Word: khmers
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...announcement was welcomed by the Soviet Union, which backs Hanoi with an estimated $1 billion a year in aid but is unhappy with Viet Nam's mismanagement. Disengagement from Kampuchea could also improve Hanoi's chilly relations with China, which supports Kampuchean resistance forces, including the once dreaded Khmer Rouge, that have been fighting the Vietnamese. Eventually, the U.S. may feel more disposed to endorse Hanoi's requests for Western assistance. Not everybody will be pleased, however. Some Kampucheans fear that the Khmer Rouge, who ruled with murderous intensity in Phnom Penh until Vietnamese forces drove them...
Archaeologists in Thailand have spent years assembling thousands of stone blocks to restore the Temple of Phnom Rung, a monument of the Khmer dynasty (A.D. 802-1250). A key part of the temple has mysteriously turned up 10,000 miles away at Chicago's Art Institute, and the Thais are demanding it back...
...coexistence of irrational ends and rational means is an enduring source of astonishment. It should not be. Once you decide to murder every Jew in Europe, Auschwitz follows logically. Once you have decided that the city is parasitic on the countryside (Khieu Samphan, leader of the Khmer Rouge, decided that at the Sorbonne and made it a tenet of his doctoral thesis), then the forced emptying of Cambodian cities at the cost of millions of lives follows logically. After all, the extirpation of parasites is a public service. Once you have decided, as did Ayatullah Khomeini, to redeem the Islamic...
...rest of the world's zealots. It is a wan hope. This century has not been kind to the notion that fanaticism must collapse from within. Generally, the crazy state does not self-destruct. On the contrary, it must be destroyed from without: Hitler by the Allies, the Khmer Rouge by Viet Nam, Idi Amin by Tanzania. (In his last years Stalin was no less irrational than Hitler, if not quite as bloody. Yet far from self- destructing, his regime, having succeeded in war, extended its hegemony over a great empire...
...being punctured from without are slim. Since crazy states tend to be destroyed from the outside, their fate is often a function of their geography. Hitler had the misfortune of being located in Central Europe; his pursuit of Lebensraum ran up against the greatest powers of the day. The Khmer Rouge's bad luck was to be living next door to an equally warlike Viet Nam. Otherwise it would be killing to this day, assuming there were any Cambodians left to kill. Gaddafi had the misfortune of being hard by the Mediterranean, an American lake. And Idi Amin's butchery...