There's something I've always wondered ... in my heart of hearts, I'm the most unrepentant liberal utopian, my fantasy U.S.A. a vision of publicly managed corporations and utilities - a house, a job, and education and health care for every American; natural resources managed in an ethical, sustainable fashion; in all, a civic paradise of educated, committed citizens based on the shared ideal that what's good for one person is good for society as a whole.
Of course, this is a complete pipe dream. Of course, it would be lovely, but people simply don't work that way. No socialist economy has ever survived - on a large or small scale - without incorporating some free market elements or collapsing entirely. (Or just brutally supressing its own citizens, but I'll get to that later.) I can certainly understand the ideological appeal of a system that shares resources rather than leaving behind those who can't or won't compete for them. But in actual practice, those systems simply don't work.
Which brings me to my question ... if socialist societies are so "Big Rock Candy Mountain"-dreamlike, then why do people have to be forced to live in them at gunpoint? Why can't their perfect insitutions withstand a little political dissent? I'm talking to you, Cuba. And China. And North Korea.
I got to thinking about this today after reading on BBC.com about the arrest of Khieu Samphan, a former president of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. He's the fifth Khmer Rouge official to be charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity by a U.N.-backed tribunal. Khieu Samphan is 76-years old. Starting just five years before I was born, he and his regime killed more than a million people, directly and indirectly.
The Khmer Rouge sought to develop Cambodia into a classless agrarian society - pretty ironic, since its leader, Pol Pot, was the son of a privileged landowner who first learned about Marxist philosophy as a student in Paris (he was fluent in French, having attended elite colonial schools) and who worked as a teacher himself. Nevertheless, Pol Pot and his administration saught to revolutionize Cambodian society by evening-out the disparities in wealth fostered by the colonial/capitalist economy.
Anything resembling industry or modernity was dismantled. No more currency, private property, religion or even family affiliations. City-dwellers were forced to evacuate; people with education (except for Pol Pot himself, of course) were threats. Imagine for a moment that U.S. society were suddenly plunged back 200 years - no electricity, no cars or even railroads and you and I forced out from in front of the television to go plant crops. Oh, and if you have an objection to this, you get send to a re-education camp to be tortured. Riiiii-ight.
How these whack-jobs managed to stay in power for four years is beyond me. (Sorry - I don't mean to sound flippant, but seriously, can you think of a better word than "whack-job" to describe people who think this way, and are willing to torture or kill those who disagree with them???) Pol Pot fled the country when Viet Nam invaded Cambodia in 1978, eventually to die in Thailand 20 years later. He'll never be brought to justice for what he did, but at least many of the men who helped him will.
Today, Cambodia still struggles to rebuild its infrastructure, after a 10-year occupation by the Vietnamese and another 13-year-long civil war that only ended in 1991. For most of the 90's, the U.N. cobbled together democratically elected governments. The CIA Factbook entry on Cambodia calls 1999 "the first full year of peace in 30 years" - 20 years after the defeat of Pol Pot's social experiment, Cambodia finally got the breathing room to start recovery.
I'm glad that the U.N. is backing the tribunal. As Isabel Allende said last week when she was speaking here on campus, you can't have reconciliation without truth first. She was talking about her native country, Chile (the rare socialist economy that might have succeeded without Henry Kissinger's interference), but it's true for Cambodia as well.
I hope that the MSM continues to cover this story with 10 per cent or so of the energy it devotes to Lindsay Lohan's latest DUI and Hillary Clinton's laugh.
BTW - I've always been fascinated by how our MSM tends to treat phenomena like the Khmer Rouge as if they came out of nowhere, when in fact one could clearly see Pol Pot coming for a good 20 years earlier. History is riddled with similar examples. Pol Pot's contempory Ho Chi Minh was at the Treaty of Versailles talks to end World War I, for heaven's sake...Oh, but that's a rant for another time. (Kind of sad how few strong references there are for this available online...) I just wish that the gatekeepers of our information were better stewards.
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