Matthew Blackwell, Quillette: Devastation and Denial: Cambodia and the Academic Left
Looking out across the yellow-washed angular buildings that clutter the inner city of Phnom Penh in 2016, hindsight fills me with anxiety. Imagining myself here in 1975, I recall the jubilant and cheering crowds in the spring of that year who weren’t privy to that hindsight as they welcomed Khmer Rouge communists into Cambodia’s capital city after months of siege.
On the morning of 17 April, word had arrived that the Khmer Rouge had captured the government’s last beleaguered military stronghold on the outskirts of the city. Prime Minister Long Boret could hardly believe the news. He demanded to be driven to the riverside to see it with his own eyes. By the time he arrived, order had already collapsed in the streets and men wearing the black shirts of the Khmer Rouge surrounded his small entourage and demanded his guards put down their guns. Managing to slip away in the chaos, Boret reported back to his cabinet at the Defence Ministry that the enemy was already in the streets. The rush then began to evacuate senior government members from the country on any government helicopters still available amidst the anarchy. Had he taken action, Boret might have escaped with his wife and children on a helicopter reserved for him, but he delayed, trying to find a helicopter with enough space for his extended family.
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WNU Editor: I always enjoy posting these articles to remind myself on how many in the West were complicit in either supporting the rise of the Khmer Rouge, or to excuse it and/or rationalize it when rumors of a genocide were taking place. You can read more on this from Wikipedia .... Cambodian genocide denial (Wikipedia). Matthew Blackwell is particularly brutal on Noam Chomsky. And while it is true that Mr. Chomsky does have his supporters .... The boring truth about Chomsky: he does not support Pol Pot (Michael Brull, ABC News Online), I cannot help but feel that on this issue he reminds me of the former New York Times reporter Walter Duranty and his reporting of the Stalin regime in the early 1930s .... trying to rationalize what cannot be rationalize.
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