On This Day in Paracultural History

[Mark Thibodeau]

On this day in the year 1622, the nations of Germany and Transylvania
ratify the Peace of Nikolsburg agreement. Contrary to some people's
assumptions, this document was signed by neither Hitler nor Dracula.

                                                               ***

Four year after their victory against the USA, Vietnam turned its military
attentions to Cambodia, where they captured the capital of Phnom Penh on
this day in 1979. In doing so, they toppled the short-lived but incredibly
brutal Khmer Rouge revolutionary regime led by the psychotic Saloth Sar,
better known by the pseudonym Pol Pot.

Born into wealth, Pot was educated in France, but spent most of his time
reading communist manifestos rather than studying his chosen field of radio
electronics. He flunked out and returned home, where he hooked up with
Cambodia's home-grown commies. Rising through the revolutionary ranks, he
eventually became enough of a pain-in-the-ass that the
American-backedSihanouk royal family chased him into the mountains. There,
he drew inspiration from the local tribesmen, whom he considered to be the
modern equivalent of Cambodia's original Khmer civilization.

In 1970, President Richard Nixon withdrew support for Sihanouk, installing
the right-wing military dictatorship of General Lon Nol. Nol's troops
fought both the Vietnamese troops who used Cambodia as a refuge from
American forces, and Pot's Khmer army. Around the same time, Nixon
illegally ordered a secret, massive bombing campaign against Cambodia,
killing hundreds of thousands and driving the nation towards starvation and
madness.

As Cambodia burned, Pol Pot's anti-Western vision started looking good to a
lot of people. When the U.S. withdrew from Southeast Asia, the Khmer Rouge
- aided by thousands of true-believing Vietnamese troops who now had
nothing better to do - rushed in to fill the void. Depending on your
political point of view, decades spent in the mountains under constant
attack had either driven Pot insane or sharpened his revolutionary resolve.
Determined that his new Kampuchean People's Republic would be a purely
agrarian, self-sufficient society, free from capitalism, Pot shut down all
schools and factories, abolished currency, forbid the use of technology,
and eliminated property rights.

To prevent ideological pollution from complicating (and thus corrupting)
his movement, Pot targeted intellectuals - which meant everyone from
university professors to people who could speak a foreign language - and
the cities, which Pot and his jungle-dwelling army despised above all else.
A mass evacuation of all cities immediately ordered. Between 1975 and 1978,
more than two million people died in what has come to be known as the
Killing Fields, where Cambodia's despised city-dwellers were either
murdered for fun or forced to work until they dropped dead. Millions more
toiled for years until the neighboring Vietnamese regime learned of the
insanity going on and invaded, sending Pot and his Khmer Rouge army running
back to the hills.

Much to the relief of surviving Cambodians, the Vietnamese established a
moderate communist government and provided protection from the Khmer Rouge,
who were now waging a low-intensity guerrilla war against the communist
forces with whom they had once been aligned. It was at this point that the
American government finally began supporting Pol Pot and his plucky band of
anti-communist mountain rebels.

                                         ***

And of course, on this day in 2015, Charlie Hebdo was the victim of an
Islamisist Terrorist Attack.
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