Welcome to 1938 Down with 47

Currently ICE agents are overwhelmed by the demands of the Trump Administration to arrest 3000 migrants a day and have moved from detaining illegals with criminal records to anyone within their grasp. Masked ICE agents show up at courts and haul out people attempting to go through the lesal process. In June alone ICE captured 965 legal applicants at 26 Federal Plaza. Just following orders adn they actions are applauded by Trump supporters, despite the obvious disregard for the 4th Amendment to the Constitution.

Internal finding from the Immigration Agency show that the daily arrest average has been about 2000. Still below the quota demanded from Kristen Gnome, the secretary of Homeland Security. More feet on the ground are needed to achieve the 3000 per day and ICE has announced at a recruitment plan offering possibly $50,000 in signing bonuses.

The guardian reported that the Secretary said in a news release, “Your country is calling you to serve at ICE. This is a defining moment in our nation’s history. Your skills, your experience, and your courage have never been more essential. Together, we must defend the homeland.”

Other perks are overtime for deportation officers and other benefits such as loan repayment or forgiveness options. Ten thousand vigilantes to carry out the exile of millions of illegals from the USA. How many millions. Maybe thirty million. At a million a year the task will take over thirty years, unless the prey decide to leave the country voluntarily en masse, leaving the USA underpopulated by workers in factories, hotels, restaurants, and fields.

Between 1958 and 1961 Chairman Mao as part of the Great Leap Forward instituted agricultural reforms establishing new farming techniques, the killing of sparrows which fostered a carefree life as well as demanding millions of farmers to abandon their fields for low level steel production. As a result of these plans millions starved in China.

"No need to pay to eat, focus on producing".

Despite the warnings of bureaucrats Mao continued with his folly, as Trump does now.

Millions of farm workers have abandoned the fields in fear of ICE. The nation is approaching harvest time. Crops are rotting on the vines. No words of warning from the US agriculture secretary Brooke Leslie Rollins, a graduate of Texas A&M with a law degree, but she speaks a good game.

“Every day, I will fight for American farmers, ranchers, and the agriculture community. Together, we have an historic opportunity to revitalize rural America and to ensure that U.S. Agriculture remains the best in the world for generations to come.”

Get ready for the call from the White House to vacate the cities and everyone move on up to the country as the Khmer Rouge demanded of Cambodians to wreak havoc on anyone opposing them. Millions died, but then judging from the GOP's success in cutting Medicare and Medicaid it is obvious that they want us all dead. Not so fast, Fatso 47. We are us. We will never be them.

Duch Choi Châ' kai Anh

Written on Jun 11, 2017

In 1975 the Khmer Rouge converted the Tuol Svay Prey High School on the outskirts of Phnom Penh into the murderous Tuol Sleng or S-21 prison. An estimated 17,000 prisoners had been subjected to the following code of behavior enforced by its administrator Comrade Duch or Kang Kek Iew and his killers.

1. You must answer accordingly to my question. Don’t turn them away.
2. Don’t try to hide the facts by making pretexts this and that you are strictly prohibited to contest me.
3. Don’t be a fool for you are a chap who dare to thwart the revolution.
4. You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect.
5. Don’t tell me either about your immoralities or the essence of the revolution.
6. While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all.
7. Do nothing, sit still and wait for my orders. If there is no order, keep quiet. When I ask you to do something, you must do it right away without protesting.
8. Don’t make pretext about Kampuchea Krom in order to hide your secret or traitor.
9. If you don’t follow all the above rules, you shall get many many lashes of electric wire.
10. If you disobey any point of my regulations you shall get either ten lashes or five shocks of electric discharge.

In 1979 the Vietnam Army ended the horror and liberated Phnom Penh. Twelve inmates exited from the three-story building. S-21 prison's executed inmates had been buried in the killing fields. The architects of this genocide fled the reprisals of the Vietnamese in 1979 and the most notorious killer Comrade Duch sought refuge in Thailand. Pol Pot demoted his underling for having destroyed the incriminating documents at Tuol Sleng and Duch had escaped justice by teaching school.

During the Khmer Rouge reign teachers had been executed without remorse.

After the murder of his wife Duch had sought salvation with the Western religious fundamentalists of the Golden West Cambodian Christian Church pursuing souls in Cambodia, but his past chased him into a corner and in 1999 he was arrested by the new authorities ie ex-Khmer Rouge compatriots.

In 26 July 2010 an international court of justice in Phnom Penh sentenced Duch to life imprisonment. During the trial he said, "I think the Khmer Rouge would already have been demolished, but Mr. Kissinger and Richard Nixon backed Lon Nol, and then the Khmer Rouge took advantage of their mistake and victory was a golden opportunity for us."

Duch asked to be released by the tribunal, admitting his guilt.

"Kissinger was walking free. Why shouldn't he?"

He had a point, but he was sent to prison. Not SR-21.

After the end of the Civil War I visited Cambodia many tiems to renew my Thai visa and I've asked the few surviving older people what they think of the Khmer Rouge and their reply comes as a surprise to most westerners raising on the litany of 'never again' for the Nazis.

"It's over. We want peace. Nothing more," one taxi driver said waiting for two Dutch tourists visiting S-21.

"What about the trials?"

"We don't understand trials. All we know is that it's over." He was old enough to have lived under the Khmer Rouge as a teenager. He spoke a little French, which would have condemned him to the Killing Fields under the Khmer Rouge.

"Au revoir."

I doubted that I would see him again, but later that night we shared a beer on Quay Sisowith. Choi laughed with all the joy that five Angkor beers can give a man who has lived long enough to wake up from a nightmare with his humor intact.

Duch Choi Ch'kai Anh

Read THE GATE by Francois Bizot.

It says it all.

January 5, 1979 - East Village Journal

The Kinks are on the radio. YOU REALLY GOT ME. A British Invasion festival from 1963 to 1966 marking an unexpected musical explosion from Great Britain. Many of the bands had been condemned by the Pat Boone loving conservatives. Few of those groups survived the Sixties. THe Beatles are dead, but the Rolling Stones survive.

The Kampuchea of the Khmer Rouge has been invaded by Vietnam backing up the Cambodian rebels to overthrow the genocidal madness through Pol Pot's attempt to create a classless agrarian society. Vietnam succeeded in defeating the RVN in South Vietnam after the USA betrayed their allies. The Pathet Lao, a communist coalition backed by Hanoi, rules Laos after the failure of the CIA to secure the landlocked country. The Nixon Administration had illegally bombed once-neutral Cambodia into the Stone Age and after the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh, the cadres forced the population out of the city into the country. Despite the defeat the Khmer Rouge have retreated to the Parrot's Beak, once an NVA stronghold, to continue the struggle, after Hanoi decided to kick out the ethnic Chinese, Red China, the main supporter of Kampuchea.

The Khmer Rouge number 90,000 against Vietnam's army of over one million with Soviet Russia's backing. Southeast Asia appears ready for a massive regional war. Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia versus Thailand, but no one was to fight them, so the Domino Theory stops at the Thai border. The Soviets, while dedicated to world revolution, want to bide their time for capitalism to collapse. The USA will never go red. We are fiercely in love with potato chips. The eucharist of patriotism from east to west.

Foto of the Khmer Rouge evacuating the cities.

Par 4 at the Killing Fields Country Club

Eleven years ago in a move destined to have the late Cambodian despot Pol Pot spinning in his grave _ if he had one _ the former Khmer Rouge cadres in their stronghold of Pailin embraced a plan to cash in on the country's tourism boom and build a golf course. Not that they know much about the game. If football is the beautiful game, to the ultra-Maoist former guerrillas, golf is the mysterious one.

The golf fanatic Prime Minister Hun Sen visited the remote area, traveling more than 100km of rugged dirt road from the nearest city of Battambang, and proposed a golf course for the municipality.

Pailin is perched on the nation's north-western border with Thailand just four hours by road from Bangkok, but up to 10 hours from the Cambodian capital.

Hun Sen was possibly the only country leader in the world to list his golf scores on his website.

Cambodia was so serious about developing golf as an industry that it has appointed a special representative to the Council of Ministers. The former Khmer Rouge are ecstatic.

Once rich in gems and timber, these resources were all but stripped bare by the Khmer Rouge as they tried to finance the remnants of the rebel movement by selling off the country's resouces before the rebels finally conceded to join Hun Sen's government in 1996.

Even journalists don't bother to go Paillin any more since four of its most infamous residents _ former Khmer Rouge leaders Ieng Sary, his wife Ieng Thirith, Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea _ were arrested on orders from the court set up to try them.

Pailin's biggest draw currently are its mainly Thai-owned casinos, which operators say draw up to 10,000 Thais per month. But thiese gaming houses lie within a quick sprint of the border and more than 12 rough kilometres from Pailin town, so most gamblers drop their money there and go no further. Nor does Pailin have the attractions of other former Khmer Rouge border strong-holds such as Anlong Veng, which at least boasts the makeshift cremation site of the movement's leader Pol Pot and Khmer Rouge military commander Ta Mok's home, complete with war room. So the former hardline communists, who drove the country to destruction in their 1975-79 failed bid to turn the nation into an agrarian utopia bereft of social classes, which left up to 2 million dead, have joyfully embraced a new ideology _ golf.

"We don't understand this game and at the moment it is just a speech by the prime minister, but it would be great for Pailin,'' says local Information Chief Kong Duong, once a Khmer Rouge propaganda chief.

He says he has never seen a golf ball, except on television. "We don't know where we will put [the course], or how big it should be, but the idea is good."

Pailin Tourism Chief So Korng is candid. He freely admits that to him, an iron is for pressing clothes, a wood is something you cut down to make furniture, and Tiger Woods is a place you never go alone or unarmed. But he agrees that the concept is attractive.

''People will have more jobs, and many people inside Cambodia and from overseas will come to visit Pailin and also see our natural attractions like our waterfall, gem shops, mountains and our agricultural programs," he said.

Revenue from the golf course may even pay for a road to the municipality's spectacular, but remote waterfall.

A former soldier who fought the Khmer Rouge in the early 1990s said the now-tamed rebels should also make good caddies.

"I've seen them climb mountains with two B-40 rockets strapped to their backs, so golf clubs should be no problem."

That would be a whole new revolution for a movement better known for its infamous black pajama uniform than plaid and plus fours. But not everyone is convinced. A spokesman for local non-government organization Buddhism for Development says golf was for the rich, and he doubted there will be much trickle-down for the impoverished former Khmer Rouge farmers in the area.

"The former Khmer Rouge are poor. They are too busy farming to have time to play golf," he said. And then there is the image problem. In a 2006 interview a senior Pailin tourism official laughingly admitted that the very concept of tourism remained somewhat alien. ''Before, our orders were to kill them, but now we invite them to visit and please spend money,"

It won't be on the killing fields

April 17, 1975 - Bangkok calling Phnom Penh

Forty-two years ago the forces of the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh. Joyous crowds greeted the jungle fighters with the hope of peace. The radio operator of the Royal Cambodian Army in Sihanoukville broadcasted a last message to his compatriot in his capitol.

Lieou Phin Oum.

"Goodbye sir. See you in Phnom Penh."

The Lieutenant Colonel didn't make it back to his homeland that year and missed the forced exodus of the cities. Over a million Cambodian died under the reign of the Khmer Rouge.

Year Zero.

I was 24.

I got to Phnom Penh in 1995.

Lieou Phin Oum has passed onto a new position.

He remains honored by the front-line observers of that conflict.

"Some gave some. A few gave all."