Yesterday, I ran across this post on Instagram by Sean, who founded 30 Sec Out (@thirtysecondsout). I felt it was too important to just repost on Instagram and that I needed to share it with the readers of SSD.
The fall of Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge happened in my lifetime and predictably so, because we abandoned our partners in South East Asia to Communism.
When I was a kid, we had a family in my church who escaped Pol Pot’s year Zero and the creation of Kampuchea. There were hundreds of refugees from the ravages of Communism on SE Asia in my city, but I never understood what that family and others went through until I saw the movie, “The Killing Fields”.
If you’ve never seen it, watch it, and invite someone you know who is anti-2A to experience it as well. But until then, read and share Sean’s words.
I learned a few things in Cambodia a few years ago, from the source. In this pic I’m standing next to our terp (interpreter) Nhean, at one of the killing field memorials called the Tower of Skulls. Nhean told me a lot of stories of what exactly happened when the Khmer Rouge, a communist group, seized power over the country in 1975 where the dictator Pol Pot wanted to create a pure utopian agriculture communist state. First, they had to kill a few million people to get things going. They started by disarming the population. Once the populace was now “soft” they started to incrementally install their ideology, through force. Nhean was brought to the fields to farm, like everyone else. Nhean said,”Anyone wearing eye glasses was shot. Anyone with books, shot. Teachers, doctors and anyone suspected of having an education, killed as well. One day a man, who I knew a little from before, had been a successful rice farmer. He approached the Khmer guards because the system of moving water they were using was not that efficient. He had a better system that yielded a better return at harvest, so he began explaining it to them. I saw them walk the man over a berm and they shot him in the head. They shot him for having an idea. No one thought any of this was possible before it happened.” Let that shit sink in…Mass killings of civilians by military dictatorships in the 1900s were commonly preceded by the confiscation of firearms, a task made easier by laws requiring the registration and/or licensing of privately-owned weapons. It’s a lot fucking harder to subjugate and enslave people when they fight you with effective weapons and knowledge. I’m not disarming, ever.
#killingfields #polpot #khmerrouge #2A #neverdisarm #neverquit
