RSSNever Again! again
Carolyn Hileman - The Voice | 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 has 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.
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