Another American Triumph

Cambodia, the Asian race, “humanitarian” delusions, and realism.

by Revilo P. Oliver

A FRIEND has brought to my attention a book that will be instructive to most Americans, and will serve as an excellent touchstone to test their intellectual maturity. It is Murder of a Gentle Land, by John Barron and Anthony Paul (New York, Crowell (Reader’s Digest Press), 1977.) The “gentle land” is Cambodia, and the adjective incidentally suffices to show that while Messrs. Paul and Barron doubtless informed themselves rather thoroughly about recent events in Cambodia, they remained almost totally ignorant of its history. Typical journalists, they doubtless think that anything that happened before they were born is ancient and, of course, obsolete and inconsiderable.

The period in which Cambodia has permanent significance in the history of the world runs from the Tenth Century to the Fifteenth and is the era in which the Khmers, the native population, came under the cultural dominion of India, adopted the religions of both Hinduism and Buddhism, and accepted Sanskrit as the language of the educated ruling class, itself of Hindu or mixed Hindu and Khmer stock. The very name of Cambodia is Sanskrit (Kamboja). This era ends with the sack of Angkor Thom by the Siamese and the consequent decadence of the nation.

The recent history of the country begins, appropriately enough, with another invasion from Siam (now called Thailand) in 1854, which impelled the ruler of Cambodia to appeal to the French for protection. The French did intervene and, more by Aryan prestige than military force, saved the Khmers from another bloody invasion. The French were establishing their colonial empire in Southeast Asia, beginning military occupation with their capture of Saigon in 1859, and culminating with the organization of Cochin-China, or Indo-China, as a single colony which brought under one unified rule the baker’s dozen of ethnically distinct and mutually antagonistic peoples who inhabited the various territories east of Siam, including, of course, Cambodia. In 1884 they found it necessary to govern Cambodia directly and depose the Norodom (1) by depriving him of all authority. If you have read even the most minor works of Lafcadio Hearn, you will remember his somewhat elegiac essay, “Norodom the Last” (1885), which was reprinted in the collection of his newspaper articles by C. W. Hutson, Editorials (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1926).

(1. ‘Norodom’ is a gentile [As in Latin gentilus, relating to a tribe or clan. — KAS] name and, borne in hereditary succession by the rulers of Cambodia, became a dynastic name, which, I was told, excited such popular veneration that it almost replaced the Cambodian word for ‘king,’ raj (obviously a derivative of Sanskrit rajan).)

French rule in Indo-China was of great importance to human history, for it was the French who discovered in the jungle the monumental ruins of Angkor and recovered the history of Cambodia in its great era, which the natives had so completely forgotten that the few who knew that the great stone edifices survived amid and beneath the teeming vegetation of the jungle, believed them the work of demons. Although no one seems to know what has now happened to those memorials of Cambodia’s transitory greatness, the work of the French archaeologists will have saved them for history.

The French occupation of Indo-China gave rise to a very considerable literature. If I were required to select the one most important work, I would select a novel by the French naval officer who wrote under the name of Claude Farrère, Les Civilisés (1905). It is as instructive today as when it was published.

The French, ever since the bloody orgy called the French Revolution, have had a morbid proclivity toward multi-racial folly, and in his novel Farrère studies the demoralizing effect of contact with the native cultures on Frenchmen thus morally tainted. If you read the novel for this fine analysis, you will, of course, make allowance for the fact that it was written when a war between France and Great Britain seemed inevitable.

The French rule of Indo-China, despite some concessions to those pests of our civilization, “Liberal intellectuals,” was securely established until Roosevelt’s War, when the Japanese, whom the Americans, as tools of the Soviets, had deflected from their natural zone of expansion, invaded Southeast Asia. You should realize that, insofar as there is any justification for the word ‘gentle’ in the title of the book I am discussing, that was directly and uniquely the result of French dominion over Cambodia as a part of Indo-China.

After 1945, the French returned, but the Americans, having ruined the one healthy nation of our race, continued their offensive against our civilization under the guise of their habitual meddling with the affairs of other nations, and rushed in “foreign aid” to prepare the country for a Communist conquest.

Then the United States began one of its bloody and devastating “peacekeeping” operations in Korea for the purpose of not only killing thousands of young Americans, bleeding the stupid tax-paying animals, and advertising the suicidal mania of the American people, but specifically to consolidate the Communist régime in China, in close cooperation with the Soviet Union, which simple-minded Americans were told was the enemy they were supposedly resisting. The gullibility of unthinking Americans is simply infinite.

The French returned to Indo-China after the defeat of Japan, but were immediately attacked by the Communist régime in China, which the United States had established by cozening and betraying the Chinese Nationalists under Chiang Kai-Shek. The French fought the invaders from 1946 to 1954, when the Americans, with their wonted treachery, betrayed the French at Dienbienphu and delivered Vietnam to the Communists, in preparation for another bloody and devastating “peace-keeping operation” in that country. Washington, obviously by agreement with Moscow, began direct military action in 1964 and successfully killed many young Americans, bled the tax-paying animals, further subjected them to domestic despotism, and conclusively disgraced the United States by demonstrating to the world that it had become a Jewish colony ruled by a Yiddish satrap named Kissinger.

It is at this point that Messrs. Barron and Paul become aware of events, although apparently not of their causes. The “war” in Vietnam naturally spilled over into Cambodia, which had become theoretically independent in 1955, been given a minor role in the vaudeville show called “United Nations,” and thus been exposed to the devastating effects of American “foreign aid.” In 1969-1970, the United States, under the usual and flimsy pretext of “fighting Communism,” began extensive military operations in Cambodia which were long kept secret from the dim-witted boobs in the United States who paid the bills. The natural (and planned) result of the American intervention was that, as the authors say, “When the Americans pulled out, they left the communists in effective control of larger areas of the country than ever before.”

The Americans had also succeeded in making the Cambodian government hopelessly and helplessly corrupt, as is usually one of the objectives of “foreign aid.” Messrs. Barron and Paul speak harshly of Norodom Sihanouk, who was installed as the monarch of Cambodia when it became “independent,” and I know too little of that individual to judge his character, but we can understand why, when he had to choose between the hypocrisy of the United States and the candor of the Soviet Union, he chose the frankly Communist power in a kind of desperation, which probably saved his life, since he did not undergo the fate of Ngo Dinh Diem, who was assassinated in 1963 by his American “allies” in Vietnam. (2)

(2. It is now generally known that the assassination of Diem was arranged by the C.I.A., but uncertain whether promises or bribes were used to inspire the Vietnamese officers who carried out the murder.)

Since 1932, American foreign policy has been uniformly successful in spreading terror, death, and destruction throughout the world, and no observer capable of objective reasoning was astonished that it attained another triumph in 1975, when Cambodia was “liberated,” American style, by hordes of “freedom fighters” from Communist China and Vietnam. They immediately instituted “democratic reforms” to liquidate the Khmers.

They began by immediately expelling from the capital city, Phnom Penh, the entire Cambodian population, estimated at three million, including the refugees who had swarmed into the city from the surrounding countryside as it was overrun by the Communists. The victims, suddenly forced to leave at once, were not permitted to take any clothing or food with them, and the Cambodians who were most fortunate were probably the ones who were murdered while the city was being looted.

For the benefit of any readers who may know nothing about the standard procedures of Judaeo-Communist operations, we may add that the Cambodian “intellectuals,” who had helped the “freedom fighters” by further undermining the Cambodian government with their seditious yammering about “social justice,” were systematically butchered, since a smattering of education was sufficient to prove that they had become “enemies of the people.”

Murder of a Gentle Land is a compilation of the experiences of the Cambodians who survived and found refuge in Siam (Thailand) and Malaya (Malaysia). With the aid of interpreters, of course, Messrs. Barron and Paul interviewed hundreds of those survivors and obtained narratives of how they had escaped from their “liberated” country. It is an appalling record of human suffering and will deeply move Aryans, who have a racial peculiarity that inclines them to compassion and generous sympathy with the unfortunate, and have only recently learned to be pitiless towards members of their own race, while retaining a tender concern for the welfare of their enemies.

The activities of the social reformers in Cambodia will horrify Aryan readers. Although the normal procedure was simply to shoot “reactionaries” with American rifles or, preferably, to save ammunition by using a pickaxe on their skulls, there were refinements for persons who were specially disliked or fell into the hands of captors who had leisure to amuse themselves. One neat method of disposal was to lock the victim in a cell and let him starve to death.

Officials of the former Cambodian government were given a star billing. After ears and nose had been cut off, and gashes made in the flesh to produce slow bleeding, the victim’s arms were tied behind his back and he was fastened to a convenient tree by a long rope and forced to dance around the tree in pain. If the show was well directed, he thus provided the interested audience with continuous entertainment for two days and nights before he finally died.

Schoolteachers were usually given a distinctive treatment: a noose was put about the neck and the rope passed over the branch of a tree; half a dozen children of eight to ten were given the privilege of pulling the rope to lift the victim up to the branch and then let him drop suddenly to the ground before he was quite strangled by the noose. This could, of course, be repeated many times before the wretch was released by death. (3) The children greatly enjoyed their sport and took pleasure in the approval of the adult spectators.

(3. This sport was probably suggested by the Chinese punishment known as san-fang-san-chin. The condemned man is strangled to the point of death and then revived and restored to consciousness so that he may fully appreciate being similarly strangled and revived three or more times before he is finally choked to death. In the traditional law of China, this is regarded as the most lenient method of execution, and that will enable you to estimate the Chinese scale of human values.)

If you want a conspectus of the various ways in which social engineering was applied to administrative problems in the new “people’s democracy,” read the book; it would be tedious to enumerate them here.

Progress was naturally extended to the rural regions, which were purged of Cambodians suspected of being literate or otherwise respectable, but the ignorant proletariat was spared, since labor was needed to cultivate the land, and high-minded social reformers cannot be expected to do hard work. Many of the peasants, however, were in need of “re-education,” and since the Marxist religion ordains that all men are equal, it is not surprising that what was called kosang in Cambodia was almost identical with the technique of “re-education” used by the Communists in Romania, which is described in Bacu’s The Anti-Humans. (4) Unenlightened persons were beaten by committees of their re-educated fellows, and then forced to “unmask” and confess their sins in sessions of “group criticism,” similar to the “sensitivity training” that is so popular in the United States. (5)

(4. Available online)

(5. This technique for destroying the vital instincts of men and women is peddled to gullible victims under many deceptive names; for an analysis of it, see Ed Dieckmann’s Beyond Jonestown: ‘Sensitivity Training’ and the Cult of Mind Control (Torrance [now Costa Mesa], California; Noontide Press, 1986).)

The events described in this book will be highly gratifying to the intelligent coryphaei of “anti-colonialism” in the Western world, for they must have planned for precisely this result; their choruses, however, are composed of sentimental fools who are too stupid to perceive the uniform results of their idealistic yapping and will always be available to make noise about Apartheid or whatever other sin their trainers designate when they give the order, “sic’em.”

Normal Aryans will be appalled by the fate of the more than one million Cambodians who were sacrificed to “make a better world.” If rational, however, the naturally horrified Aryans should carefully monitor their own reactions.

They should begin by controlling their vocabularies. They are apt to stigmatize the Communists as ‘bestial’ or ‘inhuman,’ but that is an abuse of language. Beasts kill, in ways that are necessarily painful to the victims, to obtain food or to defend themselves from predators, but it is a notorious and indisputable fact that no beast has ever killed or done harm for the pleasure of inflicting pain. Delight in torturing and killing others of their species is a characteristic found only in talking anthropoids, and in no other animals. Cruelty is exclusively human, allzumenschlich, and cannot be called ‘inhuman.’ It may, of course, be called ‘fiendish,’ with reference to a class of mythical beings who are imagined to show human proclivities intensified by supernatural powers.

Aryan readers should always remember that their instinctive revulsion from cruelty and their compassion for the sufferers form one of their racial characteristics, like the color of their skin. It is not found in other races. The joy that American Indians took in massacres and in torturing their captives when they had leisure for recreation is notorious. Congoids instinctively rejoice in torturing to death members of their own race, especially while they are so underprivileged that they hesitate to have fun with White men; even the Jews who censor television were unable to prevent Americans from seeing glimpses of Congoids in action in South Africa. As recent archaeological discoveries have shown, Jewish ingenuity was able to find means of making even crucifixion more exquisitely painful, and racial bigots among us do not approve of the clever ways by which Aryans were tortured to death at the time of the famous Jewish Conspiracy of A.D. 117.

When we consider Mongolians, we know that their race must be accorded the distinction of having shown the greatest ingenuity in devising means of inflicting protracted torture on human beings, and one of their inventions, ling-ch’ih (“the lingering death”), is regarded by experts as producing the maximum of agony that a man or woman can be made to suffer. Executions by this technique were especially enjoyed and were public holidays, at which the spectators refreshed themselves with hors-d’oeuvres and drink while watching the slow and lovingly prolonged dissection of the living victim. Perhaps even more significant is the normal racial indifference to others’ pain and misfortune. You may remember, for example, some of the typical incidents described by Frank Harris in his Undreamed-of Shores.

It is true that our own race, despite its instinctive aversion from sadism, is capable of nauseating cruelty when in paroxysms of rage or inspired by Jewish superstitions. A little booklet published by the American Atheist Press (P.O. Box 2117, Austin, Texas), George E. Macdonald’s Thumbscrew and Rack, gives a concise conspectus of some of the mechanical devices used by Christians in the Middle Ages and as late as the Seventeenth Century to promote piety or reprove erroneous opinions about the way in which the three godly pieces of the Trinity fit together. (6) In general, however, our race normally executed criminals by decapitation or hanging to ensure a quick death and a minimum of pain. The disgusting procedure of drawing and quartering was reserved for crimes thought especially heinous, and was commonly mitigated by killing the victim before cutting him up. It is true that executions were public spectacles, but for this there was a good reason, and today police officers who persist in taking their function seriously agree that if Americans should wish to discontinue their efforts to increase crime, a few public executions would be the most effective way to reverse the present policy. On the whole, therefore, even with the necessary deductions, our race is distinguished by a peculiar abhorrence of cruelty, which is not felt by the other races.

(6. The most complete account of methods of torture used in Christian nations that I have seen is a treatise De tormentis, published around the beginning of the Eighteenth Century, which I read as a young man: detailed descriptions were accompanied by copper-plate engravings. I can neither recall the full bibliographic data nor find them in my yellowing notes.)

The foregoing summary will put the events in Cambodia in the correct racial and historical perspective. The peoples of Southeast Asia are all hybrids, produced by the confluence of diverse races, but the racial stocks are compounded differently in the different peoples, producing differences of both temperament and physique. Men who have had experience in Vietnam say that they could, for example, recognize a Laotian on sight and never mistake him for an Annamese or Tongkingese or Muong, etc., let alone a Khmer or Kha. The racial elements produce naturally differences in temperament that make the various peoples incompatible in varying degrees. Since the fall of the Hinduized Khmer Empire in the Fifteenth Century, the Khmers appear to have been the natural prey of the peoples to the west, north, and east of their country. The Communist invasion of which Messrs. Barron and Paul describe the consequences was not an unprecedented event; it was only a repetition of many earlier events, but on a scale amplified by modern weapons, supplied by the United States and its Soviet partner, and by direction and troops from Communist China.

Murder of a Gentle Land was published in 1977, but the triumph of American foreign policy in Cambodia was not a definitive event. Progress has continued in Cambodia, but only more of the same. When I last heard, part of the country was occupied by invaders from Vietnam, who were at war with the Khmer Rouge, the victors in Messrs. Barron and Paul’s narrative. The antagonists are both Communists, of course, but their ethnic diversity is what counts. About a third of the country was in a state of anarchy, subject to neither group. The only possible way to end perpetual war and impose peace on Southeast Asia is by making the region once more a European colony, preferably French, but that is not feasible at the present time, and, indeed, one cannot see why it would be worth while anyway.

The pathetic narratives and present plight of the survivors whose stories are recorded in this book will arouse keen pity in every Aryan heart, and so will bring us to the crucial question, What can we, what should we do about it?

I assume that none of my readers is an Aryan, probably female, who, with sloppy sentimentality, will exclaim, “Oh, those poor people! Let’s bring them all over here and console them with Coca-cola and hamburgers!” That is obviously an impulse of suicidal folly.

So we ask again, What should we, what could we, do about it? The answer of mature minds is simple: Nothing. Pathos and pity do not alter the fact that the events we deplore are merely another instance of what has happened innumerable times throughout recorded history: known causes invariably produce known results. And even American guilt for the particular episode that now moves us to compassion does not alter the situation. The United States committed a crime, but it cannot be undone. Nemo est quin sciat praeterita mutari non posse.

Gabble about a “better world” is mere drivel, a verbal residue of Christian illusions. The most that we can hope for — if there is hope — is a better life for ourselves, for the tribe to which we belong by biological necessity. Rational men can concern themselves only with their own nation and race, and hope that in the only area that is their legitimate or reasonable concern, that nation and race may somehow avert the known causes that produce inevitable results.

Human suffering is as much a permanent phenomenon on our planet as the tides and the polar ice caps, and from this little satellite of our dwindling sun endless wails of woe and terror always have, and always will, come from the ululant throats of suffering humanity, whose lamentations and screams forever rise upward into the unheeding atmosphere and die away in the cold infinity beneath the pitiless stars.

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Source: Liberty Bell magazine, October 1988