The Greens and the Khmer Rouge Part 2

So the Greens got their history wrong and engaged in a bit of USA bashing, so what, they aren’t like the Khmer Rouge are they? I mean, you’d struggle to find the Khmer Rouge spirit and philosophy in most Green party member wouldn’t you? Well, yes probably.

However, the difference between the Greens and the Khmer Rouge is not as plain and obvious as that. Both apply the same philosophical principles, both have some similar political goals and indeed both use the same fundamental methodology, the difference is one of degree.

It is one that sadly the Greens can’t see in themselves, for to admit that would be truly horrifying.

Frogblog stated “every political and religious creed that has allowed any form of violence to be part of its agenda or methodology has at times created the sort of madness that Pol Pot let loose”

Indeed, although I doubt the Greens acknowledge that they themselves have violence at the centre of their methodology. I have said this before many times, but the fundamental means the Greens use to their ends is state violence. The rhetoric of “peace” is wrapped in the fist of the state, the state that the Greens want to ban products they don’t approve of, because of what they are, what they contain, who made them or where they are from. The same state the Greens want to compel, prohibit and regulate, all with the threat of force against those who disobey. The same state the Greens want to force people to pay more, again with the threat of confiscation of property and imprisonment if you refuse. The Greens want to increase the role of the state, which has as its sole difference from every other institution the monopoly right to initiate force against others. In short, the Greens want more violence, yet cannot see that they are on a continuum of political parties advocating more violence – the Khmer Rouge are different by a matter of degree.

Then Frogblog stated “The real underlying human attribute that set the Killing Fields, and the Holocaust, and Inquisition, and 9-11 and Abu Ghraib et al in action, is certainty, certainty on a scale that will impose its will through violence.” Note the selection of targets. Two mass murders by politicians, a torture/murder spree by religious fanatics, an act of terrorism by religious fanatics, and then… a prison run by the US government that saw some working there commit abuses of… humiliation and torture, on a tiny scale in comparison. Again, had to find something the US did, not Stalin, Mao, Hussein, Ceausescu etc.

However, Frog is curious about talking of certainty. For the environmental movement is full of the same philosophy. Certainty that man made climate change is happening, means Armageddon if CO2 emissions are not drastically cut back, and that can only happen by curtailing fossil fuel based industries and transport, and not using nuclear power, and primarily in developed countries. Organic food good, GE food bad. Natural good, manmade bad. Train good, car bad. Recycling good, mining bad. Local good, foreign bad. State owned good, private and commercial bad. You can go on and on. Attacking these points of view can easily get slander and abuse, as if you are attacking a fundamentalist religion. Criticising climate change science means you are called a denier, terminology used to describe those who deny the historical fact of the Holocaust. Of course, the Greens will happily impose their will through violence. It has supporters who happily use violence to break into property and destroy it, or use it to threaten people at protests, and naturally it still believes in state violence to achieve its goals.

However, there is a more fundamental point. The Khmer Rouge expounded a number of political goals that are not that different from what the Greens espouse.

Yes the Greens do not want to engage in mass murder of any group. Yes the Greens approve of education, admittedly state monopoly education. Yes, the Greens wouldn’t abolish liberal democracy, but how many of them believe money is the root of all evil? How many would think doing away with money isn’t a bad thing?

The Khmer Rouge rejected foreign culture, technology and influences, the Greens rabidly back protection from imports, local content quotas and subsidies on media and rage vehemently against foreign investment or foreign ownership of “our” land and assets. The Greens are xenophobic or rather just nationalistic, the difference is the Khmer Rouge were fanatically so. The difference, is a matter of degree.

The Khmer Rouge embraced subsistence, basic agriculture, labour and self sufficiency. All very environmentally friendly, all for one and one for all. Everyone worked in the fields, everyone got fed, everyone was housed. It was organic, it was healthy, it wasn’t commercialized, and notwithstanding the slave labour conditions and insufficient rations to keep people alive – the principle was everyone had a job, everyone had subsistence, everyone ate healthily and nobody got rich. The difference, is a matter of degree.

Certainly, the carbon footprint would have been tiny. The Greens welcome old fashioned agriculture, self sufficiency and reject commercialization of just about everything. Cars had been banned, indeed aviation had virtually be shut down (though so had the railways so, hmmm a bit mixed). No fossil fuel burning power stations, little use of imported oil, so nobody who went through that period could have been accused of “harming the planet”. The Greens would regard any new power station, car or plane to have been a step backwards then. The difference, is a matter of degree.

The Khmer Rouge abolished money, the Greens are against free trade and extremely suspicious of capitalism. They seek to nationalize, regulate and prohibit various business activities. The difference is a matter of degree.

The Khmer Rouge took children from their parents, placed them in state schools so they would learn the official dogma, and to spy on adults. The Greens welcomed Cindy Kiro’s proposal to monitor children from cradle to grave, to prosecute parents who apply a mild smack to their children, the Greens oppose competition in education, oppose alternative ideas being taught from their dogma on the environment, and happily call on children to get parents to recycle. The difference is a matter of degree.

Philosophically, the only core differences between the Khmer Rouge and the Greens are the willingness of the Khmer Rouge to use violence to dispatch opponents, and the degree to which the Greens would go in using force to implement a future of less capitalism, less industry, more egalitarianism and more nationalism.

You see the Greens don’t believe that your body is yours, the Greens don’t believe parents should be responsible to pay for their children (or decide their education, diet, healthcare or media) , the Greens don’t believe businesses and consumers should trade freely, the Greens don’t believe that all adult interaction should be voluntary, the Greens classify people into groups (Maori, women, GLBT, foreign investors, businesspeople, students, disabled, elderly, the “rich”, the “poor”) and regard collective action to be more valuable than individual achievement.

The Khmer Rouge didn’t believe your body was yours, they didn’t believe parents were responsible for their children, they didn’t believe in business, they didn’t believe in voluntary adult interaction and classified people into groups, and regarded individuals as a means to an end.

Be very clear. I believe that most Green party members are light years away from having the intent or desire to do anything on the scale of bloodshed of the Khmer Rouge. However, philosophically, the differences are only one of degree – not principle. The Khmer Rouge believed in a pure Cambodian society without any foreign influences and no individualism. The Greens believe in a pre-industrial NZ society with all that is foreign being carefully selected, and individualism being under the watchful eye of an ever maternal state that directs collective and democratic decision making about much of your life.

Is it any wonder Keith Locke once looked upon the “liberation” of Phnom Penh fondly?

Ready to punch your kids?

Presumably the vote on the badly worded smacking referendum means that New Zealanders predominantly want it to be legal to punch your kids in the face or smack them over the head with concrete - that's what you voted for, right? With this sort of nonsense from the child nationalisation lobby is it any wonder so many voted the way they did.

I didn't vote, partly because by the time the ballot paper got to the UK, I had little time to respond and think about how I would do so. I also believed a bad sign would be sent by voting to endorse legal smacking, as too many parents use corporal punishment frequently ("you'll get a hiding" being the apt phrase), and don't need further encouragement.

I don't like the law as it stands, but I don't believe smacking is part of good parental correction - nor do I enjoy seeing the likes of Family First gloating about something that, in my view, is a practice that should go.

As I have said before, I don't believe smacking should be a crime, but I also don't endorse it. I reject Sue Bradford's agenda of nationalising children, but also the agenda of some conservatives approving of violence to teach kids "a lesson". The law should protect children from force that causes damage or which is sadistic, repeated and terrorising. It should not protect them from force to remove them from danger or restrain them from doing violence to others. There was little evidence the old law presented problems for prosecuting real abuse, that should be the focus of tweaking criminal law -and let reform of parental discipline that is NOT abuse, be a matter for debate, discussion and dialogue.

There is now a mandate to review the law - that review should aim at only criminalising behaviour which is clearly abusive - but that legalising that which is not, is NOT endorsing it.

After all, group sex is legal, but the absence of a law against doesn't mean the state endorses it.

Libya greets killer as a hero

Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi has been returned to Libya to be given a hero's welcome by Muammar Gaddafi. His part in blowing up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie was not enough for him to be held in prison while he dies of prostate cancer - so he is feted by the Libyan dictatorship (which is now thought of as friendly, because Gaddafi doesn't play with terrorism anymore, and has a lot of oil).

Of course the disgrace of his release lies with the Scottish Justice Secretary, Kenny MacAskill. The power lay with him to release al-Megrahi as it is devolved to the loony leftwing Scottish government. MacAskill's decision has been damned by the Obama Administration and David Cameron (the British government has been rather quiet). However, it is hardly surprising, MacAskill is on the left of the Scottish National Party (which itself is more leftwing than Labour or the Lib Dems), so he probably has had more sympathy for the hardened socialist Gaddafi than most.

Of course those people who died on that Pan Am flight don't get a few months to spend with family before they died...

Temporary break

Mum's very ill, so being a polemicist isn't very important for now.

UPDATE: Stable and somewhat optimistic now, a scare, so here is hoping echocardiogram produces positive results. It appears a viral infection put the body under extreme stress, causing heart failure.

Greens and the Khmer Rouge Part 1

Frogblog has posted about the evidence given by Rob Hamill at the trial of Duch, who operated the Tuol Sleng torture and murder prison in Cambodia. A chance, of course, to reflect simply upon the horrors of the Khmer rouge era. Estimates of numbers executed and starved to death by this regime range from 1.2 to 2.2 million people, between a quarter and a third of the population.

The easy target is to throw stones at Keith Locke. It is fairly well known that in his naïve youth he cheered on the Khmer Rouge victory in Phnom Penh as a liberation. Of course he was not the only one, the Lon Nol military dictatorship that had been overthrown was corrupt and brutal. Nobody missed it at the time, it was hoped things could only get better. Few paid any attention to stories coming out of Khmer Rouge occupied territory of the Maoist autarchy imposed on the local population, although images from the early 1970s showed the uniformity and order that they had imposed (ironically published approvingly by a Chinese state propaganda pictorial magazine).

However, my concern is not Keith Locke. He was young and naïve, better to forgive that and his statements about nuclear power only being safe under socialism, and cheering on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, than to dwell a quarter of a century or more later. My concern is also not Sue Bradford, who was cheerleading on Maoist China in the early 1970s, the Khmer Rouge’s chief source of funds, arms and ideology. Imagine if a senior National MP had cheered on Pinochet, Franco or Salazar in his youth and how that would be treated by the Greens, but I digress.

It is this statement

“For us in the West what we have to get our heads around is that the Khmer Rouge learnt their ideology in Paris and were able to seize power because Richard Nixon personally ordered a secret bombing campaign that killed half a million. And that US foreign policy, in particular their determination to never forgive anyone that drives them off, allowed the Khmer Rouge to occupy Cambodia’s UN seat until 1993 rather than the government installed by the Vietnamese invasion that ended their rule.”

This statement evades certain facts, and would make you think that it is all the fault of the West and the US that the Khmer Rouge came to power. This is, at best, a side effect of failed policies, and there are others who can carry far more blame.

Yes the Khmer Rouge learnt their ideology in Paris, at the Sorbonne, along with many other Marxists. Radical Maoism was de riguer among many academics, vile as it always has been. However, the Khmer Rouge was active before the US bombings. Why did the US bomb Cambodia in the first place? Because it was being used by the North Vietnamese as a bypass route to infiltrate South Vietnam. “Neutral” Cambodia was a staging ground for invasions of South Vietnam. The US response was to use bombing and then invasion to close the borders, and buy time. The bombing killed between 100,000 and 600,000 (half a million is a high estimate), and certainly gave the Khmer Rouge propaganda to attract illiterate peasants to fight for them. The US backed the overthrow of Prince Norodom Sihanouk (a very slimy long time friend of Kim Il Sung) and supported a corrupt and brutal strongman called Lon Nol. His antics also helped fuel support for the Khmer Rouge. However he achieved the primary goal, securing the borders of Cambodia and wiping out North Vietnamese forces in Cambodia.

The Khmer Rouge was backed solidly by Mao, China supplying explicit financial and material support. The USSR was more interested in Vietnam. So it was China that enabled the Khmer Rouge to fight against Lon Nol. However, it was Lon Nol himself who was so corrupt, incompetent and cruel that caused many Cambodians to join the fight against him. Note that Prince Sihanouk himself backed the Khmer Rouge as well – the “neutral” Prince backing radical Maoists so he could continue to enjoy the trappings of power. The US did not back the Khmer Rouge, it unfortunately backed its hopelessly incompetent and immoral opponents.

So the US was guilty of foolishness in Cambodia, because its goal in Vietnam propelled victims of its actions (and its friend’s actions) to support the Khmer Rouge. However, to say Nixon enabled the Khmer Rouge to seize power is evading two key points:

1. Had the Khmer Rouge not had Chinese support, it may well have failed to takeover, avoiding the massive loss of life its regime caused.
2. The US from 1970 to 1975 armed, funded and backed the Lon Nol military regime, which whilst bad, fought the Khmer Rouge. Had Lon Nol remained in power, it would have been corrupt, and far from free, but would not have been as murderous. A similar analogy is Korea, where South Korean dictatorships and military regimes ran the country from 1953 through to 1988, but which was far less deadly than North Korea for its people.

The truth is that China provided succour to the Khmer Rouge, the US lamely fought against it, but the biggest supporters of the Khmer Rouge were often Western academics.

The Greens skirt over the Khmer Rouge years. The years when umpteen Western academics embraced the Khmer Rouge, including the fool Malcolm Caldwell who decided to go visit them, and got murdered as a result. The years when leftwing pinup Noam Chomsky declared stories of mass murder and starvation from Democratic Kampuchea as CIA propaganda (the man has slithered in evasion of this statement ever since). This thesis talks of the "Standard Total Academic View on Cambodia" being "Democratic Kampuchea symbolized their wildest hopes and dreams. From the classroom to the politburo, the new Kampuchea was, to these scholars, theory becoming reality" says Sophal Ear.

You see the Khmer Rouge represented the idealistic vision of so many on the left. More on that in Part 2.

Vietnam invaded Cambodia for various reasons, including a border incident, concern over the Khmer Rouge treatment of ethnic Vietnamese (Vietnam knew only too well what was going on there), Soviet support for Vietnamese expansionism (as Vietnam was not backed by China – as was seen in a brief border war between the two in 1979).

You may find it odd that a party that opposed the US overthrowing the Saddam Hussein dictatorship, overthrowing the Taliban dictatorship and includes many who opposed the US kicking Iraq out of Kuwait, so warmly receives (or at least glosses over) Vietnam invading Cambodia.

Let me be clear, the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia was moral, purely because it ended the Khmer Rouge horror, even though nobody could dare claim that the Socialist Republic of Vietnam was free or respected individual rights, it fell short of the mass executions of the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge had been brutal to Vietnamese on both sides of the border. However, overthrowing the Khmer Rouge does not fit well with Green Party rhetoric against imperialism and war, particularly since the government installed by Hanoi was little more than an extension of its own.

The Greens claim the US allowed the Khmer Rouge to occupy the UN seat of Cambodia rather than the Vietnamese installed regime because of a fit of pique at losing the Vietnam War. This is an element of truth evading several facts and with the wrong motive.

The seat at the UN was held by the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea, shared by the Khmer Rouge, FUNCINPEC and the KPNLF, the latter two being royalist and anti-communist. This was maintained because China and the US both vetoed Soviet and Vietnamese requests for the seat to be taken up by the Hanoi led government. Of course when the Cold War ended, all of this fell away. Vietnam had withdrawn from Cambodia, and the pro-Vietnamese government engaged in a coalition with FUNCINPEC and the KPNLF, whilst the Khmer Rouge tried to continue fighting.

So why the history lesson? Well it is understandable to write about Rob Hamill testifying at Duch’s trial. It is a tragic NZ element to one of the most vile events of the 20th century. Indeed so vile it demonstrates that what is worse than war is government turning on its own people. However, the Greens couldn’t use the occasion to simply deplore the Khmer Rouge, deplore Maoism and condemn totalitarianism and communism. No. It was used to blame the United States, by selective use of the facts and evading the fundamental blame for the Khmer Rouge – Marxist scholars, Chinese Maoists and the embrace of the ideology that individuals only exist for the greater good.

The Greens implicitly endorse the Vietnamese invasion and conquest of Cambodia, because it overthrew a murderous tyranny, but don’t support the US doing the same in Afghanistan and Iraq.

So, why would the Greens selectively report history to bash the US? Why not bash China for providing the greater succuour to the Khmer Rouge? Why not bash communism generally? Why ignore the US backing of the Khmer Rouge's opponents over sustained periods? Why not slam the apologists of the regime from leftwing academia (which included your own)? Why not criticise Norodom Sihanouk for letting Cambodia be a vehicle for Vietnamese communist insurgency (attracting US attention), and then being a vehicle for the Khmer Rouge to have legitimacy?

Or better yet, why not shut the hell up about a party and government that represented an idealised vision of a society without any capitalism (money was abolished), without carbon based energy, where everyone was equal, there were no possessions, where peasantry had been raised to the highest level, where everyone was meant to get what they needed, and nobody was rich. Then ask yourself, before the consequences of this vision were obvious, would you too have supported it?