Turbin as well.
Agreed. Fonda's recent recanting of her Hanoi days are nullified by her forthcoming anti-Iraq tour. Shameless whore.
Nice workup. Thanks for the post.
I had not realized that Pol Pot (another genocidal maniac), had been educated in the west.
I don't have time right now to look into this angle, but Jane Fonda was first married ot Roger Vadim. They were married in 1965 and had one child, Vanessa.
From a program I watched quite some time ago, I remember that Fonda lived with Vadim in France, I believe it was Paris.
Folks generally think of her turning in the Hayden era of her life. I wonder if she was traveling some of the same circles as Pot circa 1965. It could sure answer a lot of questions, if so.
The whole murderous cabal was educated in Paris. Ieng Sary - Brother Number Two (or Three?) - obtained his doctorate from the Sorbonne on the strength of a dissertation which prescribed the genocide to come a few decades later.
IIRC Ho Chi Minh was co-founder of the French Communist Party and founder of the Communist Party of Indochina, which of course included Cambodia.
Instead, you get idiotic European governments indicting Rumsfeld and Kissinger, criminals at the UN too busy lining their pockets to notice the mass murder of millions of people and Jane Fonda marrying billionaires to support her lifestyle.
Power to the People, indeed!
Totally disgusting.
I didn't realize that about Ho Chi Minh.
The Killing Fields & Murder of a Gentle Land- what really happened in Cambodia a quarter-century ago
In 1968 the Vietcong were wiped out during the Tet Offensive. But the North Vietnamese kept the fiction alive by ....
The leftist activists and the MSM created and perpetuated the myth that the U.S. had suffered a terrible defeat rather than a resounding victory. Rather than correct the record, the "best and the brightest" in Johnson's administration, most of whom he kept from the Kennedy administration, were secretly supporting the enemy, not unlike the collusion with Russia during the FDR era.
During this period, many American leftists openly supported a Communist takeover in Southeast Asia. Among the most notable spokespeople of this position was the popular actress Jane Fonda and her husband Tom Hayden, whose public comments were unambiguous in their expressions of contempt for America and sympathy for the Communists. On November 21, 1970, Fonda told a large University of Michigan audience, "If you understood what Communism was, you would hope, you would pray on your knees that we would some day become Communist."[11] At Duke University, she elaborated, "I, a socialist, think that we should strive toward a socialist society, all the way to Communism." The dual villains of Southeast Asian conflicts were, in her view, "U.S. imperialism" and "a white man’s racist aggression."[12]
We are witnessing a rerun of that now. The left is mounting the same campaign, with many of the same characters like Fonda, Kerry, Kennedy, and Hillary (whose inter circle still includes Ickes, Bloomingthal, Lake, etc.) at the forefront. They are banking on short memories, rewritten history in our schools and universities, and the efforts of activists and the MSM to pull it off.
This is what is promised:
From the moment it ascended to power, the Khmer Rouge characterized its newfound preeminence as a turning point in human history. "The Khmer revolution has no predecessors," said the party leaders. "What we are trying to bring about has never been accomplished at any time in history."[17]
This is what is delivered:
Pol Pot was prepared to pay any price to realize his goal; his currency of choice would prove to be the rivers of tears and torrents of blood flowing from the broken spirits and bodies of his own people. The result would be one of the most pitiable chapters of human suffering in the recorded history of mankind.
The infirmed were simply permitted to die unattended and uncomforted; they were considered "useless mouths" that could only consume but could not produce, and thus their deaths were welcomed by the Khmer Rouge.[33]
Terry Shiavo?
In short, people were turned into beasts of burden; the idea that human life had any special value distinguishing it from that of a goat or a spider was dismissed as a sentimental absurdity. "Losing you is not a loss," went one popular adage, "and keeping you is no specific gain."
Abortion?
People were forced to repress their personalities entirely; their individual character traits were deemed inconsequential....All traces of human creativity, ingenuity, and individualism utterly vanished from the country.
Political correctness?
As Cambodian life and culture collapsed under the weight of Pol Pot’s disastrous policies, a key tactic of the Khmer Rouge was to keep people ignorant of all ideas contrary to its own dogmas.
The MSM and the Democrats?
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]
Sound familiar? Chomsky is once again preeminent among the left.
Contemptuous of religion in general, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge targeted people of faith aggressively.
Sound familiar? Are the perpetrators of threads about evolution versus creation or ID precursors of this? Just a question.
In an interview given shortly before his death, Pol Pot claimed that he had never intended to kill so many people; that the calamities brought about by his regime were the result of his inexperience in government and his inability to rein in the zealous movement that he had started; and that all his actions had been "[f]or the love of the nation and the people."[91]
Typical unintended consequences of leftist policies and the "It's not my fault" excuse?
It should be noted that the atrocities of Pol Pot were not at all unique among Communist revolutions. His extermination campaign had many parallels with those of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, who between them may have killed 100 million people who stood between them and the progressive future. In each case, there was the systematic extermination of the class enemy as they sought to wipe clean the slate of the past and usher in the dawn of the new; in each case there was the creation of vast slave networks and concentration camps; the widespread use of torture; the implementation of crackpot economic theories inspired by Marx, the paranoid perception that enemies of the regime lurked everywhere; the determination to stamp out every last dissident, both real and imagined; the designation of particular classes as being "enemies of the people," unworthy of the most rudimentary human rights; the complete subjugation of the individual; an omnipotent state that sought to control every imaginable aspect of people’s lives; and the banishment of all spiritual rites and beliefs, effectively making the dictator the only "deity." In short, the abominations of Pol Pot were not an aberration, but a culmination of the Communist fantasy, a fulfillment of the long, grotesque tradition of the movement for "social justice."
"If you understood what Communism was, you would hope, you would pray on your knees that we would some day become Communist."[11]
Are these the people we are going to listen to? The coming elections will determine how many of us do.
I know that you know all this, DoughtyOne. I simply used you as a jumping off point to pontificate.
No problem at all bud... This stuff needs to be put out there so the young or others who haven't been exposed to it yet, can understand what's going on.
I appreciate the tail-end note. I understand completely.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.