Word: khmers
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What was happening in Vietnam and Cambodia meant a lot to us at The Crimson; for us it seemed to be the first good news from Indochina in years. Since late in the 60s we had editorially supported the Khmer Rouge and National Liberation Front in Vietnam, both nationalist groups affiliated with foreign Communist parties, and both of those characteristics--the independence and the socialist egalitarianism--appealed to us. When the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh, a Crimson editorial said, "The capture of Phnom Penh last week by the Khmer Rouge is a victory for the Cambodian people over...
After Schanberg's report of the Khmer Rouge government came out, you'd think The Crimson would have had another editorial, since we had commented on practically every major development in Indochina for five years; generations of Crimson writers had written reams of copy about Vietnam and Indochina, all of it angry and heartfelt and sympathetic to the people there. But we didn't say anything, and we haven't said anything about Indochina since. What could we say? After five years of editorial sweat and toil, how could we turn our backs on the Cambodians? And how could...
...easier to step back a little, and try to understand why the Khmer Rouge was worth supporting, before figuring out whether it still is. A few general principles seem to apply: a state of peace is better than one of war; a state of independence is better than one of control from outside; a state of complete social and economic equality for a nation's citizens is better than one of inequality. The United States monstrously violated this value system in Indochina, lining up squarely and brutally on the wrong side of all three criteria. All the Indochinese liberation movements...
...know what we all expected the Khmer Rouge to do when it came to power. It is impossible, of course, to change a nation from decayed urban capitalism to peasant socialism (the Khmer Rouge's program all along) immediately and quietly. I know when I first read Schanberg's story of a communist-imposed march what surprised me was not so much what had happened but how many prejudices I had accumulated about the situation. My immediate reaction was that this couldn't be true, that it had to be exaggerated, that the Khmer Rouge wouldn't do this sort...
With Cambodia it's an old dilemma--do we look at events in Indochina as Americans with liberal values or as the Indochinese must look at them? The Khmer Rouge can certainly no longer meet with our approval on our own terms, because they violate our feeling that anything worthy need not be accomplished through violence and cruelty. On their own terms they continue to be most of what we supported them for--staunch nationalists, socialists, remakers of their own society. It is a conflict that I am not ready to resolve. Although The Crimson has yet to commit itself...