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Could Something Like the Holocaust Happen Today? Today, many people think that the ideas of Communism were being wrongly interpreted and that they are essentially good for humankind. However, they obviously do not know the story of Cambodian genocide, which took place between 1975 and 1978. This genocide came as a direct result of practical implementation of Communist philosophy in its purest form. The name of Pol Pot is associated with indescribable horror. Yet, Marx would have been proud of this bloody dictator, for exactly following his recipes that were written in 19 th century: abolition of family women are shared whether they want or not, 12 hours a day working for food, without holidays, everyone wears the same gray ropes, to emphasize their equality.
It is estimated that 5 million people were being murdered in Cambodia, during the reign of Pol Pot, because they simply happened to belong to a wrong social class. Cambodian towns were raised to the ground, because Commies believed that urban living corrupts people. Those who did not want to work as slaves were being shot. Khmers operated a secret prison S- 21 in the city of Phnom Penh, were citizens were tortured and killed. Today, every town in Cambodia displays pyramids made out of human skulls, as the tourist attraction. Cambodian genocide is considered among the most gruesome ones that had taken place in 20 th century.
The atrocities, during the reign of Pol Pot in Cambodia, were committed by the members of Communist organization Red Khmers, which proclaimed the physical elimination of every social class, except for peasants, as its immediate goal. Red Khmers resorted to the practice of wholesale murder, in order to accomplish it. The notions of morality and compassion they referred to as bourgeois prejudice. We can say that Red Khmers hated their own people, because they did not behave in the way proscribed by Marx.
Cambodians strived to have normal lives and this was exactly the reason why they were being declared as enemies of the state. The blame for Cambodian genocide lays exclusively upon Cambodian Communists and Pol Pot personally, even though that the bearded ideologist of workers paradise can also be held indirectly responsible for the mass murder of Cambodians between 1975 - 1978, because Red Khmers murderous practices were based on his ideas. The mass murder of Cambodians used to take place in countryside. The trucks, filled with innocent people, would bring them to freshly dug out trenches. Then, the people would be lined up along the trench and mowed down with automatic rifles. Very often, Red Khmers did not even bother to cover corpses with the soil.
Murderers were not making distinction between men and women and children. They believed that the class enemies needed to be physically eliminated, in order to assure the victory of Communism in Cambodia. Their cruelty was boundless, which made many political observers to suggest that organization of Red Khmers actually consisted of pathological sadists, who used political phraseology to conceal their mental sickness. As it has been mentioned earlier, the Cambodian genocide occurred within 3 years. In the middle of seventies, Communism was still popular among many people; this is why the reports of genocide in Cambodia, during this time, were being dismissed by Leftist Medias in the Western countries, as exaggeration. Ordinary citizens were simply refusing to believe that anything like this was possible in the second half of 20 th century.
However, they were wrong. The atrocities in Cambodia went on, without being noticed by international community. Only in 1978, the Vietnamese army had invaded Cambodia and overthrew Pol Pots regime. However, this was done not because Communist Vietnam felt sorry for Pol Pots victims, but because Communists saw Pol Pot as someone who was discrediting Communist movement, even though he acted as a true Marxist. There were many reasons that made Cambodian Holocaust possible in the first place.
First of all, this is the geographical remoteness of Cambodia. Even today, this country has only a few rods, which become unusable during the rain periods. Second of all, during the reign of Red Khmers, Cambodia was cut out from the world, in informational sense of this word. The few reports that were coming out of there, were based on such extraordinary claims that many people were refusing to believe in them.
Third of all, Cambodians are Asians, therefore White people were not quite as shocked, upon finding out about Cambodian genocide, as they were when the truth about Jewish Holocaust was uncovered. In addition, the Medias in Western countries are very reluctant to refer to mass murder of people as genocide, unless these people are Jews. For example, the artificially created famine in Ukraine in 1933 resulted in death of 10 million people, by most careful estimates. Ukraine had officially recognized Jewish Holocaust, but Israel refuses to refer to the mass-murder of Ukrainians as genocide.
The same applies to mass murder of Cambodians. Communists are responsible for the wholesale killings in this country, during regime of Pol Pot. However, after the end of WWII, it became very unpopular to charge Commies with crimes against humanity, because they were U. S. allies, during the war. Nowadays, it is hard for many people to understand how it was possible for the medieval barbarism to assume a form of political movement and to result in deaths of millions of people, as it happened in Cambodia.
It is nothing but a bloodthirsty nonsense to suggest that killing the whole groups of people is necessary, because only this can end the capitalistic exploitation. Nevertheless, the same people think that there is nothing wrong with having Communist parties, in Western countries, being allowed to exist legally, even though that Nazi movement is outlawed. In my opinion, Nazis and Communists worth each other, as the cases of Jewish and Cambodian Holocausts prove. Therefore, anyone who promotes these two ideologies needs to be locked up in jail. Today, we are being told that there is more and more tolerance in the world, which should have eliminated the possibility of genocides in principle. However, the truth is different.
This is why; citizens need to learn more about every instance of ethnic or political genocide, as it is the case with Cambodian Holocaust, in order to be able to distinguish the early indications of preparations for the mass murder of people being underway.
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Research essay sample on 20 Th Century Pol Pot
