Word: pols
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Last week the regime of Premier Pol Pot was staggering under the weight of its own excesses. The government's ability to withstand Hanoi's military offensive was in jeopardy. Increasing numbers of once fanatically loyal Khmer Rouge were deserting to join the enemy forces. Peasants in Cambodian villages near the Vietnamese border had revolted, murdering the fierce Khmer "controllers" who police the villages. At the same time, 200 Cambodian civilians a week were desperately crossing minefields and other deadly border booby traps to take refuge in Thailand. More than 150,000 have already escaped to Viet...
...More Treasury debt certificates? Freshly printed greenbacks? Sell our gold? What will that do but ruin the price of gold without even touching our foreign and domestic deficits? Sure, sell at the market and we could pay the foreign deficits for a couple of years, and then what? What pol would vote to raise interest rates far enough to put us into a depression? Oil surtax? Moderately helpful as it pushes us into depression. There is nothing we can do that won't hurt too much...
...there the comparison ends. Where Skeffington is a symbol, the healthiest specimen around of the classic Irish pol, Levine is very much a human being, his own man rather than the property of every voter who happens to own a brogue or a pug nose...
...that? Well, one simplistic way was to abolish cities, because cities cannot survive without money. The new Cambodian rulers did just that. What matter that hundreds of thousands died as the cities were depopulated? It apparently meant little, if anything, to Premier Pol Pot and his shadowy colleagues on the politburo of Democratic Kampuchea, as they now call Cambodia. When asked about the figure of 1 million deaths, President Khieu Samphan replied: "It's incredible how concerned you Westerners are about war criminals." Radio Phnom Penh even dared to boast of this atrocity in the name of collectivism: "More...
...meaning outside an absolute system of values: one that is resistant to the tinkering at will by governments or revolutionary groups. The Cambodian revolution, in its own degraded "purity," has demonstrated what happens when the Marxian denial of moral absolutes is taken with total seriousness by its adherents. Pol Pot and his friends decide what good is, what bad is, and how many corpses must pile up before this rapacious demon of "purity" is appeased...