We stand, now, today, at a historic crossroads. The Democrat Party, here in the United States, has been co-opted by the far left, including the so-called "Democratic Socialists," who even have their own organization within and without the Democrat Party — the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA. Young people here in the United States are seeing socialism in a more favorable light than they have in decades past, and this 2026 midterm election and the 2028 election to come, where we will choose the next president, will set the course for American politics for a generation or more.
The left will keep pushing for socialism. Socialism has, however, borne bitter fruit throughout history, everywhere it has been attempted. The results are all too similar: Mass arrests, work camps, "re-education," mass executions, starvation, and economic collapse. On the other hand, capitalism, while it isn't perfect — no system created by humans is — has lifted more people out of poverty and into prosperity, has created more wealth, and has resulted in more technological advance than any other system of economics and government.
In this series, we'll take a look at some of the more notorious events to rise out of socialist and communist systems, as a warning for this election season: It could happen here. It very well could happen here. In this installment, we'll have a look at southeast Asia, specifically, Cambodia, and the rise of the son of a wealthy farmer to become one of the greatest mass murderers in history: Pol Pot.
It's funny how often these goblins come from wealthy backgrounds. One might have thought that the young Pol Pot might have followed in his father's prosperous footsteps, but instead, he went to Paris on an academic scholarship, where he joined the French Communist Party in 1951. That's where the rot began.
In 1953, Pol Pot returned to Cambodia. He became involved in the communist Khmer Viet Minh organization, which was at the time carrying on a civil war against Cambodia's legal government under King Norodom Sihanouk. The campaign did not go smoothly, with Pol Pot at one point having to leave the movement; as the Khmer Viet Minh fled in disarray into North Vietnam in 1954, Pol Pot actually worked as a schoolteacher in Phnom Penh. But he remained a key figure in Cambodia's Communist party.
Then, in 1975, aided by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces, Pol Pot and the Communists completed their seizure of all of Cambodia. Pol Pot assumed the dictatorship, renaming the country "Democratic (it wasn't) Kampuchea." This is where the horror of Pol Pot's rule began to make itself known. Pol Pot's goal was to transform Cambodia from a developing nation to a nation of rural peasants, and to carry this out, the government under Pol Pot began to institute his "Year Zero" plan, in April of 1975. The goal? To erase the Cambodia that had been, to bring about Pol Pot's communist vision for the country.
Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge forces moved in. They emptied the cities, driving urban residents on forced marches into the countryside. Educated people, including teachers, doctors, and the like, were often as not executed outright. The remaining people were placed on collective farms, which worked no better in Cambodia than they had in the Soviet Union. All people were forced to wear the same clothing: baggy, ill-fitting black pajamas. Money, religion, and private property were abolished — and if you think that's a lot like the rhetoric you're hearing from the far left here in the United States and in Europe, you'd be right. In the infamous Killing Fields, roughly 1.5 to 2 million people died, whether through executions, malnutrition, disease, or exhaustion.
Pol Pot's reign of terror didn't end until 1979, when Vietnam, weary of repeated incursions into Vietnamese territory by the Khmer Rouge, invaded and toppled Pol Pot. The Khmer Rouge retreated into the hills. They continued a guerrilla campaign for some years, but Pol Pot gradually moved away from leadership, and died in 1998, leaving a trail of corpses in his walk.
Think it can't happen here? It can. Just look at the rhetoric, the endless emissions of superheated gas by the far left in the United States and Europe, right now. Look at the riots in France, driven in large part by the far left and "migrants." Those riots are spreading across Europe, and if you think they can't happen here, if you think socialist and communist agitators couldn't start mass riots here, in an attempt to gain power if they fail to do so via elections, then I would caution you to take note of how close we came to nationwide chaos in the summer of 2020.
It could happen here. It could very well happen here. And if we aren't diligent, it will happen here. Many on the left would like nothing more, and we should believe them when they say so.
These are the fruits of socialism and communism. This is the precipice we may be on the edge of. This is history. And this is what we must, at all cost, vote to prevent happening here. We go to the polls in just a few more days. Vote! Vote for liberty, for property, for free trade, for free people, for honest elections, for prosperity — all of which we would lose, under socialism. Vote!
