Today is Maundy Thursday, the day faithful Christians memorialize the several events surrounding Christ’s final Passover meal, which he observed in the company of his closest friends—well, in the company of mostly his closest friends. This evening initiates the Paschal Triduum, the three-day sequence commemorating the passion, crucifixion, death, burial, and resurrection. “Maundy” derives from the Latin mandatum, for mandate or commandment, commemorating, primarily, the “new command” that his disciples love one another as he has loved them. This and similar charges Jesus issues instructing his disciples to follow his example peppers this final evening. We see this when he washes his disciples’ feet and demands they do likewise, when he says he is about to go where they will later follow, when he says that whoever loves him will obey his commands, living as he has lived, and when he instructs that they are to eat the bread and drink the wine in remembrance of him.

The bread and the wine are an obvious point of focus. They are grim symbols for the blood and flesh split and spilt so that those who love him might be reconciled with God. This suggestion of a sacral dimension to death is nothing new. In God’s Gamble: The Gravitational Power of Crucified Love, Catholic writer Gil Baillie points to the ancient origins of ritual victim sacrifice for the sake of the common good. Such sacred violence usually followed a corresponding pair of gestures. First, someone somewhere reached out to acquire some good thing. Someone else saw this acquisitive gesture and was struck with envy, a sudden desire for the very thing the other desired. Human beings do this all the time. Baillie asks us to imagine a child alone in a room full of toys. Choosing among the various things, he begins to play with a stuffed bunny. Soon after, another child enters the room. Looking around for something to play with, he notices what the first child has. Of all the available toys, which one, Baillie invites us to guess, is the new arrival going to want to play with? Now let’s imagine the new boy, being decent, doesn’t just walk right over and try and take the bunny. Instead, he feigns interest in something else, but keeps a watchful eye out on the boy and the bunny. Eventually, having grown bored with it, the first child sets the bunny aside and reaches for something else. The second one now moves in and snatches up the much-desired bunny. What does the first child do in response? It’s not at all unlikely that he will demand it back, insisting he had it first. Such rivaling desires, if left unconstrained, can can boil over into real conflict. As Virgil instructs Dante:

For when your longings center on things such
that sharing them apportions less to each,
then envy stirs the bellows of your sighs.

We mustn’t think this is simply child’s play. The behavior is no different at the societal level. As two rival wills vie for a given thing—be it material or immaterial—other observers will themselves be drawn in, suddenly infatuated with something they might never have previously even thought to want. Eventually, the competition itself takes over and the desired thing, long forgotten, gives way to an undifferentiated brawl over nothing.

Because this mimetic dynamic is true across civilizations, human beings long ago recognized that cultural procedures had to be adopted in order to attend to these conflicting passions lest everything dissolves into a war of all against all. Social cohesion—community survival—depends on the discovery of a release valve. It’s at this point that a second gesture is made—an accusatory one. Someone, or some group, is accused of being responsible for catalyzing all the conflict and they are offered up as a scapegoat. The accusatory motion made, it is seconded, and the affirmations continue until there is found the stability of a near-consensus—as Baillie puts it, a unanimity minus one. The victim’ or victims’ fate thus sealed, the violence that follows—the extirpation of the guilty—is cathartic. The communal crisis is averted. Civilization has bought itself more time. Until the cycle percolates afresh and a new scapegoat is required.

Contrary to what some might suggest, such pageants of ritualized violence are not limited to that age when all the nations had multiple gods, even if I—and Neil Gaiman—might suppose it’s an open question whether that age ever really ended. A Joshua Mitchell Providence essay written in the midst of 2020’s summer race riots explores the American admixture of pagan and Christian logic. Americans, he rightly asserts, are torn between competing understandings of justice. Do we regress to pagan conceptions of justice and their demands for blood retribution through carefully prescribed modes of choreographed catharsis; or do we reinvest in an idea of justice grounded in a Christian conception of persons, which recognizes that justice requires something more than cathartic rage, however efficacious—or titillating—the rage might be in the moment?

This desire for justice is deeply human, and the character of justice is such that even that desire for that kind of justice that can only come through violence—or better, force-—is not necessarily misplaced. One component of justice, including retributive, is the proper obligation to give to each their due. Holding one another to account is to honor each other as agential beings and to acknowledge that our choices matter. Pronouncements of guilt can be a grace—articulating aloud the perception that the alleged guilty-party has erred. If the judgment is true, it might work in the heart of the accused, forcing them to confront what they have done and possibly bringing them to repentance. Such justice also acknowledges the victim. To requite injustice is one mode of vindicating its victims—including both the direct victim and those who suffer alongside the victim. The administration of justice is not often a simple procedure. Mitigating circumstances matter, including the marbling of one’s personal history—much of which is not always their fault—and their will and the effect each then play in affecting what they do. A part of what might be due to one another, then, is mercy; the application of which is no less complex than that of justice itself. Especially because mercy always costs someone something—and it’s a very hard thing when this cost, or a portion of it, is expected to be borne by the victim.

This yearning for justice is beautifully—if tragically—illustrated in Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express. A little girl has been kidnapped and murdered and the human monster that did it has gotten away with the crime. Until now. He is tracked down by an assembly of the little girl’s loved ones—family members, friends, and other relations whose lives were in various and terrible ways, direct and indirect, disfigured by the murder. They successfully execute a meticulously orchestrated plan to kill the murderer and avenge the child. Judging whether their act is murderous bloodlust or justice is a part of the film’s preoccupation. Also in play is the correlation of the murderer’s killing with ritualized violence. Twelve of the little girl’s loved ones take part in the murderer’s execution—it’s no coincidence they’re numbered like a jury. They each take turns stabbing him. The scene is extraordinarily rendered and its careful choreography brings to mind the Great Sacrament. The killers share the same knife, stabbing their monstrous victim and passing the weapon between them, one by one. It is—to my mind clearly—a eucharistic image. As each delivers their individual strike, plunging the knife into the soft body of the accused, many of their faces are transfigured: evident grief is at once both amplified and joined by expressions of triumph, rage, and even ecstasy. In a word, they’re experiencing catharsis. It is, of course, deeply flawed; they are broken people struggling for justice in broken ways.

The eucharistic imagery is confirmed the next time we see the twelve all assembled together again. In the climatic scene, where the great detective Hercules Poirot will pass judgment, they are all sitting together at a single table, arranged in such a way as to unmistakably evoke Leonardo’s Last Supper. It’s jolting. You don’t even have to take my word for the connection, for it turns out that Branagh confesses to it in the director’s commentary accompanying the Blu-ray disc. He had seen the painting on a recent trip and thought it would fit for the story he was telling. The tragedy of the whole affair is that the retribution is freshly accomplished and yet, already, the twelve recognize its terrible imperfection. Human justice is only ever a feeble shadow of Divine Justice. It is only ever approximate. And, like mercy, it too sometimes has costs borne by the victims.

This cost is perhaps partly what is at play in King David’s dashed hope of building the Temple. 1^st Chronicles tells us that David is refused the privilege of constructing a Temple for the Lord because he is a man who has shed much blood and fought many wars. Instead, his son Solomon, who will be a man of peace, will build it in his stead. This seems terribly unfair. For starters, most of the blood that David has shed has been done in God’s service, fighting wars God had him fight. Moreover, the peace his son enjoyed was the fruit of those wars. Even more, much of the material—the gold, silver, bronze, timber, and rock—that will be used to construct the Temple include the loot and bounty of warfare. What gives? The book of Numbers tells us that a soldier who has shed blood must stay outside the camp for seven days. But this does not mean the soldier is guilty of some moral offense—for even a menstruating woman is barred from the camp. It only means that the solider—and the bleeding woman—are, in some seemingly opaque ways, having touched death, not presently fit for community life. Is this the judgment on David? The violence that David deployed, the blood he shed, carried a cost—even if it was morally right to do it.

My own work on moral injury, especially through conversations with warfighters, tells me enough to know that killing—even a morally justified kill—leaves an indelible mark. As the eponymous gunfighter puts it in Shane—and as taken up in its successor Western Logan, “There’s no going back from the killing. Right or wrong, it’s a brand, and the brand sticks.” Keeping to cinematic and literary allusions, one thinks here of Frodo at the Grey Havens. “I tried to save the Shire,” he says to Samwise. “And it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so Sam, when things are in danger someone has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.”

The just war tradition accepts this. Never feigning to be a source of moral catharsis or perfect justice, and while deeply Hebraic, it is not a religious scheme for utilizing violence to save the world or purge it of guilt. It is simply a mechanism to prompt and limit force to bring about approximations of justice that, however partial and imperfect, are, in the face of sufficiently grave evil, the only thing with a realistic chance at keeping the beasts at bay and setting up the conditions that make peaceable life possible.

We see in the ritual of the crucifixion the same human exertions to harness violence as time-proved means to purge guilt. But, this time, the scapegoat mechanism—curiously modifying the description it mirrors found in Leviticus 16—does not work. Jesus threw a stick in the spokes of the sacrificial system. Now, the truth about the scapegoating mechanism—about sacrifice and sacred violence—is revealed. Christ as scapegoat was supposed to rid the community of its sin but, instead, it made their sin more clear to them. And now they knew they needed another way to deal with it. The ritual failed to eventuate in the required catharsis, for the death of the utterly innocent victim is proved a false and debilitating remedy. The onlookers stumbled away beating their breasts. This was not an act of contrition, but a recognition of their utter failure and subsequent hopelessness. Never again would a scapegoat effectively mollify the longing for absolution.  

When Jesus takes up the cup and the bread and passes them along the table, he institutes the first eucharist. No one else knows it yet. But they register the new commands—that they too are to love one another as he has loved them, that they are to wash one another’s feet as he has done. The human tendency to mirror and model our behavior off another’s, our appetitive drive to long for what others long for so that envy turns to conflict is, in this moment, given its true purpose. We were made to imitate Christ. We were made to be Sons and Daughters of God—to be perfect as He is perfect.

As Virgil says to Dante in the lines immediately following the quote further above:

But if the love within the Highest Sphere
should turn your longings heavenward, the fear
inhabiting your breast would disappear;
For there, the more there are who would say “ours,”
so much the greater is the good possessed by each

This longing to imitate, the imitatio christi reveals, is not, when properly manifest, a diminution of human freedom, but its fulfillment. To return again to Baillie, human flourishing finds its objective measure in “how well we have replicated in our lives the pattern, the Logos.” Our efforts to do so yields the intrinsic meaning of our existence. Golgotha is God’s final appeal. There Christ makes his final case for love, forgiveness, and mercy.

It is just and mete for ecumenical purposes, if no other, to understand the Christian faith as a religion of the Book. But Christianity is not ultimately a set of rules, ideas, or doctrines. Christianity is about a Person, three-tiered, and the yearning humanity has to commune—to be in communion—with that three-tiered Person. Again, the eucharistic imagery abounds.

The wine and the bread—the blood and the flesh—of the Last Supper, and the consequent events of the unfolding Triduum which follows from it, reveal that violence has a necessary place in a world in which we long for peace but in which the enemies of peace have not surrendered their say. This is not to make holy war out of just war. Human warfare has nothing directly to do with reconciling sinners to God, or promoting faith. Nor does the just warrior suggest that he stands opposed to his enemy as the simply righteous against the simply unrighteous. But it is to suggest that works of justice and mercy always share a similar and terrible moral logic. Included among the characteristics that follow is that violence must only ever be deployed with the intention of winning peace—or its partial approximation in limited circumstances. Retribution, protection, the vindication of victims, reconciliation with the enemy, are all component parts of this approximation and have a role to play. Peace, therefore, mustn’t be understood as a virtue, per se. It is the fruit of virtue.

Meanwhile, the love that we are, ourselves, supposed to mimic to one another is the love of a man who we have seen—all week—is a man of peace but no pacifist. In a world in which some neighbors are hell-bent on devouring other neighbors, it ought to be those nourished in the Hebraic tradition who are the first to stand between the aggressor and the aggressed—even if, in the last resort, violence must be deployed to both resist and to rescue. War and violence and harsh justice must sometimes be. But only for the sake of love and the goal of peace that grows from justice and of setting up the conditions that give these great goods a chance to flourish—or at least a sufficient approximation.

Keeping faith with Christ in this effort, however modest, is our only business. The rest is not up to us.  

Fifty years ago today, the Khmer Rouge took power in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh. Instead of rebuilding the country after a destructive US bombing campaign, Pol Pot’s movement plunged it into one of the last century’s most horrifying catastrophes.

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April 1975 was a pivotal moment in global revolutionary history. In the space of two weeks, communist forces changed the map of Southeast Asia and sent shockwaves around the world.

After the dramatic fall of the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge and the capture of Saigon by North Vietnamese forces, the Second Indochina War (1955–75) ended with Communist parties claiming victory. By the end of the year, Laotian communists had peacefully occupied Vientiane and avowedly Marxist regimes now controlled all of France’s former Indochinese colonies.

The events of this month constituted the single greatest setback to Washington’s Cold War effort. The inability of the US empire to protect its anti-Communist client states was profoundly embarrassing. Domestically, this shame would feed the conservative reaction of the Ronald Reagan era. Internationally, the United States devised a new set of tactics, including what it called “low-intensity conflicts” and a robust program of covert actions.

For the international left, April 1975 was a moment of relief and cautious optimism, with widespread hopes that these new revolutionary regimes would establish peace and socially just societies. This optimism soon collapsed in the face of a horrific spasm of violence and suffering.

The international right would use the catastrophe of Khmer Rouge rule as an anti-Communist trump card — even though, in a breathtaking twist of Cold War realpolitik, the Reagan administration ended up supporting Pol Pot’s movement against Vietnam. April 17 should be remembered as a disastrous moment in the world history of revolutions.

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Origins of the Khmer Rouge

When the Khmer Rouge, secretly led by Pol Pot, seized Phnom Penh, it effectively ended the first Cambodian Civil War (1967–75). Ironically, it was French colonial rule that had introduced Marxism to Cambodia. During the 1950s, a handful of elite Cambodian students received scholarships to study in France. These young Khmer students encountered postwar Paris at the height of the popularity of the French Communist Party (PCF).

Khieu Samphan earned his doctorate in economics at the Sorbonne with a dissertation that theorized an independent and self-reliant Cambodia. Also at the Sorbonne, Hou Yuon’s dissertation, The Cambodian Peasants and Their Prospects for Modernization, argued that urbanization and industrialization were not necessary for Cambodian development. Two students, Ieng Sary and Khieu Thirith, fell in love and married in Paris. The bride, a Shakespeare scholar, was the first Khmer to earn a degree in English literature.

Saloth Sar, the man who would later become known to the world as Pol Pot, was in Paris from 1949 to 1953 to study radio-frequency engineering. A poor student who was often homesick, he joined other Khmer students in an underground Marxist reading group and then entered the PCF. A loyal Stalinist, Maurice Thorez, ran the party with a firm hand during a period when it received more than one-quarter of the national vote, more than any other French political force in the immediate postwar years.

If Saloth Sar had difficulty understanding the details of Marxist theory, he appreciated Thorez’s strict discipline. He was also inspired by Mao Zedong’s surprising success in the Chinese Civil War and the possibilities of adapting Marxism to the material conditions of rural Asia. Upon his return to Phnom Penh, he joined the Communist Party of Kampuchea.

The Cambodian ruler Norodom Sihanouk began referring to his country’s communists as the Khmer Rouge (“Red Khmer”), and the name stuck. By the early 1960s, Sar had adopted the nom de guerre “Pol Pot” and he became the party’s general secretary. He and his fellow students from Paris worked to push an older generation of leaders out of the party and soon dominated the Khmer Rouge leadership.

The small party had difficulties making inroads into Khmer society and faced violent repression from the charismatic Prince Sihanouk’s government. In 1963, Pol Pot led a small group of loyal comrades into the mountainous rainforests of northeastern Cambodia, far from the lively capital city. Following Mao’s example, they set about recruiting the rural peasantry into the revolutionary cause. Their rhetoric became increasingly anti-urban, arguing that the wealthier city dwellers were not only class enemies but also inauthentically Khmer.

When a local revolt against the government broke out in 1967, an opportunistic faction of the Khmer Rouge tried to turn it into a wider revolutionary movement. Sihanouk’s prime minister and former minister of defense, General Lon Nol, savagely cracked down on the revolt with summary executions, the burning of villages, and an alleged bounty for severed heads (there were reports of truckloads of grisly war trophies bound for Phnom Penh).

In the ensuing cycle of chaotic violence, some villagers fled into the jungles and joined the rebels. The government’s heavy-handed tactics served as a recruiting tool for the Khmer Rouge. In 1970, Lon Nol launched a coup against Prince Sihanouk, who Cambodian right-wingers viewed as being too tolerant of the Communists. Lon Nol’s regime immediately increased the violence against the Khmer Rouge but also massacred ethnic Vietnamese in genocidal pogroms.

To make matters worse, the US war in Vietnam began to spill over the border. In 1969, the Nixon administration secretly and illegally bombed significant portions of Cambodia and briefly launched a ground invasion of the country in 1970 in a quixotic campaign to break the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

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The Road to Power

As the civil war between Lon Nol and the Khmer Rouge intensified, Washington expanded the bombing to support the anti-Communist strongman. The bombing successfully prevented the encirclement of the capital but inflicted massive collateral damage with perhaps 300,000 deaths. With their villages destroyed, hundreds of thousands of traumatized peasants fled to the safety of the capital city. Soon Phnom Penh was overwhelmed with refugees as close to a third of the nation’s population was displaced in this sideshow of the Second Indochina War.

The American bombing served as excellent propaganda for the Khmer Rouge. Within a few years, the ragtag group of outcasts led by French-educated intellectuals had become a popular revolutionary movement that controlled 85 percent of Cambodia by early 1973.

With strict attention to discipline, ideological purity, and secrecy, the party, which referred to itself simply as Angkar (“the organization”), enacted its revolution in the areas it controlled. The Khmer Rouge reorganized villages into collective farms, abolished private property, and forced the population to wear dyed black clothes accessorized with a krama, a traditional scarf.

Observers frequently characterized the Khmer Rouge revolution as an extreme interpretation of Marxist-Leninist ideology that sought to create an agrarian utopia, free from the influences of capitalism and Western imperialism. Anti-communist scholarship drew a straight line from Vladimir Lenin to Joseph Stalin to Mao to Pol Pot, presenting these regimes as the logical evolution of revolutionary violence.

However, overly simplistic Cold War analyses failed to explain why the party was able to win the support of the peasantry. While the alliance of convenience between the party and the deposed Prince Sihanouk undeniably helped attract a pious rural population that revered the Buddhist monarch, the appeal of Khmer Rouge ideology and praxis should not be dismissed. Following a Maoist strategy, the Khmer Rouge lived among marginalized rural communities, shared in their poverty, and acknowledged their increasingly dire conditions.

The 1960s saw the development of increasingly burdensome taxes, government corruption, and radical disparities in wealth. The Khmer Rouge was the only institution that spoke to and for the rural poor, thus winning their support. When the violence started in 1967, the party again showed that it was on the side of the peasantry, not the urban elite. In contrast to the indiscriminate counterinsurgency tactics of the government based in Phnom Penh, the party sought to fight a Maoist people’s war.

The party persuaded many of its peasant supporters that the city dwellers were their enemies. Unlike the rural “base people,” the corrupt and decadent “new people” were insufficiently Khmer. As Yale historian Ben Kiernan has argued, the Khmer Rouge revolution was a nationalist or even racial one that stigmatized city dwellers as aliens who had been tainted by the influence of the Vietnamese, the French, and the Americans. The horrors of the US bombing campaigns offered real-world evidence to back up theoretical critiques of Western imperialism.

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After the Fall

The April 17 fall of Phnom Penh came after months of intense fighting and strategic maneuvers. The Khmer Rouge systematically cut off supply routes, isolating the city and making it increasingly dependent on aerial resupply. As the situation grew dire, the United States evacuated its nationals and a handful of allied Cambodians, leaving the city to its fate.

The Khmer Republic government attempted to relocate and continue resistance, but those efforts were futile. By the end of April 17, the Khmer Rouge had overrun the last defenses and occupied the capital.

As the insurgents entered Phnom Penh, many of its residents felt a sense of relief. They hoped that the awful civil war was finally over and were curious to see what the mysterious Khmer Rouge looked like. Yet chaos soon spread. Fearful of reprisals, Lon Nol’s troops shed their uniforms and tried to blend in with the civilians.

The city’s streets quickly filled with guerrilla fighters. Young peasant boys dressed in black with red scarves wrapped around their necks, heads full of Khmer Rouge propaganda, and crude revolutionary slogans on their lips waved their AK-47s, pistols, and grenade launchers, both to celebrate their victory and to intimidate the conquered city.

The occupiers announced that as the Americans were about to bomb the city, which had swollen to perhaps as many as two million people, everyone had to immediately evacuate Phnom Penh. This was a ruse. In the space of a couple of days, the once-bustling capital was depopulated and then lightly repopulated by Khmer Rouge officials. For the next three and a half years, the city’s population only numbered in the tens of thousands.

The evacuation of Phnom Penh enabled the Khmer Rouge to identify and target their perceived enemies — the “new people.” Government officials, military officers, regular soldiers, and anyone suspected of being part of the educated or wealthy elite were seized. Executions began immediately.

Victims were taken behind bushes or into bamboo thickets and murdered, marking the beginning of what would become known as the infamous “killing fields.” Chaos spread as refugees fled the capital, uncertain of where to go. Intimidated by the young, black-clad Khmer Rouge soldiers shouting orders, most followed instructions out of fear.

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Killing Fields

The nature of life under Khmer Rouge rule varied, though conditions were harsh everywhere. Some areas were quieter and less violent, but survival often depended on luck as much as strategy. While there was no organized resistance movement, there were individual acts of defiance as well as small groups of people who hid in the remote hills, quietly raiding communal villages at night.

Some former residents of Phnom Penh wandered from village to village in search of food and shelter. Others were forcibly marched to rural labor camps. Across the countryside, the Khmer Rouge established thousands of communal villages as part of their radical agrarian communist project.

Private property was abolished. Citizens were forced to wear dark clothing and eat in communal halls. Confused and disoriented, Cambodians were subjected to mandatory political indoctrination, chanting slogans in praise of Angkar, the shadowy leadership of the regime. Pol Pot did not reveal himself to be the leader — “Brother Number One” — until 1977.

Those labeled “new people,” or “April 17th people,” suffered the most. Many were worked to death. While some families remained together, others were separated and placed in communal barracks. Children were especially targeted as the Khmer Rouge attempted to sever family bonds and recruit child soldiers. Young women found themselves forced into marriages with complete strangers.

Angkar cadres ordered people into agricultural labor or large-scale construction projects. With a lack of engineering or planning expertise, mismanagement led to economic collapse, and hundreds of thousands died from malnutrition and disease. Medical care was primitive and often had the effect of worsening the condition of patients. The Khmer Rouge deserve their reputation for revolutionary violence, but the vast majority of the estimated 1,700,000 deaths were victims of their shocking incompetence as rulers.

The Khmer Rouge fused a superficial command of Marxism with an intense, xenophobic nationalism. Despite earlier cooperation with Vietnamese communists, they turned violently against both ethnic Vietnamese in Cambodia and the newly unified Vietnamese state. Massacres of ethnic Vietnamese had begun under Lon Nol’s regime, but under the Khmer Rouge, they escalated dramatically.

The Muslim Cham minority was also subjected to brutal repression. These campaigns of ethnic cleansing constituted clear acts of genocide (revolutionary violence against ethnic Khmer was a politicide and thus not covered by the United Nations definition of genocide). The Khmer Rouge leadership envisioned a revival of the ancient Khmer Empire, and as part of this vision, they launched reckless cross-border raids into Vietnam’s Mekong Delta — territory that had been Vietnamese for centuries.

Paranoia consumed the Khmer Rouge leadership. While the “new people” remained primary targets, no one was safe, and summary executions became routine. Lacking ammunition, executioners often used farm tools or suffocated victims with plastic bags.

Internal purges proliferated. Power struggles among party leaders led to conspiracies, betrayals, and mass killings. In Phnom Penh, a former high school was converted into the notorious S-21 prison (Tuol Sleng), where approximately 15,000 people — mostly Khmer Rouge members — were tortured, coerced into absurd confessions, and executed at the Choeung Ek killing fields.

As the regime’s grip on power weakened, irrational violence and mass arrests intensified. Party officials claimed to have uncovered elaborate plots involving supposed collaborations between the CIA, the KGB, Vietnamese agents, and Khmer counterrevolutionaries. The S-21 archives are filled with these fabricated confessions.

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Downfall

With the revolution descending into madness, some Khmer Rouge members near the Vietnamese border fled the regime. One of them was Hun Sen, a battalion commander who had joined the Khmer Rouge in 1970. In 1977, fearing for his life, he led a small group into Vietnam and urged the Vietnamese government to intervene.

In response to ongoing border attacks and the genocide of ethnic Vietnamese, Vietnam launched a massive invasion of Cambodia on December 25, 1978, starting the Third Indochina War (1978–91), a conflict among Communist states in which the Soviet Union supported Vietnam against the Chinese-backed Khmer Rouge. Hun Sen led a small contingent of ethnic Cambodian forces alongside 150,000 Vietnamese troops. Within days, eastern Cambodia had fallen and the Khmer Rouge leadership ordered another evacuation of Phnom Penh.

On January 7, 1979, Vietnamese forces entered the capital and uncovered evidence of the Khmer Rouge’s atrocities. They quickly publicized the genocide and converted Tuol Sleng into a museum and Choeung Ek into a memorial site. The Vietnamese installed the People’s Republic of Kampuchea as a replacement regime, led by Khmer Rouge defectors.

However, the Khmer Rouge retreated into western Cambodia where they regrouped and rebranded themselves as a national resistance movement against a foreign occupier. They forged alliances with other anti-Vietnamese groups and went on to wage a civil war for over a decade. In a cynical twist of fate, the People’s Republic of China invaded northern Vietnam to punish Hanoi’s attack on their Khmer Rouge vassals.

Western leftists, such as Southeast Asia scholar Benedict Anderson, were appalled by the war among socialist states, inspiring Anderson to write his celebrated book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism in 1983. Ironically, the United States supported the Khmer Rouge as part of a proxy war strategy against Vietnam and the USSR.

The Third Indochina War officially came to an end after the collapse of the Soviet Union, leaving hundreds of thousands of dead Cambodians and abandoned land mines maiming and killing others for decades. Yet remnants of the Khmer Rouge survived well into the 1990s. In 1998, Hun Sen’s “win-win” policy offered amnesty to thousands of troops and cadres. As they began to defect, the increasingly isolated leadership turned on itself. Pol Pot died in his sleep on April 15, just two days shy of the twenty-third anniversary of seizing the capital.

Since the party and the revolution did enjoy popular support for many years, it has been politically complicated for Cambodia’s latter-day rulers to vilify the entire movement. It is telling that in the end, the UN-sponsored Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia only brought charges of genocide and crimes against humanity against half a dozen Khmer Rouge leaders, several of whom were alumni of the Parisian overseas study program.

While April 30 is a day of nationalist celebration in Vietnam with massive military parades, this year, April 17 will not be marked by any significant official or informal events in Phnom Penh. This is not surprising, as Cambodia has had difficulty coming to terms with the history of the Khmer Rouge. In the interests of rebuilding the nation, silence and ambiguity have been more common than truth and reconciliation.

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An anti-union trade association is urging the US attorney general to invalidate 15 previously decided NLRB cases. The group argues the AG can and should declare that certain board precedent is no longer binding, an unprecedented and illegal move.

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On April 3, 2025, the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace (CDW), an anti-union trade association, sent Attorney General Pam Bondi a letter urging her to invalidate fifteen National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) cases that were decided during the Biden administration.

It is common for the NLRB to reverse some of its precedent whenever control of the presidency changes from one party to the other. The way this has always worked is that the general counsel brings a case through the NLRB adjudicative process and then the board uses the case to announce that they are establishing a new rule on a particular point of law.

The letter from CDW seizes upon Executive Order No. 14215 and President Donald Trump’s full embrace of the conservative unitary executive theory to argue that AG Bondi can and should just declare that certain NLRB precedent is no longer binding.

This sort of thing has never happened before. The NLRB is an independent agency, and the attorney general has no statutory role in how it operates. Such a move by the AG would be illegal under prevailing understandings of administrative law, but of course Trump and the conservative legal movement are seeking to have the Supreme Court invalidate a large swath of administrative law on the theory that it unconstitutionally restricts the power of the president.

The Economic Policy Institute has a piece about the letter, written by former NLRB member Lauren McFerran and AFL-CIO general counsel Lynn Rhinehart, explaining how unusual such a move would be. The CDW letter and a summary of it can be found here.

This letter from the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace (dated April 3, 2025) urges Attorney General Pam Bondi to direct the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to no longer treat certain Biden-era board decisions as binding precedent. The letter argues that under Executive Order No. 14215, the attorney general has authority to reject these decisions and require the NLRB to align with her interpretations of the law. The coalition contends that the NLRB has no legal obligation to treat any adjudication decision as binding precedent and can simply announce it will no longer follow certain legal interpretations. The letter claims these Biden-era decisions are unconstitutional, inconsistent with governing statutes, and/or poorly reasoned.

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Cases the Coalition Urges Bondi to Invalidate

1. Amazon.com Services, LLC, 373 NLRB No. 136 (2024): The board overruled Babcock & Wilcox and held that employers violate Section 8(a)(1) when they compel employees to attend anti-union captive-audience meetings under threat of discipline or discharge.
2. Siren Retail Corp. d/b/a Starbucks, 373 NLRB No. 135 (2024): The board overruled Tri-Cast, Inc. and held that employer campaign statements about the loss of individualized grievance rights due to unionization must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis under Gissel, rejecting the prior categorical rule permitting such statements.
3. Home Depot USA, Inc., 373 NLRB No. 25 (2024): The board held that an employer violated Section 8(a)(1) by prohibiting an employee from wearing “BLM” on their required work apron, finding such expression part of protected concerted activity related to opposing racial discrimination in the workplace.
4. Thryv, Inc., 372 NLRB No. 22 (2022): The board ruled employers are liable for direct and foreseeable financial harms flowing from unfair labor practices.
5. Lion Elastomers, 372 NLRB No. 83 (2023): The board overruled General Motors and reinstated setting-specific standards like Atlantic Steel to determine whether employee misconduct during protected activity loses the National Labor Relations Act’s protection, rejecting the uniform Wright Line standard for such cases.
6. Miller Plastic Products, Inc., 372 NLRB No. 134 (2023): The board overruled Alstate Maintenance and clarified that individual employee complaints can constitute concerted activity under Meyers II when they are made in a context suggesting group concern, reaffirming a broader interpretation of Section 7 protection.
7. McLaren Macomb, 372 NLRB No. 58 (2023): The board overruled Baylor University Medical Center and IGT, holding that offering severance agreements with broad confidentiality and nondisparagement clauses unlawfully interferes with employees’ Section 7 rights.
8. Endurance Environmental Solutions, LLC, 373 NLRB No. 141 (2024): The board overruled MV Transportation and reinstated the “clear and unmistakable waiver” standard, requiring explicit contractual language before finding that a union waived its right to bargain over mandatory subjects.
9. Metro Health Inc. d/b/a Hospital Metropolitano Rio Piedras, 373 NLRB No. 89 (2024): The board overruled UPMC and eliminated the practice of approving “consent orders” over the objection of the general counsel and charging party, holding that such orders are inconsistent with the board’s rules and statutory framework.
10. American Federation for Children, Inc., 372 NLRB No. 137 (2023): The board overruled Amnesty International and held that advocacy by employees on behalf of coworkers — including those with uncertain immigration status — constitutes protected concerted activity for mutual aid or protection, even if the person aided is not currently a statutory employee.
11. Cemex Construction Materials Pacific, LLC, 372 NLRB No. 130 (2023): The board overruled Linden Lumber and revived aspects of the Joy Silk doctrine, holding that an employer must either recognize a union that presents evidence of majority support or promptly file a Representation Management (RM) petition, and that a subsequent unfair labor practice can justify a bargaining order without requiring a new election.
12. Stericycle, Inc., 372 NLRB No. 113 (2023): The board made workplace rules presumptively unlawful if they could be interpreted to limit employee rights based on a “reasonable employee” standard.
13. The Atlanta Opera, Inc., 372 NLRB No. 95 (2023): The board overruled SuperShuttle DFW and reinstated the FedEx Home Delivery (FedEx II) standard, reaffirming that independent contractor status must be determined by a holistic application of common-law agency factors without elevating entrepreneurial opportunity above all else.
14. Tesla, Inc., 371 NLRB No. 131 (2022): The Board overruled Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., reaffirming that any employer interference with employees’ display of union insignia is presumptively unlawful and must be justified by “special circumstances” under Republic Aviation.
15. American Steel Construction, Inc., 372 NLRB No. 23 (2022): The board overruled PCC Structurals and reinstated Specialty Healthcare, restoring the “overwhelming community of interest” standard for assessing whether excluded employees must be included in a petitioned-for bargaining unit.

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Elon Musk’s cuts may have “saved” the public less than half a percent of the national debt, but they are already making Americans poorer and sicker and forcing them to spend hours waiting on phone help lines.

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$150 billion: that’s the grand total of savings Elon Musk revealed last Thursday that he and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team are expecting to make after months of ruthless and often mindless cuts from a government the billionaire Trump megadonor claimed was riddled with fraud, waste, and graft.

To call this a monumentally unimpressive number doesn’t do it justice. Musk’s “savings” here — which are already error-ridden and inflated in the first place, created by totaling up spending that never actually existed or that was, alternately, either already cut or never actually was — represent just 15 percent of the trillion dollars he originally promised he would slash. It’s a mere one-fiftieth of what the federal government spent just last year alone, would shave off only one-tenth of one year’s worth of the average federal deficit over the past decade, and is a whopping less than half a percent of the overall $36.21 trillion of US national debt.

In fact, government spending so far under Donald Trump has actually gone up compared to the last two years under Joe Biden. Three months of Musk feeding the US government through a woodchipper has done less than nothing about the ostensible problem it was meant to solve.

That doesn’t mean it hasn’t had an impact though. The miniscule amount that Musk claims to have “saved” American taxpayers has proven incredibly destructive to the functioning of the US government and to the essential services millions of Americans depend on, including:

• More than 216,000 workers pushed out of their jobs.
• Major downsizing of the agency responsible for ensuring air travel is safe, in the middle of a spate of deadly plane crashes.
• The agency responsible for ensuring trillions of dollars of Social Security payments that keep the elderly and disabled out of poverty turned into a dysfunctional mess.
• National parks forced to close for more days, visitor centers and facilities permanently shuttered, and critical projects within them delayed under sudden understaffing.
• Programs that helped disabled Americans get the care, legal protections, and services they need to live their lives gutted.
• The country’s chief watchdog for predatory white-collar crime eviscerated.
• Huge planned cuts to the US Postal Service that is often the only affordable and reliable provider of mail for rural areas, which will see its workforce culled and offices closed.
• Cybersecurity drastically undermined for the most sensitive private data of millions of veterans, some of them high-ranking US military officials.
• The vital work of making sure food, medicine, and medical devices are safe; of tracking and treating diseases and other health issues; and funding scientific research all delayed, made ineffective, or simply eliminated by mass firings and contract cancellations.
• Longer phone wait times, less incoming tax revenue, and future tax-filing chaos after a quarter of the Internal Revenue Service’s staff is set to be laid off.
• People effectively sentenced to death after funding for global HIV prevention programs was ended.
• Programs for helping poor households afford to heat and repair their homes and improve children’s literacy ended.
• Agencies devoted to enforcing worker protection laws, ensuring miners’ health and safety, and identifying workplace safety problems made impotent.
• A planned mass deregulation effort that will see federal rules for everything from the number of staff caring for elderly people in nursing homes to protecting workers from ingesting harmful chemicals rolled back or simply unenforced.

Bear in mind, this is an incomplete list. We haven’t even gotten to the DOGE cuts that eliminated the federal workers scrutinizing multiple of Musk’s experimental products for safety issues, or the cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency and the firing of Department of Energy workers whose job it is to ensure the safe handling of nuclear materials, including warheads.

All of this will make almost every American’s life worse. It will make them poorer, sicker, have to spend more time on the phone trying to get help, and more unemployed, prone to injury, and at risk of identity theft and fraud.

Most absurd, all of it will happen for the sake of making a nearly nonexistent dent in government spending and national debt. In fact, the paltry sum Musk has saved will almost entirely be negated by next year’s military budget alone, which Trump wants to total $1 trillion, a little over $100 billion more than the budget that Congress passed for this year. Musk will have effectively crippled the modern American state and ripped vital services away from ordinary Americans in order to pay for more waste at the Pentagon — an upward transfer of wealth, in other words, to rapacious military contractors who price gouge the US military and make weapons systems that don’t work.

“Perverse” hardly seems to cover it. But that’s because this has little to do with saving taxpayer money or rooting out waste and is instead all about an obsession with shrinking the government and selling its functions off to the highest private bidder.

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Marxist scholar Michael Löwy, responding to Samuel Farber’s “In Defense of Progress” from the new issue of Jacobin, defends philosopher Walter Benjamin and argues that “progress,” as defined under capitalism, has come to threaten humanity’s very survival.

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Samuel Farber’s article “In Defense of Progress” is very sensible and rational. We agree on many points, but I have some important disagreements. I’ll try to present them briefly.

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Walter Benjamin

Is Walter Benjamin, like other Western Marxists, really a thinker who tried to “shy away from politics” as Farber claims? Many criticisms can be leveled at Benjamin, but I find it difficult to deny the political character of his writings. It’s true that he didn’t belong to any political party, but that doesn’t mean he shied away from politics. Karl Marx, in the years he was writing Capital, didn’t belong to any party. Does that mean he wasn’t at that time a political thinker?

According to Farber, Benjamin “conceived of revolution as a sudden cataclysmic, messianic event that would put the brakes on the ‘locomotives of world history,’ avoiding new disasters rather than opening up a brighter future.” Yet Benjamin’s notion is defined by a dialectical vision that unifies these two aspects: avoiding disasters — a product of historical progress under the ruling classes — and opening up new futures.

Thus, in an addendum to one of his theses On the Concept of History, he points to the realization of a classless society (the “new future” of Marxism) as the aim of revolution, but he doesn’t view it as the result of progress: “Classless society is not to be conceived as the endpoint of historical development but its interruption, so many times failed, finally accomplished.”

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Revolutionary or “Left” Romanticism

Farber quotes our book here: “Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre identified various strands of left-wing romanticism in their study Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity. ‘New Rousseauism,’ for example, looks at the dawn of human history as an idealized golden age.”

For us, however, what defines revolutionary romanticism — and this also applies to Jean-Jacques Rousseau — is that it doesn’t suggest a return to the past (to the “golden age”) but a detour via the past toward a utopian future. Rousseau admired the indigenous Carib people, but he didn’t propose living like them; he dreamed of a new, democratic society in which humanity’s past liberty and equality resurfaced in novel form.

The same goes for Ernst Bloch: Farber mentions his fascination with the Middle Ages, but Bloch was the great philosopher of utopia. Bloch references the past to critique capitalist “progress,” not to suggest a return to the Middle Ages! His goal was a future society, communist in the Marxist sense. Farber’s depiction of E. P. Thompson seems to me far more accurate: it’s not about restoring a lost community but creating a new one that breaks with the ruthless antisocial logic of capitalism.

According to Farber, the most influential author we speak of in our book is Ferdinand Tönnies. But Tönnies, as we say and Farber mentions, is a “resigned romantic” and, therefore, does not belong to the revolutionary romantic tradition.

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Ecology and Economic Growth

I’m entirely in agreement with one of Farber’s arguments: we will have to “counteract the political economy of capitalism” with democratic planning that establishes priorities of production. But I don’t believe in the possibility of economic growth that’s not ecologically harmful.

It seems to me that Farber underestimates the gravity of the ecological crisis: capitalist “progress,” with its logic of limitless growth, is leading us to an unprecedented catastrophe in human history: climate change. This is a threat to humanity’s very survival. If we want to avoid such an outcome, we must reduce our energy consumption and material production, beginning with useless and superfluous commodities (which constitute the majority of what capitalism produces).

Certainly, under an alternative model of civilization that we call ecosocialism, it will be necessary to satisfy humanity’s fundamental social needs, but, as Marx laid out, the first step toward the realm of freedom is the reduction of the workday and the free time it allows for human self-realization.

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Iran reportedly possesses a unique plasma weapon and, while it denies intentions to develop nuclear weapons, it has stated it may be forced to do so if its facilities are targeted, citing the priority of protecting the Islamic Republic.

The post WATCH: Lebanese researcher claims Iran created a ‘plasma weapon’ appeared first on World Israel News.

They have made it clear that they will sell out Jews to antisemitic violence as long as it comes from their side.

By Daniel Greenfield, Frontpage Magazine

It’s official.

Former J Street press secretary Amy Spitalnick, who runs the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and has turned it into an anti-Israel pressure group, boasted of bringing together the Union for Reform Judaism (and other Reform groups) and the Rabbinical Assembly of Conservative Judaism, along with Reconstructionist groups, to stand up for campus Hamas supporters.

The letter claims that Jewish safety is tied “to the safety of others” – in this case, the safety of those calling for the murder of Jews on college campuses, and warns that “escalating federal actions have used the guise of fighting antisemitism to justify stripping students of due process rights when they face arrest and/or deportation, as well as to threaten billions in academic research and education funding.”

The Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist movements then claim that they “reject any policies or actions that foment or take advantage of antisemitism” thereby adopting the leftist anti-Israel language which accuses Jews of ‘weaponizing’ antisemitism.

“We unequivocally condemn the exploitation of our community’s real concerns about antisemitism to undermine democratic norms and rights, including the rule of law, the right of due process, and/or the freedoms of speech, press, and peaceful protest,” they assert.

Every non-Orthodox movement’s rabbinates has now chosen to stand with the leftists and Islamists who assaulted Jewish students and faculty, and with university administrators who turned a blind eye to it, over the Jewish students and communities they targeted.

They have fatally discredited themselves, not just as religious movements, but as Jewish ones.

They have made it clear that they will sell out Jews to antisemitic violence as long as it comes from their side.

This is the mark of Cain. There is no coming back from this.

There is no defense for the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, the Rabbinical Assembly, and Reform’s Central Conference of American Rabbis, which signed this letter standing with campus Hamas supporters like Mahmoud Khalil and Momoudo Taal.

Amy Spitalnick brags that the letters come from organizations “including three of the four denominations”.

Indeed. Three out of four denominations have betrayed American Jews.

Only Orthodox Judaism and its organizations did not sign on to this betrayal.

The post Non-orthodox ‘Jewish’ movements sign letter standing with campus Hamas supporters appeared first on World Israel News.

Musk’s position on circumcision is unclear, but his father told an interviewer in 2022 that he did not believe his son had been circumcised.

By Grace Gilson, JTA

Ashley St. Clair, a right-wing influencer, wasn’t the first woman to announce that she had given birth to Elon Musk’s child when she revealed the news in February.

But she was the first known woman to be Jewish — and thus produce Musk’s first Jewish child.

Now, St. Clair reveals that Musk asked her not to give their son a circumcision, a venerable ritual in the Jewish tradition.

“While she was pregnant, Musk had urged her to deliver the baby via caesarean section and told her he didn’t want the child to be circumcised,” the Wall Street Journal newspaper reported Wednesday in a lengthy article about Musk’s approach to procreation and managing the women he asks to have his children.

The story did not make clear whether St. Clair took Musk’s advice about circumcision, but suggested that she might not have.

“St. Clair is Jewish and circumcision is an important ritual in the religion, and she decided against a C-section,” the story said.

Circumcision goes back to the Bible and is widely practiced by Jews of all levels of observance, including those who are otherwise non-observant.

Musk has said he believes that C-sections allow for bigger brains and thus more intelligent offspring.

His position on circumcision is unclear, but his father told an interviewer in 2022 that he did not believe his son had been circumcised.

St. Clair is one of four women who are known to have had children by the Tesla CEO and Trump administration official.

Musk reportedly believes that a low birth rate among educated people is an existential problem and is seen as likely to have more offspring, according to the Wall Street Journal article, which said he offered St. Clair $15 million and $100,000 a month to keep quiet about her child’s parentage.

St. Clair and Musk named their son Romulus, the name of the founder of Rome according to Roman mythology, according to the article.

Musk, who is fascinated by the Roman Empire, which he has said fell because of a low birth rate, has welcomed 14 children over 20 years.

The post Did Elon Musk forbid circumsizing his first Jewish son? appeared first on World Israel News.

The video shows IDF soldier Yarden applying tourniquets and bandages to wounded soldier Anton’s leg while under heavy Hamas attack in the Gaza Strip.

Anton, this is Yarden I’m coming to rescue you. pic.twitter.com/v88H7hDElS

— Mossad Commentary (@MOSSADil) April 17, 2025

The post WATCH: Dramatic video shows IDF rescue operation under heavy fire in Gaza appeared first on World Israel News.

Noa Argamani was named as one of the most influential people of 2025 for her efforts globally to raise awareness of the plight of the remaining captives.

By World Israel News Staff

Noa Argamani, an Israeli woman who was abducted by Hamas terrorists on October 7, 2023 from the Nova music festival in southern Israel, has been named as one of TIME magazine’s top 100 most influential people of 2025.

Argamani, 27, was taken hostage at the festival in Re’im, the scene of the worst of the October 7 massacres, along with her boyfriend, Avinatan Or.

Viral footage of the abduction shows Argamani being forced onto a motorcycle and driven off to the Gaza Strip as she begs her captors to let her go.

Doug Emhoff, the husband of former vice president Kamala Harris, penned the TIME nomination of Argamani, calling her a “symbol of the pain and trauma” that “Jews worldwide, myself included, continue to feel.”

In a daring daylight raid on June 8, 2024, IDF and Israeli police special forces rescued Argamani and three other Israeli hostages held in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza. The rescue enabled Argamani to visit her mother, Chinese-born Liora Argamani, shortly before she passed away following a lengthy battle with brain cancer.

Following her return to Israel after 245 days in captivity, Argamani became a staunch advocate for the release of the remaining hostages in Gaza, including Or, who is among the 59 captives still held in Gaza.

“Noa’s advocacy has ­illuminated Hamas’ extreme brutality, but more importantly, her bravery has embodied Jewish resilience and strength even in the worst moments,” Emhoff wrote.

Other prominent figures named to TIME’s top 100 list for 2025 include US President Donald Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, Elon Musk, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., and Syria’s interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa.

The post Freed Israeli hostage listed in TIME’s top 100 most influential people appeared first on World Israel News.