or Powell's or me• • •
"Mike and Jon, Jon and Mike—I've known them both for years, and, clearly, one of them is very funny. As for the other: truly one of the great hangers-on of our time."—Steve Bodow, head writer, The Daily Show
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"Who can really judge what's funny? If humor is a subjective medium, then can there be something that is really and truly hilarious? Me. This book."—Daniel Handler, author, Adverbs, and personal representative of Lemony Snicket
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"The good news: I thought Our Kampf was consistently hilarious. The bad news: I’m the guy who wrote Monkeybone."—Sam Hamm, screenwriter, Batman, Batman Returns, and Homecoming
November 13, 2007
Khmer And Balanced
From A Century of Genocide, here's a Khmer Rouge radio broadcast from May 15, 1975:
Upon entering Phnom Penh and other cities, the brother and sister combatants of the revolutionary army...sons and daughters of our workers and peasants...were taken aback by the overwhelming unspeakable sight of long-haired men and youngsters wearing bizarre clothes making themselves indistinguishable from the fair sex...Our traditional mentality, mores, traditions, literature, and arts and culture and tradition were totally destroyed by U.S. imperialism and its stooges. Social entertaining, the tempo and rhythm of music and so forth were all based on U.S. imperialistic patterns. Our people’s traditionally clean, sound characteristics and essence were completely absent and abandoned, replaced by imperialistic, pornographic, shameless, perverted, and fanatic traits.
It's this kind of thing that makes me sad Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage et al weren't born in Cambodia. They could have had even more consequential careers there.
Posted at November 13, 2007 04:29 PM | TrackBackBut most impressive: after the vietnamese invasion 1978 the USA said that the sole legitime government of cambodia was that of POL POT. Do you know that your country supported POL POT until 1990?
Posted by: peter hofmann at November 13, 2007 05:13 PMThey could have done pretty well in Rwanda as well.
Posted by: KCinDC at November 13, 2007 06:22 PM1-202-225-0100 DEMAND IMPEACHMENT.
Posted by: Mike Meyer at November 13, 2007 07:10 PM"Our people's traditionally clean, sound characteritics and essence..."
General Jack D. Ripper, shorter and darker.
Where's Terry Southern, now that we really need him?
Guess I'll have a couple of Pol Pot Stickers for dinner.
The myth of the clean, traditional, more strictly gendered past is almost a cultural universal. It shows up in nationalisms of the Native American, African-American and Latin American varieties; orthodox Christianity, Judaism and Islam, and every political tendency you can name.
The Khmer Rouge were also masters of semiotics, whitewashing every sign in Phnom Penh and renaming everything, including the dates on the calendar, with new improved versions of the same.
Posted by: vennie at November 13, 2007 10:18 PMAh, don't cry for Limbaugh et. al. They're doing fine being imperialistic warmonger creeps right where they are.
Posted by: Donald Johnson at November 13, 2007 11:29 PMI don't think so, Limbaugh would have ended up being cannibalized by the hill tribes if he lived then.
Posted by: En Ming Hee at November 14, 2007 03:52 AMThe persons you mention might have had official positions in Kampuchea, for a while, but certainly their influence would be over now. Contrariwise, as Donald Johnson points out, they currently are important members of the Corporate Media, and will continue to pollute our precious national cerebrospinal fluids (speaking metaphorically) for the foreseeable future, however long that is - as long as the MICFiC (military-industrial-congressional-financial complex) is in charge.
Posted by: mistah charley, ph.d. at November 14, 2007 08:29 AMGee, and I thought that the Khymer Rouge were somehow connected with the gay agenda and Hillary.
Posted by: Bob In Pacifica at November 14, 2007 09:13 AM
