The Fall of Phnom Penh: The Left Has a Short Memory

When Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge, it began what was essentially a genocide of the Cambodian people. 25% of them were killed by the Reds.

From The European Conservative

By Hélène de Lauzun, PhD

Fifty years ago, the capital of Cambodia fell into the hands of the Khmer Rouge—a ‘liberation’ once hailed with enthusiasm by the French press, which still seems unfamiliar with the concept of repentance.

Who in Europe today remembers the fall of Phnom Penh to Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, which occurred just fifty years ago, on April 17th, 1975? Today, few voices are raised to recall the terrible tragedy that occurred on that day, plunging Cambodia into a mass slaughter in which millions of poor people were killed in the name of the communist ideal. To the horror of Pol Pot’s bloody dictatorship was added the disturbing fact that it was, at the time, widely celebrated by the entire progressive elite, who enthusiastically hailed it as a victory of the people over the bourgeois elite and the advent of paradise on earth.

On the morning of April 17th, 1975, fighters dressed in black and wearing red scarves, known as the Khmer Rouge, entered Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. They were the sinister servants of the Communist leader Pol Pot. Carrying a message of liberation—for the people, for the land, for equality—they were initially welcomed, as neighbouring Vietnam was in the process of liberating itself from American presence. Soon, under threat, the city was evacuated and two million inhabitants were ruthlessly driven onto the roads: women, children, the elderly, and the sick. Any resistance was met with shots and gunbutt blows. The soldiers of the new Democratic Kampuchea regime targeted their new victims: teachers, religious figures, intellectuals, those who owned books written in French or simply wore glasses.

The new Cambodian people had to be rid of these parasites and put them to work in the fields. The new society would be rural and collectivist—to the point of absurdity. The country soon turned into a huge labour- and re-education camp modelled on the Cultural Revolution that had begun a few years earlier in Maoist China. Families were destroyed and parents separated from their children. The dictatorship established by Pol Pot, which ended in 1979 with the invasion of Cambodia by Vietnam, caused between 1.5 million and 2 million deaths, with widespread violence, torture, and arbitrary executions, representing more than 20% of Cambodia’s population at the time.

Like Vietnam and Laos, Cambodia was a former French colony. In Paris, the press hailed the capture of Phnom Penh by the Khmer Rouge as the final act of France’s colonial history in Indochina. In the Cambodian capital, refugees flocked to the French embassy, which became, for a few days, the last refuge for thousands of people hoping to escape the murderous regime that was taking hold—a terrible 19-day period, at the end of which France shamefully agreed to hand over 850 Cambodians who had found refuge on the diplomatic mission’s premises to Pol Pot’s henchmen. This was a terrible repeat of the betrayal of the Indochinese handed over to the Viet Minh in 1954 and the abandonment of the Harkis, Muslims loyal to France, to Algerian independence fighters in 1962. The French government yielded under pressure from a progressive ideology promoted internationally that claimed the ‘liberation’ of the peoples of the French colonial oppressor as the ultimate advance of history.

Fifty years have passed, and today in France, few people remember the terrible conditions surrounding the fall of the Cambodian capital. And for good reason: a number of French newspapers have a vested interest in making people forget that at the time, they were among Pol Pot’s most vocal supporters, as Le Figaro opportunely reminds us.

Libération, L’Humanité, Le Monde: today, these newspapers are the voice of the Left and of politically correct thinking. When the events in Phnom Penh were announced, Libération rejoiced at the “special care” taken by the fighters to protect civilians. The next day, the daily dared to headline: “Seven days of celebration for liberation.” After celebrating the advent of a “new society,” Le Monde spoke of a “liberated” city amid “popular enthusiasm.” A few months later, when information about the ongoing genocide began to filter through, the communist newspaper L’Humanité spoke of “intox”—the ancestor of fake news. “The evacuation was carried out in a very joyful and informal manner. It was not a deportation,” it wrote in its columns. While Le Monde decided to backtrack, it took more than two years for Libération and L’Humanité to admit their misjudgment. In the meantime, millions of Cambodians died under horrific conditions. The blame lies with an entire intellectual elite of the progressive Left, who in their youth had frequented Pol Pot, trained in Paris, like Ho Chi Minh before him, and were great admirers of the French Revolution.

In a sober post on X, Marine Le Pen paid tribute to the victims of the Cambodian genocide:

On the Left, we will have to wait a little longer for the time of repentance to come.

Pictured: A commemorative stupa filled with the skulls of the victims of the red Khmer Rouge at the Killing Field of Choeung Ek