The Killing Fields Revisited
by John Toivonen

With the recent passing of President Ronald Reagan and the discussion of the role he played in bringing down Communism in Europe and Latin America it is a good time to revisit books and films that deal with the brutality of enforced collectivism. Probably nothing in cinema captures the murderous and soul-destroying power of Communism better than the 1984 film "The Killing Fields."

But there is a profound irony in the final scene of "The Killing Fields," that is not noted by reviewers in the left-leaning worlds of academia and journalism. When the New York Times correspondent Sydney Schanberg is reunited with his Cambodian assistant Dith Pran, who has recently escaped from a reeducation labor camp in Communist Cambodia, we hear John Lennon’s song "Imagine." Now this pleasant melody with lyrics about a world of peace without tyranny and bloodshed seems like the perfect song to mark the end of Pran’s gruesome ordeal. The song speaks of a hope for a world in which the dignity of all people is respected.

Yet the vision represented in the song is what fueled the killing fields of Cambodia, the Gulags of the Soviet Union, and the political persecution of millions throughout the communist world. The song asks us to imagine that are "no countries, no possessions and no religion." While this may sound appealing to the historically naïve, it is essentially communism. Communism does not respect private property, national boundaries, and is fundamentally hostile to religious faith.

The communist true believers were willing to do anything to create a world in which there were no countries and in which there was a "brotherhood of man." Now the brotherhood of man is an appealing idea. Most people like to imagine a world without war, slavery and starvation. But prior to the 19th Century most thinkers confined the perfect world to a heavenly realm. It was only in the afterlife when people would be free from pain and tyranny. Here we must admit that at times the eternal reward has been used for a cruel and devious purpose: to make the lower class servile. No ethical person would suggest that the victims of real oppression, say of the kind found in Cuba or the Sudan, should simply pray and endure. But potential revolutionaries need to understand that change is difficult, and because people are not perfect and never will be we cannot look forward to a day when all of our problems on earth will be solved.

Pol Pot did envision the day of perfection and so he pulled Cambodians out of the cities to advance his agrarian-Marxist goal, murdered close to one in four of his people, started reeducation and turned back the clock to year zero. His method was of course paradoxical in that Marxism presupposes an urban proletariat class as the agent of action.

Instead of imagining a world of perfect harmony we would do better to hold fast to a more pragmatic vision of good government in which different bodies of government check each others power and elected officials are held accountable at the polling place. Instead of a utopian ideology that leads to tyranny, we would do better to remember the vision that our Founding Fathers had for our nation and demand that our contemporary political leaders remember that vision.