It has been three decades since one of Jane Fonda and John Kerry’s favorite “enlightened peasant movements”, the Khmer Rouge, swept to power in Cambodia and, in just under four years, murdered almost half its population (a feat immortalized in the Oscar-winning The Killing Fields). So grim was this hellish “worker’s paradise” that the heirs of Ho Chi Mihn, accomplished butchers themselves, felt the need to end Pol Pot’s reign, invading and removing him in 1979.

The American left — David Horowitz and Philip Short aside — never acknowledged what happened or what it meant. Their silence is deafening; their unreconstructed sympathy for the murderers even more so, as when they speak of Cambodia at all it is to decry Richard Nixon’s 1970 attempt to shut of the flow of Communist arms and reinforcements down the Ho Chi Mihn Trail.

We cannot afford their forgetfulness. All the world must remember Cambodia’s object lesson in the applied philosophy of International Socialism, not an aberration (as the left continually claims) but rather just the most obviously extreme example of a long tradition running back through the fall of Saigon, Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward, the Soviet “Gulag Archipelago”, Stalin’s terror famine in Ukraine, and even the Paris Commune. The only difference between these and Hitler’s National Socialist holocaust is that Hitler killed about a tenth as many people (albeit not for lack of desire), a point documented all too conclusively by the sobered (and more honest) French leftists who wrote The Black Book of Communism a few years ago.

It is in the interests of that vital remembrance that Andrew Sandlin pens this brief yet excellent memorial. Everyone should take the time to read it, to remember, and to contemplate Hayek’s warning about the dangers of the seemingly benevolent road to serfdom.