Saturday, July 22, 2006

Cow dung

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2 comments:

Arelcao Akleos said...

When coming of age, in the 70s, I constructed an elaborate, if jury-rigged, thesis as to how the many yankee apologists for communism, for north vietnam, etc..., could say what they did without my having to conclude that in fact they were contemptuous of America and conscious enemies of democracy....There were so many around me, at the high-school near Boston I attended, at the university in DC I attended, that it seemed incredible their words could be meant as they were said [for who could imagine such hatred, from people who seemed blessed with every advantage, for the nation and system of thought that made fertile the ground for their blessings??].
Then, one gimpy day in 1978, after months of reports of some sort of holocaust being carried out in "Kampuchea", I read a letter from Jane Fonda, published (naturally) in the NYT, denouncing the printing of these reports, claiming them to be mere right wing propaganda, and finishing up with a strange coda wherein she claimed it unprogressive, simply wrong, to criticize the government of Pol Pot, for any criticism of one socialist to another would only aid the enemy [us]...For this, her standing in the american left only grew..
That was a bullet that clobbered my thesis, and all denial, out of my noggin. It was simply a brute fact that this country, its "intelligentisia" and social elite, was dense with virulent anti-amerian dung [this last word an apt label, AI]. They said it, repeatedly. They meant what they said, consistently. And it was time I should start taking them at their word...
As for Ta Mok, he did not pay for his crimes. And now it is too late. There is no moral there either, perhaps.

7/23/2006 1:01 AM
Tecumseh said...

But remember what Ta Mok said about Pol Pot -- cow dung has more value, you can use it as fertilizer. A fitting epigraph for both of them. but yes, no sense of justice there --no Nuremberg trial for the Khmer Rouge (whose ideology, you recall, was born in la Sorbonne, no doubt taught by some Commie French prof).

7/23/2006 8:32 AM

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