Posted On: Wednesday - May 20th 2026 8:06PM MST
In Topics: Commies History World Political Stupidity
Youtube suggested this 52 minute video for some reason. How'd it know this would be interesting to me? Algorithms, my dear boy, algorithms!
I've been conversing with some commenters who are obviously too young or too ignorant to know what the World went through during the middle of the last century with Communism. Other than it was adjacent to Vietnam and the war spilled over there, what with the Ho Chi Minh trail and that, Americans didn't really care what happened in the country of Cambodia... later renamed Kampuchea, but that didn't take, so back to Cambodia. (Vietnam and Cambodia were at war during part of the time in question here.)
However, on a population proportion basis, the takeover of Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge in 1975 and subsequent killing of somewhere near 1/3 of the entire population, could be right up at Number 1 on the Top 40 Evils of Communism chart. There was a movie I saw at the theater, The Killing Fields, about this horror.
How does this sort of thing, Pol Pot's reset of society to "Year Zero" get started? Intellectuals. Both Cambodia and Vietnam were part of what was dubbed "IndoChina" (makes sense - between India and China), and they were colonies of France going back to the mid and late 1800s, respectively. Ho Chi Minh had tried to get an audience with Woodrow Wilson in Versailles at the end of WWI to plead for French rule to be ended.* He wasn't initially into Communism, but that's the road he took for his goal.
A classroom full of the brightest Cambodian intellectuals that had gone to France in the late 1940s is shown in this video. After a few years, these people joined the French Communist party, and things went downhill from there. The man who was later to take the name Pol Pot was one of them. At 10:20 into the video we see a typical clueless White broad, French woman Laurence Pico, as she explains how excited she had been about following one of these intellectual fools to a whole new life turning Cambodia into a nation of "noble savages", Pol Pot's idea.
I'm skipping a WHOLE LOT, of course, as America was involved in various ways.
About the intellectuals, though: It is said that during the worst of the genocide of so much of the Cambodian population, in the quest for this back to the land utopia, anyone wearing glasses was picked out, because, well, he or she must be intelligent, and the Khmer Rouge at this point had no room for MOAR intellectuals. (It's not like you'd need glasses for anything else but reading books, right?) You didn't need glasses to harvest rice and own nothing and be happy... which sounds... eerily familiar ...
Well, that's just some interesting history now. A commenter on TUR did point out to me that, unlike some, say the Ceausescu tyrants of Romania, who were finally put up against a wall and blasted to hell, Pol Pot was never punished in that manner, at least on this earth. In the summer of 1997 he was put on trial and imprisoned for life by his Khmer Rouge after a falling out. He died in mid-April of 1998 of a heart attack, but the large, detailed wiki page describes a claim about this being a suicide, Pot's being worried that he was going to be handed over to the Americans.
Wiki discussed Pol Pot's change in ideology by the 1980s:
Pol Pot frequently commented that "We chose communism because we wanted to restore our nation. We helped the Vietnamese, who were communist. But now the communists are fighting us. So we have to turn to the West and follow their way."So says the know-it-all change-the-world intellectual. This change in his views was all well and good, but Pol Pot had had millions of his countrymen killed by then.
Why bother with these old stories of the Communists of last century, a reader may rightly ask. I think that when the financial crisis that's bound to come, DOES, America will finally be that low-hanging fruit that modern Communists have been waiting to pick. We should be wary of these types of people - better learn who to be wary of now. If not well, hey, Merrick Garland wears glasses... just sayin'.
* Later on, just as with Vietnam, the Japanese arrived, and the French took power back after the end of WWII.
Comments:
The Alarmist
Thursday - May 21st 2026 2:41AM MST
PS
BTW, there was a period after WW2 where the Brits took charge of Indochina, and they actually re-armed the surrendered Japs and sent them, along with their Dot-Indians, out to wholesale slaughter the Viet Minh before handing the region back to the French, who themselves were not the nicest people. It was this Brit phase that was the earliest and least talked about phase of the wars of liberation in Indochina.
🕉
BTW, there was a period after WW2 where the Brits took charge of Indochina, and they actually re-armed the surrendered Japs and sent them, along with their Dot-Indians, out to wholesale slaughter the Viet Minh before handing the region back to the French, who themselves were not the nicest people. It was this Brit phase that was the earliest and least talked about phase of the wars of liberation in Indochina.
🕉
The Alarmist
Thursday - May 21st 2026 2:37AM MST
PS
A young female colleague asked me what I thought the ramifications of AI putting so many people out of work might be … what I thought about the coming world of Universal Basic Income.
I told her we were more likely to see a Cambodian Solution. She had no idea what I was talking about. Ah, the bliss of being young, idealistic, and uninformed.
Mr. Trump’s Iran Expedition might have given a new lease on life to a generation of young Europeans who, due to fertiliser shortages, might be marched out to the fields to shovel dung a year or two sooner than it was planned to have them march on Moscow.
It’s a holiday in Europa,
Where you’ll do what you’re told….
https://youtu.be/U4reO3LabZY
☯️
A young female colleague asked me what I thought the ramifications of AI putting so many people out of work might be … what I thought about the coming world of Universal Basic Income.
I told her we were more likely to see a Cambodian Solution. She had no idea what I was talking about. Ah, the bliss of being young, idealistic, and uninformed.
Mr. Trump’s Iran Expedition might have given a new lease on life to a generation of young Europeans who, due to fertiliser shortages, might be marched out to the fields to shovel dung a year or two sooner than it was planned to have them march on Moscow.
It’s a holiday in Europa,
Where you’ll do what you’re told….
https://youtu.be/U4reO3LabZY
☯️
Thanks for the comments.
I also learned something I hadn't know, that is, about the British having taken charge of Indochina for a few years. I wonder when the area starting being called Southeast Asia instead, or was the just Vietnam?