I guess The Killing Fields and all those journalists just got it wrong.
I swear, you kill more than 20% of the population of your own country just once, and people are all nag, nag, nag. Geez, way to live in the past, guys! How come nobody talks about all the cool stuff the Khmer Rouge did? Like taco night. That was fun, right?
But noooooo, everyone’s all genocide this, and crimes against humanity that, and unspeakable inhumanity the other. Pfffft! Lighten up, people! Those few of you who survived, I mean.
Also they provide an excellent example for any other countries that might be considering murdering all their educated populace and forcing everyone remaining into pre-Industrial Age subsistence agriculture. You need to plan the transition really carefully if you want it to work.
I used to work with a guy who was an officer in the Cambodian Army when the Khmer took over. I’ll ask his opinion when I see him next. On second thought, no I won’t.
Damn, I forgot all about taco night! You’re right, that homemade guac alone makes up for everything.
The thing is, it seemed so good on paper: Herd everybody into communal labor camps, feed them 500 calories a day, and shoot anybody who disagrees. What wasn’t there to like? Now everybody’s all up in their face and Monday morning quarterbacking. As if the rest of us would have spotted the flaws in such an attractive plan.
Thats the trouble with people, they ask for strong leadership, and then when you give it to them, its all boo hoo hoo…
Ungrateful sods.
The ONLY thing bad about the Khmer Rouge is that it didn’t have a catchy enough name.
If their regime had been known as “The Democratic Republic of Cambodia” then everyone would overlook the whole ‘let’s kill all the intellectuals and starve people’ thing, possibly even turn it into a positive.
Bumping this almost three year old thread:
"A United Nations-assisted tribunal has cleared the way to begin the genocide trial of two elderly former top leaders of Cambodia’s 1970s Khmer Rouge regime.
Survivors of the communist regime’s reign of terror, along with students and Buddhist monks, attended a hearing on Wednesday that laid down the ground rules for the trial, which judges said would likely start in September or October.
The mass killings of an estimated 100,000 to 500,000 ethnic Cham Muslims and 20,000 Vietnamese form the basis of the genocide charges against Nuon Chea, 88, and Khieu Samphan, 83."
So are they going to complete the trial before the defendants die of old age?
Assume Pol Pot would also be a defendant, were he alive?
Maybe the state will use the death penalty as a deterrent.
The two were sentenced to life imprisonment: