FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED OCT. 27, 1997 THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz Pol pot speaks On Oct. 16 Nate Thayer, an American correspondent for the weekly Far Eastern Economic Review, conducted the first known interview since 1979 with Cambodian Communist Pol Pot. The New York Times printed excerpts Oct. 23. ... From 1975 and 1979, as summarized by The New York Times, Pol Pot "turned his country into a vast labor camp, driving people from the cities and forcing them to work in the fields in primitive conditions. In the name of a radical agrarian ideal, he slaughtered the middle class; professionals, monks, artists -- anyone with an education, anyone with glasses. ... ... That death toll would be equivalent to executing 75 million Americans. And what does the enfeebled mass murderer now have to say? "Our movement made mistakes," he graciously acknowledges ... "I came to carry out the struggle, not to kill people," Pol Pot still insists. "We had no other choice" but to kill political opponents, he argues. "Naturally, we had to defend ourselves." But "To say that millions died is too much. ... Even now, and you can look at me: am I a savage person? My conscience is clear." ... And now, the sheer mundanity of this tired old man, confined to a hut and insisting there were "only hundreds of thousands." ... Even if the survivors in righteous indignation were to seize Pol Pot and tear him limb from limb, the central, nagging question would remain: "Even now, and you can look at me: am I a savage?" No. Pol Pot is not a savage. ... It took the massive organization of the modern nation-state -- the division of labor with its apparent dilution of responsibility, welded to the pervasive notion that academy-trained government "experts" know better than the common folk how society should be organized, and have the right to enforce those plans by force -- to allow Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot to engage in "social engineering" on this scale. Nor were any of these characters stupid, or even uneducated. Pol Pot studied under the best of France's socialist intellectuals. That is what finally must be acknowledged here. These mass murders were an exercise in the gratification of intellectual notions of how best to "improve" society. A letter writer recently commented that it would be absurd to blame Pol Pot's socialist university professors in Paris for what he eventually did. No, it is not. Ideas have consequences. The idea that the wise "social engineers" of government have some right first to conscript our youth into mandatory uniform propaganda camps ("public schools"), then to begin "licensing" our chosen jobs, then to seize huge hunks of our incomes to fund these schemes (higher percentages from the rich, of course, as they seek like Pol Pot to "level things"), and finally to catalog and track our employment as well as our cars, our guns, and our money, will eventually lead by logical and inevitable progression to government deciding -- under the guise of whatever "emergency" proves convenient -- who lives and who dies. What thing did government ever find in its power, and not eventually try? This is what is really being debated, when lonely voices cry out for "less government meddling in our lives," while the statists now in power (yes, including "conservative Republicans") respond, "Sure, sure, We hear you. Less government, right. But first we just need to institute this new nationally standardized drivers license with an electronically scannable fingerprint, and a way to eavesdrop on all your phone calls and e-mail, and a new law to require your bank to report any cash transaction over $2500. "But we'll get around to giving you that smaller, less intrusive government you keep voting for, one of these days real soon. Just as soon as we outlaw eight more kinds of firearms before lunch. After all, private citizens aren't allowed to own firearms, at all, in really (start ital)civilized(end ital) countries like Germany, Russia, China, and Cambodia. Meantime, I'm afraid you'll have to get in line over there to give us your urine sample. ..." But they don't mean for it ever to go as far as it went in Cambodia. Honest. And if some of their armed henchmen (start ital)do(end ital) occasionally get carried away ... well, they can always claim "self-defense," or quibble about the numbers. Vin Suprynowicz is the assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Readers may contact him via e-mail at vin@lvrj.com. The web site for the Suprynowicz column is at http://www.nguworld.com/vindex/. The column is syndicated in the United States and Canada via Mountain Media Syndications, P.O. Box 4422, Las Vegas Nev. 89127. *** Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com "If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains set lightly upon you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen." -- Samuel Adams