9 Comments
User's avatar
R. Charrington's avatar

Another good piece O'Brien. I hadn't thought of some of the parallels with today, but as is said .. if there's one thing we learn from history, it's that we struggle to learn from history.

Expand full comment
John Carter's avatar

Typo:

"rise of the Khmer Rouge is the illegal, and initially convert,"

Expand full comment
Winston Smith's avatar

Oh thanks - damn autocorrect very late at night I’d say! Thanks for noticing it!

Expand full comment
John Carter's avatar

Had a feeling you wrote that late - there were a bunch of other typos that I noticed after that ;)

Expand full comment
Winston Smith's avatar

Happy for anyone to point out typos - this stuff is squeezed in between day job demands and I'm not as careful as I should be.

Expand full comment
John Carter's avatar

An interesting symmetry between the Khmer Rouge Year Zero and the Current Year's Great Reset is that the former sought to empty the cities and starve urbanites to death working the rice fields, while the latter seeks to empty the countryside and herd the population into tenements where they can be slowly starved to death while being pacified in their VR pods.

Expand full comment
John's avatar

Thank you for illustrating the importance of history.

Will this generation's genocidal experimentation be known as the Oceania Rouge?

Expand full comment
pyrrhus's avatar

Excellent piece...In Cambodia now, they say that Pol Pot killed more than half the population..Note that Pol Pot had the full support of American academics and the UN until the very end, and the UN let him off the hook for his crimes...

Expand full comment
Winston Smith's avatar

Wow, half the population, that's truly insane! And the UN... injustice to the highest degree.

Expand full comment