Twenty-two years after his murderous regime came to power in Phnom Penh, Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot has apparently been captured and may yet stand before an international tribunal to answer for his genocidal crimes against the Cambodian people and humanity. Good. Trying a blood-soaked communist dictator can only make the world a somewhat better place, if only by degree.
But Pol Pot’s capture is more than just a coda to a bloody and barbarous period in the history of Southeast Asia. It is a first. Every political ideology has stood in the dock, legitimately like National Socialism at Nuremberg, or illegitimately like the Bourbon dynasty during the French Revolution. Even democracy, Churchill’s lauded “worst form” of government, has faced charges for its alleged wrongs – ask 1960s protesters about their preferred form of government. But never before has the most vicious form of government, oligarchic collectivism -communism in its Sunday best -been called to task by humanity.
We need to put communism on trial if only to make meaningful to the American people that, in fact, we did win the Cold War. We emerged victorious through our personal and financial sacrifices of the last 40 years and the loss of 112,000 Americans in Korea and Southeast Asia. Many people believe that the greatest failure of President George Bush’s term was not his 1990 budget deal, but instead missing the opportunity to declare victory in the Cold War for the American people on the eve of the Soviet empire’s collapse.
History is filled with examples of the wrongs committed under communism’s despots. Stalin’s 1930′s collectivist purges killed millions of Russians and other Soviet dominated nationalities, Mao’s Cultural Revolution of the mid-sixties sent thousands of innocents to their deaths and petty dictators from Albania to Zaire have added to the global toll. Pol Pot’s actions added, by the best estimates another million to two million to that number – between 20 percent and 25 percent of Cambodia’s total population gone in just four years. Yet, the West has never before moved to hold the communist killers accountable for their actions.
Indeed, we have feted them at formal state dinners and politely applauded their speeches. Only a precious few have rebuked them for their horrendous actions. Republicans and Democrats alike have both been guilty of weak-kneed reactions to the communists. President Bush, a former ambassador to China, sent a top advisor to Beijing while the blood at Tiananmen Square still stained the cobblestones. This act occurred just 10 years after President Carter responded to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan by – preventing U.S. athletes from going to the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Neither was a particularly proud moment for U.S. statesmanship.
But since the fall of the Wall and the opening of communist archives, it is clear to virtually everyone that the architects of the global “evil empire” and those who attempted to find accommodation with them were wrong, while those who opposed communism as a moral, political, and economic evil were right. President Reagan and U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick knew the challenge that faced America and the West and joined with foreign leaders like Margaret Thatcher, Lech Walesa and Pope John Paul II to stand guard against the barbarity. Tragicomically, some of the same people who now lead America were among those who protested in the streets of this nation and abroad, chanting support for Ho Chi Minh and the same Viet Cong that helped create the conditions that spawned Pol Pot. Thus was he able to bring his twisted vision of utopia to the Cambodian people. The fact that they may now stand in judgment of a leader they helped bring to power is delicious irony, except for those who did not survive the killing fields.
While Pol Pot awaits his fate, we must look toward the front pages to see the other moral challenges facing the world. Having the facts of life under communist rule before us, how can we move to help bring liberty to enslaved nations without surrendering our principles in the process? A difficult question, to be sure, but one that must have an answer if we are to remain intellectually honest or even to be able to look at ourselves in the mirror.
Learning from the past is the best answer. When President Reagan called the Soviet Union “an evil empire,” he was roundly criticized by the liberal establishment for being a warmonger and saber-rattler. But he was right – the Soviet system had methodically killed millions of its own people. Anyone in a position to do so had a moral obligation to condemn all that it stood for.
We must strive to engage the remaining communist nations – and we must not be afraid of offending their rulers’ sensibilities (or the sensibilities of their “enablers” in this nation) by condemning their offenses against their own people and humanity. China utilizes a vast prison system, manned with slave labor, to produce products for trade with the West. To argue, as one Washington-based manufacturers’ association recently did, that we need to support MFN for China for cheaper “Tickle-Me-Elmo” dolls is appalling. We must place human dignity over dollars and refuse to participate in this heinous arrangement. Companies must also look to lift the human spirit rather than line their pockets with the proceeds of slave labor.
As Pol Pot languishes in his cell, those who took sides during the Cold War must take a long look back and assess where they stood during that struggle. There are those who abided communist oppression and those who fought it, sometimes at a terrible personal cost. Those who saw the evil empire for what it was and said so will have a much easier time looking back. Those who defended and excused communism should admit they were wrong and apologize.
We were right, they were wrong – and we should forcefully say so, with the pride of winners in that long twilight struggle.
Craig Shirley is president of Craig Shirley and Associates, where Robert Geist is senior account executive.
LOAD-DATE: July 1, 1997
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
Copyright 1997 The Washington Times LLC All Rights Reserved
