Canada Free Press
Jan 4 2009
Never Again! Again
By Bruce Walker Sunday, January 4, 2009
`Never again!’ was a message hammered into my head from the earliest
memories of my youth. The ghastly films of concentration and death
camps, the limp bodies of living skeleton, the reduction of humans to
something much less than ill treated livestock ` this, the civilized
world vowed, would never happen again.
Unless, of course, it could not be prevented (that first exception to
the rule.) So though Stalin still continued to fill his Gulag with
snaky lines of cattle cars into regions of Hell bearing names like
Kolyma and Karaganda after other regions bearing names like Buchenwald
and Bergen-Belsen had been liberated, `Never again!’ did not apply to
him and his Evil Empire: All evils of Hell were not equal.
And unless, of course, the slaughter of millions was done by the
lionized, self-styled agrarian reformer, Mao. He may have produced
more cadavers than Hitler or Stalin ` who knows? ` but Mao had
overthrown the despised Kou Ming Tang (never, ever called by its
Chinese name, `Party of the People.’) Mao expanded the caverns of Hell
by diabolical innovations unknown the Hitler or Stalin: Far from
hiding his mass murders, he compelled ordinary Chinese to actively
participate in the torture and murder of innocent countrymen: He
dragooned common folk into the Chinese equivalent of the SS or the
MKVD.
I understood, in a way, these exceptions. Ending the genocide of
Nazism had come at horrific human costs. Had it been worth the price?
Yes, but the price was still almost unthinkable. Ending the genocide
of Japanese Imperialism in China had come at horrific human costs.
Had this, too, been worth the price? It might have been, if China had
proceeded along the paths of corrupt authoritarian rule and become
like Taiwan instead of derailed into an inhuman totalitarian cult of
personality, as it did under the demi-god demon Mao.
Stalin also soon enough acquired fission bombs and then fusion bombs.
Although the Soviets in the decade after Potsdam never remotely had
the power to `destroy the planet,’ they did have the power to inflict
atomic destruction on many cities of Western Europe, which may have
outweighed the millions of souls condemned to forgotten deaths in
slave labor camps.
The Soviet bosses also backed Mao, at least for awhile. Could we have
ended his reign during the Korean War? Not without atomic bombs. Not
without the risk of reducing Tokyo to radioactive rubble. The right
response to the Gulag and to Mao was not perfectly clear then and it
is not now. The Nazi war machine, the mighty Japanese fleet, the
whole weight of totalitarian fever (remembering that Stalin was a
bosom friend of Hitler until late June 1941) ` these represented vast
wickedness which could be ended only by oceans of blood, sweat, and
tears. The civilized world, still reeling from the mind-numbing
losses of the `Great War,’ rightly acted in solemn caution before,
again, committing a generation to the sword.
Thirty years ago, however, a vast wickedness ended, not by the noble
armies of global conscience entering the capital of genocidal madness
as liberators. When the Vietnam War ended, it was obvious to all but
the willingly ignorant and blissfully foolish that millions of
innocent people would die terrible deaths. Why? Because that had
always happened everywhere when militant Marxism had seized power. It
did not matter that the innocents were innocent: The Red Army killed
Poles, Czechs, and other victims of Nazi aggression with the same
callous indifference as they showed to Hungarians, Rumanians, and
Slovaks, allies of the Nazis. It did not matter that the slaughter
was irrational (irrational, at least, to men who pine for human
happiness.) The goal was not human happiness but crushing terror.
Pol Pot and the Killing Fields were the most utterly predictable,
practically inevitable, result imaginable of the Khmer Rogue seizing
power in Cambodia. As a very young man, I knew long before it
happened just what would happen. And I waited for the voices of human
decency to speak: The silence was deafening.
There were no exceptions to the rule now. Cambodia was not a military
juggernaut. The Khmer Rogue was barely a functioning army. This was
not the tough army of North Vietnam. The Khmer Rogue was not even on
particularly good terms with their fellow communists in Hanoi. There
was also no chance that Moscow or Beijing would risk nuclear war for
the sake of a small country which was not important, much, to anyone.
The whole world watched while a vicious madman, at least as bad as
Hitler, Stalin, or Mao, exterminated by various monstrous measures
between 20% and 30% of the entire population of his nation. There was
not mystery about what was happening. No Allied troops needed to
overrun death camps. No Solzhenitsyn needed to chronicle the
nightmare. John Barron, an internationally respected author, wrote
Murder of a Gentle Land, which describes just what the Khmer Rogue
were doing while they were still doing it: prisoners, including
children, routinely tortured to death; entire high school classes
murdered to the last person; every man, woman, and child forced to
work 12-15 hours a day.
The whole body of nations which promised `Never again!’ yawned.
France, which had so recently ruled all Indochina, could have routed
the Khmer Rogue in a few weeks. Britain, which was another SEATO
ally, could have also ended the genocide. India, pious champion of
global human rights and practical neighbor of this holocaust, had
troops to fight a war with Pakistan but none to spare for the pacific
Khmer people. We Americans, too, did nothing.
The Khmer people were ultimately `liberated’ in January 1979 by the
thuggish armies of Communist Vietnam, that is, by a lesser evil, by a
pathetically weak yet still stronger evil ` to the great shame of
those who pretend to fight evil.
We are our brother’s keepers. That ought to have been the lesson of
the Holocaust, of the Gulag, of the Armenian genocide, and of every
other similar crime against humanity. That is, of course, the
definition of the crime: A crime against humanity. We are its victims
and we are the police and prosecutors when the crime happens. Thirty
years ago, we, the human race, abdicated that duty. `Never again!’
means `Never again!’ only when it really means that.
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