“Compassionate” Communism: 30 Years After Pol Pot

It always ends this way. Cambodia was just a bit more extreme.

by Rod D. Martin
April 18, 2005

It has been three decades since one of Jane Fonda and John Kerry's favorite "enlightened peasant movements", the Khmer Rouge, swept to power in Cambodia and, in just under three years, murdered a third of its population (a feat memorialized in the Oscar-winning The Killing Fields). So grim was this hellish "worker's paradise" that the heirs of Ho Chi Minh, accomplished butchers themselves, felt the need to end Pol Pot's reign, invading and removing him in 1978.

The American left -- Peter Collier, David Horowitz and Philip Short aside -- never acknowledged what happened or what it meant. Their silence is deafening; their unreconstructed sympathy for the murderers is even more so. Indeed, when they speak of Cambodia at all it is to decry Richard Nixon's 1970 attempt to shut off the flow of Communist arms and reinforcements down the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

We cannot afford their forgetfulness. All the world must remember Cambodia's object lesson in the applied phil…