Communism needs children. Only children will obey the tyranny of adult delusions without question. Only the young are naïve enough to hate all authority and to destroy all achievement. For youth, Communism is not a delusion but an exciting, heroic cause.
Cambodia’s Pol Pot knew this. He overtook his country on April 17, 1975, with a huge gang of young teenagers called the Khmer Rouge. Through these obedient subjects, Pol Pot murdered nearly 2 million people of his own nation, one-third of the population. In less than four years, Pol Pot created a society of pure Communism—ghastly, murderous tyranny.
Jean-Louis Margolin, in “Cambodia: A Country of Disconcerting Crimes,” in The Black Book of Communism (ed. Mark Kramer. Harvard: 1999), says that Pol Pot tried to establish Communism “in one fell swoop, without the long transitional period” that characterized the Marxist method.” Though his party was called the Party of Democratic Kampuchea, it was a horde of raw hellions. “Money was abolished in a week, total collectivization was achieved in less than two years; social distinctions were suppressed by the elimination of entire classes of property owners, intellectuals, and businessmen, and the ancient antagonism between urban and rural areas was solved by emptying the cities in a single week” (p.577).
The enforcers of this disaster were “programmed” youth. Pol Pot separated children from parents and indoctrinated them with fanatical denial of natural affection and respect for familial relationships. He understood the latent resentment of youth toward parents and adults, and youth’s penchant for destruction. Destruction is naturally exciting. Pol Pot knew that there was a “killing field” in the heart of the young, and he tapped into that virgin resource. This is clear in Roland Joffé’s 1984 documentary, The Killing Fields.
Children surrendered their natural family bonds to the unnatural vision of the Anka, the party, the Big Brother. Children became part of a national gang, and they reveled in the thrills of vandalism. Youth were given orders to not only be disrespectful to parents and adults, but to betray them, to be physically cruel to them, and even to murder them. Children under this satanic delusion could not be dissuaded or relieved.
Yet even in accounts like Children of Cambodia’s Killing Fields (Yale: 1999) and Jean-Louis Margolin’s essay, there is always stark neglect to account for Pol Pot’s use of children. Children of Cambodia’s Killing Fields emphasizes the horror stories of children who survived the victimization; there are no studies of how the children of the Khmer Rouge were recruited and indoctrinated. Margolin’s artful 70-page essay only mentions the destruction of family relations in passing, and not as the foundation of Khmer Rouge Communism.
The Communist spirit of resentment and violence was deeply absorbed by these kidnapped children. There was nothing to prevent the tide of megalomania. No religion in this essentially rural country could serve as a shield against the depravity of human nature to which Communism appealed. Buddhism was impotent, and the “Khmer smile” of Apsara, indigenous goddess of Cambodia, was an indifferent mockery.
But Communism is the god of discontent, and needs no blessing. All it needs is a heart willing to hate, willing to call envy “justice.” Equality then means the violent destruction of all social and cultural distinctions. Freedom means absolute dictatorship over the people.
Sounds like a police state, yet similar underlying conditions are developing in American youth, under our own nose. How? Because of prescribed permissiveness in American public schools: police are required to enforce the most basic, necessary child control. Kindergarteners are being arrested, handcuffed, and taken out of their schools, because only the police exercise physical authority in schools: teachers have abdicated discipline. Other adults merely frustrate the child with meaningless words.
Through this new Communism, the child is in this sense “equal” to the adult, and thus controls the day. The child answers only to the police. Children are indoctrinated to expect police intervention for safety and discipline. Control doesn’t come from the adults in schools, or the adults at home, but rather from the police, or Big Brother.
“Policed” conditions already exist in other countries of the world. And the need for a world police state, a global government, has been advocated for decades. But no one thinks about the role indoctrinated children play in the development of such a world.
Learn from America: Leftist school legislation says teachers must not control the child. Let the child rule.
This generation of children may become the next street thugs whose rebellion paves the way for a more authoritarian state. And no child will be left behind.