NYT - Covering for Communist Scum

Mona Charen, NRO - You wouldn’t have thought it possible. But then, you underestimate the ingenuity of the New York Times. The house organ of the liberal church in America, the Times covered the opening day of the trial of one of the worst killers in 20th-century history without mentioning the “C” word even once.

What technique! The 18-paragraph story certainly made clear that the reporter, Seth Mydans, was none too pleased with the defendant. That much was clear. Kaing Guek Eav (known as Duch) had been commandant of the Tuol Sleng prison camp in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Who were they? Well, according to the story, they presided over a “fanatical . . . government between 1975 and 1979.” That they certainly did. But they were Communist fanatics, and the Times managed to elide that detail. It’s odd, because in other contexts the Times is not shy about characterizing governments’ political tilt. The Times put the words “right-wing” together with the Pinochet regime in Chile so often you’d have thought it was part of the title: “The Right-Wing Regime of Augusto Pinochet.” It was the same with the “right-wing” government of El Salvador when the FMLN Communist movement was attempting to overthrow it. The Times has even used the term “conservative” to describe the mullahs in Iran and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

......Mydans tells us that hundreds of “diplomats, journalists, human rights workers, and other victims of the Khmer Rouge” attended the trial and quotes one survivor about the horrors he suffered: “When I was in jail, I could get three spoons of porridge a day and both my legs were put in shackles.” The reporter also mentions that the Khmer Rouge are thought to have murdered as many as 1.7 million Cambodians during their short reign.

......The Khmer Rouge modeled themselves on Mao and Lenin and then shifted into overdrive. They emptied the cities of their inhabitants and force-marched everyone — the elderly, the sick, pregnant women, children — in the tropical heat to the countryside where there were no facilities, little drinking water, scarce food, no medicine, and no shelter except thatched huts. There they were starved and enslaved when they weren’t shot on the spot for some minor infraction. Anyone who had any connection to the West or to modernity itself was suspect. People who spoke other languages, or who owned a typewriter or eyeglasses or any forbidden book, could be shot. Failure to make sufficiently abject apologies for ideological errors was enough to merit a bullet between the eyes.

......It may be that the evil done in the name of revolution exceeds all other manmade disasters. Certainly one cannot begin to confront Cambodia’s grisly history without acknowledging that Communists committed this atrocity.

MK - One wonders how many have to die before elements of the left finally give up their infatuation with the evil that is Communism. Perhaps they will never stop yearning to give communism another chance. Spread the word and so that their dreams may never again come true.

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