Leslie Hook's "Justice for Cambodia," (op-ed, Jan. 4) [discussing the efforts to bring Khmer Rouge leaders to justice at this late date] misses the point. The time to deal with the Khmer Rouge was in the 1960s and 1970s, before they took power and killed between two million and three million Cambodians. The way to deal with them was with soldiers and military aid to the Cambodian government, not carpetbagging lawyers and judges 40 years after the mass slaughter.[1]No such timely and efficacious efforts were forthcoming, as we know.
Why did the West never understand communism to be the political and social equivalent of a blocked sewer that it is and was?
This is much discussed. My own Second Tenet of Liberalism ("The moral value of any political act is to be judged only by whether the actor's intention is to achieve a good result.") explains much. Commie bastards sounded so good when they talked about social justice. And didn't Pol Pot want to create a "perfect democracy"? He did and what a great guy he had to be! He was willing to work for perfect democracy and what slugs we are for tolerating the imperfect kind. Imperfect goal setting at its worst.
Couple that with the First Faith Article of the Dreamers that the invention of the steam engine and the electric toothbrush are proof that the laws of physics, economics and human nature no longer apply to social engineers and you have it — The Noumenol World or, if you wish, The Construct World.
Practical result: the murderous pursuit of abstract good and auf wiedersehen to any understanding of the limitations of reason and perception.
My own gauzy liberalism went out the window at the embarrassingly advanced age of 31 when I read Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, a stunning portrait of Stalinism as it was experienced minute by minute by millions of Russians. Millions. The book illustrated the essence of U.S. constitutional law in a way that one semester of law school had not and my thinking was never the same. An irreversible shift in my point of reference. Epiphany City.
The lynching of 5,000 or so black and white people in the U.S. could now be understood in the light of the U.S.S.R. toll of 2,000 souls a day beaten, shot, tortured, starved, or worked to death over seventy years. This dark aspect of our history hardly amounted to 2-1/2 days of the Leninist-Trotskyist-Stalinist score. But . . . for the liberals the magic number was 5,000 and even one lynching would have proved by itself the innate fraud that the United States is. The Let No Sparrow Fall approach to striving for perspective in an imperfect world.
LBJ, Dean Rusk, and Robert McNamara seemed to understand the Communists were bad in a vague sort of way but were no more clear about the real nature of the beast than George W. Bush is about Islam. Rather than explaining exactly why communism was so loathsome, they caused us to endure the feckless prosecution of that war with the same artificial limits on American combat power then as in Iraq now.[2] (Think "Iran" and "free pass" and you're there.)
The antiwar left fought tenaciously to abandon the field to the enemy and the Congress eventually signaled to the South Vietnamese that they were on their own. Abandoning the Cambodians was the lagniappe to that. Ergo, no Carrad strategy of dealing with Asian communism.
My modest and long overdue mental tectonic event never comes to ueberliberals. Neither Solzhenitsyn's account of epic depravity, anecdotes of Commie massacres at Hue and Tuol Sleng, stories of Chinese internal horrors, nor accounts of N. Korean women POWs defecating in the railway cars that took them home after the Korean War[3] give any pause to the liberal's feverish search for evidence of Western putrescence. In the meantime, the slime of the world escape or run countries even now and, inevitably, good men have to go in with the bayonets to clean up the avoidable messes. But the Dreamers will be safe at home living in that safe inner world strewn with rose petals, sapphires, tax credits for Birkenstock sandals, and fluffy kitties.
Notes
[1] "Cambodian Justice Delayed." David Clayton Carrad, letter to Wall Street Journal Online (subscription), 1/5/08.
[2] As an aside, when U.S. combat power was effectively applied in1970 by invading communist sanctuaries in Cambodia the ground assaults on my camp on the border miraculously ceased. As did the recoilless rifle shots from the nearby mountain and mortar rounds on taxiing C-123s. Memo to political leadership: Some kind of a connection there.
[3] T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War.
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