First-hand account of the KR times from foreign pro-KR reporter

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Rutiger
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First-hand account of the KR times from foreign pro-KR reporter

Post by Rutiger »

Somewhat interesting article from some cluEless moron who vocally supported the Khmer Rouge regime and was rewarded by being allowed to visit the devastated country back in 1978, not long before the collapse. VERY few outsiders got such access.
Forbidden Thoughts
BY GEORGE WRIGHT | APRIL 17, 2016

In August 1978, as reports of Khmer Rouge atrocities began to flow out of Cambodia, Gunnar Bergstrom arrived in Phnom Penh on a mission.

He was hoping to discredit these reports as fabrications of the U.S. and other Western countries, and prove that the Khmer Rouge were an upright group of freedom fighters who had liberated their nation from capitalist oppressors.

“In the beginning, we wanted to believe that all of this was propaganda and that everything they said about the Khmer Rouge was a lie,” Mr. Bergstrom, now 65, said from his home in Stockholm last month.

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Mr. Bergstrom had become one of a select few Khmer Rouge supporters from Western countries who were granted access to the closed-off mass worksite that was Cambodia under the Pol Pot regime.

With a political conscience shaped by the Second Indochina War in the 1960s, the young Marxist had played an active role in Sweden’s anti-war movement, which helped turn the tide of public opinion against the U.S. presence in Vietnam. As Richard Nixon’s government began its carpet bombing campaign inside Cambodia in 1969, Mr. Bergstrom’s attentions moved across the border.

Perceiving the Khmer Rouge’s overthrow of Lon Nol in April 1975 as a liberation from a corrupt regime backed by imperialist Western superpowers, Mr. Bergstrom helped establish the Swedish-Cambodian Friendship Association a year later.

In August 1978, following two years of negotiations—during which an increasing number of tales of mass murder and starvation began to trickle out of Cambodia—Mr. Bergstrom stepped onto Phnom Penh’s Pochentong Airport runway alongside three comrades, Maoist author Jan Myrdal, Marita Wikander, and Hedvig Ekerwald, with hopes of debunking the horror stories as CIA propaganda.

Driving through the capital’s desolate streets, which had been emptied by the regime as it evacuated its residents shortly after taking power in 1975, Mr. Bergstrom encountered a surreal scene.

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“It was like a science fiction film, you know? People asked, ‘Were you not shocked and horrified?’ And we had to tell people that we expected it. We knew it was empty. We saw an empty city,” Mr. Bergstrom said.

“The things I remember thinking, and it was 40 years ago, is that we had, so far, defended the Khmer Rouge. I had never said that there were no killings and no murders because I realized there had been a war…I realized there had been some killings in the beginning.

“I thought maybe the refugee stories are about that. I hoped that the killings were over now. We defended the evacuation of the cities with the arguments that the Khmer Rouge had given us,” he said.

more

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https://www.cambodiadaily.com/news/forb ... ts-111383/
Last edited by Rutiger on Tue Apr 19, 2016 8:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: First-hand account of the KR times from foreign pro-KR reporter

Post by juansweetpotato »

Rutiger wrote:Somewhat interesting article from some cluless moron who vocally supported the Khmer Rouge regime and was rewarded by being allowed to visit the devastated country back in 1978, not long before the collapse. VERY few outsiders got such access.
I seem to remember that Swedish contingent being shown smiling, well-fed people doing the work. Not skeletons. Well, that's what normally happens when you want to show off isn't it? World cup, Olympics. Look what China did. Loads of black-prisons opened up to hide all the recently dispossessed.

They were nothing but people full of hope for a better world that were shown what they wanted them to see. Easy to criticize in hind site.
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ot mien kampf
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Re: First-hand account of the KR times from foreign pro-KR reporter

Post by ot mien kampf »

Knew it would be a Swede. Well, actually I was expecting some weedy New York Jewish communist wannabe. Now similar airheads are destroying Sweden itself with immigration.

Everyone with two braincells to rub together knew that there would be brutal, genocidal repression to "stop a counter revolution" because that was exactly what happened in Russia and China. Anyone who claimed ignorance in hindsight is too dumb to live.
with hopes of debunking the horror stories as CIA propaganda
Blinded by their own white guilt. They seem to think the only people who have ever done anything wrong were white capitalists. Unfortunately scum like this still rules the world.
We defended the evacuation of the cities with the arguments that the Khmer Rouge had given us


Pity this piece of shit didn't get ended then and there.
Rutiger
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Re: First-hand account of the KR times from foreign pro-KR reporter

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I would like to all their photos from that trip.
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Re: First-hand account of the KR times from foreign pro-KR reporter

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Rutiger wrote:I would like to all their photos from that trip.
Bergstrom had an exhibition in town years ago, and there was a book of photos that went along with it. There are notes for each photo of what he was thinking at the time and years later in hindsight. Of course what he was shown was a facade, and he does mention having had major doubts while on the trip. However he returned to Sweden with glowing reports.
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John Bingham
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Re: First-hand account of the KR times from foreign pro-KR reporter

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Image

Plenty of other images on his site:

http://www.kambodja.name/page3/index.html
“Now I think the whole trip was propaganda and we should never have made it,’’ said Begstrom. “It is still a mystery about how you can delude oneself so much. We were fooled by smiles but what fooled us the most was our own Maoist glasses we wore.”
https://cambodiatokampuchea.wordpress.c ... an-myrdal/
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Rutiger
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Re: First-hand account of the KR times from foreign pro-KR reporter

Post by Rutiger »

^ Nice. Thanks. :thumb:

From what I've read, had he looked into the pots on the tables, he typically could have easily counted the number of grains of rice on offer. i wonder if they hand-picked the healthy looking lads to sit at that table.
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Re: First-hand account of the KR times from foreign pro-KR reporter

Post by nemo »

Blinded by their own white guilt.
In a nutshell.
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John Bingham
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Re: First-hand account of the KR times from foreign pro-KR reporter

Post by John Bingham »

I must say those kids in the communal dining area don't look too happy. They look well fed enough though, probably kids of cadres or child soldiers. This blog some good stuff on it:

https://cambodiatokampuchea.wordpress.com/tag/wikander/
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Re: First-hand account of the KR times from foreign pro-KR reporter

Post by Rutiger »

John Bingham wrote:I must say those kids in the communal dining area don't look too happy.
Smiling and laughing was probably a sure-fire way to get yourself called into a mandatory night meeting and have to denounce your own obvious non-revolutionary thoughts followed by a bit of a communal beating.
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