The Forces on the Offensive in Syria Are Today’s Khmer Rouge

SYRIA IN CONTEXT, 9 Dec 2024

John Wight | Consortium News - TRANSCEND Media Service

Syria civil war – John Wight

6 Dec 2024 – The common denominator behind the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the 1970s and Salafi-jihadism in our time is Western foreign policy.

“History never really says goodbye. History says, ‘See you later.’”
— Eduardo Galeano

Taking place in Syria now as thousands of Salafi-jihadists head dangerously close to the capital, Damascus, in a surprise and lightning offensive, has the potential to unleash catastrophic consequences not only in Syria but across a region already exhausted from a surplus of conflict and the concomitant human suffering endured.

The depiction of the smorgasbord of medieval-minded head-chopping fanatics involved as “rebels” in the Western media; this is proof-positive that no lessons — zero — have been learned. None learned from the consequences following the overthrow of Mohammad Najibullah in Kabul back in 1996. From the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003. Or from the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya in 2011.

Inside Phnom Penh’s Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, former prison, torture and execution center of the Khmer Rouge, 2007. (lecercle, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

In each case, the result was not the establishment of a liberal democracy underpinned by the rule of law. Instead, in each case the result was mayhem and carnage wrought by Year Zero fanatics intent on mass slaughter in the name of a perverted rendering of Islam.

This brings us now to the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia of the 1970s, which in similar conditions of a destabilization were able to incubate and grow to the point of taking power. The cause of this destabilization in Cambodia was the extension of the war in Vietnam by the United States with a mass bombing campaign in Cambodia.

In 1973 the U.S. dropped more bombs on Cambodia in just a few weeks than it dropped on Japan in the Second World War. This small country across the Republic of Vietnam’s western border, with in 1973 a population of between 7–8 million people, found itself on the receiving end of the equivalent of five Hiroshimas.

The number of people killed by the U.S. bombing campaign has never been verified, but it’s thought to have been in the region of 500,000. It was a crime against humanity to rank with any since the Second World War.

The Khmer Rouge was, at the time, a marginal Maoist cult in Cambodia, led by Pol Pot, a former Buddhist monk. The organization had no base of support to speak of and their influence was near non-existent prior to the U.S. mass bombing campaign. The destruction and chaos wrought by it, changed everything.

By 1975 this death cult had managed to take over the country, whereupon they immediately embarked upon one of the most brutal and barbaric campaigns of genocidal violence the world has seen.

With the objective of taking the country back to “year zero,” an agrarian pure communist society, they forcibly depopulated Cambodian cities and towns, sending people into the country to work on the land in communes. In the process thousands died from disease and starvation, others were worked to death, while thousands more were tortured and executed.

Teachers, doctors, lawyers, people who’d been educated, Buddhist monks, non-Cambodians, all were slaughtered in the Khmer Rouge’s campaign to purify the country of anything which did not conform to their twisted worldview. It gave rise to the creation of a network of slave labour camps and torture centers throughout the country, in which brutality knew no bounds.

By the end of their reign a third of Cambodia’s population had perished. When considering it now it reminds us of Hannah Arendt’s timeless words, vis-à-vis the Holocaust, on the “banality of evil.”

The brutal rule of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge lasted until 1979, when the armed forces of the Republic of Vietnam entered the country to liberate its people. Washington’s response to Cambodia’s liberation was the imposition of economic sanctions on its new government — an an act of nauseating cruelty against a beleaguered people whose only crime was that they’d been liberated by a country, Vietnam, that had refused to accept its colonial status and thrown off the yoke of U.S. imperialism.

Today, the parallels between Cambodia and the Middle East are undeniable. The Salafi-jihadi groups on the offensive in Syria hold to a similar barbaric and anti-human ideology that characterized the Khmer Rouge.

These are groups and are people with no political program that can be negotiated with, offering the region nothing apart from an abyss of sectarian violence and bloodletting, which is why their defeat and destruction must be treated as non-negotiable.

The common denominator behind the rise of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s and Salafi-jihadism in our time, is Western foreign policy. It is the devil’s work, responsible for upending not just entire countries but entire regions.

If President Bashar al-Assad falls—?and at time of writing, with the so-called rebels have taken Aleppo and Hama, there is the distinct possibility that he will?—Syria’s minority communities will come under immediate threat of annihilation.

This threat will spark yet another refugee crisis of biblical proportions. This, as the clock ticks down on 2024, is where we are now — looking down the barrel of one almighty Year Zero gun.

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John Wight, author of Gaza Weeps, 2021, writes on politics, culture, sport.

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