John Wight says the common denominator behind the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the 1970s and Salafi-jihadism in our time, is Western foreign policy.
Inside Phnom Penh’s Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, former prison, torture and execution enter of the Khmer Rouge,2007. (lecercle, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
By John Wight
Medium
Taking place in Syria now as thousands of Salafi-jihadists head dangerously close to the capital, Damascus, in a surprise and lightning offensive, has the potential to unleash catastrophic consequences not only in Syria but across a region already exhausted from a surplus of conflict and the concomitant human suffering endured.
The depiction of the smorgasbord of medieval-minded head-chopping fanatics involved as “rebels” in the Western media; this is proof-positive that no lessons — zero — have been learned. None learned from the consequences following the overthrow of Mohammad Najibullah in Kabul back in 1996. From the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003. Or from the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya in 2011.
In each case, the result was not the establishment of a liberal democracy underpinned by the rule of law. Instead, in each case the result was mayhem and carnage wrought by Year Zero fanatics intent on mass slaughter in the name of a perverted rendering of Islam.
#UPDATE More than 115,000 people have been "newly displaced" in Syria's Idlib and Aleppo provinces, a UN official said on Wednesday, following a major rebel offensive in the north ?? https://t.co/q3tMeRRv9P pic.twitter.com/jnUsia0Ueg
— AFP News Agency (@AFP) December 4, 2024
This brings us now to the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia of the 1970s, which in similar conditions of a destabilization were able to incubate and grow to the point of taking power. The cause of this destabilization in Cambodia was the extension of the war in Vietnam by the United States with a mass bombing campaign in Cambodia.
In 1973 the U.S. dropped more bombs on Cambodia in just a few weeks than it dropped on Japan in the Second World War. This small country across the Republic of Vietnam’s western border, with in 1973 a population of between 7–8 million people, found itself on the receiving end of the equivalent of five Hiroshimas.
The number of people killed by the U.S. bombing campaign has never been verified, but it’s thought to have been in the region of 500,000. It was a crime against humanity to rank with any since the Second World War.
Bomb craters in 2014 in Kandal Province, Cambodia, left by U.S. bombing decades earlier. (Kimlong Meng, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)
The Khmer Rouge was, at the time, a marginal Maoist cult in Cambodia, led by Pol Pot, a former Buddhist monk. The organization had no base of support to speak of and their influence was near non-existent prior to the U.S. mass bombing campaign. The destruction and chaos wrought by it, changed everything.
By 1975 this death cult had managed to take over the country, whereupon they immediately embarked upon one of the most brutal and barbaric campaigns of genocidal violence the world has seen.
With the objective of taking the country back to “year zero,” an agrarian pure communist society, they forcibly depopulated Cambodian cities and towns, sending people into the country to work on the land in communes. In the process thousands died from disease and starvation, others were worked to death, while thousands more were tortured and executed.
USS Ross fires a Tomahawk missile towards Syria’s Shayrat Airbase in Homs on April 7, 2017. (Robert S. Price, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
Teachers, doctors, lawyers, people who’d been educated, Buddhist monks, non-Cambodians, all were slaughtered in the Khmer Rouge’s campaign to purify the country of anything which did not conform to their twisted worldview. It gave rise to the creation of a network of slave labour camps and torture centers throughout the country, in which brutality knew no bounds.
By the end of their reign a third of Cambodia’s population had perished. When considering it now it reminds us of Hannah Arendt’s timeless words, vis-à-vis the Holocaust, on the “banality of evil.”
The brutal rule of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge lasted until 1979, when the armed forces of the Republic of Vietnam entered the country to liberate its people. Washington’s response to Cambodia’s liberation was the imposition of economic sanctions on its new government — an an act of nauseating cruelty against a beleaguered people whose only crime was that they’d been liberated by a country, Vietnam, that had refused to accept its colonial status and thrown off the yoke of U.S. imperialism.
Today, the parallels between Cambodia and the Middle East are undeniable. The Salafi-jihadi groups on the offensive in Syria hold to a similar barbaric and anti-human ideology that characterized the Khmer Rouge.
These are groups and are people with no political program that can be negotiated with, offering the region nothing apart from an abyss of sectarian violence and bloodletting, which is why their defeat and destruction must be treated as non-negotiable.
The common denominator behind the rise of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s and Salafi-jihadism in our time, is Western foreign policy. It is the devil’s work, responsible for upending not just entire countries but entire regions.
If President Bashar al-Assad falls—?and at time of writing, with the so-called rebels have taken Aleppo and Hama, there is the distinct possibility that he will?—Syria’s minority communities will come under immediate threat of annihilation.
This threat will spark yet another refugee crisis of biblical proportions. This, as the clock ticks down on 2024, is where we are now — looking down the barrel of one almighty Year Zero gun.
John Wight, author of Gaza Weeps, 2021, writes on politics, culture, sport and whatever else. Please consider taking out a subscription at his Medium site.
This article is from the author’s Medium site.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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The US may have bombed Cambodia as reported here but there’s still a huge causation issue. The bombing could just as easily have solidified support for the government. It could have weakened the government too but that needs to be shown.
The KR were just as depraved in 1970 when they went after resident Vietnamese in eastern Cambodia. Inter alia I have not doubt. No bombing then to my knowledge. I still don’t know the purpose of this supposed bombing in 1973. It can’t have been to attack NVA base areas if the bombing in the photograph here was where Phnom Penh is located. What?! PP is 40 and 65 miles to the nearest border with VN. The NVA base areas were close to the border and, anyway, Nixon’s incursion finished off NVA activity in the Delta. God bless Richard Nixon.
It’s not stated here why utter lunatics like the KR would have been the ones who benefited from the reaction to the bombing.
The author’s point is solid however. US intervention all over the planet has been utterly moronic and has advanced no national interest. Full-spectrum dominance (hegemony) is about as artificial and pointless as it gets. Saddam was infinitely preferable to what came after him.
The Rot at the top is obvious to everyone. No limit exists for the depths of depravity ti which elected presidents will go to. One after another they follow each other in their effort to continue to exist.
I can not see how the existence is worth it.
Ask yourself, who was the last one to defy the creatures of the “swamp” an live to talk about it. I figure it was Nixon.
LBJ sure as hell played their game.
The guy before him was murdered by state actors, just as sure as if they had pulled the trigger that killed. him!
Time has come for these people to reap what they have sown.
The murder of of this insurance CEO is likely the first of many others. You will not be able to drive through Manhattan because of the number of armored vehicles and. cops n the streets.
The Khmer Rouge revolution was a nationalist anti-colonial peasant rebellion, but with less sophistication of leadership and perhaps looser discipline of forces than the Viet Minh who supported it. When it deposed the US-supported military regime in Cambodia with the assistance of Vietnam, forces of the latter remained in eastern Cambodia longer than invited, and the Khmer Rouge sought to expel them, even invading Vietnam for a time. Most of the perhaps 300,000 civilian casualties were inflicted by Pol Pot-allied forces in Eastern Cambodia against Cambodian villagers suspected of supporting the Vietnamese there, not in the forced evacuation of the Pnom Penh population of refugees who had fled the Khmer Rouge advance and were suspected supporters of the military regime. The Vietnamese then invaded, forced out the Pol Pot forces, and restored order to Cambodia. The US then covertly sponsored the Pol Pot forces making guerilla raids from Thailand against the Vietnamese-installed government, under the false banner of a coalition led by Prince Sihanouk who remained sidelined in Beijing.
See Brother Number One, David Chandler, 2011. The US history of the Cambodia wars is falsified.
I’d forgotten about the cruel sanctioning of liberated Cambodia, something the U.S. does reflexively–punishing innocent civilian populations, with nthing ever accomplished (see Cuba, a dozen others). It is as though we relish being the genocidal mean girls of the world.
‘The United States will support the seating of Pol Pot’s “democratic Kampuchea” regime in the United Nations again this year despite its abhorrent record on human rights, Secretary of State Edmund S. Muskie announced yesterday.’
The Washington Post, September 16, 1980
archive.ph/ahFxU
Other parallels include bans on dancing and music (except for ‘revolutionary’ songs in the case of DK, and religious chanting for the Islamists), a distinct preference for or insistence on black clothing and regulation hairstyles, obligatory declarations of loyalty, enormous distrust of most outsiders, and an officially idealised ‘glorious past’. Out with joy, and in with monotony – for the survivors.
Final legacies from the Democratic Party of the Clintons, the Obamas and the Bidens:
As if their country club buddies are not in lockstep. Remember John McCain, Bush Jr., and all the rest. Let’s keep it real here. The Washington Consensus rules,
WA Consensus, the Atlanticists, proudly viewing the world through the tunnel vision of the past.
Whereas we in the other Washington, the PNW one, can see there’s a larger ocean. Since we are also surrounded by facts of nature like dominant conifers, salmon, and volcanoes, we know where the true power on Earth lies.
It isn’t with neocon delusions of empire.
I hope it is final. I despise the “Democrats” and their by now baked in immorality. Very rich psychopaths, most of them, plus deluded or utterly fraudulent liberals (certainly not lefties) like AOC.
thank you so much for this comparison and reminder!
as to the west/global north learning lessons from mistakes
made in the past – i have by now concluded that they just
pretend to want to learn from the past, pretend to want to
spread “freedom and democracy!”
all they do is enter foreign lands to smash and crash
even the slightest traces of democracy developing bc
rising democracies mean independence from western,
i.e. global northern dictates and they mean competition.
raw materials, resources would have to be shared fairly.
unimaginable!
No wonder nobody has yet commented. I lived through those years but we were never provided with these terrible facts. I hope that somehow the present resistance in the world can overcome the genocidal maniacs of the USA/Israel/ “Western democracies ” who now seem in charge.
“The depiction of the smorgasbord of medieval-minded head-chopping fanatics involved as “rebels” in the Western media; this is proof-positive that no lessons — zero — have been learned. None learned from the consequences following the overthrow of Mohammad Najibullah in Kabul back in 1996. From the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003. Or from the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya in 2011.”
No lessons have been learned?? The utter destruction of the functional political entities (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya) and the immiseration and exploitation of the remaining demoralized and subjugated population is precisely the goal. Arguably, the West is not just learning lessons from its past exploits, it is perfecting its technique (see also Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon, Yemen, Somalia, the list is almost endless).
From Mr. Wright’s image: “USS Ross fires a Tomahawk missile towards Syria’s Shayrat Airbase in Homs on April 7, 2017.”
It is worth noting or emphasizing the date – April 7. 2017. Then United States President Donald Trump, then United Kingdom Prime Minister Theresa May and then (current) French President Emmanuel Macron joined in that illegal act of aggression against the Syrian people, which was subsequently revealed to have been based on totally false accusations that Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad unleashed chemical weapons on his own people.
Donald Trump’s public announcement of the illegal bombing of Syria (based on an obvious false flag chemical weapons attack) was reminiscent of Lyndon B. Johnson’s national address which essentially launched the catastrophic Vietnam War, the major similarity between the Trump and Johnson national addresses being that both United States presidents lied through their teeth regarding their “having no other option but war.”
Here is Donald Trump’s full statement delivered in 2017:
“My fellow Americans, on Tuesday Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad launched a horrible chemical weapons attack on innocent civilians. Using a deadly nerve agent, Assad choked out the lives of helpless men, women and children.
It was a slow and brutal death for so many. Even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack. No child of God should ever suffer such horror.
Tonight I ordered a targeted military strike on the airfield in Syria from where the chemical attack was launched. It is in this vital national security interest of the United States to prevent and deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons.
There can be no dispute that Syria used banned chemical weapons, violated its obligations under the Chemical Weapons Convention and ignored the urging of the UN Security Council.
Years of previous attempts at changing Assad’s behavior have all failed, and failed very dramatically. As a result the refugee crisis continues to deepen and the region continues to destabilize, threatening the United States and its allies.
Tonight I call on all civilized nations to join us in seeking to end the slaughter and bloodshed in Syria, and also to end terrorism of all kinds and all types.
We ask for God’s wisdom as we face the challenge of our very troubled world. We pray for the lives of the wounded and for the souls of those who have passed, and we hope that as long as America stands for justice, then peace and harmony will, in the end, prevail. Good night, and God bless America, and the entire world. Thank you.”
*
Mr. Trump has never apologized to the Syrian people or admitted the basis of his military orders as Commander-in-Chief was – as it was with LBJ’s detestable (unforgivable) lie to the American people regarding the so-called “Gulf of Tonkin Incident” – sheer falsehood.
Precisely. Well said.