Monday, March 23, 2015

Tuol Sleng shows how dangerous Western lefties can be

I am in Cambodia and today I went to Tuol Sleng, the former Khmer Rouge prison known as S-21, which is now a museum to the genocide committed by Pol Pot and his henchmen during their reign of terror in this country from 1975 to 1979. Tuol Sleng was the site of the torture and death of around 20,000 people considered to be enemies of the Khmer Rouge regime, including children and babies. It was one of 150 such prisons across Cambodia where, together with various rural work sites, an estimated 2 million Cambodians were killed by their Marxist government.

Tuol Sleng is a strange place. It was originally a high school and its origins are still evident. Tiny cells that are barely large enough to stand up in are partitioned in what were once classrooms. Some of the iron-framed beds that prisoners were shackled to are still in place, together with the iron shackles. There are cabinets full of skulls and a bin full of (what I realised were) human rib bones. Entire walls are given over to photos of prisoners, as the Khmer Rouge, in common with the Nazis and other genocidal regimes, were meticulous in documenting their victims. It is, as Hannah Arendt so aptly put it, the banality of the evil that is so astounding.

The most revealing part of my visit to Tuol Sleng, however, was the exhibit about the Western sympathisers who promoted the denial of the genocide not only during the Khmer Rouge's four years in power but for years afterwards. The most notorious of these sympathisers was a group of Swedish left-wing politicians who visited Cambodia in April 1978. Despite the fact that reports had been surfacing of the genocide since the Khmer Rouge had sezied power in 1975, the Swedish delegation produced a laudatory, white-washing report of Pol Pot's Cambodia. The delegates admitted that they knew the cities had been cleared out (the Khmer Rouge evacuated the entire population of Phnom Penh and sent them to the countryside to work as slave labour the day after they gained power) but they hailed this as a geat egalitarian experiment. Gunnar Bergstrom, the only member of the delegation to since express regret about the propaganda victory, said they did not realise that all of that huge exodus were being starved, tortured, executed or just worked to death. 

In New Zealand we had our own versions of Gunnar Bergstrom. Keith Locke, who later became a Green Party Member of Parliament, was known to be a supporter of the Khmer Rouge. Personally, I find it difficult to accept that a supporter of one of the most evil regimes in recent history could go on to find respectability as a New Zealand MP.

You might say that everyone has the right to change their political views. However, I think we need to consider the harm these supporters of the Khmer Rouge did. Their denial of the genocide in Cambodia probably allowed the regime to survive a lot longer than it should have. In fact, the Khmer Rouge were still recognized as the legitimate government of Cambodia long after the Vietnamese had invaded and put an end to this most vicious political cult. It wasn't until 1993 that Cambodia's United Nations seat was removed from the so-called Cambodian government-in-exile (that included the Khmer Rouge) and given to the successor Kingdom of Cambodia. It was people like Gunnar Bergstrom and Keith Locke who were instrumental in maintaining support for the Khmer Rouge, even after its fall from power and the reliable documentation of its horrors. These people almost certainly prolonged the life of the regime and therefore were in some small way responsible for many deaths (although, in fairness to Keith Locke, he claims he reversed his support for the regime after the extent of its horrors became known).

This is the biggest issue I have with the political left-wing in the West - that they are allowed to get away with supporting all manner of horrors, up to including full-blown genocide, if it is done in the name of their Marxist ideals. When the full extent of the horrors is revealed, they inevitably say they didn't know what the regime in question was was really up to and, anyway, it was a perversion of true Marxism. But I contend that Marxism is, by its very nature, genocidal and I don't believe anyone who truly understands Marxism as a philosophy could disagree with this. Marx himself made no bones about the fact that he expected a whole lot of killing when his philosophy was applied in practice.

There is a double standard in respect of political respectability. Left-wingers are forgiven their earlier political excesses to an extent that those on the right are never allowed. I cannot imagine a former Nazi sympathiser being allowed to take a seat in the New Zealand Parliament. Those who support genocidal regimes should be held accountable for their support, whatever their political hue.

Thursday, March 19, 2015

Traffic Reflects the Nation

In my last post about my travels in Vietnam, I mentioned the traffic in this populous Southeast Asian nation. It got me thinking further on the subject and I believe that the behaviour of motorists, and of governments' attempts to control them, provides a useful reflection of the nature of a society.

The Vietnamese, as I mentioned, have achieved a state of almost perfect anarchy on their roads. They have few traffic lights and those they do have are largely ignored. Drivers also ignore the centre line, using the opposing lane whenever they feel the need to pass another vehicle, irrespective of whether there is on-coming traffic and assuming the vehicles on the other side of the road will move onto the shoulder to avoid a head-on collision. Motorbikes often travel completely on the wrong side of the road, edging along on the far edge past the opposing traffic. The sidewalks are not the exclusive preserve of pedestrians, with motorbikes and scooters also using the footpath to avoid the traffic on the road. And yet, somehow it all works. In two weeks in Vietnam we have yet to see a serious accident. In fact, we've see only a couple of minor scrapes, seemingly with no injuries. The traffic is constantly on the move, unhindered by the innumerable traffic lights that plague all Western cities, and there is more courtesy than I've ever seen on the roads back home.

Where are the traffic police in all this mayhem, you might ask? Well, their presence is obvious and they appear to be as numerous as in most Western nations, and in one respect at least, they mirror the main role of our own traffic police - collecting money. They only difference is, in Vietnam the money comes from instant fines collected as cash and it goes straight into the pockets of the policemen themselves. The locals joke (bitterly) about the typical policeman who has grown fat in a country of thin people.

In New Zealand our policemen are, for the most part, uncorrupt. But they are incredibly paternalistic and petty. Last Christmas, they attempted to introduce a zero tolerance for speeding, writing tickets for as little as one kilometre per hour over the speed limit. The normally submissive New Zealand public, which has sat idly by while the police have introduced thousands of speed cameras and breath-testing blitzes that stop ten of thousands of drivers with no reasonable cause (and usually with negligible results), finally stood up and objected to this increasing criminalisation of innocent people. Of course it is a nonsense to have less than a one km/hour speed tolerance as most motor vehicle speedometers are only accurate to within 2 - 3 km/hour. Eventually the police leadership backed down and restored a 5 km/hour tolerance.

It was great to see the New Zealand public showing the authorities we aren't as craven as we've appeared to be in recent years. We pride ourselves on having a can-do, individualistic streak, but that aspect of our character is all too rare these days. We have watched our civil liberties be eroded to the point where the government interferes in so many petty and unnecessary ways, not trusting us to take personal responsibility to go about any part of our business and personal lives freely and safely.

Aside from the corrupt policemen, Vietnam's traffic is an example of how freely-interacting individuals can form self-organising systems - in other words, it's like capitalism applied to the roads. Like the economy, the more governments try to impose order and controls, the worse the roading system seems to work. Let people organise themselves and you get optimal perforance and outcomes. Strange but true.

Monday, March 9, 2015

Communist Vietnam is more capitalist that the West

I am on holiday in Vietnam and yesterday went to Ho Chi Minh's tomb in Hanoi. The Vietnamese Communist regime has developed all the trappings of a Leninist persnality cult around their former leader, right down to his carefully preserved corpse on display in a glass sarcophagus in a monolithic tomb. But it is apparent that Ho Chi Minh was a modest man. Near to the tomb and the immense French-colonial Presidential Palace that his Party cadres wanted him to occupy, is Ho Chi Minh's house, a modest bungalow on stilts in the style of traditional houses of the Vietnamese Northwest. The house suggests a self-effacing man who wanted none of the trappings of leadership.

Today, Vietnam is like a mini-China. Still ruled by a Communist Party that does not tolerate direct political challenge, nevertheless it is in practice a booming, dynamic place that in many ways seems more free than New Zealand. It is in everything but name a capitalist society, where most urban people run small businesses and rural people private farms, and the state interferes little with their lives. There is no free health or education, other than for the families of Party apparatchiks and former soldiers, and no welfare system. Indeed, if the anarchy of the traffic on the streets of Hanoi is anything to go by, the Vietnamese state seems to consider its citizens are perfectly capable of managing their own lives and ordering their affairs with little help from the government.

Whenever I visit a place like Vietnam, it becomes apparent that the future belongs to the people in such booming, unconstrained economies. In the West, we have become profligate and coddled by our governments, with the result that are increasingly unable to compete. It started with manufacturing, initally of unsophisticated product such as toys and clothing, and more recently of electronics and other high-technology goods. In places like India and the Phillipines, they have moved on and now lead the world in services such as call centres and software development. The West still leads in the development of intellectual property-based services such as design and entertainment, but there is no reason to doubt the Chinese and Indians, and eventually, the Vietnamese, will crack those industries too.

It is ironic that we in the West like to style ourselves capitalist societies. There is no doubt that Communist Vietnam is more capitalist in pretty much every way than any Western economy. Perhaps the only advantage we have is our lack of corruption and our rule of law, but it is no coincidence that these are the areas to which Chinese president Xi Jinping has turned his attention. It is apparent from the palatial houses and flash cars in the area of Hanoi where government officials tend to live that Vietnam also has a long way to go in this regard. But my guess is that, like China, this will become a necessary focus of the Vietnamese leadership as they strive to deliver economic growth and a standard of living to match our own. 

In the race to economic superiority, I know who I would put my money on.