I’m in Cambodia, where I just finished a series of speeches to civic groups on some of my usual topics, in this case tax policy, the recipe for growth, and libertarian principles.
All that was par for the course.
What will always stay with me and haunt my thoughts, by contrast, was my visit to the Tuol Sleng camp, which was used as a processing center during the genocide carried out by the Khmer Rouge communist dictatorship in the late 1970s.
The bottom line, as you can see from this sign, is that 14,000-20,000 civilians went through this facility and only about 200 survived.
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Here’s a sign showing the English translation of rules governing camp behavior.
The sixth rule, which says prisoners could not make noise while being beaten and tortured, seems especially perverse.
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Wow, reads like the rules governing campus anti-free speech tribunals.
But I shouldn’t joke because so much of this camp contains horrifying memories of communist barbarity.
Here you see some of the children who were processed through this death facility.
For some reason, this pile of clothes taken from butchered prisoners was very powerful.
Keep in mind that this big pile of clothes is actually a drop in the bucket. During the few years the Khmer Rouge was in power, the communists slaughtered at least 2 million out of a total population of less than 8 million.
But if a mountain of clothes is too abstract, how about this pile of bones at one of the nearby killing fields where Tuol Sleng prisoners were taken for the Cambodian version of the final solution.
As I toured this somber death camp, I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about the jerks who wander around in “Che” t-shirts.
Yes, I realize that butchery by Castro’s regime was minor compared to what happened in Cambodia, but Cuba nonetheless has been a brutal police state. And Che was one of Castro’s murderous enforcers. How can any decent human being wear a t-shirt designed to portray him, or the regime, in a positive fashion?!?
