Scratch Hard Enough

Walter Russell Mead, "Blogging Through Georgia,":

The huge dachas of the leadership on the Black Sea coast contrasted with the miserable hovels of the peasants on the road to Tiblisi. The facade of ethnic friendship among the fraternal peoples of the Soviet Union contrasted with feverish, paranoid hatreds festering just under the surface. As in Yugoslavia, I got to know people who were nerving themselves up to massacre their neighbors and drive innocent people out of their homes. I saw how the worst nationalistic paranoias and chauvinisms raged unchecked under Soviet rule — while in the capitalist west most Europeans had left that murderous claptrap behind long ago. Communism, it seemed to me then and still seems to me now, is not the opposite of fascism: it is fascism’s blood-brother, its complementary twin. The two live together in a vicious symbiotic relationship; scratch a Red and you’ll find a Brown. Better yet, scratch either one deeply enough and you will find a Black: someone so caught up in the will to power that crimes and atrocities don’t even count anymore.

Repost: The Beginning of a Reckoning for the Khmer Rouge

Tyler's Note: I originally posted this two weeks ago, but I wanted to call your attention to its contents again. So here it is.

Claire Berlinski over at Ricochet.com pointed out this article by Guy Sorman at City Journal. Mr. Sorman explains that Cambodia is finally bringing to justice - in a civil, lawful manner - some of those who perpetrated the horrors of the killing fields.

But Cambodians and foreigners alike still struggle to understand why so many were put to death. Mr. Sorman explains that the answer why is chillingly simple - such carnage is an essential part of Communism, a natural reflex:

But who or what was behind what the tribunal has called the genocide of Khmers by other Khmers? Might this be the fault of the United States? Was it not the Americans who, by setting up a regime in Cambodia to their liking, brought about a nationalist reaction? Or, might this genocide not be a cultural legacy, distinctive of Khmer civilization? Archeologists are digging through the past in vain to find a historical precedent. The true explanation, the meaning of the crime, can be found in the declarations of the Khmer Rouge themselves: just as Hitler described his crimes in advance, Pol Pot (who died in 1998) had explained early on that he would destroy his people, so as to create a new one. Pol Pot called himself a Communist; he became one in the 1960s as a student in Paris, then a cradle of Marxism. Since Pol Pot and leaders of the regime that he forced on his people referred to themselves as Communists—and in no way claimed to be heirs of some Cambodian dynasty—we must acknowledge that they were, in fact, Communists.

What the Khmer Rouge brought to Cambodia was in fact real Communism. There was no radical distinction, either conceptually or concretely, between the rule of the Khmer Rouge and that of Stalinism, Maoism, Castroism, or the North Korean regime. All Communist regimes follow strangely similar trajectories, barely colored by local traditions. In every case, these regimes seek to make a blank slate of the past and to forge a new humanity. In every case, the “rich,” intellectuals, and skeptics wind up exterminated. The Khmer Rouge rounded up urban and rural populations in agricultural communities based on precedents both Russian (the Kolkhozy) and Chinese (the popular communes), and they acted for the same ideological reasons and with the same result: famine. There is no such thing as real Communism without massacre, torture, concentration camps, gulags, or laogai. And if there has never been any such thing, then we must conclude that there could be no other outcome: Communist ideology leads necessarily to mass violence, because the masses do not want real Communism. This is as true in the rice fields of Cambodia as in the plains of Ukraine or under Cuban palms.

And still, far too many refuse to see. It simply hasn't been done properly yet; it just wasn't done right. Give us a chance. We'll make it work.

But killing is Communism's nature. It is essential to how it works, how it survives.

Communism survives - no, thrives - on blood and horror and human misery.


***

By the way, if all this seems like cold numbers to you, read this. It is an account by Pin Yathay, a man who welcomed the arrival of the Khmer Rouge into the capital - and spent the next two years trying to survive them. He escaped with only his life, watching his entire family die at their hands or by their neglect.

When everything - and everyone - is property of The State on behalf of The People, it is truly horrible what crimes will be committed in their name.


***

P.S. Ricochet and City Journal should be weekly visits, at minimum. There are some fascinating conversations at Ricochet, and absolutely fantastic writing at City Journal.

The Beginning of a Reckoning for the Khmer Rouge

Claire Berlinski over at Ricochet.com pointed out this article by Guy Sorman at City Journal. Mr. Sorman explains that Cambodia is finally bringing to justice - in a civil, lawful manner - some of those who perpetrated the horrors of the killing fields.

But Cambodians and foreigners alike still struggle to understand why so many were put to death. Mr. Sorman explains that the answer why is chillingly simple - such carnage is an essential part of Communism, a natural reflex:

But who or what was behind what the tribunal has called the genocide of Khmers by other Khmers? Might this be the fault of the United States? Was it not the Americans who, by setting up a regime in Cambodia to their liking, brought about a nationalist reaction? Or, might this genocide not be a cultural legacy, distinctive of Khmer civilization? Archeologists are digging through the past in vain to find a historical precedent. The true explanation, the meaning of the crime, can be found in the declarations of the Khmer Rouge themselves: just as Hitler described his crimes in advance, Pol Pot (who died in 1998) had explained early on that he would destroy his people, so as to create a new one. Pol Pot called himself a Communist; he became one in the 1960s as a student in Paris, then a cradle of Marxism. Since Pol Pot and leaders of the regime that he forced on his people referred to themselves as Communists—and in no way claimed to be heirs of some Cambodian dynasty—we must acknowledge that they were, in fact, Communists.

What the Khmer Rouge brought to Cambodia was in fact real Communism. There was no radical distinction, either conceptually or concretely, between the rule of the Khmer Rouge and that of Stalinism, Maoism, Castroism, or the North Korean regime. All Communist regimes follow strangely similar trajectories, barely colored by local traditions. In every case, these regimes seek to make a blank slate of the past and to forge a new humanity. In every case, the “rich,” intellectuals, and skeptics wind up exterminated. The Khmer Rouge rounded up urban and rural populations in agricultural communities based on precedents both Russian (the Kolkhozy) and Chinese (the popular communes), and they acted for the same ideological reasons and with the same result: famine. There is no such thing as real Communism without massacre, torture, concentration camps, gulags, or laogai. And if there has never been any such thing, then we must conclude that there could be no other outcome: Communist ideology leads necessarily to mass violence, because the masses do not want real Communism. This is as true in the rice fields of Cambodia as in the plains of Ukraine or under Cuban palms.

And still, far too many refuse to see. It simply hasn't been done properly yet; it just wasn't done right. Give us a chance. We'll make it work.

But killing is Communism's nature. It is essential to how it works, how it survives.

Communism survives - no, thrives - on blood and horror and human misery.

***

By the way, if all this seems like cold numbers to you, read this. It is an account by Pin Yathay, a man who welcomed the arrival of the Khmer Rouge into the capital - and spent the next two years trying to survive them. He escaped with only his life, watching his entire family die at their hands or by their neglect.

When everything - and everyone - is property of The State on behalf of The People, it is truly horrible what crimes will be committed in their name.

***

P.S. Ricochet and City Journal should be weekly visits, at minimum. There are some fascinating conversations at Ricochet, and absolutely fantastic writing at City Journal.

A Million Here, A Million There, But Still You're Talking Real People

There once was a Bolshie named Lenin
Who did five or ten million men in.
That’s a lot to have done in,
But, where he did one in,
A Bolshie named Stalin did ten in.

- Robert Conquest
(Noted here as reported at The Corner)

Some interesting historical matters of late...

Robert Conquest produced the standard works detailing Soviet repression and describing the grim toll Communism took to seize and remain in power in the Soviet Union. In particular, Conquest recorded the crimes of Stalin.

Now, Frank Dikötter is producing a similar accounting of Mao's "Great Leap Forward," in his upcoming book, Mao's Great Famine: The Story of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe. From a review in the UK's The Independent:

Mao Zedong, founder of the People's Republic of China, qualifies as the greatest mass murderer in world history, an expert who had unprecedented access to official Communist Party archives said yesterday.

Speaking at The Independent Woodstock Literary Festival, Frank Dikötter, a Hong Kong-based historian, said he found that during the time that Mao was enforcing the Great Leap Forward in 1958, in an effort to catch up with the economy of the Western world, he was responsible for overseeing "one of the worst catastrophes the world has ever known".

Mr Dikötter, who has been studying Chinese rural history from 1958 to 1962, when the nation was facing a famine, compared the systematic torture, brutality, starvation and killing of Chinese peasants to the Second World War in its magnitude. At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in China over these four years.

To put the loss into perspective, 11 million died in the Holocaust.

Sort of puts the China envy so many (who ought to know better) have in a harsher light, doesn't it?

Hat tip: Ace of Spades.

Modern Martyrs

I suspect that you, like I, think that men being forced to die for their faith is something out of the distant past. That being put to death for professing Christianity is an ancient horror story.

We would be wrong.

Jay Nordlinger today here and here:

Son Jong Nam, R.I.P.   [Jay Nordlinger]

Did you forget about North Korea? Oh, I’m sorry, let me remind you. Here’s a little news snippet. Son Jong Nam was “tortured to death for trying to spread the Gospel in his native land, armed with 20 bibles and 10 cassette tapes of hymns. He was 50.”

Don’t want to read any more? I don’t blame you, but I’m going to keep going.

In January 2001, Son was arrested by Chinese police for allegedly trying to convert North Korean defectors in China, which bans foreigners from proselytizing. He was deported home in April, where he was detained and tortured, leaving him with a limp, his brother said. He lost about 70 pounds (32 kilograms) in captivity.

“He was beaten in the head with clubs and given electric shocks,” his brother says, his eyes welling up with tears.

Ah, well, big deal, he lived. Besides, he was a Jesus freak — and you know how icky they are. More from the article:

Son was released in 2004 and sneaked across the border to Yanji to see his daughter, who had been left in the care of a Chinese missionary. He soon decided to return to North Korea to proselytize.

You mean, he went back? One season of torture wasn’t enough for him? Here is another quote from his brother: “I repeatedly urged him to change his mind, but he told me he has something to do in North Korea.”

Okay, let me finish up:

Son was arrested again in January 2006 after police found bibles at his home in the northeastern city of Hoeryong. He was also charged with spying for the United States and South Korea and sentenced to public execution by firing squad.

His brother launched an international campaign to save him. That apparently led his captors to switch to a less public method: torture. “There are many ways to kill people in North Korea,” says his brother.

Oh, for sure. You know, for the last eight years, I’ve heard that the United States tortures people. Can we please have a word other than “torture” for whatever our people did to Khaled Sheikh Mohammed in an effort to prevent further mass murder? KSM, as you remember, was the “mastermind” of the 9/11 attacks. He personally beheaded Daniel Pearl. Etc. Alternatively, could we have another word for what real torturers do, in places such as North Korea and China?

KSM is fat and happy, sitting in Gitmo with his elliptical machine and Red Cross visits. (Maybe he is not using his elliptical machine so much, being fat as well as happy.) Anyway, I’ll quit fuming (for a moment). For the complete article from which I’ve quoted, go here.

A P.S. on Son Jong Nam   [Jay Nordlinger]

You may like to know how Son got to be what he became. He started out as a good boy — a loyal North Korean. He served in the “presidential security service” for ten years. Was all hot to fight the “American imperialists,” etc. But then something happened: “His wife, eight months pregnant at the time, was arrested for allegedly saying Kim Jong Il had ruined the economy and caused a mass famine.” “Allegedly,” mind you: She only allegedly blurted out the truth. “Interrogators seeking a confession kicked her in the stomach, forcing her to discharge blood and have a miscarriage.”
So, Son fled with his family to China. His wife soon died. And that’s when he began his other life . . .

An Assassin Missed

Fortunately, Jay Nordlinger minces no words.

The PLO Misses Him; Israel Missed Him [Jay Nordlinger]

So, they missed one: Israel’s secret services missed one. He was Mohammed Oudeh, the “mastermind” of the Munich Olympics massacre. Who was massacred? Nine Israeli athletes. And Oudeh died in his bed, dammit. He was in Syria, which may not surprise you: Syria is exactly the sort of country to harbor Mohammed Oudeh.

I should put that differently: The Syrian dictatorship is exactly the sort of government to harbor Oudeh. (Just as Saddam Hussein harbored Abu Abbas, Abu Nidal, etc.)

In his later years, Oudeh said, “I regret nothing. You can only dream that I would apologize.” Mohammed, I don’t even dream it, believe me. He did one good thing in his life, as far as I’m concerned. He titled his autobiography “Memoirs of a Palestinian Terrorist.” I don’t care whether he meant it ironically: It’s still a just title.

Mahmoud Abbas, the great moderate in the West Bank, wrote a letter of condolence to the late terrorist’s family: “He is missed. He was one of the leading figures of Fatah and spent his life in resistance and sincere work as well as physical sacrifice for his people’s just causes.”

Uh-huh. Bear in mind that President Obama has much better relations with Abbas and the PLO than he does with the Israeli government.

The New Anti-Semitism Can Give You a Headache

I'll let Mr. Nordlinger do all the talking this time:

Jews, Decoy and Real [Jay Nordlinger]

The news about “decoy Jews” in Holland is making the rounds. And I was especially interested in this column by Paul Belien, available from Hudson New York. (Yes, you read that right: no commas no nothin’.) I’ll excerpt a little of the column, or a lot:

Last week, a television broadcast showed how three Jews with skullcaps, two adolescents and an adult, were harassed within thirty minutes of being out in the streets of Amsterdam. Young Muslims spat at them, mocked them, shouted insults and made Nazi salutes. “Dirty Jew, go back to your own country,” a group of Moroccan youths shouted at a young indigenous Dutch Jew. “It is rather ironic,” the young man commented, adding that if one goes out in a burka one encounters less hostility than if one wears a skullcap.

I wonder what those young Moroccans meant by “your own country.” Helen Thomas means Germany and Poland, chiefly. (She did not specify Auschwitz: That was the “peace activists” and “humanitarians” aboard that Turkish ship.) Do they mean Israel? It must be so confusing for a Jew, this “go home” stuff. Where’s home? Poland? Israel? Mars?

But the Moroccans clearly have a sure sense of home: Holland, and Europe generally...

...Now, check out this bit:

The deployment of “decoy Jews”, however, is being criticized by leftist parties such as the Dutch Greens. Evelien van Roemburg, an Amsterdam counselor of the Green Left Party, says that using a decoy by the police amounts to provoking a crime, which is itself a criminal offence under Dutch law.

Got that? If you go out looking like a Jew, and a Muslim physically assaults you, it’s your fault — kind of like it’s your fault if you’re a girl and your skirt is too short. To be on the safe side: Don’t look Jewish. And if you do look Jewish, you had better be Jewish, or the Dutch Greens won’t like it. Or something.

The new anti-Semitism is sometimes hard to keep up with.

Or, if you’re a Muslim, and you assault a Jew who is actually a Jew, that’s kind of bad, but if you assault a Jew who turns out to be a decoy — even though you thought he was a Jew — that’s not so bad, because you were tricked . . . or something.

The new anti-Semitism can give you a headache.

Hang This One Up On The Wall

"There is no "good" communist," writes Jeff Jacoby.


A simple truth that just doesn't seem to penetrate into the popular culture. It's nice to hear it so plainly spoken:

IF JOSÉ Saramago, the Portuguese writer who died on Friday at 87, had been an unrepentant Nazi for the last four decades, he would never have won international acclaim or received the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature. Leading publishers would never have brought out his books, his works would not have been translated into more than 20 languages, and the head of Portugal’s government would never have said on his death — as Prime Minister José Sócrates did say last week — that he was “one of our great cultural figures and his disappearance has left our culture poorer.’’


But Saramago wasn’t a Nazi, he was a communist.

Continuing,

But the idea that good people can be devoted communists is grotesque. The two categories are mutually exclusive. There was a time, perhaps, when dedication to communism could be absolved as misplaced idealism or naiveté, but that day is long past. After Auschwitz and Babi Yar, only a moral cripple could be a committed Nazi. By the same token, there are no good and decent communists — not after the Gulag Archipelago and the Cambodian killing fields and Mao’s “Great Leap Forward.’’ Not after the testimonies of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Armando Valladares and Dith Pran...


...Anyone who imagines that the horrors of communist rule is a thing of the past ought to spend a few minutes with, say, the State Department’s latest human rights report on North Korea. (Sample passage: “Methods of torture . . . included severe beatings, electric shock, prolonged periods of exposure to the elements, humiliations such as public nakedness, confinement for up to several weeks in small ‘punishment cells’ in which prisoners were unable to stand upright or lie down... and forcing mothers recently repatriated from China to watch the infanticide of their newborn infants.") Communism is not, as its champions like to claim, an appealing doctrine that has been perverted by monstrous regimes. It is a monstrous doctrine that hides behind appealing rhetoric. It is mass crime embodied in government. Nothing devised by human beings has caused more misery or proven more brutal.


Saramago may have been a fine writer, but he was no exemplar of goodness. Good people do not embrace communism, and communists are not good.

Bolding is mine.

How rare that is to hear, and how sad how few realize its truth. Well said, Mr. Jacoby.

It Took A While

"You know what's great about anti-Semitism? It lets you know exactly who the dirt-bags are."
Andrew Klavan, Klavan on the Culture

Eventually, the truth will out:




Note her language: occupation, "those people"; "Palestine", not Israel. For someone so supposedly smart, insightful, and perceptive, she sure is ignorant, blinkered, and bigoted. She has been a joke for decades now; finally she did something the White House Correspondents Association could no longer ignore. She revealed who she really is, and it's ugly.

As Jay Nordlinger summarized:

A few basic thoughts, occasioned by the Helen Thomas outburst. We owe something to her: She said out loud, in her specially nasty way, what other people think — that Israel should “get the hell out of Palestine” (not Israel, but “Palestine”) and that the Jews should “go home”: to Germany, to Poland, to wherever else they came from, or fled from. (Has anyone told Thomas that she should “go home” to Lebanon? I’m sure that Hezbollah would welcome her as a heroine.)

With the hard-core anti-Israel crowd, the problem is not “occupation,” not the addition of in-law suites in Jerusalem: The problem is Israel itself. The very right of that state to exist. People like Helen Thomas are way to the “left,” if that’s the term, of the official position of the PLO. They are in line with Hamas and Hezbollah — and their patron in Iran.

The PLO-niks — Saeb Erekat, Hanan Ashrawi — are now the Uncle Toms of the anti-Israel community. Helen Thomas and the flotilla people are in the cool, fashionable forefront.

There is a sadly growing acceptance of anti-Semitism, from those bitter quarters that constantly preach tolerance until it comes their turn to practice it. The growing rise of Islamic radicalism legitimizes it, as hating the Jews is a fundamental element of their idealogy, and the Radical Left has yet to meet a "resistance" movement it doesn't like. It makes no sense - but there it is: they feel more in league with a repressive authoritarian theocracy than with a modern open democracy.

Last word back to Jay:

If the world lets Israel go under, a mere two or three generations after the Holocaust, we will have learned a sick, sick thing about the world... Events large and small — Iran’s nuclear drive, the Helen Thomas outburst — have led me to think about the unthinkable: the loss of Israel. They won’t go without a fight, I feel sure. And I know which side I’m on.

As do I. Do you?



Postscript: Well said, Brickmuppet:

She is gone.

Almost a shame. After all, It's rare indeed to see someone whose face so closely matches their inner beauty.

Yes, They Really Were That Bad

Proof positive that the East German border guards had shoot-on-sight orders regarding those trying to escape to the West.

Somehow, I doubt Robert Conquest would be surprised.

Sometimes, the bad guys really are bad guys.



Hat tip to the folks over at The Castle, who found this first.