Pol Pot Quotes

For the average person, all problems date to World War II; for the more informed, to World War I; for the genuine historian, to the French Revolution.

The farmer was and remains the stumbling block to socialist experiments everywhere. Since he raises his own food and tends to live in his own house, he is less “controllable” than say, the urban dweller.

Who is secure in all his basic needs? Who has work, spiritual care, medical care, housing, food, occasional entertainment, free clothing, free burial, free everything? The answer might be nuns and monks, but the standard reply is 'prisoners'.

As well, they used their B-52 bombers to drop thousands of tons of bombs which included napalm and cluster bombs. In a particularly vile attack, they used poisonous chemicals on our base regions of Xuyen Moc, the Minh Dam and the Nui Thi Vai mountains. They sprayed their defoliants over jungle, and productive farmland alike. They even bull-dozed bare, both sides along the communication routes and more than a kilometre into the jungle adjacent to our base areas. This caused the Ba Ria-Long Khanh Province Unit to send out a directive to D445 and D440 Battalions that as of 01/November/1969, the rations of both battalions would be set at 27 litres of rice per man per month when on operations. And 25 litres when in base or training. So it was that as the American forces withdrew, their arms and lavish base facilities were transferred across to the RVN. The the forces of the South Vietnamese Government were with thereby more resources but this also created any severe maintenance, logistic and training problems. The Australian Army felt that a complete Australian withdrawal was desirable with the departure of the Task Force (1ATF), but the conservative government of Australia thought that there were political advantages in keeping a small force in south Vietnam. Before his election, in 1964, Johnston used a line which promised peace, but also had a policy of war. The very same tactic was used by Nixon. Nixon had as early as 1950 called for direction intervention by American Forces which were to be on the side of the French colonialists. The defoliants were sprayed upon several millions of hectares, and it can best be described as virtual biocide. According to the figure from the Americans themselves, between the years of 1965 to 1973, ten million Vietnamese people were forced to leave their villages ad move to cities because of what the Americans and their allies had done. The Americans intensified the bombing of whole regions of Laos which were controlled by Lao patriotic forces. They used up to six hundred sorties per day with many types of aircraft including B52s. On 07/January/1979, the Vietnamese Army using Russian built T-54 and T-59 tanks, assisted by some Cambodian patriots liberated Phnom Penh while the Pol Pot Government and its agencies fled into the jungle. A new government under Hun Sen was installed and the Khmer Rouge’s navy was sunk nine days later in a battle with the Vietnamese Navy which resulted in twenty-two Kampuchean ships being sunk.

As a Nobel Peace laureate, I, like most people, agonize over the use of force. But when it comes to rescuing an innocent people from tyranny or genocide, I've never questioned the justification for resorting to force. That's why I supported Vietnam's 1978 invasion of Cambodia, which ended Pol Pot's regime, and Tanzania's invasion of Uganda in 1979, to oust Idi Amin. In both cases, those countries acted without U.N. or international approval—and in both cases they were right to do so.

The bigger the government, the more the corruption. It's almost never mentioned, and it might be the biggest of the ten principles that I am speaking of…Do you know who has created the greatest evils of history? Big governments. Big SECULAR governments. Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, all big States. Why would anybody trust the big state? It's amazing how many callers have imbued the college message that more people have been killed by religion than anything else in history. NO. More people have been killed by governments than anything else in history…….and just in the 20th century alone, and none of them were religious. You don't learn THAT in college.

Work, then, institutionalizes homicide as a way of life. People think the Cambodians were crazy for exterminating themselves, but are we any different? The Pol Pot regime at least had a vision, however blurred, of an egalitarian society. We kill people in the six-figure range (at least) in order to sell Big Macs and Cadillacs to the survivors. Our forty or fifty thousand annual highway fatalities are victims, not martyrs. They died for nothing — or rather, they died for work. But work is nothing to die for.

Trying to get ahold of Davis later on, i asked Jonathan, "Who would have Lanny Davis's number?" He replied, I don't know, Pol Pot?

Among the nations of Earth in all its history, ours is one of the precious few that has not brought forth its Hitler, its Stalin, its Pol Pot, its Mao Tse-tung, its Vlad the Impaler, the one who is never satisfied to have every knee bend to him but wants also to be the architect of a new world by destroying the existing one.

Generals, on the average, are far less bellicose than journalists or patriotic housewives: They know the horrors of a war and they dislike any break in the routine

The true rightist is not a man who wants to go back to this or that institution for the sake of a return; he wants first to find out what is eternally true, eternally valid, and then either to restore or reinstall it, regardless of whether it seems obsolete, whether it is ancient, contemporary, or even without precedent, brand new, "ultramodern." Old truths can be rediscovered, entirely new ones found. The Man of the Right does not have a time-bound, but a sovereign mind.

The world has far too much morality, at least in the sense of activity of people's moral instincts. If you look, and this become clear to me as I tried to identify the causes of violence at various scales throughout human history, from police blotters where the biggest motive for homicide is not just amoral predacious: a smuggler killing someone to steal his Rolex, the biggest categories of motives for homicide are moralistic in the eyes of the perpetrator, of the murderer, is capital punishment: killing someone who deserve to die because: whether is a spouse who's unfaithful or someone who distim him in an argument over a parking space or cheated him in a deal. That's why people kill each other: for moral reasons. That is true as large scales as well.If you'll look up at the largest episodes of bloodletting in human history most of them would have moralistic motives: the nazi Holocaust, Pol Pot, Stalin, the Gulag, Mao, the European war of religions, the Crusades, all of them were killing people for, not because they wanted to accumulate vast amounts of money, or huge harems of women, but because they thought they were acting out of a moral cause.

For if there is one lesson worth retaining from the travails of the Cold War and the miseries it brought in its wake, it is the folly of seeking simple answers to complicated questions. It is a lesson which governments still show no sign of learning.

When we contemplate what happened in Cambodia, we are looking not at some exotic horror story but into darkness, into the foul places of our own souls.

The shock which the Nazi horrors produced was so great, because they came after two hundred years of Roussellian propaganda about the goodness of human nature and also because the Germans were literate, clean, technologically progressive, hard working, “modern,” sober, “orderly,” and so forth. Yet about human nature we get more concrete and more pertinent information from the Bible than from statistics dealing with secondary education, the frequency of bathtubs or the mileage of superhighways.

Wrong views and wrong convictions can be the most devastating of all our delusions. Surely both Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot must have been convinced that they were right? And yet each and every one of us has that same dangerous tendency as they had: to form convictions, believe them without question and act on them, so bringing down suffering not only on ourselves, but also on all those around us. On

So, once again, back to the question - just what IS power? Is it perhaps no more than a deadly mutation of ambition, one that may or may not translate into social activity? Any fool, any moron, any psychopath can aspire to the seizure and exercise of power, and of course the more psychopathic, the more efficient: Hitler, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Sergeant Doe and the latest in the line of the unconscionably driven, our own lately departed General Sanni Abacha - all have proved that power, as long as you are sufficiently ruthless, amoral and manipulative, is within the grasp of even the mentally deficient.

Even now, and you can look at me: Am I a savage person? My conscience is clear. —POL POT The eradication of conscience is one of the toughest things you’re going to have to learn. Not everyone can do it.

Quan en Boris em parlava d'un país on viure, jo sempre em repetia que ell tenia una nostàlgia a dins molt fonda perquè enyorava una cosa que no havia tingut mai, i aquesta és la pitjor nostàlgia que es pot tenir.

From beyond the grave, Hannah says that although living in the world of plurality and natality is no picnic, if we want to avoid Auschwitz or the Gulag or Stonewall or Pol Pot or Attica or ISIS, we as a species have no choice but to embrace it and endure it. In other words, there is no single answer, no single bullet of understanding to guide us, just a glorious neverending mess. The neverending mess of true human freedom.

For two hundred years the radical left has believed in a religion promising a heaven on earth whose end justifies any means. That is why progressives like Lenin and Stalin and Pol Pot killed so many innocent people.

Like the moon, the novel is a symbol and a necessary reality. Ideally it serves neither gods nor masters. Philosopher’s stone, it sublimates, precipitates, and quickens. House of Keys, it opens all our darkest doors. May the Pol Pot Persons of all genders and denominations take heed: to create a fictional world with rigor and passion, to imagine a character of any sex, place, time, or color and make it palpitate and quiver, to catapult it into the deepest forests of our most luminous reveries, is to commit an act of empathy. To write a novel of the imagination is a gesture of tenderness; to enter the body of a book is a fearless act and generous.

The Thousand Year Reich did not last two decades; the Soviet Union lasted three quarters of a century; Idi Amin ruled for eight years; the Confederacy didn't make it to kindergarten; Argentina's Dirty War lasted six years; Pinochet dominated Chile for sixteen years; nothing lasts forever, even the worst things. Hitler killed himself; Stalin and Franco lasted too long but ultimately dropped dead and last year Franco's body was exhumed from its grand prison-labor-built monument and dumped in a municipal cemetery; Pol Pot died in prison; Mugabe had to step down; Putin is not immortal. Every day under these monstrosities was too long, and part of the horror of life under a corrupt and brutal regime is that it seems never-ending, but nothing lasts forever. And believing that something can end is often instrumental to working toward ending it; how the people in Eastern Europe dared to hope that their efforts might succeed I cannot imagine.

The Left’s great fight is with material inequality, not with evil as normally understood. Thus, the Left has always been less interested in fighting tyranny than in fighting inequality. That is why Leftist dictators—from Lenin to Mao to Pol Pot to Ho Chi Minh to Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez—have had so much support from Leftists around the world. Many of these dictators were mass murderers, but to much of the world’s Left it was more important that they opposed material inequality (and America).

In our twenty-first century world, the terms "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing" sit uneasily in the mind, associated with some of our darkest and most disturbing thoughts about human nature. They conjure Darfur, Serbia, Cambodia, and Pol Pot, and, most vividly of all for many of us, the horrors in Europe before and during World War II. "Species cleansing," on the other hand, is not a term that falls readily to hand, although we have engaged in it without much remorse for at least 10,000 years and probably more. Be it North American mammoths, driven to annihilation ten millennia ago by bands of a near-professional hunting culture known as Clovis ... to passenger pigeons and ivory-billed woodpeckers ... in twentieth century America, humans are ancient veterans of the art of species cleansing, ...

Hitler, Pol Pot. Funny, isn’t it? How it only seems to be evil people who think they can change the world? I wonder why that is.’ And Kai had responded, ‘Because they’re mad.’ She had dug a sharp elbow into his ribs. Then she shook her head. ‘But they do, don’t they? They do change the world.

Pol Pot (the architect of the Cambodian genocide) and my sweet grandmother (who wouldn’t hurt a fly) stand together before the Great Physician, and his question is not, “Which one of you was better?” but rather, “Will you let me heal you?” In leveling the playing field, Jesus makes way for grace.

This is outrageous and demonstrates the danger of permitting religion in the public square,” Liebowitz said. “History teaches us, or should have by now, that wars caused by religion, and especially Christianity, have killed more people than all other causes, combined.” “I'm afraid that's not accurate. Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot each killed millions and they were all confirmed atheists,” Cardinal Guzetti replied. “Remember the Great Peoples Cultural Revolution? Over twenty million died before it was over. The killing fields in Cambodia claimed the lives of unknown millions, but some estimates suggest twenty five percent of the country's population died at the hands of the Camere Rouge. Joseph Stalin starved ten to twelve million Russian peasant farmers to death and killed another two million building the great Canal outside of Moscow. All three of these monsters were confirmed atheists . . . Probably five thousand people were killed during the Inquisition. In America, thirteen were put on trial during the Salem witch trials. Horrible and indefensible, no doubt. But millions of human beings were slaughtered by Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao. I'm afraid we Christians are amateurs compared to you atheists.

The imperfect freedom that property and law make possible, and on which the soixante-huitards depended for their comforts and their excitements, was not enough. That real but relative freedom must be destroyed for the sake of its illusory but absolute shadow. The new ‘theories’ that poured from the pens of Parisian intellectuals in their battle against the ‘structures’ of bourgeois society were not theories at all, but bundles of paradox, designed to reassure the student revolutionaries that, since law, order, science and truth are merely masks for bourgeois domination, it no longer matters what you think so long as you are on the side of the workers in their ‘struggle’. The genocides inspired by that struggle earned no mention in the writings of Althusser, Deleuze, Foucault and Lacan, even though one such genocide was beginning at that very moment in Cambodia, led by Pol Pot, a Paris-educated member of the French Communist Party.

Myself, after having not a child but this particular one, I couldn’t see how anyone could claim to love children in the generic any more that anyone could credibly claim to love people in a sufficiently sweeping sense as to embrace Pol Pot, Don Rickles, and an upstairs neighbor who does 2,000 jumping jacks at three in the morning.

In some important aspects the Nazi genocide was not unique. In numbers killed, Hitler was surpassed by Stalin and by Mao. In proportion of the population killed, he was surpassed by Pol Pot. But, in other ways, there was a unique moral horror to what the Nazis did. There was an intensity of positive hatred in those who planned the genocide,

For the genuine materialist there is no fundamental, but only a gradual, an “evolutionary” difference, between man and a pest, a noxious insect

having a line of coloured sand drawn around Phnom Penh to give the city magical protection.

his youngest child, a four-year-old girl whom he adored, had suddenly fallen ill and lay dying.

If you have a disease of the old society, take a dose of Lenin as medication.

Alçant els punys pots percudir la lluna.

When preparing for Book One, I talked to a couple of psychiatrists about psychosomatic phenomena, neuroses and dissociative conditions, for example the so—called hysterical blindness suffered by many who saw the Killing Fields in Pol Pot’s Cambodia: their eyes objectively see, but they are not aware of it and are blind because they believe they can’t see. One specialist told me that among modern Western people, ’metaphorical’ symptoms such as Fredy or those Cambodians evince are much rarer now than earlier in the twentieth century or before. Nowadays most people are better equipped by education to verbalise their neuroses, and have lots of jargon in which to do so. For most of the dissociative dimension, I could draw on things I knew from within myself.

They say he has kept his identity a secret to guard against assassins. They say that he liberated us from foreign domination and gave us independence. They tell us Pol Pot makes us work hard because he wants to purify our spirit and help us achieve beyond our potential as farmers. They say he has a round face, full lips, and kind eyes. I wonder if his kind eyes can see us starving.

I recently walked through the Cambodian killing fields and saw the remnants of that horror myself. I remember looking down at my sandals to see what had been caught between my toes as I was walking through the grass—it was a human tooth. There are teeth, tattered clothing, bones, and other remains of the tortured still scattered throughout the fields today. One of the taunting slogans of the regime was: “To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss.” While attending a church service in Cambodia, I was served Communion by a former member of the Khmer Rouge whose life was completely transformed by the love of Christ. Many other former regime members have also dedicated their lives to Christ and are active in the church today. If Pol Pot’s soldiers can change, then there is hope for even a rebellious teenager.

Socialists are convinced socialism will work if it's only managed by the right people. It's one of the reasons so many socialist countries wind up led by dictators. Socialist leaders inevitably become convinced that only they can manage the state properly, so it would be folly, they reason, to give up their hard-won power. That's how socialism always seems to wind up with people like Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot and Chairman Mao in charge.

The world, however, is indebted to Germany in a terrifying way, because she demonstrated to everyone what the ultimate conclusions of negative and destructive ideas really are. Ideas which in London or New York are repeated as seemingly harmless abstractions have been shown up by the Germans in all their blood-chilling finality. In this sense Nazi Germany has become the Gorgonian Mirror in which a decadent West could study its own features.

Here’s the thing about birthdays. Your dad didn’t pull out. You didn’t do shit. You didn’t earn anything. I’ll tell you who else has or had birthday celebrations each year: Charles Manson, Jim Jones, Osama bin Laden, Pol Pot, Jeremy Piven, and Ted Bundy. All the people you hate in life, all the pedophiles, all the murderers, all the IRS auditors have birthdays. I don’t think we should celebrate Idi Amin’s birthday and I don’t think we should celebrate yours either.

For God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son [Stalin], so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. God sent his Son into the world not to judge the world, but to save the world through him.

As part of the logic of human sociality, the internal cohesion of a group is in direct proportion to the degree of threat it perceives from the outside. It follows that anyone who wants to unite a nation, especially one that has been deeply fractured, must demonise an adversary or, if necessary, invent an enemy. For the Turks it was the Armenians. For the Serbs it was the Muslims. For Stalin it was the bourgeoisie or the counter-revolutionaries. For Pol Pot it was the capitalists and intellectuals. For Hitler it was Christian Europe’s eternal Other, the Jews.

Democracy is a political form, a system of government. It has no social content, although it is frequently misused in that sense. It is wrong to say, “Mr. Green is very democratic; on his trips he sits down for lunch with his chauffeur.” He is, rather, a friend of simple people, and so is appropriately called demophile, not democratic. “Democracy” is a Greek word composed of demos (the people) and krátos (power in a strong, almost brutal sense). The milder form would be arché which implies leadership rather than rule. Hence “monarchy” is the fatherlike rule of a man in the interest of the common good, whereas “monocracy” is a one-man tyranny.

The Nazis had succeeded in turning the legal order on its head, making the wrong and the malevolent the foundation of a new “righteousness.” In the Third Reich evil lost its distinctive characteristic by which most people had until then recognized it. The Nazis redefined it as a civil norm. Conventional goodness became a mere temptation which most Germans were fast learning to resist. Within this upside-down world Eichmann (perhaps like Pol Pot four decades later) seemed not to have been aware of having done evil. In matters of elementary morality, Arendt warned, what had been thought of as decent instincts were no longer to be taken for granted.

In this chapter, I want to focus on the really big crimes that have been committed by atheist groups and governments. In the past hundred years or so, the most powerful atheist regimes—Communist Russia, Communist China, and Nazi Germany—have wiped out people in astronomical numbers. Stalin was responsible for around twenty million deaths, produced through mass slayings, forced labor camps, show trials followed by firing squads, population relocation and starvation, and so on. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s authoritative recent study Mao: The Unknown Story attributes to Mao Zedong’s regime a staggering seventy million deaths.4 Some China scholars think Chang and Halliday’s numbers are a bit high, but the authors present convincing evidence that Mao’s atheist regime was the most murderous in world history. Stalin’s and Mao’s killings—unlike those of, say, the Crusades or the Thirty Years’ War—were done in peacetime and were performed on their fellow countrymen. Hitler comes in a distant third with around ten million murders, six million of them Jews. So far, I haven’t even counted the assassinations and slayings ordered by other Soviet dictators like Lenin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and so on. Nor have I included a host of “lesser” atheist tyrants: Pol Pot, Enver Hoxha, Nicolae Ceaus̹escu, Fidel Castro, Kim Jong-il. Even these “minor league” despots killed a lot of people. Consider Pol Pot, who was the leader of the Khmer Rouge, the Communist Party faction that ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Within this four-year period Pol Pot and his revolutionary ideologues engaged in systematic mass relocations and killings that eliminated approximately one-fifth of the Cambodian population, an estimated 1.5 million to 2 million people. In fact, Pol Pot killed a larger percentage of his countrymen than Stalin and Mao killed of theirs.5 Even so, focusing only on the big three—Stalin, Hitler, and Mao—we have to recognize that atheist regimes have in a single century murdered more than one hundred million people.

As he breathed the black and grey air into his body he no longer thought of anything as lovely, the way the retiring trees of his boyhood had been; for everything was made up of dirt-clods; and you do construct a mountain from molehills or other over-codified facts. If only the cities had been dynamited before it was too late for him! -- That Pol Pot sure had the right idea, blowing down those ticky-tacky rice paper offices and illuminating the middlemen with bullets of vanguardist light so everyone could get back to the country, don’t you think? -- As things stood, even had Bug been able to cover the earth again with forests, after having lived so long in the excremental piles of cement and rusted steel he never could have seen trees as more than tedious identical dirty giant toothpicks unfit to be taken into the mouth’ his summer camp, as a dishwasher jail where you breathed in the steam of bad food; and the islands to which he had rowed, as sad unwholesome protuberances, polyps and land-cancers still in the stink of the outhouse -- and all the girls had long since grown up completely to make travesties of their lives, even though some inherited great riches as we used to reckon riches in those days. -- But surely this change in him was necessary, for without wretchedness and degradation of self one will never accomplish anything.

Still, in summing up the situation, we must not forget that the New Left expresses certain truths and truisms and provides us with not a few straws in the wind. However immature, destructive, sterile, and confused, it is a cry of anguish and protest against a mechanized, profoundly leftish age. It is, in a sense, leftism to end all leftism.

There was no more reasonable sequitur between “provocation” and “reaction” in the case of the French Revolution than in the case of the Jews and the Nazis, the Armenians and the young Turks, the old Russian regime, the Kerensky interlude and bolshevism, Portuguese colonial rule in Angola and the horrors perpetrated by savage monsters of Holden Roberto’s “Liberation Front,” the Belgian administration in the Congo and the delirious atrocities of Gbenye and Mulele, British colonialism in Kenya and the Mau-Mau. We have to face the fact that man is not “good”—only the extraordinary man is, only the heroic saint or the saintly hero, while the noble savage belongs to the world of fairy tales.

Imagine if one should drag an innocent passer-by from the street to the operating room of a nearby hospital and force him at gunpoint to perform a delicate operation. The man would burst into tears. However, if one were to ask him to sound off on problems such as nuclear experiments, Vietnam, the borders of Israel, support for Indonesia, aid to Latin America, or recognition of Red China, in most cases he would start spouting opinions.

I’m not helping you kill anybody else. It’s just not happening. I’m done.”“What makes you think you have a choice?”“You know why? I’ll tell you. Because we were just kissing in the street, and deep down, I don’t believe you could actually blow up my house or kill my sister. I just don’t, and she’s probably not even in the house anymore anyway, so if you want to go in there and shoot somebody, fine, but you’re on your own.”Gobi paused, seeming to consider all of this. “What is it that you want to hear from me, Perry? Do you want me to tell you that these are bad people that I am killing tonight? Because they are. They are very bad people. They deserve to die, each and every one of them.”“Nobody deserves to die.”“Oh, really?”“Okay, I mean, maybe people like Hitler and Pol Pot . . . dictators, tyrants, African warlords who starve their people into submission . . . but that guy at the bar wasn’t an evil man.”“How do you know? Because he had drinks with Hemingway?”“I just know.

Christians like yourself invariably declare that monsters like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and Kim Il Sung spring from the womb of atheism. ... The problem with such tyrants is not that they reject the dogma of religion, but that they embrace other life-destroying myths. Most become the center of a quasi-religious personality cult, requiring the continual use of propaganda for its maintenance. There is a difference between propaganda and the honest dissemination of information that we (generally) expect from a liberal democracy. ... Consider the Holocaust: the anti-Semitism that built the Nazi death camps was a direct inheritance from medieval Christianity. For centuries, Christian Europeans had viewed the Jews as the worst species of heretics and attributed every societal ill to their continued presence among the faithful. While the hatred of Jews in Germany expressed itself in a predominately secular way, its roots were religious, and the explicitly religious demonization of the Jews of Europe continued throughout the period. The Vatican itself perpetuated the blood libel in its newspapers as late as 1914. And both Catholic and Protestant churches have a shameful record of complicity with the Nazi genocide. Auschwitz, the Soviet gulags, and the killing fields of Cambodia are not examples of what happens to people when they become too reasonable. To the contrary, these horrors testify to the dangers of political and racial dogmatism. It is time that Christians like yourself stop pretending that a rational rejection of your faith entails the blind embrace of atheism as a dogma. One need not accept anything on insufficient evidence to find the virgin birth of Jesus to be a preposterous idea. The problem with religion—as with Nazism, Stalinism, or any other totalitarian mythology—is the problem of dogma itself. I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.

The true rightist is not a man who wants to go back to this or that institution for the sake of a return; he wants first to find out what is eternally true, eternally valid, and then either to restore or reinstall it, regardless of whether it seems obsolete, whether it is ancient, contemporary, or even without precedent, brand new, “ultramodern.” Old truths can be rediscovered, entirely new ones found. The Man of the Right does not have a time-bound, but a sovereign mind[...] The right stands for liberty, a free, unprejudiced form of thinking, a readiness to preserve traditional values (provided they are true values), a balanced view of the nature of man, seeing in him neither beast nor angel, insisting also on the uniqueness of human beings who cannot be transformed into or treated as mere numbers or ciphers; but the left is the advocate of the opposite principles. It is the enemy of diversity and the fanatical promoter of identity. Uniformity is stressed in all leftist utopias, a paradise in which everybody should be the “same,” where envy is dead, where the “enemy” either no longer exists, lives outside the gates, or is utterly humiliated. Leftism loathes differences, deviation, stratifications. Any hierarchy it accepts is only “functional.

Yet the sources of their fanaticism are left undefined. The “last night” letter of the terrorists is posted on a wall, but without any English translation. And so the deeper truth that religious fanaticism was the whole of their horrible cause—that, in the last-night letter, God is cited a hundred and twenty-one times—is elided. It is disquieting to be reminded that the women-in-paradise promise, which sophisticates have widely thought to be a claim made by Western propagandists, is right there, too. The terrorists did not hate us for our freedom; they hated us for our lack of faith. (There’s a complicated sense in which the two go together, but they weren’t capable of making the complicated case.) Their godliness does not exhaust the meanings of religion, any more than Pol Pot’s atheism exhausts the meanings of doubt. But it is a central fact of the occasion, not illuminated by being ignored.

I argue that three key doctrines of postmodernist thought have conspired to discredit the classical concept of ideology. The first of these doctrines turns on a rejection of the notion of representation--in fact, a rejection of an empiricist model of representation, in which the representational baby has been nonchalantly slung out with, the empiricist bathwater. The second revolves on an epistemological skepticism which would hold that the very act of identifying a form of consciousness as ideological entails some untenable notion of absolute truth. Since the latter idea attracts few devotees these days, the former is thought to crumble in its wake. We cannot brand Pol Pot a Stalinist bigot since this would imply some metaphysical certitude about what not being a Stalinist bigot would involve. The third doctrine concerns a reformulation of the relations between rationality, interests and power, along roughly neo-Nietzschean lines, which is thought to render the whole concept of ideology redundant.

El socialismo abandona la referencia obrera y, poblado de maestros, funcionarios y revolucionarios profesionales, rinde culto a una dinastía de vagos sociópatas que, con Marx como referente, produce, en cien años cien millones de muertos: Lenin, Trotski, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, el Che, Fidel Castro, Abimael Guzmán…

Genocid? Treba se odlučiti i na to da se okvalificiraju zločini Crvenih kmera. To je naučni ulog: smjestiti Kambodžu u odnosu na druge velike užase ovog stoljeća i pronaći joj mjesto u historiji komunizma. To je takodjer i sudska neophodnost. Veliki dio šefova KPK-a još su živi i aktivni. Trebamo li se pomiriti sa sudbinom da su oni i dalje slobodni u svojim pokretima? Ako ne, pod kojom optužnicom im suditi? Da su Pol Pot i njegovi nekrunisani odgovorni za ratne zločine to je očigledno. Zatvorenici republikanske armije sistematski su maltretirani i često pogubljeni, oni koji su predali oružje 1975. nemilorsdno su proganjani. Zločin protiv čovječnosti takodjer je prisutan, cijele društvene grupe bile su na meti kao nedostojne postojanja i naširoko su istrijebljene.

Fakat dehşet bu kadarla kalmaz. Her seferinde çocuklar, kadınlar ve erkekler, gözü dönmüş fanatiklerin kurbanı olurlar: Vietnamlı mülteciler; Kamboçya'daki Pol Pot kurbanları; İran'daki devrim kurbanları; Afganistan mültecileri. Bu akla hayale sığmayan olayları önlemek için ne yapabiliriz? Bunun önüne geçebilir miyiz? Yanıtım, evettir. Bir şeyler yapabileceğimize inanıyorum. "Biz" demekle, aydınları kastediyorum; yani düşüncelerle uğraşan, özellikle de okuyan ve de yazan insanları. Peki neden, biz aydınların yardım edebileceğini düşünüyorum? Çünkü, asırlar boyu insanlığa en fazla zarar verenler, biz aydınlar olduk. Bir düşünce, öğreti, kuram adına, toplu cinayetler, bizlerin eseri, bizlerin buluşu olmuştur: aydınların buluşu. İnsanları birbirine düşürmekten -çoğu kez iyi niyetlerle- vazgeçmek bile, bize birçok şey kazandıracaktır. Hiç kimse de bunun olanaksız olduğunu söyleyemez. On Emir'den en önemlisi: Öldürmemelisin! bu buyruk hemen hemen etiğin tamamını içerir. Sözgelimi Schopenhauer'in etiği formüle ediş biçimi, bu en önemli buyruğun yalnızca genişletilmiş halidir. Schopenhauer'in etiği, basit, dolaysız ve açıktır. Schopenhauer, kimseyi incitme,r herkese elinden geldiğince yardım et, der.

Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot all employed mass imprisonment, each presiding over a process that arrested and incarcerated millions. Such systems are often part of massive programs of slave labor or forced resettlement, in which high death rates are a typical by-product. And some examples of mass incarceration are explicitly part of a program of ethnic cleansing or genocide—a tool of policy that intends the extermination of entire populations. But now, for the first time, we see mass incarceration in a democratic society.

asked him why. His knee-jerk response was that, throughout history, religion was to blame for the greatest number of wars and deaths.” Mother Pascalina stared to laugh, “Ja, I’ve heard the same thing all my life. I heard it from the time I was a little girl.” “I asked this young man if he knew anything about twentieth century history, his own century. Then I gave him a few very conservative facts and figures: Hitler: 17 million victims; Stalin: 23 —though some have it at 40 million; Tito: 5 million; Mao: 79 million; Pol Pot: 1.5 million; Castro: 75,000, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. When I asked him what all of these progressivist dictators had in common, he just sat there looking at me. ‘They were all atheists, I said, ‘not a believer among them’.

Two of the most violent criminals in US history were Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer. Bundy preyed on girls and women; Dahmer on boys and men. Both violent sex addicts gave themselves wholly over to dark compulsions. They murdered dozens of innocent people to gratify out-of-control lust. Law enforcers eventually caught and convicted these men, but only after reigns of terror and death. The state of Florida executed Ted Bundy in 1989 at age 42. A fellow prisoner bludgeoned Dahmer to death in 1994 while he served a life sentence. Dahmer was 34. These two monsters shared another characteristic in common: they both professed Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. They received his forgiveness while in prison. Many of us would exclaim, “No way!” I did. How can such miserable excuses for human beings be let off the hook by a just God? If this is true that means even Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, and Pol Pot could have repented and God would have forgiven them. That’s entirely too much grace and mercy in my book! Such unmerited and massive forgiveness feels unfair and impossible to believe, but it’s consistent with biblical accounts of Jesus’s character and teachings. He lives by a different book than we do. Even when put to death unjustly, he still forgives.

Modifying Clausewitz’ aphorism—war is the continuation of diplomacy by other means—one could say that in ideologically divided countries civil war is but the continuation of parliamentarism with other means.

DIVINE LIGHT,MURDEROUS LIGHT The flames crackle. On the pyre burn discarded mattresses, discarded easy chairs, discarded tires. A discarded god also burns: the fire blackens the body of Pol Pot. At the end of 1998, the man who killed with such abandon died at home, in his bed. No plague had ever so reduced the population of Cambodia. Invoking the sacred names of Marx, Lenin, and Mao, Pol Pot erected a colossal slaughterhouse. To save time and money, every charge came complete with sentence, and every jail had a door to a common grave. The entire country was a great burial mound and a temple to Pol Pot, who purified society to make it worthy of him. Revolutionary purity demanded liquidating the impure. The impure: those who thought, those who dissented, those who doubted, those who disobeyed.

Él nunca lo ha querido confesar, pero yo estoy absolutamente convencido de que a Guzmán lo inspira Pol Pot y no Mao Tse Tung.

tried not to let her see me doing so; but to my dismay, she always did.

The regime

¿Es posible que nuestro siglo haya sido lo que ha sido después de que Dostoievski escribiera Los demonios? ¿De dónde salen Pol Pot y los demás cuando se ha imaginado el personaje de Piotr Verjovenski? ¿Y el terror de los campos cuando Chejov ha escrito Sajalín? ... ¿Y cómo es posible que cuando todo hubo pasado, la tierra entera no leyera La especie humana de Robert Antelme, aunque solo fuera para liberar al Cristo de Carlo Levi, definitivamente detenido en Éboli?

As the enthusiasm for the Soviet model waned, the idealistic and dissenting energies of intellectuals and the young embraced other cult figures and myths of salvation and purification: Mao, Fidel, Che, and even Pol Pot.

Or you’d go – look, women in power, not always good: Margaret Thatcher, Queen Isabella of Spain, Katie Hopkins. And he’d reply “yes, I will take your Margaret Thatcher and I will raise you a Pol Pot, a Stalin, a Franco, a Genghis Khan, a Vlad the Impaler.

The corollary of this visceral desire to avoid confrontation at all costs is that debate and argument do not function as a means of resolving differences. Between the extremes of acquiescence and violence there is no middle ground. The

trop fameux Gott mit uns, aujourd'hui repris par George Bush dans le cadre de sa lutte contre l'« axe du Mal », l'homme justifie ses intentions belliqueuses en utilisant la religion à ses propres fins, et n'hésite pas à déclarer la guerre en son nom. Une pratique mal décelée dans le bouddhisme, encore que ce soit en terre bouddhique que se sera perpétrée, on l'a dit, la folle aventure génocidaire de Pol Pot. Une

tried to understand what I’d seen. I felt as if I’d just stepped out of a limn on twentieth-century book burnings: gaunt, vampiric Goebbels screaming beside a seditious inferno; Stalin; Mao and his Red Guards; Iranian forces in the Republic of Mahabad burning anything in Kurdish; midcentury New York school kids incinerating comics in Binghamton; Ray Bradbury’s firemen; apartheid-era librarians; Pinochet; Pol Pot; Serbian nationalists setting fire to the National and University Library.

For if there is one lesson worth retaining from the travails of the Cold War and the miseries it brought in its wake, it is the folly of seeking simple answers to complicated questions.

As things now stand, everything is up for grabs. Nevertheless: Napalming babies is bad. Starving the poor is wicked. Buying and selling each other is depraved. Those who stood up to and died resisting Hitler, Stalin, Amin, and Pol Pot—and General Custer too—have earned salvation. Those who acquiesced deserve to be damned. There is in the world such a thing as evil. [All together now:] Sez who? God help us.6

Dalla Cina di Mao all’India di Gandhi e alla Cambogia di Pol Pot, tutti gli esperimenti di autarchia, di sviluppo non capitalista, con caratteristiche nazionali, sono falliti. I più per giunta, facendo milioni di vittime.

The Vietnamese never asked themselves, any more than had the French, whether the Cambodians wanted the new system they were introducing. They acted in the unassailable certitude of a superior truth.

Over the next 1,364 days, the Khmer Rouge, seeking to obliterate the social classes and create an agrarian society of peasants, was responsible for killing, starving, or working to death about two million Cambodians, out of a population of eight million. Accounting for the percentage of people destroyed, Pol Pot’s Communist regime was the most murderous in the modern age.

Americans generally think of Pol Pot as some kind of unique, self-generated monster and his “killing fields” as an inexplicable atavism totally divorced from civilization. But without the United States government’s Vietnam-era savagery, he could never have come to power in a culture like Cambodia’s,

What I find particularly hypocritical and dishonest is the suggestion that secularism is synonym for “doubt” and “tolerance”, as opposed to the certainty and intolerance of religion. Since the French Revolution, secularism, when translated into social or political action, has hardly been a synonym for tolerance and scepticism, but has been instead unfailingly characterised by a presumption to occupy the moral high ground which entitles to deal out moral judgments. This self-righteousness has often extended to a point that its proponents have not hesitated to execute those who dare to dissent from the new received orthodoxy, with an unwavering certainty that they are fulfilling the momentous mission of promoting social and moral progress. It is perhaps worth reminding that communism – an ideological monster responsible for, within just a few short decades, mass murders on a scale previously unprecedented in human history – is a political manifestation of the idea of a secular society. Marxist communist ideologies are intrinsically linked to the notion of a state sponsored, and enforced, secularism. 3 Communism has never struck me as particularly tolerant or imbued with scepticism. It is indeed a shame that the ruthless dictators of state atheism – such as Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot - before butchering tens of millions of people, did not doubt for an instant of doing the right thing.

Truques insistentment a moltes portes però ja saps que no hi haurà resposta. Doncs bé, que cadascú recullo el seu cadàver i, si pot, miri de fer-se un enterrament digne, presentable.

El buit és un preu alt per sobreviure quan no voldries més que reposar i beure a petits glops la poca vida que et falta per viure. Consirós i lúcid et revoltes - contra què No pots fugir de tu mateix ni ho vols. Tota pregunta ha esdevingut inútil i ho seria també tota resposta.

Atura el temps si pots, i si no pots atura't tu i aprofita el silenci per escoltar la veu que et representa.

God’s sovereignty ensures that everything works together for His own glory. Though not all acts in-and-of-themselves, such as sin, bring glory to God, they do work together to accomplish a greater purpose. Everything, including Adolf Hitler and the terrible crimes of Lenin, Stalin, and Pol Pot, will bring praise to God, or otherwise God would not have allowed such calamities. Man’s wicked plans will all be thwarted and turned around before it is all said and done, so that the name of the all-wise, all-good, and all-powerful God will be exalted. Anything less than an all-powerful God could not bring all things, including evil, to a glorious conclusion. Compatibility

The French Revolution was a revolt of the mob. It was the primogenitor of the horrors of the Bolshevik Revolution, Hitler’s Nazi Party, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot’s slaughter, and America’s periodic mob uprisings, from Shays’ Rebellion to today’s dirty waifs smashing Starbucks windows whenever bankers come to town. The French Revolution is the godless antithesis to the founding of America. And

God has never sat around biting his nails, wondering what Hitler and Pol Pot and Saddam Hussein were going to do.

Revolutions, even as they destroy, build on the model of what has gone before.

The militant atheists lament that religion is the foremost source of the world’s violence is contradicted by three realities: Most religious organizations do not foster violence; many nonreligious groups do engage in violence; and many religious moral precepts encourage nonvio lence. Indeed, we can confidently assert that if religion was the sole or primary force behind wars, then secular ideologies should be relatively benign by comparison, which history teaches us has not been the case. Revealingly, in his Encyclopedia of Wars, Charles Phillips chronicled a total of 1,763 conflicts throughout history, of which just 123 were categorized as religious. And it is important to note further that over the last century the most brutality has been perpetrated by nonreligious cult figures (Hitler, Stalin, Kim Jong-Il, Mao Zedong, Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Fidel Castro, Slobodan Milosevic, Robert Mugabe—you get the picture). Thus to attribute the impetus behind violence mainly to religious sentiments is a highly simplistic interpretation of history.

Another Cercle member remembered Sary advising him to masturbate instead of wasting his time with young women.

Wars stopped slavery in America and liberated Europe and put an end to Japanese imperialism and killed Hitler and Mussolini and Pol Pot and Che Guevara and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. That’s why we have them.

m y i nterest i n de v e lopi n g a fem in i s t cr i t ique of t h e s t a t e w a s a n i mated less b y i n t r i n s i c fas c i n a t ion w i t h t h e state t h a n b y con c e r n over t h e pot e n t i a l di­ l u t i o n of e m ancipatory pol i t i c a l a i m s e n t a i l ed in femi n i sm' s turn to the state to adjudicate or redress pract ices o f m a l e d o m i nance

As a form of neurosis, race-conscious nationalism almost always ignores logic and knowledge: In the East European civil wars between 1918 and 1920 Jews were slaughtered for a variety of contradictory reasons, as capitalists and as communists, as friends of the Ukrainians, as Polonophiles, as pro-German-just as it suited the circumstances.

As far as elites’ incomes are concerned, Japan morphed from a society whose income distribution was as unequal as that of the United States on the eve of the stock market crash of 1929—a high-water mark of the “1 percent”—to one akin to Denmark today, the most equal developed country in the world today in terms of top income shares. And elites’ wealth had been largely wiped out: only Lenin, Mao, or Pol Pot could have done a more thorough job (see chapter 7). But Japan had not achieved the ideal of “getting to Denmark,” nor had it been taken over by raving communists. What it had done instead was enter—or, depending on one’s definition, start—World War II, first by trying to establish control over China and then by setting up a colonial empire that reached from Burma in the west to the atolls of Micronesia in the east and from the Aleutians north of the Arctic Circle to the Solomon Islands south of the equator. At the height of its power, it laid claim to roughly as many souls as the British Empire did at the time—close to half a billion people, or a fifth of the world population.

In our twenty-first-century world, the terms "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing" sit uneasily in the mind, associated with some of our darkest and most disturbing thoughts about human nature. They conjure Darfur, Servia, Cambodia and Pol Pot, and most vividly of all for many of us, the horrors in Europe before and during World War II. "Spicies cleansing," on the other hand, is not a term that falls readily to hand, although we have engaged in it without much remorse for at least 10,000 years and probably more.

The last time Holbrooke saw Blythe was in the fall of 1980, when he was in New York to finalize the divorce and to reaffirm the American vote for the Khmer Rouge seat at the United Nations. "Pol Pot, Dick?" Blythe said after they signed the papers. "How could you?

A prominent example is Pol Pot, who ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. In that relatively brief period roughly two million Cambodians died-an even greater proportion of the population than were killed by Stalin during the twenty-five years he headed the Soviet Union.

L'ALTRE I JO De la mateixa manera que perdre's pot ser un retrobament inesperat, passo comptes amb l'altre que no sóc per estar net de culpa davant meu. Amb tot, no sé si el temps serà propici o si m’hauré de desdir del que penso per no ofendre ningú d’aquells que no confien en els canvis de la història. Sigui com sigui, amb gent que no conec cada matí subscric normes i pactes i em costa menys de creure en el desig que d’apuntalar els anys amb moltes crosses. L'altre i jo ens perdrem junts qualsevol vespre i en acabat algú, potser el mateix que ara em descriu sense saber-me gaire, de sentirà tan ple de mi que per comprendre'm ja no li caldran paraules.

The years between the end of the Second World War and 2010 or 2011, Pinker designates the long peace.19 It is a peace that encompassed the Chinese Communist revolution, the partition of India, the Great Leap Forward, the ignominious Cultural Revolution, the suppression of Tibet, the Korean War, the French and American wars of Indochinese succession, the Egypt-Yemen war, the Franco-Algerian war, the Israeli-Arab wars, the genocidal Pol Pot regime, the grotesque and sterile Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, ethnic cleansings in Rwanda, Burundi, and the former Yugoslavia, the farcical Russian and American invasions of Afghanistan, the American invasion of Iraq, and various massacres, sub-continental famines, squalid civil insurrections, blood-lettings, throat-slittings, death squads, theological infamies, and suicide bombings taking place from Latin America to East Timor. Alone, broken, incompetent, and unloved, the Soviet Union lumbered into oblivion in 1989. The twentieth century had come to an end.

Military history teaches us, contrary to popular belief, that wars are not necessarily the most costly of human calamities. The allied coalition lost few lives in getting Saddam out of Kuwait during the Gulf War of 1991, yet doing nothing in Rwanda allowed savage gangs and militias to murder hundreds of thousands with impunity. Bill Clinton stopped a Balkan holocaust through air strikes, without sacrificing American soldiers. His supporters argued, with some merit, that the collateral damage from the NATO bombing of Belgrade resulted in far fewer innocents killed, in such a “terrible arithmetic,” than if the Serbian death squads had been allowed to continue their unchecked cleansing of Islamic communities. Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and Stalin killed far more off the battlefield than on it. The 1918 Spanish flu epidemic brought down more people than did the First World War. And more Americans—over 3.2 million—lost their lives driving cars over the past 90 years than died in combat in this nation’s 230-plus-year history.

Nergens zijn er aan de Evenaar onder Leopold II, of zijn Belgische opvolgers na 1908, volkerenslachtingen geweest à la de zieke heersers Hitler, Stalin of Pol Pot. Wel hebben Lucas Catherine, Jules Marchal en Daniel Groenweghe het bestrijden van het imperialisme — of het wegschrijven van hun ontgoochelingen in Afrika — gezien als de overtreffende trap van het antikapitalisme. En auteurs als Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle en Hugo Claus hebben met een bloeiende verbeelding en de insteek van Don Quichote, een potpourri gemaakt van Congo Vrijstaat en zijn stichter.