Dith Pran, RIP

A man died today whose life symbolized one of those terrible episodes of 20th century life: the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia. That man was Dith Pran, who was the subject of the 1984 film The Killing Fields.

I continually talk about people such as Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge because they are examples of the atrocities inflicted on the world by Communism. Ideas have consequences, and sometimes those consequences are horrific. One site estimate that 130,000,000 people died due to communism. This is in addition to all the other suffering inflicted at the hands of Marx and Lenin's ideological offspring.

I am sometimes atypical of anti-communists. I despise big government, I oppose almost all wars, and I think that the changes of the 1960s were good for American life.

But communism was a horrible, dreadful mistake. Whenever you hear someone making apologies for communism, when you hear someone suggesting that communism was good in theory, that it just didn't work out in practice, whatever, mention this man's name: Dith Pran. He managed to escape from Cambodia, after suffering almost unbelievable horrors. But 2,000,000 Cambodians did not escape, and were killed at the hands of ideological thugs who make Genghis Khan sound almost benign.