Not True Communism - the left and Cambodian genocide

It was in 1980 when I first encountered the Western academic response to the Khmer Rouge, Angkar and Pol Pot. This was something of an eye-opener - my spectacularly low opinion of Noam Chomsky was formed at this time - as we considered the still emerging evidence of communist atrocity in Cambodia set alongside the dominant commentary, inspired by the likes of Chomsky, that the refugee tales couldn't be believed and it was just "...a rationally conceived strategy for dealing with the urgent problems that faced postwar Cambodia."

Cambodian academic, Sophal Ear and US researcher, Donald W. Beachler call this the "Standard Total Academic View" - it was pretty much what that part of my South East Asian Politics module taught. Question the reports, challenge the numbers (we had a whole seminar dissecting the numbers who died - downwards and sideways mostly) and argue that the sources of criticism were either 'neo-colonialist', US imperialist or Viet imperialist. Even as we read reports about children killed, their heads smashed against trees, starvation and mass murder using the most basic of implements - shovels, mattocks, axes, our reading list contained stuff like this:

Chomsky invites us to consider historian Ben Kiernan’s hypothesis that the Khmer Rouge leaders never properly established discipline over insubordinate soldiers: “[Kiernan] notes that most of the atrocity stories come from areas of little Khmer Rouge strength, where orders to stop reprisals were disobeyed by soldiers wreaking vengeance, often drawn from the poorest sections of the peasantry.”

This quote comes from a frightening article by Matthew Blackwell describing both the personal tragedy, the scale of death and the manner in which so much of what we'd now call "progressive academia" denied or down-played what was happening. These were heroic socialist liberators, how could they possibly install such a reign of murderous terror? Even today some still deny - here from 2012 in American 'radical' magazine, Counterpunch:

The Pol Pot the Cambodians remember was not a tyrant, but a great patriot and nationalist, a lover of native culture and native way of life. New Cambodia (or Kampuchea, as it was called) under Pol Pot and his comrades was a nightmare for the privileged, for the wealthy and for their retainers; but poor people had enough food and were taught to read and write. As for the mass killings, these are just horror stories, averred my Cambodian interlocuters.

Set against a million dead people, torture and starvation, we have people - academics, commentors, reporters - prepared to spin and prevaricate so as to suggest that, far from the Killing Fields being the direct consequence of a deliberate policy imposed by the Angkar and inspired by the Marxism they'd learned in 1950s Paris, they were some sort of accident or mistake.

This is a pattern for these progressive academics and writers - from G B Shaw's apologia for Stalinism through Chomsky's excusing of Pol Pot to today's left fawning over Chavez's Venezuela and Castro's Cuba. And when the denial of the violent oppression communism requires becomes to painful, our leftists fall back on "that wasn't true communism".

....

The choir sang...

****

It was a choir of primary school children and was like so many of these choirs - nearly all girls, in this case with one slightly sheepish bespectacled boy, and singing those primary school songs that are both banal and also uplifting. On this occasion there was a supplement of older people sharing the singing, giving it a little gravitas (and a little more bass).

Through my mind went a simple thought - "how do you explain to an eight year old child, regardless of background or origin, about the event they were singing for?"

The event was Bradford Council's Holocaust Memorial Day. We were recalling, in the comfortable surroundings of City Hall's banqueting chamber, how six million Jews and thousands of others deemed "sub-human" were first herded into ghettos, then into camps and lastly into ovens. It started with just the numbers - numbing numbers - before you get to appreciate that these were real people. Living, breathing, walking the streets, doing business, laughing, playing and working. Some of those people's families were in the room with us.

Some of those people, dragged from their homes, crammed onto trains and sent on a hideous journey...some of them were children, eight year old children like the boys and girls singing for us. We had no images to grasp the enormity of that fact, to appreciate the truth of a deliberate attempt to exterminate the Jewish people. A slaughter of such proportion that we can barely grasp its scale - how many people work where you work? Fifty? A hundred? Have you been to a premier league football game with thirty, forty, perhaps fifty thousand others? I was at Knebworth in an audience of 200,000 plus in 1979.

Imagine all those people dead and the same number again starved and emaciated almost to the point of death. Close your eyes and picture it, picture the horror. And then multiply it by ten times. Men, women and children dead, strewn across the land before your eyes. As far as you can see. Not because they were bad or wrong, violent or criminal. Dead because of what they are - Jewish.

We'd like for the world to remember. At this event we bore witness to that memory. We lit candles.

But it seems to me that the world has forgotten. We read almost daily of atrocities. Of Christians - men, women, children - killed because they are Christians. Of people blown to shreds because they chose the nightclub instead of church, temple or mosque. Of women cut down for wearing the wrong clothes. Of girls shot for going to school.

And the words of hate are still spread. The lies that led to the murder of the Jews, those Russian forgeries that led to pogrom, are still placed before the credulous public as if they are fact. The blood libel is still repeated and the allegation of christian cannibalism still used to frighten the ignorant. Great art, wisdom and science is pushed aside, declared as apostasy. And the works of faith - Bible, Koran, Torah - are sneered at, their adherents dismissed as the ignorant.

We spend our time categorising and recategorising humans. Placing us all in little boxes labelled "sexual preference", "race", "religion", "social class", "physical ability", "education", "gender"...and so on forever. In doing this we do just what those who hate want us to do - place metaphorical stars and triangles on each of us. And where does it get us? It gets us to a world where a veritable dictionary of the taboo exists - page after page of things we cannot say, words we cannot use. And it gets us to the point where these "protected characteristics" are seen by government as defining who you are - "Jewish, female, heterosexual, older, middle-class, employed" or "White British, male, gay, disabled, unemployed, working class".

These are not descriptions of people but labels on boxes, it tells me nothing about that woman, about what makes her laugh or cry, how she dresses, does she drink white wine or like a gin and tonic? A thousand and more little things that make her different all trapped inside a box with a label. A box with a label about which we can use only the approved descriptions, the ones that aren't in that dictionary of the taboo.

Holocaust Memorial Day recalls a time when the label on one of those boxes became a death sentence. Surely our aim should be to start treating people as simply people, to stop putting each one into a convenient box? A box that those who hate can point at and condemn.

The choir sang hopeful, uplifting songs. Songs about journeys, arrival and where we're going. Let's hope those children arrive in a place where what you are doesn't matter but who you are does,

....

Quote of the day: "they of all people"

****

From the always readable and sometimes brilliant Heresy Corner:

...however much you disagree with Israeli policy in the West Bank and elsewhere (and I'm not a big fan) there is no valid comparison between an over-the-top security operation intended to preserve the territorial integrity, indeed the very existence, of the state of Israel, and the systematic attempt by the Nazis to wipe an entire people from the face of the earth. None.

Do read the rest of the piece.

....