The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Sweden-Kampuchea Friendship Association 2.0: Illegal Immigrants Are the New Khmer Rouge or Something

Posted on | June 9, 2025 | No Comments

Dana Pico was thrashing Philadelphia Inquirer liberal columnist Will Bunch, who loves Kilmar Abrego Garcia more than he loves his own mother, and it got me thinking about the utterly reflexive nature of left-wing politics. Liberals see the world as a great dramatic conflict between the Forces of Evil (Republicans generally, and Donald Trump specifically) and the Innocent Victims of Oppression. This is the only explanation for why, after Democrats lost an election in which all polling showed the electorate tilting sharply right on the immigration issue, liberals have now embraced criminal foreigners as their beloved mascots.

Over there in their Bluesky echo chambers, liberals like Will Bunch are convinced they’re on “the right side of history,” and the fact that polls show a majority of voters support mass deportation of illegal immigrants — it was a crucial issue last November — doesn’t make a dent. They claim to be defending democracy, and yet when the president actually does what voters elected him to do, liberals scream “fascism.”

“War is peace,” “ignorance is strength,” democracy is fascism.

This kind of knee-jerk reaction could have devastating political consequences for Democrats, as NBC News observed in reporting on the recent human trafficking indictment of Abrego Garcia:

The apparent strength of the government’s case could reignite debate among Democrats about the risks of focusing on Abrego Garcia’s case. For weeks, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., and other Democrats emphasized that their criticism targeted Trump’s decision to unilaterally deport Abrego Garcia without judicial oversight, not a defense of Abrego Garcia himself. . . .
Van Hollen defended his stance in a CNN interview. “You know, I will never apologize for defending the Constitution,” he said. “In fact, it’s the Trump administration and all his cronies who should apologize to the country for putting us through this unnecessary situation.”

Did you catch that? The Constitution is at stake, according to this eminent Democrat, because DHS made a paperwork error, loading the MS-13 gangster onto a deportation flight without taking notice of a judge’s 2019 grant of “protected” status for Abrego Garcia.

Anyone making a common-sense assessment would say, “So what?” It would probably be easy — although requiring a court hearing or two — to rescind the “protected” status, which appears to have been granted (a) entirely on the basis of Abrego Garcia’s assertion that he would be at risk of violence from rival gangs if he were returned to El Salvador and (b) without knowledge of his criminal activities in the United States. What is known now about Abrego Garcia was not known to the judge in 2019, and therefore Abrego Garcia’s “protected” status may be regarded as invalid, yet Chris Van Hollen seems to believe the entire Constitution depends upon this, and the lunatic Will Bunch is shouting “Free Kilmar” as if the wife-beating gang-banger were a heroic martyr.

Voters elected Donald Trump for a reason, and if Chris Van Hollen, Will Bunch or anyone else thinks they’re going to fool the electorate into sharing their sympathy for Kilmar Abrego Garcia, they’re simply delusional. But we have often seen the Left enthralled by such delusions.

The Sweden-Kampuchea Friendship Association in 1978

Jan Myrdal, Marita Wikander, Gunnar Bergström and Hedvig Ekerwald were Swedish socialists who enthusiastically supported Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, a widespread sentiment in Sweden at the time:

The Indochinese revolutionary movements enjoyed widespread support in Swedish society, particularly among supporters of the Swedish Social Democratic Party. When the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh [in April 1975] and expelled its inhabitants, 15,000 Swedes greeted their victory by spontaneously celebrating in the center of Stockholm.

The arrival of Year Zero in Democratic Kampuchea was, as we now know, the beginning of one of the most murderous tyrannies in all human history. The best estimates are that Pol Pot’s communist regime killed about 1.5 million people, nearly 25% of the country’s population.

The first widely noticed account of the ongoing massacre in Cambodia was published by the Reader’s Digest in February 1977, and immediately sparked widespread controversy. The Left, having embraced the Communist regime in Cambodia, denounced the Reader’s Digest account as “propaganda.” To quote Wikipedia:

According to Joel Brinkley, “Khmer Rouge apologists [among Western academics] easily outnumbered those who believed a tragedy was under way.” . . .
[H]uman-rights activist David Hawk . . . claimed that the West was indifferent to the atrocities taking place in Cambodia due to “the influence of anti-war academics on the American left who obfuscated Khmer Rouge behavior, denigrated the post-1975 refugee reports, and denounced the journalists who got those stories.”

In the prevailing worldview of the intelligentsia, the Communists must be good, because America was bad. Therefore, reports about atrocities in Cambodia (based on accounts from those who had escaped) must be false or exaggerated. Such was the background of the August 1978 trip to Cambodia by Myrdal, Wikander, Bergström and Ekerwald as a delegation from the Sweden-Kampuchea Friendship Association (SKFA). They spent two weeks as guests of the Khmer Rouge, even having dinner with Pol Pot, and “returned to Sweden where they undertook a speaking tour and wrote articles in support of the Democratic Kampuchea regime.” Bergström expressed the belief that, under the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia could become “a very special model for the third world … an ideal society with no oppressors.” And this, keep in mind, was a brutal regime that killed a higher percentage of their national population than any known dictatorship in all human history. Among the victims were Marita Wikander’s husband. She had married a Khmer Rouge diplomat, who returned to Cambodia in 1977. During the SKFA trip to Phnom Penh in 1978, she asked to see her husband. The request was denied. It wasn’t until years later that she learned he had been executed by the regime shortly after his return to Cambodia. Such an “ideal society“!

The analogy to current liberal politics is obvious enough. Viewing Trump as the Sum of All Evils, liberals reflexively attack any policy advocated by Trump. Therefore, if Trump wishes to deport criminal illegal aliens, liberals must defend criminal illegal aliens: “Free Kilmar!”

Yeah, now, about those so-called “peaceful protests” . . .



 

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Category: Cambodia, History, Immigration, Liberals

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