As many supporters of Hillary Clinton say, there is no way that Bernie Sanders can win the nomination. Let us assume that premise is true. Let us also assume that some fraction of the Liberal base will not vote for her, for reasons noble or otherwise.
Most of those reasons are more concrete than the one I present. There remains a figure from the 1970s whose hands are dirty as hell on atrocities across the world. This figure is one of the most reviled among those who were against the Vietnam War. I want to focus on Kampuchea, Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge, and Pol Pot (born Saloth Sar, may he rot in hell).
Now, we all know that Hillary backtracked when she praised Nancy and Ronald Reagan regarding the response to the HIV epidemic, because the LGBT community forced her to. But there aren’t too many Cambodian voters around to force the issue. Genocide is a “whatever” issue, unless we’re talking about Nazi Germany. And that was a long ago, right? Americans don’t care about Rwanda, or Bosnia, which were horrible events.
The horrible fact about mass murder is a truism misattributed to the mass murderer Joseph Stalin: “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.” In the 20th Century millions will killed by genocidal maniacs. Tens of millions. Their murderers had names like Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Hitler.
Do you want to know who was the most effective genocidal evil fucker ever in human history? Pol Pot. Out of the then 1975 population of 7 million Cambodians, Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge managed to genocide about 2 million of them in the Cambodian Holocaust. That would be as if Hitler killed 20 million people, instead of 6 million, or Stalin starved to death in the Ukraine. Not only did Pol Pot “win” the contest for the worst person ever by percentage, but he won because that fucker just killed anyone. Which is how, I suspect, you can wipe out nearly 30% of your population. The Khmer Rouge didn’t just go after anyone of religious beliefs, they went after anyone of education, targeting anyone who wore eyeglasses, even. Read the breakout book at the time, titles “Murder of a Gentle Land” by John Barron.
And now I come to Henry Kissinger:
During his time in office, Kissinger had been involved in three of the genocides Power mentions in her book: Pol Pot’s “killing fields” in Cambodia, which would never have occurred had he not infamously ordered an illegal four-and-a-half-year bombing campaign in that country; Indonesia’s massacre in East Timor; and Pakistan’s in Bangladesh, both of which he expedited.
Three genocides? Let’s just talk about the most horrible one. Some of you from the Vietnam era might recall that the bombing of Cambodia sparked a renewed protest by students in the US, marked by the Kent State killings of “four dead in Ohio.” Four dead. Then two million.
Hilary Clinton will win my vote by not only denouncing her bestie Henry Fucking Kissinger, but promising me that he be remanded to the Hague on war crimes charges. Friends don’t let friends hug war criminals.