May 10, 1978

Holocaust In Our Time

Watchman, what of the night?

The night is full of death - and the watchman sleeps.

The holocaust continues.

As it was in Nazi Germany a twinkling ago, so is it today in Indochina.  Then it was Jews, now it is Orientals.

Where are the Jews?

Where are the Americans?

Where are all those who weep for the past?

They sleep now with the watchman, as they did then.

Who next will perish in the night?  No matter, so long as it is not me.

A couple of weeks ago we churned our guts watching an electronic reincarnation of Hitler's systematic murder of millions of Jews during World War II.

An identical genocide is underway this moment in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam - but the world casts down its eyes and murmurs, "Not me."

President Jimmy Carter exalts human rights but lifts not up his voice for a gentle race - as inoffensive as the Jews - who jump into death pits meekly after weeks of dehumanizing treatment by thugs.

The United Nations, unwilling to believe the stories of horror told by a few Indochinese who managed to escape, sent its own investigators.  The truth is so monstrous that the UN put the report under lock and key for fear it will offend the communist nations.

The clergy is strangely silent.  A few journalists twitter.  The sensitive anti-war protestors who once castigated American "brutality" are too busy picketing nuclear power stations to get involved with real demons.

The U.S. State Department has compiled a library of affidavits by Indochina refugees that detail a program of national murder.  Yet, these accounts are labeled top secret lest they disturb the American conscience.

This is how the original holocaust in Germany festered.  Murder as a national policy is too monstrous to contemplate.  If we do not acknowledge it, it will not be so.  If we do not awaken our conscience we will not have to act.

But it is so.  And we must act.

According to a book of chilling personal tragedies - "Murder of a Gentle Land," by John Barron and Anthony Pal - more than a million Cambodians have been beaten or shot to death by the Khmer Rouge (Red Communists).  How many more millions have died of starvation, exhaustion and exposure will never be known except that it is numberless.

A conservative estimate is that one-third of the Cambodian population has been wiped out to date.  In proportion, this is a greater tragedy than the slaughter of the Jews in Germany.

The announced objective of the Khmer is to destroy all but the poor farmers.  A U.S. State Department official has admitted, "We frankly don't know how many Cambodians are left, but if the trend continues, they may become extinct."

The savagery visited upon Cambodia is being repeated to a lesser degree by the North Vietnamese army in South Vietnam.  Two million Vietnamese were forced from their homes in Saigon into the countryside to toil from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. in the rice paddies.  At least half have died, 300,000 are in concentration camps, and the daily executions number in the thousands.

Laotians have been fleeing their tortured land by the tens of thousands.  There are 100,000 Indochinese in wretched refugee camps in Thailand, and their number was growing by 3,000 per month until Thailand closed its doors.

As we shrank from contact with barbarism during the ignominious pull-out of Vietnam, we admitted a few of our collaborators into the United States.  Just enough to put our conscience to sleep.

A few world leaders are starting to speak out.  Senator Ted Kennedy - whose brother Jack sent the first troops to Indochina to try and save those tiny enclaves of Asian freedom - has introduced legislation to "parole" some refugees into our society.

It is the least we can do if we recoiled at the brutality portrayed in the television documentary "Holocaust."

The main burden of providing relief for the innocent victims, particularly children, of communist savagery must come from near by Asian nations enjoying the protection of American military defense.

Japan and Philippines must share the burdens of liberty with us.  Shelter the homeless, or pick up the musket and fight tyranny in the trenches.

This must be the cry of the United Nations, our watchman in the night.

If the watchman fears the dark, we must patrol the ramparts of freedom one by one and two by two.

Author: Lindsey Williams