The Possible

Something I read this morning referenced Paul Johnson’s “ Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties (1992), specifically the chapter America’s Suicide Attempt, about the late 60s and their sequelae.
These days, everybody’s talkin Saigon, the helicopters from the roof of the embassy. Memory tends to collapse events, I have found. In January 1973 we ended the war via the Paris Peace accords. But after Nixon was forced to resign, the conditions and safeguards included in those accords giving the US the right to enforce a peace were gutted by Congress. Ford begged them to take the action which the executive no longer could legally take. But they didn’t. Knowing there would be no consequences, the North Vietnamese flouted their promises, a million refugees fled to Saigon, and it was some of them who were airlifted out in the now-famous scenes, in April 1975.

The Vietnam War did not end in a rout, as the war in Afghanistan is doing. It took over two years and a Democratic Congress to engineer those scenes in Saigon.

And as part of the rout by the Communists , the Khmer Rouge took over in Cambodia, and it’s what they did that I want to talk about here.
Everybody probably remembers the catchy title The Killing Fields. It literally means fields, rural areas as opposed to cities. And how did the victims get there?

The Khmer Rouge drove everyone out of the cities. And they started with the big hospitals, rousting doctors, nurses, and sick and dying patients out at gunpoint. Terrified residents were carrying incapacitated family members on their backs, people were running through the streets pushing people in hospital beds, clutching IV bottles. The Khmer Rouge periodically fired into the fleeing crowds to ensure panic. Out! Out into the jungle!

Think of the shocking brutality of this. Could there have been a better way to demonstrate, by one action, their intent to eradicate, literally, rip out by the root, any and all vestiges of common humanity, to show the populace that life as they had known it, civilization as they had come to depend on it, was over?

And the world, which had been all “Never again!” after the German atrocities of WW II came to light, simply shrugged and turned away.