After a short 33-year intermission, they are finally holding a trial for a few of the last rickety members of the Khmer Rouge leadership. Kaing Guek Eav, nicknamed "Duch," is making a plea for his rights. The NY Times provides dramatic coverage at the linked article.
At the very end of the article there is this little display of historical illiteracy and obsfuscation straight out of the Progressive Handbook of Approved Lies About History:
In an attempt to create an agrarian utopia, the Khmer Rouge caused the deaths of as much as one-fourth of the population through starvation, exhaustion and disease, as well as torture and execution.
Agrarian Utopia?! They were "creating" a Communist Hellhole! And succeeded! They killed babies for being insufficiently proletarian! Foe Heaven's sake, this guy "Duch" oversaw the executions of 14,000 people in Phnom Phen! What did that have to do with creating an "agrarian utopia?"
This really is an ugly echo of the 20th century's approach to history. Western progressives rely on the "agrarian reform" dodge to explain away the deaths of millions in the Ukraine, Red China, Viet Nam, Cuba, and a dozen other select outposts of hell on earth.
"Duch," by himself, killed more people than Pinochet's entire security services did contemporaneously. And we've been hearing about Pinochet ad nauseam ever since, while the deaths of millions at the hands of Paris-educated Cambodian leftists are dismissed out of hand. Just by coincidence, Pinochet knocked off a putative "agrarian reformer" who didn't have a chance to wreck Chile in the same way Duch and his compatriots wrecked Cambodia.
History doesn't repeat, but the lies about history certainly do.
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