Under a Just God

By: Mr. Curmudgeon
mrcurmudgeon@inthepublicsquare.com

“Robespierre, with his cruel moral relativism, embodied the cardinal sin of all revolution, the heartlessness of ideas.”

--From Modern Times, by Paul Johnson

Cambodian dictator and mass-murderer Pol Pot escaped Earthly, if not cosmic, justice when he died in 1998. During his bloody reign, his Khmer Rouge murdered an estimated 26 percent of his country's population, or about 1.7 million men, women and children. It all came to an end after communist Vietnam toppled the Cambodian regime in 1979, much to the chagrin of the United Nations who regarded the Khmer Rouge as Cambodia's legitimate government. Thirty-three years later, Pol Pot's in-laws, and co-serial killers, face some semblance of justice - maybe.

The Cambodian Tribunal arrested Ieng Sary and his wife Leng Thirith (Pol Pot's brother and sister in-law) on November 12, 2007, for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Ieng Sary served as the Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister under Pol Pot, while Leng Thirith served as the regime's Minister of Social Action.

When the Khmer Rouge came to power in 1975, Ieng Sary pleaded with educated Cambodians who fled the country to escape the revolution's violence, to return and help rebuild the nation. When they did, they were rounded up and executed in a purge of the country's intellectuals. Ironically, many were sent to the notorious death camp S-21, previously a suburban school. Teachers, students and doctors were executed to sever the peasants from their pre-revolutionary past.

Suong Sikoeun, an assistant to Pol Pot, fondly recounted their education in France, which helped define the young Cambodian's who would one day form the Khmer Rouge:

The French Revolution influenced me very strongly, above all Robespierre...Robespierre is my hero. Robespierre and Pol Pot: Both men have the same quality of decisiveness and integrity.

Unfortunately for those left to rot in the humid heat of Cambodia's “killing fields,” Pol Pot's efficient murder machine far surpassed the estimated 40,000 wretches dispatched by Robespierre's guillotines.

“Terror is only justice,” said Maximilen Robespierre, “prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue; it is less a distinct principle than a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing wants of the country.”

Of course, most American's associate the democratic impulse with justice - majority rule and all that. And yet, the spirit of Robespierre lives in every lynching, riot and abomination great and small sanctioned by the mob...I mean, the majority.

Abraham Lincoln, on the other hand, viewed our fragile democracy as operating within the constraints of a moral universe:

This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.

Ironically, the United Nations - who once stood staunchly by its recognition of Pot Pot's regime - is now overseeing and funding the belated war crimes trial of former Khmer Rouge leaders, many of whom are elderly and in failing health. If the prosecution of Serbian strongman Slobodan Miloshevich for war crimes is any indication of how Pol Pot's henchmen will fare, the never-ending legal proceedings all but assure that the accused will die sooner from old age or boredom than as a result of the hangman's noose.

But no matter the judgment of men of United Nations, when these villains depart this mortal world – that is when the real judgment begins.
--Mr. Curmudgeon