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  • Never Again! Again

    Canada Free Press
    Jan 4 2009


    Never Again! Again

    By Bruce Walker Sunday, January 4, 2009


    `Never again!' was a message hammered into my head from the earliest
    memories of my youth. The ghastly films of concentration and death
    camps, the limp bodies of living skeleton, the reduction of humans to
    something much less than ill treated livestock ` this, the civilized
    world vowed, would never happen again.

    Unless, of course, it could not be prevented (that first exception to
    the rule.) So though Stalin still continued to fill his Gulag with
    snaky lines of cattle cars into regions of Hell bearing names like
    Kolyma and Karaganda after other regions bearing names like Buchenwald
    and Bergen-Belsen had been liberated, `Never again!' did not apply to
    him and his Evil Empire: All evils of Hell were not equal.

    And unless, of course, the slaughter of millions was done by the
    lionized, self-styled agrarian reformer, Mao. He may have produced
    more cadavers than Hitler or Stalin ` who knows? ` but Mao had
    overthrown the despised Kou Ming Tang (never, ever called by its
    Chinese name, `Party of the People.') Mao expanded the caverns of Hell
    by diabolical innovations unknown the Hitler or Stalin: Far from
    hiding his mass murders, he compelled ordinary Chinese to actively
    participate in the torture and murder of innocent countrymen: He
    dragooned common folk into the Chinese equivalent of the SS or the
    MKVD.

    I understood, in a way, these exceptions. Ending the genocide of
    Nazism had come at horrific human costs. Had it been worth the price?
    Yes, but the price was still almost unthinkable. Ending the genocide
    of Japanese Imperialism in China had come at horrific human costs.
    Had this, too, been worth the price? It might have been, if China had
    proceeded along the paths of corrupt authoritarian rule and become
    like Taiwan instead of derailed into an inhuman totalitarian cult of
    personality, as it did under the demi-god demon Mao.

    Stalin also soon enough acquired fission bombs and then fusion bombs.
    Although the Soviets in the decade after Potsdam never remotely had
    the power to `destroy the planet,' they did have the power to inflict
    atomic destruction on many cities of Western Europe, which may have
    outweighed the millions of souls condemned to forgotten deaths in
    slave labor camps.

    The Soviet bosses also backed Mao, at least for awhile. Could we have
    ended his reign during the Korean War? Not without atomic bombs. Not
    without the risk of reducing Tokyo to radioactive rubble. The right
    response to the Gulag and to Mao was not perfectly clear then and it
    is not now. The Nazi war machine, the mighty Japanese fleet, the
    whole weight of totalitarian fever (remembering that Stalin was a
    bosom friend of Hitler until late June 1941) ` these represented vast
    wickedness which could be ended only by oceans of blood, sweat, and
    tears. The civilized world, still reeling from the mind-numbing
    losses of the `Great War,' rightly acted in solemn caution before,
    again, committing a generation to the sword.

    Thirty years ago, however, a vast wickedness ended, not by the noble
    armies of global conscience entering the capital of genocidal madness
    as liberators. When the Vietnam War ended, it was obvious to all but
    the willingly ignorant and blissfully foolish that millions of
    innocent people would die terrible deaths. Why? Because that had
    always happened everywhere when militant Marxism had seized power. It
    did not matter that the innocents were innocent: The Red Army killed
    Poles, Czechs, and other victims of Nazi aggression with the same
    callous indifference as they showed to Hungarians, Rumanians, and
    Slovaks, allies of the Nazis. It did not matter that the slaughter
    was irrational (irrational, at least, to men who pine for human
    happiness.) The goal was not human happiness but crushing terror.

    Pol Pot and the Killing Fields were the most utterly predictable,
    practically inevitable, result imaginable of the Khmer Rogue seizing
    power in Cambodia. As a very young man, I knew long before it
    happened just what would happen. And I waited for the voices of human
    decency to speak: The silence was deafening.

    There were no exceptions to the rule now. Cambodia was not a military
    juggernaut. The Khmer Rogue was barely a functioning army. This was
    not the tough army of North Vietnam. The Khmer Rogue was not even on
    particularly good terms with their fellow communists in Hanoi. There
    was also no chance that Moscow or Beijing would risk nuclear war for
    the sake of a small country which was not important, much, to anyone.

    The whole world watched while a vicious madman, at least as bad as
    Hitler, Stalin, or Mao, exterminated by various monstrous measures
    between 20% and 30% of the entire population of his nation. There was
    not mystery about what was happening. No Allied troops needed to
    overrun death camps. No Solzhenitsyn needed to chronicle the
    nightmare. John Barron, an internationally respected author, wrote
    Murder of a Gentle Land, which describes just what the Khmer Rogue
    were doing while they were still doing it: prisoners, including
    children, routinely tortured to death; entire high school classes
    murdered to the last person; every man, woman, and child forced to
    work 12-15 hours a day.

    The whole body of nations which promised `Never again!' yawned.
    France, which had so recently ruled all Indochina, could have routed
    the Khmer Rogue in a few weeks. Britain, which was another SEATO
    ally, could have also ended the genocide. India, pious champion of
    global human rights and practical neighbor of this holocaust, had
    troops to fight a war with Pakistan but none to spare for the pacific
    Khmer people. We Americans, too, did nothing.

    The Khmer people were ultimately `liberated' in January 1979 by the
    thuggish armies of Communist Vietnam, that is, by a lesser evil, by a
    pathetically weak yet still stronger evil ` to the great shame of
    those who pretend to fight evil.

    We are our brother's keepers. That ought to have been the lesson of
    the Holocaust, of the Gulag, of the Armenian genocide, and of every
    other similar crime against humanity. That is, of course, the
    definition of the crime: A crime against humanity. We are its victims
    and we are the police and prosecutors when the crime happens. Thirty
    years ago, we, the human race, abdicated that duty. `Never again!'
    means `Never again!' only when it really means that.

    http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/articl e/7315
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