Edited Quote:
Communism, along with Nazism, was the greatest evil of the twentieth century.
As far as we know there was no more intense genocide in the twentieth century than that committed by the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge murdered at least 25% and perhaps as much as 47% of the seven million-strong Cambodian population in the three years it ruled. As the Khmer Rouge openly stated: “All we need to build our country is a million good revolutionaries. No more than that. And we would rather kill ten friends than allow one enemy to live.”
Officially possessing no prisons, the entire country of Cambodia became a death camp, between 1975 and 1979. One Cambodian witness explained: “There was no spare moment in the twenty-four-hour day. Daily life was divided up as follows: twelve hours for physical labor, two hours for eating, three hours for rest and education, and seven hours for sleep. We all lived in an enormous concentration camp. There was no justice.”
As one demographer, R.J. Rummel, put it in his 1994 magnum opus, Death by Government, “These communists turned Cambodia into a gulag of nearly 7 million people, each a prisoner and a slave.”
Rummel struggled to find a label for Communist Cambodia’s evil. “The closest I can come to describing the conditions and suffering of the Cambodian people under the Khmer Rouge is ‘hell state’.”
The murdering was done not by the Nazi mass method of gas chambers or ovens, but, more often, performed with simple blunt instruments. As the Black Book of Communism reports, around 64 percent of the Khmer Rouge’s victims died from blows to the head, asphyxiation, cut throats, or hanging. The executioners wanted to save bullets and satisfy their “sadistic instincts.” Truly, few things in life could match their brutality.
Somewhat surprisingly to westerners, many of the Khmer Rouge’s soldiers were young teens, ranging from age 12 to 15. They had been peasants taken from their parents and taught nothing but brutality by the Khmer Rouge. They even experimented viciously on animals, thus desensitizing themselves to violence against human beings. When the soldiers moved into Phnom Penh, New York Times reporter, Sydney Schanberg, noted, “Most of the soldiers were teenagers, which is startling. They were universally grim, robot-like, brutal. Weapons drip from them like fruit from trees - grenades, pistols, rifles, rockets.”
Rousseau, Robespierre, Fanon, Sartre, and intense racism proved to be the horrific blend that constituted Khmer Rouge thought.
They also loved Chairman Mao. Indeed, Pol Pot was convinced that he would be to the twenty-first century what Stalin and Mao were to the twentieth century. He believed himself the very manifestation and definition of “revolution.” Pol Pot went so far as to believe that all future Marxist revolutionaries, the world over, would speak Khmer.
No, there was, is, will be no “triumph of love” in humanity’s common affairs. Yes, peace, happiness, ease and plenty occur but are only interludes. Pain, struggle, loss and horror are never defeated. Human evil wins throughout history. (Though fortunately not always at the pitch of Communist Cambodia.)