Lew Rockwell’s post regarding Cambodia points to a truly sorry tale of American politics. As everyone knows, the Khmer Rouge, one of the most fanatical of all communist movements, emptied the cities of Cambodia and killed millions of people, many through torture and murder and many from starvation.

Now, Pol Pot and his minions planned this whole thing when they were graduate students in France — no doubt with the approval of their Marxist professors — but the United States made the takeover much easier after having destroyed Cambodia through invasions and bombings in 1970. (Even LBJ, who was mostly responsible for the Vietnam War, would not go into Cambodia, but Nixon and Kissinger had no qualms about it.)

It did not take long for the news to come out about the outright murder and brutality of the Khmer Rouge government. The American left, however, refused to believe the stories and Gareth Porter, who represented a wing of the United Methodist Church and was a familiar writer in leftist publications like Ramparts, openly praised and defended the regime. He especially was complimentary of the KR’s move to empty the cities.

In 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and pushed out the Khmer regime, and it was then that many of the full horrors of what happened were revealed. However, the Carter Administration opposed the invasion and demanded that Vietnam leave and turn back the reins of government to the “legitimate” government of Pol Pot. The Reagan Administration continued what the Carterite State Department had begun.

The irony here is that the heroic “liberators” in this situation were the Vietnamese communists. But Americans, who were more responsible for the turmoil and carnage in Southeast Asia than anyone else, insisted that only the US of A could be “liberators” and everyone else was an Evil Commie. Thus, we had a situation in which the United States Government, claiming its “liberator” status, officially supported the return to power of one of the most genocidal regimes in all of history. And both Democrats and Republicans (Why am I not surprised?) took part in this sorry episode.