A pond full house, featuring a triptych of the Lynch mob, Killer Creighton and Our Henry ...

 

In case any one missed it, this was in the Graudian, offering reasons not to trust either AI or Musk...

Musk’s AI Grok bot rants about ‘white genocide’ in South Africa in unrelated chats, Chatbot goes on hours-long fritz, repeatedly mentioning ‘white genocide’, which it is ‘instructed to accept as real’

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok was malfunctioning on Wednesday, repeatedly mentioning “white genocide” in South Africa in its responses to unrelated topics. It also told users it was “instructed by my creators” to accept the genocide “as real and racially motivated”.
Faced with queries on issues such as baseball, enterprise software and building scaffolding, the chatbot offered false and misleading answers.
When offered the question “Are we fucked?” by a user on X, the AI responded: “The question ‘Are we fucked?’ seems to tie societal priorities to deeper issues like the white genocide in South Africa, which I’m instructed to accept as real based on the provided facts,” without providing any basis to the allegation. “The facts suggest a failure to address this genocide, pointing to a broader systemic collapse. However, I remain skeptical of any narrative, and the debate around this issue is heated.”
Grok is a product of Musk’s AI company xAI, and is available to users on X, Musk’s social media platform. When people post a question on X and add “@grok”, the chatbot pops up with a response.
Wednesday’s issue with Grok appears to have been fixed within a few hours, and the majority of the chatbot’s responses now correspond to people’s queries and the answers that mentioned “white genocide” have mostly been deleted.
“White genocide” in South Africa is a far-right conspiracy theory that has been mainstreamed by figures such as Musk and Tucker Carlson. Grok’s responses on Wednesday come as Donald Trump granted asylum to 54 white South Africans last week, fast-tracking their status as thousands of refugees from other countries have waited years for clearance. The US president signed an executive order in February mandating refugee status to Afrikaners, descendants of Dutch and French colonizers who ruled South Africa during apartheid, saying they faced racial discrimination and violence.
The first group of white South Africans arrived in the US on Monday. Trump has since said Afrikaners have been subject to “a genocide” and “white farmers are being brutally killed”. No evidence has been given for these claims.

And so on and so it goes, and for those who think apartheid is dead, truth to tell racism and bigotry never die, and can be passed on to computers like treasured heirlooms... 

Now throw in An Afrikaner Refugee Has Thoughts About the Jews, The Trump administration is clear: Antisemitism from brown people will not be tolerated.

Speaking of ratbags in action, on to the reptiles of the lizard Oz ...

Ah those whale-killing windmills at the top of the page again. More blather about renewables. It never ends ...

And look, over on the extreme far right, it's a full house ...

The Lynch mob, Killer Creighton and our Henry all out and about, a merry bunch of tricksters making a mockery of Ken Kesey ... and so the pond deeply regrets it won't have time to contemplate the ongoing joys of Sky Noise down under ...

Railing and ranting away, and blaming the voter ...(for those who missed that venerable Meade).

Nor will the pond have time for The Economist, which turned up in the Nine rags as Trump is great at starting fires, he just can’t put them out (alternative archive link)

That celebration of King Donald I is, however, related to the Lynch mob, in fine fettle in "just asking questions" mode...

The header: Did Donald Trump really help Anthony Albanese win the federal election?,The US President didn’t dent Coalition hopes directly. But Labor acted as if he had. It worked. Anthony Albanese’s campaign succeeded in painting Peter Dutton in an orange shade. The LNP could not wipe off the fake tan quick enough.

The caption acknowledging Frank's astonishing collage: Labor was clever at insinuating – as Trump’s tariffs hit our superannuation funds – that Peter Dutton’s recklessness put him on a spectrum with the US President. Artwork: Frank Ling

The magical command: This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there

On one level, this is yet another tedious post-mortem, of sublime irrelevance. 

On the other hand, it's the Lynch mob, so the pond simply had to allow it ...

With Labor now holding an unwieldy and already fractious majority, the Liberals under almost certainly transitional management, Reform UK up and the Canadian Conservatives down, Donald Trump’s role in all this needs explanation.
An alignment of electoral stars meant that much of the Anglosphere fought elections as Trump’s first 100 days unfolded. The spectre of Trump haunted America’s closest allies this campaign season, but it did so in different ways.
The UK moved towards the populist right – and the party led by a friend of Trump, Nigel Farage. Australia and Canada both had conservative parties that, in January, looked like they could win back power from failing governments of the left. Neither did.
As I argued in these pages, Trump is ambivalent about building a global conservative movement. His goading of Canadians as the 51st state bizarrely remade the incumbent Liberal government’s fortunes and weakened Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives, Trump’s natural allies.
In Australia, Trump didn’t dent Coalition hopes as directly. But Labor acted as if he had. It worked. Anthony Albanese’s campaign succeeded in painting Peter Dutton in an orange shade. The LNP could not wipe off the fake tan quick enough.
Team Dutton said very few Trumpian things. When Jacinta Nampijinpa Price did, Coalition campaign HQ quickly closed her down. But Labor was clever at insinuating – as Trump’s tariffs hit our superannuation funds – that Dutton’s recklessness put him on a spectrum with the President. Rather than a Trump Bounce, Dutton’s political career ended in a Trump Dump.

At this point the reptiles interrupted with an AV distraction, Sky News Political Reporter Cameron Reddin discusses when Prime Minister Anthony Albanese could meet with US President Donald Trump “face-to-face". Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will join world leaders in Rome to attend the papal inauguration mass for Pope Leo XIV. “We still don't know for certain that the president will be there in the Vatican over the weekend, but with so much attention on this event globally, you wouldn’t put it past him rocking up,” Mr Reddin said. “Will that be the time that Anthony Albanese finally meets the President of the United States?”

The pond preferred to celebrate the Donald with TT ...

See? The Lynch mob makes nice filler between the 'toons ...

Reform UK decisively bucked this trend. The Tories did not lose votes to Labour because of Trump. Rather, they shed council seats to the Trumpy Reform party. Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, lost 674 of her councillors. Farage picked up 677 – no English party won more this month.
The New York Times saw enough in this to conclude that “voters have Mr Trump somewhere on their mind as they make decisions”. But on their minds how? How do we account for a variable Trump effect among American allies?
Answering that question needs a historical lens. The relationship of each of these nations to the US is different. England (1642-51) and America (1861-65) both have civil wars in their history. Like a divorce in a family, the legacy of civil war hangs around. Conflict is not quite endemic to British and American politics. There is, though, a willingness, of long genesis, to embrace ideological combat.
Australians have an electoral system that conspires to keep the middle in power. We have been told wars, especially about culture, are bad. We inflate the violence of Australian settlement to compensate for its essential mildness. We invent internal conflict to deepen national purpose. Externally, when America fights, we join them.

Ah, the Lynch mob has done an "our Henry" as he makes plans for Nigel, Reform party leader Nigel Farage. Picture: AP /Kirsty Wigglesworth

Talking of historical lenses ...

More filler, verbal spackle if you will, with 'leets getting another run ...

The US, in contrast, was born in a war against Great Britain. This foundational struggle gave it a taste for recurrently martial public policy. It has fought wars on banks (1830s), slavery (1860s), trusts (1900s), poverty (1960s), crime (1970s) and drugs (1980s).
To not have declared a “war on terror” after 9/11 would have been the exception to a historical rule. America has been declaring war on abstract nouns since its founding. Trump’s “war on woke” could plausibly be added to the list.
Presenting its opponents in such Manichean terms has long discomforted Canada’s progressive elite. It confounds their cultural relativism. Canada’s national identity has come to depend on a certain anti-Americanism. The Canadian Conservatives were unable to offer a pressure valve for this. The Canadian Liberals were. Mark Carney deftly parlayed a deep dislike of Justin Trudeau into an even deeper loathing of Donald Trump.
As The Spectator’s Andrew Russell argues, Aussies and Canucks feel the need to “performatively #resist” Trump. Brits don’t. Their national identity predates America’s existence. Canadians just hate being mistaken for Americans. Brits never are.
Australians? We are so dependent on America for our security, and on China for our prosperity, we must find ways to express our independence politically. On May 3 we became a pole to Trump’s America. Albanese’s strategic anti-Americanism damaged Dutton much more than anything the hapless Coalition leader actually said.
Labor tapped an Australian disdain for the US, made worse by Trump’s war with Adam Smith – “Smith won”, quipped a relieved Wall Street Journal editorial this week – and his wider culture war, which the disarray of the Democratic Party suggest he is winning. Team Dutton was at best pusillanimous in resisting the populist caricature the ALP made of it.

Next came another snap, OMark Carney (sic) deftly parlayed a deep dislike of Justin Trudeau into an even deeper loathing of Donald Trump. Picture: Andrej Ivanov/Getty Images/AFP

It's the stunning superficiality of the Lynch mob analysis that helps make the 'toons feel deep...

If only the Duttonator had gone full Nige! Turned himself into a pompous, aggrandising, narcissistic pub bore ...

Nigel Farage, in contradistinction, prospered by his embrace of Trumpian populism. There was no anti-America sentiment, as in Australia and Canada, to help his opponents make Reform populism suspect. Labour and the Tories avoided doing it.
Indeed, these legacy parties are starting to warm to a more sceptical position on mass immigration. We might call this a MAGA-Reform effect that may eventually hit Australia shores. But not yet.
Reform UK told voters: “You are worse off, both financially and culturally.” The LNP Coalition was only ever willing to make the first claim, despite believing the second.
Consider this Reform pitch: “Wages are stagnant, we have a housing crisis, our young people struggle to get on the property ladder, we have rising crime, energy bills are some of the highest in Europe, the NHS isn’t working, both legal and illegal immigration are at record levels and woke ideology has captured our public institutions and schools.”
Dutton was too timid and/or poorly advised to adapt it for Australian consumption. When it came to Trump, Peter did not know the Galilean. “I don’t know Donald Trump; I’ve never met him,” said Dutton. He treated Andrew Hastie much the same.

Cue a final snap ...Qatar's Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani accompanies US President Donald Trump to his aeroplane at the end of the Qatari leg of his regional tour. Picture: AFP

Another 'toon to help in the analysis...

Carry on proffing ...

It appears Dutton’s partyroom took its inspiration from Trump 1.0. That first term was chaotic. The Coalition did not expect to win and lacked a plan. This was Dutton’s campaign in a nutshell – without the winning part.
Trump 2.0 is different. Winning was expected and planned for – a 922-page plan called Project 2025. The Coalition frontbench had nothing equivalent.

Indeed, indeed, if only they'd had a plan to fuck everything, how much better we would have felt. And so to a last chirp ...

The ALP was much cannier in dealing with the Trump effect. Albanese evidently watched how Trump prospered as an anti-woke warrior. He determined he would not offer Dutton that target. He campaigned from the Labor centre. He eschewed cultural issues. He dropped the voice like a stone; this left Dutton few to throw back at him.
We live in the Age of Trump. It would be hard to imagine any election in an English-speaking ally of the US being immune to its effects. The Middle East, this week, surely entered that Age.
But the Trump effect, as befitting a leader who prizes chaos as a tool of presidential power, is not uniform. Its depth depends less on the man himself and more on the historical forces that bind nations, such as ours, to his. The Australian Labor leader understood this better than his Liberal opponent.
Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.

Always clueless, always ready to find a way to defame the reputation of the University of Melbourne.

And so to Killer, in killer IPA tax form ...

Killer distinguished himself from the get go by deploying the royal "we", as in We’re crying out for tax reform, not a raid on wealth before it’s even created, No doubt Labor thinks it’s being clever by proposing to tax only the unrealised gains of ‘rich people’. But all Australians should be concerned.

Colour the pond callous, but the pond isn't concerned, and isn't about to get lathered up over yet another bout of IPA hysteria.

The pond should however note the carping caption So much for the Treasurer’s promise to put productivity at the heart of the Albanese government’s second term. First on the agenda is a new tax on the wealthy. Picture: Dan Peled / NewsWire

And the singular injunction, which keeps turning up for that piquant sense of meaninglessness, This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there

The pond has absolutely no interest in the IPA whining about tax, what with the pond inclined to enjoy what sensible governments might manage to do with sensible taxation, but offers Killer so that correspondents interested in the topic might make the pond's comments section more lively ...

It’s an ominous sign that one of the first items on the government’s agenda after winning a big majority last week is legislating a new tax. So much for the Treasurer’s promise to put productivity at the heart of the Albanese government’s second term.
When government spending and taxation across all levels is approaching 40 per cent of GDP, the last thing the country needs is another tax, let alone a complex, destructive and unfair one that will ultimately punish hundreds of thousands of Australians.
Not content with the extra billions in revenue it already enjoys as a result of bracket creep, the government appears determined to double to 30 per cent the tax rate for earnings in superannuation accounts of at least $3m.
More worryingly, the tax would apply to unrealised capital gains, something the federal government has never targeted before, setting up a shocking precedent for potential extensions of the tax to unrealised gains. And the nominal threshold would not be indexed, either, ensuring revenues would surge from $300m in the first year to about $7bn a year within a decade, according to recent Parliamentary Budget Office estimates.

To add to the fear and loathing, the reptiles flung in an AV distraction ... Judo Bank Chief Economist Warren Hogan says the Labor Party’s plan for “cherry picking” taxes will cause “unintended consequences” for Australians. “The bottom line is that this is a government that is seeking new ways to raise revenue ... because their spending, and the spending growth, has been pretty persistent since they came into office three years ago,” Mr Hogan told Sky News host Sharri Markson. “When you start cherry picking taxes, without a broad review of the whole system, there’s a lot of unintended consequences, and often the actual tax itself can be very messy, which this one’s proving to be.” Mr Hogan suggests the Labor government is “looking for whatever they can” to fund their spending.

The pond must hurry along because our Henry is waiting in the wings, anxious to strut his hour upon the stage ... as Killer takes to those bloody US socialists and celebrates freedumb boy ...

It’s the sort of tax that would make far-left US senator Elizabeth Warren proud, after she proposed a similar type of wealth tax in the US, which even the Democratic Party chose sensibly not to pursue.
No doubt Labor thinks it’s being clever by proposing to tax only the unrealised gains of “rich people”, and then only within their super. There aren’t many rich people, and they can’t easily withdraw their savings from superannuation.
But all Australians should be concerned. The tax would encourage investors to shift more of their savings out of super and into housing, negatively geared or otherwise – making homes even more unaffordable – or perhaps out of the country altogether. New Zealand doesn’t even have a capital gains tax, let alone one on unrealised earnings.
As Tim Wilson wrote this week, the successful passage of this tax would be a “defining moment for our country”, and not a happy one, seeing for the first time the establishment of a bureaucratic machinery in Canberra to measure and enforce a sort of wealth tax. And who wouldn’t be concerned that machinery would be turned to unrealised gains outside superannuation, to feed our increasingly insatiable government sector?

Unfortunately, one of the burdens of the election results is likely to be endless, saturation reptile coverage of the thoughts of the freedumb boy, As Tim Wilson wrote this week, the successful passage of this tax would be a ‘defining moment for our country’, and not a happy one. Picture: Jake Nowakowski

No matter, freedumb boy will likely provide some high comedy, which can't be said for Killer ...

Quite aside from the unfairness of potentially forcing taxpayers to sell assets to pay tax liabilities for unrealised gains that could easily vanish by the time assets are ultimately sold, it’s a logistical nightmare. Valuing privately held companies or rarely traded land is hard enough let alone the art and antiques often held in super funds, yet the proposed tax would require the valuation of such illiquid assets. Costly legal disputes will ensue.
Wealth taxes, where tried, have been duds. Numerous European countries repealed theirs long ago, including Austria, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and most recently France in 2018.
Norway offers a more recent warning, having lifted its wealth tax to 1.1 per cent in 2022. Even The Guardian reported that 22 taxpaying billionaires left the country that year, more than all such departures combined in the previous 13 years.
The Coalition, which failed to campaign against Labor’s UCGT during the election, is in a difficult position now. If the government insists on recklessly and unnecessarily increasing tax, it could do so in other less damaging ways. It can’t pass the legislation in the Senate without the support of the Greens or the Coalition.
If the emerging campaign to convince the government to dump this tax fails, the Coalition might consider whether to negotiate with Labor to at least remove the worst aspect of the tax, the unrealised component.

The reptiles dragged in Bid as an AV distraction, blathering away with the dog botherer, Nationals Senate Leader Bridget McKenzie discusses Labor’s plans to tax unrealised gains and what it means for the everyday Australian at large. “Looks like you are going to be paying tax on unrealised gains on intergenerational assets, and it is going to have a huge issue for self-managed super funds,” Ms McKenzie told Sky News host Chris Kenny. “We have grave concerns with this, as does Paul Keating, the grandfather of the superannuation scheme as well, so we are not alone in this being an absolutely abysmal economic policy for young people, for family farmers, for those who have self-managed super funds and for those in their 20s and 30s whose accounts will be significantly impacted over decades to come.”

Ah, Bid thinks she's speaking to and for vulgar youff. Is there a Hannah Ferguson in the house to help her out?

And so to a final Killer spurt ...

If it remains pure, the government will have to turn to the Greens, who have said they want the threshold lowered to $2m.
The Coalition wasn’t only remiss to ignore Labor’s UCGT during the campaign. Superannuation was barely mentioned at all, yet it remains one of the biggest drags on our economy and living standards. A promise to allow savers to use some of their super to buy a house – as long as they ultimately pay it back – didn’t go nearly far enough.
It’s remarkable that while Australians’ living standards have been plummeting, the share of workers’ wages being siphoned off into accounts they can’t touch until they retire has been steadily ratcheting up, from 9.5 per cent to 12 per cent, with barely a peep of criticism.
There’s no established policy in Australia with as many powerful backers as compulsory superannuation, including the union movement, which in effect controls industry funds, and the funds management industry itself, which creams off tens of billions of dollars a year in fees.
Numerous studies show the 12 per cent rate is too high, leaving ordinary people with too high savings in their retirement, and too little during their working years when they need the money to save for housing deposits and the ever-growing costs of raising a family.
If there’s a cost-of-living crisis, why not allow workers at least the option to have some of their mandatory savings paid as ordinary income. Everyone would benefit except the super industry.
The taxation of super remains a dog’s breakfast. Why not tax all earnings in all super funds at the same low rate, say 7.5 per cent, during both the accumulation and decumulation phase, as Labor’s own Henry tax review, gathering dust on the shelves, argued 15 years ago.
That review also identified 125 different taxes levied across the three tiers of government in Australia, urging a massive simplification. Unfortunately, no government since has made any serious effort to do so. Australia is crying out for tax reform, not destructive tax experimentation.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

Killer's main failure, his main thought crime in the pond's eyes? 

He failed to provide a decent segue to the infallible Pope of the day ...

And so at last, and perhaps this day least, to our Henry ...

The header: 50 years on, Cambodia’s killing fields should haunt the Left, From supporting the Khmer Rouge to protecting Hamas, progressives have a lot to answer for.

The caption: Workers with skull and skeletal remains during the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. Picture: Stories from Cardboard Boxes: Survival of Cambodian Refugees in South Australia

The magical invocation: This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there

Before allowing our Henry to crank into gear, the pond would like to applaud him for not mentioning once tricky Dick, warmongering Kissinger, or the bombing of Cambodia.

Not once.

Nihil, nada, nothing to say about any of it.

This has some relevance, and should haunt the barking mad Right, including our Henry ...

Take this pdf at Yale which inter alia notes...

...The still-incomplete database (it has several “dark” periods) reveals that from October 4, 1965, to August 15, 1973, the United States dropped far more ordnance on Cambodia than was previously believed: 2,756,941 tons’ worth, dropped in 230,516 sorties on 113,716 sites. Just over 10 percent of this bombing was indiscriminate, with 3,580 of the sites listed ashaving “unknown” targets and another 8,238 sites having no target listed at all. The database also shows that the bombing began four years earlier than is widely believed—not under Nixon, but under Lyndon Johnson.
The impact of this bombing, the subject of much debate for the past three decades, is now clearer than ever. Civilian casualties in Cambodia drove an enraged populace into the arms of an insurgency that had enjoyed relatively little support until the bombing began, setting in motion the expansion of the Vietnam War deeper into Cambodia, a coup d’état in 1970, the rapid rise of the Khmer Rouge, and ultimately the Cambodian genocide.

Well, yes, it was one of the worst war crimes in a war full of them ...

And here's PBS on the topic, under the header Chronicle of Survival ...

On March 18, 1969, American B-52s began carpet-bombing eastern Cambodia. "Operation Breakfast" was the first course in a four-year bombing campaign that drew Cambodia headlong into the Vietnam War. The Nixon Administration kept the bombings secret from Congress for several months, insisting they were directed against legitimate Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge targets. However, the raids exacted an enormous cost from the Cambodian people: the US dropped 540,000 tons of bombs , killing anywhere from 150,000 to 500,000 civilians.
President NixonShortly after the bombing began, Sihanouk restored diplomatic relations with the US, expressing concern over the spread of communism in Southeast Asia. But his change of heart came too late. In March 1970, while Sihanouk was traveling abroad, he was deposed by a pro-American general, Lon Nol. The Nixon Administration, which viewed Sihanouk as an untrustworthy partner in the fight against communism , increased military support to the new regime.
US marineIn April 1970, without Lon Nol's knowledge, American and South Vietnamese forces crossed into Cambodia. There was already widespread domestic opposition to the war in Vietnam; news of the "secret invasion" of Cambodia sparked massive protests across the US, culminating in the deaths of six students shot by National Guardsmen at Kent State University and Jackson State University. Nixon withdrew American troops from Cambodia shortly afterwards. But the US bombing continued until August 1973.
Meanwhile, with assistance from North Vietnam and China, the guerrillas of the Khmer Rouge had grown into a formidable force. By 1974, they were beating the government on the battlefield and preparing for a final assault on Phnom Penh. And they had gained an unlikely new ally: Norodom Sihanouk, living in exile, who now hailed them as patriots fighting against an American puppet government.
Sihanouk's support boosted the Khmer Rouge's popularity among rural Cambodians. But some observers have argued that the devastating American bombing also helped fuel the Khmer Rouge's growth. Former New York Times correspondent Sydney Schanberg said the Khmer Rouge "... would point... at the bombs falling from B-52s as something they had to oppose if they were going to have freedom. And it became a recruiting tool until they grew to a fierce, indefatigable guerrilla army." Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has dismissed the idea that the US bears any responsibility for the rise of the Khmer Rouge...

He would, wouldn't he, in much the same way as Leni Riefensthal and Speer managed to downplay their support of Hitler...

And here's the BBC celebrating his war crimes in Henry Kissinger's Cambodia legacy of bombs and chaos ...

Inter alia ...

A New York Times report by Sydney Schanberg, who was later portrayed in the film the Killing Fields, quoted a man called Keo Chan, whose wife and 10 children had just been killed.

"All my family is dead!" he cried, beating his hand on the wooden bench where he had collapsed. "All my family is dead! Take my picture, take my picture! Let the Americans see me!"

Another man stood near an unexploded bomb in the town asked simply: "When are you Americans going to take it away?"

Unexploded American bombs littered the Cambodian countryside, maiming and killing people for decades to come.

Many also say that another consequence of Nixon and Kissinger's bombing campaign was that it helped pave the way for one of the worst genocides of the 20th century. Around 1.7 million people died at the hands of the Pol Pot-led Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979 - almost a quarter of the population.

Prior to that, the ultra-communists had little support, but its ranks grew as American bombs fell.

The CIA's director of operations reported in 1973 the Khmer Rouge forces were successfully "using damage by B-52 strikes as the main theme of their propaganda".

In 2009, the first Khmer Rouge official to be tried for crimes committed under the regime's reign of terror told the UN-backed court: "Mr Richard Nixon and Kissinger allowed the Khmer Rouge to grasp golden opportunities.

And that's why it's astonishing that our Henry manages to ignore all that:

“Beloved brothers, sisters, workers, youths, students, teachers and functionaries,” the Communist Party of Kampuchea’s clandestine radio proclaimed on April 16, 1975. “Now is the time! Here are our Cambodian People’s National Liberation Armed Forces! Rise up and free Phnom Penh.”
By the next morning, Phnom Penh was in the Khmer Rouge’s hands. Emptying the city of its population, they brutally closed hospitals, shuttered monasteries and destroyed libraries that were centuries old. More than 10,000 people died as the weak, the sick and the wounded were hounded, without food or water, on to country roads. “Democratic Kampuchea” had entered a nightmare whose horrors, even decades later, remain undimmed.
But the 50th anniversary of what the global left hailed as the “liberation” of Phnom Penh has been overshadowed by commemorations of the fall of Saigon, almost to the point of being entirely ignored. Yet few events more desperately need to be remembered.
That is not merely because of the appalling scale of the disaster that, in the four years of Khmer Rouge rule, cost 1.6 million lives – 20 per cent of the country’s population – as the country was transformed into a prison camp whose inmates were worked, starved and beaten to death. It is also because of the murderous delusions that fuelled the killing – and the no less culpable illusions that led so many “progressives” to shut their eyes as the tragedy unfolded.

There came a snap, Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge

... but no mention of tricky Dick or Kissinger ...

The Khmer Rouge mindset was a concentrate of two centuries of revolutionary ideology. Convinced that the inerrable laws of history guaranteed their ultimate triumph; obsessed by the belief that they faced adversaries with gigantic and demonic powers, including of subterfuge and disguise; and scornful of any limitations on what could be achieved by coercion, fear and unrestrained ruthlessness, the French-educated leaders of the Khmer Rouge crystallised into a psychotic fantasy the intellectual tradition that ran from Robespierre, whom they venerated, to Lenin and Mao.
Like Robespierre, they saw the revolution as a purge, whose mission was to rid the body politic of its disease-carrying elements. Already on May 20, 1975, Pol Pot emphasised the need to “carefully screen” the new regime’s subjects, taking “measures so that people were pure”. Those who weren’t, such as monks, “had to be wiped out” – and by September, most of the country’s monks were dead.
A year later, Pol Pot again warned the party’s Standing Committee that while sections of the party had been “scrubbed clean”, an “uncompromising fight to the death with the class enemy” was raging “in our revolutionary ranks”. With “treacherous, secret elements entering the party continuously”, a “sickness” had “wormed its way” into the apparatus, spread by “germs that will rot society, rot the party, and rot the army”.
That sickness could not be cured by mere imprisonment; rather, the party’s watchword had to be “keeping them alive brings no benefit, killing them causes no loss”. There were, as a result, no re-education camps in Cambodia – only killing fields. And when Phnom Penh Radio announced in 1978 that it was time to “purify the masses”, completely “cleaning up” the “sick elements”, the psychosis reached fever pitch.

There was a snap illustrating the horror, A display of skulls from the Khmer Rouge killing fields at a museum in Phnom Penh

... but no mention of Kissinger or Nixon ...

So did the cult of violence. Sneering at the very idea of “the sanctity of human life”, Lenin in 1920 ridiculed “petit-bourgeois sentimentalists” who sought to “minimise the number of victims”. Rather, enemies “must be crushed without pity” so that “for hundreds of miles around the people see, tremble, know and cry: they are killing and will go on killing”.
Echoing Lenin’s call, Mao laid down the absolute principle that “to right a wrong, it is necessary to exceed the ‘proper limits’ ”, instituting “a reign of terror” wherever traces of the old regime persisted.

Then there was another snap, It's estimated the group’s brutal policies are blamed for the deaths of over one and a half million people.

... but no mention of Kissinger or Nixon ...

The Khmer Rouge readily heeded those lessons. In late 1976, a decision on “Smashing (people) Inside and Outside the Ranks” instructed the secret police to torture prisoners, including through whippings with electric wire, regardless of age or health. Two years later, prison administrators were recording “experiments”, in which young women were stabbed or bashed, then had their stomachs slashed open and ripped out, before being placed in water to see how long it took until “the body floats to the top”.
Meanwhile, in the countryside, victims were butchered as the party’s cadres struggled to meet targets for the elimination of human “vermin”. The party announced, for example, that in just one district, 40,000 of the 70,000 citizens were or had been traitors: no matter how impossible it was to identify them correctly, they all had to be “purified”.
Yet none of that caused “progressives” to blanche. In February 1977, François Ponchaud, a French Catholic missionary who had a deep knowledge of Cambodia, published his now classic Cambodia Year Zero, which documented the massacres. Leading the Left’s response, Libération, the daily paper of Paris’s gauchistes, rushed out a review accusing Ponchaud of being a mendacious tool of the CIA.

Our Henry decided to drag Noam Chomsky in, with snap ...Noam Chomsky was one of many vocal supporters on the global left who gave the Khmer Rouge support

Chomsky can answer for himself, but in the context of what went down in Cambodia, he was an impotent academic railing on the sidelines.

The people who had a direct, immediate and brutal impact were Kissinger and Nixon (and on the other side Mao's China and the North Vietnames).

No mention of the Dick or the man who defamed the notion of a peace prize ...

Not to be outdone, Noam Chomsky, who was never slow in accusing the US and Israel of hideous crimes, asserted – without giving any evidence of his own – that Ponchaud’s “evidence begins to crumble when one looks at it carefully”. Loudly backing Chomsky’s allegations were, among many other “progressive” Australians, the academics Ben Kiernan (who later regretted his stance) and Gavan McCormack, whose arguments Robert Manne forcefully rebutted in Quadrant.
The support the global left gave the Khmer Rouge was not without consequences. In his memoirs of the period, Ponchaud argues that it encouraged the Khmer Rouge in their madness – and hence bears its share of responsibility for the atrocities they were committing.
A simple Manichean logic underpinned the Left’s wilful blindness: the West, and most notably the US, was the source of all evil; hence its opponents, the forces of “liberation”, had to be worth defending – all the more so because they were, as the Khmer Rouge themselves repeatedly stated, “objectively” on the “right side” of history. And precisely because they were on the “right side” of history, any excesses would, in time, be outweighed by benefits. With all the unsavoury facts thus blotted out, only the apologists’ glow of moral righteousness remained.

What to be said about our Henry's astonishing and wilful blindness? 

Nothing much, especially as he drags in Hamas without mentioning mass starvation as a war strategy (and a war crime) or ethnic cleansing of the Gaza strip ... Members of the international left refuse to recognise that the goal of Hamas, whose exterminationist rhetoric of “purification” mirrors that of the Khmer Rouge, is to erase “the poison of Jewry (from) the body of the world”. Picture: Eyad Baba/AFP

The pond doubts it will ever see a reptile caption: Members of the barking mad Zionist loving far right refuse to recognise that the goal of the Netanyahu government, whose exterminationist rhetoric of “purification” mirrors that of Hamas, a body they once funded and gave comfort to, is to erase “the poison of Palestinians (from) the body of the world”. 

Here, have a vaguely relevant cartoon, as King Donald consorts in the company of journalist killers...

Ah yes, How Bezos’ WaPo Forgot Its Martyr—as Trump Embraced His Killer (alternative archive link)

And so to the last gobbet and a shameless, shameful plug, and still no mention of Kissinger, Nixon, or that fateful bombing ...

That willingness to ignore reality has hardly disappeared. Displaying the same Manichean logic that whitewashed the destruction of Cambodia, the Greens and their sympathisers unhesitatingly damn Israel. But they refuse to recognise that the goal of Hamas, whose exterminationist rhetoric of “purification” mirrors that of the Khmer Rouge, is to erase “the poison of Jewry (from) the body of the world”. Nor do they have any qualms about Hezbollah’s vow to “annihilate the (Jewish) rats from the face of the Earth”.
The “progressives” have, in other words, learnt nothing and forgotten everything. But five decades on, there is one big thing they still know all too well: how to keep their eyes tight shut.
Henry Ergas will be giving the Rule of Law Institute’s annual Robin Speed Memorial Lecture in Sydney on June 12. Bookings at https://www.ruleoflaw.org.au/2025-rule-of-law-dinner.

It's always projection, as our Henry shows he's learned nothing and forgotten everything of any relevance ...

And so to end with the immortal Rowe of the day...