On Mon, 19 May 1997, Michael Coghlan wrote:

>
> Well, again talking to people I know through my work, ALL Cambodians talk in
> terms of pre and post KR. Life before Pol Pot was not grand, but it
> certainly got a lot worse afterwards.

Part of the problem in matters like these are the short historic memories.
Why did it get worse? Why did the bad guys come to power in the first
place? Was there some great power responsibility for the destruction of a
way of life and its replacement by another, far more desperate way? That
seems to be the point of criticisms, like Chomsky's, about the use of one
or another crime in order to get people to forget an even greater crime
that made the second one possible, if not necessary.

The "evil" KP would not have taken>power, and may not even have existed, if
our best and brightest hadn't moved to destroy what existed before, because
it wasn't quite frantically anti-communist enough. Enough, already...
fs