February 15, 2007

Things we should remember...

Most revisionist history is simply a matter of ignoring the past, not of inventing a new past. In America, leftists mostly control the schools and medias, so certain things get dropped down the Memory Hole. Especially, certain horrific slaughters, if they get noticed at all, just happened. There's no mention of why they happened.

One of those big facts that's been excised from memory, is the subject of a piece by Jeff Jacoby: American Leftists Were Pol Pot's Cheerleaders. Remember. Be Aware. The same creatures who want to bring us "peace" in Iraq helped to bestow the same sort of "peace" on Cambodia.

....But nowhere in the Times story was there a reminder that the Khmer Rouge was able to seize power only after the US Congress in 1975 cut off all aid to the embattled pro-American government of Lon Nol -- and that it did so despite frantic warnings of the bloodbath that would ensue. President Ford warned of "horror and tragedy'' if Cambodia was abandoned to the Khmer Rouge and pleaded with Congress to supply Lon Nol's army with the tools it needed to defend itself.

To no avail. US troops had come home two years earlier, but American antiwar activists were still intent on effecting the "liberation'' of Southeast Asia. Radicals like Jane Fonda, David Dellinger, and Tom Hayden stormed the country, denouncing anyone who opposed communist victory in Cambodia and Vietnam. On the campuses, in the media, and in Congress, it was taken on faith that a Khmer Rouge victory would bring peace and enlightened leadership to Cambodia.

"The growing hysteria of the administration's posture on Cambodia,"declared Senator George McGovern, "seems to me to reflect a determined refusal to consider what the fall of the existing government in Phnom Penh would actually mean. . . . We should be able to see that the kind of government which would succeed Lon Nol's forces would most likely be a government . . . run by some of the best-educated, most able intellectuals in Cambodia.''

Stanley Karnow, hailed nowadays as an authoritative Indochina historian, was quite sure that "the 'loss' of Cambodia would . . . be the salvation of the Cambodians. "There was no point helping the noncommunist government survive, he wrote, "since the rebels are unlikely to kill more innocent civilians than are being slaughtered by the rockets promiscuously hitting Phnom Penh."

The New Republic told its readers that the ouster of Lon Nol should be of no concern, since "the Cambodian people will finally be rescued from the horrors of a war that never really had any meaning.''

In Washington, then-Representative Christopher Dodd of Connecticut averred: "The greatest gift our country can give to the Cambodian people is peace, not guns. And the best way to accomplish that goal is by ending military aid now."...
[Emphasis added. Thanks to Orrin]

There's more, of course. Notice the bit about how the war "never really had any meaning." Just think about it. Does it sound familiar?

* I should add that the Khmer Rouge habit of inflicting torture and death was known. It was no secret. The advice given to those who worked in Cambodia was, "Don't be taken alive."

In the same way, the tendency to murder and torture of the terrorists and Ba'athist is known. We have heard the tales of the Taliban inflicting horrific deaths for sins like flying kites or owning a songbird. We found the torture-chambers when we re-took Falluja.

So when leftists and fake pacifists prate endlessly about abu Ghraib (a relatively minor evil that was soon corrected and punished) they are not just indulging in anti-Americanism. They are actively promoting things a thousand times worse, by directing the world's attention away from them.

Posted by John Weidner at February 15, 2007 7:22 AM
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