“Beloved brothers, sisters, workers, youths, students, teachers and functionaries,” the Communist Party of Kampuchea’s clandestine radio proclaimed on April 16, 1975. “Now is the time! Here are our Cambodian People’s National Liberation Armed Forces! Rise up and free Phnom Penh.”
By the next morning, Phnom Penh was in the Khmer Rouge’s hands. Emptying the city of its population, they brutally closed hospitals, shuttered monasteries and destroyed libraries that were centuries old. More than 10,000 people died as the weak, the sick and the wounded were hounded, without food or water, on to country roads. “Democratic Kampuchea” had entered a nightmare whose horrors, even decades later, remain undimmed.
But the 50th anniversary of what the global left hailed as the “liberation” of Phnom Penh has been overshadowed by commemorations of the fall of Saigon, almost to the point of being entirely ignored. Yet few events more desperately need to be remembered.
That is not merely because of the appalling scale of the disaster that, in the four years of Khmer Rouge rule, cost 1.6 million lives – 20 per cent of the country’s population – as the country was transformed into a prison camp whose inmates were worked, starved and beaten to death. It is also because of the murderous delusions that fuelled the killing – and the no less culpable illusions that led so many “progressives” to shut their eyes as the tragedy unfolded.
The Khmer Rouge mindset was a concentrate of two centuries of revolutionary ideology. Convinced that the inerrable laws of history guaranteed their ultimate triumph; obsessed by the belief that they faced adversaries with gigantic and demonic powers, including of subterfuge and disguise; and scornful of any limitations on what could be achieved by coercion, fear and unrestrained ruthlessness, the French-educated leaders of the Khmer Rouge crystallised into a psychotic fantasy the intellectual tradition that ran from Robespierre, whom they venerated, to Lenin and Mao.
Like Robespierre, they saw the revolution as a purge, whose mission was to rid the body politic of its disease-carrying elements. Already on May 20, 1975, Pol Pot emphasised the need to “carefully screen” the new regime’s subjects, taking “measures so that people were pure”. Those who weren’t, such as monks, “had to be wiped out” – and by September, most of the country’s monks were dead.
A year later, Pol Pot again warned the party’s Standing Committee that while sections of the party had been “scrubbed clean”, an “uncompromising fight to the death with the class enemy” was raging “in our revolutionary ranks”. With “treacherous, secret elements entering the party continuously”, a “sickness” had “wormed its way” into the apparatus, spread by “germs that will rot society, rot the party, and rot the army”.
That sickness could not be cured by mere imprisonment; rather, the party’s watchword had to be “keeping them alive brings no benefit, killing them causes no loss”. There were, as a result, no re-education camps in Cambodia – only killing fields. And when Phnom Penh Radio announced in 1978 that it was time to “purify the masses”, completely “cleaning up” the “sick elements”, the psychosis reached fever pitch.
So did the cult of violence. Sneering at the very idea of “the sanctity of human life”, Lenin in 1920 ridiculed “petit-bourgeois sentimentalists” who sought to “minimise the number of victims”. Rather, enemies “must be crushed without pity” so that “for hundreds of miles around the people see, tremble, know and cry: they are killing and will go on killing”.
Echoing Lenin’s call, Mao laid down the absolute principle that “to right a wrong, it is necessary to exceed the ‘proper limits’ ”, instituting “a reign of terror” wherever traces of the old regime persisted.
The Khmer Rouge readily heeded those lessons. In late 1976, a decision on “Smashing (people) Inside and Outside the Ranks” instructed the secret police to torture prisoners, including through whippings with electric wire, regardless of age or health. Two years later, prison administrators were recording “experiments”, in which young women were stabbed or bashed, then had their stomachs slashed open and ripped out, before being placed in water to see how long it took until “the body floats to the top”.
Meanwhile, in the countryside, victims were butchered as the party’s cadres struggled to meet targets for the elimination of human “vermin”. The party announced, for example, that in just one district, 40,000 of the 70,000 citizens were or had been traitors: no matter how impossible it was to identify them correctly, they all had to be “purified”.
Yet none of that caused “progressives” to blanche. In February 1977, François Ponchaud, a French Catholic missionary who had a deep knowledge of Cambodia, published his now classic Cambodia Year Zero, which documented the massacres. Leading the Left’s response, Libération, the daily paper of Paris’s gauchistes, rushed out a review accusing Ponchaud of being a mendacious tool of the CIA.
Not to be outdone, Noam Chomsky, who was never slow in accusing the US and Israel of hideous crimes, asserted – without giving any evidence of his own – that Ponchaud’s “evidence begins to crumble when one looks at it carefully”. Loudly backing Chomsky’s allegations were, among many other “progressive” Australians, the academics Ben Kiernan (who later regretted his stance) and Gavan McCormack, whose arguments Robert Manne forcefully rebutted in Quadrant.
The support the global left gave the Khmer Rouge was not without consequences. In his memoirs of the period, Ponchaud argues that it encouraged the Khmer Rouge in their madness – and hence bears its share of responsibility for the atrocities they were committing.
A simple Manichean logic underpinned the Left’s wilful blindness: the West, and most notably the US, was the source of all evil; hence its opponents, the forces of “liberation”, had to be worth defending – all the more so because they were, as the Khmer Rouge themselves repeatedly stated, “objectively” on the “right side” of history. And precisely because they were on the “right side” of history, any excesses would, in time, be outweighed by benefits. With all the unsavoury facts thus blotted out, only the apologists’ glow of moral righteousness remained.
That willingness to ignore reality has hardly disappeared. Displaying the same Manichean logic that whitewashed the destruction of Cambodia, the Greens and their sympathisers unhesitatingly damn Israel. But they refuse to recognise that the goal of Hamas, whose exterminationist rhetoric of “purification” mirrors that of the Khmer Rouge, is to erase “the poison of Jewry (from) the body of the world”. Nor do they have any qualms about Hezbollah’s vow to “annihilate the (Jewish) rats from the face of the Earth”.
The “progressives” have, in other words, learnt nothing and forgotten everything. But five decades on, there is one big thing they still know all too well: how to keep their eyes tight shut.
Henry Ergas will be giving the Rule of Law Institute’s annual Robin Speed Memorial Lecture in Sydney on June 12. Bookings at https://www.ruleoflaw.org.au/2025-rule-of-law-dinner.
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